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If you had the power to change up to three things in the world today that are related to IT security, what would they be?

Internet design--that's enough.

That's it? What's wrong with the design of the Internet?

There's anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people--hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong...to introduce it in the same way.
-- unquote --

That's total BS, what's wrong with the Internet is the vast networks of compromised desktop computers co-opted to be used as botnets to provide spamming and phishing services to the criminal sector. The vast majority of which run on Microsoft Windows. And people like you making a good living out of selling 'security' solutions. If everyone on the planet switched off their office 'computer' when they went home from work, the amount of spam/malware on the Internet would drop by over a half.

There is nothing wrong with the Internet, it performs as designed. It delivers packets to-and-from IP addresses. It doesn't know or care what's in 'em. Nor should it, that would break the design. Security should be handled at the end connections. What would cure the current smam/phishing/malware infestation is to design a desktop 'computer' that don't get infected by opening an email attachment or clicking on a URL.

"If I were Bill Gates, I'd run another company--100 percent owned by Microsoft--that produces the antivirus under a different brand"

It's never occured to Kaspersky to suggest that Bill Gates design an Operating System that don't rely on AV to protect. As Marcus Ranum once said enumerating badness is a bad idea since, ' the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness '.

So basically because people like Kaspersky have failed at security, and want to implement an Internet Stasi (Staatssicherheit). I don't think so. There are enough people out there that'll see it don't ever happen. --

'Kaspersky Lab UK provides the leading antivirus and spyware software'

please by more of my bogus 'security' solutions - nuff said .. :)

I was about to comment on how they used a rather wimpy (to today's standards) 14th Century crossbow. Of course, in the Ukraine that may be all they have. I think a modern Commando 2 similar to the one I used as a youngster would probably penetrate that thing. We used to shoot bolts through hefty Northern Virginia phone books. The whole bolt wouldn't go through, but the head would usually get all the way through. Sounds like a Mythbusters project.

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews97025.html

is a little review of the device.
the german website for
digitech is

http://www.digitech-gmbh.de/

but it basically says the sites in development but you can email them on
webmaster@digitech-gmbh.de

btw this was just a £7.99 device
my point basically was a remote sensor doesnt need to eat batterys to be wireless

The trick here is allowing the mp3's to play through the daily humdrum noise without hurting the ear in the execution.

Why would any different style of speaker be any more or less likely to cause hearing damage vs another? Surely the only thing that really matters is the volume at which the sound hits your eardrum.

Earbuds may be closer to the eardrum, but the sound that comes out of them is far less loud than that of a speaker (for comparison, plug your earbuds in and listen to them from the same distance that you'd listen to speakers from. clearly they're FAR more quiet). Therefore they make up for the closer distance to your eardrum by being less noisy. As a result, you should be just as likely to get hearing damage from speakers as from earbuds, assuming you listen to both at the same perceived volume.

All that the article seems to indicate is "In a study published last year in the journal Ear and Hearing, researchers at Harvard Medical School looked at a variety of headphones and found that, on average, the smaller they were, the higher their output levels at any given volume-control setting.". So basically smaller earphones are more sensitive. Duh? Basically all they're saying is that you dont have to turn the volume knob up as high for small buds vs big headphones.

At any given volume, earbuds aren't any more likely to cause hearing damage than headphones or speakers.. it's just that it seems people are too dumb to realise that they have to turn the volume knob down when they change to different brands/styles of headphones.

The research doesn't show that earbuds cause hearing damage, it shows that excessive listening to music at excessive volumes causes hearing damage. It just so happens that portable music players gives the option for many people to listen to music for large amounts of time, and that most portable music players come with earbud style headphones. This is not causation.

In the end, the best way to prevent hearing damage is probably "in-ear phones" or "canalphones". See etymotic, shure, sony, sharp. They are just earphones that go deep inside the earcanal and use a material (usually silicone or foam) to make a seal with the earcanal to prevent any external noise from "leaking" in. Thus, you dont have to turn up the volume to allow you to hear your music over cars, computer fans, tvs, etc... Thus, your music is at a lower volume and your hearing is happier

For proof, btw, I personally got hearing damage when i moved away from canalphones and instead bought some full-sized headphones. They were both very bright in sound (lots of shharp trebble) and open (lots of sound leaking in, meaning i turned it up more). That combo did more damage than earphones ever have

Hey guys, duh, I can't be bothered to Google or get any insight to a very common question answered almost a millenia ago.

The very [b]vast[/b] majority of MP3 players are USB mass storage devices and will play MP3. Only consumer retards by Apple or Creative players.

I was lucky enough to have access to the Internet, and thus Google and found myself the iRiver H340 a lovely device which will play both OGG and MP3 and after a surprising firmware patch, movies too! All for around £250.

Apple invented the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox?

Um, I had an Archos Jukebox long before the first iPod came out (and got lots of weird stares from people trying to explain to them what it was). And the Personal Jukebox came out even before the Archos did.

Apple didn't invent the hard drive-based portable MP3 jukebox -- they perfected it. May not seem like a big difference, but let's not write the people who did the actual inventing out of the history books...

Does anyone really ever use ask jeeves?

I asked Jeeves, and I got this:
Many people use Ask Jeeves because it has a picture of a butler

Manufacterers like kodak and hp don't have a lot of experience in camera design and that's why they're so cheap compared to a good nikon or canon digital SLR with much much better lenses.

That's a great point. It takes experience to make good digital cameras. I owned an HP camera and it ranked pretty poorly compared to my current camera, a Casio QV-R40, which is an excellent little camera. Casio are probably more synonymous with calculators than cameras, but an interesting piece of trivia is that they were one of the first to introduce consumer cameras in the mid 90s with their QV-10.

you are not getting it: there are microwaves photons. There is no distinction between visual light and microwaves, other then their frequency

You are not getting it. And probably won't until the third time you learn it.

Isaac Newton said,

I know light is corpuscular because I grind my own lenses.

He knew the mathematics of waves and how they are affected by running into uneven surfaces. He knew that in grinding a lens you never make it an even surface, you use finer and finer powders to make finer and finer scratches in the surface.

Grab a copy of Richard Feynman's QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter. He confirms Newton's suspicion on the corpuscular nature of light.

Then reread what I said about steam and swells.

Oh. By the way. Dirt is a liquid. In case you run out of things to wonder about.

I'll admit, if the product is all that the review makes it out to be then I would be very interested. Cheap, too--it's selling for $169.99 + free shipping. Of course, you still have to add in your connectivity of choice, but regardless, a more than reasonable price considering some of what I've seen from similar media delivery companies such as Escient and SonicBlue.

Unfortunately, it seems that it's only a nice deal if you can get it to work. Three reviewers over at Review Centre are a little less than satisfied:

"Oritron NPD3117 networked DVD player is a very unreliable product. The first one I had, it stopped working after two weeks. I couldn't get the DVD door to open reliably...While playing DVD movie, the pixel would just break up all over the screen. The service center was no help. They did replaced my breaken unit. The second unit broke after one week."

"Had to return the first Oritron NPD3117 DVD player because networking did not function properly. Second player sent worked for a month and then would not turn on properly with wireless network card."

If it's anything like the PocketPC phone I tried, it's horribly clunky and overtly complex. It's like a tiny Windows XP box, which can look cute at first, but it falls down flat for a small device.

D

What idiot modded this guy up?

Check his user info. He only has 3 comments, ever. All of them in this thread about how great the MS smart phone is and how "Smartphone is a brilliant OS."

Sounds like a rabid MS fanboy or an astroturfer to me.

Here is a link to some user reviews of this phone. In particular, note the user reviews which describe these updates which he claimed just increase efficiency, are actually necessary to keep the phone from crashing all the time.

This is my favorite quote from his postings:
"There was never any problems with the OS, only the Orange side of it. The firmware upgrade has improved performance and batterylife and its now a very good phone/pda."

Funny, it seems everyone else's smartphone crashes but his. Maybe he got a magic phone.

I bought a copy of New Deal School Suite. Very powerful multitasking and all it requires is a '286 with 640K. Unfortunately, their networking support was pretty weak, which might've been their downfall.

Apparently they've gone under, since their website doesn't exist anymore. I did find some reviews of it here.

The first clients for AOL for the PC was an entire self-contained GEOS installation.