Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Texasocial, Networking, Attacks
Why meet people in real life? Roland Piquepaille writes "I wrote [Saturday] a column about social-network mapping tools mentioned by Slashdot. Slashdot readers sent me many comments and e-mails about other visualization tools. Here are these new tools, in no particular order: email constellations, Apache Agora, NetVis Module, EtherApe, inGridX, NameBase's Proximity Search, Surf3D Pro and the dazzling KartOO. Finally, a reader talked about another kind of tools, the Visual Thesaurus. This web tool is not about social mapping, but it shows graphical connections between words. In this previous column, "The Visual Thesaurus: What Does it Show About Thanksgiving?," I already explored this very funny tool. Check this new story for more the details about all these tools."
Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : Directly related: Josh Tyler writes "Related to a recent Slashdot posting on social networks is this paper on automatically discovering communities based on email data, just published by our group at HP Labs. We find that simple communication data is enough to identify communities, both formal and informal, and possibly even to identify the leaders of these groups."
Speaking of online community ... TGK writes "Audioscrobbler (which many of us visited the first time it was posted here) has a new site up, and most importantly, new plugins for XMMS and Winamp 3."
From the site, a capsule description of what Audioscrobbler does: "It grows to know what music you like by monitoring what songs you play on your computer. From this information you can discover other users that share some or all of your taste in music."
Feedback is always cool. An anonymous reader writes: "Sudhakar Govindavajhala, co-author of the paper referenced by the Saturday Slashdot article 'Using Memory Errors to Attack a Virtual Machine,' has responded to many of your [Slashdot readers'] questions and comments. His commentary is located at his Princeton CS website."
Another reason that Social Security isn't. GregAllen writes "Remember the recent case of SSN data theft at The University of Texas? A student has turned himself in. In his confession he says that he acted alone, and had no intention to disseminate the information. Maybe this will convince them to stop using SSNs for student IDs." Bonker also points out that "Salon is carrying an AP article that's a followup to the story a few days ago about the mass of Social Security Numbers stolen from University of Texas. Christopher Andrew Phillips is described as a 'fine young man who has never before been in trouble with the law'. Apparently he wrote a program 'to access a university Web site that tracks employees who attend training classes'. Whether or not this was done for illegitimate purposes remains to be seen. As a former UTA student, I'm glad my SSN is no longer in danger!"
What's the state of the device? An anonymous reader writes "N-Philes.com did another State of the GBA Industry Article and Roundtable. Here is the Industry Article, and here is the Roundtable"
Update: 03/19 00:34 GMT by T : And one more presroi writes "Just one week after even slashdot has noticed the new 2.2.24 linux kernel, Alan Cox has announced a new version due to a security issue found in 2.2 as well as in the 2.4 branch. I hope that we all were to lazy to upgrade from 2.2.X to .24 until now :)"
Didn't someone write a script measuring people's degrees of separation from each other on slashdot via Zoo?
sulli
RTFJ.
Makes it easier to deal with student loans, scholarships, and other financial aids a student might recieve.
Sure, it's easy enough to correllate a student id to a SSN, but some dont.
The university I went to had our SIN (canadian version of the SSN) mixed in with other 'info', like the semester and year you started, to form a new number. It was possible to take your number and extract the SSN, but much harder to brute force student ID's and get the SSN back.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The important question is whether the baskets constitute abandoned property. I don't know what the typical laws are concerning what defines abandoned property.
what steps are being taken to protect the data and users privacy ? [... is the info] for sale to the highest bidder ?
What privacy?
The whole POINT of the service is to tell other users who listen to similar music who you are.
So execs don't even need to buy the info in a special transaction. Just subscribe a pseudo-user who "listens to the songs" they're interested in, and BINGO! The service gives 'em a contact list.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm at Cambridge University, where students get a username consisting of their initials plus a (by now fairly large) sequential number (so John Michael Smith might be jms112), which tends to be a lot more memorable (only 3 arbitrary digits to remember). Students use these as their e-mail addresses and to log in to all lab or library computers, so they're easy to remember from frequent use as well.
This userID also appears on the college food/rent bill, so I assume they're just using these usernames as the unique identifiers in their billing system (which seems to make sense; after all, you're going to have a slightly memorable username generated for you anyway).
I didn't even go to UT Austin, and they won't leave me alone. I applied to UTA for grad school last year, got in, but decided not to go. But their registrar or someone left my email address in their file when they sold it to everyone. So I get spam from the Austin Jamba Juice, from people trying to rent houses in Austin, from the UTA ACM group, from the UTA book store etc. I can't tell who sold my address, so I can't get off of it. It's very targetted email; it's just wrongly targetted.
Makes me wonder if they have my SSN in there as well. When you apply to graduate schools, don't give UTA your real email address!
I'm having a tough time figuring out what Audioscrobbler's privacy policy is. Is RJ collecting information to sell to marketers? Does this bother anyone that there is no up-front privacy policy? Or is everyone too busy saying geewhiz?
regardless of intent, it is called asportation, it involves the physically relocating objects. I am not sure if it covers DATA though....
Asportation is what they get the smart a$$es in stores who ACT like they are stealing somthing then put it down elsewhere..
asportation
n. removal, especially crime of removing property.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
...on average, we can remember 7-digit numbers maximum easily enough (I don't remember the why, maybe because of phone numbers, somethign like that?)
You're close. 7 (plus or minus 2) is widely believed to be the number of "chunks" we can hold in short-term memory at one time. Because we usually learn this type of (otherwise meaningless) data by mentally rehearsing it, it's harder to learn a longer number (because it's harder to rehearse - you'd have to be looking at the number and rehearsing it, instead of simply repeating it over and over without looking).
This also doesn't mean we can learn these "easily". Think about how hard it is for most people simply to remember shorter number-strings, like birthdays and anniversaries. I'm all for security. But making people have different IDs all over the place is hard on the memory.
"Now which 7-digit number is this? Did it start with 1? Yes! *types in* Oh wait, it's a DIFFERENT number that starts with 1... nope, it's not that either. I think this one ends in 9..." (ad nauseam)
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?