Wrong profile linked. Correct profile. Stupid misclick. Ugh. In other news, his background is not a software developer, but a network admin with some cisco experience. Like many in that area of IT, there is some exposure to security. I wouldn't call him an expert in MIM attacks, but he's not a layperson either.
What are this guy's credentials apart from being a guy with a blog?
He's a software developer, mostly focusing on database integration. He has no professional security experience beyond what you'd get in that role. source
what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon?
You can't opt out of it; The platform is locked. Also, it's a cell phone, so there's a strong link between all internet traffic and a realworld identity. This isn't like Opera or Amazon, for which there are anonymizing options available to the enterprising individuals who wish to use said services (or don't, it's their choice).
I would hope that Opera/Amazon/Nokia are atleast as credible as your ISP though it's an additional point of failure.
these services are a god send, especially with a lot of sites moving to HTTPS by default.
HTTP/SSL was originally meant to ensure only the two parties involved in the transaction (your client and the remote website) would be aware of its contents, preventing man in the middle attacks. By adding proxies, redirects, etc., the entire point of the protocol is destroyed. It's like password protecting your wifi connection with "letmein" -- bad security is in some cases worse than no security because people think the connection is secure when it most certainly is not.
I'm not sure what you mean by "credible" in this context, as you mention no specific claims any of these three are making, nor offer any reason why we should (or should not) trust whatever reputations these companies may have with regards to said claim. Can you elaborate?
Because some people have a sense of dignity and object to being treated like cattle.
If these hypothetical people equate RFID badges to the undignified and bovine because it might allow someone to track their movements, I can only assume they also don't work at any place that requires keycards or ID badges for entry (most are RFID-based), carry no credit cards, have no plans on ever leaving the country (passport), don't own a cell phone, do not drive a car (automated number plate recognition), only buy from an increasingly-limited number of stores who don't embed RFID tags in their products for inventory control, and in the near future will have to avoid taking certain drugs (RFID-tagged pills on things like pain medication, etc., for medication management is in the works)...
Pray tell, where do these hypothetical people live, with the Amish? RFID is everywhere. It is a pervasive technology, and until someone suggested tagging high schoolers with them, nobody's sense of dignity and bovinity was called into question. I suspect there's a sense of something here that's driving most people who have a problem with this -- but it's not dignity.
No, it just means that the astronomers are using the telescope that doesn't have the mirror with the words "objects are closer than they appear" on it.
Isn't the whole point of a telescope to make exactly that happen? Maybe they're just holding it backwards.
I don't know how calling someone a "fascist boot-licker" got modded anything but troll, but let me spell it out for you and the idiot mods that bumped you: I'm not saying that charging him with disorderly conduct was the right response either. Go re-read my post again, I'll wait. What I said was that if the officer is dead-set on getting this guy's camera away from him, a disorderly conduct charge would be a lot better than trumped up "HIPPA violation, obstruction of justice, blah blah." The legal system is a crap shoot and it's possible one of those charges might stick -- and even if they don't he's still out a lot of time and money defending it. It's also terrible publicity. Disorderly conduct charges don't make the news and they don't screw up your employment. You're not ruining someone's life with a disorderly conduct charge. You're aiming to hurt someone pretty good when you slap them with obstruction of justice.
All I'm doing here is pointing out that there were lesser evils to choose from. That does not make me a "fascist boot-licker", it makes me a practical person who understands that cops are people too and if I had to deal with assholes everyday, I might just feel an urge to drag one through the mud every now and then, especially if they're blathering on about their right to be there and how you're being an asshole for rendering medical aid to a mentally ill person. Does that make it right? No. Do I understand it? Fuck yes.
That orbital perturbation is random & would simply not be predictable.
Not exactly. It's passing by earth again in another 15 years or so -- and its orbit has to pass through a very small space in order for Earth's gravity to alter it just that tiny smidge so that over the following 15 years, that few thousands of a degree change due to gravitational pull will close that 22,364 mile gap. It has to be spot on -- if the vector is even slightly off, it'll either get slingshot out of the solar system (or into one of the outer planets), or into the Sun.
While you're right that the energy required to move the asteroid into a collision path is low, it has to be the precise amount, and at the precise vector. A random preturbation has a very low chance of being at both the correct energy level, and at the correct vector. And even many such random preturbations still wouldn't alter the orbit enough that if we looked for it on its next approach in a very narrow region of the sky, we couldn't find it. Which means we'll know its coming, and we'll have several years' warning to take action. I just hope they can clone Bruce Willis before then.
Now if work places started using badges to monitor how long everyone was at their workspace then you'd certainly see a lot of objections to that spring up.
Yes, we're certainly fortunate your employer doesn't know whether or even when you're at work. Such a technological advancement would never be tolerated.
Recall what the 'free' laptops with webcams did in US schools?
Just wait until this guy finds out what teenagers do with the ones their parents paid for. In other news, sometimes people drink and drive. The solution is therefore to ban cars. Sometimes people shoot other people. Solution? Ban guns. And sometimes, very rarely, people on the internet say stupid things. Obviously... we need to ban the internet too. Or perhaps we should just accept that sometimes people do stupid things, and rather than punish everybody, we just punish the stupid people. Unless of course children are involved, in which case, feel free to go bat shiat crazy. It's the popular thing to do right now. I'm looking at you, Obama.
Yup. The accounting scheme by which schools are funded. It's not based on the number of students attending a school, but the number of seat hours. RFID offers a better way of tracking students while they're on campus, which in turn increases the number of seat hours while holding down the costs of keeping detailed attendance records. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with tracking students. You know those little ID batches you have to wear to work (office workers everywhere know this)? Same technology. Adults do it all the time, and nobody complains about how MegaCorp Inc is watching where they're going once they're off work because they're carrying an RFID card. Your credit card probably has an RFID too. Your cell phone may even have one. The crap you buy at the superstore... yup, there too.
But stick it on a kid and suddenly everyone goes full retard. As if.
They may disarm the citizen, but I doubt even obtaining the weapon makes him more dangerous. All these guys come loaded for bear anyway, it's not like one extra gun is going to make them feel better when they already have three.
Oh comeon, let the man have his moment. He probably thinks a terrorist cares that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces too.
That, combined with destruction of the evidence, does not remotely sound like honest belief in a HIPAA violation by an expert person knowledgeable in medical-industry practices.
Correct. An expert knows not to leave witnesses, or evidence, but if there simply must be one or the other, to ship it overseas, write a bunch of CYA policy documentation, and then blame "the other guy" when caught.
First, it's an opinion article. Second, Editor's note: Jeremy Shane, who served in the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. It's right there under the headline. Heeeeere's your sign.
Quite possibly the dumbest article I've ever seen.
Gunman walks into school, opens fire. Citizen nearby with legal carry and conceal permit and gun responds. Raises gun to kill gunman as he's mowing down little children and... *click*. Nothing. Gunman blows away citzen, continues on his rampage. How could this have happened? Easy: The deranged lunatic took out the batteries. Sorry, Would-Be Citizen Hero And Families Of All Those Dead Kids, our bad.
People doing/saying things that you don't like, apparently.
Actually, if you bother to read the text of your average disorderly conduct statute, you'll find it's pretty vague and amounts to "disturbing the peace" or being a nuisance. It's used as a catch-all by police to get rid of someone causing trouble, but not necessarily causing damage or anything overtly illegal. As such, it's also usually a petty misdemeanor, meaning it doesn't show up on most criminal background checks (doesn't affect employment). Most of the time, the charges are dropped or "continued for dismissal" which is basically the judge saying "If you don't do anything stupid for the next N months, I'll dismiss the charges."
Now, you can get angry, call me a "boot licking facist" like the another poster did, or you can recognize that the main duty of law enforcement is to protect the peace and maintain the standards of their community. Maybe we've drifted from that, but that's a topic for another day. In this case... the police officer may have just wanted to give the poor bastard being hauled away in an ambulance some privacy and the camera-toting citizen decided to give some attitude over an otherwise polite request. The article doesn't say.
I give people the benefit of the doubt, even police officers. But, don't let my middle of the road approach stop you (or anyone else) from having a king sized bitch fest over police brutality and trolololo all that.
Supposedly the evidence was deleted from the camera while in police custody.
This is obviously a case of the police not knowing the law (shocker, I know). I think the officers meant well enough -- I mean, how would you like the worst day of your life being thrown up on YouTube by some paparazzi? But they handled this very badly. I would be willing to bet that if the police had simply approached the guy and said, "Look man, this guy's had a rough night and he doesn't need video of it showing up on the internet. Unless you think there's a crime happening here, could you please delete the footage? I think this guy deserves a little respect," that the guy would have complied. Unless of course he's a total douche, in which case that's what disorderly conduct is for, and the police, while still wrong, could have simply taken him to jail, had his possessions surrendered, and then deleted the footage and released him after booking.
There are good ways, bad ways, and terrible ways, to handle these sorts of issues. I think it's obvious here which one they picked.
It's also a sign of a stagnant industry/marketplace. Needs change as circumstances change, and if the software doesn't change with the customer, it tends to disappear.
IBM is still selling mainframes. Your argument is invalid.
And your complaining about the mainstream version of Firefox while ignoring the existence of the enterprise version of Firefox makes your argument disingenuous.
I'm well aware of it. It has support for all of... 1 year. Also, to quote directly from the same page: "Backports of any functional enhancements and/or stability fixes are not in scope."
So, who's being more disingenuous here... the person who makes the argument that "release early, release often" may not be suitable for all applications, or the guy that handwaves the argument, claims a lie of omission, and then makes a lie of omission of his own? Stupid facts, getting in the way of a good internet roasting...
This is bullshit. Many folks I know personally at Microsoft sport Macbook Pros (running Windows mostly). Not sure about the phone thing, but if it runs Windows, it's definitely kosher.
*facepalm* *headdesk* *strangles self with mouse cord*
You never noticed that just about all *nix commands reads input from a file (without any arguments to point out the file)?
Yes, but that's beside the point. All of this comes down to bitching about style... and frankly, I could give a damn about style. Does it work? Good! That's all that matters.
And your narrow-mindedness is annoying. Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems? Because corporate environments can become violently ill when something is updated without it being tested first. You call it whining and say your customers are backward, but I see customers that prefer to not jump in head first into a pool they can't see the bottom of. That's why Chrome, Firefox, etc., aren't the most-used browsers.
Hell, even Linux has a stable and development branch. With Firefox, the stable branch might as well be the development branch. Plugins become outdated with every new release because they changed something in the API, or the way this feature works, or what that variable contains.
And for the record, a product that doesn't need to be updated is something some programmers strive for: It means they've made something that does its job so well there's no need to change it. That's not whining: That's damn good engineering.
Seriously, were y'all drunk when you came up with that name? It conjures up images of some kind of celestial primate flinging high energy particles about. Firefox at least sounds like something that could be found frolicing about in heavily wooded areas.
for i = 0; i++; i But more seriously, when you get used to pipes in UNIX, you'll do this too. Everyone does because like many UNIX commands, 'cat' is dead simple and easier to remember than whether it was -f or --file or --directory or consulting the man page to figure out what will convince the next command (in this case, grep) to read one or more files. So stop flogging a decades-dead horse and just smile and enjoy the geeky 1UP.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong profile linked. Correct profile. Stupid misclick. Ugh. In other news, his background is not a software developer, but a network admin with some cisco experience. Like many in that area of IT, there is some exposure to security. I wouldn't call him an expert in MIM attacks, but he's not a layperson either.
What are this guy's credentials apart from being a guy with a blog?
He's a software developer, mostly focusing on database integration. He has no professional security experience beyond what you'd get in that role. source
what's with this jumping on the Nokia hate bandwagon?
You can't opt out of it; The platform is locked. Also, it's a cell phone, so there's a strong link between all internet traffic and a realworld identity. This isn't like Opera or Amazon, for which there are anonymizing options available to the enterprising individuals who wish to use said services (or don't, it's their choice).
I would hope that Opera/Amazon/Nokia are atleast as credible as your ISP though it's an additional point of failure.
these services are a god send, especially with a lot of sites moving to HTTPS by default.
HTTP/SSL was originally meant to ensure only the two parties involved in the transaction (your client and the remote website) would be aware of its contents, preventing man in the middle attacks. By adding proxies, redirects, etc., the entire point of the protocol is destroyed. It's like password protecting your wifi connection with "letmein" -- bad security is in some cases worse than no security because people think the connection is secure when it most certainly is not.
I'm not sure what you mean by "credible" in this context, as you mention no specific claims any of these three are making, nor offer any reason why we should (or should not) trust whatever reputations these companies may have with regards to said claim. Can you elaborate?
Because some people have a sense of dignity and object to being treated like cattle.
If these hypothetical people equate RFID badges to the undignified and bovine because it might allow someone to track their movements, I can only assume they also don't work at any place that requires keycards or ID badges for entry (most are RFID-based), carry no credit cards, have no plans on ever leaving the country (passport), don't own a cell phone, do not drive a car (automated number plate recognition), only buy from an increasingly-limited number of stores who don't embed RFID tags in their products for inventory control, and in the near future will have to avoid taking certain drugs (RFID-tagged pills on things like pain medication, etc., for medication management is in the works)...
Pray tell, where do these hypothetical people live, with the Amish? RFID is everywhere. It is a pervasive technology, and until someone suggested tagging high schoolers with them, nobody's sense of dignity and bovinity was called into question. I suspect there's a sense of something here that's driving most people who have a problem with this -- but it's not dignity.
No, it just means that the astronomers are using the telescope that doesn't have the mirror with the words "objects are closer than they appear" on it.
Isn't the whole point of a telescope to make exactly that happen? Maybe they're just holding it backwards.
I don't know how calling someone a "fascist boot-licker" got modded anything but troll, but let me spell it out for you and the idiot mods that bumped you: I'm not saying that charging him with disorderly conduct was the right response either. Go re-read my post again, I'll wait. What I said was that if the officer is dead-set on getting this guy's camera away from him, a disorderly conduct charge would be a lot better than trumped up "HIPPA violation, obstruction of justice, blah blah." The legal system is a crap shoot and it's possible one of those charges might stick -- and even if they don't he's still out a lot of time and money defending it. It's also terrible publicity. Disorderly conduct charges don't make the news and they don't screw up your employment. You're not ruining someone's life with a disorderly conduct charge. You're aiming to hurt someone pretty good when you slap them with obstruction of justice.
All I'm doing here is pointing out that there were lesser evils to choose from. That does not make me a "fascist boot-licker", it makes me a practical person who understands that cops are people too and if I had to deal with assholes everyday, I might just feel an urge to drag one through the mud every now and then, especially if they're blathering on about their right to be there and how you're being an asshole for rendering medical aid to a mentally ill person. Does that make it right? No. Do I understand it? Fuck yes.
That orbital perturbation is random & would simply not be predictable.
Not exactly. It's passing by earth again in another 15 years or so -- and its orbit has to pass through a very small space in order for Earth's gravity to alter it just that tiny smidge so that over the following 15 years, that few thousands of a degree change due to gravitational pull will close that 22,364 mile gap. It has to be spot on -- if the vector is even slightly off, it'll either get slingshot out of the solar system (or into one of the outer planets), or into the Sun.
While you're right that the energy required to move the asteroid into a collision path is low, it has to be the precise amount, and at the precise vector. A random preturbation has a very low chance of being at both the correct energy level, and at the correct vector. And even many such random preturbations still wouldn't alter the orbit enough that if we looked for it on its next approach in a very narrow region of the sky, we couldn't find it. Which means we'll know its coming, and we'll have several years' warning to take action. I just hope they can clone Bruce Willis before then.
Now if work places started using badges to monitor how long everyone was at their workspace then you'd certainly see a lot of objections to that spring up.
Yes, we're certainly fortunate your employer doesn't know whether or even when you're at work. Such a technological advancement would never be tolerated.
Assuming that children and teachers don't conspire to arrange for a perfect attendance, discrepancies should catch either side gaming the measurement.
That depends on children, teenagers and government employees being honest.
Besides, it's nothing that can't be solved with a suitable application of Faraday cages ;-)
That'll make the parents who insist wifi and cell phones are making them sick happy, atleast...
Recall what the 'free' laptops with webcams did in US schools?
Just wait until this guy finds out what teenagers do with the ones their parents paid for. In other news, sometimes people drink and drive. The solution is therefore to ban cars. Sometimes people shoot other people. Solution? Ban guns. And sometimes, very rarely, people on the internet say stupid things. Obviously... we need to ban the internet too. Or perhaps we should just accept that sometimes people do stupid things, and rather than punish everybody, we just punish the stupid people. Unless of course children are involved, in which case, feel free to go bat shiat crazy. It's the popular thing to do right now. I'm looking at you, Obama.
Does this mean we need to prepare for a Goa'uld invasion?
No. Antarctica is melting at an unprecidented rate. It's only a matter of time before they discover the research station the Ancients left behind.
Is there something I've missed?
Yup. The accounting scheme by which schools are funded. It's not based on the number of students attending a school, but the number of seat hours. RFID offers a better way of tracking students while they're on campus, which in turn increases the number of seat hours while holding down the costs of keeping detailed attendance records. It actually has absolutely nothing to do with tracking students. You know those little ID batches you have to wear to work (office workers everywhere know this)? Same technology. Adults do it all the time, and nobody complains about how MegaCorp Inc is watching where they're going once they're off work because they're carrying an RFID card. Your credit card probably has an RFID too. Your cell phone may even have one. The crap you buy at the superstore... yup, there too.
But stick it on a kid and suddenly everyone goes full retard. As if.
They may disarm the citizen, but I doubt even obtaining the weapon makes him more dangerous. All these guys come loaded for bear anyway, it's not like one extra gun is going to make them feel better when they already have three.
Oh comeon, let the man have his moment. He probably thinks a terrorist cares that his car bomb is taking up two parking spaces too.
That, combined with destruction of the evidence, does not remotely sound like honest belief in a HIPAA violation by an expert person knowledgeable in medical-industry practices.
Correct. An expert knows not to leave witnesses, or evidence, but if there simply must be one or the other, to ship it overseas, write a bunch of CYA policy documentation, and then blame "the other guy" when caught.
From CNN, what did you expect?
First, it's an opinion article. Second, Editor's note: Jeremy Shane, who served in the Justice Department during the George H.W. Bush administration. It's right there under the headline. Heeeeere's your sign.
Quite possibly the dumbest article I've ever seen.
Gunman walks into school, opens fire. Citizen nearby with legal carry and conceal permit and gun responds. Raises gun to kill gunman as he's mowing down little children and... *click*. Nothing. Gunman blows away citzen, continues on his rampage. How could this have happened? Easy: The deranged lunatic took out the batteries. Sorry, Would-Be Citizen Hero And Families Of All Those Dead Kids, our bad.
People doing/saying things that you don't like, apparently.
Actually, if you bother to read the text of your average disorderly conduct statute, you'll find it's pretty vague and amounts to "disturbing the peace" or being a nuisance. It's used as a catch-all by police to get rid of someone causing trouble, but not necessarily causing damage or anything overtly illegal. As such, it's also usually a petty misdemeanor, meaning it doesn't show up on most criminal background checks (doesn't affect employment). Most of the time, the charges are dropped or "continued for dismissal" which is basically the judge saying "If you don't do anything stupid for the next N months, I'll dismiss the charges."
Now, you can get angry, call me a "boot licking facist" like the another poster did, or you can recognize that the main duty of law enforcement is to protect the peace and maintain the standards of their community. Maybe we've drifted from that, but that's a topic for another day. In this case... the police officer may have just wanted to give the poor bastard being hauled away in an ambulance some privacy and the camera-toting citizen decided to give some attitude over an otherwise polite request. The article doesn't say.
I give people the benefit of the doubt, even police officers. But, don't let my middle of the road approach stop you (or anyone else) from having a king sized bitch fest over police brutality and trolololo all that.
Supposedly the evidence was deleted from the camera while in police custody.
This is obviously a case of the police not knowing the law (shocker, I know). I think the officers meant well enough -- I mean, how would you like the worst day of your life being thrown up on YouTube by some paparazzi? But they handled this very badly. I would be willing to bet that if the police had simply approached the guy and said, "Look man, this guy's had a rough night and he doesn't need video of it showing up on the internet. Unless you think there's a crime happening here, could you please delete the footage? I think this guy deserves a little respect," that the guy would have complied. Unless of course he's a total douche, in which case that's what disorderly conduct is for, and the police, while still wrong, could have simply taken him to jail, had his possessions surrendered, and then deleted the footage and released him after booking.
There are good ways, bad ways, and terrible ways, to handle these sorts of issues. I think it's obvious here which one they picked.
It's also a sign of a stagnant industry/marketplace. Needs change as circumstances change, and if the software doesn't change with the customer, it tends to disappear.
IBM is still selling mainframes. Your argument is invalid.
And your complaining about the mainstream version of Firefox while ignoring the existence of the enterprise version of Firefox makes your argument disingenuous.
I'm well aware of it. It has support for all of... 1 year. Also, to quote directly from the same page: "Backports of any functional enhancements and/or stability fixes are not in scope."
So, who's being more disingenuous here... the person who makes the argument that "release early, release often" may not be suitable for all applications, or the guy that handwaves the argument, claims a lie of omission, and then makes a lie of omission of his own? Stupid facts, getting in the way of a good internet roasting...
Dear Google,
How do you plan on overcoming internet dropping out for blocks around everytime someone wants to make some hot pockets?
Sincerely,
Unregulated Spectrum
This is bullshit. Many folks I know personally at Microsoft sport Macbook Pros (running Windows mostly). Not sure about the phone thing, but if it runs Windows, it's definitely kosher.
*facepalm* *headdesk* *strangles self with mouse cord*
You never noticed that just about all *nix commands reads input from a file (without any arguments to point out the file)?
Yes, but that's beside the point. All of this comes down to bitching about style... and frankly, I could give a damn about style. Does it work? Good! That's all that matters.
Honestly, your whining is counterproductive.
And your narrow-mindedness is annoying. Do you know why Microsoft only releases patches once a month for its operating systems? Because corporate environments can become violently ill when something is updated without it being tested first. You call it whining and say your customers are backward, but I see customers that prefer to not jump in head first into a pool they can't see the bottom of. That's why Chrome, Firefox, etc., aren't the most-used browsers.
Hell, even Linux has a stable and development branch. With Firefox, the stable branch might as well be the development branch. Plugins become outdated with every new release because they changed something in the API, or the way this feature works, or what that variable contains.
And for the record, a product that doesn't need to be updated is something some programmers strive for: It means they've made something that does its job so well there's no need to change it. That's not whining: That's damn good engineering.
Seriously, were y'all drunk when you came up with that name? It conjures up images of some kind of celestial primate flinging high energy particles about. Firefox at least sounds like something that could be found frolicing about in heavily wooded areas.
You earned yourself a Useless Use of Cat Award!
for i = 0; i++; i But more seriously, when you get used to pipes in UNIX, you'll do this too. Everyone does because like many UNIX commands, 'cat' is dead simple and easier to remember than whether it was -f or --file or --directory or consulting the man page to figure out what will convince the next command (in this case, grep) to read one or more files. So stop flogging a decades-dead horse and just smile and enjoy the geeky 1UP.