For all telco law experts out there, what would it take for the telcos to refute their "common carrier" status? And lose/gain the same legal standing as the cable companies? Voice==data and data==voice so it seems like it owuld be an even playing field.
You are correct - I could argue that most bank's CIPs already conformed to the Patriot Act but I won't disagree with you aftre doing a little more research; since the FDIC has issued guidance on the subject it looks like the Patriot Act has gotten its grubbly little fingers into a lot of new places, not just the highly publicized or obvious ones:
... I didn't want to start a class war. But to keep on topic the DoD is doing their recruting for what a lot of people (especially outside the US) think is only the first of a string of wars to fight for cheap oil. Who's next on the list? Cuba? Venezuela? Iran?
This is still on topic because high school students and parent should be asking these questions: Will this war bring Iraq eventual peace and freedom in spite of the bogus circustances under which it was begun, and will it have been found to have been conducted for the right reasons?
Most companies are so after your business I wonder if they would ever take the trouble to hunt you down. You could always claim stupidity if they called you back - I usually just transpose a few digits when I know the request is bogus. It would be an intersting experiement in separating people who really use it from those who just ask for it for the hell of it.
I really think people don't check. Hell I have had root on hundred of boxes at big banks and ecommerce companies and according to my free credit reports none of my employers has ever asked for a credit report, at least from Experian.
Does a query like that even show up?
If an employer makes a query to one of the big three does it show up on the other two's systems?
I'm not endorsing the practice. Just be insistent and don't be an asshole (I know that's asking a lot of/.-ers) and people who ask for it and truly don't need it will usually comply. In most jurisdictions, it's not even legal for them to ask for it unless they plan to use it for a credit check.
Don't let your tinfoil hats make you conflate the Patriot Act with the rest of the laws on the books. Banks have been collecting SSNs since 1970 on most types of accounts to comply with the "Financial Recordkeeping and Reporting of Currency and Foreign Transactions Act of 1970" and various Bank Secrecy acts passed in the mid-80s.
The Patriot Act had virtually no impant on banking laws except to the extent it weakened (or strengthened depending on your perspectives) the procedures for getting info without warrants or court orders, and the number of agencies that can snoop domestic data sources.
At least in California, you get at least one phone screen for each claim filed, once a year you need to make a personal visit to the unemployment office to take a class (but you are not IDed IIRC), and the state does call your ex-employer to verify your information. So you would have to have a pretty good setup to get around all this and launder all the checks. I suppose you could set up a "Vandelay Enterpises" type company to front for you but it sounds a lot more risky than just ordering a bunch of expensive stuff and selling it on the street or EBay.
Well, the same forces that make hidebound, bureaucratic economies make hidebound, bureaucratic customers. IBM used to cater to them, but they figured this out a few years ago. Vast parts of IBM still cater to those customers, but the company is leaner and meaner than a lot of people recognize.
However, as far as bureaucracies go, I still think India can give France and Gernmany a run for their money. But India seems to be in a mind to fix things these days.
How this applies here in the US us that most providers have a zero to very low-cost option to make in-network calls unlimited and free. For example my wife and I share a plan, and my uncle is with the same provider, so all the calls between us are unlimited and free.
Thus, one big marketing push is to motivate households to unite their services all under one plan (5 phones free for the kids, etc) and for cliques to all sign up with the same provider so they can call each other at will.
In fact, if Charles Rangel D-NY has his way, a draft will be instituted to force the rich sons and daughters of yuppies to fight for their parent's right to drive cheaply-fueled gas guzzlers.
The soldiers currently KIA in Iraq actually fall on one side of a rural/urban demographic line than a white/nonwhite or rich/poor line. This is getting Congress' attention FWIW:
Well, they do have all those pickup trucks in the Heartland. If you want to start a class war, say let them fight for their gas guzzlers.
Me, I say, what do you do when you find yourself deep in a hole? Stop digging.
I think OP was confusing DGPS with WAAS sortof
on
Forget GPS, Hello WPS
·
· Score: 1
I think the original poster was slightly conflating WAAS and DGPS. Yes, WAAS is based on data from a network of land stations that is compiled and then relayed via geostationary sats. DGPS is a different system that uses a local low or medium frequency (?) station to transmit a correction signal, and supposedly isn't quite as accurate.
Having been involved in this situation some time ago, it's not really that the data is a security issue but that cash-strapped agencies have no time or staffing to make the data available in a format ready for public consumption. So there's a nautral tendency to just say no initially. Now they have to preen the data for sensitive information like SSNs, probably export it in a format that anyone off the street and not just other users of their brand if GIS can use, burn one-off CDROMs or worse tapes, and worst case help dumbass users debug their CDROM drives and Excel macros. Someone has to get paid to do that grunt work, and it can suck up a lot of time you woudl other wise spend doing real work like field-checking, developing new features, etc.
At the time the dangers of low-level exposure were not well known. Hence all the sicknesses in people living downstream of US aboveground tests, for example. And radium watches (*) were still being made then. And ambulance-chasing trial-lawyering had not become a major industry.
- where they sell 2 KG bags of yellow curry powder mix. Either very large families, or very large spice loadings. Even I, white-bread all-American dude that I am, use a quarter-kilo of the stuff a year.
The fact is that it's a almost a dead cert a big one will happen sometime in the next 50 years on some faults. For example, the probability for the Big One on the Hayward Fault (nearest where I live), the northern half of which is directly under Berkeley and Oakland, is usually expressed as "80% chance in the next 20 years." The interval between big earthquakes in California is definitely a bell-shaped curve, obviously with a constraint on zero and lots of heteroskedacity, but it's pretty reasonable to make some assumptions and come up with "X% in N years".
I'm active in the volunteer emergency services in my neighborhood. We don't care if The Big One happens tomorrow, or whether the chance is one in 10000 or one in 50000 for a particular day ro week or month. What matters is, over the lifetime of any new of recently built structure, and in my lifetime personally, it's fairly certain. The 94 Northridge quake drastically changed building codes and requirements, so since all but the most recently built structures near the fault will be damaged or destroyed by such a quake, this statistic is extremely useful is motivating people to upgrade their structures, make contingency and recovery plans, etc.
At a wireless Access Point, anybody can presumably crack whatever WEP is in use and eavesdrops, or if the AP uses no WEP at all, which is no big deal if you are using an SSL browser or better yet some secure tunnel to somewhere.
They are talking about hardware keyloggers, which are not necessarily easy to spot. I could wire one INSIDE a box where no one would see it in about 15 minutes.
I don't want to detract from TFA since it's a good tutorial in sendmail configuration, but I think he's including all spam attempts to all email addresses at his mail server. Blacklisted IP addresses can be rejected without even receiving the complete envelope information; based on my experience even at smallish company MX host will receive about 1/2 its connection attempts from blacklisted servers.
Even more are attempts at addresses like 'asmith@..", "bsmith@...", etc, and can be rejected immediately after the envelope is processed.
I'd like to see the count actually addressed to "jef@poskanzer.net" or whatever. I'll bet "sales@microsoft.com" and "info@aol.com" or whatever attract more traffic.
For the typical home user, this is probably good advice. TFA is making this suggestion because the alternative, choosing an easily-remembered weak or nonexistent password, is worse.
Your only worries are someone breaking into your house, in which case you are likely to know about it pretty quickly and will hopefully remember to change your password. And your haxx0r punk roommate / child / spouse who will use the password for whatever nefarious means they can think of. Geez, it's just a router password. It's easier and more profitable for a burglar or family member to steal / guess an ATM PIN.
FWIW, yes - no compressed air is needed in this rig. Maybe a little - TFA describes an "air bag". I was tought your lungs can handle about 2 psi max before you embolize, which is why you can die in the shallow end of the pool if you hold your breath and ascend. Not hard to make a plastic bag to hold 2 psi.
But a "one kilo lithium battery" is a frickin bomb waiting to go off, especially considering it is immersed in salt water. The lithium battery in your cell phone is only a few ounces.
Of course not as lethal as a 3000 psi scuba tank going off. I was taught to handle the tank by the valve. I saw the aftermath of some dumb ass who threw a tank in the trunk of a car valve first. The valve broke off and the tank was launched through the side of the car and punched a 2-foot hole in a cinderblock wall. Nobody got hurt thank god and luckily I wasn't around when it happened...
Is a small "patch" antenna that can be placed remotely from the receiver. It's about the same size as a deck of cards.
Reception seems to be possible indoors, with the antenna placed near a window, to about the same extent that you can get a lock on a similarly-placed GPS receiver.
My friends that have the units say they sometimes but don't always lose the signals going under highway bridges.
There is no such thing as a rechargeable AA lithium cell. "Lithium" AA's use Lithium-Iron or a similar technology and are about 1.45 V per cell. "Lithium-Ion" cells are mostly what we use in our phones and other gizmos (some cheapo cells are NiMh) and those cells are about 3.6V per cell.
There is a somewhat standard Li-Ion form factor for those designers willing to use cylindrical cells: for example the 18650 is fairly ubiquitous, about 2000 MaH. My HP Jornada uses 2 of them in series and will run about 6 hours with WiFi disabled.
.. I forgot that there are contraints on the problem - no climbing over seat and spilling your drinks on people. You could formulate it as an LP, then, maybe with each variable as a row in the theatre. Have to dif out my old textbooks . . .
Slashdot Mirror
For all telco law experts out there, what would it take for the telcos to refute their "common carrier" status? And lose/gain the same legal standing as the cable companies? Voice==data and data==voice so it seems like it owuld be an even playing field.
You are correct - I could argue that most bank's CIPs already conformed to the Patriot Act but I won't disagree with you aftre doing a little more research; since the FDIC has issued guidance on the subject it looks like the Patriot Act has gotten its grubbly little fingers into a lot of new places, not just the highly publicized or obvious ones:
4 04a.html
x .html
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2004/fil0
The FDIC Financial Institution Letters make interesting reading in general:
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2005/inde
... I didn't want to start a class war. But to keep on topic the DoD is doing their recruting for what a lot of people (especially outside the US) think is only the first of a string of wars to fight for cheap oil. Who's next on the list? Cuba? Venezuela? Iran?
This is still on topic because high school students and parent should be asking these questions: Will this war bring Iraq eventual peace and freedom in spite of the bogus circustances under which it was begun, and will it have been found to have been conducted for the right reasons?
Most companies are so after your business I wonder if they would ever take the trouble to hunt you down. You could always claim stupidity if they called you back - I usually just transpose a few digits when I know the request is bogus. It would be an intersting experiement in separating people who really use it from those who just ask for it for the hell of it.
/.-ers) and people who ask for it and truly don't need it will usually comply. In most jurisdictions, it's not even legal for them to ask for it unless they plan to use it for a credit check.
I really think people don't check. Hell I have had root on hundred of boxes at big banks and ecommerce companies and according to my free credit reports none of my employers has ever asked for a credit report, at least from Experian.
Does a query like that even show up?
If an employer makes a query to one of the big three does it show up on the other two's systems?
I'm not endorsing the practice. Just be insistent and don't be an asshole (I know that's asking a lot of
Don't let your tinfoil hats make you conflate the Patriot Act with the rest of the laws on the books. Banks have been collecting SSNs since 1970 on most types of accounts to comply with the "Financial Recordkeeping and Reporting of Currency and Foreign Transactions Act of 1970" and various Bank Secrecy acts passed in the mid-80s.
The Patriot Act had virtually no impant on banking laws except to the extent it weakened (or strengthened depending on your perspectives) the procedures for getting info without warrants or court orders, and the number of agencies that can snoop domestic data sources.
More here:
http://www.uhuh.com/laws/31usc1051.htm
At least in California, you get at least one phone screen for each claim filed, once a year you need to make a personal visit to the unemployment office to take a class (but you are not IDed IIRC), and the state does call your ex-employer to verify your information. So you would have to have a pretty good setup to get around all this and launder all the checks. I suppose you could set up a "Vandelay Enterpises" type company to front for you but it sounds a lot more risky than just ordering a bunch of expensive stuff and selling it on the street or EBay.
Well, the same forces that make hidebound, bureaucratic economies make hidebound, bureaucratic customers. IBM used to cater to them, but they figured this out a few years ago. Vast parts of IBM still cater to those customers, but the company is leaner and meaner than a lot of people recognize.
However, as far as bureaucracies go, I still think India can give France and Gernmany a run for their money. But India seems to be in a mind to fix things these days.
How this applies here in the US us that most providers have a zero to very low-cost option to make in-network calls unlimited and free. For example my wife and I share a plan, and my uncle is with the same provider, so all the calls between us are unlimited and free.
Thus, one big marketing push is to motivate households to unite their services all under one plan (5 phones free for the kids, etc) and for cliques to all sign up with the same provider so they can call each other at will.
In fact, if Charles Rangel D-NY has his way, a draft will be instituted to force the rich sons and daughters of yuppies to fight for their parent's right to drive cheaply-fueled gas guzzlers.
Good NYT reprint here:
http://www.radicalmiddle.com/military_mirrors.htm
The soldiers currently KIA in Iraq actually fall on one side of a rural/urban demographic line than a white/nonwhite or rich/poor line. This is getting Congress' attention FWIW:
http://www.house.gov/skelton/pr050228.htm
Well, they do have all those pickup trucks in the Heartland. If you want to start a class war, say let them fight for their gas guzzlers.
Me, I say, what do you do when you find yourself deep in a hole? Stop digging.
I think the original poster was slightly conflating WAAS and DGPS. Yes, WAAS is based on data from a network of land stations that is compiled and then relayed via geostationary sats. DGPS is a different system that uses a local low or medium frequency (?) station to transmit a correction signal, and supposedly isn't quite as accurate.
Having been involved in this situation some time ago, it's not really that the data is a security issue but that cash-strapped agencies have no time or staffing to make the data available in a format ready for public consumption. So there's a nautral tendency to just say no initially. Now they have to preen the data for sensitive information like SSNs, probably export it in a format that anyone off the street and not just other users of their brand if GIS can use, burn one-off CDROMs or worse tapes, and worst case help dumbass users debug their CDROM drives and Excel macros. Someone has to get paid to do that grunt work, and it can suck up a lot of time you woudl other wise spend doing real work like field-checking, developing new features, etc.
. . . my options are priced at $1500 per share end they're not above water yet!
At the time the dangers of low-level exposure were not well known. Hence all the sicknesses in people living downstream of US aboveground tests, for example. And radium watches (*) were still being made then. And ambulance-chasing trial-lawyering had not become a major industry.
h tm
(*) Not dangerous for wearers, but certainly hazardous for manufacturers and as waste. See: http://www.roger-russell.com/jeffers/radiumdials.
- where they sell 2 KG bags of yellow curry powder mix. Either very large families, or very large spice loadings. Even I, white-bread all-American dude that I am, use a quarter-kilo of the stuff a year.
The fact is that it's a almost a dead cert a big one will happen sometime in the next 50 years on some faults. For example, the probability for the Big One on the Hayward Fault (nearest where I live), the northern half of which is directly under Berkeley and Oakland, is usually expressed as "80% chance in the next 20 years." The interval between big earthquakes in California is definitely a bell-shaped curve, obviously with a constraint on zero and lots of heteroskedacity, but it's pretty reasonable to make some assumptions and come up with "X% in N years".
I'm active in the volunteer emergency services in my neighborhood. We don't care if The Big One happens tomorrow, or whether the chance is one in 10000 or one in 50000 for a particular day ro week or month. What matters is, over the lifetime of any new of recently built structure, and in my lifetime personally, it's fairly certain. The 94 Northridge quake drastically changed building codes and requirements, so since all but the most recently built structures near the fault will be damaged or destroyed by such a quake, this statistic is extremely useful is motivating people to upgrade their structures, make contingency and recovery plans, etc.
At a wireless Access Point, anybody can presumably crack whatever WEP is in use and eavesdrops, or if the AP uses no WEP at all, which is no big deal if you are using an SSL browser or better yet some secure tunnel to somewhere.
They are talking about hardware keyloggers, which are not necessarily easy to spot. I could wire one INSIDE a box where no one would see it in about 15 minutes.
I don't want to detract from TFA since it's a good tutorial in sendmail configuration, but I think he's including all spam attempts to all email addresses at his mail server. Blacklisted IP addresses can be rejected without even receiving the complete envelope information; based on my experience even at smallish company MX host will receive about 1/2 its connection attempts from blacklisted servers.
Even more are attempts at addresses like 'asmith@..", "bsmith@...", etc, and can be rejected immediately after the envelope is processed.
I'd like to see the count actually addressed to "jef@poskanzer.net" or whatever. I'll bet "sales@microsoft.com" and "info@aol.com" or whatever attract more traffic.
For the typical home user, this is probably good advice. TFA is making this suggestion because the alternative, choosing an easily-remembered weak or nonexistent password, is worse.
Your only worries are someone breaking into your house, in which case you are likely to know about it pretty quickly and will hopefully remember to change your password. And your haxx0r punk roommate / child / spouse who will use the password for whatever nefarious means they can think of. Geez, it's just a router password. It's easier and more profitable for a burglar or family member to steal / guess an ATM PIN.
FWIW, yes - no compressed air is needed in this rig. Maybe a little - TFA describes an "air bag". I was tought your lungs can handle about 2 psi max before you embolize, which is why you can die in the shallow end of the pool if you hold your breath and ascend. Not hard to make a plastic bag to hold 2 psi.
...
But a "one kilo lithium battery" is a frickin bomb waiting to go off, especially considering it is immersed in salt water. The lithium battery in your cell phone is only a few ounces.
Of course not as lethal as a 3000 psi scuba tank going off. I was taught to handle the tank by the valve. I saw the aftermath of some dumb ass who threw a tank in the trunk of a car valve first. The valve broke off and the tank was launched through the side of the car and punched a 2-foot hole in a cinderblock wall. Nobody got hurt thank god and luckily I wasn't around when it happened
so no one else to blame but American corporations!
Is a small "patch" antenna that can be placed remotely from the receiver. It's about the same size as a deck of cards.
Reception seems to be possible indoors, with the antenna placed near a window, to about the same extent that you can get a lock on a similarly-placed GPS receiver.
My friends that have the units say they sometimes but don't always lose the signals going under highway bridges.
There is no such thing as a rechargeable AA lithium cell. "Lithium" AA's use Lithium-Iron or a similar technology and are about 1.45 V per cell. "Lithium-Ion" cells are mostly what we use in our phones and other gizmos (some cheapo cells are NiMh) and those cells are about 3.6V per cell.
There is a somewhat standard Li-Ion form factor for those designers willing to use cylindrical cells: for example the 18650 is fairly ubiquitous, about 2000 MaH. My HP Jornada uses 2 of them in series and will run about 6 hours with WiFi disabled.
You haven't read my blog, then, have you?
.. I forgot that there are contraints on the problem - no climbing over seat and spilling your drinks on people. You could formulate it as an LP, then, maybe with each variable as a row in the theatre. Have to dif out my old textbooks . . .
Find min(R) where R is the distance from the center of the theatre. KISS is my co-pilot.