The big problem I see in people who are tech managers is a lack of understanding of project management. They're fine with people, if not missing some subtlety here and there, and it sounds like you've got a team that has few personnel problems. So focus on building your project management talents, which is about deadlines, coming up with objective measurements for progress, and setting realistic goals. Your team should be able to tell you where the trouble spots will be in the development cycle, how fast they expect to overcome each obstacle, and help you plot a roadmap, but only if you ask the right questions.
Well, I'm older than I look, but act younger than I am, so it evens out.;) And girls are more interested in passing slashfic to each other than linux CDs, if my own experience is any judge. hehe
Nine years and this is what they come up with? What else came from 1999... Oh, right: The first delay in the release of Duke Nukem Forever. And I also believe that's the year they came out with "cooler ranch" potato chips, and they've sucked ever since. Ah, and there was that Prince song. Yes, that one. So based on empirical evidence, I conclude that this too shall suck, but we'll party like it's... *bang*
If credit cards have to be used to pay for such products, punishing the credit-card companies for processing those payments would make the economic incentive to sell such products dry up.
No, I see the point perfectly and I think it's idiocy. How does punishing one company for the actions of another solve the problem? It's like punishing gun manufacturers for people who use their product to murder. There's no relationship between the two. Cybercriminals will just find another way to steal funds, trick people, or interfere with commerce and manipulate those systems to seize an advantage. Attacking the credit card companies doesn't do crap except further damage an already vulnerable public resource.
Credit card companies have one asset in this war, and that's tracking trends, providing an audit trail, and quickly identifying patterns and sources of transactions. Law enforcement needs to work closely with them to get that information to the right organizations, likely international. The window of opportunity for some of these crimes is only a few hours. My question stands.
So this was less about Linux and more about a teenage boy being, well... a boy. Figures. It would have gone better for him if it had been some ecchi anime. First rule of high school is -- don't point out that the teacher knows less than you do. The second rule of course is, if you break the first rule do so in an epic way.
Why do you do nothing about the credit card companies handling the proceeds of crime? Most cybercrime relies on credit/debit card companies
You have a very poor grasp of "cyber crime" and what the current trends are in it. Spam is distributed by botnets, and I'm pretty sure they don't need a valid credit card number to operate. Malware is being developed every day that exploits people's online banking login credentials to conduct wire transfers, which do not involve credit/debit card companies or the ATM network (not directly anyway), in addition to secondary uses in industrial espionage and selling computing cycles for things like key cracking.
Lastly, the commissioner is asking about what can be done to secure cyberspace, which is a loftier goal than getting "cheap viagra" off the market and squelching spam. You can direct those comments to a panel being setup on questioning the effectiveness of the FDA and why the #$@! there's no funding to prosecute vendors for making intentionally false claims about their products.
Perhaps I can rephrase your question in a more meaningful way:
Chairman, how will you work to improve cooperation between domestic and foreign law enforcement to effect a more rapid response to cyber crimes (for example, stolen credit card data)?
Ah yes, forgot -- the question. So, Mr. Chairman, what will you recommend to improve the protection of the global surveillance network from abuse by foreign and domestic interests? What oversight will be available, and what punishments will be dealt for such abuses? What's to prevent the oversight committee from becoming too comfortable and complacent in its duties that an erosion of vigilance occurs and ultimately makes it a meaningless appendage of the bureaucratic process?
If I may offer a suggestion: Disclosure. Show us some of the near-collisions between this ethereal world and the real one, how close we've come to losing valuable assets. Show the challenges and balancing act that is as much about people as technology -- put a human face on the men and women who work in secret to protect us every day. Take us inside. Give us a reason to trust your commission, and the people they oversee, rather than empty assurances that abuse isn't happening. I accept there isn't much we can do to turn back the clock, but I'd sure like to know that the people manning the walls and standing at the gates are people like me who understand the moral implications of the choices they make every day. Because right now I have my doubts, as do millions of other Americans who look uneasily to the future.
In today's political environment, "balance" is short for "annhilate but in a way that doesn't draw public attention." They already monitor all domestic and much of international internet traffic. There are several super-massive networks dedicated to this, and data-centers that make Google's resources look like a street beggar next to a executive banker. Their two main challenges are sifting the data for timely intelligence and warehousing the data. Fortunately for them, much of internet traffic is redundant, especially when you already have a copy of something previously sent -- you can use deltas and journals to store and retrieve the data streams at a fraction of the cost of brute force storage approaches. Privacy died years ago but people are still clinging to the idea that it's out of reach because their imagination can't fully encompass the full magnitude of the surveillance effort. This slashdot post, and tens of thousands like it, undoubtedly reside in a database, instantly accessible, and tools exist to conduct a variety of analysis' at every level of communication. These tools make Wireshark look like a high school science fair project in comparison, and while they are internally developed, often poorly implemented, and are not easy to use -- they still work well enough and research is always underway to improve them.
What the government is continuing to do is surround itself in a dense layer of laws, bureauacracy, and legal framework to insulate itself from public protest, hoping to repel or entirely dissipate any manner of organized dissent. This is simply another step in what has been a progressive march towards total control of the global communications networks, and the United States has had assistance from over a dozen major players. The spectre of terrorism, in tandem with rapid advances in sigint technology has simply accelerated long-sought for powers and caused a paradigm shift in the way intelligence is gathered and distributed. To bypass certain legal restrictions placed on them, they simply "outsource" intelligence work, pooling their collective resources while maintaining plausible deniability and a layer of obfusciation with the sole purpose of continuing the charade for the publics' benefit in the respective member countries.
If any of this is news, it shouldn't be -- the major governments of the world want a global internet where every electronic communications device interconnects with every other because they already control most of the gateways and they are holding most of the keys. They are only too happy to have the assistance of people like you and me who labor under the notion that this will ultimately help society economically, socially, and politically. And it's true -- a global communications infrastructure will do exactly that, making the world a smaller place, making geographical and political lines largely irrelevant, streamlining economic exchanges, and bringing the thousand cultures of the world right to our fingertips. All under the watchful vigilance of ethereal and nameless soldiers, who promise you safety in exchange for an eye and an ear on the innermost details of your life.
And we're going to give it to them, not because we have a choice, but because several thousand years of human history says that somebody has to man the walls, somebody has to watch the gates, somebody has to enforce the laws (however arbitrary), and we're desperately afraid that this invisible framework that holds back the chaos today will fail and unleash a flood of uncertainty. All such frameworks are of course transitory in nature, but we will nevertheless sacrifice our freedoms in exchange for the promise of safety because we've never known any other way to live.
Freedom ever was only an illusion, a dream we continually strive for yet fail to achieve in any lasting way. Yet, because people continue have impossible dreams a balance will always be maintained between the extremes of tyranny and freedom. It was as true two hundred years ago on muddy battlefields as it is today, in a ethereal world of electric impulses.
P.S. Taking out the battery works too. ^_^ Then just flip your cell phone open, find a place with zero bars, and plop down.
If you want to be fancy, build yourself a small faraday cage. Woo-woo...
For This Project You Will Need: * replacement outdoor screening material, approx. 200sqft. You can get this at a Fleet Farm or online. * 4 2x8s * 2 2x16s, * 1 50" extension cord, * six metal rods approx. 6" in length (suggest construction reed bar) * power stapler * wood glue (or similar) * hacksaw * pile driver
Note: You don't necessarily need the metal rods, you can connect to any solid earth ground. I just figure if you're going to do it, do it right eh?
Relying on cell phone communication? If it's GSM, it's already been p0wn3d. info. At the moment, it's only within reach of large corporations, but those barriers are artificial. There's also been development on creating a fake base station using a USRP (google it), a very nice piece of hardware kit that can do the signals processing necessary... So the hardware exists for $1000 to pull this hack off. Failing that, just pop the screws and cut the antenna leads to the internal wifi (which is likely the same antenna as the cell phone), or use a x-acto blade and cut the etching. Worse case scenario, look for the power pin(s) and cut them. Oh noes, I lost wifi ($30 for a cardbus card) and gained myself a free laptop!
When I can crack your security using a $5 hobby knife, you've got issues.
Users hate change. To get anything done, you need to shove it down their throats and anger them - hence the anger at the move to Vista and, among other things, a true multi-user security model. But even in pure UI terms, a lot of people will complain because "it doesn't work exactly the way it did in XP". That's too bad. It's called progress. The UI is more responsive and more intuitive, and yet people will continue to complain. (See: Office 2007)
O_o You assume that people reflexively hate anything new. If that were the case, we wouldn't have technology of any kind to begin with. I find your statement to be either condescending or naive--I'm not sure which.
Captain Obvious flies in and reminds everyone: Anything that penetrates the skin dramatically increases the risk of infection, and early signs of a skin infection would be covered by hair on the scalps. Up, up and awaaaaaay...
Boot time and synthetic benchmarks are poor indicators of an operating system's performance and usability. It'd be like me comparing the zero to sixty time as the sole metric to judge a vehicle's fitness for use by, say, a college student. Perhaps Miles per Gallon might be better? Or even the number of cup holders? I'll believe Windows 7 is an improvement when it passes the Mom Test... Which is to say, we sit our mothers down at a computer and ask them "Is this better than XP?" But not your mother of course, because she's crazy.;)
I'm not sure which is worse: the stupid people who are completely ignorant, or the smart people who think they know it all and act, unknowingly, half-cocked at best.
The smart people, because they don't know it all and act anyway, aware their limitations, moving deliberately towards a larger design. Dumb people, know it all types, and the half-cocked all make themselves ripe for abuse by the few who know how to manipulate their emotions, and perhaps this is best.
If this were a wiki post, I'd use the term "weasel words" to describe the analogy--The author is confusing several issues. Women's rights have absolutely no connection whatsoever to the issue of anonymity online.
The material issue here is whether the benefits to society in allowing anonymous posts outweigh the harm in doing so. And in the United States, we already have the answer -- we have a long history (albeit, recently screwed up!) of supporting free speech and expression as a general rule. And nowhere does it say that you must reveal your identity to protest -- for example KKK protests. In fact, anonymity is an indespensible tool in a society where it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbors. In every case I've seen where a person clamoured for a secret identity to be revealed one of the following has been true:
1. Money or economic interest; ie, quash a leaked trade secret, protect a brand name, or a copyright. 2. Personal attack; ie, Myspace, Facebook, "cyberbullying"; Where someone didn't like being told they were a douche, etc. 3. Batman 4. Political dissent 5. Unpopular viewpoint (NAMBLA, for example) 6. Illegal; ie, terrorism, white collar crime, etc.
In my opinion, #4's benefits outweigh the risks and harm caused by all others, and also applies to all others. Things are made illegal (such as file sharing) that are not necessarily in the public interest all the time. Money or economic interests -- money doesn't vanish because someone made a comment, it just goes somewhere else. They're reciprocally free to post their opinions. Personal attacks are a fact of life... Deal with it people. Same with unpopular viewpoints -- they're an anecdote to mass hysteria and mob thinking.
Anonymity is a necessary first step in political protest, because protest is never necessary when the majority approves... Remove anonymity and what you've got left are circumstances ripe for tyranny either by the few or the many, but tyranny all the same.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
They have a right to redress of their greviances, and so far they've used that to take away the rights of minorities (gay marriage, et al.), undermined the educational system (intelligent design, labels on text books calling evolution a "theory", etc.), stated that God will protect them from terrorists, attempted to modify their state and federal constitutions for frivolous things like "wildlife preservation", have worked to ban baggy pants, sought to reinforce sexual discrimination (look at Title IX, which specifically bans the YWCA, girl scouts, etc., from sexual discrimination lawsuits), attempted to pass legislation to divert federal tax dollars to private religious schools, and passed so many idiotic laws that everyone can be a criminal, and expanded the police powers in this country to the point that people can be summarily executed without trial and there is little or no oversight or review of the people responsible.
I am biased against uneducated individuals, unapologetically. Our founding fathers created this as a republic, whose tenets are written in the Constitution, specifically as a guard against the uneducated. Education is a choice -- anyone can direct their education and become better informed. Their disinclination to do so is a moral weakness, because lacking education we have only our own prejudices, preconceptions, and emotions to decide.
Do you really want to live in a world governed on hope? Or fear? Or hatred? Because when the uneducated vote, that's what they're voting for -- and you'll have to live with those choices.
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Well, the working definition of a democracy is "the majority rules". But stop and think how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. Those people are the majority. I'm quite glad we live in a republic, where the stupid elect those who have demonstrated they at least have machiavellian intelligence. It's fortunate for all of us that one breed of intelligence usually includes others as well. -_-
This story should have been tagged "Whatcouldpossiblygowrong". I mean, a moderation system that lets useful ideas float to the top and useless ideas to the bottom is based on the rather naive concept that the people voting are educated and unbiased. On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present, I'd like to add the following comment to this idea: buwhahahahahahahahahaha--!!!
People don't vote their conscience, they vote their prejudices. I thought that would have been clear by now.
How Things Work Everywhere Else: 1. Concept. 2. Pilot. 3. Evaluation. bad: Return to 1, or continue to 4. 4. Real world trial. 5. Evaluation. bad: Return to 1, or continue to 6. 6. Implementation 7. Fine-tuning 5. Evaluation. bad: Return to 7, or continue to 8. 8. Maintenance
How Things Work in Australia 1. Concept. 2. Real world trial. 3. Public relations debacle. bad: Return to 2, or continue to 4. 4. Implementation. 5. Drink beer. 6. Maintenance.
As you can see, everything is going according to plan. Just check your boots before you leave the server room. -_-
ad 1) DNS is one of the few protocols where conciseness really REALLY matters. DNS attempts to answer requests in one UDP packet to avoid the overhead of establishing a connection. Elliptic curve keys are smaller than RSA keys of the same strength. The choice of 1024bit RSA keys for DNSSEC is a compromise (pardon the pun), which isn't necessary with elliptic curve cryptography.
I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the technical merits; I'm pointing out a flaw in the political actions of this coalition. Commercial coalitions form when there's money at stake and very often the technical issues are rapidly effaced in favor of how much has been invested in a particular solution. Witness VHS v. Betamax. I'm saying that we (as internet users and administrators) should support an open and transparent process that involves all interested parties, and that all viable options are given equal consideration.
1. This Bernstein guy is pushing a new crypto algorithm. Why is it necessary to use a new one when old ones have been demonstrated to be effective and secure? It seems imprudent to use a new and largely untested algorithm to patch critical infrastructure. His reputation should not be a deciding or even motivating factor in the adoption of a new algorithm; Isn't the standard process to submit it to the IETF or similar organization to have it ratified first?
2. Industry coalitions are great, but this seems to be an attempt to create a new de facto standard controlled by a few large corporate interests, most of which are based in the United States. Isn't this kind of organization exactly what ICANN was created to avoid (I'm side-stepping the controversy surrounding them here)?
It seems to me they're rushing headlong toward a solution to solve a problem that hasn't yet made a major impact (though the potential for exploitation is substantial), and there is great potential to create an even larger problem here. This is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to be avoided when making infrastructure-level decisions about large, global networks. The Domain Name System is a global resource and an asset to every country on the planet. It is highly circumspect that those countries are presently without a voice in this transition.
the courts have already partially answered this question elsewhere -- the harm the comment can/has made to the reputation of the plaintiff must be substantial and demonstrated. In that case, they can ask the provider in that jurisdiction. Maryland cannot order, say, a New York ISP to do so. That must be resolved at the federal level. And nuts to him if the data he wants resides on an international system. Of course, whether those records exist, to what degree they can identify a specific person, etc., is not a trivial matter.
Ironically, the plaintiff is drawing more attention to this than it ever would have received had he not brought suit; He'd had been better off keeping his mouth shut. this may be a case of economic darwinism -- he's self-selecting himself into bankrupcy.
The coriolis effect is not a real force. It's an illusionary effect that happens when you have a moving point of reference. As to solar winds and stuff; can you be a little less vague. Let's say for a 10 meter thick cord, white color, how much force would be imparted on the cable over its length? Is the concept currently economical? No, and that's hardly news. Is it unstable and unworkable? Well... if you're pinning your conclusions something that doesn't actually exist to answer that, I think you might have a problem.
Opinions are not statements of fact, something that apparently escapes even the highest court in Maryland. Slander and libel are passing off false statements as fact. This is why in the newspaper you always hear about the alleged crime, or how the government may be involved in massive surveillance domestically, or that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field(tm) could be real.
Hopefully the court will realize that one person making his/her own opinion known in a public forum (anonymously or otherwise) does not constitute a malicious attempt to degrade the reputation of another. If not, we may have to bump Florida from the 2008 dumbest judiciary system award.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the sanitation is also inspired by WoW. If so, we are soooo screwed. There will be zombies everywhere.
The big problem I see in people who are tech managers is a lack of understanding of project management. They're fine with people, if not missing some subtlety here and there, and it sounds like you've got a team that has few personnel problems. So focus on building your project management talents, which is about deadlines, coming up with objective measurements for progress, and setting realistic goals. Your team should be able to tell you where the trouble spots will be in the development cycle, how fast they expect to overcome each obstacle, and help you plot a roadmap, but only if you ask the right questions.
Well, I'm older than I look, but act younger than I am, so it evens out. ;) And girls are more interested in passing slashfic to each other than linux CDs, if my own experience is any judge. hehe
Nine years and this is what they come up with? What else came from 1999... Oh, right: The first delay in the release of Duke Nukem Forever. And I also believe that's the year they came out with "cooler ranch" potato chips, and they've sucked ever since. Ah, and there was that Prince song. Yes, that one. So based on empirical evidence, I conclude that this too shall suck, but we'll party like it's... *bang*
NO CARRIER
If credit cards have to be used to pay for such products, punishing the credit-card companies for processing those payments would make the economic incentive to sell such products dry up.
No, I see the point perfectly and I think it's idiocy. How does punishing one company for the actions of another solve the problem? It's like punishing gun manufacturers for people who use their product to murder. There's no relationship between the two. Cybercriminals will just find another way to steal funds, trick people, or interfere with commerce and manipulate those systems to seize an advantage. Attacking the credit card companies doesn't do crap except further damage an already vulnerable public resource.
Credit card companies have one asset in this war, and that's tracking trends, providing an audit trail, and quickly identifying patterns and sources of transactions. Law enforcement needs to work closely with them to get that information to the right organizations, likely international. The window of opportunity for some of these crimes is only a few hours. My question stands.
So this was less about Linux and more about a teenage boy being, well... a boy. Figures. It would have gone better for him if it had been some ecchi anime. First rule of high school is -- don't point out that the teacher knows less than you do. The second rule of course is, if you break the first rule do so in an epic way.
Why do you do nothing about the credit card companies handling the proceeds of crime? Most cybercrime relies on credit/debit card companies
You have a very poor grasp of "cyber crime" and what the current trends are in it. Spam is distributed by botnets, and I'm pretty sure they don't need a valid credit card number to operate. Malware is being developed every day that exploits people's online banking login credentials to conduct wire transfers, which do not involve credit/debit card companies or the ATM network (not directly anyway), in addition to secondary uses in industrial espionage and selling computing cycles for things like key cracking.
Lastly, the commissioner is asking about what can be done to secure cyberspace, which is a loftier goal than getting "cheap viagra" off the market and squelching spam. You can direct those comments to a panel being setup on questioning the effectiveness of the FDA and why the #$@! there's no funding to prosecute vendors for making intentionally false claims about their products.
Perhaps I can rephrase your question in a more meaningful way:
Chairman, how will you work to improve cooperation between domestic and foreign law enforcement to effect a more rapid response to cyber crimes (for example, stolen credit card data)?
Ah yes, forgot -- the question. So, Mr. Chairman, what will you recommend to improve the protection of the global surveillance network from abuse by foreign and domestic interests? What oversight will be available, and what punishments will be dealt for such abuses? What's to prevent the oversight committee from becoming too comfortable and complacent in its duties that an erosion of vigilance occurs and ultimately makes it a meaningless appendage of the bureaucratic process?
If I may offer a suggestion: Disclosure. Show us some of the near-collisions between this ethereal world and the real one, how close we've come to losing valuable assets. Show the challenges and balancing act that is as much about people as technology -- put a human face on the men and women who work in secret to protect us every day. Take us inside. Give us a reason to trust your commission, and the people they oversee, rather than empty assurances that abuse isn't happening. I accept there isn't much we can do to turn back the clock, but I'd sure like to know that the people manning the walls and standing at the gates are people like me who understand the moral implications of the choices they make every day. Because right now I have my doubts, as do millions of other Americans who look uneasily to the future.
In today's political environment, "balance" is short for "annhilate but in a way that doesn't draw public attention." They already monitor all domestic and much of international internet traffic. There are several super-massive networks dedicated to this, and data-centers that make Google's resources look like a street beggar next to a executive banker. Their two main challenges are sifting the data for timely intelligence and warehousing the data. Fortunately for them, much of internet traffic is redundant, especially when you already have a copy of something previously sent -- you can use deltas and journals to store and retrieve the data streams at a fraction of the cost of brute force storage approaches. Privacy died years ago but people are still clinging to the idea that it's out of reach because their imagination can't fully encompass the full magnitude of the surveillance effort. This slashdot post, and tens of thousands like it, undoubtedly reside in a database, instantly accessible, and tools exist to conduct a variety of analysis' at every level of communication. These tools make Wireshark look like a high school science fair project in comparison, and while they are internally developed, often poorly implemented, and are not easy to use -- they still work well enough and research is always underway to improve them.
What the government is continuing to do is surround itself in a dense layer of laws, bureauacracy, and legal framework to insulate itself from public protest, hoping to repel or entirely dissipate any manner of organized dissent. This is simply another step in what has been a progressive march towards total control of the global communications networks, and the United States has had assistance from over a dozen major players. The spectre of terrorism, in tandem with rapid advances in sigint technology has simply accelerated long-sought for powers and caused a paradigm shift in the way intelligence is gathered and distributed. To bypass certain legal restrictions placed on them, they simply "outsource" intelligence work, pooling their collective resources while maintaining plausible deniability and a layer of obfusciation with the sole purpose of continuing the charade for the publics' benefit in the respective member countries.
If any of this is news, it shouldn't be -- the major governments of the world want a global internet where every electronic communications device interconnects with every other because they already control most of the gateways and they are holding most of the keys. They are only too happy to have the assistance of people like you and me who labor under the notion that this will ultimately help society economically, socially, and politically. And it's true -- a global communications infrastructure will do exactly that, making the world a smaller place, making geographical and political lines largely irrelevant, streamlining economic exchanges, and bringing the thousand cultures of the world right to our fingertips. All under the watchful vigilance of ethereal and nameless soldiers, who promise you safety in exchange for an eye and an ear on the innermost details of your life.
And we're going to give it to them, not because we have a choice, but because several thousand years of human history says that somebody has to man the walls, somebody has to watch the gates, somebody has to enforce the laws (however arbitrary), and we're desperately afraid that this invisible framework that holds back the chaos today will fail and unleash a flood of uncertainty. All such frameworks are of course transitory in nature, but we will nevertheless sacrifice our freedoms in exchange for the promise of safety because we've never known any other way to live.
Freedom ever was only an illusion, a dream we continually strive for yet fail to achieve in any lasting way. Yet, because people continue have impossible dreams a balance will always be maintained between the extremes of tyranny and freedom. It was as true two hundred years ago on muddy battlefields as it is today, in a ethereal world of electric impulses.
P.S. Taking out the battery works too. ^_^ Then just flip your cell phone open, find a place with zero bars, and plop down.
If you want to be fancy, build yourself a small faraday cage. Woo-woo...
For This Project You Will Need:
* replacement outdoor screening material, approx. 200sqft. You can get this at a Fleet Farm or online.
* 4 2x8s
* 2 2x16s,
* 1 50" extension cord,
* six metal rods approx. 6" in length (suggest construction reed bar)
* power stapler
* wood glue (or similar)
* hacksaw
* pile driver
Note: You don't necessarily need the metal rods, you can connect to any solid earth ground. I just figure if you're going to do it, do it right eh?
Relying on cell phone communication? If it's GSM, it's already been p0wn3d. info. At the moment, it's only within reach of large corporations, but those barriers are artificial. There's also been development on creating a fake base station using a USRP (google it), a very nice piece of hardware kit that can do the signals processing necessary... So the hardware exists for $1000 to pull this hack off. Failing that, just pop the screws and cut the antenna leads to the internal wifi (which is likely the same antenna as the cell phone), or use a x-acto blade and cut the etching. Worse case scenario, look for the power pin(s) and cut them. Oh noes, I lost wifi ($30 for a cardbus card) and gained myself a free laptop!
When I can crack your security using a $5 hobby knife, you've got issues.
Users hate change. To get anything done, you need to shove it down their throats and anger them - hence the anger at the move to Vista and, among other things, a true multi-user security model. But even in pure UI terms, a lot of people will complain because "it doesn't work exactly the way it did in XP". That's too bad. It's called progress. The UI is more responsive and more intuitive, and yet people will continue to complain. (See: Office 2007)
O_o You assume that people reflexively hate anything new. If that were the case, we wouldn't have technology of any kind to begin with. I find your statement to be either condescending or naive--I'm not sure which.
Captain Obvious flies in and reminds everyone: Anything that penetrates the skin dramatically increases the risk of infection, and early signs of a skin infection would be covered by hair on the scalps. Up, up and awaaaaaay...
Boot time and synthetic benchmarks are poor indicators of an operating system's performance and usability. It'd be like me comparing the zero to sixty time as the sole metric to judge a vehicle's fitness for use by, say, a college student. Perhaps Miles per Gallon might be better? Or even the number of cup holders? I'll believe Windows 7 is an improvement when it passes the Mom Test... Which is to say, we sit our mothers down at a computer and ask them "Is this better than XP?" But not your mother of course, because she's crazy. ;)
I'm not sure which is worse: the stupid people who are completely ignorant, or the smart people who think they know it all and act, unknowingly, half-cocked at best.
The smart people, because they don't know it all and act anyway, aware their limitations, moving deliberately towards a larger design. Dumb people, know it all types, and the half-cocked all make themselves ripe for abuse by the few who know how to manipulate their emotions, and perhaps this is best.
If this were a wiki post, I'd use the term "weasel words" to describe the analogy--The author is confusing several issues. Women's rights have absolutely no connection whatsoever to the issue of anonymity online.
The material issue here is whether the benefits to society in allowing anonymous posts outweigh the harm in doing so. And in the United States, we already have the answer -- we have a long history (albeit, recently screwed up!) of supporting free speech and expression as a general rule. And nowhere does it say that you must reveal your identity to protest -- for example KKK protests. In fact, anonymity is an indespensible tool in a society where it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbors. In every case I've seen where a person clamoured for a secret identity to be revealed one of the following has been true:
1. Money or economic interest; ie, quash a leaked trade secret, protect a brand name, or a copyright.
2. Personal attack; ie, Myspace, Facebook, "cyberbullying"; Where someone didn't like being told they were a douche, etc.
3. Batman
4. Political dissent
5. Unpopular viewpoint (NAMBLA, for example)
6. Illegal; ie, terrorism, white collar crime, etc.
In my opinion, #4's benefits outweigh the risks and harm caused by all others, and also applies to all others. Things are made illegal (such as file sharing) that are not necessarily in the public interest all the time. Money or economic interests -- money doesn't vanish because someone made a comment, it just goes somewhere else. They're reciprocally free to post their opinions. Personal attacks are a fact of life... Deal with it people. Same with unpopular viewpoints -- they're an anecdote to mass hysteria and mob thinking.
Anonymity is a necessary first step in political protest, because protest is never necessary when the majority approves... Remove anonymity and what you've got left are circumstances ripe for tyranny either by the few or the many, but tyranny all the same.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
They have a right to redress of their greviances, and so far they've used that to take away the rights of minorities (gay marriage, et al.), undermined the educational system (intelligent design, labels on text books calling evolution a "theory", etc.), stated that God will protect them from terrorists, attempted to modify their state and federal constitutions for frivolous things like "wildlife preservation", have worked to ban baggy pants, sought to reinforce sexual discrimination (look at Title IX, which specifically bans the YWCA, girl scouts, etc., from sexual discrimination lawsuits), attempted to pass legislation to divert federal tax dollars to private religious schools, and passed so many idiotic laws that everyone can be a criminal, and expanded the police powers in this country to the point that people can be summarily executed without trial and there is little or no oversight or review of the people responsible.
I am biased against uneducated individuals, unapologetically. Our founding fathers created this as a republic, whose tenets are written in the Constitution, specifically as a guard against the uneducated. Education is a choice -- anyone can direct their education and become better informed. Their disinclination to do so is a moral weakness, because lacking education we have only our own prejudices, preconceptions, and emotions to decide.
Do you really want to live in a world governed on hope? Or fear? Or hatred? Because when the uneducated vote, that's what they're voting for -- and you'll have to live with those choices.
The republic be damned. This is true democracy in action: decision-by-mob!
Well, the working definition of a democracy is "the majority rules". But stop and think how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are stupider than that. Those people are the majority. I'm quite glad we live in a republic, where the stupid elect those who have demonstrated they at least have machiavellian intelligence. It's fortunate for all of us that one breed of intelligence usually includes others as well. -_-
This story should have been tagged "Whatcouldpossiblygowrong". I mean, a moderation system that lets useful ideas float to the top and useless ideas to the bottom is based on the rather naive concept that the people voting are educated and unbiased. On behalf of the few educated and unbiased people present, I'd like to add the following comment to this idea: buwhahahahahahahahahaha--!!!
People don't vote their conscience, they vote their prejudices. I thought that would have been clear by now.
How Things Work Everywhere Else:
1. Concept.
2. Pilot.
3. Evaluation. bad: Return to 1, or continue to 4.
4. Real world trial.
5. Evaluation. bad: Return to 1, or continue to 6.
6. Implementation
7. Fine-tuning
5. Evaluation. bad: Return to 7, or continue to 8.
8. Maintenance
How Things Work in Australia
1. Concept.
2. Real world trial.
3. Public relations debacle. bad: Return to 2, or continue to 4.
4. Implementation.
5. Drink beer.
6. Maintenance.
As you can see, everything is going according to plan. Just check your boots before you leave the server room. -_-
ad 1) DNS is one of the few protocols where conciseness really REALLY matters. DNS attempts to answer requests in one UDP packet to avoid the overhead of establishing a connection. Elliptic curve keys are smaller than RSA keys of the same strength. The choice of 1024bit RSA keys for DNSSEC is a compromise (pardon the pun), which isn't necessary with elliptic curve cryptography.
I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the technical merits; I'm pointing out a flaw in the political actions of this coalition. Commercial coalitions form when there's money at stake and very often the technical issues are rapidly effaced in favor of how much has been invested in a particular solution. Witness VHS v. Betamax. I'm saying that we (as internet users and administrators) should support an open and transparent process that involves all interested parties, and that all viable options are given equal consideration.
Okay, a few things;
1. This Bernstein guy is pushing a new crypto algorithm. Why is it necessary to use a new one when old ones have been demonstrated to be effective and secure? It seems imprudent to use a new and largely untested algorithm to patch critical infrastructure. His reputation should not be a deciding or even motivating factor in the adoption of a new algorithm; Isn't the standard process to submit it to the IETF or similar organization to have it ratified first?
2. Industry coalitions are great, but this seems to be an attempt to create a new de facto standard controlled by a few large corporate interests, most of which are based in the United States. Isn't this kind of organization exactly what ICANN was created to avoid (I'm side-stepping the controversy surrounding them here)?
It seems to me they're rushing headlong toward a solution to solve a problem that hasn't yet made a major impact (though the potential for exploitation is substantial), and there is great potential to create an even larger problem here. This is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to be avoided when making infrastructure-level decisions about large, global networks. The Domain Name System is a global resource and an asset to every country on the planet. It is highly circumspect that those countries are presently without a voice in this transition.
the courts have already partially answered this question elsewhere -- the harm the comment can/has made to the reputation of the plaintiff must be substantial and demonstrated. In that case, they can ask the provider in that jurisdiction. Maryland cannot order, say, a New York ISP to do so. That must be resolved at the federal level. And nuts to him if the data he wants resides on an international system. Of course, whether those records exist, to what degree they can identify a specific person, etc., is not a trivial matter.
Ironically, the plaintiff is drawing more attention to this than it ever would have received had he not brought suit; He'd had been better off keeping his mouth shut. this may be a case of economic darwinism -- he's self-selecting himself into bankrupcy.
The coriolis effect is not a real force. It's an illusionary effect that happens when you have a moving point of reference. As to solar winds and stuff; can you be a little less vague. Let's say for a 10 meter thick cord, white color, how much force would be imparted on the cable over its length? Is the concept currently economical? No, and that's hardly news. Is it unstable and unworkable? Well... if you're pinning your conclusions something that doesn't actually exist to answer that, I think you might have a problem.
Opinions are not statements of fact, something that apparently escapes even the highest court in Maryland. Slander and libel are passing off false statements as fact. This is why in the newspaper you always hear about the alleged crime, or how the government may be involved in massive surveillance domestically, or that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field(tm) could be real.
Hopefully the court will realize that one person making his/her own opinion known in a public forum (anonymously or otherwise) does not constitute a malicious attempt to degrade the reputation of another. If not, we may have to bump Florida from the 2008 dumbest judiciary system award.