Plug in a fax machine. If they're using anything decent it will detect the fax signal and remove you from the calling.
A good idea in theory, but not in practice. They don't remove your number when detecting a fax machine at first. It takes multiple attempts; as you said, if they're using anything decent... then they know you're a residential line, and if they have no other phone number, it'll typically assume it's a dual-purpose line and keep you on the list.
These robo-dialers are listening for particular frequencies that are in the human vocal range -- that's why when you pick up and say hello there's a slight pause. That's because it is routing it to a person... they know that, say, only 1 in 50 will pickup, so they make 50 calls whenever someone becomes available.. and route the 1 that answers to the available rep.
Hanging a fax machine off the line will keep it from going to a person, but it won't get you dropped from the list; not if it's a residential line. now if it's your work phone... it'll probably do the job quite nicely.
There some problems with "largest country's economy" (or "largest country's economy"). From Wikipedia:
... And then there was a very long collection of wikipedia quotes, confirming that, indeed, America is still numero uno. One. Top dog. Best in class. Aced it. Nailed it. America - Fuck Yeah.
This is a tempest in a teapot? Oh hardly.
As far as the OP claiming this would result in military action, yes. We're not only the biggest economy on the planet, we also have the biggest military. Nobody's gonna fuck with us over some punk kid making public what every country on the planet already knew in private: We all spy on each other.
Given Snowden's background, it doesn't seem he has issues with divulging information.
Snowden no longer can be given credit for anything; He released everything he stole months ago. Everything else has been due to jockeying for position by other governments and politicians keen on gaining an economic or political edge over their opponents. Which is what they'd be doing anyway, since its their job.
The only thing Snowden still commands is his name. He's like a brand identity, like Coca-cola. Slap his name on everything, because that's what people recognize...
the end of an Empire or a WW soon? Russia must be loving this as the US keep inching towards their own noose and their allies looking quite guitly.
Oh hardly. This is a tempest in a teapot. Every country spies, but they have the good sense not to get caught out on it. Now these NSA "revelations" have just become cannon fodder for anyone with an agenda. To suggest it'll lead to military action though is far-fetched to say the least. This is how international politics play out. It's nothing of any real import.
Many people gain by seeing the US cock-blocked in certain economies. Cisco was on track to grow 12% this quarter and instead shrunk by 6% -- as a major telecommunications provider, Snowden and this NSA business have cost them billions. And those billions have gone to its competitors.
All this talk isn't about the military, but about the economy. Anything that can be used to give other countries an edge against the largest country's economy is going to be leveraged to its fullest.
This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.
Well, since porn has usually been a driver for technology... It goes without saying... being able to taste the sex will be one use this technology will soon be put to. And if they can perfect the taste of flavored latex... the sky is the limit. -_- I know you think I'm joking, but I'm not -- VHS versus Betamax. VHS won because Betamax wouldn't license to porn producers. Technology is replete with examples of our insatiable hedonistic appetites driving it to profit and success over its competitors, who tried to maintain "the high ground".
I know Americans don't want to hear this... but a large gap between rich and poor is BAD for society.
Excuse me, but when you use the phrase "Americans", you are claiming what follows is true of the majority. It is most certainly not. The majority of Americans are right now either below or near poverty guideline; And they will tell you in no uncertain terms that the rich getting richer is not okay. We tried to organize a resistance to this; You seem to have already forgotten Occupy Wall Street. You may also have forgotten what happened: The police sent in tanks and armed para-military squads to arrest and jail the protesters. Department of Homeland Security coordinated strikes across 28 different cities effecting mass arrests, while orchestrating a minimal media presence; Over 15,000 people were arrested and not a single major media outlet covered it. In California, workers went on strike and joined protesters to seal the entire port off in an attempt to gain media attention. It failed.
So let me be very, very clear on this point: The majority are fed up. We've tried rebelling. But when we see every attempt to organize for social change squashed and people jailed and stripped of their assets... it tends to have a chilling effect on future protest. And maybe you've been asleep all this time, but we have some rather pervasive surveillance. Police today come at protesters sideways... for every tear gas canister lobbed into a crowd, there's fifty more people having their door busted in on bogus drug warrants, or police sent to find something, anything, to detain those involved. And they sleep quite well believing they're protecting America from the dirty, filthy protesters, who are probably forming little terror cells too.
So no. You do not get to say the majority doesn't want to hear this. The majority has heard it. Too many times. The majority, however, is sick of losing everything and seeing little to no actual change for their troubles. If there's going to be a change, it will have to come from outside. America is no longer a democracy. It no longer responds to democratic pressure. If there's to be a change anymore, it will have to be external. And historically, such change only comes at a cost in blood.
Exactly. It is very, very difficult to fire someone who works for the Federal Government.
It's also very difficult for people to justify that the federal government works so radically different from that of a large corporation. Bureauacracies are the same on each side, with similar problems. I can't say a whole lot about what any individual will do in response to a given situation, but when you start talking about groups of 20 or more people, it becomes very predictable.
Firing people doesn't accomplish anything. This is a structural problem, and at that, not even the one under discussion. Anyone who's worked for a big business knows that a lot, if not the majority, of IT work doesn't get documented. A 42% compliance rate on paper looks terrible, but that is not reflective of what's actually going on. Many of those projects probably did get farther along than reported, but there's no documentation. This could just be some database only used by a small group of internal auditors. There's no way to assess what the actual compliance rate is without a full external audit, which hasn't been conducted.
But the low compliance rate does suggest a few things; For one, a lack of uniformity. The IRS is comprised of dozens to hundreds of departments, each with their own goals and priorities. Flat out it's a failure of leadership to have this many cooks in the kitchen -- every initiative, IT or otherwise, will suffer from a combination of the telephone game to endless meetings in which everyone has a voice and nobody takes concrete action. When you increase the number of people responsible for fixing something, individual responsibility falls correspondingly. If 5 people are responsible for something, they feel 20% responsible for the result. At 10, 10%, and so on. And there's a crucial threshold below which everyone's own sense of responsibility for the problem is so small that nobody does anything because they all feel somebody else will do it. This is the real structural problem at the IRS, not their compliancy rate.
Cut out large swaths of middle management in a big restructuring initiative and centralize your IT. Your compliancy rates will go up then, and there'll be less inconsistency between the departments. People charge millions to say this; I'm doing it for free. Twenty years in the business says you lead from the top down -- keep the management chain short and you'll be nimble and responsive. Make it long and unclear, and I'll charge you $2.50 for a small mirror -- so you can bend over and properly kiss your ass goodbye.
It wouldn't be hard to have outdoor chargers; the problem is that they suck a lot of juice and you'd attract leeches like nobody's business without some way to charge them and do so securely -- ie, if the charger was tampered with it or disconnected would shut off. Tragedy of the commons, theft of services, etc.
On the other hand, it probably makes more sense to have a QA lab set up if one is going to operate this way, so that one can test a rollout in advance, hopefully forestalling such problems going live.
And that's pretty hopeful. The thing is, in the real world, you just don't test all your patches. You can't; in any non-trivially sized network you're going to have hundreds of them to go through every week, and the workload is the same for a small or large business. That's why large businesses tend to do better (strangely enough) than small ones when it comes to patch management. And this is an attitude that is backed up by the numbers -- I would say over 9 times out of 10, a break/fix patch has no consequences being pushed into the production environment. It goes out. The version increments. The end. It's that 1 time that screws everyone up -- but it happens infrequently enough that management doesn't update its policies.
Most managers operate under a triage approach to maintenance -- that is, throw resources at a problem when something breaks and complaints start coming in, rather than throwing resources at prevention. In the short run, this is the right approach -- in a crisis you want all hands on deck. The problem is that over time, neglecting preventative maintenance procedures, which show up only as a cost without a defined benefit, results in departments moving to a triage model all the time. Basically, the problem is short-term prioritization over long-term cost reduction.
And I've seen it in almost every IT department I've worked for. I've even sat down with managers and explained to them that when 35% of their workflow is emergency break/fix and that number is trending upwards, we have a process control issue. They invariably agree with me, but say they can't get out from under the workload. Of course, when I come back three months later and it's now at 47% and the workload is now a third higher, they say the same thing.
I would lay money that this is how project management is happening at BART, and it has now deteriorated to the point where its starting to impact its core business. The problem is, while it is still likely at a point where effective project management can right this sinking ship... it almost never happens. Unfortunately, the solution most of the time here is to throw someone under the bus, blaming them for the failure, and insisting that as the system has worked up until this point, it does not need an overhaul.
They couldn't be more wrong; But unfortunately it will take several people being thrown under the bus and a few more high-profile failures before senior management fires the mid-level manager responsible for the project and brings on someone with a strong background in project management and they restructure their department from the ground up following the best practices of change management. Of course, they'll over-do it in the attempt and the pendulum will have to start swinging back the other way, but... that's what happens.
the only thing they are "providing" is an expectation in your clients that you support Chrome only, and an API that is guaranteed to break and need maintenance in the near future
You're forgetting; A browser is supposed to be a sandbox app. That is, its job is to render data and present an interactive interface to the user -- but not allow automated access to resources on the host system. Their APIs break that. Badly. One need only look to the recent example of Java and it's failed sandbox to recognize the problem here.
I expect that my mouse movements and typing styles vary from computer to computer. If the point of an authentication scheme using this sort of method is to be global, I'd end up with either lockouts or with multiple profiles, requiring updating every time I use different equipment. Right now we're up to four without even going into other computers I have casual use of, and I can only see that going up over time.
Well, there's good and there's bad. Let's look to a completely different industry that uses similiar analytics, but for a very different purpose: Credit card companies. As you know, they track your purchase habits. What you may not know is that they also use this for fraud detection. A very simple example would be making a POS purchase in California, and a half an hour later, making a POS purchase in New York, when only one card was issued to the card holder. This would be a red flag -- we can safely assume a suburban mother of three does not possess a space ship to move across four time zones over her lunch break. Another more complex example would be someone with a history of only purchasing small ticket items like groceries, pizza, and online music, suddenly purchasing a $8,000 speed boat, then a $1200 plasma TV, hundreds of miles away from where he/she lived. My point is that credit card companies use very similar behavioral heuristic algorithms for fraud detection...
The algorithms are nearly identical for both use scenarios: Whether it's a keyboard or a credit card, people fall into habits when using them. But here's the key problem -- credit card fraud cannot detect a very basic form of fraud; Identity theft. This is where someone steals your identity and then gets a brand new credit card in your name. Maybe they even make a few trivial payments to make it look legit, but you know what comes next. And fraud detection algorithms cannot tell the difference between a legitimate new card and an illegitimate one because they have no historical data to compare to. Also, criminal buying patterns for a new card look pretty much like regular buying patterns to a lot of people -- get a new card, blow it all on expensive shit, max the limit. Looks the same.
And so too will be the problem with biometrics like this. It may be good at detecting you, but it cannot help if you aren't who you say you are. As well, the algorithm can be reverse-engineered. All it can measure is how long the key is pressed and released, and the delay between keystrokes. It is not difficult to build up a tree of keystrokes and then put a device in between the keyboard and the computer that re-creates a stream that statistically matches what the algorithm is looking for.
In effect, it alters the digital fingerprint in realtime. And the technical know-how to do this and equipment available is something any programmer with a bit of knowledge of embedded systems can pull off. So this type of security is just another layer to break through -- it does not offer any real value either as a tamper-evident or tamper-resistant system; The cost of breaking it is very low for a determined attacker.
I've been sick, I've been injured. My COO has been sick a lot. We log in to systems using Strongbox maybe four times per day. Four times per day times about 400 days = 1600 logins for each of us.
Your sample size is only two people. Just because two people login to a system for 400 days straight, 4 times a day, does not give you a larger sample size; It gives you a larger sample count.
Looking at millions of user logins, the keyboard and mouse indicators closely track the other indicators we use.
By your own admission, you only know two people; About 3,200 logins total. Assuming "millions" equals the minimum of "2 million" to make this second statement true, you've only sampled 2 people out of 1,250 (minimum).
Does "not a problem" seem like a statistically valid conclusion for you to be drawing here, given the exceptionally limited data set you're basing this on?
f your phone detects that you are drunk, it prevents you from dialing those numbers and embarrassing yourself.
Yeah, because drunk people respond so well to people and things telling them 'no'. I'm imagining your phone detecting you're drunk, followed shortly after by your phone detecting it is dying because it was thrown at a wall. then stomped on. Then punched. And then finally drowned in warm beer.
Pray tell, who is 'the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"'?
He doesn't exist. That was the point I was making, which then made a nice whooshing noise as it went over your head.
Because (assuming you're talking about the US presidential election, you insensitive clod) I sure as hell didn't see him making an appearance amongst the guys who didn't win.
That may simply be a reflection of your limited sensory abilities. It is, afterall, humanly impossible for anyone to have watched all the television, read all the newspapers, and gone to all the campaign speeches, during the last election. And, were it possible, I would severely question the sanity of that individual.
FTFY.
I see your ad hominid and raise you a witty reparte. You are now (glancing at nickname)... OneBehind.
The only thing they "backed off" from was a a default setting. Big deal.
Paid for by Google Ads. Yeah, it's a problem.
IIRC, they were the first to even include that feature in their browser.
It was a proposed government standard. It was first implimented by collaborators after that meeting, and a plugin published for download on Mozilla's homepage. So no, they were not the first. Mozilla was the first browser to have it included, but that was not because of the Mozilla Foundation.
AFAIK there is still no other browser that offers such functionality. Not even Ghostery does the same job.
All browsers save cookies. They are documented ways of recovering them; for obvious reasons. Sorry.
How? How have they "infected" it?
The same way rich lobbyists infected Congress.
Mozilla was not always getting most of its revenue from Google,
Which means nothing in the present, in which they are.
Google isn't "giving" them the money, it's from ads,
No, Google is giving them money. But don't take my word for it; It's in the FAQ for their financial statements. Just browse down to the question "How does Mozilla generate revenue?"
The majority of Mozillaâ(TM)s revenue is generated from search and commerce functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. Mozillaâ(TM)s reported revenues also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants, which are growing significantly, as well as other forms of income from our investable assets.
and Google's disappearance tomorrow would not make Mozilla "implode". They'd just have to advertise elsewhere.
Yeah. 90% of their revenue dries up and it's just a simple matter of pointing their ad servers to a new place...
I think you have extremely grossly overstated your case.
But I don't think I have "extremely grossly overstated" anything... in fact, if anything, I was trying to understate things to avoid flames from idiot fanboys who think their youthful idealism is shared by the companies whose products they use. But as that has failed, I'm reverting to my usual brand of bluntness. So with that in mind: I think you've been smoking more crack than the Toronto mayor. You were wrong on every point you made, and not just a little.
You know, if half the Firefox users who complain about this actually donated to Mozilla on a regular basis, I'll bet Google wouldn't even have to account for half of Mozilla's revenue.
You really think charity-work is going to be able to drum up as much money as one of the largest companies on the face of the Earth? Good luck with that.
It's because instead of listening to what the users want,
Okay, who are you going to listen to: The person paying 90% of your salary, or the remaining 10%. And before you answer this -- who won the last election? The guy with the most money, or the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"?
... And we wonder why they backed off the Do Not Track, why plugins are no longer being vetted to ensure they're actually doing what they say, etc. Guys... How much more evidence do you need that Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on. We piss ourselves like excited dogs at the prospect of the NSA spying on us (Sorry but you just aren't that interesting), but when Google does ten times that and is whoring out your personal data like it has a crack addiction, we find people saying "Ah, well, it's a convenience, and how else do you expect us to get all these nifty apps if we don't surrender all our privacy and have advertisements shoved down our throats?"
And now they've infected the only major open source software browser out there. And it's just a matter of time before they pull the rug out from under the organization and it implodes. But it's cool... you can always upgrade to Chrome. And as a bonus... it'll happily store every interaction you make with your browser on Google's servers. Isn't that... convenient?
And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?"
For anything intended for wireless use or that processes analog signals, yes, absolutely. But for a lot of things, it's just digital; you don't need a scope for that. You need what you have already. So it all comes down to what you want to build.
Do you plan on doing this in a way that would risk infringement on google's well-made copyrights?
Hi RandomUsername99. Did you know that you are in violation of Missouri statute 575.120, Washington RCW 9a.60.040, and many others, all felonies, for impersonating Qzukk? As well, you are also guilty of numerous other felonies regarding unauthorized access of a computer, and that these felonies also violate federal law as the crime occurred across state lines. You can expect a minimum sentence of 15 years and a fine of not less than $350,000.
If your staff is going to be stumbling around in the dark either way, you might as well pick an OS that doesn't cost you a license fee on top to upgrade.
Just because you're in the dark and stumbling about doesn't mean it cannot help a great deal to know where you are and what's around. Only people who have never had to go to the bathroom without waking anyone up would say something so terribly unenlightened. Suggesting that choosing an OS they're unfamiliar with when they're already blind and tripping over themselves is like saying that navigating a house you're familiar with and navigating one you aren't is the same thing.
I will not willingly surrender anything but words to the government. Many feel similar. The government has done nothing but lose credibility since at least the 1950s regarding how it treats its citizens privacy and confidentiality. "Anything you say can and will be used against you"... and funny thing: Nothing you say, by law, can help you. So no. Government can suck a fart out of my curvy white arse.:/
Slashdot Mirror
Plug in a fax machine. If they're using anything decent it will detect the fax signal and remove you from the calling.
A good idea in theory, but not in practice. They don't remove your number when detecting a fax machine at first. It takes multiple attempts; as you said, if they're using anything decent... then they know you're a residential line, and if they have no other phone number, it'll typically assume it's a dual-purpose line and keep you on the list.
These robo-dialers are listening for particular frequencies that are in the human vocal range -- that's why when you pick up and say hello there's a slight pause. That's because it is routing it to a person... they know that, say, only 1 in 50 will pickup, so they make 50 calls whenever someone becomes available.. and route the 1 that answers to the available rep.
Hanging a fax machine off the line will keep it from going to a person, but it won't get you dropped from the list; not if it's a residential line. now if it's your work phone... it'll probably do the job quite nicely.
There some problems with "largest country's economy" (or "largest country's economy"). From Wikipedia:
... And then there was a very long collection of wikipedia quotes, confirming that, indeed, America is still numero uno. One. Top dog. Best in class. Aced it. Nailed it. America - Fuck Yeah.
This is a tempest in a teapot? Oh hardly.
As far as the OP claiming this would result in military action, yes. We're not only the biggest economy on the planet, we also have the biggest military. Nobody's gonna fuck with us over some punk kid making public what every country on the planet already knew in private: We all spy on each other.
This is a tempest in a teapot. Sorry.
Given Snowden's background, it doesn't seem he has issues with divulging information.
Snowden no longer can be given credit for anything; He released everything he stole months ago. Everything else has been due to jockeying for position by other governments and politicians keen on gaining an economic or political edge over their opponents. Which is what they'd be doing anyway, since its their job.
The only thing Snowden still commands is his name. He's like a brand identity, like Coca-cola. Slap his name on everything, because that's what people recognize...
the end of an Empire or a WW soon? Russia must be loving this as the US keep inching towards their own noose and their allies looking quite guitly.
Oh hardly. This is a tempest in a teapot. Every country spies, but they have the good sense not to get caught out on it. Now these NSA "revelations" have just become cannon fodder for anyone with an agenda. To suggest it'll lead to military action though is far-fetched to say the least. This is how international politics play out. It's nothing of any real import.
Many people gain by seeing the US cock-blocked in certain economies. Cisco was on track to grow 12% this quarter and instead shrunk by 6% -- as a major telecommunications provider, Snowden and this NSA business have cost them billions. And those billions have gone to its competitors.
All this talk isn't about the military, but about the economy. Anything that can be used to give other countries an edge against the largest country's economy is going to be leveraged to its fullest.
This is an excellent example of traffic analysis and how you can leak your identity based just on the nature of the transaction. It makes me wonder why bitcoin users do not routinely engage in 1:1 transactions simply to frustrate traffic analysis.
Well, since porn has usually been a driver for technology... It goes without saying... being able to taste the sex will be one use this technology will soon be put to. And if they can perfect the taste of flavored latex... the sky is the limit. -_- I know you think I'm joking, but I'm not -- VHS versus Betamax. VHS won because Betamax wouldn't license to porn producers. Technology is replete with examples of our insatiable hedonistic appetites driving it to profit and success over its competitors, who tried to maintain "the high ground".
I know Americans don't want to hear this... but a large gap between rich and poor is BAD for society.
Excuse me, but when you use the phrase "Americans", you are claiming what follows is true of the majority. It is most certainly not. The majority of Americans are right now either below or near poverty guideline; And they will tell you in no uncertain terms that the rich getting richer is not okay. We tried to organize a resistance to this; You seem to have already forgotten Occupy Wall Street. You may also have forgotten what happened: The police sent in tanks and armed para-military squads to arrest and jail the protesters. Department of Homeland Security coordinated strikes across 28 different cities effecting mass arrests, while orchestrating a minimal media presence; Over 15,000 people were arrested and not a single major media outlet covered it. In California, workers went on strike and joined protesters to seal the entire port off in an attempt to gain media attention. It failed.
So let me be very, very clear on this point: The majority are fed up. We've tried rebelling. But when we see every attempt to organize for social change squashed and people jailed and stripped of their assets... it tends to have a chilling effect on future protest. And maybe you've been asleep all this time, but we have some rather pervasive surveillance. Police today come at protesters sideways... for every tear gas canister lobbed into a crowd, there's fifty more people having their door busted in on bogus drug warrants, or police sent to find something, anything, to detain those involved. And they sleep quite well believing they're protecting America from the dirty, filthy protesters, who are probably forming little terror cells too.
So no. You do not get to say the majority doesn't want to hear this. The majority has heard it. Too many times. The majority, however, is sick of losing everything and seeing little to no actual change for their troubles. If there's going to be a change, it will have to come from outside. America is no longer a democracy. It no longer responds to democratic pressure. If there's to be a change anymore, it will have to be external. And historically, such change only comes at a cost in blood.
Exactly. It is very, very difficult to fire someone who works for the Federal Government.
It's also very difficult for people to justify that the federal government works so radically different from that of a large corporation. Bureauacracies are the same on each side, with similar problems. I can't say a whole lot about what any individual will do in response to a given situation, but when you start talking about groups of 20 or more people, it becomes very predictable.
Firing people doesn't accomplish anything. This is a structural problem, and at that, not even the one under discussion. Anyone who's worked for a big business knows that a lot, if not the majority, of IT work doesn't get documented. A 42% compliance rate on paper looks terrible, but that is not reflective of what's actually going on. Many of those projects probably did get farther along than reported, but there's no documentation. This could just be some database only used by a small group of internal auditors. There's no way to assess what the actual compliance rate is without a full external audit, which hasn't been conducted.
But the low compliance rate does suggest a few things; For one, a lack of uniformity. The IRS is comprised of dozens to hundreds of departments, each with their own goals and priorities. Flat out it's a failure of leadership to have this many cooks in the kitchen -- every initiative, IT or otherwise, will suffer from a combination of the telephone game to endless meetings in which everyone has a voice and nobody takes concrete action. When you increase the number of people responsible for fixing something, individual responsibility falls correspondingly. If 5 people are responsible for something, they feel 20% responsible for the result. At 10, 10%, and so on. And there's a crucial threshold below which everyone's own sense of responsibility for the problem is so small that nobody does anything because they all feel somebody else will do it. This is the real structural problem at the IRS, not their compliancy rate.
Cut out large swaths of middle management in a big restructuring initiative and centralize your IT. Your compliancy rates will go up then, and there'll be less inconsistency between the departments. People charge millions to say this; I'm doing it for free. Twenty years in the business says you lead from the top down -- keep the management chain short and you'll be nimble and responsive. Make it long and unclear, and I'll charge you $2.50 for a small mirror -- so you can bend over and properly kiss your ass goodbye.
Chicken, meet egg.
It wouldn't be hard to have outdoor chargers; the problem is that they suck a lot of juice and you'd attract leeches like nobody's business without some way to charge them and do so securely -- ie, if the charger was tampered with it or disconnected would shut off. Tragedy of the commons, theft of services, etc.
On the other hand, it probably makes more sense to have a QA lab set up if one is going to operate this way, so that one can test a rollout in advance, hopefully forestalling such problems going live.
And that's pretty hopeful. The thing is, in the real world, you just don't test all your patches. You can't; in any non-trivially sized network you're going to have hundreds of them to go through every week, and the workload is the same for a small or large business. That's why large businesses tend to do better (strangely enough) than small ones when it comes to patch management. And this is an attitude that is backed up by the numbers -- I would say over 9 times out of 10, a break/fix patch has no consequences being pushed into the production environment. It goes out. The version increments. The end. It's that 1 time that screws everyone up -- but it happens infrequently enough that management doesn't update its policies.
Most managers operate under a triage approach to maintenance -- that is, throw resources at a problem when something breaks and complaints start coming in, rather than throwing resources at prevention. In the short run, this is the right approach -- in a crisis you want all hands on deck. The problem is that over time, neglecting preventative maintenance procedures, which show up only as a cost without a defined benefit, results in departments moving to a triage model all the time. Basically, the problem is short-term prioritization over long-term cost reduction.
And I've seen it in almost every IT department I've worked for. I've even sat down with managers and explained to them that when 35% of their workflow is emergency break/fix and that number is trending upwards, we have a process control issue. They invariably agree with me, but say they can't get out from under the workload. Of course, when I come back three months later and it's now at 47% and the workload is now a third higher, they say the same thing.
I would lay money that this is how project management is happening at BART, and it has now deteriorated to the point where its starting to impact its core business. The problem is, while it is still likely at a point where effective project management can right this sinking ship... it almost never happens. Unfortunately, the solution most of the time here is to throw someone under the bus, blaming them for the failure, and insisting that as the system has worked up until this point, it does not need an overhaul.
They couldn't be more wrong; But unfortunately it will take several people being thrown under the bus and a few more high-profile failures before senior management fires the mid-level manager responsible for the project and brings on someone with a strong background in project management and they restructure their department from the ground up following the best practices of change management. Of course, they'll over-do it in the attempt and the pendulum will have to start swinging back the other way, but... that's what happens.
the only thing they are "providing" is an expectation in your clients that you support Chrome only, and an API that is guaranteed to break and need maintenance in the near future
You're forgetting; A browser is supposed to be a sandbox app. That is, its job is to render data and present an interactive interface to the user -- but not allow automated access to resources on the host system. Their APIs break that. Badly. One need only look to the recent example of Java and it's failed sandbox to recognize the problem here.
I expect that my mouse movements and typing styles vary from computer to computer. If the point of an authentication scheme using this sort of method is to be global, I'd end up with either lockouts or with multiple profiles, requiring updating every time I use different equipment. Right now we're up to four without even going into other computers I have casual use of, and I can only see that going up over time.
Well, there's good and there's bad. Let's look to a completely different industry that uses similiar analytics, but for a very different purpose: Credit card companies. As you know, they track your purchase habits. What you may not know is that they also use this for fraud detection. A very simple example would be making a POS purchase in California, and a half an hour later, making a POS purchase in New York, when only one card was issued to the card holder. This would be a red flag -- we can safely assume a suburban mother of three does not possess a space ship to move across four time zones over her lunch break. Another more complex example would be someone with a history of only purchasing small ticket items like groceries, pizza, and online music, suddenly purchasing a $8,000 speed boat, then a $1200 plasma TV, hundreds of miles away from where he/she lived. My point is that credit card companies use very similar behavioral heuristic algorithms for fraud detection...
The algorithms are nearly identical for both use scenarios: Whether it's a keyboard or a credit card, people fall into habits when using them. But here's the key problem -- credit card fraud cannot detect a very basic form of fraud; Identity theft. This is where someone steals your identity and then gets a brand new credit card in your name. Maybe they even make a few trivial payments to make it look legit, but you know what comes next. And fraud detection algorithms cannot tell the difference between a legitimate new card and an illegitimate one because they have no historical data to compare to. Also, criminal buying patterns for a new card look pretty much like regular buying patterns to a lot of people -- get a new card, blow it all on expensive shit, max the limit. Looks the same.
And so too will be the problem with biometrics like this. It may be good at detecting you, but it cannot help if you aren't who you say you are. As well, the algorithm can be reverse-engineered. All it can measure is how long the key is pressed and released, and the delay between keystrokes. It is not difficult to build up a tree of keystrokes and then put a device in between the keyboard and the computer that re-creates a stream that statistically matches what the algorithm is looking for.
In effect, it alters the digital fingerprint in realtime. And the technical know-how to do this and equipment available is something any programmer with a bit of knowledge of embedded systems can pull off. So this type of security is just another layer to break through -- it does not offer any real value either as a tamper-evident or tamper-resistant system; The cost of breaking it is very low for a determined attacker.
I've been sick, I've been injured. My COO has been sick a lot. We log in to systems using Strongbox maybe four times per day. Four times per day times about 400 days = 1600 logins for each of us.
Your sample size is only two people. Just because two people login to a system for 400 days straight, 4 times a day, does not give you a larger sample size; It gives you a larger sample count.
Looking at millions of user logins, the keyboard and mouse indicators closely track the other indicators we use.
By your own admission, you only know two people; About 3,200 logins total. Assuming "millions" equals the minimum of "2 million" to make this second statement true, you've only sampled 2 people out of 1,250 (minimum).
Does "not a problem" seem like a statistically valid conclusion for you to be drawing here, given the exceptionally limited data set you're basing this on?
f your phone detects that you are drunk, it prevents you from dialing those numbers and embarrassing yourself.
Yeah, because drunk people respond so well to people and things telling them 'no'. I'm imagining your phone detecting you're drunk, followed shortly after by your phone detecting it is dying because it was thrown at a wall. then stomped on. Then punched. And then finally drowned in warm beer.
Pray tell, who is 'the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"'?
He doesn't exist. That was the point I was making, which then made a nice whooshing noise as it went over your head.
Because (assuming you're talking about the US presidential election, you insensitive clod) I sure as hell didn't see him making an appearance amongst the guys who didn't win.
That may simply be a reflection of your limited sensory abilities. It is, afterall, humanly impossible for anyone to have watched all the television, read all the newspapers, and gone to all the campaign speeches, during the last election. And, were it possible, I would severely question the sanity of that individual.
FTFY.
I see your ad hominid and raise you a witty reparte. You are now (glancing at nickname)... OneBehind.
The only thing they "backed off" from was a a default setting. Big deal.
Paid for by Google Ads. Yeah, it's a problem.
IIRC, they were the first to even include that feature in their browser.
It was a proposed government standard. It was first implimented by collaborators after that meeting, and a plugin published for download on Mozilla's homepage. So no, they were not the first. Mozilla was the first browser to have it included, but that was not because of the Mozilla Foundation.
AFAIK there is still no other browser that offers such functionality. Not even Ghostery does the same job.
All browsers save cookies. They are documented ways of recovering them; for obvious reasons. Sorry.
How? How have they "infected" it?
The same way rich lobbyists infected Congress.
Mozilla was not always getting most of its revenue from Google,
Which means nothing in the present, in which they are.
Google isn't "giving" them the money, it's from ads,
No, Google is giving them money. But don't take my word for it; It's in the FAQ for their financial statements. Just browse down to the question "How does Mozilla generate revenue?"
The majority of Mozillaâ(TM)s revenue is generated from search and commerce functionality included in our Firefox product through all major search partners including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon, Ebay and others. Mozillaâ(TM)s reported revenues also include very important individual and corporate donations and grants, which are growing significantly, as well as other forms of income from our investable assets.
and Google's disappearance tomorrow would not make Mozilla "implode". They'd just have to advertise elsewhere.
Yeah. 90% of their revenue dries up and it's just a simple matter of pointing their ad servers to a new place...
I think you have extremely grossly overstated your case.
But I don't think I have "extremely grossly overstated" anything... in fact, if anything, I was trying to understate things to avoid flames from idiot fanboys who think their youthful idealism is shared by the companies whose products they use. But as that has failed, I'm reverting to my usual brand of bluntness. So with that in mind: I think you've been smoking more crack than the Toronto mayor. You were wrong on every point you made, and not just a little.
You know, if half the Firefox users who complain about this actually donated to Mozilla on a regular basis, I'll bet Google wouldn't even have to account for half of Mozilla's revenue.
You really think charity-work is going to be able to drum up as much money as one of the largest companies on the face of the Earth? Good luck with that.
(2) Google isn't breaking anyone's door down with a well armed friends.
They don't need to. You give them everything they ask for.
It's because instead of listening to what the users want,
Okay, who are you going to listen to: The person paying 90% of your salary, or the remaining 10%. And before you answer this -- who won the last election? The guy with the most money, or the guy who "listened to what the [users] want"?
Your logic is shit. Everyone takes the money.
... And we wonder why they backed off the Do Not Track, why plugins are no longer being vetted to ensure they're actually doing what they say, etc. Guys... How much more evidence do you need that Google is evil -- they're sending vans in your neighborhood, taking pictures of your houses, collecting your wifi network names, OTA traffic, embedding realtime tracking into your phones, and the list goes on. We piss ourselves like excited dogs at the prospect of the NSA spying on us (Sorry but you just aren't that interesting), but when Google does ten times that and is whoring out your personal data like it has a crack addiction, we find people saying "Ah, well, it's a convenience, and how else do you expect us to get all these nifty apps if we don't surrender all our privacy and have advertisements shoved down our throats?"
And now they've infected the only major open source software browser out there. And it's just a matter of time before they pull the rug out from under the organization and it implodes. But it's cool... you can always upgrade to Chrome. And as a bonus... it'll happily store every interaction you make with your browser on Google's servers. Isn't that... convenient?
This isn't biometrics. This is RFID.
This isn't tracking. This is convenience.
And would you tell someone trying to get into electronics that they need a scope?"
For anything intended for wireless use or that processes analog signals, yes, absolutely. But for a lot of things, it's just digital; you don't need a scope for that. You need what you have already. So it all comes down to what you want to build.
Do you plan on doing this in a way that would risk infringement on google's well-made copyrights?
Hi RandomUsername99. Did you know that you are in violation of Missouri statute 575.120, Washington RCW 9a.60.040, and many others, all felonies, for impersonating Qzukk? As well, you are also guilty of numerous other felonies regarding unauthorized access of a computer, and that these felonies also violate federal law as the crime occurred across state lines. You can expect a minimum sentence of 15 years and a fine of not less than $350,000.
If your staff is going to be stumbling around in the dark either way, you might as well pick an OS that doesn't cost you a license fee on top to upgrade.
Just because you're in the dark and stumbling about doesn't mean it cannot help a great deal to know where you are and what's around. Only people who have never had to go to the bathroom without waking anyone up would say something so terribly unenlightened. Suggesting that choosing an OS they're unfamiliar with when they're already blind and tripping over themselves is like saying that navigating a house you're familiar with and navigating one you aren't is the same thing.
I will not willingly surrender anything but words to the government. Many feel similar. The government has done nothing but lose credibility since at least the 1950s regarding how it treats its citizens privacy and confidentiality. "Anything you say can and will be used against you"... and funny thing: Nothing you say, by law, can help you. So no. Government can suck a fart out of my curvy white arse. :/