As the other poster stated: this information was NOT stored in plaintext. Passwords were hashed. Sony's statement tries to make an artificial distinction between encryption and hashing (perhaps to justify their earlier statement?) but the fact is that hashing is encryption. Just a particular form of it.
"Keeping track of your socioeconomic status is of prime importance for successfully navigating life within the tribe."
Except there is one important statistic that contradicts this idea: people of "lower socioeconomic status" get married and breed much more often than the "upper crust".
"Why wouldn't they want to know how often the same person visits their shop, or how often that person comes in to town and visits other shops but not them?"
They probably would. But that wasn't the point of the article, I think.
But in-store traffic patters are HUGE from a marketing standpoint. You wonder why modern stores are laid out the way they are? So that you have to go past the produce, for example, before you can get to the frozen pizza. Or through the jewelry section before you get to the kids' clothes.
But I am surprised the article does not mention even one of the obvious -- one might even say glaring -- exceptions.
Take various species of tortoise for example. They can easily live to be 150 years old, yet weigh (many of them anyway) far less than a human. Same with many species of parrot.
Then there's the hydra... 100 million years old or so, in its current form (just a wild guess... it could be a billion but I don't think that's likely), but every hydra is budded from its "parent"... so each individual hydra is ONE single organism that has lived for millions of years. (They don't die of old age, either.)
I understand that they are talking about trends, but they should not use such superlatives as "every" and "all". There are exceptions all around us.
According to OP, this analysis was done by three "microbiologists of wrongdoing". I would not place much faith in their accuracy. Unless I am mistaken, they belong to the same professional organization as the "physicists of pillage".
"... which is why Zoe Lofgren, D California, has drafted Aaron's Law to ban Terms of Service breaches from using the CFAA."
It goes a little deeper than that. In effect, making anything that violates a TOS illegal would allow anybody who writes a TOS to define their own law, just by including it in the document. That goes against just about every traditional legal principle in the U.S.
For a ridiculous example: I could put in my TOS that you were not "authorized" to use the site when you were accessing it from a tablet while sitting on the toilet. Then visiting the site from your living room would be legal, but walking into the bathroom would be a felony.
Theoretically, I suppose, I could write into my TOS that any agent of the government, or employee or representative of such agent, could not access my site at all.
"Change your MAC address to a pseudo-random one every time you go out of your main home or work environment. It's possible on android and iOS devices."
This would be of absolutely no help with an in-store tracking system. They don't care what your MAC address IS, they just use it to track you in the store.
And despite what the software vendors claim: a tracking system that assigns a MAC address to you walking down an aisle *IS* personally identifiable... as long as you are in the store.
It is possible I accidentally clicked when I shouldn't have and ended up viewing just the graphic containing the graph. If so, I retract my earlier comment. But there is no way I can tell right now because the site isn't coming up at all.
Well, when I visited the link before, I am pretty sure it did not say so. All I saw was a graph with some years on the tick marks, and a line that looked like it was supposed to be a regression fit. Except that it went from the lowest point to near the highest point, which is not at all typical of a regression line. I saw nothing further to clarify it.
The site seems to be having problems right now (10:16 pm CST). The page won't load. So there is no way to sort out the issue.
Note that the supposed average starts at that low point on the left. In a curve that accounted for prior data, the line would start somewhat further up.
Just one observation about that graph. There are several points of note.
"Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980."
Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point.
You are comparing the low temperature from one year to the high temperature of another. Also, look at the years chosen: if you choose instead 1998 to present, you end up with (roughly) 0.4 to 0.3, or a change of -0.4.
I'm not arguing with you about AGW. I'm just saying that the evidence you have used to support your point is almost laughably weak.
"I don't think so. I think its way bigger. I think they want to have the right to control all media."
That's not bigger. It's actually a subset of what I was saying. Why would they want to control all media? One reason only: to screw as many people out of as much $$$ as possible.
"If you can't even describe how it would be possible for someone to determine; then you may assume that it is impossible to determine. "
I think you are trolling a bit here, but I'll bite anyway.
I didn't say I couldn't describe it, I said I wasn't concerned about it here. You're moving the goalposts, then trying to make it look like some kind of failure on my part. It won't work.
First, the statement isn't even logical. But even aside from that, I was simply saying it's possible for a corporation to be evil (and I gave examples that I think most people would agree are evil). But then you ask me to actually define a line between good and evil, which is completely off the subject. Some of the best of us could not do that in entire books on the subject. Asking me to do it on Slashdot is not very reasonable.
As an analogy: one might not be able to draw a distinct line between urban family vehicles and SUVs. But wherever that line is, there are vehicles on either side of it, and there exist vehicles that almost everybody would agree are urban family vehicles, and others that almost everybody would agree qualify as SUVs.
"And if it's not possible to accurately measure whether a corporation is evil or not, then it's irrelevent, and the distinction doesn't really exist:) "
Again, that's just rhetorical nonsense, not logic. It has not been possible to accurately measure good and evil outside of corporations either; that has no bearing on whether they exist. One person's good might even be another person's evil; but there do exist things that the vast majority consider to be good, and other things generally considered evil. And I don't believe I know anyone who thinks it's irrelevant.
It would seem so, since I saw similar survey results clear back in 2000... that is, 13 years ago.
The music industry has known about this. Their campaigns and lawsuits are not about fairness. They are about screwing as many people over for $$$ as possible.
Now create a nice graphic-and-fancy-text-filled web page in Adobe Illustrator CS5 (or 6 now, if you prefer), and save it as.pdf. Then see if you can open it with an older program that was made to read the.pdf specification as it was in 2008 or 2009.
Not quite the same thing. Those are flavored with bacteria. The "bloomy" cheeses are mold.
Even so... smell is one thing, taste is quite another.
I'll pass on them both, thanks. Give me a good slice of cheddar, gouda, edam, mozzarella, colby, jack... whatever. As long as it's all cheese, not bacteria or mold.
"The way to treat a steak is to pocket it and fill it with blue stilton, not slobber it with mayo and red sauce."
I don't disagree about the mayo and red sauce. But blue stilton? Yuck.
Farmer: "Hey, Marge! Come look at this cheese. It's been sitting in the cow barn all winter. It's got blue-green sh*t growing all over it. Should we eat it?"
Slashdot Mirror
"Encryption's been here for -how long-?"
As the other poster stated: this information was NOT stored in plaintext. Passwords were hashed. Sony's statement tries to make an artificial distinction between encryption and hashing (perhaps to justify their earlier statement?) but the fact is that hashing is encryption. Just a particular form of it.
More often per capita, that is.
"Keeping track of your socioeconomic status is of prime importance for successfully navigating life within the tribe."
Except there is one important statistic that contradicts this idea: people of "lower socioeconomic status" get married and breed much more often than the "upper crust".
"Why wouldn't they want to know how often the same person visits their shop, or how often that person comes in to town and visits other shops but not them?"
They probably would. But that wasn't the point of the article, I think.
But in-store traffic patters are HUGE from a marketing standpoint. You wonder why modern stores are laid out the way they are? So that you have to go past the produce, for example, before you can get to the frozen pizza. Or through the jewelry section before you get to the kids' clothes.
But I am surprised the article does not mention even one of the obvious -- one might even say glaring -- exceptions.
... 100 million years old or so, in its current form (just a wild guess... it could be a billion but I don't think that's likely), but every hydra is budded from its "parent"... so each individual hydra is ONE single organism that has lived for millions of years. (They don't die of old age, either.)
Take various species of tortoise for example. They can easily live to be 150 years old, yet weigh (many of them anyway) far less than a human. Same with many species of parrot.
Then there's the hydra
I understand that they are talking about trends, but they should not use such superlatives as "every" and "all". There are exceptions all around us.
"Try this on, just as a possibility."
Calm down. Don't get your knickers in a twist.
According to OP, this analysis was done by three "microbiologists of wrongdoing". I would not place much faith in their accuracy. Unless I am mistaken, they belong to the same professional organization as the "physicists of pillage".
"... which is why Zoe Lofgren, D California, has drafted Aaron's Law to ban Terms of Service breaches from using the CFAA."
It goes a little deeper than that. In effect, making anything that violates a TOS illegal would allow anybody who writes a TOS to define their own law, just by including it in the document. That goes against just about every traditional legal principle in the U.S.
For a ridiculous example: I could put in my TOS that you were not "authorized" to use the site when you were accessing it from a tablet while sitting on the toilet. Then visiting the site from your living room would be legal, but walking into the bathroom would be a felony.
Theoretically, I suppose, I could write into my TOS that any agent of the government, or employee or representative of such agent, could not access my site at all.
TDD forces good test coverage, and reduces or eliminates regression errors.
Also, TDD is correlated with successful, robust software, but code review generally is not. (Unless you count QA as "review".)
"You're right, woodfortrees is down. Instead, you could try the Skeptical Science trend calculator "
Thanks for the info, and I may take a look. But it still has no bearing on my comment, which was only about what I saw at the link in his post.
"That is a tasty burger."
Is it?
I wonder how well it does with "hold the salt" or "lighten up on the mayo."
"Change your MAC address to a pseudo-random one every time you go out of your main home or work environment. It's possible on android and iOS devices."
This would be of absolutely no help with an in-store tracking system. They don't care what your MAC address IS, they just use it to track you in the store.
And despite what the software vendors claim: a tracking system that assigns a MAC address to you walking down an aisle *IS* personally identifiable... as long as you are in the store.
Depends on the cheese. Some of them aren't cultured, they're made with milk and rennet.
It is possible I accidentally clicked when I shouldn't have and ended up viewing just the graphic containing the graph. If so, I retract my earlier comment. But there is no way I can tell right now because the site isn't coming up at all.
"It is the entire satellite record."
Well, when I visited the link before, I am pretty sure it did not say so. All I saw was a graph with some years on the tick marks, and a line that looked like it was supposed to be a regression fit. Except that it went from the lowest point to near the highest point, which is not at all typical of a regression line. I saw nothing further to clarify it.
The site seems to be having problems right now (10:16 pm CST). The page won't load. So there is no way to sort out the issue.
"That's nonsense, Jane. Click on "raw data" then scroll down:"
When I looked before, there was no link to "raw data". Just a plain graph with nothing else to support it. That was my whole point.
When I saw your post, I clicked the link to look at it again, in case I had been in error, but now the site is not coming up for me.
So any comment on my part will have to wait until such time as that page appears again.
Addendum:
Note that the supposed average starts at that low point on the left. In a curve that accounted for prior data, the line would start somewhat further up.
Just one observation about that graph. There are several points of note.
"Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980."
Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point.
You are comparing the low temperature from one year to the high temperature of another. Also, look at the years chosen: if you choose instead 1998 to present, you end up with (roughly) 0.4 to 0.3, or a change of -0.4.
I'm not arguing with you about AGW. I'm just saying that the evidence you have used to support your point is almost laughably weak.
"The funding is irrelevant to the study except to people in denial of the massive fossil fuel funding of climate alarmism."
The funding is irrelevant unless it supports your side of the argument???
Hahahaha! Now THAT is trying to have it both ways!
"I don't think so. I think its way bigger. I think they want to have the right to control all media."
That's not bigger. It's actually a subset of what I was saying. Why would they want to control all media? One reason only: to screw as many people out of as much $$$ as possible.
"If you can't even describe how it would be possible for someone to determine; then you may assume that it is impossible to determine. "
I think you are trolling a bit here, but I'll bite anyway.
I didn't say I couldn't describe it, I said I wasn't concerned about it here. You're moving the goalposts, then trying to make it look like some kind of failure on my part. It won't work.
First, the statement isn't even logical. But even aside from that, I was simply saying it's possible for a corporation to be evil (and I gave examples that I think most people would agree are evil). But then you ask me to actually define a line between good and evil, which is completely off the subject. Some of the best of us could not do that in entire books on the subject. Asking me to do it on Slashdot is not very reasonable.
As an analogy: one might not be able to draw a distinct line between urban family vehicles and SUVs. But wherever that line is, there are vehicles on either side of it, and there exist vehicles that almost everybody would agree are urban family vehicles, and others that almost everybody would agree qualify as SUVs.
"And if it's not possible to accurately measure whether a corporation is evil or not, then it's irrelevent, and the distinction doesn't really exist :) "
Again, that's just rhetorical nonsense, not logic. It has not been possible to accurately measure good and evil outside of corporations either; that has no bearing on whether they exist. One person's good might even be another person's evil; but there do exist things that the vast majority consider to be good, and other things generally considered evil. And I don't believe I know anyone who thinks it's irrelevant.
"Is that a crime?"
It would seem so, since I saw similar survey results clear back in 2000... that is, 13 years ago.
The music industry has known about this. Their campaigns and lawsuits are not about fairness. They are about screwing as many people over for $$$ as possible.
"Wikipedia also sayz:"
Well, good for Wikipedia.
.pdf. Then see if you can open it with an older program that was made to read the .pdf specification as it was in 2008 or 2009.
Now create a nice graphic-and-fancy-text-filled web page in Adobe Illustrator CS5 (or 6 now, if you prefer), and save it as
And good luck with that.
"It is the feet of God you are smelling."
Not quite the same thing. Those are flavored with bacteria. The "bloomy" cheeses are mold.
Even so... smell is one thing, taste is quite another.
I'll pass on them both, thanks. Give me a good slice of cheddar, gouda, edam, mozzarella, colby, jack... whatever. As long as it's all cheese, not bacteria or mold.
"Oh you are so missing out."
No, I am not.
I've tried that as well as other "blue" cheese variants, and I just don't like them.
To me, they taste like... well... mold.
"The way to treat a steak is to pocket it and fill it with blue stilton, not slobber it with mayo and red sauce."
I don't disagree about the mayo and red sauce. But blue stilton? Yuck.
Farmer: "Hey, Marge! Come look at this cheese. It's been sitting in the cow barn all winter. It's got blue-green sh*t growing all over it. Should we eat it?"
Marge: "No".