Actually, this says that the subset of Myspace users that are dumb enough to fall for a phishing attack, are still picking better passwords than a representative subset of the whole set of corporate employees. So the worst of the Myspace users are still better than the average corporate employee.
It doesn't really surprise me. The slashdot hive mind may not greatly respect Myspace users, but the fact that they are on the internet and trying new stuff like Myspace, makes them a lot more tech-friendly than the average American, or the average corporate employee. There is a huge amount of technophobia among the general public, and just being able to use the internet as entertainment puts you very much ahead of the flock. And it gets you learning, at which point the process becomes autonomous, and you're on the slippery slope into geekdom.
What would it be worth to find out that the Challenger mission was going to end badly (that was one of his examples)?
Why is it that people doing this sort of research always cite these mundane examples as selling points. It's like the Steorn company that claimed to have invented perpetual motion, earlier this year. One of their slogans was "imagine never having to recharge you cell phone". You're redefining physics and solving the greatest crisis of out time, and you're talking about cell phones? These things are not some useful commodity, they historic events such as the world has never seen. You don't need to sell this.
The same thing here, if this guy succeeds he would be playing with the fabric of reality, throwing causality out of whack, and all he's saying is "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to know how your project 's gonna go before you do it. Could save you some serious bucks."
It scares me that these are the kind of people doing this sort of research.
Sorry to disappoint you, Anakin, but they ditched the handcrank about a year ago. The plastic body of the laptop couldn't take the repeated stress. It does have cute bunny-like wifi ears.
And there are plans to sell them commercially for three times the regular price, and pump the profit back into the charity program, so you won't have to buy the thing in eBay for $1000.
This sort of stuff really baffles me. I admit, I don't know the intricacies of voting machine design. But if we can build machines that simulate the birth of the universe, how difficult is it to build one that can count how many times a button is pushed. I know, there's security and communication and all that, but the basic function of these things is so mindbogglingly simple, that I really don't see how one out of 36 votes can be miscounted. These things need to be opened up and scrutinized.
Of course there is also the possibility, that out of all towns where a party got one vote, there was one where the guy voting for himself accidentally pushed the wrong button, without noticing it. That actually seems more likely than a voting machine malfunction.
That would be akin to re-planting rain forest for the purpose of getting emission rights, which companies are already doing. That is, of course, given that such a structure would work and that it would be cheaper to build than simply buying emission rights.
Enter the Kyoto protocol (Americans may need to look this one up:).
It may cost a company 30% more to use this concrete, but the reduction in emissions that it creates gives them more freedom in the rest of their operation. They can either pollute more in other places, or (more positively) sell their emission surplus to other companies, and make that 30% back in actual cash . Add to that the goodwill that their marketing department can generate by telling people how friendly they are to the environment and I'm sure most companies would be happy to invest in this sort of thing, even if they can't make the full 30% back directly. I would even go so far as to say that when the loss isn't too high, some companies will actually make that sacrifice purely for the environment (but then I'm an optimist).
It all boils down to setting the emission standards strict enough to make it profitable for companies to make the environmentally friendly decision. Companies are remarkably like organisms, change their environment, and they will adapt. And the environment is in the hands of the government (god help us all).
I think you're forgetting that a computer expert will be examining the hard disk. There'll be plenty of scrutinizing going on with that porn collection.
Not that I generally disagree with you, but a couple of points, just to be pedantic: * They lifted the fingerprint off a cd jewelcase. * The photocopy worked on the expensive system, but not on the simple USB device. In fact the reason they kept dumbing down (in contrast to their usual mode of operation to increase complexity as needed), was that the simple methods didn't work on the usb device. Only the second balistics model worked, which was cast from a manually improved version of the captured fingerprint. When they tried the actual doorlock, everything down to the photocopy turned out to work.
I think that in the blaster days there was a copycat worm that downloaded the microsoft anti-blaster patch and installed it (in fact I know there was, because I got 'hit' with it).
It's a nice way to fight zombies, and it might go some way to doing what legal/conventional means have failed to do by using the same viral nature of the original malware to clean the internet up. (While still trying to copy itself from cleaned pc's). The only problem with this is (besides the ethical bit about fighting fire with fire, which I don't really care about) is that the users won't know about it.
Getting infected to the point of having to have somebody clean your system up and install ativirus/firewall/antispyware and a safe browser and email client is a learning experience about how dangerous the internet is these days. If people have their system cleaned up without realizing it, the system may be clean but the people are none the wiser. The best thing, I think would be to install free (as in beer) software, hiding it just until all scans are done and the system has been cleaned and protected, and then, informing the user in some clear way what has happened and what they can do about preventing it in the future, and that they should probably get their system checked out by a human. It would have to do so in some way that doesn't get mistaken for a web-ad, like replacing the wallpaper with the message.
The problem with this scheme of course is that once they get their machine cleaned out the machine won't be spreading the worm anymore and it will lose out to other worms that have the luxury of staying completely still. Maybe if you let the worm hide for two weeks, and then inform the user...
Hosed? Surely the service would fail gracefully, inform the user of the problem and Opera users would simply have to browse as they do now, without having their traffic checked. Doesn't really qualify as 'hosed' to me, or any decent reason to go through all the trouble of ddossing a service that is used to serving data every time an Opera user loads a page. It would take more than a simple bot net to get that down.
Slashdot Mirror
Cause drugs are bad, right? Yeah for patents!
Actually, this says that the subset of Myspace users that are dumb enough to fall for a phishing attack, are still picking better passwords than a representative subset of the whole set of corporate employees. So the worst of the Myspace users are still better than the average corporate employee.
It doesn't really surprise me. The slashdot hive mind may not greatly respect Myspace users, but the fact that they are on the internet and trying new stuff like Myspace, makes them a lot more tech-friendly than the average American, or the average corporate employee. There is a huge amount of technophobia among the general public, and just being able to use the internet as entertainment puts you very much ahead of the flock. And it gets you learning, at which point the process becomes autonomous, and you're on the slippery slope into geekdom.
There was nothing obligatory about that. And the "joke" part wasn't that accurate either.
Yeah, Microsoft! They talk about innovation, but they haven't even cured diabetes yet. Lazy bastards.
Yeah, that would've made him get up.
Why is it that people doing this sort of research always cite these mundane examples as selling points. It's like the Steorn company that claimed to have invented perpetual motion, earlier this year. One of their slogans was "imagine never having to recharge you cell phone". You're redefining physics and solving the greatest crisis of out time, and you're talking about cell phones? These things are not some useful commodity, they historic events such as the world has never seen. You don't need to sell this.
The same thing here, if this guy succeeds he would be playing with the fabric of reality, throwing causality out of whack, and all he's saying is "Gosh, wouldn't it be nice to know how your project 's gonna go before you do it. Could save you some serious bucks."
It scares me that these are the kind of people doing this sort of research.
Sorry to disappoint you, Anakin, but they ditched the handcrank about a year ago. The plastic body of the laptop couldn't take the repeated stress. It does have cute bunny-like wifi ears.
And there are plans to sell them commercially for three times the regular price, and pump the profit back into the charity program, so you won't have to buy the thing in eBay for $1000.
This sort of stuff really baffles me. I admit, I don't know the intricacies of voting machine design. But if we can build machines that simulate the birth of the universe, how difficult is it to build one that can count how many times a button is pushed. I know, there's security and communication and all that, but the basic function of these things is so mindbogglingly simple, that I really don't see how one out of 36 votes can be miscounted. These things need to be opened up and scrutinized.
Of course there is also the possibility, that out of all towns where a party got one vote, there was one where the guy voting for himself accidentally pushed the wrong button, without noticing it. That actually seems more likely than a voting machine malfunction.
That would be akin to re-planting rain forest for the purpose of getting emission rights, which companies are already doing. That is, of course, given that such a structure would work and that it would be cheaper to build than simply buying emission rights.
Enter the Kyoto protocol (Americans may need to look this one up :).
It may cost a company 30% more to use this concrete, but the reduction in emissions that it creates gives them more freedom in the rest of their operation. They can either pollute more in other places, or (more positively) sell their emission surplus to other companies, and make that 30% back in actual cash . Add to that the goodwill that their marketing department can generate by telling people how friendly they are to the environment and I'm sure most companies would be happy to invest in this sort of thing, even if they can't make the full 30% back directly. I would even go so far as to say that when the loss isn't too high, some companies will actually make that sacrifice purely for the environment (but then I'm an optimist).
It all boils down to setting the emission standards strict enough to make it profitable for companies to make the environmentally friendly decision. Companies are remarkably like organisms, change their environment, and they will adapt. And the environment is in the hands of the government (god help us all).
I'm still holding out for Web 2.11 for Workgroups.
That's crumbelievable!
Actually, it's the binary code, read out by Morgan Freeman.
I know how to make your friend call you more. You fix their goddamn computer....
I think you're forgetting that a computer expert will be examining the hard disk. There'll be plenty of scrutinizing going on with that porn collection.
Oh, the movie will be great. The problem is you can't look directly at it. Thank you, I'll be here all week, try the veal.
Not that I generally disagree with you, but a couple of points, just to be pedantic:
* They lifted the fingerprint off a cd jewelcase.
* The photocopy worked on the expensive system, but not on the simple USB device. In fact the reason they kept dumbing down (in contrast to their usual mode of operation to increase complexity as needed), was that the simple methods didn't work on the usb device. Only the second balistics model worked, which was cast from a manually improved version of the captured fingerprint. When they tried the actual doorlock, everything down to the photocopy turned out to work.
I think that in the blaster days there was a copycat worm that downloaded the microsoft anti-blaster patch and installed it (in fact I know there was, because I got 'hit' with it).
It's a nice way to fight zombies, and it might go some way to doing what legal/conventional means have failed to do by using the same viral nature of the original malware to clean the internet up. (While still trying to copy itself from cleaned pc's). The only problem with this is (besides the ethical bit about fighting fire with fire, which I don't really care about) is that the users won't know about it.
Getting infected to the point of having to have somebody clean your system up and install ativirus/firewall/antispyware and a safe browser and email client is a learning experience about how dangerous the internet is these days. If people have their system cleaned up without realizing it, the system may be clean but the people are none the wiser. The best thing, I think would be to install free (as in beer) software, hiding it just until all scans are done and the system has been cleaned and protected, and then, informing the user in some clear way what has happened and what they can do about preventing it in the future, and that they should probably get their system checked out by a human. It would have to do so in some way that doesn't get mistaken for a web-ad, like replacing the wallpaper with the message.
The problem with this scheme of course is that once they get their machine cleaned out the machine won't be spreading the worm anymore and it will lose out to other worms that have the luxury of staying completely still. Maybe if you let the worm hide for two weeks, and then inform the user...
Yarrrr, me first badge, Oi been waitin' all me life fer this moment...
Hosed? Surely the service would fail gracefully, inform the user of the problem and Opera users would simply have to browse as they do now, without having their traffic checked. Doesn't really qualify as 'hosed' to me, or any decent reason to go through all the trouble of ddossing a service that is used to serving data every time an Opera user loads a page. It would take more than a simple bot net to get that down.
Maybe they'll forget to pay their domain name fee some year. Then we'll have them...
I get it!
It's latin for retard.