This is interesting to me. Does a personal bankruptcy in the US result in that the debts are cancelled? In many (well, some) European countries personal bankruptcy is different from a corporate bankruptcy in that you do _not_ automatically get rid of your debts. Instead, you lose access to all your finances, anything you earn will be under the control of a "good man" who will take care of all your money for you, giving you a weekly allowance for living expenses (and you are not allow to buy anything other than the bare necessities) and then using the rest to pay off your debts. This will go on for as long as needed, or, if it's clear that there is no chance that you'll ever pay off your debt, you may be eligible for debt reduction (after having lived for many year on the allowance only).
Unless you're building Vista or a full Linux distro you should be building several times per day, and certainly not on a weekly basis. Preferably on each commit. My team produces tens of builds on a busy workday. Naturally, testing should be done automatically as well, as a part of the team's standard continuous integration system.
I still have not seen one single artist that actually made a career this way.
I could easily think of two Swedish artists that made it to the local top charts (and several foreign) after starting out only by putting their music online for free (not P2P, but Myspace and personal homepages): Basshunter and Miss Li.
I'm pretty sure it's possible to find more examples with a bit of research.
It surely does, especially as the daylight hours get longer as the summer approaches. People watch a lot of TV series and movies during the dark winter hours, and much less during the light and warm summers. Note that in northen Sweden, sun doesn't set at all during summer, while in winter the sun never rise. In the more populated areas, like Stockholm, it's not quite as bad but the difference in the amount of daylight is still very big:
Of course, there's no such thing as "how it works in Europe". Yes, in Europe a phone is generally more detached from the subscription than what seems to be the norm in the US, but there are almost 50 different countries in Europes, all with their own little quirks and specialities when it comes to how mobile telephony has been implemented. Some countries have laws requiring GSM phones to be unlocked while allowing 3G phones to be locked. Some countries do not allow locked phones at all. Some countries let the market decide. The EU may harmonise the market a bit within its 27 member states, but generally lets the local governments decide how they want to implement things (and it's worth remembering that there are still some 20 European states that are not part of the EU).
It's quite possible for Mobile Safari in iPhone to be vulnerable without that making the phone pwnable. For example, one reason could be that the iPhone OS kernel is only able to execute signed code - unless the phone has been pwned and the signing restrictions disabled. There are probably ways around this from userland, too, but I guess they are pretty hard to find and even harder to exploit. And also, owning Mobile Safari would only give you a uid 501 process, from there you'd have to find some way to escalate your privileges to root.
This whole "Why MS? They've got money!" thing stinks more of people here's biases
Who are these people? Most of the highly moderated comments here so far seem to say that this is a non-issue and that the story is a troll. In fact, I just counted, and reading at +4, there are five comments who agree with you, while one comment is neutral and one disagrees.
Buying something from the App Store is nothing like the hassle you describe - at most you have to enter your iTunes Store password at purchase time (once you have an iTunes Store account, that is, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of iPhone and iPod Touch users have). It's much easier than jailbreaking your iPhone and installing a copy from a third-party source.
You mean the paper that explicitly concluded that "Skype was made by clever people" and "Good use of cryptography"?
Yes, it has weaknesses, but unless you get your victim to run a trojanized Skype (at which point they'd be screwed either way), it still seems reasonably secure. Oh, and of course you trust Skype Inc anyway, if you're running their binary.
That said, Skype is inherently scary, and I'd naturally advocate an open source, peer-reviewed system. I just get the feeling that many people misinterpreted that paper.
"Ever wish you had one of those big LED displays to keep you up to date on e-mails, stock quotes, server uptimes, or weather?
Yeah, I used to wish exactly that, but I took the easy (well, I did have to reverse-engineer the serial protocol, but that was fairly easy) way out and went to the hardware store and bought one. It's been serving my team very well since then.:-)
iPhone uses SSL for IMAP by default, and I'd be surprised if the Exchange connection isn't encrypted as well. Most Exchange users will use the built-in VPN support to access their Exchange e-mail. That said, you are probably right in that RIM is the only player in the enterprise, but "end-to-end encryption" seems like a bad example.
It's not the Slashdot I'm seeing. I see a lot of fair criticism, sprinkled with fanbois straight from the reality distortion field here and there, of course, but they generally don't set the tone of the whole discussion. And with every Apple article there is some genious saying that he's going to "burn karma" because he's "telling the truth" about how Slashdot users are irrational in their Apple-fanboyism. Just a few pages up there's a +5 post saying "Apple has been more closed and more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was", and there are posts like that in every single Apple discussion, and the more literate ones usually get moderated insightful.
Where did I say that DTMF tones are secure? I said that one-time-passwords and challenge-response authentication are secure. The security of DTMF tones is irrelevant. The whole point was that eavesdropping, or a corrupted employee leaking information, wouldn't be a problem, as the password entered wouldn't be valid twice.
God forbid you used an automated phone authentication system such as, I don't know, maybe typing in numbers? Modern banks require you to enter a PIN and a one-time-password, either from a scratch-sheet or one obtained using a challenge and an electronic password generator. This is not rocket science.
I call my bank operator, tell them my business, and when they need to authenticate me, they say "please hold while we transfer you to the automated authentication system" and I get to punch in some OTP numbers sent using DTMF tones. Once authenticated, I get transferred back to the operator, who now has verified who I am, but has had no part of the actual authentication.
I find it quite disturbing that there still are banks that haven't even reached this level of security yet.
POP3 (and IMAP) is supported by the built-in MobileMail application, SSH is available in the App Store as well as VNC and RDP clients. Some of these costs money, some don't. Of course, if you jailbreak it you can run a regular OpenSSH (client and server) or telnet in a Terminal, as well as a whole bunch of other networked applications.
When I was a teenager, I used to decode FAT tables and directory structures by hand, using pen and paper and printouts from a raw hex dump of a hard disk. I didn't do this because there was a problem needed to be solved; I knew what was on the disk and there sure were plenty of tools to read the data (like MS-DOS). But it was a fun challenge and I learned how FAT worked.
I can see how this is a similar challenge. It's nothing more than a geeky sudoku.
I haven't used a single ISP that hasn't offered unlimited access. The norm varies a lot between countries, it seems - I have only lived in Sweden and Finland, but here nobody seems to throttle.
It is interesting to note that the Swedish people has had a long history of trusting the government and governmental bureaucracy, with some historian speculating that the trust has its roots in the kings of the old times actually generally supporting the majority of the population, since they'd otherwise be overthrown. Even in ancient medieval times kings were elected ("Mora stenar") and could be overthrown by the people if they were too unpopular. This is one thing that makes this story spectacular. It might be evidence of a government trust that has been steadily decreasing over the last decades.
How easy is it to get an iphone to run through a 'VPN' so it can access an intranet site and have no or extremely limited access to the public WWW?
On the iPod Touch (on the the iPhone is probably the same) Settings -> General -> Network -> VPN
(The wording might be different, I have another language.) It supports L2TP and PPTP with RSA SecureID or pre-shared secrets authentication (no certificate support though), and you can configure it to route all traffic through the VPN. I'm guessing that, with iPhone OS 2.0, it will get a bit more enterprisey.
Slashdot Mirror
This is interesting to me. Does a personal bankruptcy in the US result in that the debts are cancelled? In many (well, some) European countries personal bankruptcy is different from a corporate bankruptcy in that you do _not_ automatically get rid of your debts. Instead, you lose access to all your finances, anything you earn will be under the control of a "good man" who will take care of all your money for you, giving you a weekly allowance for living expenses (and you are not allow to buy anything other than the bare necessities) and then using the rest to pay off your debts. This will go on for as long as needed, or, if it's clear that there is no chance that you'll ever pay off your debt, you may be eligible for debt reduction (after having lived for many year on the allowance only).
Unless you're building Vista or a full Linux distro you should be building several times per day, and certainly not on a weekly basis. Preferably on each commit. My team produces tens of builds on a busy workday. Naturally, testing should be done automatically as well, as a part of the team's standard continuous integration system.
How is it a conspiracy? To me it sounds more like a company meeting the demands of a (big and important) customer.
I could easily think of two Swedish artists that made it to the local top charts (and several foreign) after starting out only by putting their music online for free (not P2P, but Myspace and personal homepages): Basshunter and Miss Li.
I'm pretty sure it's possible to find more examples with a bit of research.
It surely does, especially as the daylight hours get longer as the summer approaches. People watch a lot of TV series and movies during the dark winter hours, and much less during the light and warm summers. Note that in northen Sweden, sun doesn't set at all during summer, while in winter the sun never rise. In the more populated areas, like Stockholm, it's not quite as bad but the difference in the amount of daylight is still very big:
http://www.visitsweden.com/sweden/Sweden-Facts/Worth-knowing-about-Sweden/Time--daylight-hours/
Of course, there's no such thing as "how it works in Europe". Yes, in Europe a phone is generally more detached from the subscription than what seems to be the norm in the US, but there are almost 50 different countries in Europes, all with their own little quirks and specialities when it comes to how mobile telephony has been implemented. Some countries have laws requiring GSM phones to be unlocked while allowing 3G phones to be locked. Some countries do not allow locked phones at all. Some countries let the market decide. The EU may harmonise the market a bit within its 27 member states, but generally lets the local governments decide how they want to implement things (and it's worth remembering that there are still some 20 European states that are not part of the EU).
It's quite possible for Mobile Safari in iPhone to be vulnerable without that making the phone pwnable. For example, one reason could be that the iPhone OS kernel is only able to execute signed code - unless the phone has been pwned and the signing restrictions disabled. There are probably ways around this from userland, too, but I guess they are pretty hard to find and even harder to exploit. And also, owning Mobile Safari would only give you a uid 501 process, from there you'd have to find some way to escalate your privileges to root.
Who are these people? Most of the highly moderated comments here so far seem to say that this is a non-issue and that the story is a troll. In fact, I just counted, and reading at +4, there are five comments who agree with you, while one comment is neutral and one disagrees.
Buying something from the App Store is nothing like the hassle you describe - at most you have to enter your iTunes Store password at purchase time (once you have an iTunes Store account, that is, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of iPhone and iPod Touch users have). It's much easier than jailbreaking your iPhone and installing a copy from a third-party source.
You mean the paper that explicitly concluded that "Skype was made by clever people" and "Good use of cryptography"?
Yes, it has weaknesses, but unless you get your victim to run a trojanized Skype (at which point they'd be screwed either way), it still seems reasonably secure. Oh, and of course you trust Skype Inc anyway, if you're running their binary.
That said, Skype is inherently scary, and I'd naturally advocate an open source, peer-reviewed system. I just get the feeling that many people misinterpreted that paper.
Unfortunately, video cameras are not allowed in Swedish court rooms. The Swedish state television SVT, that currently has live audio streams of the trial, practically said that they would have provided video streams as well, if they were allowed to. (roughly, the editor-in-chief says "unfortunately, the trial laws only allows us to transmit sound")
"Ever wish you had one of those big LED displays to keep you up to date on e-mails, stock quotes, server uptimes, or weather?
Yeah, I used to wish exactly that, but I took the easy (well, I did have to reverse-engineer the serial protocol, but that was fairly easy) way out and went to the hardware store and bought one. It's been serving my team very well since then. :-)
Except they didn't, really: http://www.lightreading.com/boards/message.asp?msg_id=99975
iPhone uses SSL for IMAP by default, and I'd be surprised if the Exchange connection isn't encrypted as well. Most Exchange users will use the built-in VPN support to access their Exchange e-mail. That said, you are probably right in that RIM is the only player in the enterprise, but "end-to-end encryption" seems like a bad example.
It's not the Slashdot I'm seeing. I see a lot of fair criticism, sprinkled with fanbois straight from the reality distortion field here and there, of course, but they generally don't set the tone of the whole discussion. And with every Apple article there is some genious saying that he's going to "burn karma" because he's "telling the truth" about how Slashdot users are irrational in their Apple-fanboyism. Just a few pages up there's a +5 post saying "Apple has been more closed and more anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was", and there are posts like that in every single Apple discussion, and the more literate ones usually get moderated insightful.
Where did I say that DTMF tones are secure? I said that one-time-passwords and challenge-response authentication are secure. The security of DTMF tones is irrelevant. The whole point was that eavesdropping, or a corrupted employee leaking information, wouldn't be a problem, as the password entered wouldn't be valid twice.
God forbid you used an automated phone authentication system such as, I don't know, maybe typing in numbers? Modern banks require you to enter a PIN and a one-time-password, either from a scratch-sheet or one obtained using a challenge and an electronic password generator. This is not rocket science.
I call my bank operator, tell them my business, and when they need to authenticate me, they say "please hold while we transfer you to the automated authentication system" and I get to punch in some OTP numbers sent using DTMF tones. Once authenticated, I get transferred back to the operator, who now has verified who I am, but has had no part of the actual authentication.
I find it quite disturbing that there still are banks that haven't even reached this level of security yet.
It will just be a few Adams, Allen and Anderson that will get upset, the rest would be outside the 140 character per tweet limit.
POP3 (and IMAP) is supported by the built-in MobileMail application, SSH is available in the App Store as well as VNC and RDP clients. Some of these costs money, some don't. Of course, if you jailbreak it you can run a regular OpenSSH (client and server) or telnet in a Terminal, as well as a whole bunch of other networked applications.
When I was a teenager, I used to decode FAT tables and directory structures by hand, using pen and paper and printouts from a raw hex dump of a hard disk. I didn't do this because there was a problem needed to be solved; I knew what was on the disk and there sure were plenty of tools to read the data (like MS-DOS). But it was a fun challenge and I learned how FAT worked.
I can see how this is a similar challenge. It's nothing more than a geeky sudoku.
I haven't used a single ISP that hasn't offered unlimited access. The norm varies a lot between countries, it seems - I have only lived in Sweden and Finland, but here nobody seems to throttle.
It is interesting to note that the Swedish people has had a long history of trusting the government and governmental bureaucracy, with some historian speculating that the trust has its roots in the kings of the old times actually generally supporting the majority of the population, since they'd otherwise be overthrown. Even in ancient medieval times kings were elected ("Mora stenar") and could be overthrown by the people if they were too unpopular. This is one thing that makes this story spectacular. It might be evidence of a government trust that has been steadily decreasing over the last decades.
There is a Journalled Flash File System.
On the iPod Touch (on the the iPhone is probably the same) Settings -> General -> Network -> VPN
(The wording might be different, I have another language.) It supports L2TP and PPTP with RSA SecureID or pre-shared secrets authentication (no certificate support though), and you can configure it to route all traffic through the VPN. I'm guessing that, with iPhone OS 2.0, it will get a bit more enterprisey.
If they get the first sentence completely wrong, I'm not going to bother with the rest of the article.
(Viking literally means a person who comes from a bay or similar.)