Because it's the FBI's sworn duty to take all PCs, wherever a crime may be committed. If the FBI catchs murder, they take the gun, the victim, any item with blood on it, AND the store where he bought the gun.
"Researching" is a joke. It's merely a tech support thing of "Hey, you found a new virus. Neat...give it to us and will put it in the definition file." Nevermind CLEANING the virus; the only solution for every virus problem nowadays is deleting the file. Virus cleaning used to be sort of an artform, but now they are too lazy for their own high-paying jobs.
Why can't you vote for another Democrat for the senate? It doesn't have to be a party issue. (Or is there something I'm forgetting about senator races vs. president races?)
Quite frankly, the whole concept of Frontpage is a mistake. I really just have one question about it: WTF IS WRONG WITH FTP?!!? Again, yet another example of MS re-inventing the wheel.
You know...I kinda get tired doing that 3 times a week. Plus, I don't want to even think of how long those SERIOUS security flaws have been lurking in those servers for how many YEARS, and only NOW has MS told me about it!
This reminds me of the time I tried to prevent the cat from catching birds and stuff by putting a bell around his neck. The result: a faster and quieter hunter. Instead of alerting the birds about the cat, the cat would just find sneaker ways to pounce on his victim and not set off the bell around his neck (until it was too late for the bird anyway).
Moral of the story: Give a cat a challenge, and s/he'll regard it as a challenge to solve.
This patent is too wide-scoped for mere "private companies". Huge corporations have OS-independant encryption. They have the money to fund this sort of lawsuit. Hell, they have more money than the government, since they are the ones paying off the government for this sort of thing anyway.
OTOH, I don't see a record of ABC News even reporting the bill on their Sci/Tech or Politics pages. I guess I'd expect Disney to hide the truth like they always do. Any company that forces their Goofy's and Mickey's to wear their own lice-infected underwear can't be that good in the "fairness and truth" department.
"When ABC News (Disney) and Fox News (News Corporation) discuss this, they're not going to be spending much time talking about the downside."
That's odd. Fox News did an article bashing the SSSCA. Not that I like Fox News that much, but like MSNBC, they aren't going to skew their story to what their company feels. That would just piss off readers.
And wrote to my parents and friends an e-mail about this. It's extremely rare for me to say "Please forward" in anything I send. (Forgive me if you think this to be karma-whoring...)
Reading Slashdot every day sometimes makes me want to shoot every corporate and government entity on the planet as I figure out what they are doing to the US public every day. The DMCA, if you didn't already realize, is already doing some heavy damage, and it is highly unconstitutional: The DMCA in plain English.
If you think that's scary, that's not even the icing on the cake! The newly-proposed law going to the Senate right now, the SSSCA, funded by the RIAA and the MPAA, is like the DMCA on crack. Passing it is suicide to all things technological!
If this new CBDTPA gets passed, computers several years from now will not be the computers we have today. They will be limited pieces of hardware, hard-coded to prevent you from doing "bad things". They will monitor your activities. And this will affect everything from car stereos to TVs to anything else "computer related". If it has a format or something to "protect", it will be affected. This includes you and the way you use computers!
How can you make things secure, if you don't have the tools to test security? This is on par with banning crowbars because they can be used to break into a home, instead of arresting the robbers that use them.
So, what can you do about it? The ACLU actually isn't paying much attention to this one, because it's not really their realm. The real freedom fighter in cases like these is the EFF. The EFF is a well-known organization that some people have called "the ACLU for technology". Many computer techs are members. Wil Wheaton was one of the Star Trek guests on a "Weakest Link" special episode, who chose the EFF as his donating organization. (He won them $10,000 on that show.)
The EFF is truly the only line of defense for this. Voting doesn't work. Petitions don't work. The only thing that works (unforunately) is money, and fighting the system with its own laws. The RIAA and MPAA "donated" over $50 million dollars to both political parties! We need to fight back and donate to the EFF! I just donated my dues to the EFF today, because they are going to need it now.
Please forward this to all of your friends! Donate to the EFF now!!!
Didn't we see this somewhere before?
on
Optical Cryptography
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Oh yeah...Johnny Mnemonic! Yeah, when he was picking random images for the data to encrypt it. I find it strange that something from such a mediocre movie gets to actually be applied as technology. (Then again, the whole point of the movie was its neat ideas.)
What about pace makers? Aren't x-rays a little dangerous around pace makers? I can imagine the conversation:
Idiot guard: "We need you to pass through the x-ray machine." Pacemaker implantee: "I can't. I have a pace maker." IG: "I'm sorry, but we have to have you pass through the x-ray machine." PI: "You don't seem to understand: if I go through there, I COULD DIE!" IG: "We really don't care. Please pass through the x-ray machine." [PI passes through] PI: "...Uggg! Oh god! *THUMP*" IG: "....Ummmm...shit! Does this mean I'm fired?" Boss: "You're fired!"
Speaking of which, where's that joke page for him that displayed articles from him, where he (Warwick, I mean) was a time traveller who went back in time to figure out "what went wrong"? That was classic.
How about the cost of information, if classified documents wind up into Al-Queda hands? This is the military we are talking about, and they are using Windows?! Hell, I'd be suprised that they would even consider Linux and go straight for BSD, just to make sure that it's secure.
So, just now, the USAF wakes up and says "Hey, I think security is a pretty good idea." Huh? Since when has the military branch of the government not been keen on security? (And why does "military intelligence" sound like an oxymoron. I guess this is yet another indictation of how ass-backwards our govt is.)
Pointing it out that it exists in a EULA isn't a good defense strategy either. Most judges realize that putting "you owe the company $5 billion if you click this" on a EULA doesn't mean anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Offtopic? What crack are the moderators smoking?!
Worse yet...
SpamAssassin already has this. It's called automatic-whitelisting.
Because it's the FBI's sworn duty to take all PCs, wherever a crime may be committed. If the FBI catchs murder, they take the gun, the victim, any item with blood on it, AND the store where he bought the gun.
Keyword is overkill.
"Researching" is a joke. It's merely a tech support thing of "Hey, you found a new virus. Neat...give it to us and will put it in the definition file." Nevermind CLEANING the virus; the only solution for every virus problem nowadays is deleting the file. Virus cleaning used to be sort of an artform, but now they are too lazy for their own high-paying jobs.
There's ways to make the hash unique to that fingerprint, and only that fingerprint, just like passwords work. It's just a one-way encryption.
What's this idea that hashs weaken the uniqueness of its data? If that was the case, password crackers would be a LOT faster than they are.
And that would be a poor GeoCities site getting /.ed to hell and back...
Why can't you vote for another Democrat for the senate? It doesn't have to be a party issue. (Or is there something I'm forgetting about senator races vs. president races?)
Quite frankly, the whole concept of Frontpage is a mistake. I really just have one question about it: WTF IS WRONG WITH FTP?!!? Again, yet another example of MS re-inventing the wheel.
You know...I kinda get tired doing that 3 times a week. Plus, I don't want to even think of how long those SERIOUS security flaws have been lurking in those servers for how many YEARS, and only NOW has MS told me about it!
Jesus...let it go! This argument is over two years old! RTFM!
This reminds me of the time I tried to prevent the cat from catching birds and stuff by putting a bell around his neck. The result: a faster and quieter hunter. Instead of alerting the birds about the cat, the cat would just find sneaker ways to pounce on his victim and not set off the bell around his neck (until it was too late for the bird anyway).
Moral of the story: Give a cat a challenge, and s/he'll regard it as a challenge to solve.
This patent is too wide-scoped for mere "private companies". Huge corporations have OS-independant encryption. They have the money to fund this sort of lawsuit. Hell, they have more money than the government, since they are the ones paying off the government for this sort of thing anyway.
OTOH, I don't see a record of ABC News even reporting the bill on their Sci/Tech or Politics pages. I guess I'd expect Disney to hide the truth like they always do. Any company that forces their Goofy's and Mickey's to wear their own lice-infected underwear can't be that good in the "fairness and truth" department.
"When ABC News (Disney) and Fox News (News Corporation) discuss this, they're not going to be spending much time talking about the downside."
That's odd. Fox News did an article bashing the SSSCA. Not that I like Fox News that much, but like MSNBC, they aren't going to skew their story to what their company feels. That would just piss off readers.
He's been a media doll for years. He's no damn cyborg, and even if he is, Steve Mann got him beat as the first.
Steve Mann is the man, or part-man I should say. Hope he recovers from his airline experience.
And wrote to my parents and friends an e-mail about this. It's extremely rare for me to say "Please forward" in anything I send. (Forgive me if you think this to be karma-whoring...)
Reading Slashdot every day sometimes makes me want to shoot every corporate and government entity on the planet as I figure out what they are doing to the US public every day. The DMCA, if you didn't already realize, is already doing some heavy damage, and it is highly unconstitutional: The DMCA in plain English.
Here's some of the latest abuses of the DMCA:
Writing a eBook convertor for the blind (the Sklyarov case): 1 2
No DVD software player for Linux and no research on cryptology
Blocking anti-Scientology sites
If you think that's scary, that's not even the icing on the cake! The newly-proposed law going to the Senate right now, the SSSCA, funded by the RIAA and the MPAA, is like the DMCA on crack. Passing it is suicide to all things technological!
The SSSCA in plain English: 1 2 3
The SSSCA (now the CBDTPA) is in the Senate
If this new CBDTPA gets passed, computers several years from now will not be the computers we have today. They will be limited pieces of hardware, hard-coded to prevent you from doing "bad things". They will monitor your activities. And this will affect everything from car stereos to TVs to anything else "computer related". If it has a format or something to "protect", it will be affected. This includes you and the way you use computers!
How can you make things secure, if you don't have the tools to test security? This is on par with banning crowbars because they can be used to break into a home, instead of arresting the robbers that use them.
So, what can you do about it? The ACLU actually isn't paying much attention to this one, because it's not really their realm. The real freedom fighter in cases like these is the EFF. The EFF is a well-known organization that some people have called "the ACLU for technology". Many computer techs are members. Wil Wheaton was one of the Star Trek guests on a "Weakest Link" special episode, who chose the EFF as his donating organization. (He won them $10,000 on that show.)
The EFF is truly the only line of defense for this. Voting doesn't work. Petitions don't work. The only thing that works (unforunately) is money, and fighting the system with its own laws. The RIAA and MPAA "donated" over $50 million dollars to both political parties! We need to fight back and donate to the EFF! I just donated my dues to the EFF today, because they are going to need it now.
Please forward this to all of your friends! Donate to the EFF now!!!
So be it. I stand corrected.
Oh yeah...Johnny Mnemonic! Yeah, when he was picking random images for the data to encrypt it. I find it strange that something from such a mediocre movie gets to actually be applied as technology. (Then again, the whole point of the movie was its neat ideas.)
Why didn't somebody think of this before?
What about pace makers? Aren't x-rays a little dangerous around pace makers? I can imagine the conversation:
Idiot guard: "We need you to pass through the x-ray machine."
Pacemaker implantee: "I can't. I have a pace maker."
IG: "I'm sorry, but we have to have you pass through the x-ray machine."
PI: "You don't seem to understand: if I go through there, I COULD DIE!"
IG: "We really don't care. Please pass through the x-ray machine."
[PI passes through]
PI: "...Uggg! Oh god! *THUMP*"
IG: "....Ummmm...shit! Does this mean I'm fired?"
Boss: "You're fired!"
Speaking of which, where's that joke page for him that displayed articles from him, where he (Warwick, I mean) was a time traveller who went back in time to figure out "what went wrong"? That was classic.
How about the cost of information, if classified documents wind up into Al-Queda hands? This is the military we are talking about, and they are using Windows?! Hell, I'd be suprised that they would even consider Linux and go straight for BSD, just to make sure that it's secure.
So, just now, the USAF wakes up and says "Hey, I think security is a pretty good idea." Huh? Since when has the military branch of the government not been keen on security? (And why does "military intelligence" sound like an oxymoron. I guess this is yet another indictation of how ass-backwards our govt is.)
Pointing it out that it exists in a EULA isn't a good defense strategy either. Most judges realize that putting "you owe the company $5 billion if you click this" on a EULA doesn't mean anything.
Sure: MS Office doesn't have a Linux version :)
...for yet another plug for Galeon. Whenever Mozilla is mentioned, there's a guy in the distance who shouts Galeon every single time.