PINs are sort of stupid in a retail setting, any way. The way most pads are set up, the other customers can clearly see what digits you're inputting, and voila, now they can use your card at any ATM.
Signatures are just as pointless. They don't prove anything unless you have a meticulous signature. People in general aren't that anal and unless you're Benjamin Franklin or some shit with a degree in calligraphy, the makeup of your signature fluctuates over time.
The US appears to be using a system that's outlived its usefulness.
Stupid on so many levels that I'm not even sure why you said it. Do you really go around your life worried that you're a target for mugging? Maybe you should put the fancy tablet away when you're hanging out in the ghetto. Honestly I don't know what to say to you, your response should be modded down for trolling.
As far as the liability is concerned, who cares? You're still in purchasing limbo until you straighten out a new card. "Have fun" waiting for the mail to arrive and going through the process of re-activating all of your cards and double-checking to make sure the bank didn't pull a fast one in the hub-bub. I personally have been a victim of skimming on several occasions so -- "have fun getting mugged online".
What impact? Mom and pops aren't in charge of how the banking system runs. The efforts required to fix the problem don't "scale down" -- it's all up at the top with the people who hate parting with their hoarded money.
The companies don't wanna pay good money for real security, and they want to throw you behind bars if you go vigilante white-hat on them, so give up. I agree with another/.'er who stated yesterday about the news of the Australian white-hat kid: let 'em burn. If that means going cash, too, go cash.
Keeping everything consolidated on just one card doesn't hurt, either. If it's a debit card you can coal-load it. When you need to make purchases, tally them up first and then go deposit the money you'll need. Charge it back out online and what will the thiefs steal, if anything? Next to zero.
I've always been wary of internet business. I didn't start purchasing things online until literally just a couple of years ago, and that was some music-related art imports from Italy. This year is the first year I've made purchases on Amazon or Ebay. That about marks my limit, too. I have no reason to use anything else. I haven't even activated my newer Bank of America debit card since BoA changed to another bank.
At least with one card I only have one cancellation to take care of if some site I've used it on gets hacked.
Previous comment mentions using an anonymous drop to inform the relevant companies or newspapers. That is the most immediate solution, I would have to agree.
But I also wonder if anything would have been said or done about this vulnerability if there hadn't been a name or identity to target and make an example of?
(Example being, "don't get smart with us".)
I am starting to think that what you say is the best solution. If you find a system if vulnerable, perhaps it's best to withdraw your funds, close your account, deny all services, and stop doing business with the vulnerable. In this case, time to stop refreshing your name in their database and start buying your transit cards or tokens in person using cash. Cancel the card you used with them or report it stolen to get the card number associated with your account regenerated. Leaving something behind (address, phone number, mother's maiden name)? Make sure to change (scramble) your "account details" before jumping ship.
What good is being done any more by free-lance white-hatting or the old vanguard of "let the company know and when you get the inevitable silent treatment, tell the public"? It's being treated like "vigilantism" even though no real victimization is being perpetrated. It's only against the law because of either idiotic legislators or weird "new world order" style agendas.
Consider a company which would press charges against you for revealing their own vulnerability to them or for forcing the vulnerability into the open to get it fixed. We can easily say that's a company being run ignorantly. Consider a police department that would agree to handle those charges and throw you in the slammer in agreement with some lame law. Consider the obtuse lawmakers who gavel'd that idiot law into being. Consider the largely computer-illiterate -- nay, computer-superstitious -- population that regularly produces all of these idiots. Take all of that into consideration for a moment and ask:
Whom are you going to save, from what, for the benefit of whom, on behalf of whom, as an upstanding citizen of what exactly, and with what as your reward?
You're going to protect a moron company from "criminals", for the benefit of that moronic company lording it over a moronic population manhandled by a moronic police department, on behalf of said moronic police department (in their stead, on their behalf, same thing), as an upstanding citizen of a moronic state featuring a moronic population its moronic legislature passing moronic laws and the moronic police department that enforces those laws, and you're going to be branded a "criminal" and thrown in prison with a bunch of morons as a result.
So, maybe re-think the whole old-school, "for the betterment of civilization" style of white-hatting at all, for anybody, whatsoever. Whether you protect your identity, get thrown in jail, or get heard out and get to see your suggestions taken seriously and resulting in a more secure website, the people you are trying to "help" obviously:
(1) don't need it
(2) don't or can't truly appreciate it
(3) don't deserve it
Pick any combination of the 3, even having one of those 3 present in the relationship calls for an end to the relationship.
If they can't pay -- money, attention, time -- for real competent and intact security, let them get run over. Stop trying to "help". It's probably only contributing to the dumbing down of society, any way.
NOT going to the conference is EXACTLY what the NSA wants you to do!
If you DO go to the conference, then you get to discuss the issue with like minds and with the source of the issue.
If you "boycott" the conference, trust me, there's already a prepared script for handling that "quote" "contingency" "quote".
I would have some serious questions for whomever first pitched the idea of boycotting the conference as some kind of political statement. Can it be traced to a person or circle of people? What is / are their identity(ies)?
*keys clicking* *CRT fixed-width reflecting on eyeglass lens* *sudden black screen and gasp*
who relates more closely to computers than to people
*boy and a girl walking side by side* GIRL: "think you'll come to the party tonight?" GUY: "do you think computers like Titanic?" GIRL: "excuse me?" GUY: "I can show you the world!"
decides enough is enough
GIRL: "I don't think we can see each other." GUY: "do you think computers have feelings?"
*explosions* *people dying*
and retreats into his basement to create his own entire world
*guy guzzling 2-liter*
GUY: "I'm going to add the airborn mine cart explosion that can send a dwarf flying through the air and landing in another mine cart today" OTHER GUY: "you got rent?"
follow us into a world where reality is all topsy-turvy
GUY: "The computer isn't just playing the game. The computer is LEARNING."
*record scratch*
OTHER GUY: "You're telling it what to do." GUY: "Yeah but I'm telling it it's called do_learn(token).... what? Jeez, shut up!"
and where dreams become reality
GUY: "I can actually make the game program itself, now." GIRL: "Wow, that's so cool. What's that symbol mean?" GUY: "Oh, it looks like the game thought it would be a good idea to make itself be about elephants humping with a quest goal of finding a lost abacus." GIRL: "I have to go. I hear my mom. LET ME GO."
this spring, get ready, to re-define your entire sense of what creativity means
OTHER GUY: "You can't have a flight sim that's about penguins and walruses absorbing blocks of gelatin through their bellies and shooting skyscrapers out of their mouths" GUY: "It -- it wasn't me. It was THE GAME!" OTHER GUY: "Yeah but it's stupid." GUY: "ITH NOT THUPAAAAAGGGHHHHD!"
from the same people that brought you Unsolvable Sokoban, Endless Sudoku, and Eliza
GUY: "It's like it's thinking. It's really thinking." OTHER GUY: "No, it's like you've been awake for 68 hours" GUY *hoarsely* "Ith tho amathiiiiiinnnnng"
Starring that guy who played Corky from Growing Pains or whatever the fuck that was
GUY: "I'm just like normal people you know." GIRL: "Normal people don't think randomly splashing paint on a canvas is creativity." GUY: "I'm just like Manhattan people you know."
And that girl that never mind
And the other guy who's more successful in life because he isn't completely deranged
OTHER GUY *drooling and staring at tv static*
Rated R for: * conceptual challenges * a complete lack of experimental control * we're pretending being retarded is normal * the film was computer generated. creators cannot be held liable for what might appear in front of you.
Thomas Kuhn would just point out that shifting your paradigm in and out of frame and babbling on about AI while you basically lower your standards of what "creative" means is fucking STUPID
god, what autistic mish-mash are we going to be exposed to next
probably some article about how autism is the new normal. hipsters haven't had enough of that shit, yet. you have to have precisely 3.14 articles of that topic every year or "life" isn't definitively hip-ronic enough.
fucking hipster dumb shit. what self respecting intelligent person ("nerd") doesn't puke at this shit and wish the sprinkler system would turn on in this guy's computer room?
If we can, let's put this death into the form of a something like a "Dead Schroedinger's Cat" and put it in a box for the time being.
You don't know for sure why this dead cat is dead, because you don't know enough about it, so you, being no sort of authority on the hidden and ever-changing features of the sub rosa, cannot make well-founded claims as to the causes behind this guy's death.
The "cat" is either dead from a legitimate overdose, or the "cat" is dead from being administered a bad cocktail by some agent of the empire. Unless you open the box, you don't know which it was.
The thing is, it's a dead fucking cat. And either way you look at it, drugs were involved. Does it matter if the guy was chasing his personal dragon and fucked up, or whether somebody showed up at his place and interrogated and killed him with his own drugs and some stuff found in the medicine cabinet? Allow me to carry the "penetration" analogy that some others in comments have mentioned, that in either case, the vector of "attack" is the drugs, the "attacker" being death.
Why would you want to fuck around with things like heroin or cocaine? I'm not a total drug-prude or something. I once spent an entire year, sans three days, high on some weed from Afghanistan. My cousin owns a successful pot shop in Colorado, and he's digging the new legalization just as much as I am. Of course, I can't smoke right now because it ruins my concentration and I'm going through college (a little late I might add) but that's all cool, smoke away, nobody ever died of a fucking pot overdose. I once did a couple doses of crystal MDMA, it was nice (nothing like what ravers describe Ecstacy to be), I felt super relaxed for the first time in my life since, like, adolescence, and it has had a nice, long-term residual effect, so that I don't think I will need to add to it for quite a number of years. But I would never contribute to my death with something known to be instantly lethal like cocaine or heroin. So many friends of mine have died using heroin, it's sort of a lost cause to tell me that there's A World Where heroin is okay to use. Cocaine is notoriously addictive and life-ruining, not to mention associated with heart disease (though some say it's a good agent against cholesterol levels). I tended to my Grandfather on his deathbed while I observed his decline accelerating due to his prescribed addiction to Xanax. So that's me, that's where I'm coming from.
I say it's stupid to do hard or addictive drugs. Look at what you're setting yourself up for: addiction and potential death. Where's the trade-off? "An altered state of mind"? There are plenty of safe hallucinogens to use. "Oh, I do it for the energy" that's bullshit, since I quite using caffeine and smoking cigarettes I have more energy than I ever did before. This is a documented side-effect of quitting systemically harmful drugs, especially stimulants. You don't have to worship L Ron Hubbard to know that some substances are plainly fucking stupid on their face.
And now look at the other possible quantum state of Dead Schroedinger's Cat, here. Suppose he DID get nipped by some secret agent spy-man. What was the cover-up? The guy's drug usage which some here believe is a made-up story but others have pointed out was a fact the guy himself made known. What would we be looking at if there wasn't this handy cover-up available, and a handy stash of drugs and well-stsocked medicine cabinet nearby to aid the implement of destruction? In all likelihood there would be a much more questionable medical examiner's report. So, again, the drug use serves up more "cons" than pros, this time directly to the people who are concerned with this guy's life -- fans, or whatever. You weren't getting high from this guy's drug use. There's no benefit to his drug use at all to you, but now that you're scratching your head wondering "WTF", there's definitely a major drawback to it, wouldn't you say?
So whether the dead cat inside is dead of its own cause, or somebody intervened to hasten d
if they make a movie of this it could be brutally funny with dry humor. if anybody dies it could be dry and dark but still funny as a movie. even if it's not funny that those people died in real life. there's nothing wrong with me, i'm comPLETEly normal.
Tales From the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Penguin Classics. There are two editions of this book that I've handled. One is a single tome, which I received when I was 8 and proceeded to never forget. The other I gifted to my two brothers when they were 9 and 10, and it was a 2-volume version, a celebratory version if I recall, limited edition. If the whole house is going to be reading, you might want the 2-volume version (it's expanded, not just split in two) because once the kid starts talking about how great the stories are you'll want to put down what you're reading. The adult themes are not spared. Sometimes the stories involve lewd sexuality.
"Where Did I Come From?" It's always good to have The Talk. But after you do, it's good to have a reference around for the kid to read. This one works. It's illustrated, frank, and honest. Moreover, it's short and to the point and doesn't try to fill the kid's head with things. My parents also kept around a copy of "The Joy of Sex" and didn't seem to care if I read it. So maybe get both of those and keep "The Joy" on the parents' bookshelf.
A book on the history of magic tricks. The biggest, thickest, oldest tome you can get covering the greatest span of history possible. My parents had a couple of these. If the book has an illustration of an old Arab in a turban carrying a secret water tank on his back with a tube running down his sleeve, you got the right one.
A book on monsters. The actual kind. Human history is full of "monsters". Pieced-together mermaids. Tales of creatures with fins parading across the countryside in 15th century France. There are some old tomes on this history as well.
"The Secret Teachings of All Ages". Manly P. Hall. 1928. This is written simply enough for an 8 year old with an avid reading habit. The pseudo scientific claims made here and there within should be balanced by a decent book on modern geometry and math and a book on the sciences.
I recommend something similar to "The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics". More or less everything is inside of it, even calculus. It's all very well illustrated. Copies are hard to come by. There are some other books sort of like this that treat math as a serious subject for children, but not many. A quick perusal of "math books for children" on the web turns up countless impetuous results.
There are numerous books on "the way things work" by David Macaulay. Etc.
"The Humanure Handbook: a guide to composting human manure", by Joseph Jenkins. 2005. This book will single-handedly re-teach you everything there is to know about composting, will shatter all the myths you *thought* you knew, and will make you seriously consider the present and future of modern humanity in our willingness to throw away fresh water and spoil the water table. Winner: Independent Publishing Award; Amazon.com Category Bestseller; Foreward Magazine's Book of the Year Award Finalist; Three Rivers Environmental Awards; Independent Book Publishing Association Benjamin Franklin Award; Mother Earth News Books for Wiser Living Recommendation.
"The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk", Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement. 2000. As someone who learned to program computers in the home from age 8, I appreciated many of the points made in the case against introducing computers in the classroom. The author seems not to be too well familiar with the inner workings of machines, and some geek faux pas litter throughout. But the case against similar minds spending mega-bucks on pushing computers at disinterested children is well-made. The well-researched book rails against those who make money purely by pressuring schools to adopt expensive computer placement contracts, and points out that not only is there a lack of evidence that involving computers in schooling is beneficial but cites numerous evidence to the contrary.
"The Little, Brown Essential Handbook". This is that book you were assigned in College Level Writing. Going to write a blog? Be professional about it. There are too many unprofessional writers smearing across the interwebs.
"Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice". ed. Jeremy MacClancy, Jeya Henry, Helen Macbeth. 2007. In this, Volume 6 of the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, you will find the details of what people eat when food isn't available. From the cover photo of a little girl picking her nose to the final (the 18th) paper titled "The Use of Waste Products in the Fermentation of Alcoholic Beverages", you're in for a fun read about things like eating clay, dung, salt, lime, garbage, etc.
"Interpersonal Communication: The Whole Story". Kory Floyd. 2009. This is the book assigned in many college Interpersonal Communication courses. It's fun and eye-opening. Having trouble in your marriage, at work, between friends, etc.? The answers may lie in this book. Contains numerous exercises that might help you find out how well you communicate. Full of useful lingo and jargon that you can use to describe interpersonal communications. Equally useful for the super-analytical as for the casual know-it-all.
"The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an Autohagiography". It's an old book, good luck getting a hardcover copy. It's definitely worth the read. The man's life, as told by himself, makes for wonderful adventure reading.
"Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons". George Pendle. 2005. Here's the first man to successfully develop rockets to add thrust to airplanes for the U.S. military. The first man to develop a castable fuel, GALCIT 53. The American man whose inventions and achievements were taken from him and given to a Nazi, and who was almost forgotten by history. Probably due to his involvement in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Aleister Crowley's sacred lodge. Parsons is the man who L. Ron Hubbard stole the money, boat, and girlfriend from to run off and write Dianetics and start Scientology. A fascinating personality.
"Caswal of Axoth". John Petrush. 2005. The strangest, most violent, sci-fi page-turner I've ever had the pleasure of not being able to put down.
"The Ambidextrous Universe" by Martin Gardner. The symmetry of every last symmetric or asymmetric thing in the universe is explained in excruciating detail.
I can appreciate nefarious and anal-retentive levels, to an extent, I really can.
Back when Super Nintendo released "Super Mario All-Stars", I actually completed every level of Super Mario "Lost Levels" within three days of the game's release, well within the time frame needed to take a picture and send it in to get your "No Warps!" patch. Did I do it? No. How many 12 year olds are into taking 35mm photos of the TV, getting the film developed, getting an envelope... hold on, I need to sleep in for a bit... snore... getting stamps, and actually sending it in the mail? My problem. But I totally, TOTALLY understand hard gaming. I love hard gaming. I'm a very experienced and skilled gamer in a lot of different genres. My favorites are racing, flight combat, and platforming.
But I STILL consider designing levels to be a gracious art. Yeah, yes, you can actually make levels that require tedious replaying and tense perfectionism like Mario Lost Levels (SMB 2 Japan) or like the examples below given for POP, or I suppose like I will find when I go searching for examples of what you're describing (I'm about to do so after I post this response).
That doesn't mean I *appreciate* those levels on any level beyond my enjoyment as a hard gamer. I really, really love games that speak to wider audiences and that are beatable by the median group of game players. I know most people don't enjoy easy peasy games, and I know most people enjoy impossibly hard perfectionist games. So I know for sure that most people enjoy games that are of moderate to hard difficulty, for the sake of being able to beat the game with some effort and also being able to siphon that effort into a momentary proficiency.
In other words, I don't think much is being done by introducing a level editor for a game that doesn't offer much in the way of graphical variation.
Check out the world editor for Zelda (NES original) for instance. You can make a really interesting-looking game out of all those background sprites. With POP, not so much. All that's left to POP is more and more nefarious locking puzzles and so on. Need I say more?
I remember playing Prince of Persia quite fondly, back when I was in elementary school. Around 25 years ago. I went back and played it again as a 20-something some time ago, as well. Finally beat the damn thing. Video gaming is one of those skills that you definitely get better at with age. Don't let people say it's just a kid's hobby.
I would make levels for it, but I am dead sure that every little possibility had already been utilized, that while you could make more nefarious and harder levels requiring more anal-retentive precision in order to complete safely, those levels would not incorporate anything really "new" that wasn't already tried out within the original game. They really did present practically every edge-case of what the player is capable of doing, every different length and height of "leap of faith", and every confusing combination of trap floors and so on. There's nothing "new" you can do, here.
But I am still going to download that level editor and the next free copy of the game I can find, bitcheeessssss
Just always be ready with damage-control on the stuff you have sprinkled around online. Always be up front with yourself and your employers / whomever else whose opinion of your past internet activities could possibly ever matter enough to make you care that much about it / your employers.
They would mostly be concerned about the image that you reflect onto their company. I've thought of this some times. To me, the best idea is to form a website that is your "professional image" site, and do damage-control from there. Maybe package it very simply with a link off of the front page to "My Web Footprint, Q & A".
Start with a nice lead-in that captures the empathy of the audience.
Go into detail about things that you find cringe-worthy, and shrug them off as not being a very big deal and not being reflective of who you are, today. Explain the misconceptions in your mind that led to those past statements or behaviors, and let the audience know how glad you are that you aren't like that any more. If there's evidence of that, link to the evidence.
There, now you're not a potential liability, you're a success story that the corporation can be happy to link to and parade around as proof that they are in touch with real people, not just any people, upward-mobile people.
You have the opportunity to get out of it in ways that older folks who did things they're ashamed of in the 60's and 70's didn't have:
(1.) The opportunity to face it head-on by knowing fully well that it's easily discoverable information and by becoming your own blackmailer ahead of anyone else.
(2.) The opportunity to spin it however you want and make it into whatever sort of rags-to-riches, turned-over-a-leaf, now-I-know-what-the-salt-of-the-Earth-is-really-like sort of story you really think people want to see.
(3.) The opportunity to surround it with gay frog images and links to buy your published-on-demand memoirs of those weird times.
China is smart to do this. People are far too shut-in these days. Look how much entertainment has expanded and filtered in the niches of everyone's lives. It does not always have a positive effect on individuals (does the news even bother to cover stories of MMORPG recluses any more or is it now to be taken for granted?) and therefore nor does it always have a positive effect on populations.
Consider the effect that a film like "V for Vendetta" has had on activism itself. The iconic Guy Fawkes mask and the anonymized approach to public activism leaked directly from the film into peoples' lives, who took it seriously and decided to implement it in a fashion.
Consider the effect that video games have on what you decide to talk about with people when you're out shopping, or at work, or at school, just "hanging out", and so on. For many people, about the only people they wouldn't talk about their video games with would be their parents, who would grow weary of the subject and try to divert them to something "more productive". And that HAS to be a dwindling case, considering how many life long gamer are now parents of kids old enough to game passionately.
People fall in love with "weighted companion cubes" (despite the dead bodies inside). People spend a great deal of time meditating on whether the cake is a lie or whether there is no spoon.
When you add in a dimension of possible political opinion and conflict to an immersive game, it also adds those political opinions and conflicts to the discussion. With things in China as bad as they are right now, in many districts, it would be a bad idea to entertain people with some game depicting "the day after tomorrow" sort of mayhem that no doubt many of them wish was real today.
Because that is what they would be talking about around the water cooler, or out shopping, or while stocking the coal cellar, or while cooking, or at school. Especially the at school part, that's sort of what China's mostly concerned about. Remember it was students who were active in Tiananmen Square.
Every day, in the United States, I shake my head in shame at how many people are operating in their daily lives on a level of cinema fantasy running through their heads. It's not that they watch too many movies or that the content of the movies is wrong somehow, it's that they take what they've watched far too seriously and for whatever reason they've also adapted it to fit their self image and their perception of what their life actually is.
It's easy to defend these people as "needing heroes", and "needing to be heroes", and so on. But it's not easy to defend people who aren't aware of their surroundings and who aren't concerned with real events and real consequences in real life, no in any sense of the word "defend". And plenty of people -- who don't have self-image and self-esteem issues, or who aren't trying to take reality escapism to a whole different level -- enjoy their hero sagas and their epic struggles as things separate from real life. It's not those people that draw my concern, it's the growing number of others who get completely absorbed and proceed to live in a psychological bubble composed of entertainment imagery.
Case in point, "thug life", which is a cultural mainstream even in neighborhoods where there's no threat of actual gang activity and where there are plenty of opportunities for a better life. It's even a mainstream with little white upper class girls in grade school who obviously aren't going to cap anybody and if they wanted to count stacks they could learn accounting and investment from their millionaire parents. There's something lacking in someone's life besides monetary value and secure social networks, when they emulate being a thug ostensibly in pursuit of money and social standing, even when they have ready access to plenty of both.
It's expensive to get a rich man's money, but, it's cheap to fill a poor man's pockets.
Anonymity doesn't entail vitriol nor vice versa. I'm occasionally vitriolic and I use my actual name on forums and comment sections. I couldn't care if people are "scared away from the service" by that. I get way too many pluses, likes, and other positive responses to give a crap.
At any rate. If some web site tries to make you give a "real name" just fake it. There's nothing they can put in your way to ensure reality that you can't just get around, spoof out, or otherwise hack.
The whole thing about nasty shysters hiding behind pseudonyms is older than the world wide web. It's the darker side of anonymity. But there's no getting rid of it. If you try to get rid of the xBADxCATx13x 's in the world you're just going to be inundated with Ron Chauls III 's and Franklin Scarlet's and so on.
Good point. In other words, "try to assemble the Mac Pro by buying the individual components piecemeals and see if you can beat the cost of a factory Mac Pro."
I think OP meant, "live as slaves -- as equals, or face extinction". I think they meant to describe living in slavery as essentially making all of us (slaves) equal. I don't think the slave-owners were intended to be included in the equality.
Slashdot Mirror
PINs are sort of stupid in a retail setting, any way. The way most pads are set up, the other customers can clearly see what digits you're inputting, and voila, now they can use your card at any ATM.
Signatures are just as pointless. They don't prove anything unless you have a meticulous signature. People in general aren't that anal and unless you're Benjamin Franklin or some shit with a degree in calligraphy, the makeup of your signature fluctuates over time.
The US appears to be using a system that's outlived its usefulness.
> "Have fun getting mugged"
Stupid on so many levels that I'm not even sure why you said it. Do you really go around your life worried that you're a target for mugging? Maybe you should put the fancy tablet away when you're hanging out in the ghetto. Honestly I don't know what to say to you, your response should be modded down for trolling.
As far as the liability is concerned, who cares? You're still in purchasing limbo until you straighten out a new card. "Have fun" waiting for the mail to arrive and going through the process of re-activating all of your cards and double-checking to make sure the bank didn't pull a fast one in the hub-bub. I personally have been a victim of skimming on several occasions so -- "have fun getting mugged online".
Ass.
What impact? Mom and pops aren't in charge of how the banking system runs. The efforts required to fix the problem don't "scale down" -- it's all up at the top with the people who hate parting with their hoarded money.
The companies don't wanna pay good money for real security, and they want to throw you behind bars if you go vigilante white-hat on them, so give up. I agree with another /.'er who stated yesterday about the news of the Australian white-hat kid: let 'em burn. If that means going cash, too, go cash.
Keeping everything consolidated on just one card doesn't hurt, either. If it's a debit card you can coal-load it. When you need to make purchases, tally them up first and then go deposit the money you'll need. Charge it back out online and what will the thiefs steal, if anything? Next to zero.
I've always been wary of internet business. I didn't start purchasing things online until literally just a couple of years ago, and that was some music-related art imports from Italy. This year is the first year I've made purchases on Amazon or Ebay. That about marks my limit, too. I have no reason to use anything else. I haven't even activated my newer Bank of America debit card since BoA changed to another bank.
At least with one card I only have one cancellation to take care of if some site I've used it on gets hacked.
Previous comment mentions using an anonymous drop to inform the relevant companies or newspapers. That is the most immediate solution, I would have to agree.
But I also wonder if anything would have been said or done about this vulnerability if there hadn't been a name or identity to target and make an example of?
(Example being, "don't get smart with us".)
I am starting to think that what you say is the best solution. If you find a system if vulnerable, perhaps it's best to withdraw your funds, close your account, deny all services, and stop doing business with the vulnerable. In this case, time to stop refreshing your name in their database and start buying your transit cards or tokens in person using cash. Cancel the card you used with them or report it stolen to get the card number associated with your account regenerated. Leaving something behind (address, phone number, mother's maiden name)? Make sure to change (scramble) your "account details" before jumping ship.
What good is being done any more by free-lance white-hatting or the old vanguard of "let the company know and when you get the inevitable silent treatment, tell the public"? It's being treated like "vigilantism" even though no real victimization is being perpetrated. It's only against the law because of either idiotic legislators or weird "new world order" style agendas.
Consider a company which would press charges against you for revealing their own vulnerability to them or for forcing the vulnerability into the open to get it fixed. We can easily say that's a company being run ignorantly. Consider a police department that would agree to handle those charges and throw you in the slammer in agreement with some lame law. Consider the obtuse lawmakers who gavel'd that idiot law into being. Consider the largely computer-illiterate -- nay, computer-superstitious -- population that regularly produces all of these idiots. Take all of that into consideration for a moment and ask:
Whom are you going to save, from what, for the benefit of whom, on behalf of whom, as an upstanding citizen of what exactly, and with what as your reward?
You're going to protect a moron company from "criminals", for the benefit of that moronic company lording it over a moronic population manhandled by a moronic police department, on behalf of said moronic police department (in their stead, on their behalf, same thing), as an upstanding citizen of a moronic state featuring a moronic population its moronic legislature passing moronic laws and the moronic police department that enforces those laws, and you're going to be branded a "criminal" and thrown in prison with a bunch of morons as a result.
So, maybe re-think the whole old-school, "for the betterment of civilization" style of white-hatting at all, for anybody, whatsoever. Whether you protect your identity, get thrown in jail, or get heard out and get to see your suggestions taken seriously and resulting in a more secure website, the people you are trying to "help" obviously:
(1) don't need it
(2) don't or can't truly appreciate it
(3) don't deserve it
Pick any combination of the 3, even having one of those 3 present in the relationship calls for an end to the relationship.
If they can't pay -- money, attention, time -- for real competent and intact security, let them get run over. Stop trying to "help". It's probably only contributing to the dumbing down of society, any way.
It has been up and running for over 15 years. Is there some problem?
Uh, hello pinhead. HELLO PINHEAD!
NOT going to the conference is EXACTLY what the NSA wants you to do!
If you DO go to the conference, then you get to discuss the issue with like minds and with the source of the issue.
If you "boycott" the conference, trust me, there's already a prepared script for handling that "quote" "contingency" "quote".
I would have some serious questions for whomever first pitched the idea of boycotting the conference as some kind of political statement. Can it be traced to a person or circle of people? What is / are their identity(ies)?
Half of the dogs will begin pooping there with their nose on the concrete and their butt suspended in mid-air above them.
The other half of the dogs will begin pooping there while standing up like human beings.
In A World
where one programmer
*keys clicking*
*CRT fixed-width reflecting on eyeglass lens*
*sudden black screen and gasp*
who relates more closely to computers than to people
*boy and a girl walking side by side*
GIRL: "think you'll come to the party tonight?"
GUY: "do you think computers like Titanic?"
GIRL: "excuse me?"
GUY: "I can show you the world!"
decides enough is enough
GIRL: "I don't think we can see each other."
GUY: "do you think computers have feelings?"
*explosions*
*people dying*
and retreats into his basement to create his own entire world
*guy guzzling 2-liter*
GUY: "I'm going to add the airborn mine cart explosion that can send a dwarf flying through the air and landing in another mine cart today"
OTHER GUY: "you got rent?"
follow us into a world where reality is all topsy-turvy
GUY: "The computer isn't just playing the game. The computer is LEARNING."
*record scratch*
OTHER GUY: "You're telling it what to do."
GUY: "Yeah but I'm telling it it's called do_learn(token).... what? Jeez, shut up!"
and where dreams become reality
GUY: "I can actually make the game program itself, now."
GIRL: "Wow, that's so cool. What's that symbol mean?"
GUY: "Oh, it looks like the game thought it would be a good idea to make itself be about elephants humping with a quest goal of finding a lost abacus."
GIRL: "I have to go. I hear my mom. LET ME GO."
this spring, get ready, to re-define your entire sense of what creativity means
OTHER GUY: "You can't have a flight sim that's about penguins and walruses absorbing blocks of gelatin through their bellies and shooting skyscrapers out of their mouths"
GUY: "It -- it wasn't me. It was THE GAME!"
OTHER GUY: "Yeah but it's stupid."
GUY: "ITH NOT THUPAAAAAGGGHHHHD!"
from the same people that brought you Unsolvable Sokoban, Endless Sudoku, and Eliza
GUY: "It's like it's thinking. It's really thinking."
OTHER GUY: "No, it's like you've been awake for 68 hours"
GUY *hoarsely* "Ith tho amathiiiiiinnnnng"
Starring that guy who played Corky from Growing Pains or whatever the fuck that was
GUY: "I'm just like normal people you know."
GIRL: "Normal people don't think randomly splashing paint on a canvas is creativity."
GUY: "I'm just like Manhattan people you know."
And that girl that never mind
And the other guy who's more successful in life because he isn't completely deranged
OTHER GUY *drooling and staring at tv static*
Rated R for:
* conceptual challenges
* a complete lack of experimental control
* we're pretending being retarded is normal
* the film was computer generated. creators cannot be held liable for what might appear in front of you.
Thomas Kuhn would just point out that shifting your paradigm in and out of frame and babbling on about AI while you basically lower your standards of what "creative" means is fucking STUPID
fucking stupid premise, fucking stupid article, fucking stupid stupid.
god, what autistic mish-mash are we going to be exposed to next
probably some article about how autism is the new normal. hipsters haven't had enough of that shit, yet. you have to have precisely 3.14 articles of that topic every year or "life" isn't definitively hip-ronic enough.
fucking hipster dumb shit. what self respecting intelligent person ("nerd") doesn't puke at this shit and wish the sprinkler system would turn on in this guy's computer room?
[moderate this one to flame-bait, it would be honest]
god, shut up. you obviously don't know what you read because you can't even qualify your verbs and shit or whatever. just shut up.
oh, hey, idiot: procedurally generated games have been out forever. there you go. the game was developed by "ai". fuck, what a fucktarded article.
If we can, let's put this death into the form of a something like a "Dead Schroedinger's Cat" and put it in a box for the time being.
You don't know for sure why this dead cat is dead, because you don't know enough about it, so you, being no sort of authority on the hidden and ever-changing features of the sub rosa, cannot make well-founded claims as to the causes behind this guy's death.
The "cat" is either dead from a legitimate overdose, or the "cat" is dead from being administered a bad cocktail by some agent of the empire. Unless you open the box, you don't know which it was.
The thing is, it's a dead fucking cat. And either way you look at it, drugs were involved. Does it matter if the guy was chasing his personal dragon and fucked up, or whether somebody showed up at his place and interrogated and killed him with his own drugs and some stuff found in the medicine cabinet? Allow me to carry the "penetration" analogy that some others in comments have mentioned, that in either case, the vector of "attack" is the drugs, the "attacker" being death.
Why would you want to fuck around with things like heroin or cocaine? I'm not a total drug-prude or something. I once spent an entire year, sans three days, high on some weed from Afghanistan. My cousin owns a successful pot shop in Colorado, and he's digging the new legalization just as much as I am. Of course, I can't smoke right now because it ruins my concentration and I'm going through college (a little late I might add) but that's all cool, smoke away, nobody ever died of a fucking pot overdose. I once did a couple doses of crystal MDMA, it was nice (nothing like what ravers describe Ecstacy to be), I felt super relaxed for the first time in my life since, like, adolescence, and it has had a nice, long-term residual effect, so that I don't think I will need to add to it for quite a number of years. But I would never contribute to my death with something known to be instantly lethal like cocaine or heroin. So many friends of mine have died using heroin, it's sort of a lost cause to tell me that there's A World Where heroin is okay to use. Cocaine is notoriously addictive and life-ruining, not to mention associated with heart disease (though some say it's a good agent against cholesterol levels). I tended to my Grandfather on his deathbed while I observed his decline accelerating due to his prescribed addiction to Xanax. So that's me, that's where I'm coming from.
I say it's stupid to do hard or addictive drugs. Look at what you're setting yourself up for: addiction and potential death. Where's the trade-off? "An altered state of mind"? There are plenty of safe hallucinogens to use. "Oh, I do it for the energy" that's bullshit, since I quite using caffeine and smoking cigarettes I have more energy than I ever did before. This is a documented side-effect of quitting systemically harmful drugs, especially stimulants. You don't have to worship L Ron Hubbard to know that some substances are plainly fucking stupid on their face.
And now look at the other possible quantum state of Dead Schroedinger's Cat, here. Suppose he DID get nipped by some secret agent spy-man. What was the cover-up? The guy's drug usage which some here believe is a made-up story but others have pointed out was a fact the guy himself made known. What would we be looking at if there wasn't this handy cover-up available, and a handy stash of drugs and well-stsocked medicine cabinet nearby to aid the implement of destruction? In all likelihood there would be a much more questionable medical examiner's report. So, again, the drug use serves up more "cons" than pros, this time directly to the people who are concerned with this guy's life -- fans, or whatever. You weren't getting high from this guy's drug use. There's no benefit to his drug use at all to you, but now that you're scratching your head wondering "WTF", there's definitely a major drawback to it, wouldn't you say?
So whether the dead cat inside is dead of its own cause, or somebody intervened to hasten d
if they make a movie of this it could be brutally funny with dry humor. if anybody dies it could be dry and dark but still funny as a movie. even if it's not funny that those people died in real life. there's nothing wrong with me, i'm comPLETEly normal.
I forgot you mentioned a child.
Tales From the Thousand and One Arabian Nights. Penguin Classics. There are two editions of this book that I've handled. One is a single tome, which I received when I was 8 and proceeded to never forget. The other I gifted to my two brothers when they were 9 and 10, and it was a 2-volume version, a celebratory version if I recall, limited edition. If the whole house is going to be reading, you might want the 2-volume version (it's expanded, not just split in two) because once the kid starts talking about how great the stories are you'll want to put down what you're reading. The adult themes are not spared. Sometimes the stories involve lewd sexuality.
"Where Did I Come From?" It's always good to have The Talk. But after you do, it's good to have a reference around for the kid to read. This one works. It's illustrated, frank, and honest. Moreover, it's short and to the point and doesn't try to fill the kid's head with things. My parents also kept around a copy of "The Joy of Sex" and didn't seem to care if I read it. So maybe get both of those and keep "The Joy" on the parents' bookshelf.
A book on the history of magic tricks. The biggest, thickest, oldest tome you can get covering the greatest span of history possible. My parents had a couple of these. If the book has an illustration of an old Arab in a turban carrying a secret water tank on his back with a tube running down his sleeve, you got the right one.
A book on monsters. The actual kind. Human history is full of "monsters". Pieced-together mermaids. Tales of creatures with fins parading across the countryside in 15th century France. There are some old tomes on this history as well.
"The Secret Teachings of All Ages". Manly P. Hall. 1928. This is written simply enough for an 8 year old with an avid reading habit. The pseudo scientific claims made here and there within should be balanced by a decent book on modern geometry and math and a book on the sciences.
I recommend something similar to "The Giant Golden Book of Mathematics". More or less everything is inside of it, even calculus. It's all very well illustrated. Copies are hard to come by. There are some other books sort of like this that treat math as a serious subject for children, but not many. A quick perusal of "math books for children" on the web turns up countless impetuous results.
There are numerous books on "the way things work" by David Macaulay. Etc.
"The Humanure Handbook: a guide to composting human manure", by Joseph Jenkins. 2005. This book will single-handedly re-teach you everything there is to know about composting, will shatter all the myths you *thought* you knew, and will make you seriously consider the present and future of modern humanity in our willingness to throw away fresh water and spoil the water table. Winner: Independent Publishing Award; Amazon.com Category Bestseller; Foreward Magazine's Book of the Year Award Finalist; Three Rivers Environmental Awards; Independent Book Publishing Association Benjamin Franklin Award; Mother Earth News Books for Wiser Living Recommendation.
"The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk", Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement. 2000. As someone who learned to program computers in the home from age 8, I appreciated many of the points made in the case against introducing computers in the classroom. The author seems not to be too well familiar with the inner workings of machines, and some geek faux pas litter throughout. But the case against similar minds spending mega-bucks on pushing computers at disinterested children is well-made. The well-researched book rails against those who make money purely by pressuring schools to adopt expensive computer placement contracts, and points out that not only is there a lack of evidence that involving computers in schooling is beneficial but cites numerous evidence to the contrary.
"The Little, Brown Essential Handbook". This is that book you were assigned in College Level Writing. Going to write a blog? Be professional about it. There are too many unprofessional writers smearing across the interwebs.
"Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice". ed. Jeremy MacClancy, Jeya Henry, Helen Macbeth. 2007. In this, Volume 6 of the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, you will find the details of what people eat when food isn't available. From the cover photo of a little girl picking her nose to the final (the 18th) paper titled "The Use of Waste Products in the Fermentation of Alcoholic Beverages", you're in for a fun read about things like eating clay, dung, salt, lime, garbage, etc.
"Interpersonal Communication: The Whole Story". Kory Floyd. 2009. This is the book assigned in many college Interpersonal Communication courses. It's fun and eye-opening. Having trouble in your marriage, at work, between friends, etc.? The answers may lie in this book. Contains numerous exercises that might help you find out how well you communicate. Full of useful lingo and jargon that you can use to describe interpersonal communications. Equally useful for the super-analytical as for the casual know-it-all.
"The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: an Autohagiography". It's an old book, good luck getting a hardcover copy. It's definitely worth the read. The man's life, as told by himself, makes for wonderful adventure reading.
"Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons". George Pendle. 2005. Here's the first man to successfully develop rockets to add thrust to airplanes for the U.S. military. The first man to develop a castable fuel, GALCIT 53. The American man whose inventions and achievements were taken from him and given to a Nazi, and who was almost forgotten by history. Probably due to his involvement in the Ordo Templi Orientis, Aleister Crowley's sacred lodge. Parsons is the man who L. Ron Hubbard stole the money, boat, and girlfriend from to run off and write Dianetics and start Scientology. A fascinating personality.
"Caswal of Axoth". John Petrush. 2005. The strangest, most violent, sci-fi page-turner I've ever had the pleasure of not being able to put down.
"The Ambidextrous Universe" by Martin Gardner. The symmetry of every last symmetric or asymmetric thing in the universe is explained in excruciating detail.
I can appreciate nefarious and anal-retentive levels, to an extent, I really can.
Back when Super Nintendo released "Super Mario All-Stars", I actually completed every level of Super Mario "Lost Levels" within three days of the game's release, well within the time frame needed to take a picture and send it in to get your "No Warps!" patch. Did I do it? No. How many 12 year olds are into taking 35mm photos of the TV, getting the film developed, getting an envelope ... hold on, I need to sleep in for a bit ... snore ... getting stamps, and actually sending it in the mail? My problem. But I totally, TOTALLY understand hard gaming. I love hard gaming. I'm a very experienced and skilled gamer in a lot of different genres. My favorites are racing, flight combat, and platforming.
But I STILL consider designing levels to be a gracious art. Yeah, yes, you can actually make levels that require tedious replaying and tense perfectionism like Mario Lost Levels (SMB 2 Japan) or like the examples below given for POP, or I suppose like I will find when I go searching for examples of what you're describing (I'm about to do so after I post this response).
That doesn't mean I *appreciate* those levels on any level beyond my enjoyment as a hard gamer. I really, really love games that speak to wider audiences and that are beatable by the median group of game players. I know most people don't enjoy easy peasy games, and I know most people enjoy impossibly hard perfectionist games. So I know for sure that most people enjoy games that are of moderate to hard difficulty, for the sake of being able to beat the game with some effort and also being able to siphon that effort into a momentary proficiency.
In other words, I don't think much is being done by introducing a level editor for a game that doesn't offer much in the way of graphical variation.
Check out the world editor for Zelda (NES original) for instance. You can make a really interesting-looking game out of all those background sprites. With POP, not so much. All that's left to POP is more and more nefarious locking puzzles and so on. Need I say more?
Okay, this is exactly what I was referring to when I said things like "nefarious" and "anal-retentive".
The sooner I get my PhD in computer engineering, the sooner I can do something about there being fewer stories like this.
I remember playing Prince of Persia quite fondly, back when I was in elementary school. Around 25 years ago. I went back and played it again as a 20-something some time ago, as well. Finally beat the damn thing. Video gaming is one of those skills that you definitely get better at with age. Don't let people say it's just a kid's hobby.
I would make levels for it, but I am dead sure that every little possibility had already been utilized, that while you could make more nefarious and harder levels requiring more anal-retentive precision in order to complete safely, those levels would not incorporate anything really "new" that wasn't already tried out within the original game. They really did present practically every edge-case of what the player is capable of doing, every different length and height of "leap of faith", and every confusing combination of trap floors and so on. There's nothing "new" you can do, here.
But I am still going to download that level editor and the next free copy of the game I can find, bitcheeessssss
"
Just always be ready with damage-control on the stuff you have sprinkled around online. Always be up front with yourself and your employers / whomever else whose opinion of your past internet activities could possibly ever matter enough to make you care that much about it / your employers.
They would mostly be concerned about the image that you reflect onto their company. I've thought of this some times. To me, the best idea is to form a website that is your "professional image" site, and do damage-control from there. Maybe package it very simply with a link off of the front page to "My Web Footprint, Q & A".
Start with a nice lead-in that captures the empathy of the audience.
Go into detail about things that you find cringe-worthy, and shrug them off as not being a very big deal and not being reflective of who you are, today. Explain the misconceptions in your mind that led to those past statements or behaviors, and let the audience know how glad you are that you aren't like that any more. If there's evidence of that, link to the evidence.
There, now you're not a potential liability, you're a success story that the corporation can be happy to link to and parade around as proof that they are in touch with real people, not just any people, upward-mobile people.
You have the opportunity to get out of it in ways that older folks who did things they're ashamed of in the 60's and 70's didn't have:
(1.) The opportunity to face it head-on by knowing fully well that it's easily discoverable information and by becoming your own blackmailer ahead of anyone else.
(2.) The opportunity to spin it however you want and make it into whatever sort of rags-to-riches, turned-over-a-leaf, now-I-know-what-the-salt-of-the-Earth-is-really-like sort of story you really think people want to see.
(3.) The opportunity to surround it with gay frog images and links to buy your published-on-demand memoirs of those weird times.
* The End *
^--- !!!
China is smart to do this. People are far too shut-in these days. Look how much entertainment has expanded and filtered in the niches of everyone's lives. It does not always have a positive effect on individuals (does the news even bother to cover stories of MMORPG recluses any more or is it now to be taken for granted?) and therefore nor does it always have a positive effect on populations.
Consider the effect that a film like "V for Vendetta" has had on activism itself. The iconic Guy Fawkes mask and the anonymized approach to public activism leaked directly from the film into peoples' lives, who took it seriously and decided to implement it in a fashion.
Consider the effect that video games have on what you decide to talk about with people when you're out shopping, or at work, or at school, just "hanging out", and so on. For many people, about the only people they wouldn't talk about their video games with would be their parents, who would grow weary of the subject and try to divert them to something "more productive". And that HAS to be a dwindling case, considering how many life long gamer are now parents of kids old enough to game passionately.
People fall in love with "weighted companion cubes" (despite the dead bodies inside). People spend a great deal of time meditating on whether the cake is a lie or whether there is no spoon.
When you add in a dimension of possible political opinion and conflict to an immersive game, it also adds those political opinions and conflicts to the discussion. With things in China as bad as they are right now, in many districts, it would be a bad idea to entertain people with some game depicting "the day after tomorrow" sort of mayhem that no doubt many of them wish was real today.
Because that is what they would be talking about around the water cooler, or out shopping, or while stocking the coal cellar, or while cooking, or at school. Especially the at school part, that's sort of what China's mostly concerned about. Remember it was students who were active in Tiananmen Square.
Every day, in the United States, I shake my head in shame at how many people are operating in their daily lives on a level of cinema fantasy running through their heads. It's not that they watch too many movies or that the content of the movies is wrong somehow, it's that they take what they've watched far too seriously and for whatever reason they've also adapted it to fit their self image and their perception of what their life actually is.
It's easy to defend these people as "needing heroes", and "needing to be heroes", and so on. But it's not easy to defend people who aren't aware of their surroundings and who aren't concerned with real events and real consequences in real life, no in any sense of the word "defend". And plenty of people -- who don't have self-image and self-esteem issues, or who aren't trying to take reality escapism to a whole different level -- enjoy their hero sagas and their epic struggles as things separate from real life. It's not those people that draw my concern, it's the growing number of others who get completely absorbed and proceed to live in a psychological bubble composed of entertainment imagery.
Case in point, "thug life", which is a cultural mainstream even in neighborhoods where there's no threat of actual gang activity and where there are plenty of opportunities for a better life. It's even a mainstream with little white upper class girls in grade school who obviously aren't going to cap anybody and if they wanted to count stacks they could learn accounting and investment from their millionaire parents. There's something lacking in someone's life besides monetary value and secure social networks, when they emulate being a thug ostensibly in pursuit of money and social standing, even when they have ready access to plenty of both.
It's expensive to get a rich man's money, but, it's cheap to fill a poor man's pockets.
Anonymity doesn't entail vitriol nor vice versa. I'm occasionally vitriolic and I use my actual name on forums and comment sections. I couldn't care if people are "scared away from the service" by that. I get way too many pluses, likes, and other positive responses to give a crap.
At any rate. If some web site tries to make you give a "real name" just fake it. There's nothing they can put in your way to ensure reality that you can't just get around, spoof out, or otherwise hack.
The whole thing about nasty shysters hiding behind pseudonyms is older than the world wide web. It's the darker side of anonymity. But there's no getting rid of it. If you try to get rid of the xBADxCATx13x 's in the world you're just going to be inundated with Ron Chauls III 's and Franklin Scarlet's and so on.
Good point. In other words, "try to assemble the Mac Pro by buying the individual components piecemeals and see if you can beat the cost of a factory Mac Pro."
I think OP meant, "live as slaves -- as equals, or face extinction". I think they meant to describe living in slavery as essentially making all of us (slaves) equal. I don't think the slave-owners were intended to be included in the equality.