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Accidental Privacy Spills
ahem writes "A journalist attends the World Economic forum, and writes an email to a few friends. It's a chatty, casual conference report. The conference is a gathering of the 5,000 most powerful people in the world. The report gives a breezy insight into how stuff gets done at that level, and what the concerns are that keep the world's leaders up at night. That email was intended only for the journalist's friends. That email winds up getting plastered all over the net. Here is a very interesting discussion of the implications of this "privacy spill." Make sure you read down to the Epilogue. Here is the email itself." The Lawmeme discussion is quite thoughtful and in-depth, very good reading.
When will people get that email is not secure. Its the digital equivalent of a postcard, but idiots still email credit card numbers and worse.
gathering of [...] most powerful people in the world
Well why the hell wasnt I invited???
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
The only way to have anything not exposed would be to of encrypted the messages for each person.
The next step? Go the Microsoft way and have either a timed encrypted message or some way to have a message self-delete after so much time. Both are possible but either add it's own complexities or possiblities of comprimise. (ie. the timed message abitliy is out there but basically you view a message which exists on an external server and is displayed on your machine via a doc.write comand. Not the best way.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
From reading the article, basically the rich are completely against war because it will screw their investments... If you haven't been paying attention, the deficit between rich and poor is the worst in HISTORY, currently the rich are getting MUCH richer, and the poor slipping behind further. Maybe a good war is what we need...
This e-mail was intended to be "leaked" so that it gets more attention. Its called constructive journalism. The journalist intended for it to be public, why else would she have written such a lengthy piece?
The solution is simple don't send anything to anybody that you don't want them to spread around.
Technology gives us more speed and a larger play field but gossip is gossip and it will spread via word of mouth over the backyard fence or on somebody's blog. There is nothing new here except the speed and scope.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
How the hell do all these people know I have a small penis?
... that when you pass "personal" notes in the classroom, the teacher might just be paying attention and decide to read it to the rest of the class. This is not a violation of privacy, but rather a misunderstanding of the rules.
like a 'good' case of cancer?
war for monIE/oil? absolute doom.
"Accidental Privacy Spills" just sounds dirty to me. Insert "Depends" joke here....
This is a symptom of what has become all too common in todays email society - the trivialization of communication.
The "forward" has become a replacement for an actual composed email message. Its easier to maintain the illusion of staying in touch by forwarding some insipid crap rather than taking the time to actually *gasp* drop someone a personal note.
As a result, most email is not private, or more importantly, personal. I can easily imagine what went through the recipients mind - "wow, this is cool, let me forward it to ____". Why wouldn't he ? After all, we foward crap to each other all the time, why should this very interesting email be any different ?
You get something that looks interesting, you forward it. It couldn't POSSIBLY have been intended for ONLY you.
I would bet that had this letter been handwritten, the recipients would not have shown it around.
Welcome to the global communication era.
I've heard this a few times, but nobody seems to be able to actually show any documentation of this. Can you help me out?
There is a liberal bastion that opposes the way not because of the people, but because there investments will get screwed.
Power is sexy
Swiss is a hick way of saying "expensive"
Al Qaeda's threat is mostly done with...
Nope... No major news here... Move along... nothing to see.
hopefully i formatted it right!
With apologies for the group email... I thought this was interesting enough to pass along. These are the notes from a friend of a friend who writes for Newsday.
Adam Davis
Director, EPRIsolutions Environment Division
1299 4th Street, Suite 307
San Rafael, CA 94901
Main Office:415-454-8800
Direct:415-257-4631
Cell: 415-305-4786
Hi Guys.
OK, hard to believe, but true. Yours truely has been hobnobbing with the ruling class.
I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on, unfettered, class A hobnobbing.
Davos, I discovered, is a breathtakingly beautiful spot, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. Nestled high in the Swiss Alps, it's a three hours train ride from Zurich that finds you climbing steadily through snow-laden mountains that bring to mind Heidi and Audrey Hepburn (as in the opening scenes of "Charade"). The EXTREMELY powerful arrive by helicopter. The moderately powerful take the first class train. The NGOs and we mere mortals reach heaven via coach train or a conference bus. Once in Europe's bit of heaven conferees are scattered in hotels that range from B&B to ultra luxury 5-stars, all of which are located along one of only three streets that bisect the idyllic village of some 13,000 permanent residents.
Local Davos folks are fanatic about skiing, and the slopes are literally a 5-15 minute bus ride away, depending on which astounding downhill you care to try. I don't know how, so rather than come home in a full body cast I merely watched.
This sweet little chalet village was during the WEF packed with about 3000 delegates and press, some 1000 Swiss police, another 400 Swiss soldiers, numerous tanks and armored personnel carriers, gigantic rolls of coiled barbed wire that gracefully cascaded down snow-covered hillsides, missile launchers and assorted other tools of the national security trade. The security precautions did not, of course, stop there. Every single person who planned to enter the conference site had special electronic badges which, upon being swiped across a reading pad, produced a computer screen filled color portrait of the attendee, along with his/her vital statistics. These were swiped and scrutinized by soldiers and police every few minutes -- any time one passed through a door, basically. The whole system was connected to handheld wireless communication devices made by HP, which were issued to all VIPs. I got one. Very cool, except when they crashed. Which, of course, they did frequently. These devices supplied every imagineable piece of information one could want about the conference, your fellow delegates, Davos, the world news, etc. And they were emailing devices --- all emails being monitored, of course, by Swiss cops.
Antiglobalization folks didn't stand a chance. Nor did Al Qaeda. After all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class POOF, just like that. So security was the name of the game. Metal detectors, X-ray machines, shivering soldiers standing in blizzards, etc.
Overall, here is what I learned about the state of our world:
- I was in a dinner with heads of Saudi and German FBI, plus the foreign minister of Afghanistan. They all said that at its peak Al Qaeda had 70,000 members. Only 10% of them were trained in terrorism -- the rest were military recruits. Of that 7000, they say all but about 200 are dead or in jail.
- But Al Qaeda, they say, is like a brand which has been heavily franchised. And nobody knows how many unofficial franchises have been spawned since 9/11.
- The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war.
- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.
- Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood. Last year the WEF was a lovefest for America. This year the mood was so ugly that it reminded me of what it felt like to be an American overseas in the Reagan years. The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
- Plenty are also infuriated because they disagree on policy grounds. I learned a great deal. It goes FAR beyond the sorts of questions one hears raised by demonstrators and in UN debates. For example:
- If Al Qaeda is down to merely 200 terrorists cadres and a handful of wannabe franchises, what's all the fuss?
- The Middle East situation has never been worse. All hope for a settlement between Israel and Palestine seems to have evaporated. The energy should be focused on placing painful financial pressure on all sides in that fight, forcing them to the negotiating table. Otherwise, the ME may well explode. The war in Iraq is at best a distraction from that core issue, at worst may aggravate it. Jordan's Queen Rania spoke of the "desperate search for hope".
- Serious Islamic leaders (e.g. the King of Jordan, the Prime Minster of Malaysia, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia) believe that the Islamic world must recapture the glory days of 12-13th C Islam. That means finding tolerance and building great education institutions and places of learning. The King was passionate on the subject. It also means freedom of movement and speech within and among the Islamic nations. And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation. (However, there were also several Middle East respresentatives who argued precisely the opposite. They believe bringing down Saddam Hussein and then pushing the Israel/Palestine issue could actually result in a Golden Age for Arab Islam.)
- US unilateralism is seen as arrogant, bullyish. If the U.S. cannot behave in partnership with its allies -- especially the Europeans -- it risks not only political alliance but BUSINESS, as well. Company leaders argued that they would rather not have to deal with US government attitudes about all sorts of multilateral treaties (climate change, intellectual property, rights of children, etc.) -- it's easier to just do business in countries whose governments agree with yours. And it's cheaper, in the long run, because the regulatory envornments match. War against Iraq is seen as just another example of the unilateralism.
- For a minority of the participants there was another layer of AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard delegates complain that the US "opposes the rights of children", because we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as a "right". Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating. The rest of the world's elite finds this American Christian behavior at least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to "faith-based" programs. It's different from how it makes non- Christian
Americans feel -- these folks experience it as downright embarrassing.
- When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the nonAmerican delegates, the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands!
I learned that the only economy about which there is much enthusiasm is China, which was responsible for 77% of the global GDP growth in 2002. But the honcho of the Bank of China, Zhu Min, said that fantastic growth could slow to a crawl if China cannot solve its rural/urban problem. Currently 400 million Chinese are urbanites, and their average income is 16 times that of the 900 million rural residents. Zhu argued China must urbanize nearly a billion people in ten years!
I learned that the US economy is the primary drag on the global economy, and only a handful of nations have sufficient internal growth to thrive when the US is stagnating.
The WEF was overwhelmed by talk of security, with fears of terrorism, computer and copyright theft, assassination and global instability dominating almost every discussion.
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
The mood was very grim. Almost no parties, little fun. If it hadn't been for the South Africans -- party animals every one of them -- I'd never have danced. Thankfully, the South Africans staged a helluva party, with Jimmy Dludlu's band rocking until 3am and Stellenbosch wines pouring freely, glass after glass after glass....
These WEF folks are freaked out. They see very bad economics ahead, war, and more terrorism. About 10% of the sessions were about terrorism, and it's heavy stuff. One session costed out what another 9/11-type attack would do to global markets, predicting a far, far worse impact due to the "second hit" effect -- a second hit that would prove all the world's post-9/11 security efforts had failed. Another costed out in detail what this, or that, war scenario Would do to spot oil prices. Russian speakers argued that "failed nations" were spawning terrorists --- code for saying, "we hate Chechnya". Entire sessions were devoted to arguing which poses the greater asymmetric threat: nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is sufficiently Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance. Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS. Vicente Fox -- who I had breakfast with -- proved sexy and smart like a --- well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a hug.
The world isn't run by a clever cabal. It's run by about 5,000 bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal power. A few have both. Many of them turn out to be remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology. All of them are financially wise, though their ranks have thinned due to unwise tech-stock investing. They pay close heed to politics, though most would be happy if the global political system behaved far more rationally -- better for the bottom line. They work very hard, attending sessions from dawn to nearly midnight, but expect the standards of intelligence and analysis to be the best available in the entire world. They are impatient. They have a hard time reconciling long term issues (global wearming, AIDS pandemic, resource scarcity) with their daily bottomline foci. They are comfortable working across languages, cultures and gender, though white caucasian males still outnumber all other categories. They adore hi- tech gadgets and are glued to their cell phones.
Welcome to Earth: meet the leaders.
Ciao,
Laurie
I would expect that a journalist of sufficient importance to be offered a pass such as 'Laurie' received, would know better than to use 'who' when she should have used 'whom'. More than a typo, I think...
Redistributing is an even bigger no-no. . .:)P
You are not the customer.
finally, an ontopic first post, even still its moderated down.
You have no right to privacy. Anyone who can see you destroys that. The government is intent on taking away all your privacy. The Internet makes it really easy for anyone to do.
Any expectations of privacy are unreasonable. In the modern world, if you don't want other people to know that you said something there is only one course of action that will work: Don't say it!
Word is bad about saving info. You with find previously deleted text, revisions, computer names, account names, sometime passwords embedded into the document. I would have to say that Word is one of the most insecure formats in which to deliver a message.
BTW - this same way has gotten me past passwords more then once.
Patrick Havens (Mr. 573333 to you.) Graphic Artist / Coder / Father / Journeler
Was the part where all these hugely wealthy guys are livid at America because they think the Iraq thing will sink their personal fortunes.
Yeah... OK. They could support the quick liberation of the oppressed peoples in Iraq and lose a paltry couple of million... but they'd rather let the Iraqis suffer and keep the cash. Well, I can see looking out for your own self interest, but wow... makes the whole thing seem rather mercenary.
It's not evil to be rich, and you can't force compassion and altruism (unless you are the government)... but it makes you think....
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
A professional journalist wrote this? I gave up on that notion after about 20 sec. of skimming. I refuse to believe, ubiquity of spell checking software notwithstanding, that a professional journalist wrote that. From the spelling, you'd guess a /.-er penned the thing.
AC
Let's compare it to a real letter, or better yet, a company memo (in dead-tree form), since real letters typically only have one recipient. Let's say a memo gets sent to all 5 members of the HR department of a company. That memo warns that there will be no holiday bonuses this year. It goes on to say that the employees will be informed of this later, but HR is getting a heads-up in advance. Now, one of the HR employees, pissed off about this, decides to scan it, and post it on the company web site. Is he wrong to do this? Most people would say he is, I'll bet.
Now, the question is, why is it so different with e-mail? If I send a printed letter to a friend, I have the expectation that it will not be plastered on bulletin boards around town. If I send an e-mail, people would argue that I can't expect it to remain private. Why? I think the answer is because it's so easy to distribute an e-mail. Clicking the forward button is trivial.
So what's the solution? Disclaimers and confidentiality statements like some companies have on their e-mail? Doubtful. Even if they would hold up in court, who's willing to fight it? How about some sort of flag that specifices whether a message can be forwarded? That smacks of DRM, and no one's going to like that, nor will every client implement it. PGP? Well, that's nice, but once the recipient decrypts it, it's plain text, which can be forwarded. As much as it sucks, we may just have to rely on personal judgement.
So was the person who forwarded her e-mail a jerk? Probably. Should he have asked permission of the author? Definitely. Is there anything that can be done about it? Nope.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
How glaringly obvious is it that the "leaked email" is merely a troll? Major economic collapse? Recession? It's filled with buzzwords to make people notice and talk about it. Typical troll.
This is an excellent illustration of being extremely careful with the information you posess. And, as the subject indicates, who your friends are. If she considered the information to be somewhat sensitive in nature, then she could have easily: (1) kept it to herself for a future article or (2) maybe make it clear in the email to not redistribute. She obviously chose to do neither, which sort of opened the doors. Unfortunate that someone on her "distribution list" felt that everyone needed to know what went on at the World Economic Forum based on Laurie's experiences. From reading the email it really doesn't look like she has divulged any really serious world secrets. Another prime example of how to learn from one's mistakes.
-- Rick
But isn't this a copyright infringement?
An author's original work, whether or not it is intentional, is published to the public without thier consent. Since anything you write which is not plagerized is considered automatically copyrighted to you, the fact that it was posted to a public forum wouldn't it be illegal?
From the original email: "...various insundry countries...".
S/he's a reporter but thinks "insundry" is a word? The phrase is "...and sundry".
But wait, it gets funnier, I googled (tm) for "insundry" and got more than 100 hits. I guess a lot of people hear "and sundry" as "insundry". Is there a word for that? It's like a meme, but it's something you've heard. A heme! Oh, wait. Taken. A misspelleme?
// todo: implement sig
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Davros in Switzerland? Damn...those really WERE the rulers of the world.
I opened both the article and the email itself -- but read the article first, and did *not* read the email. If she didn't intend for me to read it, and made it clear she still doesn't intend for me to read it, then I'm not going to read it.
I strongly suspect that her grammar was one of the reasons she did not want it read. She possibly *can't* spell or construct proper sentences when she rights, and depends on an editor to fix her writing. If so, then the change in public perception will damage her credibility as a journalist. It shouldn't, but it will. If she *can* spell, then the poorer level of writing may still make people assume she can't, with the same result.
But it really was her own fault. I have this problem myself, not only with email, but on Slashdot.
There are lots of times when I see an article, and write a post, and then think "I don't want to post this". Or "I don't want to post this in my name."
When I have those thoughts, I think about why. Usually, rather than clicking "Post anonymously", I simply click "x" in the upper right hand corner.
You see, often what I think I don't want to be associated with, shouldn't be said, even if it is is true.
It is for this same reason that within the Catholic Church, one of the things that can really hurt a person's candidacy for sainthood is their writings. People simply need to not be frivolous with things they write, because what they write can spread. And if it's wrong, or evil, or even right and good -- but in the wrong context to do good -- then it was a bad idea to write it down.
[But just so you know, I too later discover grammar errors in my writing, and I too use my writing skills professionally. My most common mistake is to use "to" where "two" or "too" belongs. My second most common mistake is broken sentence structure, that appears when I go back and edit my writing, and use the "Submit" butten instead of the the "Oewcuwq" button.]
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If you put something in electronic format, and assume it won't get out sooner or later, you'r either a fool or damn good at security
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
This article brings up a number of interesting concerns, including changing views of privacy in the digital environment, the public sphere and how this sphere is affected by new technologies. One subject that I find particularly fascinating is the new interactions between groups that have never been directly concerned with on another. Taken from the text:
---
[Garrett] "Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?:
Whereas rcade says:
"The world doesn't need to wait around for professional journalists to carefully predigest the news for us any more. We're capable of collecting and analyzing information from a thousand different sources and directions, even an injudicious e-mail by a chatty Pulitzer Prize winner to at least one loose-lipped friend."
To these two feuding flamers and their dueling versions of democratic discussion, it seems to me, the only sensible response is "Do we have to choose?"
[...]
Remember how everyone keeps saying that distance is irrelevant on the Internet? Well, this is what happens when distance disappears. You wind up right next to the damndest people.
---
So, Slashdot- are you participating? Are you participating in a political or democratic process? And if so, what is it that you are participating in?
The metafilter thread can be found here.
This goes to show how much very powerful people watch economic measures.
If millions of citizens agreed to not make big consumer purchases during a specific week, governments and powers like these listen.
Citizens could make this pact based on governments not changing their war stance.
Every time one of these weeks was approaching, the governments would cringe each time.
The potential drawback is a backlash on the protest and labelling it unpatriotic. But sometimes your vote doesn't count until it's too late (sometimes it doesn't get counted at all;-) ), but you can also vote with your dollar.
Of course Ashcroft could throw you in Guantanamo for not spending your own money.
-Just thinking out load
The first thing I looked at and read was the e-mail. Was it made up? was it real? who cares. The point is that we are curious by nature. We look at things we know we shouldn't. Sometimes it's just curiosity, sometimes it's an invasion of privacy.
my cube has a window...
Not so much the length, but the elegance of her writing is way above what I'd think most people would send in an email like that. Not that you'd expect a journalist to comment: "a/s/l j00 3 me" though from reading her work it seems a little too convenient that this was leaked.
:)
Conspiracy? Sure. Would you listen to Bill Gates if he publicly came out against the war or would you rather get an insight in a sneaky and naughty way?
Sincerely,
-Matt
--- Need web hosting?
go get yourself a better education and find a high paying job. don't be so fucking pissed off just because some people work their assess off to get the highest paying jobs.
the worlds most powerful will start to take personal encryption products (pgp etc) seriously. If you don't want to spill the beans, crypt it with a public key you trust (i.e., that you're sure only the recepient can decrypt). Once the fashion leaders start doing it, everyone will.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This article (and the term 'privacy spill') seems to rightly point out that the propagation of information well beyond it's intended use lies somewhere between an incovenience and a hazard. There's some justified screaming when e-mails slip beyond their intended recipients, especially when they're subjected to scrutiny by the no-life pedantic dinks that comprise some of the Internet population.
But there's also justified screaming when we read stories about Microsoft researching how to extend DRM all the way through the Windows asset model, from Word docs to e-mail.
I hope that at the very least this blurs the black-and-white approach many people have allowed themselves to take on this. DRM can be more than useful than making somebody pay for the new power ballad from the latest band you're exploiting. It can suck when it keeps me from transferring tunes more than three times to my mini-disc. It can be okay when it keeps people from stealing music from some musical artists that are just squeking by to begin with. But it can be very useful in making sure that (for example) some correspondence don't accidentally leave a designated group of recipients. If we're talking, for instance, about distributing documents to doctors, or investors, that might contain sensitive information, then there are some benefits.
So I think this is at least a step towards realizing that we might be able to have it both ways, that there are real benefits for real people to an encryption system suited to offering content to an audience that is larger than might be easy with pgp, but smaller than cc:world
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
I love this place! Classic!
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
you can just smell the fear.
From: Orlando Ayala
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 5:22 AM
To: GMs of Subsidiaries
Cc: Mich Mathews; Mike Nash; Craig Mundie; Brad Smith (LCA); Pamela Passman (LCA); Vivek Varma; Orlando Ayala's Direct Reports
Subject: OSS and Goverment
{Probably LCA = "Law and Corporate Affairs". Passman's bio suggests this interpretation.
We need to more effectively respond to press reports regarding Governments and other major institutions considering OSS alternatives to our products. We must be prepared to respond to announcements, such as this one by the Japan Government (or prior announcements in Peru, Germany etc) quickly and with facts to counter the perception that large institutions are deploying OSS or Linux, when they are only considering or just piloting the technology. Announcements by governments are reported quickly around the world and require more coordination. In several instances, our ability to communicate effectively has been hindered by a lack of integration across groups in Redmond and the subsidiaries.
{Translation: We can expect a lot more OSS adoption announcements. This deer-caught-in-the-headlights paralysis thing has got to stop!}
What to Escalate: Any instance of government organizations and significant corporate customers who are planning to study, support or deploy OSS including Linux and Star Office that is likely to generate media attention (as differentiated from the COMPHOT alias). Any media coverage detailing the real or expected announcement of a government organization of corporate customer to study, support or deploy OSS.
{Translation: The peasantry is getting restless. Not only must we be prepared to deploy massive armadas of marketing suits to squelch "real" unrest, we must begin jumping at "expected" shadows.}
{COMPHOT would appear to be another mailing list, possibly one devoted to competitive hot spots. Isn't it interesting that it's the combined attack on the OS monopoly and office-suite monopoly that really worries them? And they're missing a trick. The real threat isn't StarOffice, which they could scuttle by taking out Sun. The real threat is OpenOffice.}
How to Escalate: Send an email immediately (same day) to the OSSI alias. This group includes members from the Security Business Unit, Server Marketing, LCA and Corporate PR who can quickly pull in additional stakeholders, influence business decisions, create and communicate PR guidance. Your mail should include the following information:
{Translation: we have a high-level damage-control group knit together with an "OSSI" mailing list that everybody in the To line knows enough about that we don't have to give its full name.}
* Designate the subsidiary owner (s) and their 24 hour contact information
* Explain the overall validity of claim, what is being reported, what is true/false
* Explain how and where the organization fits within govt structure (is it a small/medium/large department, how much influence does it have on other IT decisions, are their political influences at play, is there a commitment to deploy, what are the specific details of the announcement, what are the next steps)
* Explain likely influences, bottom line reasoning on why this is happening (i.e. security, cost, politics)
{Translation: They could be moving because our software's security sucks dead maggots through a straw, or because our licensing terms are highway robbery and feloniously illegal in some jurisdictions, or because some politician got a nationalistic bug up his ass. Better pray it's the last, because if it's either of the first two we are completely screwed.}
* Explain Microsoft's presence in the account
* Name the key contacts within the gov't
{Translation: Who can we suborn?}
* Name available third parties/potential defenders
{Translation: Who are our paid shills and astroturfers this week?}--
don't cry for US india, we're catching on.
As I said before: tough shit for them
Unfortunately, the US taxpayer will wind up bailing them out, especially the Russians.
I almost wondered if it wasn't a hoax. A lot of people with various agendas from global-warming to christian fundementalism like to make up faked 'forward-this' emails.
:P
If it's not though. Wow. We're all fucked.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Wow check out what he said
[original message]
This is a symptom of what has become all too common in todays email society - the trivialization of communication.
The "forward" has become a replacement for an actual composed email message. Its easier to maintain the illusion of staying in touch by forwarding some insipid crap rather than taking the time to actually *gasp* drop someone a personal note.
As a result, most email is not private, or more importantly, personal. I can easily imagine what went through the recipients mind - "wow, this is cool, let me forward it to ____". Why wouldn't he ? After all, we foward crap to each other all the time, why should this very interesting email be any different ?
You get something that looks interesting, you forward it. It couldn't POSSIBLY have been intended for ONLY you.
I would bet that had this letter been handwritten, the recipients would not have shown it around.
Welcome to the global communication era.
Except that in the case of email, you can't. Repeat after me, kids:
All you can do is make it difficult or illegal. But give me the most-secure email system, and I can probably do any of these:
But by all means, if someone wants to develop a huge expensive system that "guarantees" uncopyable email, be my guest. It'll be good for laughs.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
And yet the first posts were done within minutes of the article.
A very fascinating talk about privacy, copyright, and the failures of both. Betrayed by friends.
And of course, the assholes that chat online (blog? what a stupid word).
But it comes down to one small point- a single failure allowed that message to get out. Who's to blame? The guy forwarding it to the mass list? Did he know *everyone* on that list? Probably not. So therefore I'm saying the fault lies there. In every other case, the people that forwarded knew the others, no more than if a simple discussion was being undertaken among friends. I might not know joe and amy, but sue does, and she might mention how I had a good success at work. I wouldn't have told them, but that knowledge propogated without my help.
However, if Sue then posted on some forumn about my work success, then she'd be crossing the line. So I say, that is where the line in the sand is....and you crossed it. And Laurie is the one that pays for your broken implicit promise.
This meeting was to be held at ... dramatic pause ... The Meadows.
And there were only to be 5 of the most powerful people in the world there. Known as "The Pentaverit."
I spent a week in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum. I was
awarded a special pass which allowed me full access to not only the
entire official meeting, but also private dinners with the likes the
head of the Saudi Secret Police, presidents of various insundry
countries, your Fortune 500 CEOS and the leaders of the most important
NGOs in the world. This was not typical press access. It was full-on,
unfettered, class A hobnobbing.
You can be sure he'll never get that again. Of course though it's his own fault.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
You are absolutely right. Considering the length and the details in which this email goes, I am pretty sure it was meant to be leaked. Who writes such long casual emails (without spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) ?
I've just skimmed the article (which seems quite good) and read the letter. I can think of a number of reasons the author wouldn't want an e-mail to slip out, but now that it has, I have to say:
:)
That was a damn fine read.
Sure, it could use some editing, but it's not that bad. It's easy to find worse in the print press, let alone on the internet. Besides, that's just form and style... content is what really matters.
And in content, it is actually very interesting and eye-opening. I would be delighted if the author were to write a more lengthy and involved piece on WEF in Davos that actually *is* intended for publication. After this little debacle, it's sure to get a lot of exposure, and I bet she's got a lot more she could say on the subject.
(And sure, the fuss may have all been a marketing gimmick for a forthcoming article. I don't really care, because if so it was really well done!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Sorry, but anyone that trusts email as confidential deserves what they get in the end. Didn't anyone learn from the Halloween Memo? If you don't want it to become public, don't put it in writing.
I read that looking for some incredible juicy tidbit, some secret about the rich and famous, some national security leak ...
...
but
Nothing. Just *exactly* a snapshot of what I know already about the current state of world. Even down to the crashing pocket computer.
So what's the big deal again? Does the fact it comes straight from a journalist's keyboard give it some special aura or something? *I* could've written something like that (I'd have to make it up of course, but then again, maybe she did too?).
Information spreads. Doesn't matter if it's email or word of mouth. "Information wants to be free", you know?
Does anyone else suspect this "e-mail" was put together by a clever bored Sinophile?
She could have created a word doc with DRM, keeping her friends from forwarding it.
:P
Anyway, another interesting thing about this was how the lawmeme article is basically telling the story of the life of a metafilter thread. MeFi is a pretty cool website that I post on regularly (although, I missed this story). Slashdot gets mentioned in the press often, but slashdot blows. I'm not really proud to be associated with it
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I'm glad you enjoyed my piece. There's something called a Freudian slip, and I can either let it take the credit and say "well, I noticed after I punched submit, but it actually was accidental", or I can try to claim "yeah, I thought it up myself, glad you liked it."
Nonetheless, it is truly precious when my post is funny enough to get the notice of *four* posters.
Should it be classed as flamebait?
Well, maybe it should. But at least it's high quality flamebait. Glad you enjoyed it -- we each do our best in our own way.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
people that write for a living?
also, that there are no spelling mistakes and grammatical errors shows that its fake? some people are capable of using a spell checker, and some people even care about writing when its just for friends
I'm glad this was leaked. Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that the worlds "ruling classes" can get together, have a chinwag and for it not to be mentioned in the mainstream press?
The Bilderberg (sp?) Group is a similar example. In a nutshell, the self appointed elite get together in some secret location (different every year) and discuss whatever it is these people are interested in. That's a fact. I'm not suggesting they eat babies or worship Satan or anything (although defendents of the group will try to smear opponents with the lunatic conspiracy brush), I simply question why the most powerful men on the planet can get together in secret. What are they discussing? Why are we, in a democratic country, left out of the loop?
They crosscheck with a list of Slashdot users first.
Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world? I beg of all of you--the Internet addicts of the world--to turn off your TVs and computers now and then and engage the world. Go have actual eye-to-eye conversations with your family, friends and neighbors. Read a great book. Argue politics over dinner with friends. Go to City Council meeting. Raise money for your local public library. Teach your 12-year-old algebra.
Laurie - can I call you Laurie? - fuck you. Are you so proud that you could hobnob with "cute" Vicente Fox and "huggable" David Stern that you don't see the value of other people's opinions? People who might in fact be active doing things in the real world, in addition to taking advantage of online sites like slashdot, MeFi, etc. for debate, education, info relevant to work, and (though it must not be as "fascinating and fun" as "a day spent with Bill Gates", or as "hilarious" as "the CEO of Heinekin" (sic)) fun.
Do not begin to impugn our work in the real world, just because we don't have the direct access to oil-company executives and NGO bosses that you seem to enjoy so much. We do quite well without it, thanks.
sulli
RTFJ.
Come on, a JOURNALIST attends this
conference, of course she would write
an article about it, there are
no secrets in this email. It's probably
fake anyway.
Society and politics aren't changing as fast as technology. They can't possibly handle all the implications of each new invention.
Privacy may be an outdated idea. People want it to hide what may embarrass them. But their embarrassment really is the problem.
If something would embarrass them, either they are too weak to stand up for who they are, or they are doing something they know to be bad, and against their own stated principles.
We need to be more forgiving of people for their weaknesses, and be more careful about our own. If loss of privacy would help these two statements, then what is the problem?
-------
Incite and flee.
It's much better than it used to be. Years ago, I used the "strings blah.doc" trick on a Word file an office mate had sent me. What I found was that in addition to the text he intended, a bunch of his email headers were included! He of course blamed Eudora, because Microsoft certainly wouldn't be at fault.
It turns out that Windows didn't use to bother zeroing out RAM when it handed it over to an application, so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications. And Office of course doesn't actually write files out in a known format, it pretty much just dumps memory out intact (which is why it's such a pain to reverse engineer the file format). The combination of the OS not clearing RAM and Office writing out memory which it had allocated but never bothered using resulted in email headers in Word documents. This was fixed years ago, of course. I kinda missed it, though. I still routinely run strings on Office docs to see what shows up.
Back then part of my job was overseeing a subcontractor writing some software for us.
One day I learned that they had modified some code without sending us (me mostly) the
analysis they'd promised on how the changes would solve the problems we'd identified.
I sent a flaming email back to my contact at the subcontractor about how many times
they'd violated their contract and that I felt they'd lied to us and I didn't feel like
dealing with them anymore yada yada yada and cc'd a couple of coworkers.
The next morning I hear that my boss's boss's boss's boss had gone to my boss with
a printout of my email, asking my boss whether I'd written a letter of resignation.
I don't think this big boss actually had email, but it shows how far the email had gone.
Actually I was already looking for a new job. I left a month later. :)
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
PGP actualy has a sort-of DRM option. You can set things up so that a message is only displayed graphicaly (or on the console screen) and can be saved or redirected.
You can't stop someone from taking a screen-grab or retyping the text. But there's a good chance this level of crypto would have prevented the sort of 'hey check this out' forwarding that got this letter posted all over the 'web.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Is there a way to clean the undo history in MS Word 2000 and XP?
:)
Thank you in advance.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
For the billionth time RTFA.. This point (and many other interesing ideas/questions/comments) are brought up in the _very_ insightful article by James Grimmelmann. Furthermore, he goes into more thought provoking depth about this issue and brings up some points you may not have thought of yet.
Trust me, this is one you definitely want to read if you are even mildly intested in this topic.
Or maybe you're just a troll..
Oh well, I'll light the fuse and burn in my own karma.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
At its peak, about once every few days (slower since the dot-bust), I'd get a message directed to an address that bounces into my postmaster recycle bin containing all sorts of wonderfully cool private information: business plans, financial spreadsheets, customer contact lists, credit reports. Obviously, this was intended for the identical address at the VC firm, but the sender (wrongly) presumed that they could shorten that to just stonehenge.com.
What's odd is that nearly every time I responded with my curt message of "hey, you shouldn't be sending private info with big financial impact without either verifying the recipient or encrypting the data", they would come back at me, like it was my fault! Weirder, they'd ask me what the proper email address was, like I knew (or cared).
I spent about 20 minutes one day talking with the IT director at the VC company. I tried to make him understand that ultimately, it was his company that might be held liable for not making their email address clear to the clients they were dealing with. But he seemed to think that all I needed to do was agree to forward the misdirected email. We never did agree on that.
I still get misdirected emails for a video production house in Canada as well.
Why don't people understand that every character in an email address matters?
I love how when something on slashdot takes off web sites go down, slow down, or change format in order to handle to requests. Makes me feel part of a mob :-P
Maybe you just have low standards. The article didn't seem to be that polished. Just the raw output of someone who has a good natural writing ability.
Also, some of her spelling had been corrected along the way.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
# Al Qaeda's threat is mostly done with...
I didn't know Al Qaeda's threat was mostly done with. In fact, I recall being on Orange Alert for most of February. Increased chattter... whose chatter was it? Is there a new terrorist group that has Al Qaeda-like capabilities? That would certainly be big news.
and this seems like it might be important: I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
this is not something I've heard from any American politician. Certainly I think the American people (me included) would like to know that war with Iraq is just the beginning of a long, drawn out war. And any discussions about the war with Iraq should take this concept of "cleansing the planet" into account.
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I am so glad I am not a member of this ruling class, because there would be some many changes. From caller id actually working, to politicians telling the truth and doing what the people need and want, to e-mail being as secure as a private conversation in a bathroom with all the faucets running.(funny how are technology is so far advanced we can put tap your bathroom but if the faucet is running you can't hear jack)
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
By the time it was the top virus spreading around, the virus send the Ukranian president schedule to a news web site, document that is usually a highly protected secret.
As long as the average number of forwards per recipient is greater than one -- no matter by how little or how much -- the laws of probability tell us to expect a nice happy power-law curve zipping up towards infinity.
I'm almost sure that he should be saying "exponential growth" and not "power law."
Lots of people use email as a replacement for mail. Lots of people forget that email is not much like mail at all.
Mail (in it's traditional form) is slow, hard to copy, and difficult to compose. Email is fast, easy to copy and easy to compose. Neither are very secure. Combining composability with easy copying gives you forwarding.
With forwarding being so easy, people do it as second nature to share interesting/relevant information. It would not surprise me for a minute to see something I didn't want passed around forwarded because the recipiant didn't realise it was confidential, mostly due to not taking the time to rub two brain cells together. Nevermind the technolgical security issues, which make me place email as being way less secure than calling someone on my phone.
If I'm going to send anything at all that that I don't want forwarded, I'll make it painfully obvious with 'DO NOT FORWARD, PRIVATE, FOR YOUR EYES ONLY' etc. Of course, even with that, I still would not forward anything other than the lowest of privacy concern on my part, since email is so insecure.
If I want to keep it secret, the most secure form is to tell no one. If I'm going to tell someone, at the highest security level, it would be in person where I have the least chance of being overheard. Email is LAST method on the list, used only for trivial secrets.
W9x:Thanks for the make-work project Bill.
The World Economic Forum wasn't mentioned in the mainstream press?
Really?
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Download this tool and follow the directions. Make sure you don't skip the fdisk step, and then your undo history will be cleared.
There are two mistakes in the first two paragraphs alone: "truely" and "insundry").
it's a very one-sided view of things. There are, what, 34 nations that are going to support the US in the Iraq war?
Uhm, no, you are mistaken in your understanding of malloc. This is the standard for malloc:
Taken from malloc (1).
It is not the operating systems responsibility to clear the memory of something recently allocated, and it is good programming practice to set the bits to 0 after a malloc unless you know for a damn well certainty that you will fill the entire segment.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
"usually arrogant"
Well, I think you're pretty arrogant to assume all world leaders are such complete retards, and to sweepingly criticise them like that.
"remarkably naive -- especially about science and technology."
You're probably remarkably naive about politics and economics. Why should they concern themselves with science, they have advisors for that. Do you think Blair should browse Slashdot during the boring bits of the daily security briefing?
my post is totally better!
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
Any time we release a document to any other group of people, inside work or out, we are 'encouraged' to copy all, paste into a new document. That document is then password protected from editing (weak, I know, but it shows diligence). Only then is it to be sent out.
:)
Of course, following all of that is a royal pain in the arse, so it only gets done on vendor communications and whatnot, and typically it's iffy then. But it is funny to see a template that had gotten hit by a virus from my boss once- I called him up and had him panic about having another bug on his box
Don't faith based organisations have a conflict of interest when it comes to things like AIDS and sex education, since they have an ideological line to push that is often anti-condom, etc?
Who give a shit about some cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Although I do wonder if Russia has any nukes it hasn't sold to the Mafia.
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
This is pure crap. What "American security and military speakers" are going to tell a JOURNALIST at an INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION that the U.S. wants a global war?
As with almost every other "accident" on the net these days, this is just part of someone's agenda.
Don't be fooled.
and the ramifications of using the internet and the guise of a "privacy spill" to proffer the information. I have some moderator points and I debated wether to use them on this article, but as I read through the replies only one touched on my point, so I thought it better to comment. While most of you discuss this as a matter of what should be private, and how MS is the worst, I feel the real problem is that (keep in mind that I do not believe the article to be true) the possiblity of mass "leaking" this email somehow lends it more credibility. So far I have not fallen for any of the urban legends or hoax type emails, and I don't intend to. We are supposed to be the most savy when it comes to this type of scam, don't let the topic of discussion or the topic of the email cloud your judgement.
. Then the reporter's note to friends via email gets out in the wild against her wishes.
What does that say about those who are wooed by the power and money of those elitist types? The blind following the blind?
does that suprise you at all?
who else would listen to these people if they had a choice?
If you can eschew the moral implications for a moment, this part really helps in understanding the wave of anti-Americanism:
The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
Add in the bit about how Al Qaeda is down to 200 from 7000 members, and the foreign perspective on this starts to click into focus. Esepcially if there's anything behind this comment:
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
Jesus. One hopes she is exaggerating.
To compare Christian's who call themselves fundamentalist with what the press calls a fundamentalist shows a lot of ignorance. God bless John Ashcroft!!
First: Can anyone be sure this so called "leaked" email is even true. If no one has proof, then it is nothing more than a hoax, scam, whatever you want to call it.
Second: Lets just say the email is real and did come from this Laurie person. Does anyone have first hand personal knowledge of Laurie? Is this person writing facts or personal opinion? How reliable is this information?
People always bend the "truth" to make it fit their agenda. That is why statistics were created.
It amazes me how many people believe everything they read. "Hell, if it's on the Internet it must be true!" --WTF ever.
Of course, the woman who this is credited to has confirmed as legitimate.
So, maybe when you get invited to hob-knob with world leaders, I'll accept your judgment of her.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This is exactly wrong. An email is a text documnet, hence completely binary. It's not so hard to search a database, even one as large as the Internet, for exact matches as long as this email. It is a linear time problem.
I believe that this is why some experts believe that copyright enforcement is possible. It is watermarking (embedded DRM) which is hopeless. I freely admit that the "exact match" problem is much harder for images, audio, and video. And perhaps also for heavily annotated text files (such as this LawMeme piece...)
I found some of Laurie Garrett's articles from Newsday and compared the writing style to the email. Some erie similaries, most notably the excessive use of commas...
From Newsday Article
Some researchers insist all of the drugs, or one particular element of HIV treatment, is responsible. Some argue, it's simply HIV itself, finding new ways to destroy those it infects...
When drugs are switched, the viruses mutate back into their prior, tougher forms, and the illness worsens.
Though the prices of most anti-HIV drugs have come down considerably in recent years, and generic forms are available for as little as $300 a year in some poor countries, the overall price tag of HIV treatment in the United States is rising.
From the Email
I attended a small lunch with
Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed
It's run by about 5,000
bickering, sometimes charming, usually arrogant, mostly male people who
are accustomed to living in either phenomenal wealth, or great personal
power....And, most importantly to the WEF, it means flourishing free trade and
support for entrepeneurs with minimal state regulation.
Her writing is mostly fine. I didn't notice any glaring grammar errors (though at least one obnoxious pendant on slashdot pointed one out), and I doubt she would be in the position she's in (a journalist) if she couldn't write well.
I think the main problem she had was that everyone knows about her school-girl crush on Vincentie Fox
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
<troll>
If we had Palladium DRM we could restrict the license of use on our outgoing messages, and this wouldn't have happened. You can prevent someone from forwarding content, replying to all on BCC's, etc.
</troll>Or just use calloc and move on with your life. :)
That neither the article nor anyone here has pointed out that the author herself sent the email out as a group mailing, something she certainly could not have done easily via snail-mail.
Since the writer went to the conference as a journalist, she was expected to publish something. With a bit of cleanup, she could have published that as a column. Nobody in Europe would be upset.
The US media is very gentle on the Administration. You don't see publicly in the US media that, to most of the world's elites, Bush and his cronies are viewed as inept and dangerous. "Jesus freaks with nuclear weapons" is a bit harsh, but it's mainstream British opinion.
On the economic front, everybody who can read the numbers knows it's going to be at least a few years before things get better. Whole countries are going bankrupt. IMF policy doesn't work. The bubble in the US still hasn't fully deflated. Japan has been in the tank for a decade, and nobody knows how to fix it.
Again, none of this should surprise anyone other than heavy TV viewers.
I read the email. I saw that movie too. Nice synopsis of the beginning of True Lies.
What a croc.
First you claim he was mistaken, then proceed to post the "correction" - which consisted of something that agrees perfectly with what he described happening. Make up your mind.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Laurie Garrett may have been a dork for sending email that she didn't want shared to the world, but I think that ol' Adam Davis that forwarded her message is even a bigger dork. Anyone that would forward mail with their home and cell phone numbers. Let's all give him a call!
> Adam Davis
> Director, EPRIsolutions Environment Division
> 1299 4th Street, Suite 307
> San Rafael, CA 94901
> Main Office:415-454-8800
> Direct:415-257-4631
> Cell: 415-305-4786
Writers write; it's what they do. A writer "can't not," as Stephen King puts it. I get emails from friends who make a living with words, and precisely because they aren't "on," they're obviously writers, writing, because they can't not: "Damn the blue pencil, full speed ahead!"
When Mr. Largo leaves the room, the Springfield Elementary Orchestra plays the forbidden music: "Pop Goes the Weasel." Writers off-duty are wordy as hell, like this letter. She may even have been drunk, and I mean that affectionately.
Haven't you ever heard the quote about "Sorry about the long letter but I didn't have time to write a short one"?
it is a trust problem.
Somebody she trusted, violated that trust.
If I tell you a secret, and you just start telling people it, it is not the peoples fault, it is the person who violated that trust.
Of course, peple with 2 or more brain cells will usually indicated it is not for the public. Like "please don't spread this information".
Once it is out, it is out. Personally, I think she should of encrypted it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Not really in the personal privacy sphere but I once saw a DEA document that they published in PDF with the name of their agents blacked out. in Acrobat the names were actually blacked out but in OS X preview app you could see them.
I know absolutely nothing about PDF but I assume they have layers.
Ironically it was a report about some Israelis trying to gather information on DEA agents and there they had all their names and addresses published in the internet.
Any operating system with some sort of security certification will write zeros to a page before giving it to the application. Windows NT has always done this. If not, all an app would have to do to look at another process's memory space would be to keep allocating pages. The OS usually bypasses this for kernel-mode allocations (what's the point?), which is why there was a vulnerability discovered recently in ethernet drivers that didn't bother zero'ing their memory blocks before sending the blocks out over the wire.
malloc() takes chunks of the application's virtual memory that has already been allocated by the operating system and paritions it outs. It won't bother zeroing the memory for performance reasons.
So what do people think of the content itself? Are we that close to the brink?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
The issue of e-mail privacy is a modestly serious one. I was stung by this in a bad way two months ago. I sent an angry personal e-mail to the president of a fundamentalist Christian 'family rights group,' who in turn took the verbatim contents of that e-mail and published them in a press release from his organization (because I'm the editor of a small but well-known newspaper).
Suddenly my personal e-mail to him was circulating in the inboxes of thousands of the group's members, and I started getting calls from the media, family rights groups, etc. Several other 'family rights' groups published the story on their websites; it went national rather quickly. I later apologized for the e-mail, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The issue is likely to haunt me for a while, even though the hubbub from it has died down now.
Now, it's quite true that I should have known full well that if I send something out in e-mail, it could get re-distributed; it's the nature of the beast. So I'm not really too upset at anybody but myself. Even so, the flippancy of people in dealing with personal e-mail is quite striking. You also see this when people CC or BCC to people other than the primary recipient.
I feel sorry for the journalist (although her e-mail was fascinating to read!). There ought to be a higher level of trust allowed in e-mail, but since there isn't, we ought to watch what we write.
On a protected memory OS, the OS is indeed responsible for clearing memory before it is handed to a process the first time, to avoid precisely this problem, however once memory has been allocated to a process, it may be reallocated without clearing it.
I've missed you Dunbar.
Post I responded to:
This means that he thinks Windows will zero out memory allocated. This is wrong, and I illustrated that malloc() does this intentionally.
Post I responded to:
This is also incorrect, you will only get memory that is unused by any application. Yes, you can over step your bounds, just as you can assign random addresses to pointers.
Post I responded to:
Now, here is the real meat. The OS is not supposed to zero the RAM, unless you use calloc(). That is what calloc() is for. Office should ensure that the memory is zero'd if doing a malloc to prevent things like this. See Cisco CERTs for some good reasons why.
Now, I hope with this overly verbose explanation of why he was wrong, and detailing out in what ways he was wrong (Not in his understanding of malloc() so much, but his understanding of what the operating systems role is when it gives a segment of memory to a process) I expect you can agree with me on this and not feel the urge to be condescending or argue.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
A friend of mine had an amusing (yet logically flawed) signature so one day I decided to write her pointing out her fallacy. I was horrified to see that her reply was sent not just back to myself, but to a massive list of people. Granted, neither the original message nor the reply contained anything extremely personal, but I felt as though my privacy had been voilated.
Any operating system with some sort of security certification will write zeros to a page before giving it to the application.
calloc() does this. malloc() will not zero the memory out. Some operating systems that have security certifications will just fill with random bits.
Windows NT has always done this. If not, all an app would have to do to look at another process's memory space would be to keep allocating pages.
No, it hasn't always done this. I wrote a page-dumper for NT that would print out every string in memory from start to finish. It was user space, didn't run as administrator.
malloc() takes chunks of the application's virtual memory that has already been allocated by the operating system and paritions it outs. It won't bother zeroing the memory for performance reasons.
Uhm, do you know what virtual memory is?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Probably to blackmail any DEA agents they could, and then use them to smuggle drugs into the US.
Hey...
With friends like Israelis, the USA doesn't need enemies.
Remember Jonathan Pollard. A great Jewish American patriot.
Vacuous or Vapor The Potentates' Pates? That is the question, whether it is nobler to sling arrows at such fools or accept the absurd as reality and join them. God save humanity, because these poor lost soles are clueless.
...) fault and that dang USA dollar that is at the root of all humanities' pains and atrocities. Dadadadadadadu?
After reading Laurie's comments of the WEF, I was not surprised or disappointed. No wonder the world is in such a pitiful mess. The very people who could do something denied, avoided, and evaded any responsibility for the advancement of humanity.
It must be gods' will, blame the evil-sinful-criminal-immoral peoples, (yep!) it is America's (Canada, US, Mexico,
I have decided I am a psychic. The human species will be extinct (Think - Dodo Birds and Dinosaurs) by 2120ec.
By the way WEF members and supporting fools, THANKS MUCH!
Jadi Ba
Reality is a self induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
it's a getaway excuse to take a vacation from your busy days to go skiing with the hot ski bunnies...
The CEO of sony (powerful as he may be) does not talk about issues that will keep soo many world economic leaders up at night... instead he talks about his 30 years of work and dedication....
Richard gere also.. says something that's just plain stupid....
so IMHO a stupid essay that picked the wrong event to bring about the main point.
calloc() does this. malloc() will not zero the memory out.
Yah, but these are not Operating systems.
I wrote a page-dumper for NT that would print out every string in memory from start to finish.
Was it 3.5?
Uhm, do you know what virtual memory is?
They don't.
The explanation for that that I heard was that word allocates more disk space than needed for files, and doesn't clear the unused space on the disk. So it might allocate 512k for a file, and use 200k, and the remaining empty space in the file is filled with whatever was on those blocks of the disk previously. It could easily be deleted email, or temp files from an email program, as it could be their old IE history or cookies, or quicken data. But it's ok, because "who would want to hack me? I don't mind windows is the most unsecure piece of shit ever, see, because nobody would ever try to hack me! That stuff only happens in the movies!!" *sigh*
Well, it seems the Slashdot crowd has plenty of book smarts, but no street smarts. Where I come from, we call leaked letters like this "propaganda". Nobody writes to their "friends" in this style. This was written for dissemination worldwide, and a "leak" cover story invented to make it seem more credible - to make it seem less like this "journalist" just made a bunch of stuff up.
Lots of journalists attend the WEF, yet this is the only "letter" we've seen like this. Why is that? Because it's not real, that's why.
Privacy concerns are moot when you're talking about hoaxes, propaganda, and articles intended for public consumption from the start. You're all missing the point here.
Just think about the privacy implication of such cross-application leaks on a multi-user system. Rather than relying on a broken word processor, an attacker could write a program that intentionnally malloc'ed large chunks of memory, and then went searching through them for interesting data of his fellow users...
- If the U.S. unilaterally goes to war, and it is anything short of a
quick surgical strike (lasting less than 30 days), the economists were
all predicting extreme economic gloom: falling dollar value, rising spot
market oil prices, the Fed pushing interest rates down towards zero with
resulting increase in national debt, severe trouble in all countries
whose currency is guaranteed agains the dollar (which is just about
everybody except the EU), a near cessation of all development and
humanitarian programs for poor countries. Very few economists or
ministers of finance predicted the world getting out of that economic
funk for minimally five-10 years, once the downward spiral ensues.
if I understand this correctly, everybody, except the Euro-using countries, is f***ed...
So long the US being the rulers of the universe...
I don't know why I respond to idiotic comments like this, but what the hell.
calloc() does this. malloc() will not zero the memory out. Some operating systems that have security certifications will just fill with random bits.
calloc() and malloc() are functions in a user-mode library. When they run out of space on their heap, they request more memory from the operating system. In Windows NT, this is with the VirtualAlloc call.
No, it hasn't always done this. I wrote a page-dumper for NT that would print out every string in memory from start to finish. It was user space, didn't run as administrator.
You successfully dumped every string in your process. If you are more clever than I think you, you might have dumped memory for every other process created by you by posing as a debugger. Big deal. You did not get memory from another user memory space. If you think you did, please provide the code!
Uhm, do you know what virtual memory is?
Do you have any clue how memory management works at any level in the operating system?
Someone leading Jordan has no right to preach about freedom and fairness, especially with the claim that the islamic religion will help bring it. In Jordan, specifically because Islamic laws are in place, women can be legally murdered by their families for bringing shame to the family through infedelity. This is called "Honor killing". And the family doesn't even need proof. Merely suspecting a woman is sufficient.
Other religions were just as bad once, but Islam is younger, and still at the state of maturity Christianity was during the Crusades - any attrocity is justified provided it results in more devout believers in the one correct religion.
No, I don't have much respect for Islam. So sue me. I also don't have respect for any other religion.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I realize copyright issues on things like this is really not where it's at or what copyright was really intended for. And "piracy" or whatever is a touchy subject.
And I find it utterly pathetic people forwarded a personal email--one or two iterations (friend of a friend) is pushing, but to make it out to a list so that it was web archived??? Don't these archives have standards on copyright or "gee, it may be someone else's work we have here...."??
That all said, the "author" seems to be taking of a beating on this. Although this isn't an avenue one would typically pursue, in this case, it may be warranted, or at least a frank discussion of the line should be put forward.
Now, all that said... What about her copyright rights?
As my understanding of copyright goes, isn't her piece protected by copyright? I call this less in the realm of privacy--if it was sent over email, it's legally usually considered public (non-private if you will), even if it was intended for a group of friends. *I* consider my emails private, but I know that *legally* they are not. If it was sent to another, there is no expectaton of privacy, as least my understand of internet case law is on this.
But then, copyright law should kick in. Now, no one does this with email really, or only the nuts do. But, again, this seems to be an extreme case where people are just attacking and criticizing left and right.... Her friends were not given rights to distribute (forward). All the web sites that received the work, even in ignorance, did not have the right to replicate and distribute further the material.
Suing folks isn't going to stop the spread of this. But it seems simple polite, reasonable treatment of this personal email was violated. And on top of that, copyright rights, normally not pursued on correspondance, violated as well.
Sucks to be her.
Discussion of her screw-uph ive/cat_me dia.html
http://www.fultonchaindesign.com/mt/arc
Her website:
www.lauriegarrett.com
left wing writer, email is obviously what she saw filtered through her biases
the author hadn't flattened the layers. it got noticed I think by a reporter using a slower computer than many used at the time so they saw the names appear then get blanked over where-as for most people that happened too quick to see. it was reported here on Slashdot
I read it and the entire time I am thinking, 'where is the proof that this is real?'.
/.'rs are pretty smart. If some twit sent you an email that started out like that (replace Newsday with, oh Cisco') and then went on to say that you needed to take all your money out of the bank because there are problems with ATM's that no one wants to admit to, how seriously would you take him?
Has any of the people quoted in that email come forward and admitted talking to this person?
I mean, he name drops like crazy (that alone makes me suspicious) but the first I hear about it is on Slashdot?
And I read the whole thing. You know what it reads like to me.... a political agenda.
A typical, America is evil, comunism is good, liberal agenda.
For those who are clue challenged please allow me to point things out...
It opens strong:
'With apologies for the group email... I thought this was interesting enough
to pass along. These are the notes from a friend of a friend who writes for
Newsday.'
How many of us have gotten emails from long lost relatives and business associates in Nigeria that started out like that.
Seriously though. You
Well this is worse. Cause I don't know this twit.
Lets move along....
Now dude spends a bunch of paragraphs talking up this place in the Swiss Alps like he is trying to sell me a time share.
This follows formula to a 'T' for reeling in the suckers. He is getting downright personal with the recipent of this email.
Makes us feel all comfy and gushy inside.
Got a question for ya.
Why hasn't he asked the reciepent (gotta learn how to spell that damn word) any personal questions? Where is the 'How are your kids?' or 'I am bringning you and your wife back some kids' or even 'Isn't it weird how your wife and I both came down with the Clap at the same time? Are you sure you are not infected?'.
Oh because he edited that stuff out.
Fair enough.
This email doesn't read like it has been edited. Most forwarded emails that I read that have been edited read like they have been edited.....
Which sets us up nicely for his political agenda.
The following information in the email cannot be proven or disproven. The only exception to this is if people like Bill Clinton, the queen of Africa (what is her name, Latifa?) or Bill 'Money' Gates came forward and either denied or confirmed this stuff. Bear this in mind too....
the odds of any of those people confirming they talked to this twerp are nonexistent. And if someone did come forward and deny it, well, that would be twisted around the person as an admittal. As in 'Why do you find it neccasary to lie about....' sort of thing. It is a no win scenerio for these people. And to be frank with you I am sure all of them, with the possible exception of Bill (no not that Bill, the other Bill, the one obsessed with world domination) have better things to do with there time then get caught up in this controversy.
And this next paragraph (near the end) is just too much. To be quite frank with you I am not sure where to begin. Read it:
Finally, who are these guys? I actually enjoyed a lot of my
conversations, and found many of the leaders and rich quite charming and
remarkably candid. Some dressed elegantly, no matter how bitter cold and
snowy it was, but most seemed quite happy in ski clothes or casual
attire. Women wearing pants was perfectly acceptable, and the elite is
sufficiently
Multicultural that even the suit and tie lacks a sense of dominance.
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel
room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed
circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy
from a remarkably candid head of state. A day spent with Bill Gates
turned out to be fascinating and fun. I found the CEO of Heinekin
hilarious, and George Soros proved quite earnest about confronting AIDS.
Vicente Fox -- who I had breakfast with -- proved sexy and smart like a
--- well, a fox. David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a
hug.
---
Let me get this straight.
These people are all paranoid about assasination attempts (he says that farther up in the email) and he is spending the day with Bill gates, hanging out in the hotel room of the King of god only knows where, making passes at some dude from Fox and (this is my favorite line)
'David Stern (Chair of the NBA) ran up and gave me a
hug.'
Granted this is a chick writing this, so the hug thing isn't too far fetched.
Still though, you know damn well that people in positions like where these people are didn't get there by being stupid.
They know better then to hang too close to reporters and paparazzi.
Anyways that is my take on this.
Just calling 'em like I see 'em.
While I was waiting for the slashdot effect to simmer down on LawMeme, I read the letter. Then I forwarded it. Then I read the LawMeme article. Damn this mirror, I must be better looking than that.
Uhm, no, you are mistaken in your understanding of malloc. This is the standard for malloc:
malloc() allocates size bytes and returns a pointer to the allocated memory. The memory is not cleared.
I doubt this is the current Microsoft standard in Windows, since it opens up huge security holes in a multiuser OS..
Two of the oldest tricks to gain information you shouldn't havem on a Unix system, were to malloc(3) a fairly large chunk of memory and then read the data that was left by the last user/process.
The other trick was to fopen(3) a new file, do a large fseek(3) and fclose(3) the filehandle. Then simply read the file to get the data that had been written on the disk blocks previously.
But of course those tricks haven't worked for over 10 years now in the Unix world.
I would be very surprised to learn that they do work on Windows.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
New US Policy Towards Iraq
Friday February 28, 2003.
WASHINGTON (Repos) - The United States on Friday dismissed Iraq's pledge to destroy missiles and said the move will still not stop the ongoing march towards war.
Iraq's vow to obey U.N. orders to destroy its al-Samoud 2 ballistic missiles, whose 90 mile range exceeds the U.N. limit set in 1991, set off another round of denunciations from the White House.
"That's the problem with Saddam Hussein. Every time we find something like evidence that we can jump on, he gives in and leaves us making even more outlandish demands." White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
The U.S. comback was that the missiles represented only the tip of a massive iceberg and that Baghdad was still hiding a massive stores of weapons of mass destruction it is required to disarm under U.N. resolution 1441. To date, the US has come up with no evidence.
"If Saddam insists on staying in power, the only way we will cancel our invasion of Iraq is if Saddam submits to a complete sex change. The works. Chop-chop. Breasts, big ones. And estrogen treatments. This is now official US policy towards Saddam," Fleischer said.
"We think this is reasonable and fair," said Condoleeza Rice. The new sex change procedures will become the new US foreign policy towards all heads of state that the Bush administration decides are unacceptable. "It's much better than assassination. This is a part of our new "Compassionate Americanism" initiative that I am pushing," said Rice.
> Who writes such long casual emails (without
> spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) ?
The fact that you can't spell or write doesn't mean nobody else can.
And bear in mind that the writer is supposedly a professional journalist, who may be assumed to *like* writing.
Ohh! *VERY* interesting. After all, our (I live in Europe, Sweden) leaders
arent so stupid that I have thought. I agree on many things that they think.
But its bad that they are naive about science and technology.
However, that wasnt any news.
This is the most interesting text I have read on slashdot this year.
quote:
"Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel
room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed
circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow..."
That's all the sniffer was looking for, really...
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
Second paragraph: "...presidents of various insundry countries...". Insundry? And this is from a journalist?
Watching Bill Clinton address the conference while sitting in the hotel room of the President of Mozambique -- we were viewing it on closed circuit TV -- I got juicy blow-by=blow analysis of US foreign policy from a remarkably candid head of state.
Was I the only one who saw "juicy blow-by=blow-job analysis" in this sentence?
Peace and love, y'all
Whether the OS clears ram or not has nothing to do with whether or not the C library calls calloc and malloc do so. Calloc and malloc are more high-level than the OS, operating within the memory space given to a single process by the OS. The decision of what appaers in that memory space is made before calloc and malloc are involved. That decision is the providence of the memory pager. If page 1234 belonged to pid 100 before and now you are giving it to pid 101 instead, do you clear it or not? That is something that happens beneath the level of libc.
In this case it's Microsoft's fault either way, since they coded BOTH the OS and the application.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
but I can't take it. No matter how carefully I edit a post, I manage to slip in an error. This is doubly true when I am critical of a typical Slashdot grammar or spelling error.
there/their/there
And those are:
definately/definitly/definatly
priviledge
its/it's
who/whom
etcetera
Yes, it's a blog. Sorry if that offends you.
Reread the post you nit.
I said "There is nothing new here except the speed and scope."
Gossip has been around from the beginning of time.
I'm saying the same thing you are saying.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
an email that I got over 3 years ago
The Alaskan Assassin!
I wonder if that guy is in Iraq yet...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Supposedly some extasis ring. They cheked out the house of some DEA chemist.
The OS is not responsible for giving you zeroed memory; the OS *is* responsible for clearing memory from other programs that it gives to you. It is good practice to clear the memory anyway, so that you don't risk leaking information from freed memory in the same program. Also, the OS could fill the memory with some other value or with random data if it felt like it.
(You mean malloc(3), BTW, not malloc (1), which would be a user command rather than a C function)
Instead of ranting at the bloggers and posters, Mrs. Garrett should simply have said something along the lines:
"That email was private and intended for a only a few friends. I am sorry it has been exposed to the world, it was never meant as perfectly accurate, peer-reviewed report of the Davos forum, but rather my quick impressions. Please take it as such, and do not base any business or investment decisions on it. Ciao."
The fact is, she was naive and unthinking to fail to realize the possibility that one of her friends may forward it, and that the email would get out. Yes, she should have a right to privacy, but the possibilty certainly exists, and instead of relying upon a nebulous "right", she should have taken steps to minimize or eradicate that possibility instead. Both she and her friend made a mistake, and the email got out into the news-hungry metanet where it snowballed. But ranting at random people for that only made matters worse. Something for us all to keep in mind.
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
So this is an email from someone who was there? I liked the nice description of the transportation and surroundings, so much more believable.
If this was a novel instead of an email, I would ask what the character's motivation was.
It is a fraud.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
I bet there were some juicy tidbits to be discovered by a sniffer on that wireless network! I wonder how many passwords and email correspondence were captured by the intelligence agencies of the world present at that conference.
Is her complaint really about privacy or is it about the heat she may be taking for having an off-the-cuff report of the WEF spread around that perhaps is not congruent with the way the rest of the media wants such things reported - i.e., edited by editors with political axes of their own to grind?
Did she write an "official" report on the WEF - and if so, how does it square with her "unofficial" one?
Otherwise, the analysis makes no sense. Intellectual property is what's in your head. Once it's outside your head and outside your direct control (i.e., encrypted on your hard drive), it is no longer property and no longer yours. You can use encryption - which works only if the decryptor agrees to maintain the encryption. Or you can use a non-disclosure contract - which works only as long as the second party does not breach the contract and also imposes the same contract on anyone to whom they are allowed to forward. These things are merely delaying tactics.
Once one of these events occurs, do you then go back and complain about the whole history of technology that you didn't use a quill pen and the Pony Express?
And if you react irrationally and decide to forego the Net, is that supposed to alter the technological and economic impact of the Net such that we should be worried about it?
None of that makes any sense...
I think Garrett's complaint stems not so much from the privacy issue but from her concern over her public, social, and professional status as a result of off-the-cuff remarks. And this is not an issue anyone should be concerned with.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"Do you imagine for a moment that the participants in the WEF--whether they be the CEOs of Amoco an IBM of the leaders of Amnesty International and OXFAM--waste their time with Internet chat rooms and discussions such as this? Do you actually believe, as you type your random thoughts in such Internet settings, that you are participating in Civilization? In Democracy? In changing your world?"
Being an obvious newbie to the culture of the Internet, I suppose it's understandable that you didn't realize you should always ponder a bit before turning on the flame thrower. Perhaps if you'd taken a moment to think about it, you might have had a moment of shock at the realization that there exists an entire culture of political thought of which you were apparently completely unaware. Perhaps you'd have realized that some of the participants in these political discussions will _BE_ the policy makers of tomorrow. Perhaps you'd have taken a moment to be frightened of a future that will be defined by a culture that is so completely foreign to you. You see Laurie, we are in the process of changing the world; you've just been blissfully ignorant of it.
"After all, if someone managed to take out Davos during WEF week the world would basically lose a fair chunk of its ruling and governing class
POOF, just like that. "
Let's suppose they did blow up these fuckers. So what? Slime from below would rise and fill the cracks. In other words, these people's "power" is an accident, and is mostly in people's *heads*, YOUR head.
If people could only see beyond titles and bullshit and not care, nobody could have this "power" in the first place.
"The global economy is in very very very very bad shape. Last year when WEF met here in New York all I heard was, "Yeah, it's bad, but recovery is right around the corner". This year "recovery" was a word never uttered. Fear was palpable -- fear of enormous fiscal hysteria. The watchwords were "deflation", "long term stagnation" and "collapse of the dollar". All of this is without war."
Good. Nobody uses 286s with Windows 1.0 anymore, why should the world use an even older system, capitalism?
Because in your HEAD, that's the only way to go?
Good luck, world!
Dude, reading that email had to have made me stupider by 10 iq points too.
God spoke to me
The writer of the Feature on Accidential Privacy Spills goes on about P3P, encryption, copyright, ... but he seemingly simply forgot one point. The netiquette clearly states:
E-mail is not to be published.
The guy to blame is also clear: Adam Davis posted the e-mail to a mailing list, which is publication. (And some other guy called 'beagle' seemingly published two other e-mails of Laurie Garrett).
All this endless talk on how publishing e-mails degrades (or improves) information of the masses in a democracy, all this speculative writings on possible technologies to prevent it. This all is completely pointless. The question is how to make everyone aware and understand the netiquette and why it is necessary. The author of the feature implicitely gives some pretty compelling reasons for the why but also clearly shows he hasn't understand the netiquette since he (mockingly) proposes to Cease-and-Desist the e-mail out of publicity.
There is no need for C&D. Netiquette has been breached and any webmaster who really deserves that name should be extremly willing to remove the e-mail from any website/archive he is responsible for simply on request.
Social pressure is it. Or maybe was it. We shouldn't have let in all those AOLers a few years ago .
Metafilter RULES
George W. Bush.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest of the gang in the 2003 White House.
THESE ARE THE CLOWNS.
They are of the hypocritical political party that whined about "wagging the dog" when the US intervened in Bosnia, and loudly and repeatedly BLAMED their Commander in Chief (one that was elected) for any spilled American blood.
Who are the "clowns"? The only [ones] willing to lay down their lives for others -- for others lives? their freedom?
No, the clowns who presently sit in the White House AVOIDED ever putting their asses on the line. A White House of cowardly clowns.
If being a "clown" means caring about the world, and not just my personal comfort, then count me as one as well.
Personal comfort? If those clowns cared any more for their personal comfort they'd be spending even MORE time in places like on their fake ranch in Texas, or at Camp David. As it is, the Head Clown spends too much time having his personal comfort catered to.
Bill, don't be a fool.
This long, rambling, long, LawMeme article spends a lot of time huffing and puffing about nothing important. News flash to the writer: "information wants to be free" (a property or quality of information actually).
;-)
The article isn't really worth reading because it's a long, drawn out self-debate about whether people are going to stop using email because there's a chance it'll escape. To most people, nothing they write about is important enough to really make this a serious problem. People like Laurie should be more careful.
There's no great lesson here. But it's obviously a fascinating leaked email
simon
home page
I like how this is being discussed as a 'privacy spill'. How come people aren't discussing that this very frank, candid e-mail is pretty much at odds with the American Media's portrayal of how such policy issues are shaped (both at home and abroad).
Is the public dissemination of what actually goes on behind closed doors at these world forums a 'privacy spill'?
Information just wants to be free...
(I couldn't resist)
I kid you not, when I was a T.A. in grad school, a student once handed in a paper where they said "foo foo foo, intern bar happens"! Yep, "intern", like Monica Lewinsky. This person had graduated from high school with decent enough grades to get into the biology program at one of Canada's top universities :-P
(Also an example of the perils of relying on spell check! Though I hope that would at least catch "insundry"...)
Freedom: "I won't!"
If you are going to send something that's not public grade, but to a group, make sure each one gets a slightly different email.
That way if something goes wrong you might be able to know who not to send emails to the next time. You might wish to do a few test cases first.
Despite what the many idiots here think, encryption doesn't solve breach of trust or indiscretion.
Whether the OS clears ram or not has nothing to do with whether or not the C library calls calloc and malloc do so.
I would advise you to stop this thread, because we are talking about standards here. calloc() sets memory to zero. malloc() does not. This does not depend upon what C library you are using, this is the standard.
The decision of what appaers in that memory space is made before calloc and malloc are involved.
Yes, just like the decision for their to be molecules that can be arranged for a cup of coffee are there long before it's brewed. This is irrelevant.
In this case it's Microsoft's fault either way, since they coded BOTH the OS and the application.
Uhm, the same thing happens in Linux too. People use malloc() and do not zero out the memory they are given. This is not operating system specific. malloc() should not be expected to set the memory to zero. That is what you are gauranteed when you code an application. Same thing as every data type is greater than or equal to the data size of char (e.g., sizeof(int) >= sizeof(char))
You are taking a simple informational post (malloc() isn't supposed to zero out memory) that you criticized because you failed to understand, and are trying to maintain that you know something about ANSI/ISO C.
The fact of the matter is malloc() is not expected to zero the memory, where as calloc() is. malloc(0) can return a null pointer or a pointer to zero bytes. These are the things that malloc() is designed and understood to do. You can argue what happens behind the scenes all you want, but as for the actual function call, it is not expected to zero the memory.
Understand?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Is this significantly different from me receiving a snailmail letter from you and then sending the text to the opinion section of the local paper. IF, and it's a big if, the editor decides to publish it many people will have the information. Going farther back in time, the literate people were likely to publish pamphlets with often virulent statements.
the OS *is* responsible for clearing memory from other programs that it gives to you.
;)) and I free it, I don't want the added overhead. If I'm storing a password, than I will zero it out before freeing. This is my responsibility as a programmer.
You should define clearing here. If by clearing you mean segmenting it so it will not allocate any pointers to that segment than yes, it should do that. If by clearing you mean that after every free() call it should clear that memory space, than no, it shouldn't.
If I have a temporary scratch pad that I'm just sticking an arbitrary value in (say a formatted date string, don't argue stack vs. hash please
(You mean malloc(3), BTW, not malloc (1), which would be a user command rather than a C function)
Egg on my face.. Thanks for pointing it out. Can I blame it on all the perl code? OR better yet, I am such a C guru that I need not the man pages, for I have them all memorized!
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
How about being in the room when Vladimir Putin and Jiang Ziamin are talking, now that would be interesting.
They are probably saying something along the lines of what's written in Jan Sejna's "We Will Bury You".
Only a couple people figured out that that "leaked e-mail" was an article intended to be seen by the world. And when they did point it out half the people said something as trite as "well just because your a complete poo-poo head does not mean everyone else writes like crap". Especially when the person wrote "if the Iraq war is longer than 30 days it will cause the the recession to last 5-10 years longer", then thats a DEPRESSION you idiots, and that WILL NOT happen. As soon as the Iraq war/situation ends the economy will go up. The writer is obviosuly against the war and wants others to think everyone else is and also make everyone think the U.S. governemnt is out of controll. You people are gullible enough to believe that was not totall crap. By the way I did not spell or grammar check.
Too stupid not to cc everyone in your company (or your competition) with your trade secrets? No problem, the next iteration of MS Office will protect you...
No, really.
Stop laughing.
Screw you guys, I'm going home.
?
They cheked out the house of some DEA chemist.
where'd you get that info? any web links?
is Bush's current interpretation of Compassion?
I don't know about two birds, but a swift kick in the Bush is worth quite a bit more than a harlf dozen Quayles.
(You mean malloc(3), BTW, not malloc (1), which would be a user command rather than a C function)
Is that what the (#) after man entries means? I have been baffled by that for two years. There is always some elite bastard telling me a command with a number after it, and I could never determine why. What is the secret decoder for all of these numbers?
Huh? You're surprised because a Christian fundie acted in an underhanded way? Please - these are the kind of people who have been misrepresenting their own holy book for centuries to justify everything from the enslavement of Africans to murdering abortion doctors. The fact that they also tend to misquote Stephen Jay Gould while attacking evolution, and circulate as fact The Onion's "story" about how Harry Potter is satanic, is icing on the cake my friend.
You're lucky that this knob didn't also "quote" you as saying you're fond of gay group sex while wearing a goat mask.
(He's lucky his God has more important things to do than send that lighting bolt...)
Freedom: "I won't!"
It's also the standard in Unix. It is not up to the operating system to determine what is whose information. If you free your information, and it has everybodies password in plain text, than it will be reallocated and if malloc() is used to reallocate it, than it will be readable and could be written to a word document.
Two of the oldest tricks to gain information you shouldn't havem on a Unix system, were to malloc(3) a fairly large chunk of memory and then read the data that was left by the last user/process.
Uhm, try this:
Run it a few times, it'll segfault at some point. You will start to see memory overlapping.
To reiterate: Memory freed by another process previously without being previously zeroed out can be given to another process through a malloc() call with that data in tact..
But of course those tricks haven't worked for over 10 years now in the Unix world.
They aren't tricks. It's about lazy programmers who don't feel the need to call a quick zero blit on the memory before it's free'd.
I would be very surprised to learn that they do work on Windows.
Surprise, and it's not even your birthday.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
On their website, they've got video/audio, and transcripts of the more important speakers. The C. Powell one is pretty decent.
there is no thing
what else could you want?
I would advise you to stop this thread, because we are talking about standards here. calloc() sets memory to zero. malloc() does not. This does not depend upon what C library you are using, this is the standard.
and *I* would advise *you* to stop being a dick before you get flamed. Decent people make their points with respect, assholes do not. This does not depend upon upon what point you are trying to make, basic deceny is the standard.
only academically-- but gained special prominence when
ultimately I started my career as a COBOL application programmer.
For, instance, anytime memory was not specifically "initialized" it would
reliably contain junk that could be data from previous transactions. One
especially spectacular failure was revealed a few years ago when the
kooky State of California had to scrap its Deadbeat-Dad system
-- due to "phantom data" showing up in non-dead-beat-dad's accounts. Oops.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Your absolutely right dude. You hit the nail on the head as to why France and Russia oppose this war so much, cant believe other people dont understand that, like the entire liberal half of this country.
Do you have any clue how memory management works at any level in the operating system?
Virtual Memory is just a method of mapping virtual memory segments to physical memory so they will not overlap. Memory management works differently in each operating system.
calloc() and malloc() are functions in a user-mode library. When they run out of space on their heap, they request more memory from the operating system. In Windows NT, this is with the VirtualAlloc call.
I went from DOS to Unix, with the exception of a few programs in NT years ago. What they do now I do not know. What I do know, is that malloc() is not expected to zero bits it allocates to you.
End of story. Keep arguing about how this has something to do with other parts of the operating system, and it doesn't fucking matter.
The original poster said something that was incorrect about his expectations on the function of malloc(). I corrected him. Your little tyrade about virtual memory, and what happens before a malloc() is ultimately pointless, you see. Because malloc() is not expected to zero memory. I don't care if it sets them all to an alternating pattern of prime numbers, I was letting him know you can't expect malloc() to go to zero.
If someone said, "I use my left side blinker on my car to let people know I want coffee", and someone else said, "That's actually designed for letting people know you are going to be turning left" would you go off about the engine of the car?
In the nicest way I can put this, what the fuck are you talking about this shit for, and can you please stop because I really don't give a flying rats ass about how windows manages it's virtual memory tables or how they relate to malloc().
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
It's really very simple -- email isn't private. It can and will be forwarded by recipients. This one was so juicy it would travel far. A journalist ought to have known that. She should have either published or not. Copyright is technically available, but ultimately sour grapes.
All that text argueing that the only thing that keeps private emails private is social pressure, and then go on to say that its disapearing and there is no good way to solve it. Wrong. I say that is the way it should be. People judge you by the people you are friends with, and when you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. When I send a private email to a close circle of friends, they know that I sent that email to the people I wanted to see it. If they really want their sister to see it, they ask me. If I grab a few jokes and write a humorous and fairly anonymous email to my friends, well then they can paper their bathroom with it for all I care. The distinction is in the context. A private email is meant to be kept private, a friendly email is just that. Just a friendly email, and anything done with it is implied as fine. So her problem is in her choice of friends. When they forewarded that, just to Aunt Merle, if they did it without her permission, they violated the trust they had. I mean really, everybody has that one friend that cannot keep a secret if their life depended on it, and you learn to not tell them things you dont want the free world to know. She decided she could trust them, and then was proven wrong. The real tragedy here? That a large reasonably well written article on LawMeme was given front page views on slashdot, and it basically amounts to cries of the sky falling for the worlds sense of privacy.
Duh. Has anyone ever heard of using a locked Adobe PDF document?
I'm sure there are a million ways to secure digital documents, and using even the most simple ones get out the idea that the document isn't to be shared, and some ( like locked PDFs ) even make it somewhat difficult to do so.
Email is *wildly* insecure, the messages can be intercepted at *any* mail server, if you are worried about someone getting your email, it doesn't *need* to be forwarded, encrypt and protect! I'm going to have to side with the "she's an idiot" crowd...
of course, when it comes to computers, most people are idiots. We've got some interesting times going in that regard... and we're going to see a real battle between those who want all information to be free and those who want all information but their own to be free...
I send this to you to have your advice!
------
This is a symptom of what has become all too common in todays email society - the trivialization of communication.
The "forward" has become a replacement for an actual composed email message. Its easier to maintain the illusion of staying in touch by forwarding some insipid crap rather than taking the time to actually *gasp* drop someone a personal note.
As a result, most email is not private, or more importantly, personal. I can easily imagine what went through the recipients mind - "wow, this is cool, let me forward it to ____". Why wouldn't he ? After all, we foward crap to each other all the time, why should this very interesting email be any different ?
You get something that looks interesting, you forward it. It couldn't POSSIBLY have been intended for ONLY you.
I would bet that had this letter been handwritten, the recipients would not have shown it around.
Welcome to the global communication era.
The Unix manual is divided into sections. Section 1 is user commands, 2 is syscalls, 3 is library functions, 4-8 vary depending on the particular flavor. Some systems also have sections like 3f (fortran library functions).
Since some headings have entries in multiple sections (i.e. user commands with the same name as a library function) you disambiguate them by following them with their section number in parentheses. It has since become convention to say (for example) who(1) to indicate you are referring to the unix command (or its manpage) rather than some other random meaning of the word.
And this one is intended for public consumption. It's also written from the opposite side of the political spectrum (Newsday is notoriously lefty). Both articles are well worth reading and aren't as far apart as you might think. This one has additional commentary from Clinton and Gates.
Unfortunately for my employeer, I just spent a large chunk of time visiting the referenced discussion about the journalist's notes. While doing so I followed a link to a TCPA and Palladium faq. As a result, I think I just crapped my pants (I could be wrong, let me check). Nope that wasn't crap. It was any hope of a bright future leaving my body through the same orafice that I will take it for the rest of my life. I admit to ignoring most news / rumors about TCPA and Palladium. Until now I didn't read much about it. Having done so, and serriously thought about ramifications, possibilities, and likely outcomes, I have concluded that the future will not be bright. I think I'll start digging that hole I will eventually shove my head in.
It's based on the original chapters from the (printed) manual for AT&T Unix, if I recall correctly.
/usr/bin/printf manual /bin/passwd manual /etc/passwd manual
Some of the more obscure ones vary from unix to unix, you can usually see them with 'man man' or something similar.
Here's the "key" for Linux:
1) executable programs or shell commands
2) system calls (kernel calls)
3) library calls
4) special files (/dev/*)
5) file formats
6) games
7) misc (macro packages eg. man(7), groff(7))
8) system administration commands (ie. superuser utils)
9) kernel routines
These 'section numbers' are very useful for when you have a program named the same as a C function (printf(1) vs. printf(3) for example).
On Linux:
man printf or man 1 printf--
man 3 printf -- printf() manual
man passwd or man 1 passwd --
man 5 passwd --
The days when there was a standoff between the USA and the USSR, so that neither got to "take out" as many countries as they wanted, look pretty attractive in hindsight.
As a Hungarian, I can assure you that the Cold War era was in no way attractive relative to the current international situation. Furthermore as a "resident of the planet" myself, I also do not wax nostalgic over the threat of the planet being "cleansed" by an all-out nuclear war between two superpowers.
Although things could certainly be better right now (you American's voting out that clown Bush in 2004 would be great start), at least in my country, things are much better than they were only twenty-odd years ago.
Yes. The (#) means which volume of the manual it comes out of. I have a set of the BSD 4.3 manuals over on my bookshelf, and it corresponds to which physical volume the man pages are in. That seperation of sections can also be seen if you run Xman and look at how things are divided into sections, although in a lot of recent Linux versions it's pretty fubared.
Could somebody please explain to me the need for "undo" data to be stored within saved MS-Word documents? The same kind of document that I can edit, save, close down, reopen and then not have the option to undo changes I made before that last save?
Sometimes when I'm at work and I come across a particularly complex document, I'll copy everything and paste it into a blank document. The new file is sometimes something like 2KB smaller than the old one.
Talk about unnecessary garbage...
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Garrett's piece was reminiscent of, but much shorter than, another first-hand account of this year's WEF, written by Jay Nordlinger of National Review, and which you can find in four parts: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV. I liked it, but then again, I'm a conservative Catholic ...
The journalist made a glaring blooper that reveals the fact that she learned English by watching TV, and that she doesn't do much reading of the print medium for which she writes. That's worthy of a bit of ribbing. She's lucky she has editors who (hopefully) have a better education.
ahh but then you would be breaking the first rule to keeping something private.. NEVER EVER write it down..
"What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so mad you could bite?" - Mister Rogers
I don't typically make spelling mistakes. Some people are simply decent at spelling and grammar.
my first impression... this "leak" is propoganda. If I had a strong desire to get others to follow my opinion, I'd "leak" it too, as if it were entirely credible.
the net is not a reality filter.
yes, I am a skeptic. always. unless skeptic comes in style.
It's only a model.
she probably ought to get some thicker skinned friends.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The original poster said something that was incorrect about his expectations on the function of malloc(). I corrected him. Your little tyrade about virtual memory, and what happens before a malloc() is ultimately pointless, you see. Because malloc() is not expected to zero memory. I don't care if it sets them all to an alternating pattern of prime numbers, I was letting him know you can't expect malloc() to go to zero.
Actually, he said:
It turns out that Windows didn't use to bother zeroing out RAM when it handed it over to an application, so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications.
My stressing.
And you said:
It is not the operating systems responsibility to clear the memory of something recently allocated, and it is good programming practice to set the bits to 0 after a malloc unless you know for a damn well certainty that you will fill the entire segment.
Finally, what the fuck are you talking about this shit for
I don't know about anyone else, but I want to see you squirm.
don't give a flying rats ass about how windows manages it's virtual memory tables or how they relate to malloc().
Care to post any Word Documents?
Hiya Tony, new mate
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Visit Aunt Thatcher, for cookies
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Then, we can take over the world.
Yours Best Mate George
[click]->Send
mutter: Shit, did i just send it to friends@hotmail.com
--+> Life, is there any?
She's a journalist, but she doesn't understand global economics, she doesn't understand the Internet, she doesn't understand social or grassroots or networked behavior, and she learned English from TV. Don't be mad at her, feel sorry for her. Or just ignore her.
You should define clearing here. If by clearing you mean segmenting it so it will not allocate any pointers to that segment than yes, it should do that.
What kind of newfangled meaning of "clearing" is this? Are you *intentionally* this dense? Are you just a clever troll?
Egg on my face..
Shit on your face...
OR better yet, I am such a C guru that I need not the man pages, for I have them all memorized!
Or better yet?! Yeah... just pull your excuses out of thin air.
If anything, you're a c-ithead.
--personally, I think the writer had the DUTY to keep even more notes, and release publically even more information. Instead she is "embarrassed" that we the poor planets peons get to see a small amount of what's going on. By her own words, these are the people who actually control the planet. We NEED to know what they really think and say and what they are planning, not this thrice spun drivel that finally makes it to the mainstream news. It's NOT just 5,000 peoples planet! They run it like it's ALL theirs, and these people are by default, so far removed from "no money and no power" they have NO IDEA how it is to really live like anyone "normal" in any of these various nations. As such, they only make decisions that benefit THEM and their drinkin buds, NOT you and me. That's the one thing she got wrong, it IS a cabal.
And I HOPE that middle class people reading this take particular care in really paying attention to the state of the economy. IF we have a severe economic reversal, which at this point I would say is way more likely than not, if the rest of the world abandons the federal reserve note in favor of the euro dollar and the muslim gold dinar possibly, the US will be in a WORLD of hurt. I mean BAD NEWS CITY. People are ignoring a problem now that is the worst conglomeration of economic factors the US ever faced. The TV talking econo heads have already scrapped the bottom of the barrel of happy face makeup, there ain't no mo left.
It is not up to the operating system to determine what is whose information.
Thanks, you're doing my job for me just fine. Keep up the good work.
that the Earth is about to be demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass.
Vonnegut: "What is the purpose of life? To be the eyes, ears, and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
the email serves to confirm, not reveal, what an increasing number of us are suspecting.
---- oh no - it's the RIAA and their $100000000 fine. I'm gonna take that so seriously...
silly monkeys who forgot they were animals
Obviously, he thinks it *didn't*.
Post I responded to:
so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications. This is also incorrect, you will only get memory that is unused by any application.
You have *not* contradicted his statement. Do not assume that by "random junk" he meant any junk.
Post I responded to:
The combination of the OS not clearing RAM and Office writing out memory which it had allocated but never bothered using resulted in email headers in Word documents.
Now, here is the real meat. The OS is not supposed to zero the RAM, unless you use calloc(). That is what calloc() is for. Office should ensure that the memory is zero'd if doing a malloc to prevent things like this. See Cisco CERTs for some good reasons why.
Have you forgot about rogue applications? If one application is compromised, shouldn't it try to be sandboxed as much as possible?
Now, I hope with this overly verbose explanation of why he was wrong, and detailing out in what ways he was wrong (Not in his understanding of malloc() so much, but his understanding of what the operating systems role is when it gives a segment of memory to a process) I expect you can agree with me on this and not feel the urge to be condescending or argue.
I argue with you because you're a condescending shithead. Just saying anyone who argues with you is condescending is simply bullish.
from the email:
"For a minority of the participants there was another layer of
AntiAmericanism that focused on moralisms and religion. I often heard
delegates complain that the US "opposes the rights of children", because
we block all treaties and UN efforts that would support sex education
and condom access for children and teens. They spoke of sex education as
a "right". Similarly, there was a decidedly mixed feeling about
Ashcroft, who addressed the conference. I attended a small lunch with
Ashcroft, and observed Ralph Reed and other prominent Christian
fundamentalists working the room and bowing their heads before eating.
The rest of the world's elite finds this American Christian behavior at
least as uncomfortable as it does Moslem or Hindu fundamentalist
behavior. They find it awkward every time a US representative refers to
"faith-based" programs. It's different from how it makes non-Christian
Americans feel -- these folks experience it as downright embarrassing."
I find this behavior embarrassing as well.
-l
e x p e c t d e l a y . c o m
The author mentions Palladium in passing, but I'm not sure he realized it will put an end to such leakages. The average slashdotter is apparently still under the impression that any such scheme will be cracked within weeks of its release. But Palladium appears carefully designed. I expect it to bring email into compliance with the expectations of normal people - no more effortless forwarding of confidential documents.
Also, no more Pentagon Papers, embarassing Microsoft email, etc.
Palladium will be a huge and sharp wedge severing the geeks from the rest of society. On the technical level, we will no longer be able to read email from our friends, customers and bosses unless we use Microsoft products. On a personal level, the normal folk will breathe a sigh of relief that the "information wants to be free" era is over, while the geeks will rage and protest against the new regime.
Oy...I need to go wash my brain out, now...
1) Who said that forwarding an e-mail is a violation of privacy of the sender? After all, she didn't write anything terribly personal there.
2) Given the nature of the e-mail, the benefits of sharing this information with the whole Internet far outweight the shortcomings.
3) Personally I think it is ok to sometimes violate the privacy of others.
Conclusion. Come on, people, try to be a little bit more flexible! Sometimes it is ok to cheat, to lie or to be a jerk. As long as you don't do it too often, think about the consequences and don't do anything too bad, you are fine.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Of course that's a pain in the ass, just like the other fifty dumb things you have to do to overcome Word's "features". Don't you wish you had a program that would print to post script of portable document format with a two clicks? Pssst! Open Office does that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Article comments about the reasons for war on Iraq: Pre-emptive action. A complete 250 year turn around in American Policy. A better explantion of this massive change in policy (which most Americans haven't even noticed); http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/iraq /etc/synopsis.html
Misspellsurfing can be fun. Here are some more.
"would of" - 283,000 vs "would have" - 6,410,000
"should of" - 116,000 vs "should have" - 4,900,000
"congradulations" - 43,500 vs "congratulations" - 2,810,000
Don't tell me that people are going to start sending self destructing Micros~.DOC to me! Ahhhh! The normal .DOC are bad enough, but one that demands write access? "This message will self destruct, in good faith, in ten seconds."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Like most of the media it anti america this anti america that nothing new or nothing news such a slant to the left.
Can't you guys tell by the writing style, this is just like the email (though a bit more polished) about that upcoming email tax, the farking other similar "leaks" from famouse people...it is total BS!
privacy implications *ASIDE*
nobody would get that access who could not be trusted to shut their freaking mouth!
It should write over any memory it's giving you. For your temporary values, you actually don't generally get new memory from the OS, since free will generally not return the memory to the system, but will return it for a future call to malloc; malloc and free are library functions, not system calls (that's why it's (3), not (2, system calls); memory is gotten from the OS with either mmap or sbrk). This is the real reason you have to zero memory from malloc: *you* could have stored something at this address previously, freed it, and gotten it again, in which case the OS hasn't done anything with it and the library doesn't clear it.
/etc/passwd, in which case it is. The policy of having the OS clear any memory before giving it to a program actually started when people using ITS found that, by allocating a lot of memory and writing it to disk without initializing it, they could often steal the passwords in the system, which had been left there by other programs. Obviously, you can't depend on a hacker clearing the memory before searching for sensitive contents, and programs generally don't clear memory before freeing it; this leaves the OS as the only place to do it, and the OS is generally responsible for protecting programs from each other.
Programs can't necessarily tell whether the contents of their memory is sensitive. Is stuff read from a file by a text editor sensitive? Generally not, but you might be editing
I can excuse not knowing that it's (3), but thinking it's (1), I'm not so sure about. Surely you encounter newly-written user commands...
look at these poor critters. They really need to get out and get a life. Something more than just hanging on to a shitty web site. Tee hee. Including the writer of the Lawmeme article, one of Matt Haughey's lakeis. The Lawmeme article is not insightful at all. The writer is just sucking up to Matt Haughey, the "creator" of metafilter, the jilted lover of Blogger. I guess most of you know by now, that Blogger got bought by Google, and unemployed Matt Haughey, former Pyra employee really feels let down. The dot.com boom sort of passed him by. He takes revenge in unleashing the dogs on Laurie. February 28, 2003 Accidental Privacy Spills. (found via /.) In which are discussed the Laurie Garrett thread and its implications for privacy, correspondence, and the getting of life.
posted by brownpau to MetaFilter-related at 2:42 PM PST
That should be /. I know I tested that link. Gah.
posted by brownpau at 2:48 PM PST on February 28
Double post, I'm afraid.
Worth looking at again though.
posted by feelinglistless at 2:51 PM PST on February 28
Ah hell, sorry, everyone. That's what I get for not dropping by MeTa often enough.
posted by brownpau at 2:56 PM PST on February 28
Actually it's fun to read what the Slashdotters have to say. What a closed group self-righteous introverts, spending all day arguing on a website. They really need to get a life.
posted by Stan Chin at 3:18 PM PST on February 28
This is the best part. Someone with this CV got a position as an Assistant Professor. Imagine what she had to do to get there. No, not that. She is way too ugly, although evidently not everybody is choosy these days. Tee Hee. BTW, this is Matt Haughey's wife. It's all on the Web, so Privacy Issues are no problem here. Do a Search for Kay Livesay and you'll see that she is indeed an Assistant Professor with such a shitty CV. L I V E S A Y . O R G current vitaresearch interestsselected publications Kay Livesay University of San Francisco Department of Psychology 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco, CA 94117 (415) 422-5097 livesay@usfca.edu Education 9/92 - 12/98 University of California, Riverside Ph.D., Psychology: area of emphasis, Cognitive Psychology Dissertation: Multiple constraints and individual differences in semantic and syntactic processing. 9/92 - 12/96 University of California, Riverside Masters of Arts: Psychology, emphasis Cognitive Psychology. Thesis: Category facilitation in free recall: The have's and have not's in free recall 9/87 - 3/92 University of California, Los Angeles Bachelor of Science in Psychobiology Honors and Awards APA Dissertation Research Grant (1997-1998) Graduate Division Dissertation Research Grant (1997-1998) Humanities Research Grant (1997-1998) Invited to attend the 3CAPS Modeling workshop at Carnegie Mellon (summer 1995) Current Research Interest High-dimensional space modeling of meaning representation. Determining the effects of syntax, semantics and discourse constraints on sentence comprehension. Factors contributing to individual differences in reading comprehension. Teaching Experience Courses Taught Psychological Research Methods (4 semesters, USF) Psychological Statistics (1 quarter UCR, 1 quarter UCLA) Cognitive Psychology (2 semesters USF, 2 quarters UCLA) Learning and Memory (2 semesters USF, 1 quarter UCR) Service Advisor to Psi Chi, national honor in psychology Advisor to the Psychology Club, a general interest psychology club. Policy Board: College of Arts and Science, Arts representative to the faculty union's policy board. The policy board makes decisions concerning union contracts, faculty grievances and negotiations with the administration. Papers Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (in press). Mediated Priming in the Cerebral Hemispheres, Brain & Cognition, X, XX-XX. Burgess, C & Livesay, K. (1998). The effect of corpus size in predicting reaction time in a basic word recognition task: Moving on from Kucera and Francis. Behavior Research Methods, Instrument Computers, 30, 272-277. Livesay, K, & Burgess, C. (1998). Mediated priming in high-dimensional semantic space: No effect of direct semantic relationships or co-occurrence. Brain & Cognition, 37, 102-105. Burgess, C., Livesay, K. & Lund, K. (1998). Explorations in context space: Words, sentences, discourse. Discourse Processes, 25, 211-257. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1997). Mediated Priming: A representational and empirical account using the HAL model. In: Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 436-441). Hillsdale, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Burgess, C , Livesay, K. & Lund, K. (1996). Modeling parsing constraints in high-dimensional semantic space: On the use of proper names. In: Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 737). Hillsdale, N. J. : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Published Abstracts Livesay, K. (2001). The influence of verbal ability on mediated priming. In: Abstracts of the Psychonomics Society (p.). Austin, TX: Psychonomic Society Publications. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (2000). Influence of verbal ability and working memory on syntactic processing. In: Abstracts of the Psychonomics Society (p. 48). Austin, TX: Psychonomic Society Publications. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1999). Mediated priming: The role of verbal ability and contextual consistency. In: Abstracts of the Psychonomics Society (p. 9). Austin, TX: Psychonomic Society Publications. In Preparation Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (in preparation). The effects of semantic relatedness, lexical co-occurrence and context on mediated priming. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (in preparation). Efficacy of high-dimensional semantic neighborhoods as word definitions. Presentations Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (2002). Factors influencing mediated priming. Paper presented at the 14th Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Society. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (2002). Mediated priming in the cerebral hemispheres. Paper presented at TENNET XIII, The Thirteenth Annual Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Montreal, Quebec. Livesay, K. (2001). The influence of verbal ability on mediated priming. Paper presented at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (2000). Influence of verbal ability and working memory on syntactic processing. Paper presented at the 41st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1999). Mediated priming: The role of verbal ability and contextual consistency. Paper presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1997). Mediated priming: A representational and empirical account using the HAL model. Paper presented at the 19th annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stanford, CA. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1997). Mediated priming in high-dimensional semantic space: No effect of direct semantic relationships or co-occurrence. Paper presented at TENNET VIII, Eighth Annual Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Neuropsychology, Montreal, Quebec. Livesay, K. & Burgess, C. (1997). Mediated priming does not rely on direct semantics or co-occurrence. Paper presented at the 10th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Santa Monica, CA. Burgess, C , Livesay, K. & Lund, K. (1997, invited talk). Using High dimensional context space: Semantic neighborhoods, word and sentence vectors, and inferencing. Paper presented at the Winter Text Conference, Jackson Hole, WY. Burgess, C , Livesay, K. & Lund, K. (1996). Modeling parsing constraints in high-dimensional semantic space: On the use of proper names. Paper presented at the 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, San Diego. Livesay, K. & Clark, S. E. (1995). Category facilitation and interference in free recall. Paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Western Psychological Association. Burgess, C., Clark, S. E., Audet, C. & Livesay, K. L. (1995). Eyewitness interpretation of an ambiguous event: bias and gender effects. Paper presented at the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Western Psychological Association. Clark, S. E., Livesay, K. L. & Callan, S. (1994). Effect of organization on free recall. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology. Clark, S. E., Livesay, K. L. (1994). Organization and independence in recall. Paper presented at the 35th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Professional Affiliations Western Psychological Association American Psychological Society Psychonomics Society
I know it takes more time and does not address many people easily, but would have been as secure as she needed.
Blogging because I can...
Then nobody would have ever read it.
Come on now, give the guy a break. He is unemployed, he needs someone to pay the bills. His wife is butt-ugly, so what? Of course it's somewhat strange, considering that he and his cronies keep gushing about "prettyness" - they are even obsessing about whether and how all girls should be made pretty - by genetic modifications, no less. With a wife like that and with a male like Matt Haughey to provide the rest, the outcome does not need to be created in Photoshop. It's easy to imagine the offsprings. Brr ...
The other issue: so the wife got her job at a university by corruption. Big deal. It would not be the first time. She will fail miserably when she wants to get more money than the bare necessities to cover her salary. It's all on the Web by the way. Kay Livesay.
Actually, what happens is that Word pads out documents (it seems to have notions about what size certain parts of the file need to be) and for this purpose it grabs any data that's handy -- can be from RAM or from the swapfile. It's not a Windows bug per se, but a Word design flaw.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Office 11 gets released
Documents are encrypted
Strings doesn't work
Wife loses job.
Jews are the largest dealers of ecstasy. I thought everyone knew this by now, but I guess not. Just do a web search. Here is the first page that came up on Google: http://www.freedomsite.org/pipermail/fs_discussion /2001-March/001558.html
Isn't it ironic? Don'tcha think?
This is an article on LawMeme whose final analysis is that we have no better system to handle the privacy of an email. In as such, we should all go back about our business but abide by a tighter social contract which treats e-mail a bit more private than Laurie's treatment by her friends (or friends of friends)...And yet, this same article (and the persuing slashdot article) has now been linked and circulated to even more people than had read (or even heard about it) in the first place!
Ahhh, beautiful irony. We must ruin Laurie's privacy even further to hopefully contain privacy better in the future...or to use their analogy:
Let's feed the lion an elephant and hope that he's not hungry enough to snack on any of the rest of us.
(Not that I had a better idea...)
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I would advise you to stop this thread, because we are talking about standards here. calloc() sets memory to zero. malloc() does not. This does not depend upon what C library you are using, this is the standard.
We're talking about OS allocation routines, not malloc()
The fact of the matter is malloc() is not expected to zero the memory, where as calloc() is. malloc(0) can return a null pointer or a pointer to zero bytes. These are the things that malloc() is designed and understood to do. You can argue what happens behind the scenes all you want, but as for the actual function call, it is not expected to zero the memory.
The fact of the matter is that you are missing a very large point: The OS is handing leftover data from one app to another. This is all sorts of bad for any number of security issues. I don't want to depend on every app that runs on my machine to do the right thing and zero memory that is being written out to disk or the wire.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Has it ever occurred to anyone that this entire scenario of a leaked e-mail might be a set up?
It reminds me of guerrilla marketing tactics. Like the people who are paid to chat someone up in a bar and then drop the name of a movie. Some are paid simply to look good wearing something with a predominately placed logo while in public places A, B & C.
"Laurie" conveniently has a privacy leak consisting of an e-mail message that reads like editorial with several obvious political agenda and which is written in a style one might use when preaching to young children? Riiiiiight...
Who talks or writes like this?
Come on!
It basically runs down a list of stereotypical people and tells you how they think about a given issue.
The paragraph above would have us belive that, if you're in the business community, then you should be opposed to the current state of things in the "Iraq Crisis." This is because if you are not, and the author above makes this clear by implication, you must be some sort of diehard American Republican (read: fascist wacko), a Brit Tory (read: fascist wacko), or a Middle Eastern Person (read: someone with an overriding local agenda.) The author sums up the neat little paragraph with a reminder that if you're rich, regardless of your ethnic background, you should be against this war.
The whole e-mail goes on in this fashion, telling us how to think about various issues and giving straw men, ad populum fallacies and the like as support. It's like listening to a debate in which one person is on stage and the other is home with a cold.
The entire thing is just a little to convenient for me. Read it again and let me know what you think!
Do you have any clue how memory management works at any level in the operating system?
No, but he sure do like his malloc(3), don't he?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It is not up to the operating system to determine what is whose information.
What's the point in distinguishing between users at all, then?
Memory freed by another process without being previously zeroed out can be given to another process through a malloc() call with that data intact.
Name one modern multiuser operating system which works this way.
You can't.
You can name lots of places where it does happen, yes. Embedded systems, DOS and Win9x, etc. Generally the same places where memory protections are weak to begin with.
It's about lazy programmers who don't feel the need to call a quick zero blit on the memory before it's free'd.
If this was a necessary part of the process, free() would do it. But of course it makes much more sense to do this between processes, which is where it gets done.
If you would spend 30 seconds searching MSDN, you would see the documentation contradicts your assertions about Windows not zeroing pages before handing them to user processes. Perhaps Windows NT once had a bug in this respect, but the correct behavior is still obvious.
Your ignorance is so determined it verges on trolling. You can take this chance to learn something from the many posters who have corrected you, or you can continue to make an ass of yourself.
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Actually, that would create a sparse file which ls(1) would report as having a size of "large" bytes, but du(1) would report as occuping zero blocks.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
1) Is the email verified as comming from who it is said to have come.
2) does it really say anything important?
3) was it meant to be leaked?
All I read from this email is from someone who seems to goo goo eyed at all the "powerful" people she came in contact with, and there really wasn't anything of substance.
C library documentation cannot be used as a guideline for operating system design.
The Laurie Garrett hoax is just that -- it's a great example of performance art. But what makes it so believable? It's the whole state of global current affairs ... it's just a clever piece of anti-war propaganda disguised as a conference report from some accredited news reporter who may likely have attended the event.
Why do we believe that this isn't a hoax because some pseudonymous person named "beagle" claims to have interacted with the supposedly "real" Laurie Garrett with no real proof other than another piece of performance art hoax email that has no verifiable details to prove the message was really sent by Laurie herself.
Someone (or some group) out there is trying to make us believe that the state of affairs is grim, that the war with Iraq will make it even worse ... and they "leaked" this "privileged" information under Laurie's name to give it artificial credibility.
The world's collective stupidity is astounding, and our desire to believe the ridiculous -- wholesale, without rationality -- is disappointing.
-- Dossy
Dossy's Blog
I was enjoying reading this e-mail until I reached this part:
Not surprisingly, the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the WEF was in a foul, angry anti-American mood.
I call bullshit. I can't speak for the Middle East and the Republicans by the British Tories (Conservatives) aren't pro-war and pro-American.. the Labour government is.
Tony Blair is not a Tory/Conservative, yet he's one of Bush's best chums and is pretty much pro-war at this stage.
I get the feeling this is nothing more than an elaborate piece of bullshit.
Besides, 'all the rich' aren't going to be against a war.. what about the oil rich? Or.. what about those who believe in the UN? If the UN doesn't strike Saddam, what is the UN's effectiveness? Diddly squat, that's what.. it might as well not exist.
mogorific carpentry experiments
"it is still unacceptable that the OS leaks data from one application to the next. In Unix, if you find junk in a malloc'ed segment, it can only come from the application itself (previously allocated, used, and then freed memory), never from another app."
This is ridiculous! Of course memory is leaked between apps, even in Unix,- it is always up to the app to zero out any sensitive information.
maybe i should move to europe (it would be canada but i hear they're becoming mroe and more like us everyday hell they pay taxes to the riaa for cdrs for christ's sake)
they are jesus freaks with nukes, and bush is pushing a holy war
and ashcroft is a jack-booted goose stepping nazi and i'm glad to see the rest of world is leery of him too he alone has made me reconsider my citizenship more than once
i've been reading news.google.com caches the last few days basically saying that 2/3rd's of the english don't support their prime minister at all, i wonder what similar polls in teh US would (have?) reveal(ed) and even went so far as to say 1/3rd would not support a war even if a second resolutoin from teh UN said so.. they had a "revolt" in the house of lords over some war-related issue, it seems that bush isn't the only one with a dissenting public
if you disagree with me REPLY have the balls not to moderate
The whole world gets a rare and fascinating peek through the looking glass into the world of the ruling class. And all you geeks can talk about are these internet issues. Email this and Palladium that, blah blah blah. Sad.
I would expect a placeholder salary to go along with a placeholder name like John Smith.
the app is responsible FOR CLEARING IT'S OWN MEMORY, NOT THE OS. Show me one fucking shred of evidence otherwise.
On the email itself:-
... like a war, or oil, or the environment really going wrong.
:p
It didn't really tell me anything new. I felt like I'd heard it all before. Kinda sounded exactly how you'd imagine it, even down to the individual character described of the people in power; yup they sound like the over-confident middle management, money driven.
But it did enforce what visions I already had.
----
On distrust:-
Well, we (English speakers) are known for our individuality; we're not known for our strength in groups we're not Japanese - we're known for having strengths as individuals and weeknesses in society or groups.
Infomation coming across the language barrier is at society level - the weekness. Imagine how Saddam feels when the 5th repeat of Friends comes on? He channel flicks to QVC... then back to find Jackass. What can be made of this culture? What values do they follow? Religion?
A PR disaster.
Yes, the world thinks America is full of fools.
Why? - Because they're basing their judgement on the infomation they're getting and it looks bad. Of course it's not just TV it's foriegn policy, trade, economic size, religion, the lot.
We cannot hope to get anywhere without empathy. When world leaders talk, do they say "Ah, I can sympathsise and understand why someone would fly a plane into a building, from this I understand my enemy and I am albe to defeat him without bloodshed." Or at least reduce it.
Don't you ever wonder why someone would do this?! Why someone would lay down thier life to do this? They must be pretty annoyed right?
No empathy is an evil world.
We enter another war. But I doubt either side has actually read "The Art of War" ffs.
The trust issue is everwhere in the west; conspiracy theory, patents, copyright, secirity, terrorists - the lot. Why? Because we're socially lagged. Advanced as individuals MAYBE, but disconnected. We want to know who we can trust because we're putting our feelers out - trying to create a stronger society. Real progress will be made when there's a common interest
Though I hate all the conspiracy theories they are less insulting than reality. I mean, is this what we're supposed to believe? Am I this stupid? Perhaps. Are we? Definately.
How individualist
A blog I run for the wealth
Where should I go to find news?
by that I mean, mainstream news that isn't "sugarcoated".
The only time i've seen examples of alternate media sources, they're the extreme left wing type; "The Illegal President Bush signed an order to kill iraqii babies today."
We don't like GM foods here and we want to label them clearly, but the stoopid Yankees say that is a barrier to trade (well, der!) and they want us not to do it or they say they'll sue us
F-ck them - Can't think why people dislike Yanks - really I can't
ok, this writer spilled her guts, but so would most journo's - why on earth would the wealthy power elites admit journalists?
Am I the only one that can't stand it when people go over seas and snicker about how gauche America is and Americans are. I am British by birth, I lived in Canada and am now and forever more an American citizen and resident. Invariably, when I go overseas, especially Europe, people for some odd reason feel it fit to start in on how horrible America is. They start with a fairly inocuous, off the cuff criticism and look for the slightest support of their observations and if they find the support they are looking for, you have to spend the next 30 minutes listening to how America "just doesn't get it". What is worse is when the American joins in on anti-American tirade. I don't think for an instant the every foreign national should blindly follow the lead of the party in power. The people who do that are clearly partisans and are just the type of people who engage in this self-loathing anti-Americanism. A pragmatic person can see that life is extremely complex. Those that say they have the answers are almost invaribly those that do not even understand the question. Economics, foreign policy, politics ... are 99 parts art and 1 part science. The answer is ALWAYS contingent upon many unknown varibles. No one can, with any consistency, predict outcomes in these fields. Leaders of countries, especially true democracys (and republics) rarely make flip decisions. These elected officials futures depend upon their decisions today. So when people such as the author of the email in question express the views that she did, they are really just saying that they either don't understand the questions or just are just too bitter to be intellectually honest.
The reason that countries make these comments about other countries (especially America) is that they are trying to exert their influence over the foreign power itself. America engages in this as does every other country. It is just a game of politics.
BTW unilateral means one-sided. Multilateral means many-sided. Unilateral does not mean "without UN support." America is not acting unilaterally, it is acting multilaterally without UN support. The trick is to be intellectually honest and not fall prey to politics.
To keep this on-topic, it sucks that the author's email was forwarded and read in such a public forum. The moral is pick your friends wisely.
At my work there are nice scanner/photocopiers that will scan a multi page hardcopy and offer to email it (usually pdf, but other formats available) to the address/list of your choice. And lots of people starting with Nixon, Diana, and Monica can vouch for the spread of interesting information originally made on the phone. Who knew someone had a recording device attached. And now even home cameras have night vision, infrared and directional microphones. You need blackout blinds and double glazing just to stop people filming your bedroom. Hopefully privacy will be protected by an abundance of noise (useless information). Unfortunately, history suggests that interesting stuff will always surface (eg dead sea scrolls and subsequent). Perhaps next time Laurie can do a lovely abstract painting of her thoughts instead. At least most people will have a more difficult time figuring out the details, or find it less interesting.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
Google News is pretty good. It may link to some sugercoated sources, but it will also link to international ones, so it all evens out.
Understanding a Middle East story is only possible after having read both the Israeli and Arab takes on it.
May we never see th
"Laurie Garrett needs to learn that you never write something you don't stand behind. And if you don't stand behind it"
Man, I'm screwed if my e-mails (prior to my professional career) ever became public!
Only because a) It's not supported by the IT department and b) I use electronic documentation back and forth and it's gotta be readable on every machine. If that could be guaranteed on 35000 different systems.... possibly. ;P
I re-read the original metafilter thread. http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/23493 A user named "sparky" published the email as a front page post on metafilter, and attributed it to a journalist named "Laurie" who works for "Newsday". It was the metafilter owner, Matt Haughey, that is "mathowie" who then named "Laurie Garrett" instead of deleting the thread. Do you think somebody should now publish the email notes on public bulletin boards that Kay Livesay, Matt Haughey's wife sends out? The students at the Department of Psychology of University of California in San Francisco could really learn a lot! Kay Livesay is the keyword and her lousy CV is available for all to see on http://www.livesay.org - the domain name is owned by her husband, Matt Haughey. The Web site was made last August but her life seems to have ended when her Advisor helped her to a fast-track Ph.D. and almost immediately got her a job as Assistant Professor at another University of California joint.
I see your example from an entirely different perspective. If there are going to be no holiday bonuses, but the employees are working under the impression that there will be, it is unethical not to release the information. The only reason I can think of for management sitting on the information is to boost morale with fictitious bonuses. It would just be a way to get extra unpaid overtime out of the employees.
Obviously this assumes that the employees expect a bonus. If they were not aware of the bonus at all, for example if management was going to surprise them with bonuses and ran out of money, then it would probably be unreasonable to pass it on to the employees either by a leak or by official announcement. If the employees have always received bonuses in the past or have intentionally been informed that there will be bonuses this year then any attempt to hide the fact that bonuses will not be awarded is a lie by omission. And it would be a lie intended to get something for nothing. I don't know if it would go as far as being something you could sue for. It would certainly be something that only someone with no sense of ethics or morals would do. In other words, virtually all members of any given management team would do it.
I understand that all of this has nothing to do with your point. I could not just let that sit there with you saying that most people would recognize the HR persons actions as wrong. You are probably right that most people would. And most of them probably would not notice the _real_ violation of trust going on there. Most people have a very broken moral compass in my opinion.
(gif of) text of that note
Liberty uber alles.
Any decent Windows programmer would use HeapAlloc, which does zero the memory.
That is a minor security issue. The libraries should not allow user programs to allocate memory that hasn't been zeroed, regardless of what OS is in question. Go ahead and argue about performance hits. I hope for the sake of your credibility that you're using a VIC-20, because it can be easily argued that all that graphical crap on top of your OS is burning more cycles than filling memory before use.
No. The fact of the matter is that that wasn't the type of memory allocation the original poster was referring to. It's irrelevant what the standard has to say about what libc is supposed to do, since the OS itself is what the poster was complaining about, and the libc is at a level above that. (For example, what if the language being used is assembly language, not C, and therefore malloc and calloc aren't even there?)
[deleting the rest of your idiocy]
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
His point is also false. The original poster accused the OS of doing something wrong by not clearing memory from one program when alloced by another. This idiot then went on a rant about how malloc() isn't supposed to do that. I, and another, agreed that malloc doesn't do that, but that this is irrelevant to the original point since it's the OS routines beneath malloc that are the ones in question. He then not only decided to be insulting, but apparently ignored the fact that this was said, and couched his reply under the assumption that I don't know how malloc works with regard to not clearing memory.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Is a private letter not copyrighted as soon as it's written? And would a letter sent to a select few still not be copyrighted. A quick search on google for "copyright law" "private letters" (http://www.google.ca/search?q=%22copyright+law%22 +%22private+letters%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btn G=Google+Search&meta=) would indicate that this is so.
If this is the right home page: www.weforum.org it shows that the main focus of the event was "Building Trust". Sort of ironic given what happened to her email.
No. The fact of the matter is that that wasn't the type of memory allocation the original poster was referring to. It's irrelevant what the standard has to say about what libc is supposed to do, since the OS itself is what the poster was complaining about, and the libc is at a level above that. (For example, what if the language being used is assembly language, not C, and therefore malloc and calloc aren't even there?)
This would almost be correct had he not directly said, "malloc()" himself. Right? Go back and read it. He said "so I guess at times you could call malloc() and get random junk from other running applications."
Understand this? He said malloc(). Not me.
[deleting the rest of your idiocy]
I'm still unsure of why you try to do this. You try to make me look bad by saying I said things that I never say. I'm responding to someone saying malloc() should clear memory; end of it, nothing more, fin. You understand this, right? It's not past your grasp?
This is how our threads go, and have always gone: I respond correcting someone, or stating my opinion. You say I said something I never said, or say that I'm wrong. I say I didn't say that, clarify to extrordinary detail what I did in fact say. You respond with something trying to defend some arbitrary position that never has anything to do with the thread.
What are you trying to accomplish here? It never gets anywhere outside of you looking like a fool accusing me of things I never say.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Matt Haughey now desperately tries to cash in on the Garrett story. He thinks if he presents himself and his dogs as "journalists" at some obscure panel meeting, he will be taken more seriously by his ugly wife, who provides him with food and shelter. For now, anyway.
Heh. Of course, he cannot cash in on anything else, he has no talent, he has no Web experience.
One day it was announced that the young monk Kyogen had reached
an enlightened state. Much impressed by this news, several of his peers
went to speak with him.
"We have heard that you are enlightened. Is this true?" his fellow
students inquired.
"It is", Kyogen answered.
"Tell us", said a friend, "how do you feel?"
"As miserable as ever", replied the enlightened Kyogen.
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