Was the botnet doing anything bad? Or was it just making Tor faster for everyone?
Actually, it shit up the network so badly that Tor developers considered it effectively a DDoS attack. During the peak of the infection, the network was effectively unusable, with latencies exceeding that of the typical TCP connection timeout of 120 seconds. As it turns out, using an anonymizing network doesn't translate into knowing how to build a network-aware application that doesn't stomp on its own dick so hard that the only thing the bot-net ever appears to have done was shit up the Tor network -- it does not appear it was ever activated in any meaningful capacity because the botnet owner, having shit the network it connected to, wasn't able to actually send commands to the majority of clients.
"If this post is marked Troll, I pissed off a fanboy again." Or maybe you made a snarky post falsely implying Apple doesn't do exactly the same thing, even though they do?
Except they don't. Plug in an iPhone and it'll immediately dump its guts to whatever its connected to without requiring interaction with the device itself. It does this by default. Android does not.
That's the way I've done it, or else just using the word "near" (e.g. "Catholic confessionals near bars of questionable repute").
Google found 1920 results.
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Maybe its because you can simply pull up an area on the map and type what you are looking for in the search bar (i.e. restaurants) and essentially get the same result.
So maybe, and maybe so far... here's a probably: Because it's not generating enough revenue.I don't know why people seem to forget that google is a corporation and their main products are services... so funding these things is sorta important. They aren't a charity.
The Constitution defines what is criminal and what is not.
The Constitution, by its own verbiage, is to be interpreted by the Supreme Court and subject to modification at any time by Congress. As such, it means whatever they say it does, not what you say it does.
If you wish to quibble about whether they're "right" or "wrong" in their interpretations, there's a social club for that -- they meet every friday down at the bar when they aren't shitting up internet forums the world 'round. But they're the ones that say what is "legal" and what is "illegal", not you or me.
I think steganography is far more likely to be used to track the people who leak information.
You've got the right idea, but you're not connecting all the pieces of the puzzle to answer how. Allow me: You know that massive data center the NSA is building to basically "download the internet"? Well, as it turns out, the overwhelming amount of traffic on the internet is just a copy of something else. Translation: If you compressed it you'd get some amazing compression rates. Here's the thing about steganography that is going to fuck most people who try to use it: If they ever find the original file that you used pre-stego, a simple binary comparison will reveal the alteration. In other words, if you use any publicly available image, document, etc., and then "stego" it... an adversary like the NSA can programically detect this. Plausible deniability goes right out the window.
The increased availability of the technology will likely mean smaller companies or government agencies will use it to suppress leaks.
This is something separate from steganography. What you're talking about is watermarking, and it's something color printers already do -- the serial number, username, time, etc., is encoded in yellow microdots on all pages. It was originally implimented to assist in anti-counterfeiting measures, but has since expanded to cover "national security" interests. And by that, I mean tracking down political undesireables and neutralizing them.
I don't see how an app could get data to a computer from a locked Android device unless the app managed to get itself root, or there was some other trick to break into the Android device (physical dumping the RAM), and if an attacker is that sophisticated, pretty much what an app tries to do for security is pointless.
That doesn't seem terribly convenient. Why don't they do it like Apple does?/snark
Indeed. As the US government operates outside of its constitutional limits, it can only be considered a criminal organization.
Since it defines what is and isn't criminal it cannot, by definition, be a criminal organization. What it can be is unethical, immoral, corrupt, incompetent, unjust, and moronic... but it can't be illegal. People often confuse the word "criminal" with the concept of the "bad person". Ethics and morality have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the law. The law is about order. Ethics and morality is about justice. And our justice system has as much to do with actual justice as the military has to do with "peace" keeping.
In every society in which the rule of law has existed for more than a couple generations, it has been corrupted to prioritize order over justice -- and order is another way of saying "remove malcontents and political undesireables". Principally, in an industrialized society these will be young males under the age of 35 who are unemployed, under-employed, sexually frustrated, mentally ill, not eligible for meat grinder service or otherwise producing wealth for the already-wealthy.
Eventually, the law reaches the point where everyone can be a criminal, that the law itself has become and inaccessible bureauacracy, and every action can be rationalized as legal. That point is now, in the UK, the US, and indeed, most of Europe and much of eastern Asia. Every major empire has a historical record of its citizens complaining about overly dense laws and regulations, from modern times all the way back to the Roman Empire, and fragments of literature suggesting an intractable bureaucracy that appeared to randomly punish people as far back as the Akkadian Empire (for the iPod generation, that's about 2300 BC, or about the time Al Gore invented the internet and Jesus rode around on primitive loldinocats).
My point in all this is, it's not a new problem. Arguably, it isn't even a problem: It is in fact the natural progression of all empires and countries. But have hope: It's a sure sign that the civilization has passed its epoch. Within the next 50-100 years, western civilization will start to deteriorate back to a feudalistic-capitalistic hybrid where destitution, slavery, debtors prisons, and constant warfare again become the norm... and eventually the people will rebel, the world will burn, and out of the ashes a new civilization will rise up, and our grandchildren will enjoy a period of relative peace and prosperity.
A kilogram is straightforwardly defined as 2.20462 pounds. Simple enough.
Yeah right! There's over a dozen different definitions for the "pound". You're citing the intuitively named international avoirdupois pound designation. Unfortunately, your own definition is over a century out of date! The Mendenhall Order of 1893 defined it as 2.20462... but the following year, someone got their hands on a British kilogram and it was redefined to be 2.20462234.
And where-fore did the previous pound measurement come from, before it was normalized to the kilogram? Why, the weight of 120 Arabic silver dirhams, found in some king's dingy treasury of course! Not to be outdone, the previous definition was based on the average weight of a pile of wheat traded in the town of Troy.
You would have done better with the technologies at hand at the time how?
You would have practiced science using methodologies nearly a century out of date when? See that's the thing about science -- it's supposed to change in response to new data. And it usually does, except for some of our basic units of measurement, which remain stubbornly stuck in the past. That's why it's an embarassment. The whooshing sound you heard is the point sailing over your head.
But that argument would indicate that EA and its subsidiaries behave just like drug dealers and pimps! Oh, right... Carry on!
Please don't compare EA with drug dealers and pimps. Both usually provide exactly what is promised; drugs, or sex. EA can't meet that standard, not by a long shot. When you buy drugs, or a girl for the night, you usually get to do what you want... not guilted at every turn and told you can't be trusted, and that instead of forking over $50 you'll be forked over for about $500,000 and a 7 year jail sentence for "piracy" because your DVD got scratched and you used a backup copy... for shame.
I never said that. Geeze, way to overblow and misconstrue things to get your opinions heard.
You're the one that "overblew" and "misconstrued" things to get your opinion heard. All I did was lay out the logical conclusions your opinion lead to. You're an asshole. It's okay, most people are; having sympathy and empathy for others is outdated a notion as chastity in today's culture. Be proud of your inner douchebag! It makes you decidedly average.
It does not, however, make you right, nor does it encourage any hope for the future. Any old idiot can shit on others and call themselves great... but it takes a genius to see the worth and value in others, when others cannot.
Years ago, I read about a study in which researchers tried to determine what type of music would make cows produce the most milk. They tried all the common genres, from classical to hard rock, but didn't find any clear winner. However, they found that the cows produced slightly more milk when the type of music was changed.
This is an excellent analysis, but it has one small flaw: It's more complex than another equally-valid analysis... that monkey boy is incompetent. Microsoft is directionless, without vision of any kind. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was its main business strategy before, but it did branch out frequently, and had just enough successes amongst the piles of failure to keep growing. But now, it's like Hollywood: It's just endless sequels and formulaic responses. This is a clear signal of a risk-averse culture within Microsoft. In IT, this is basically consigning yourself to a slow death. Ballmer has never shown that he has any ability to innovate; that is, to break away from formula and paradigm. He is a manager's manager. Gates, at least, had some grasp of the technology... he could "smell" a good idea. Ballmer lacks such insight.
In applying Occam's Razor to corporate strategy, or indeed to any bureauacracy, the simplest explanation for a failure is usually incompetent leadership. You're suggesting that this was intelligent and directed action... but reading and hearing most of what people have had to say about Windows 8 suggests to me that little thought went into it, and even less consultation with the users... it's difficult to imagine them going forward with the "metro" interface thinking it would be widely adopted by users, when so many of them violently rejected it. Was any user interaction study done at all on this prior to its release?
In 2015, EMV becomes required in the US. Those retailers who don't black box their card readers will be 100% liable for fraud at their point-of-sale (including stolen cards).
Retailers are 100% liable today. And that's the problem!
EMV offers no additional protection whatsoever in a card present scenario unless the customer is required to enter a PIN. Which as you know.. convenience blah blah, speed blah, reasons. And nobody will. Even "einstein" level smart chips are useless without a PIN. What EMV was designed to do is reverse the precident that banks are responsible for bearing the costs of fraud unless the customer can be proven to have been negligent. All EMV is, is an attempt by the industry to dial things back to the way they were pre-2009 -- which was where they could claim the systems were perfect and infallible, therefore all liability is with the customer. It took an act of Congress, also known as the FSA, to override the courts and provide relief to the customers.It's taken a lot of work on the down-low getting key positions in the Senate filled by sympathetic Republicans, but behold! EMV: Now the courts and congress can be fully aligned in their desire to screw over the customer. It's motto might as well be Enter your PIN: Assume full liability.
Also... I don't know what you think "black box" means, but merely separating the card swiper from the cashier's hands is not "black box" in IT; and that's all EMV does. In IT, black box means that the entire interface is subsumed into an external device, not networked, and not user-programmable, and it provides a pass/fail signal or similar. Retail will never, ever, go for this. Your name and zip code is embedded in the card; that's valuable marketing data. They're not going to reduce transactions to what would essentially be anonymous... this is just common sense.
So I'm going to have to slap on the cliche "Citation Needed" onto your assertion. EMV has but one purpose -- to deprive consumers of any recourse to fraud in a card-present scenario, and to reduce liability to the banks in a CNP scenario as well. Fraud is a multi-billion dollar industry, and businesses like fixed costs. Everything about card transactions is a fixed cost to the bank, except for fraud. Make the customer responsible, and now everything is nice and orderly.
What everybody is worried about is "losing their privacy" so that all the laws that they break on a regular basis might get enforced on them.
Close but no cigar. This has been a problem since the 1950s when the FBI engaged in numerous high-profile attacks against political undesireables, setting up constant surveillance. The simple truth is, everyone's a criminal. We always have been. The laws don't exist to promote fairness and justice, but order, and that's a very different thing than the first two. Order is essentially subservience to authority. Anyone who is different, atypical, abnormal, politically undesireable, a minority, poor, etc., is considered a blight upon the landscape of the perfectly ordered society and should be informed and then manipulated, exploited, or otherwise forced into ceasing to be visible in public. Law enforcement is not fair, or impartial, or anything else. It is highly biased, racist, and generally filled with first rate assholes... because frankly, that's what society wants.
The problem with the NSA is not the NSA. The problem with the NSA is our cultural attitudes, which the NSA is an institutionalized abstract of. We are, in a fashion, the reason for the NSA's existance and at the same time the target of its operations. If you look at it in terms of creating order (irrespective of the morality and ethics of said activity) then everything that's happening makes sense in a clear and straightforward fashion.
There's no need for conspiracies, no need to discuss liberty, no need for martyrs or heroes, no finger pointing about who is out of control, and who's not doing their job, etc., etc. It's all very simple: We created the problem. We just don't like the consequences. It's like this -- watch someone you don't like suffer, and you don't generally ask if it's fair. It's that feeling, motivation, and aspect of humanity, that has created all the problems referenced within.
"The bigs hit me, so I hit the littles. That's fair." -- Every bully. Ever.
Here we are talking about a welfare program that costs productive members of society money.
Yes. Money is clearly more important than things like being humane and decent.
The poor/dependent classes are just that, poor, dependent and unproductive.
Therefore we should simply kill them. Afterall, it would improve productivity and enhance cash flow.
You make it seem like we do it to get benefit from them, when in actual fact we don't get anything from them besides crime.
Yes. Every poor person is just a cesspool of crime with no redeeming qualities of any kind. All human beings can be judged solely by their bank account balance.
My point was that without the stamps the money for food would be more strained forcing the individual that was previously on food stamps to shop cheaper.
There's already been solid science done that poor diet actually causes a person's cognitive abilities to decrease, and reduces impulse control, aggression, etc. It's because high fat diets damage the neuronal sheath. It's speculative whether this is reversible or not, but it's clear that the poor literally cannot help themselves. Once you've been poor for too long, you're physically, biochemically, mentally rendered less capable of helping yourself out of your own situation by a substantial degree.
"They want to starve. There's plenty of jobs for them. They're just freeloaders... blah blah blah." It's all Conservative USDA-certified Prime Bullshit. The truth is a bit more sobering, and none too flattering: When you have a bunch of people whose brains have been scooped out and they no longer have good judgement or reasoning abilities... they're easy to manipulate and force into slavery. Just feed them endless amounts of cheap entertainment and drugs and you'll find happiness in slavery and destitution.
Frankly, it's been known since biblical times what poor diet does to people... it's just that we haven't been able to describe exactly how it happens until recently thanks to advancements in medicine. We want the poor to eat badly... because it keeps them poor, and exploitable.
I normally like and agree with your posts, but here you are pretty far off-base.
This just in: If somebody who you normally agree with disagrees with you, you should consider not reflexively assuming they're "pretty far off-base"... they may in fact have an equally valid position that simply isn't the same as yours.
I know everyone on slashdot wants to have Snowden's babies... but there are other opinions of him out there that are defensible. I don't think the NSA is out of control, I think Congress is.
According to the Census Bureau, there're about 115 million households in the US. Target has basically admitted that the theft amounts to their entire database.
*facepalm* A household is not the same as an individual. And most people own not one card, but an average of about 3.7. Currently, over 391 million credit card accounts exist in the United States. 115 million equals 29.4% of that. Further, I don't know what you consider "their entire database", since the census bureau tracks the number of households and other population data, not the number of valid credit card numbers Target has. But let's not quibble over details...
I'd like to think that this would mean the end of the credit reporting rackets; how can anybody even pretend any more that that data is meaningful when this sort of fraud is taking place?
Yes, let's just give up and go back to checks -- nobody ever committed fraud with those! Oh wait, they did? Umm, how about just cash transactions? Damn! Foiled again. Umm, gold? Wait, you can fake gold? How about the barter system? They got to that too? I guess I'll just have to move into the mountains, far away from any other person, and live off the land like our ancestors did, forsaking all advancements of civilization.
Or I could come up with some kind of social framework, something with a nice ring to it, like the Rule of Law. Sounds impressive. Let's go with that.
But I also wanted to think that the Snowden revelations would have meant the end of the NSA, so clearly I'm not somebody anybody is paying or should pay attention to.
You know, mentioning Snowden or the NSA in any reference to civil liberties or privacy should invoke some kind of response similar to Godwin'ing a thread. "You know who else liked data breaches..." Snowden didn't have any "revelations". The revelations were that there's a spy agency that (wait for it) spies on people. It's like saying Microsoft develops software is a revelation. And no, the NSA didn't just implode because some cheeky twenty-something dropped drawers and mooned them, anymore than Target's going to simply shutter up and crawl into a corner to die quietly in retail exile.
It may be exceedingly inconvenient that people can say and do stupid things with such regularity and suffer no long-term effects but that's about it. If you're expressing surprise or admonishment over this state of affairs, you clearly need to get out more.
This has nothing to do with the market in bitcoin speculation. It's about the fact that a majority of the cryptographic network (which is what bitcoin miners are) has to concur for a transaction (sending money to someone else) to be considered valid. When you control 51% of the computing power, you can start faking transactions.
Whether you own 1 dollar, or 1 billion dollars, you can order the same food at a McDonald's, pay for it, and then eat it, without ever worrying that the next person who shows up at the drive-thru will invalidate your transaction. And yet, we tolerate this kind of stupidity in crypto-currency. The only headlines bitcoin seems to make are multi-million dollar scams, and abstract new attacks that make what goes on in Wall Street look rather dull and ordinary by comparison. It seems the only reason to use bitcoin is out of fear. Maybe you're scared of the government. Maybe you're scared of banks. Whatever your motivation, it seems that if you're using bitcoin, it's mostly based on some kind of fear.
I could be using painted rocks and secure the currency better than bitcoin seems to be capable of; an irony no doubt since it was allegedly designed to use cryptography so strong and with protocols so resiliant that it would be "better" than physical currency.
Slashdot Mirror
Was the botnet doing anything bad? Or was it just making Tor faster for everyone?
Actually, it shit up the network so badly that Tor developers considered it effectively a DDoS attack. During the peak of the infection, the network was effectively unusable, with latencies exceeding that of the typical TCP connection timeout of 120 seconds. As it turns out, using an anonymizing network doesn't translate into knowing how to build a network-aware application that doesn't stomp on its own dick so hard that the only thing the bot-net ever appears to have done was shit up the Tor network -- it does not appear it was ever activated in any meaningful capacity because the botnet owner, having shit the network it connected to, wasn't able to actually send commands to the majority of clients.
Headline: NSA Collects 200 Million Text Messages Per Day
Translation: They're tracking about 5 teenagers.
You're definition is shallow.
ObSnark: Not as shallow as your grammar skills!
"If this post is marked Troll, I pissed off a fanboy again." Or maybe you made a snarky post falsely implying Apple doesn't do exactly the same thing, even though they do?
Except they don't. Plug in an iPhone and it'll immediately dump its guts to whatever its connected to without requiring interaction with the device itself. It does this by default. Android does not.
That's the way I've done it, or else just using the word "near" (e.g. "Catholic confessionals near bars of questionable repute").
Google found 1920 results.
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On January 3, 2014, the U.S. House of Representatives convened to start its second session of the 113th Congress. Speaker Boehner honoring President
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List of federal political sex scandals in the United States - Wikipedia ... ..... Gary Hart, Senator (D-CO): While seeking the Democratic nomination for president, Hart ...
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Maybe its because you can simply pull up an area on the map and type what you are looking for in the search bar (i.e. restaurants) and essentially get the same result.
So maybe, and maybe so far... here's a probably: Because it's not generating enough revenue.I don't know why people seem to forget that google is a corporation and their main products are services... so funding these things is sorta important. They aren't a charity.
The Constitution defines what is criminal and what is not.
The Constitution, by its own verbiage, is to be interpreted by the Supreme Court and subject to modification at any time by Congress. As such, it means whatever they say it does, not what you say it does.
If you wish to quibble about whether they're "right" or "wrong" in their interpretations, there's a social club for that -- they meet every friday down at the bar when they aren't shitting up internet forums the world 'round. But they're the ones that say what is "legal" and what is "illegal", not you or me.
I think steganography is far more likely to be used to track the people who leak information.
You've got the right idea, but you're not connecting all the pieces of the puzzle to answer how. Allow me: You know that massive data center the NSA is building to basically "download the internet"? Well, as it turns out, the overwhelming amount of traffic on the internet is just a copy of something else. Translation: If you compressed it you'd get some amazing compression rates. Here's the thing about steganography that is going to fuck most people who try to use it: If they ever find the original file that you used pre-stego, a simple binary comparison will reveal the alteration. In other words, if you use any publicly available image, document, etc., and then "stego" it... an adversary like the NSA can programically detect this. Plausible deniability goes right out the window.
The increased availability of the technology will likely mean smaller companies or government agencies will use it to suppress leaks.
This is something separate from steganography. What you're talking about is watermarking, and it's something color printers already do -- the serial number, username, time, etc., is encoded in yellow microdots on all pages. It was originally implimented to assist in anti-counterfeiting measures, but has since expanded to cover "national security" interests. And by that, I mean tracking down political undesireables and neutralizing them.
I almost modded that as Troll, but maybe it's insightful if decoded with a different key.
Iway on'tday inkthay it'sway anway encryptionway emeschay, utbay away ewnay anguagelay. Avehay ouyay iedtray unningray itway oughthray Ooglegay?
I don't see how an app could get data to a computer from a locked Android device unless the app managed to get itself root, or there was some other trick to break into the Android device (physical dumping the RAM), and if an attacker is that sophisticated, pretty much what an app tries to do for security is pointless.
That doesn't seem terribly convenient. Why don't they do it like Apple does? /snark
Indeed. As the US government operates outside of its constitutional limits, it can only be considered a criminal organization.
Since it defines what is and isn't criminal it cannot, by definition, be a criminal organization. What it can be is unethical, immoral, corrupt, incompetent, unjust, and moronic... but it can't be illegal. People often confuse the word "criminal" with the concept of the "bad person". Ethics and morality have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the law. The law is about order. Ethics and morality is about justice. And our justice system has as much to do with actual justice as the military has to do with "peace" keeping.
In every society in which the rule of law has existed for more than a couple generations, it has been corrupted to prioritize order over justice -- and order is another way of saying "remove malcontents and political undesireables". Principally, in an industrialized society these will be young males under the age of 35 who are unemployed, under-employed, sexually frustrated, mentally ill, not eligible for meat grinder service or otherwise producing wealth for the already-wealthy.
Eventually, the law reaches the point where everyone can be a criminal, that the law itself has become and inaccessible bureauacracy, and every action can be rationalized as legal. That point is now, in the UK, the US, and indeed, most of Europe and much of eastern Asia. Every major empire has a historical record of its citizens complaining about overly dense laws and regulations, from modern times all the way back to the Roman Empire, and fragments of literature suggesting an intractable bureaucracy that appeared to randomly punish people as far back as the Akkadian Empire (for the iPod generation, that's about 2300 BC, or about the time Al Gore invented the internet and Jesus rode around on primitive loldinocats).
My point in all this is, it's not a new problem. Arguably, it isn't even a problem: It is in fact the natural progression of all empires and countries. But have hope: It's a sure sign that the civilization has passed its epoch. Within the next 50-100 years, western civilization will start to deteriorate back to a feudalistic-capitalistic hybrid where destitution, slavery, debtors prisons, and constant warfare again become the norm... and eventually the people will rebel, the world will burn, and out of the ashes a new civilization will rise up, and our grandchildren will enjoy a period of relative peace and prosperity.
Humanity is cyclical.
A kilogram is straightforwardly defined as 2.20462 pounds. Simple enough.
Yeah right! There's over a dozen different definitions for the "pound". You're citing the intuitively named international avoirdupois pound designation. Unfortunately, your own definition is over a century out of date! The Mendenhall Order of 1893 defined it as 2.20462 ... but the following year, someone got their hands on a British kilogram and it was redefined to be 2.20462234.
And where-fore did the previous pound measurement come from, before it was normalized to the kilogram? Why, the weight of 120 Arabic silver dirhams, found in some king's dingy treasury of course! Not to be outdone, the previous definition was based on the average weight of a pile of wheat traded in the town of Troy.
It's all so simple!
You would have done better with the technologies at hand at the time how?
You would have practiced science using methodologies nearly a century out of date when? See that's the thing about science -- it's supposed to change in response to new data. And it usually does, except for some of our basic units of measurement, which remain stubbornly stuck in the past. That's why it's an embarassment. The whooshing sound you heard is the point sailing over your head.
I'm going to wait for Web 3.11 for Workgroups.
Yes... because having web apps where pressing 'cancel' on a login screen sounds like a great idea.
I'm calling it that, and I dont care if Fedora leaves it nameless.
A company that gives up naming its products is like a parent who gives up naming their children...
But that argument would indicate that EA and its subsidiaries behave just like drug dealers and pimps! Oh, right... Carry on!
Please don't compare EA with drug dealers and pimps. Both usually provide exactly what is promised; drugs, or sex. EA can't meet that standard, not by a long shot. When you buy drugs, or a girl for the night, you usually get to do what you want... not guilted at every turn and told you can't be trusted, and that instead of forking over $50 you'll be forked over for about $500,000 and a 7 year jail sentence for "piracy" because your DVD got scratched and you used a backup copy... for shame.
I never said that. Geeze, way to overblow and misconstrue things to get your opinions heard.
You're the one that "overblew" and "misconstrued" things to get your opinion heard. All I did was lay out the logical conclusions your opinion lead to. You're an asshole. It's okay, most people are; having sympathy and empathy for others is outdated a notion as chastity in today's culture. Be proud of your inner douchebag! It makes you decidedly average.
It does not, however, make you right, nor does it encourage any hope for the future. Any old idiot can shit on others and call themselves great... but it takes a genius to see the worth and value in others, when others cannot.
Years ago, I read about a study in which researchers tried to determine what type of music would make cows produce the most milk. They tried all the common genres, from classical to hard rock, but didn't find any clear winner. However, they found that the cows produced slightly more milk when the type of music was changed.
This is an excellent analysis, but it has one small flaw: It's more complex than another equally-valid analysis... that monkey boy is incompetent. Microsoft is directionless, without vision of any kind. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" was its main business strategy before, but it did branch out frequently, and had just enough successes amongst the piles of failure to keep growing. But now, it's like Hollywood: It's just endless sequels and formulaic responses. This is a clear signal of a risk-averse culture within Microsoft. In IT, this is basically consigning yourself to a slow death. Ballmer has never shown that he has any ability to innovate; that is, to break away from formula and paradigm. He is a manager's manager. Gates, at least, had some grasp of the technology... he could "smell" a good idea. Ballmer lacks such insight.
In applying Occam's Razor to corporate strategy, or indeed to any bureauacracy, the simplest explanation for a failure is usually incompetent leadership. You're suggesting that this was intelligent and directed action... but reading and hearing most of what people have had to say about Windows 8 suggests to me that little thought went into it, and even less consultation with the users... it's difficult to imagine them going forward with the "metro" interface thinking it would be widely adopted by users, when so many of them violently rejected it. Was any user interaction study done at all on this prior to its release?
In 2015, EMV becomes required in the US. Those retailers who don't black box their card readers will be 100% liable for fraud at their point-of-sale (including stolen cards).
Retailers are 100% liable today. And that's the problem!
EMV offers no additional protection whatsoever in a card present scenario unless the customer is required to enter a PIN. Which as you know.. convenience blah blah, speed blah, reasons. And nobody will. Even "einstein" level smart chips are useless without a PIN. What EMV was designed to do is reverse the precident that banks are responsible for bearing the costs of fraud unless the customer can be proven to have been negligent. All EMV is, is an attempt by the industry to dial things back to the way they were pre-2009 -- which was where they could claim the systems were perfect and infallible, therefore all liability is with the customer. It took an act of Congress, also known as the FSA, to override the courts and provide relief to the customers.It's taken a lot of work on the down-low getting key positions in the Senate filled by sympathetic Republicans, but behold! EMV: Now the courts and congress can be fully aligned in their desire to screw over the customer. It's motto might as well be Enter your PIN: Assume full liability.
Also... I don't know what you think "black box" means, but merely separating the card swiper from the cashier's hands is not "black box" in IT; and that's all EMV does. In IT, black box means that the entire interface is subsumed into an external device, not networked, and not user-programmable, and it provides a pass/fail signal or similar. Retail will never, ever, go for this. Your name and zip code is embedded in the card; that's valuable marketing data. They're not going to reduce transactions to what would essentially be anonymous... this is just common sense.
So I'm going to have to slap on the cliche "Citation Needed" onto your assertion. EMV has but one purpose -- to deprive consumers of any recourse to fraud in a card-present scenario, and to reduce liability to the banks in a CNP scenario as well. Fraud is a multi-billion dollar industry, and businesses like fixed costs. Everything about card transactions is a fixed cost to the bank, except for fraud. Make the customer responsible, and now everything is nice and orderly.
What everybody is worried about is "losing their privacy" so that all the laws that they break on a regular basis might get enforced on them.
Close but no cigar. This has been a problem since the 1950s when the FBI engaged in numerous high-profile attacks against political undesireables, setting up constant surveillance. The simple truth is, everyone's a criminal. We always have been. The laws don't exist to promote fairness and justice, but order, and that's a very different thing than the first two. Order is essentially subservience to authority. Anyone who is different, atypical, abnormal, politically undesireable, a minority, poor, etc., is considered a blight upon the landscape of the perfectly ordered society and should be informed and then manipulated, exploited, or otherwise forced into ceasing to be visible in public. Law enforcement is not fair, or impartial, or anything else. It is highly biased, racist, and generally filled with first rate assholes... because frankly, that's what society wants.
The problem with the NSA is not the NSA. The problem with the NSA is our cultural attitudes, which the NSA is an institutionalized abstract of. We are, in a fashion, the reason for the NSA's existance and at the same time the target of its operations. If you look at it in terms of creating order (irrespective of the morality and ethics of said activity) then everything that's happening makes sense in a clear and straightforward fashion.
There's no need for conspiracies, no need to discuss liberty, no need for martyrs or heroes, no finger pointing about who is out of control, and who's not doing their job, etc., etc. It's all very simple: We created the problem. We just don't like the consequences. It's like this -- watch someone you don't like suffer, and you don't generally ask if it's fair. It's that feeling, motivation, and aspect of humanity, that has created all the problems referenced within.
"The bigs hit me, so I hit the littles. That's fair."
-- Every bully. Ever.
Why would we want that?
Because we have a soul.
Here we are talking about a welfare program that costs productive members of society money.
Yes. Money is clearly more important than things like being humane and decent.
The poor/dependent classes are just that, poor, dependent and unproductive.
Therefore we should simply kill them. Afterall, it would improve productivity and enhance cash flow.
You make it seem like we do it to get benefit from them, when in actual fact we don't get anything from them besides crime.
Yes. Every poor person is just a cesspool of crime with no redeeming qualities of any kind. All human beings can be judged solely by their bank account balance.
My point was that without the stamps the money for food would be more strained forcing the individual that was previously on food stamps to shop cheaper.
There's already been solid science done that poor diet actually causes a person's cognitive abilities to decrease, and reduces impulse control, aggression, etc. It's because high fat diets damage the neuronal sheath. It's speculative whether this is reversible or not, but it's clear that the poor literally cannot help themselves. Once you've been poor for too long, you're physically, biochemically, mentally rendered less capable of helping yourself out of your own situation by a substantial degree.
"They want to starve. There's plenty of jobs for them. They're just freeloaders... blah blah blah." It's all Conservative USDA-certified Prime Bullshit. The truth is a bit more sobering, and none too flattering: When you have a bunch of people whose brains have been scooped out and they no longer have good judgement or reasoning abilities... they're easy to manipulate and force into slavery. Just feed them endless amounts of cheap entertainment and drugs and you'll find happiness in slavery and destitution.
Frankly, it's been known since biblical times what poor diet does to people... it's just that we haven't been able to describe exactly how it happens until recently thanks to advancements in medicine. We want the poor to eat badly... because it keeps them poor, and exploitable.
I normally like and agree with your posts, but here you are pretty far off-base.
This just in: If somebody who you normally agree with disagrees with you, you should consider not reflexively assuming they're "pretty far off-base"... they may in fact have an equally valid position that simply isn't the same as yours.
I know everyone on slashdot wants to have Snowden's babies... but there are other opinions of him out there that are defensible. I don't think the NSA is out of control, I think Congress is.
According to the Census Bureau, there're about 115 million households in the US. Target has basically admitted that the theft amounts to their entire database.
*facepalm* A household is not the same as an individual. And most people own not one card, but an average of about 3.7. Currently, over 391 million credit card accounts exist in the United States. 115 million equals 29.4% of that. Further, I don't know what you consider "their entire database", since the census bureau tracks the number of households and other population data, not the number of valid credit card numbers Target has. But let's not quibble over details...
I'd like to think that this would mean the end of the credit reporting rackets; how can anybody even pretend any more that that data is meaningful when this sort of fraud is taking place?
Yes, let's just give up and go back to checks -- nobody ever committed fraud with those! Oh wait, they did? Umm, how about just cash transactions? Damn! Foiled again. Umm, gold? Wait, you can fake gold? How about the barter system? They got to that too? I guess I'll just have to move into the mountains, far away from any other person, and live off the land like our ancestors did, forsaking all advancements of civilization.
Or I could come up with some kind of social framework, something with a nice ring to it, like the Rule of Law. Sounds impressive. Let's go with that.
But I also wanted to think that the Snowden revelations would have meant the end of the NSA, so clearly I'm not somebody anybody is paying or should pay attention to.
You know, mentioning Snowden or the NSA in any reference to civil liberties or privacy should invoke some kind of response similar to Godwin'ing a thread. "You know who else liked data breaches..." Snowden didn't have any "revelations". The revelations were that there's a spy agency that (wait for it) spies on people. It's like saying Microsoft develops software is a revelation. And no, the NSA didn't just implode because some cheeky twenty-something dropped drawers and mooned them, anymore than Target's going to simply shutter up and crawl into a corner to die quietly in retail exile.
It may be exceedingly inconvenient that people can say and do stupid things with such regularity and suffer no long-term effects but that's about it. If you're expressing surprise or admonishment over this state of affairs, you clearly need to get out more.
This has nothing to do with the market in bitcoin speculation. It's about the fact that a majority of the cryptographic network (which is what bitcoin miners are) has to concur for a transaction (sending money to someone else) to be considered valid. When you control 51% of the computing power, you can start faking transactions.
Whether you own 1 dollar, or 1 billion dollars, you can order the same food at a McDonald's, pay for it, and then eat it, without ever worrying that the next person who shows up at the drive-thru will invalidate your transaction. And yet, we tolerate this kind of stupidity in crypto-currency. The only headlines bitcoin seems to make are multi-million dollar scams, and abstract new attacks that make what goes on in Wall Street look rather dull and ordinary by comparison. It seems the only reason to use bitcoin is out of fear. Maybe you're scared of the government. Maybe you're scared of banks. Whatever your motivation, it seems that if you're using bitcoin, it's mostly based on some kind of fear.
I could be using painted rocks and secure the currency better than bitcoin seems to be capable of; an irony no doubt since it was allegedly designed to use cryptography so strong and with protocols so resiliant that it would be "better" than physical currency.