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 :)"
I *think* there was some precedent on this;
something about a guy who stole money / robbed a store JUST so that he would go to jail to be away from his wife. The judge decided that since he was not stealing with the intention of theft, he was not guilty and don't get to goto jail. (in the other words, be still under the whips and chains of his wife - which might be a fitting punishment?)
Could have just been a joke that I took for real, though...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
while I cannot *stand* any institution using SSNs for anything not money related (financial aid) it is a near necessity...
I went to BGSU and we had P00 numbers as our student ID (P001123344 for example). While I remember mine from BGSU the college I currently work for has "student IDs" as well but they are not as widely known (most of the foreign students w/o SSNs know theirs but not many others).
So if colleges didn't use them MANY people would have problems getting the info they needed b/c searching through 10000 Michael John Smith's is a pain in the ass.
Didn't someone write a script measuring people's degrees of separation from each other on slashdot via Zoo?
sulli
RTFJ.
That system must really stink!
Also worth noting: Scrobbler is going open-source.
See Developer Mailing List
Sourceforge projects:
Main
XMMS Plugin
Winamp Plugin
iTunes Plugin
Hmmmn on balance I should probably tell RJ to consolidate the projects into one and use modules... Ah well
I thought about this for a moment (just one, just one moment) and came to the conclusion that I actually have no idea why an instition would use SSNs (or SINs) to internally identify their members. The university I go to has their own student numbering system and we seem to do fine. It's not difficult at all to remember a 7 digit code that you find you have to write down at least 5 times a week. *shrug*
So basically, it's OK to use SSN because students aren't smart enough or are too lazy to learn a new PIN. While the PIN seems pretty long, I still see no reason for an SSN. Between phone #, address, etc, you should be able to identify your Michael John Smiths. Being that the identifier given is relatively the same length as an SIN (at least ones around here) - why couldn't anyone who memorizes their SIN memorize the ID.
For those that can't... put it in your damn wallet on a card or something, because with the SIN they're probably referencing their card anyhow.
A homeless man wandered into a bank near where I live, and asked the teller for some money. The teller thought she was being held up, and gave him all the cash in the register.
:)
They later found him, took the money back, and did not arrest him. Of course, in that case, he was given the money. I think he should have sued the cops for stealing it from him
This was a local news item. I doubt it's a hoax.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
It is just a number of tidbits about a number of stories that have already been posted before, kind of like an update.
I like to think of it more as a multiple double post.
A somewhat slow (retarded) man walked into a bank, took a deposit slip and managed to write "This is a robbery" on it.
He didnt want to wait in the long line, so he left and took his note to the bank across the street.
When he got to the teller, she noticed he was obviously mentally challenged. So he hands her the note written on the deposit slip, and she says "I cant do anything with this, this slip is from another bank".
The frustrated robber leaves, and is arrested a few minutes later standing in line at the first bank.
True story, I heard it straight from the cop who booked the guy into the local jail.
"As a former UTA student, I'm glad my SSN is no longer in danger!"
Depends on how long ago you attended. Most universities keep your record on file indefinitely right along with active students indefinitely. I have a friend who works in the student services division of my university. She tells me that she routinely has to perform maintenance on records of people who graduated 10 or more years ago. You may want to call your uni and tell them to remove you if they haven't done so already.
Seriously, what law was broken here? If the university left a list of student/faculty names and SSNs on the sidewalk and someone picked it up, with no intent to commit fraud etc., would that be crime?
Suppose someone from the school administration had memorized everyone's SSN and sat in the student union and would answer questions of the form, "do you know who has xxx-xx-xxxx as their SSN?" If students (or others) asked questions of this form and eventually learned a list of SSNs, would this be a crime? And who would be guilty, the questioners, or the idiot that was giving out confidential information without the owner's consent?
In this case the moron who created the web site was answering this question indirectly over the Internet. Who's at fault? The guy who took the time to ask the questions, or the dork who made it possible to get the answers?
In going through some old papers from my grad school days, I found my carbon copy of a grade report which lists student names and SSNs (along with their grades in the class I taught). Am I guilty of a crime for possessing that list? Clearly, I was trusted with that information because I was hired to teach a class, so isn't it my responsibility to keep that information confidential? It seems to me the web author has the same responsibility.
Obviously, it's a very different situation if someone does something illegal with the list, but just building the list from publicly available information doesn't seem like a crime to me. Making the list easy to publicly deduce seems like the real crime in this case.
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 ?