If this is true, then why are government officials so reluctant to have their own activities monitored? Why do law enforcement get so edgy about being filmed? Why are cameras not allowed in most court rooms? Why aren't public officials monitored all day long? It just stops crime, after all.
You bring up a very interesting point. What if the flying-camera-drone catches some police abuse on civilians, or some other egregious violation of human or civil rights? Do we, as civilians, have the right to request the footage of that incident at that time? After all OUR money paid for this plan, the pilot's salary, the camera, the fuel and everything else related to putting that object in the air. Does the FOIA cover this too?
No, nor do I have to. I was starting with a clean profile, as I do with every Firefox version I test.
The problem isn't the profile itself, it's that the plug-ins and add-ons literally do not install, because they query the browser version and refuse to do so, unless I mangle them and force it... and that's not going to be met with success, if the code in the plug-in itself needs to be updated for the new Firefox codebase.
It'll take a few months before everything coalesces back to a place where 3.0.x plug-ins are compatible with 3.5.x browser code.
The downside is... that almost nothing works with it; hardly any code has been ported for themes, plug-ins or add-ons, so you're basically starting back at square one again.
I tried it here on 64-bit Linux, using the Adobe flash plugin and got dozens of crashes/hangs (even the bug-reporting feature hung, and had to be xkill'd off). It's faster, but it crashes a LOT more than 3.0.11 for me, given my current use of the browser as a productivity tool.
Those crashes were with no plugins installed at all. My 3.0.11 browser has 32 plugins installed in it, and it is ROCK solid.
It's getting there, but it's not quite ready for prime-time just yet.
Basically I'm using rsnapshot to back up everything, Linux, BSD and yes.. even Windows, with relatively pain-free results. The added benefit (for the Windows users) is that they can browse the snapshot hierarchy (exposed via Samba), to get back any files they want from the hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots on the array.
Years ago, I worked for $BIG_PHARMA, and in one of the labs, there was a shared printer and some shared PCs. Each PC required a user to log in, using their own credentials.
One day, one of the female scientists walked over to the printer to retrieve some print jobs, and found full-color pr0n prints sitting on the printer that someone had printed from one of the shared PCs in that lab.
An investigation ensued, and they found the offending machine, but couldn't pinpoint who had actually browsed to the site or printed the images. What they did find, was a VERY organized local directory of pr0n on the machine.
When they were looking through the upstream proxy and web logs, they found the site that the images were sourced from, found the date and time they were viewed and requested, etc. They finally figured out who the culpret was... and terminated him.
HOWEVER, they also found hundreds of other PCs across the company visiting the same site all over the logs, including some VERY high-level directors.
So now what do you do? Do you just fire the one person who was caught because of the reported incident, or do you start firing everybody because they're guilty of the same "offense" (browsing restricted content on company resources).
I don't know how it ended up, but I do know a lot of people were talked to and put on probation/had their public web browsing rights restricted or removed (only internal/intranet allowed).
That whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing is something that the Founding Fathers felt strongly about...having lived in England.
The bolded portion is precisely the problem! It should read "innocent unless proven guilty", but it doesn't. All it takes is enough time, and eventually (they contend) that EVERYONE is guilty... at some point.
The dye-based CDs have significantly LESS shelf life than the etched, commercial versions. Less protective layers, cheaper discs, poor-quality dyes, etc.
Yes, except the shelf life of standard, single-use, recordable CDs is 5-8 years, max.
What do you envision happening when those CDs "expire" at that point? Copying the data down to a hard drive and re-burn every decade? Not feasible either.
In the digital age, wiping out thousands of volumes of material takes mere seconds. Permanently. Gone. Poof.
We have books, printed books, which go back hundreds and hundreds of years (well, written material; the printing press is a fairly recent invention).
We don't even have a record of some newspaper articles that came out 5 years ago. We're LOSING our history, not retaining it, because we lack sufficient "printing" to always keep a copy in circulation. Witness the Avism.com debacle and hundreds of other cases where this has happened.
Until we can have a hard-copy of digital media which can NOT be changed, edited, altered or redacted... we're lost.
When we all have "Kindle DX2" devices in the classroom for digital copies of our textbooks... what is stopping them from "gently changing" some of the wording over time, over a few years, to permanently alter the way our youth views the history of times they never lived through?
How can you compare one version of a website today, with the one that was there last week? Was anything changed? Was article content "censored" in any subtle way?
We're heading down a very slippery slope, when digital information can't remain static enough to hold through the years, and be validated and verified to be unchanged, with sufficient copies in enough hands, to ensure survivability. The Internet is not the place to "store" things you want to keep for years and decades.
"All you need to say are five magic words: Am I free to go?"
Actually, the phrase is: "Am I being charged with a crime, or am I free to go?"
There's an actual reason for that exact wording. If they say "Yes", what are they answering? The police are trained in using this double-speak against you all the time. Use it against them as well.
PANERA Bread already solved this problem. If you go to a PANERA during peak hours, you get roughly 10-15 minutes of free WiFi, and then you're shut off, at the MAC address level. Thankfully, I have GNU macchanger installed, so I can grab some more time, but they're already doing it programatically.
What's funny is watching someone come in, spill out their entire office on the table (manila file folders, laptop, external number pad and everything), and then get shut off because they sat chatting at the coffee machine for 10 minutes while their laptop was connected, and shut their laptop down, only to stare at me working for 30+ minutes at a time.
Am I breaking the rules? Maybe... but I also buy a breakfast, then a tea, then a lunch in the same 1-2 hours I'm there. I also have WWAN, so if WiFi was turned off, I could still continue to work, without changing anything (all built-in).
McDonalds should just limit the free wifi to 10-15 minutes and be done with it. Oh, and also SHUT IT OFF at the end of the night, so people don't just park in the parking lot and steal your wifi for nefarious means.
As with most of these "problems", the solution is rarely technical. It is usually a political problem that stops the solution from being implemented.
If I go out and have some work done on my vehicle, and the mechanics or I find some unnamed, "black box" device attached to the undercarriage, what happens if I rip it off and destroy it? What then? Am I liable for destruction of police property? Does it clearly state that it can't be removed, and that it belongs to the local PD?
Lots of people track lots of other people with portable GPS devices attached to vehicles, clothing and other things. Read up on any PI forum or Adultery forum and you'll see thousands of people doing this every day.
But if I noticed anything like that on my vehicle, you can bet I would immediately rip it off of there and either shut it down, or destroy it. Period.
Hey, if they don't need warrants to attach gps trackers, then neither do we. Perfect! Everybody jump in and get your TrackStick while you can!
Now let's make sure we find all of the police officers that are sleeping in the back of the diner parking lot, getting late-night blowjobs in the alley from prostitutes they're supposed to be arresting and so on.
I'm all for it. If they don't need a warrant, then it becomes legal, and we can do it too.
In short, I have a young child (kindergarten) who goes to school near where I live, and I share 50% custody of her. My ex-wife is not going to relocate, and neither can I. I can give up custody and relocate closer to work (choosing job over child), or I can stay where I am and keep both.
My travel to work (it's not called "commuting", because then you're not paid for it), consists of taking Amtrak from a town 20 minutes drive from my house, 2.5 hours into Penn Station in NYC, working 5+ hours, and then back on the train 2.5 hours back home.
I spend (out of pocket) about $16k/year on this travel alone... which I can *NOT* expense. I can't expense my WWAN card that I use on the train while I work (I'm typing this while heading back home right now on that very train), I can't expense my DSL at home for the days when I DO telecommute, and I can't even expense my cellphone, which I use for calls while in-transit.
Driving my personal vehicle would certainly be more expensive, take longer and ratchet up my stress levels to very high levels, so I take the train... and I suck it up. I live 143 miles from my work, each way.
If I didn't accept this job, and this travel and this distance, I'd be living out of a cardboard box in a public park. Literally.
"If this guy had had half a brain, he would have wiped the computer's hard drive clean by overwriting it with zeroes..."
And if he had a whole brain, he wouldn't do that, because you can recover the data up to 7 low-level formats deep, and overwriting everything with zeroes makes it VERY easy to recover.
What he should do is overwrite it with a minimum of 12 passes of truly random data, like the DoD 32-pass wipe, Schneier wipe or similar methods.
Note to the kids: Don't ever assume that formatting or overwriting with/dev/zero does anything to make it hard to recover your data. It doesn't.
You can filter and whitelist/blacklist all you want, but that won't stop spammers from spamming. [...] Spammers will continue spamming as long as they can make money doing it.
Completely and utterly false myth. Spammers don't make money from sending email, they get money from people reading it and then buying the trash they're peddling. If filtering works, upstream or at the local mailbox, then the recipients won't see the mail, won't buy the products, and won't give the spammers money. Problem solved.
Filtering works... and as a testimony to that, I haven't seen a single spam in my mailbox in over 4 years, and maybe a handful of false positives each year, which I retrain with a click and never have to worry about it again. dspam rocks, and blows away everything out there, including SpamAssassin, Gmail's filtering and every other commercial solution I've ever seen. I put Graymilter in front of dspam and sendmail, and the amount of incoming spam my MTA receives and processes immediately dropped by 90%.
If we reduce the amount of overall spam delivered locally or upstream through filtering, we stop stupid people from contributing their income to the bank accounts of these spammers. It's a win:win.
"The name comes from the fact that the apps are built with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the like."
Would that be the same Javascript that (by design) does not permit any local I/O? How is it you imagine them creating and writing database records and opening/closing filehandles on a filesystem, when the scripting language itself, forbids it?
When a company decides they are no longer going to spend any money, time or capital on developing a software product, they should immediately re-license it under an Open Source compatible license, and give it away to the community.
THEY may not be interested in developing it any further, but that doesn't mean that WE aren't! (that, and we have already been supporting thousands of their users for over 12 years now).
Message to "New Palm": Get your head out of your ass and do the community some good will, by giving the OS away.. rip out all of the components which are patented and licensed to other incompatible third-parties, and let us rewrite those bits, and FIX the OS to continue to support the userbase.
Well, even with this, I STILL can't watch anything on Netflix's "Watch It Now" section... because THAT requires Moonlight AND ActiveX (and I still had to forge my UA just to get that far).
We're no farther along than we were before.. as always.
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up a very interesting point. What if the flying-camera-drone catches some police abuse on civilians, or some other egregious violation of human or civil rights? Do we, as civilians, have the right to request the footage of that incident at that time? After all OUR money paid for this plan, the pilot's salary, the camera, the fuel and everything else related to putting that object in the air. Does the FOIA cover this too?
((emphasis mine above) The EIZO is only 10-bit grayscale, NOT color.
Here, try this one which works without using Javascript at all.
No, nor do I have to. I was starting with a clean profile, as I do with every Firefox version I test.
The problem isn't the profile itself, it's that the plug-ins and add-ons literally do not install, because they query the browser version and refuse to do so, unless I mangle them and force it... and that's not going to be met with success, if the code in the plug-in itself needs to be updated for the new Firefox codebase.
It'll take a few months before everything coalesces back to a place where 3.0.x plug-ins are compatible with 3.5.x browser code.
The downside is... that almost nothing works with it; hardly any code has been ported for themes, plug-ins or add-ons, so you're basically starting back at square one again.
I tried it here on 64-bit Linux, using the Adobe flash plugin and got dozens of crashes/hangs (even the bug-reporting feature hung, and had to be xkill'd off). It's faster, but it crashes a LOT more than 3.0.11 for me, given my current use of the browser as a productivity tool.
Those crashes were with no plugins installed at all. My 3.0.11 browser has 32 plugins installed in it, and it is ROCK solid.
It's getting there, but it's not quite ready for prime-time just yet.
You can read more about it here:
http://blog.gnu-designs.com/snapshot-backups-of-everything-using-rsync-including-windows
Basically I'm using rsnapshot to back up everything, Linux, BSD and yes.. even Windows, with relatively pain-free results. The added benefit (for the Windows users) is that they can browse the snapshot hierarchy (exposed via Samba), to get back any files they want from the hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots on the array.
It works beautifully here.
Years ago, I worked for $BIG_PHARMA, and in one of the labs, there was a shared printer and some shared PCs. Each PC required a user to log in, using their own credentials.
One day, one of the female scientists walked over to the printer to retrieve some print jobs, and found full-color pr0n prints sitting on the printer that someone had printed from one of the shared PCs in that lab.
An investigation ensued, and they found the offending machine, but couldn't pinpoint who had actually browsed to the site or printed the images. What they did find, was a VERY organized local directory of pr0n on the machine.
When they were looking through the upstream proxy and web logs, they found the site that the images were sourced from, found the date and time they were viewed and requested, etc. They finally figured out who the culpret was... and terminated him.
HOWEVER , they also found hundreds of other PCs across the company visiting the same site all over the logs, including some VERY high-level directors.
So now what do you do? Do you just fire the one person who was caught because of the reported incident, or do you start firing everybody because they're guilty of the same "offense" (browsing restricted content on company resources).
I don't know how it ended up, but I do know a lot of people were talked to and put on probation/had their public web browsing rights restricted or removed (only internal/intranet allowed).
The bolded portion is precisely the problem! It should read "innocent unless proven guilty", but it doesn't. All it takes is enough time, and eventually (they contend) that EVERYONE is guilty... at some point.
Answer: NONE . Office 10 doesn't run on UNIX.
The dye-based CDs have significantly LESS shelf life than the etched, commercial versions. Less protective layers, cheaper discs, poor-quality dyes, etc.
Yes, except the shelf life of standard, single-use, recordable CDs is 5-8 years, max.
What do you envision happening when those CDs "expire" at that point? Copying the data down to a hard drive and re-burn every decade? Not feasible either.
In the digital age, wiping out thousands of volumes of material takes mere seconds. Permanently. Gone. Poof.
We have books, printed books, which go back hundreds and hundreds of years (well, written material; the printing press is a fairly recent invention).
We don't even have a record of some newspaper articles that came out 5 years ago. We're LOSING our history, not retaining it, because we lack sufficient "printing" to always keep a copy in circulation. Witness the Avism.com debacle and hundreds of other cases where this has happened.
Until we can have a hard-copy of digital media which can NOT be changed, edited, altered or redacted... we're lost.
When we all have "Kindle DX2" devices in the classroom for digital copies of our textbooks... what is stopping them from "gently changing" some of the wording over time, over a few years, to permanently alter the way our youth views the history of times they never lived through?
How can you compare one version of a website today, with the one that was there last week? Was anything changed? Was article content "censored" in any subtle way?
We're heading down a very slippery slope, when digital information can't remain static enough to hold through the years, and be validated and verified to be unchanged, with sufficient copies in enough hands, to ensure survivability. The Internet is not the place to "store" things you want to keep for years and decades.
Actually, the phrase is: "Am I being charged with a crime, or am I free to go?"
There's an actual reason for that exact wording. If they say "Yes", what are they answering? The police are trained in using this double-speak against you all the time. Use it against them as well.
PANERA Bread already solved this problem. If you go to a PANERA during peak hours, you get roughly 10-15 minutes of free WiFi, and then you're shut off, at the MAC address level. Thankfully, I have GNU macchanger installed, so I can grab some more time, but they're already doing it programatically.
What's funny is watching someone come in, spill out their entire office on the table (manila file folders, laptop, external number pad and everything), and then get shut off because they sat chatting at the coffee machine for 10 minutes while their laptop was connected, and shut their laptop down, only to stare at me working for 30+ minutes at a time.
Am I breaking the rules? Maybe... but I also buy a breakfast, then a tea, then a lunch in the same 1-2 hours I'm there. I also have WWAN, so if WiFi was turned off, I could still continue to work, without changing anything (all built-in).
McDonalds should just limit the free wifi to 10-15 minutes and be done with it. Oh, and also SHUT IT OFF at the end of the night, so people don't just park in the parking lot and steal your wifi for nefarious means.
As with most of these "problems", the solution is rarely technical. It is usually a political problem that stops the solution from being implemented.
I just thought of something...
If I go out and have some work done on my vehicle, and the mechanics or I find some unnamed, "black box" device attached to the undercarriage, what happens if I rip it off and destroy it? What then? Am I liable for destruction of police property? Does it clearly state that it can't be removed, and that it belongs to the local PD?
Lots of people track lots of other people with portable GPS devices attached to vehicles, clothing and other things. Read up on any PI forum or Adultery forum and you'll see thousands of people doing this every day.
But if I noticed anything like that on my vehicle, you can bet I would immediately rip it off of there and either shut it down, or destroy it. Period.
Hey, if they don't need warrants to attach gps trackers, then neither do we. Perfect! Everybody jump in and get your TrackStick while you can!
Now let's make sure we find all of the police officers that are sleeping in the back of the diner parking lot, getting late-night blowjobs in the alley from prostitutes they're supposed to be arresting and so on.
I'm all for it. If they don't need a warrant, then it becomes legal, and we can do it too.
In short, I have a young child (kindergarten) who goes to school near where I live, and I share 50% custody of her. My ex-wife is not going to relocate, and neither can I. I can give up custody and relocate closer to work (choosing job over child), or I can stay where I am and keep both.
My travel to work (it's not called "commuting", because then you're not paid for it), consists of taking Amtrak from a town 20 minutes drive from my house, 2.5 hours into Penn Station in NYC, working 5+ hours, and then back on the train 2.5 hours back home.
I spend (out of pocket) about $16k/year on this travel alone... which I can *NOT* expense. I can't expense my WWAN card that I use on the train while I work (I'm typing this while heading back home right now on that very train), I can't expense my DSL at home for the days when I DO telecommute, and I can't even expense my cellphone, which I use for calls while in-transit.
Driving my personal vehicle would certainly be more expensive, take longer and ratchet up my stress levels to very high levels, so I take the train... and I suck it up. I live 143 miles from my work, each way.
If I didn't accept this job, and this travel and this distance, I'd be living out of a cardboard box in a public park. Literally.
"...isn't it better to take the bullets out of the gun, instead of wearing a bulletproof vest?" :D
I pay $89.95 now for 1.5/512 here on the East Coast in CT, and that's the best deal there is, a few miles from the CO. There's no other game in town :(
If you know a place where I can get faster speeds for less (or the same!), sign me up!
And if he had a whole brain, he wouldn't do that, because you can recover the data up to 7 low-level formats deep, and overwriting everything with zeroes makes it VERY easy to recover.
What he should do is overwrite it with a minimum of 12 passes of truly random data, like the DoD 32-pass wipe, Schneier wipe or similar methods.
Note to the kids: Don't ever assume that formatting or overwriting with /dev/zero does anything to make it hard to recover your data. It doesn't.
Completely and utterly false myth. Spammers don't make money from sending email, they get money from people reading it and then buying the trash they're peddling. If filtering works, upstream or at the local mailbox, then the recipients won't see the mail, won't buy the products, and won't give the spammers money. Problem solved.
Filtering works... and as a testimony to that, I haven't seen a single spam in my mailbox in over 4 years, and maybe a handful of false positives each year, which I retrain with a click and never have to worry about it again. dspam rocks, and blows away everything out there, including SpamAssassin, Gmail's filtering and every other commercial solution I've ever seen. I put Graymilter in front of dspam and sendmail, and the amount of incoming spam my MTA receives and processes immediately dropped by 90%.
If we reduce the amount of overall spam delivered locally or upstream through filtering, we stop stupid people from contributing their income to the bank accounts of these spammers. It's a win:win.
Would that be the same Javascript that (by design) does not permit any local I/O? How is it you imagine them creating and writing database records and opening/closing filehandles on a filesystem, when the scripting language itself, forbids it?
When a company decides they are no longer going to spend any money, time or capital on developing a software product, they should immediately re-license it under an Open Source compatible license, and give it away to the community.
THEY may not be interested in developing it any further, but that doesn't mean that WE aren't! (that, and we have already been supporting thousands of their users for over 12 years now).
Message to "New Palm": Get your head out of your ass and do the community some good will, by giving the OS away.. rip out all of the components which are patented and licensed to other incompatible third-parties, and let us rewrite those bits, and FIX the OS to continue to support the userbase.
Well, even with this, I STILL can't watch anything on Netflix's "Watch It Now" section... because THAT requires Moonlight AND ActiveX (and I still had to forge my UA just to get that far).
We're no farther along than we were before.. as always.