Actually, last time I was on a plane (Airtran), they said all wifi-capable devices must also be turned off. Too bad they don't actually turn off their wifi router; they just redirect you to a page saying all wireless devices should be turned off. I guess wireless routers that broadcast within these frequencies are ok because as long as they aren't actually accomplishing anything then the radio waves coming from it magically become less dangerous or something.
Actually, someone I know is still paying a monthly bill for AOL for a different reason. They are afraid of the people on the retention line, and don't want to plan out a couple of hours to fight over it. Call it unethical or illegal, but it works - I still to this date (4 years later) cannot get them to cancel because they don't want to waste the time and energy. I would expect that a lot of other successful companies play this game too.
I suspect there will be a few more former cops on the streets, and a few job openings at TSA. What would be funny is if you uploaded the names of the guys in charge of this scheme. (posted to undo accidental bad moderation)
We all knew this would happen again sooner or later, what with all these new anti-consumer copyright laws either already enacted or pending legislation around the world.
No, what was pointless was actually trying to complain to a big company like Priceline. It's not like they cared if I was unhappy with those charges, or even if one customer who noticed what was going on wasn't going to return, as long as they got their commission for selling my information on top of what I already paid. I didn't even feel better after sitting on the phone for all that time, and my letter was most likely thrown away.
Yes, terms of use tend to be convoluted and obfuscated, but are not always impossible for a non-lawyer to understand. They're more long than anything usually, with only like 1 or 2 sentences that mean anything. In this case, it was pretty clear (to me, at least) they had my information and entering my e-mail address was "explicit authorization" to use it, while someone who didn't bother to read the terms (most people) wouldn't have known.
The only time I wanted to archive an ad was when I was complaining to the company that booked my flight about their shady behind-the-scenes sale of my credit card number. I got this ad in my itinerary promising me 20% cash back from my purchase if I signed onto a trial for this "Great Fun Site" (run by Trilegiant). Thing is, I'm pretty detail oriented (what most people call "weird") and I actually read the terms of use. Sure enough, although they ask for only my e-mail address, the terms of use said Priceline already handed them my credit card information before I even entered anything. The idea behind this company is that after the 1-month free trial (where I hear you don't really get any of the coupons they promise), they start billing you monthly and you have to call their customer service line to cancel (entering your e-mail address is formal agreement to their billing terms). Naturally, I didn't enter anything.
At the time, I had more important/productive things to do than complain about it. A few months later, I wound up with around $700 of international charges for Cyprus-based adult websites on that same credit card. It was a new card, and in protest to bad practices of banks I always pay with cash when possible, so Priceline was the only company I gave the information to. So, when I went to complain and show them the link, the ad was conveniently gone so I had no evidence. Priceline insisted they did not send anything to Trilegiant (even though the terms from the ad said they already had it) because I didn't enter my e-mail address nothing was sent, and their systems were "unbreakable" and had "never been hacked as long as Priceline existed".
I guess in summary, the only reason I would want to save an ad is for legal documentation when the advertiser oversteps his/her bounds.
To be fair, in this case it could go either way. The issuing bank, 5/3 Bank, has been careless and tried to pass the cost of fraud onto me several times in the past (this time by refusing to dispute the international transaction fees). I can narrow it down between 5/3 Bank or Priceline & Friends, but in my opinion they're both equally shady and equally likely to have had a data breach somewhere they're not telling anyone about.
Don't do business with Chino Commercial Bank.
Yes, yes, I know. All banks are going to play that same game, but if I can just convince myself that by not doing business with certain companies that screw their customers (not all of them) I might just feel a little better about our economic system...
Waterboarding does cause permanent harm. That kind of conditioning leaves prisoners with a pervasive fear of water falling on them, which then generalizes to other similar forms. I'm pretty sure being unable to go outside when it rains without collapsing in fear would qualify as "clinically significant distress" and that kind of conditioning isn't something you can just magically extinguish in any reasonable amount of time. It's like a very severe case of agoraphobia, artificially inflicted on you.
What people often fail to realize is if you lose one, you inherently lose the other. If someone is impersonating the server you wish to connect to (called a man-in-the-middle attack), then they can see everything you're doing because it's encrypted with their key.
Would you still be ok with it if they stored the pictures they took, the stored pictures they insist don't exist somehow wound up on the internet, and eventually those pictures of your wife wound up on 4chan? Just saying...
Freedom of speech...really, when you get right down to it, when you download music, that's a form of censorship. You're taking money away from the MPAA, and that's money they use to bribe congressmen and senators and presidents. How can they redress the Government when they don't have any money?
The internet is used for a lot more than downloading music, and is often used as a way of distributing information. For the common citizen (who doesn't own a TV station), short of speaking in a street/park with a megaphone, this is often the only way they have of communicating. The internet a medium of communication, facilitating speech even if in electronic form.
For freedom of the press, how important is it to be able for the media to access the Internet? You have newspapers and television and radio. Admittedly, half of those are official government propaganda machines and the other half is owned by media conglomerates, but the idea is still there.
Well, if I want unbiased information about politics, the internet is probably where I would start. The internet is the only form of media where anyone regardless of how wealthy they are can put something, and if you take that away, making the only form of free speech privately owned and controlled, then it's not quite free anymore. Sure it's free for the people who own the media, but anyone else only gets to say something if it's in line with the message the owner wants expressed. Truly free speech means even the people you (or the elite class) does not like, and currently the internet is the only place where that (usually) happens.
Assembly? For online stuff? Come on, it's not like you could use something like twitter to tell the outside world about how things are going in your country.
People actually do use Twitter for this sort of thing, though I more often see Facebook used for that. Also, use of one's own online service, like hosting your own website for coordination of protests, collaborating over an IRC channel or other chat room, web streaming (or use of YouTube), or just plain e-mail communication, are all perfectly legitimate uses of the internet for assembly, and very prone to use for political motives by the masses. If the powers that be can argue there is copyright infringement (or linkage, like with thepiratebay.org) going on from protest-gathering-website.com, then they can justify blocking it just like any other website and thereby prevent assembly on it. The way the DMCA works now (and I don't think this law will be any better), any time an issue is time-sensitive or the defendants lack resources to defend themselves in court, you (the powers that be) don't even have to prove you own the copyrighted work. The DMCA wasn't even intended for censorship, while this particular bill is. Same goes for pretty much any other website.
Aside from religion (unless they decide Islamic websites are illegal or something), the ability of the government to censor parts of the internet does apply to the 1st amendment. Futhermore, copyright has already been (ab)usedmanytimes to censor free speech, so this is not just a hypothetical scenario. To claim copyright cannot, was not, or will not be used for online political censorship or that a law aimed at online censorship will not be abused is either naive or lying.
Nah, paper usually reaches terminal velocity pretty fast with its high surface area to mass ratio. It would have to go pretty fast against air friction to burn up. Now getting torn apart in the wind is another matter.
All I know is that if I didn't have an outlet for my anger at home, I would have let it out at school.
Not to say one way or another - it's really hard to prove causality in media/violence cases especially in video games - but I'd like to refer you to Albert Bandura's famous Bobo Doll study (video). The belief that an outlet for violence (particularly violent television) was good for satiating people's natural aggressive tendencies was widely believed up until this study was published in 1961. I am shocked nobody else here bothered to cite this study.
What's really sad is that the survey is probably at least close to accurate. There are so many people out there today who think they can get some "real justice" if they give up their rights to "fight terrorism" that I am having a hard time tearing apart the article.
Um - detectable depending on what they want to access. I've deployed a daily login attempt/file access logarithm that will alert me to any intrusion attempt
What exactly do you consider an "intrusion attempt"? A failed SSH login? A suspicious script running on a website one of your users loaded? A phishing/trojan e-mail? An alert from the anti-virus (if you're running Windows)? How on earth do you browse through all those alerts, most of which can be ignored? Also, if you're working in IT, then you do care if they get into something. Obviously you would prefer it not be something like your main file server or something that stores sensitive financial/FERPA/HIPAA/whatever records, but you probably still care if one of your users' desktops is hosting malware/pr0n, pumping spam, logging keystrokes, or launching DoS attacks.
it doesn't really matter to me how many other servers the intruder attempts to intrude; in fact, I don't even look.
Aren't you desensitizing yourself to important alerts from the logs? There are certainly noteworthy things in the logs - coming from somebody who reads logs on his servers - but if you try to manually read and acknowledge every failed root login and every request with a bunch of - signs and quotation marks, you're going to be tempted to just ignore everything no matter how important.
because professors always want you to have the latest edition; which the library never has or if they do, just one copy
Forget "latest edition" copies. Last year, I paid $120 for a textbook that was copyright 1993! The professor said there was no need for a newer edition since we were studying older computer architectures, but once the bookstores caught on, they either refused to carry the old edition, or jacked the price up to that of newer books. Of course, selling it back you'd get maybe $5 just because it's required next quarter, or a "newer" edition is coming out that year, but these companies charge whatever they can away with no matter how old or new the book is. Over 16 years, the price for students went through the roof while the price students can sell the book at went to almost nothing.
Yeah, the professors are usually naive/apathetic/complicit about it as long as they get their own colorful copy for free (some don't even bother teaching), but between the publishers and bookstores fixing prices for required textbooks, the students are pretty screwed no matter what position professors take. And it's not like the authors who actually write the books get any significant portion of this money. It's just the publishers playing gatekeeper on students' degrees in an economy where finding a job is nigh impossible without that degree.
Yes, at my school some professors request copies on closed reserve (one even got the publishers to send a free "sample" copy to the library), but many don't and it's really hard to do calculus problems in a big open space with lots of people talking/eating around you because you can't take it outside the library and it's due back in 1-2 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, last time I was on a plane (Airtran), they said all wifi-capable devices must also be turned off. Too bad they don't actually turn off their wifi router; they just redirect you to a page saying all wireless devices should be turned off. I guess wireless routers that broadcast within these frequencies are ok because as long as they aren't actually accomplishing anything then the radio waves coming from it magically become less dangerous or something.
So, he's writing college textbooks? Glad I'm not in food science...
Actually, someone I know is still paying a monthly bill for AOL for a different reason. They are afraid of the people on the retention line, and don't want to plan out a couple of hours to fight over it. Call it unethical or illegal, but it works - I still to this date (4 years later) cannot get them to cancel because they don't want to waste the time and energy. I would expect that a lot of other successful companies play this game too.
I'm surprised they didn't just outsource their e-mail to Microsoft in return for a few little perks, as many colleges seem to be doing. https://www.microsoft.com/education/solutions/liveedu.aspx
Sure he will! That makes it willful infringement.
Come on, we all knew this had to happen eventually. I call Rule 34 on space!
And that, folks, is why they call it a server farm.
I suspect there will be a few more former cops on the streets, and a few job openings at TSA. What would be funny is if you uploaded the names of the guys in charge of this scheme. (posted to undo accidental bad moderation)
We all knew this would happen again sooner or later, what with all these new anti-consumer copyright laws either already enacted or pending legislation around the world.
For those who don't remember, ASCAP threatens to sue girl scouts for exactly the same thing: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications/ASCAP.html
No, what was pointless was actually trying to complain to a big company like Priceline. It's not like they cared if I was unhappy with those charges, or even if one customer who noticed what was going on wasn't going to return, as long as they got their commission for selling my information on top of what I already paid. I didn't even feel better after sitting on the phone for all that time, and my letter was most likely thrown away.
Yes, terms of use tend to be convoluted and obfuscated, but are not always impossible for a non-lawyer to understand. They're more long than anything usually, with only like 1 or 2 sentences that mean anything. In this case, it was pretty clear (to me, at least) they had my information and entering my e-mail address was "explicit authorization" to use it, while someone who didn't bother to read the terms (most people) wouldn't have known.
List of printers: https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots
I don't know about cameras, but somebody else who replied posted something that looks promising.
The only time I wanted to archive an ad was when I was complaining to the company that booked my flight about their shady behind-the-scenes sale of my credit card number. I got this ad in my itinerary promising me 20% cash back from my purchase if I signed onto a trial for this "Great Fun Site" (run by Trilegiant). Thing is, I'm pretty detail oriented (what most people call "weird") and I actually read the terms of use. Sure enough, although they ask for only my e-mail address, the terms of use said Priceline already handed them my credit card information before I even entered anything. The idea behind this company is that after the 1-month free trial (where I hear you don't really get any of the coupons they promise), they start billing you monthly and you have to call their customer service line to cancel (entering your e-mail address is formal agreement to their billing terms). Naturally, I didn't enter anything.
At the time, I had more important/productive things to do than complain about it. A few months later, I wound up with around $700 of international charges for Cyprus-based adult websites on that same credit card. It was a new card, and in protest to bad practices of banks I always pay with cash when possible, so Priceline was the only company I gave the information to. So, when I went to complain and show them the link, the ad was conveniently gone so I had no evidence. Priceline insisted they did not send anything to Trilegiant (even though the terms from the ad said they already had it) because I didn't enter my e-mail address nothing was sent, and their systems were "unbreakable" and had "never been hacked as long as Priceline existed".
I guess in summary, the only reason I would want to save an ad is for legal documentation when the advertiser oversteps his/her bounds.
To be fair, in this case it could go either way. The issuing bank, 5/3 Bank, has been careless and tried to pass the cost of fraud onto me several times in the past (this time by refusing to dispute the international transaction fees). I can narrow it down between 5/3 Bank or Priceline & Friends, but in my opinion they're both equally shady and equally likely to have had a data breach somewhere they're not telling anyone about.
Don't do business with Chino Commercial Bank. Yes, yes, I know. All banks are going to play that same game, but if I can just convince myself that by not doing business with certain companies that screw their customers (not all of them) I might just feel a little better about our economic system...
That a mcdonaldsmom.com exists worries me greatly.
Yes but do any of them have /meat/ flavoring?
From the summary:
...and infused with meat flavor,...
You didn't even have to read the article for that information.
Waterboarding does cause permanent harm. That kind of conditioning leaves prisoners with a pervasive fear of water falling on them, which then generalizes to other similar forms. I'm pretty sure being unable to go outside when it rains without collapsing in fear would qualify as "clinically significant distress" and that kind of conditioning isn't something you can just magically extinguish in any reasonable amount of time. It's like a very severe case of agoraphobia, artificially inflicted on you.
What people often fail to realize is if you lose one, you inherently lose the other. If someone is impersonating the server you wish to connect to (called a man-in-the-middle attack), then they can see everything you're doing because it's encrypted with their key.
Would you still be ok with it if they stored the pictures they took, the stored pictures they insist don't exist somehow wound up on the internet, and eventually those pictures of your wife wound up on 4chan? Just saying...
Freedom of speech...really, when you get right down to it, when you download music, that's a form of censorship. You're taking money away from the MPAA, and that's money they use to bribe congressmen and senators and presidents. How can they redress the Government when they don't have any money?
The internet is used for a lot more than downloading music, and is often used as a way of distributing information. For the common citizen (who doesn't own a TV station), short of speaking in a street/park with a megaphone, this is often the only way they have of communicating. The internet a medium of communication, facilitating speech even if in electronic form.
For freedom of the press, how important is it to be able for the media to access the Internet? You have newspapers and television and radio. Admittedly, half of those are official government propaganda machines and the other half is owned by media conglomerates, but the idea is still there.
Well, if I want unbiased information about politics, the internet is probably where I would start. The internet is the only form of media where anyone regardless of how wealthy they are can put something, and if you take that away, making the only form of free speech privately owned and controlled, then it's not quite free anymore. Sure it's free for the people who own the media, but anyone else only gets to say something if it's in line with the message the owner wants expressed. Truly free speech means even the people you (or the elite class) does not like, and currently the internet is the only place where that (usually) happens.
Assembly? For online stuff? Come on, it's not like you could use something like twitter to tell the outside world about how things are going in your country.
People actually do use Twitter for this sort of thing, though I more often see Facebook used for that. Also, use of one's own online service, like hosting your own website for coordination of protests, collaborating over an IRC channel or other chat room, web streaming (or use of YouTube), or just plain e-mail communication, are all perfectly legitimate uses of the internet for assembly, and very prone to use for political motives by the masses. If the powers that be can argue there is copyright infringement (or linkage, like with thepiratebay.org) going on from protest-gathering-website.com, then they can justify blocking it just like any other website and thereby prevent assembly on it. The way the DMCA works now (and I don't think this law will be any better), any time an issue is time-sensitive or the defendants lack resources to defend themselves in court, you (the powers that be) don't even have to prove you own the copyrighted work. The DMCA wasn't even intended for censorship, while this particular bill is. Same goes for pretty much any other website.
Aside from religion (unless they decide Islamic websites are illegal or something), the ability of the government to censor parts of the internet does apply to the 1st amendment. Futhermore, copyright has already been (ab)used many times to censor free speech, so this is not just a hypothetical scenario. To claim copyright cannot, was not, or will not be used for online political censorship or that a law aimed at online censorship will not be abused is either naive or lying.
Nah, paper usually reaches terminal velocity pretty fast with its high surface area to mass ratio. It would have to go pretty fast against air friction to burn up. Now getting torn apart in the wind is another matter.
All I know is that if I didn't have an outlet for my anger at home, I would have let it out at school.
Not to say one way or another - it's really hard to prove causality in media/violence cases especially in video games - but I'd like to refer you to Albert Bandura's famous Bobo Doll study (video). The belief that an outlet for violence (particularly violent television) was good for satiating people's natural aggressive tendencies was widely believed up until this study was published in 1961. I am shocked nobody else here bothered to cite this study.
How much you wanna bet we're going to have to wait for Adobe's next 90-day update cycle, since this was released right on the day of another patch?
What's really sad is that the survey is probably at least close to accurate. There are so many people out there today who think they can get some "real justice" if they give up their rights to "fight terrorism" that I am having a hard time tearing apart the article.
Um - detectable depending on what they want to access. I've deployed a daily login attempt/file access logarithm that will alert me to any intrusion attempt
What exactly do you consider an "intrusion attempt"? A failed SSH login? A suspicious script running on a website one of your users loaded? A phishing/trojan e-mail? An alert from the anti-virus (if you're running Windows)? How on earth do you browse through all those alerts, most of which can be ignored? Also, if you're working in IT, then you do care if they get into something. Obviously you would prefer it not be something like your main file server or something that stores sensitive financial/FERPA/HIPAA/whatever records, but you probably still care if one of your users' desktops is hosting malware/pr0n, pumping spam, logging keystrokes, or launching DoS attacks.
it doesn't really matter to me how many other servers the intruder attempts to intrude; in fact, I don't even look.
Aren't you desensitizing yourself to important alerts from the logs? There are certainly noteworthy things in the logs - coming from somebody who reads logs on his servers - but if you try to manually read and acknowledge every failed root login and every request with a bunch of - signs and quotation marks, you're going to be tempted to just ignore everything no matter how important.
because professors always want you to have the latest edition; which the library never has or if they do, just one copy
Forget "latest edition" copies. Last year, I paid $120 for a textbook that was copyright 1993! The professor said there was no need for a newer edition since we were studying older computer architectures, but once the bookstores caught on, they either refused to carry the old edition, or jacked the price up to that of newer books. Of course, selling it back you'd get maybe $5 just because it's required next quarter, or a "newer" edition is coming out that year, but these companies charge whatever they can away with no matter how old or new the book is. Over 16 years, the price for students went through the roof while the price students can sell the book at went to almost nothing.
Yeah, the professors are usually naive/apathetic/complicit about it as long as they get their own colorful copy for free (some don't even bother teaching), but between the publishers and bookstores fixing prices for required textbooks, the students are pretty screwed no matter what position professors take. And it's not like the authors who actually write the books get any significant portion of this money. It's just the publishers playing gatekeeper on students' degrees in an economy where finding a job is nigh impossible without that degree.
Yes, at my school some professors request copies on closed reserve (one even got the publishers to send a free "sample" copy to the library), but many don't and it's really hard to do calculus problems in a big open space with lots of people talking/eating around you because you can't take it outside the library and it's due back in 1-2 hours.