They don't care about your real name, or which individual body it refers to.
They care about you the user, with your user account, because they know that behind one user account is one individual user, and no matter what name they put on the account it is still one user. That user has interests, has friends, connections, posts photos and messages, replies, likes, pokes: that is the information they need to create a profile of you, the user. And with that profile they can figure out your likes and dislikes, and target advertising to you. Even if you don't put your name/location/etc in it, they will have a very very good guess based on your relations with other people, not to forget the geocoding of the IP you use to log in to their system.
Your Facebook data is as valuable to Facebook as anyone else who uses their real name, because a name is just that: a name. Have you ever asked any of your real-life friends whether the name they introduce themselves with to you is the same as the name that appears on their ID card? And does it really matter?
You may make it a little harder for external parties that have an interest in you the person to find your real world identity out of your Facebook data, but it won't be too hard either. The other way around is even easier: someone just has to poke around on your computer and they will very soon find your Facebook name somewhere.
And rightfully so: getting attention for the huge amount of personal data Facebook gathers of every single user of their site. It is something too many people do not realise: whatever you put on Facebook is there, out in the open (don't worry about "privacy settings", they have little to no meaning), and is there forever (don't worry about "delete" because it doesn't do what it says).
The Chinese are fully capable of ramping up production and swamping the market with competing devices - like they're doing already. The only restriction might be in getting the parts for those devices, as those again are often made by high-tech giants like Samsung.
Patents are supposed to work the same all over the world.
Why?
Because 1) they are supposed to fully and clearly describe an invention, so testing whether another machine uses a certain invention doesn't leave much grey area, and 2) they're based on international agreements.
Note that I say "supposed", I know it's idealising and that practice leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Yet in practice if a patent is found to be infringed upon in one country, very likely other countries' courts will come to the same conclusion.
WWII destroyed the British Empire, handed about half the human race over to communists where they couldn't compete with Western manufacturers and destroyed most of Europe's industrial production capacity. America benefited massively from the war because it was left with no real competition and the only large-scale manufacturing capacity in the West.
America was a remote party of the war, like they are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. It costs heaps of money, leaves the target in tatters, but nothing much happens on home soil. Same for WWII: there were no bombardments of US cities, no US bridges blown up, few US merchant vessels sunk. Compare that to the European countries.
Like now if Samsung and Apple (aka Germany and the other European countries) kill off each other, Google (aka US) maybe chipping in as secondary party getting hurt on the sidelines but not in their cores, parties like Google and of course all other manufacturers see two major competitors gone, opening up a huge market potential for them.
Patents are supposed to work the same all over the world. They may differ in details such as amount of penalties, back-penalties, etc - the basics (what is covered, and what constitutes infringement) should be roughly the same. So indeed if one courts rules one way, likely courts in other countries will rule the same.
But to come back to your statement about war: mind that there are no winners in war. There are only losers. In WWII the allied forces were considered the winners, but the rest of Europe was as much in tatters as loser Germany was. Both sides lost huge in form of people killed or seriously wounded and disabled, buildings destroyed, infrastructure destroyed, economic losses due to the high cost of warfare and the lost production, etc. It took enormous financial support from mainly the US to help get Europe back on its feet.
In these patent wars there will be no "Marshall plan" when the dust settles. Both Samsung and Apple (I think they can be considered the main parties here) may end up seriously crippled. Samsung has much more than just phones and tablets (they produce many other consumer electronics, and also parts for them, including parts for Apple products), Apple otoh is more reliant on their phone/tablet business, and losing too many of this kind of suits may cause them to go bankrupt in the end. And for side players like Google the mobile phone business is merely a way to expand/protect their core business, so they don't have much to lose there.
Samsung is blocked selling their tablets and phones elsewhere.
Now with a little luck within a year or two no-one is allowed to sell any smartphone or tablet anywhere in the world.
The winners will be: the Chinese manufacturers who don't care about patents and copyrights, who will just continue to produce, and sell their products all over the world on the grey markets at rock-bottom prices.
That's what I said: she gets an idea to work on. As in: the idea is given to her by some supervisor, who thinks it may be interesting to look a bit deeper into it, and then it appears to be a very promising idea for a change.
EU also has very strict requirements on allowing medication or treatments onto the market. No clue how much it costs, other than that it's very expensive and requires a lot of testing to be done to see whether it's safe and effective.
Small firms will have to get venture capital on board. That part is actually relatively easy in the US, there is a lot of such capital available. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who are more than willing to invest in promising "cure for cancer" research even if they would be sure that they would not get back their investment.
Well like all research it of course builds upon work from others. Those PhD researchers themselves usually work in a team, exchanging ideas and work results, in the process teaching each other about various aspects of the work, giving each other new suggestions on how to do stuff, etc. Sometimes the view of an outsider can be very enlightening.
To move on in research and make new discoveries, someone has to come up with a new idea, and that someone (or someone else) has to work out that idea. That idea may appear to be a little improvement, later unexpectedly working out to something great.
Indeed in this case I wouldn't be surprised if it works out roughly like that: experienced researcher walks around with various ideas in his head, gets a student assistant, and then gives that student assistant one of those ideas to work out. And then this happens to be a smart student that gets a promising idea to work on which actually works out surprisingly well.
The design appears safe, but the same accounts for the pebble bed reactor. The trial reactor built in Germany left them with very serious radioactive pollution.
The idea of a TWR is seriously interesting of course, as it uses so much of the fuel, and leaves relatively little waste. And I think it definitely warrants more research. I understand that small-scale experiments have been done with this tech, so it seems time to try to scale it up a bit. If successful it could go a long way in solving our energy problems.
I am a strong believer in nuclear technology, but the main issue I have with it is the waste, which is so hard to handle and at the moment is basically useless, as in we don't have a way to continue using it.
Actually about the waste issue: the spent rods are known to produce a lot of heat, and need active cooling. That's at least part of the problem faced in Japan. Can't all that energy be used, one way or another?
And network accepts customers without asking them to show an identity document? If so that's a major part of the problem. And would make theft of tel. nrs. very easy.
If this "authenticator" is an app running on your phone, then it is limited to people with a phone capable of running that. So that must be a smartphone for starters. And running a supported OS. I don't know the numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if in most countries that's still a minority. Otoh virtually everyone has a mobile phone, and all of them can receive SMS.
Indeed. Later I read the article, and found out the number had actually been ported to a completely different network.
How that is possible without putting down a signature and showing an ID document (if only at the receiving network!) I really can not understand. And I would think that this is a problem that goes much further than just allowing attackers to intercept banking details.
And besides, if they get the old network to give up the number, it has to go somewhere: attacker must have registered an account with the other network where the number can be ported to.
It's all in all a quite complex case, and because of that clearly highly targeted.
Everyone is focusing on just the (in)security of the second factor, the telephone number, but what's missing from this story is that the scammers obviously also got their hands on much more information from this person first: they knew his bank login details (account name, password), and they knew his daughter's identity and managed to contact her.
The solution for SMS as my bank implements it, is that SMS is never sent to a forwarded number. That's arranged between the bank and the carriers or so, I don't know the technical details, but SMS is sent only to the original number. That's already a safeguard against arranging numbers to be forwarded, which other commenters note is quite easy to accomplish.
Anyway it is the classic story of when something goes wrong, it's usually not a single issue that went wrong. It's almost always an array of factors that have to come together "just right" to make it work. While it may be a good idea to review the security of the SMS as second factor, one should also look at how the criminals got their hands on the first factor and the rest of the information.
Part of the amazing part is that life managed to start one way or another and that such evolution could take place to begin with. Even the simplest life forms (such as viruses - though I know there is discussion going on about whether they should be classified as "living" to begin with) on earth are already really complex.
Our bodies continue to amaze me. So complex systems, so adaptable and flexible. And the second amazing part is of course that we are able to "see" those molecular processes, can figure out how it happens, and subsequently manipulate it.
And of course this complexity and flexibility is not limited to the human body but basically all life forms on this planet. The more we learn about life, the more amazing it becomes.
I have some 12 GB of mail, mainly business related, lots of attachments, dating some 8 years back.
Quite regularly (once a month or so) I am looking for some e-mail that I received well half year to a year ago, to look up some detail about an old deal or offer.
And sometimes I have to look up something that's a bit older than that. Two, three times so far I have been searching through e-mails that dated five, six years back, pretty much the beginning of the archive then. And that usually also had to do with the attachments.
It is totally unpredictable what you could need in the future, which is why I don't delete any of it. Well, that is except the sent folder which I now and then trim (though the last time I did that is also two years ago or so by now), as almost everything that I send out comes back to me as quotes in a reply mail. And that's enough for me.
Cyrus imap server has indexing services built in. Works well.
I can search my complete e-mail archive (something like 12 GB over 8 years, including attachments) in seconds, while I'm sitting at home with barely any mails copied locally (only mails that I actually opened are pulled in, for the rest only the headers are downloaded).
Mail client is Evolution; server is Cyrus imapd. I do assume other IMAP servers will have similar functionality, and other IMAP mail clients will also handle server-side searches just fine.
FedEx, UPS, and the like cherry-pick profitable areas, but also have a far smaller volume than the mail services. USPS has the requirement of delivering all over the country at the same cost, but also has the right to place mail boxes all over the place, something FedEx and UPS can not do. So FedEx has to go and pick up the consignment, increasing their cost significantly.
Also when delivering letters, FedEx may have a delivery in one out of every 10 homes in a street or less - USPS may have one or more for almost every address. That also makes their operations much more efficient thanks to economies of scale. It's also probably for that reason that I see mailmen routinely do their deliveries by bicycle, while FedEx always comes with a van. Much more expensive to run than a bike, but a necessity because of the relatively large distance between addresses. And of course FedEx specialises in packages, while USPS specialises in letters, which are far lighter and smaller.
You can't easily compare the two, really. They have overlap in their services, but also operate under very different rules and regulations.
And that is exactly why these scripts are run in a browser, and not directly from your desktop or so.
One of the tasks of a web browser is to provide a script jail, where scripts can run safely, and where they can access resources they need but nothing more. You are downloading stuff from the Internet to display - that's how web browsing works of course. And that is why I want to be able to put trust in my browser that it will do everything it can to prevent these scripts from breaking out of their jail, and from accessing information they have no right to. So far at least Firefox is doing a pretty decent job in that, and I have put my trust in that browser.
Also I'm glad to read about this kind of attacks. I'm not surprised it can be done, there will always be leaks. Though it appears to be rather hard to do, and I hope Mozilla and their competitors will read this too and implement some feature that thwarts this type of attack, keeping the rest of us safe.
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What's stopping you filing a request for that data?
They don't care about your real name, or which individual body it refers to.
They care about you the user, with your user account, because they know that behind one user account is one individual user, and no matter what name they put on the account it is still one user. That user has interests, has friends, connections, posts photos and messages, replies, likes, pokes: that is the information they need to create a profile of you, the user. And with that profile they can figure out your likes and dislikes, and target advertising to you. Even if you don't put your name/location/etc in it, they will have a very very good guess based on your relations with other people, not to forget the geocoding of the IP you use to log in to their system.
Your Facebook data is as valuable to Facebook as anyone else who uses their real name, because a name is just that: a name. Have you ever asked any of your real-life friends whether the name they introduce themselves with to you is the same as the name that appears on their ID card? And does it really matter?
You may make it a little harder for external parties that have an interest in you the person to find your real world identity out of your Facebook data, but it won't be too hard either. The other way around is even easier: someone just has to poke around on your computer and they will very soon find your Facebook name somewhere.
It contained one big surprise to him: everything that he thought was "deleted" was still there.
And rightfully so: getting attention for the huge amount of personal data Facebook gathers of every single user of their site. It is something too many people do not realise: whatever you put on Facebook is there, out in the open (don't worry about "privacy settings", they have little to no meaning), and is there forever (don't worry about "delete" because it doesn't do what it says).
The Chinese are fully capable of ramping up production and swamping the market with competing devices - like they're doing already. The only restriction might be in getting the parts for those devices, as those again are often made by high-tech giants like Samsung.
Patents are supposed to work the same all over the world.
Why?
Because 1) they are supposed to fully and clearly describe an invention, so testing whether another machine uses a certain invention doesn't leave much grey area, and 2) they're based on international agreements.
Note that I say "supposed", I know it's idealising and that practice leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Yet in practice if a patent is found to be infringed upon in one country, very likely other countries' courts will come to the same conclusion.
WWII destroyed the British Empire, handed about half the human race over to communists where they couldn't compete with Western manufacturers and destroyed most of Europe's industrial production capacity. America benefited massively from the war because it was left with no real competition and the only large-scale manufacturing capacity in the West.
America was a remote party of the war, like they are now in Iraq and Afghanistan. It costs heaps of money, leaves the target in tatters, but nothing much happens on home soil. Same for WWII: there were no bombardments of US cities, no US bridges blown up, few US merchant vessels sunk. Compare that to the European countries.
Like now if Samsung and Apple (aka Germany and the other European countries) kill off each other, Google (aka US) maybe chipping in as secondary party getting hurt on the sidelines but not in their cores, parties like Google and of course all other manufacturers see two major competitors gone, opening up a huge market potential for them.
Patents are supposed to work the same all over the world. They may differ in details such as amount of penalties, back-penalties, etc - the basics (what is covered, and what constitutes infringement) should be roughly the same. So indeed if one courts rules one way, likely courts in other countries will rule the same.
But to come back to your statement about war: mind that there are no winners in war. There are only losers. In WWII the allied forces were considered the winners, but the rest of Europe was as much in tatters as loser Germany was. Both sides lost huge in form of people killed or seriously wounded and disabled, buildings destroyed, infrastructure destroyed, economic losses due to the high cost of warfare and the lost production, etc. It took enormous financial support from mainly the US to help get Europe back on its feet.
In these patent wars there will be no "Marshall plan" when the dust settles. Both Samsung and Apple (I think they can be considered the main parties here) may end up seriously crippled. Samsung has much more than just phones and tablets (they produce many other consumer electronics, and also parts for them, including parts for Apple products), Apple otoh is more reliant on their phone/tablet business, and losing too many of this kind of suits may cause them to go bankrupt in the end. And for side players like Google the mobile phone business is merely a way to expand/protect their core business, so they don't have much to lose there.
Well, let's see, the tally so far.
Apple is blocked from selling iPad and iPhone.
Samsung is blocked selling their tablets and phones elsewhere.
Now with a little luck within a year or two no-one is allowed to sell any smartphone or tablet anywhere in the world.
The winners will be: the Chinese manufacturers who don't care about patents and copyrights, who will just continue to produce, and sell their products all over the world on the grey markets at rock-bottom prices.
Works for me.
That's what I said: she gets an idea to work on. As in: the idea is given to her by some supervisor, who thinks it may be interesting to look a bit deeper into it, and then it appears to be a very promising idea for a change.
EU also has very strict requirements on allowing medication or treatments onto the market. No clue how much it costs, other than that it's very expensive and requires a lot of testing to be done to see whether it's safe and effective.
Small firms will have to get venture capital on board. That part is actually relatively easy in the US, there is a lot of such capital available. And I'm sure there are plenty of people who are more than willing to invest in promising "cure for cancer" research even if they would be sure that they would not get back their investment.
Well like all research it of course builds upon work from others. Those PhD researchers themselves usually work in a team, exchanging ideas and work results, in the process teaching each other about various aspects of the work, giving each other new suggestions on how to do stuff, etc. Sometimes the view of an outsider can be very enlightening.
To move on in research and make new discoveries, someone has to come up with a new idea, and that someone (or someone else) has to work out that idea. That idea may appear to be a little improvement, later unexpectedly working out to something great.
Indeed in this case I wouldn't be surprised if it works out roughly like that: experienced researcher walks around with various ideas in his head, gets a student assistant, and then gives that student assistant one of those ideas to work out. And then this happens to be a smart student that gets a promising idea to work on which actually works out surprisingly well.
The design appears safe, but the same accounts for the pebble bed reactor. The trial reactor built in Germany left them with very serious radioactive pollution.
The idea of a TWR is seriously interesting of course, as it uses so much of the fuel, and leaves relatively little waste. And I think it definitely warrants more research. I understand that small-scale experiments have been done with this tech, so it seems time to try to scale it up a bit. If successful it could go a long way in solving our energy problems.
I am a strong believer in nuclear technology, but the main issue I have with it is the waste, which is so hard to handle and at the moment is basically useless, as in we don't have a way to continue using it.
Actually about the waste issue: the spent rods are known to produce a lot of heat, and need active cooling. That's at least part of the problem faced in Japan. Can't all that energy be used, one way or another?
And my comment was really intended to be "funny" not "informative"...
And network accepts customers without asking them to show an identity document? If so that's a major part of the problem. And would make theft of tel. nrs. very easy.
If this "authenticator" is an app running on your phone, then it is limited to people with a phone capable of running that. So that must be a smartphone for starters. And running a supported OS. I don't know the numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if in most countries that's still a minority. Otoh virtually everyone has a mobile phone, and all of them can receive SMS.
Indeed. Later I read the article, and found out the number had actually been ported to a completely different network.
How that is possible without putting down a signature and showing an ID document (if only at the receiving network!) I really can not understand. And I would think that this is a problem that goes much further than just allowing attackers to intercept banking details.
And besides, if they get the old network to give up the number, it has to go somewhere: attacker must have registered an account with the other network where the number can be ported to.
It's all in all a quite complex case, and because of that clearly highly targeted.
Everyone is focusing on just the (in)security of the second factor, the telephone number, but what's missing from this story is that the scammers obviously also got their hands on much more information from this person first: they knew his bank login details (account name, password), and they knew his daughter's identity and managed to contact her.
The solution for SMS as my bank implements it, is that SMS is never sent to a forwarded number. That's arranged between the bank and the carriers or so, I don't know the technical details, but SMS is sent only to the original number. That's already a safeguard against arranging numbers to be forwarded, which other commenters note is quite easy to accomplish.
Anyway it is the classic story of when something goes wrong, it's usually not a single issue that went wrong. It's almost always an array of factors that have to come together "just right" to make it work. While it may be a good idea to review the security of the SMS as second factor, one should also look at how the criminals got their hands on the first factor and the rest of the information.
Part of the amazing part is that life managed to start one way or another and that such evolution could take place to begin with. Even the simplest life forms (such as viruses - though I know there is discussion going on about whether they should be classified as "living" to begin with) on earth are already really complex.
Our bodies continue to amaze me. So complex systems, so adaptable and flexible. And the second amazing part is of course that we are able to "see" those molecular processes, can figure out how it happens, and subsequently manipulate it.
And of course this complexity and flexibility is not limited to the human body but basically all life forms on this planet. The more we learn about life, the more amazing it becomes.
I have some 12 GB of mail, mainly business related, lots of attachments, dating some 8 years back.
Quite regularly (once a month or so) I am looking for some e-mail that I received well half year to a year ago, to look up some detail about an old deal or offer.
And sometimes I have to look up something that's a bit older than that. Two, three times so far I have been searching through e-mails that dated five, six years back, pretty much the beginning of the archive then. And that usually also had to do with the attachments.
It is totally unpredictable what you could need in the future, which is why I don't delete any of it. Well, that is except the sent folder which I now and then trim (though the last time I did that is also two years ago or so by now), as almost everything that I send out comes back to me as quotes in a reply mail. And that's enough for me.
Cyrus imap server has indexing services built in. Works well.
I can search my complete e-mail archive (something like 12 GB over 8 years, including attachments) in seconds, while I'm sitting at home with barely any mails copied locally (only mails that I actually opened are pulled in, for the rest only the headers are downloaded).
Mail client is Evolution; server is Cyrus imapd. I do assume other IMAP servers will have similar functionality, and other IMAP mail clients will also handle server-side searches just fine.
Oh well. If nothing else works they could always use them to power a vacuum cleaner.
FedEx, UPS, and the like cherry-pick profitable areas, but also have a far smaller volume than the mail services. USPS has the requirement of delivering all over the country at the same cost, but also has the right to place mail boxes all over the place, something FedEx and UPS can not do. So FedEx has to go and pick up the consignment, increasing their cost significantly.
Also when delivering letters, FedEx may have a delivery in one out of every 10 homes in a street or less - USPS may have one or more for almost every address. That also makes their operations much more efficient thanks to economies of scale. It's also probably for that reason that I see mailmen routinely do their deliveries by bicycle, while FedEx always comes with a van. Much more expensive to run than a bike, but a necessity because of the relatively large distance between addresses. And of course FedEx specialises in packages, while USPS specialises in letters, which are far lighter and smaller.
You can't easily compare the two, really. They have overlap in their services, but also operate under very different rules and regulations.
Won't more transistors allow it to suck better?
And that is exactly why these scripts are run in a browser, and not directly from your desktop or so.
One of the tasks of a web browser is to provide a script jail, where scripts can run safely, and where they can access resources they need but nothing more. You are downloading stuff from the Internet to display - that's how web browsing works of course. And that is why I want to be able to put trust in my browser that it will do everything it can to prevent these scripts from breaking out of their jail, and from accessing information they have no right to. So far at least Firefox is doing a pretty decent job in that, and I have put my trust in that browser.
Also I'm glad to read about this kind of attacks. I'm not surprised it can be done, there will always be leaks. Though it appears to be rather hard to do, and I hope Mozilla and their competitors will read this too and implement some feature that thwarts this type of attack, keeping the rest of us safe.