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User: doas777

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  1. Freedom isn't free on NSA Head Asks How To Spy Without Collecting Metadata · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The cost of freedom is that you must acknowledge that you must remain vulnerable to attack. Otherwise you destroy the freedom you are supposedly trying to protect.

    In this case, that the job exists at all is the problem. That makes the solution simple and elegant. The only remaining issue, is accepting that everytime somthing bad happens, we are necessarilly limited in our ability prevent it.

    The government cannot ever make me safe. all they can do is protect my liberties, and over the last 12 years they have been doing a piss-poor job of it.

  2. MPAA probably did it on Internet Archive's San Francisco Home Badly Damaged By Fire · · Score: 1

    they were likely worried that the archive had scraped ISOHunt the way ArchiveTeam did.

  3. Re:Quality vs quantity on More Evidence That Piracy Can Increase Sales · · Score: 1

    Quite true. additionally our economy can only support so many super-profitable acts. There could only be one Elvis, and at the time there were only a handful of popular/profitable musical groups. Now they try to manufacture a thousand Elvis's, but don't want to subdivide the pie. You can have one king, or you can have dozens of dukes, but you can't have both, and you certainly can't have thousands of different acts and still expect any of them to make decent money.

  4. Giant Duche vs Turd Sandwich on Doubleclick Cofounder Responds to Patent Troll by Filing Extortion Lawsuit · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So a guy who got rich by assuming illegitimate rights over peoples personal info, is mad that another entity is trying to get rich by assuming illegitimate rights over a process that appears to sell that personal info. Mafioso's all around.

  5. Very differant experience on Visual Studio vs. Eclipse: a Programmer's Comparison · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The author and I have had a almost oppositionally different experience with the platforms I've had. Visual studio, for all its flaws, feels smooth and solid, with prompt code assistance features and a generally good approach to code organization. It has its share of issues, but it seems to be clearer and more directed.

    Eclipse however just feels generally clunky. I pause for 20+ seconds just to get code completion prompting to come up in python or java, and half the time its in the wrong context. the perspectives is also really annoying. everytime I go to debug, it halts everything to tell me it wants to switch, and then gives me a 2inch high window for viewing the code, anchoring is weak, and it always seems like I never get back the space I should when I dock a sub-window. Personally I really don't care how extensible my IDE is. any given ide is not going to be able to support all langagues and technologies, so why try to shoehorn it in?

  6. Least untruthful, or mistake? pick one on US Director of National Intelligence Admits He Was Wrong About Data Collection · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Clappers office has previously released a statement that his answer was "least untruthful" he could make it, because the program was classified. this clearly implies that he was aware that the statement was false at the time he made it.
    https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130610/09473723393/clapper-my-answer-to-wydens-beating-your-wife-question-data-surveillance-was-least-untruthful-answer.shtml

    Today the statement is, "I misunderstood", implying that at the time, he believed the statement he made was factual.

    So, which is it? These statements appear contradictory

  7. Mail merge would be an improvement on Lawyer Loses It In Letter To Patent Office · · Score: 4, Informative

    with all the horrible patents coming around today, automatically rejecting everything would be a boon for society in general.

  8. rdesktop on Ask Slashdot: Open Source Remote Application Access? · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you looked at these solutions? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization

  9. Privacy and Safety on Ask Slashdot: Are Smart Meters Safe? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Though I have no idea regarding the RF tx concerns, I can speak a little about the privacy implications. first a little reading, Here is a link to the NIST-IR 7628, which describes guidelines for smartgrid security. Volume 2 focuses on privacy impact. http://www.egov.vic.gov.au/focus-on-countries/north-and-south-america-and-the-caribbean/united-states/trends-and-issues-united-states/information-and-communications-technology-united-states/cyber-security-united-states/nistir-7628-guidelines-for-smart-grid-cyber-security.html

    it is already possible with analog meters to identify devices inside a home, simply by sampling the signal at the meter at an interval of less than 2 minutes. the faster the sample the more accurate. by comparing the signals to a database of common electrical devices researchers were able to profile device usage as early as 1992. obviously, up till now, most utilities coudn't afford the staff to sample most lines at that interval however.

    The smart grid exacerbates this privacy issue, because it allows and in fact requires high speed sampling to accommodate Time-Of-Use billing, and because the meters can send usage information to the utility head end effortlessly with no additional cost.

    the real issue with privacy however will not come for a few years: smart appliances. Several EDUs are already selling internet service through their smart meters, but there is effectively no option to firewall this connection as it travels over the power lines and any interference would be felony meter tampering.

    So, imagine 5 years from now, you are buying a new TV. you don;t care about internet connectivity, but the device comes with it embedded, and there are very few options in the TVs menus for configuring it. It uses powerline networking, so in order to just turn it on, you have already connected it to the Internet. At this point, you basically have to trust your TV manufacturer to not report to advertisers what you watch, including stuff like pr0n. with SMART devices you have to trust the manufacture implicitly..

    Another big focus for the smartgrid is Electric Vehicles. The plan at present is to have the car identify itself to the power network, along with its owners billing info, so that wherever you plug in to get a recharge, it appears on your monthly bill. this can easily be used to track you over long periods of time.

    SG meter data can also be used to uncover hidden sources of power generation within your property, so if you hide your usage to maintain your privacy, that will likely be accessible to any adversarial party that requests it.

    So, a well monitored smart meter can be used to tell your schedule, the size of your family, when you are home, when you are away, your approximate worth, enumerate your devices, log how/when/where (in your house) you use them, track your internet usage, how far you travel each day (and possibly where you went), the day of the week you go to the grocery, and what ever any device you plug in decides to send to third parties, all with no indication that anything is happening.

  10. NoScript on Berkeley Law Releases Its First Web Privacy Census · · Score: 2

    This is exactly why I use noscript. I persistently block googleadservices.com, doubleclick.net, etc, but I like that Noscripts protects me from the 3rd party listeners by default but in a granular way.

  11. DDRescue + Photorec/Testdisk on Ask Slashdot: Recovering Data From 20-Year-Old Diskettes? · · Score: 1

    PhotoRec is capable of carving .zip files, so I would use GNU DDRescue to create an image of the disk, and then photorec or testdisk to recover the file or the partition respectively. you can find all these utilities on this nice bootable livecd: http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/

  12. Dont Try on Ask Slashdot: Low-Cost Tools To Track Employees' Web Use? · · Score: 1

    to be honest, the best possible outcome, is that every business in AU and NZ does nothing, and when they all get sued/charged, then the courts and the legislature will deal with their own mess, instead of passing it on to you, like they tried to do with this law.

  13. Re:Wow... on Lower Merion School's Report Says IT Dept. Did It, But Didn't Inhale · · Score: 4, Informative
    I sympathise with them to a certain extent, but Mike Prebix has been caught on film making statements about how cool it was that he could use this software to observe students without them knowing.

    Additionally there is plenty of evidence that IT staff did view the images as is shown in their emails. the report concludes that "there was no evidence of spying" but acknowledges that there would be no way to obtain evidence that spying was or wasn't happening. there were numerous incidents where the software was engaged, but for no known reason, and several times when it was engaged but there is no record of who made the request, or in some cases, of who actually turned it on.

    it also doesn't lend credibility that they purged the entire LanRev TheftTracker database some months before this issue, destroying much of what would have been evidence in this case.

  14. Title 17 Chap 1 Section 5 on Professor Posts "Illegal Copy" of Guide To Oregon Public Record Laws · · Score: 1

    per http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html:
    Â 105. Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works
    Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

    that says it all. Govt work is free as in beer.

  15. Like every other Opera user on Most Expensive JavaScript Ever? · · Score: 5, Funny

    spoof the agent, just like everyone else who uses Opera

  16. price is right, now how do I hand them a dollar on Pandora Stabilizes, No Longer Completely Free · · Score: 3, Interesting

    My primary concern with low-cost services, is that of transactional security. I don't want to expose my CC to compromise over only 1$. Paypal is just as bad. if I subscribe to 100 1$ services per month, how much does that increase my exposure, vs one transaction for 100$? low cost webservices may be the answer to making money online, but I'm not here so a provider can make a buck.

  17. Thank goodness on Microsoft Puts C# and the CLI Under "Community Promise" · · Score: -1, Troll

    'bout time. Perhaps now, RMS will shut up about it.

  18. Hats on Bike Projector Makes Lane For Rider · · Score: 1

    if this works, then so does my "Designated Smoking Area" hat.

  19. Stallmans just mad because on Richard Stallman Says No To Mono · · Score: 4, Funny

    he can't make us call it "gnu-mono", so it must be bad.

  20. Law enforcement on Another Question Of Search Engine Legality and Infringement · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It seems to me that the powers that be have it backward. instead of using technology to enforce the law, they should use it to make the law irrelevant. The internet could have saved us from many laws, but no, they just went and wrote more of them.

  21. Re:Zeitgeist on Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site · · Score: 2, Informative

    do you think that everyone woke up late may 1941, and said, "Hey, Lets have a Holocaust!". the answer of course is No. small changes like this culminated in atrocity. seriously, search slashdot for "yro germany", and tell me you don't see a disturbing picture appearing over the last 2 years. probably not a sign of impending genocide, but that was only one aspect of the regime. everyone focuses on it (and rightly so), but it's not the only bad thing they did.

  22. Re:goddard on Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site · · Score: 1
  23. Re:goddard on Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site · · Score: 1

    I still think the op meant godwin's (the context implies such anyway), there is in fact a "goddard's law" internet meme. http://wiki.freetalklive.com/Goddard's_Law

    I hadn't heard of it before today either.

  24. Re:Zeitgeist on Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site · · Score: 1

    if your in the us, political media must recieve equal time and access (with in limits)

  25. Re:Zeitgeist on Pirate Party Banned From Social Networking Site · · Score: 1

    See, where i live, you could sue over that to achieve redress.