Thought I'd look at my own data, but when they started asking for the last 4 digits of my SSN I decided I didn't care so much about what they knew about me...
Phishing, anyone? I get the feeling that they don't actually have (or perhaps aren't sure of) my personal information like address, full name, DOB, or last 4 digits of SSN linked to my email address, and are using this as a gimmick to get goobers to add value to their proprietary data for free.
If they wanted to actually provide information to curious people securely, they could have provided a form that asked for a public email address only, and then emailed a report directly to that address. Surely they can look up your info based on an email address. Scumbags.
Yeah, and once it is in the TOS I wonder if using Twitter like this will become a criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, "having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access" ?
Brilliant. That way BA wouldn't even have to pay for their own lawyers' time in a libel suit. Instead it would all be US prosecutors on the US taxpayer's dime.
It seems like Craigslist had to pass two hurdles to get to this result. First, they sent a cease and desist letter to 3taps which effectively withdrew authorization to use their website for scraping. Second, they put up a technological barrier (albeit a token one) to prevent 3taps from scraping. 3taps subsequently ignored the cease and desist letter willfully, as demonstrated by their use of proxies. I don't think 3taps has any legs to stand on.
Anyone who uses a proxy does not have to worry about violating the CFAA unless they are doing it specifically to get somewhere they have been explicitly banned from. 3taps apparently was taking ads from Craiglist and pawning them off on some other website. Sorry, you can't ethically do that any more than I could scrape comments off of this site and pass them off as coming from pishpot.org.
I do think that it is inane to call this a criminal matter, however. As it was inane in the Schwarz/JSTOR case too. Over-criminalization is a general problem.
And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years. Many large public research institutions ceased being "state supported" universities and instead became "state located" universities in the past two decades. It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
This is a non-sequitur. The criticism is that universities have bloated their facilities, infrastructure and administrative headcount beyond what is necessary to deliver a decent educational outcome. The observation is that universities have no real incentive to restrain that bloat because the costs are borne by third parties, like the government or a loan underwriter. Trying to make the case that university costs jump because some public monies are no longer available to subsidize a student is like claiming the cost of producing bedsheets jumps when one shops at Kohl's without a coupon.
It seems like some of the problem here is that Javascript is the Lingua Franca, and also that it has to use the web pages DOM. If the system were being designed from scratch, it seems unlikely this would be the choice.
I think there is a Peter Principle for technology: Every good, proven technology gets extended, extended, and extended until it breaks. Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system. Then some markup was added to make the documents look pretty. Then CGI and server-side processing were added to make the content more dynamic. Then tricks were applied (eg- cookies) to break the statelessness, albeit in a limited way. Then the prettiness of documents were improved with CSS and liquid design. Things got slow. Then the scalability of the server side was improved with various frameworks like JSP, Struts, Rails, etc. Applets had been tried, but they didn't take off because security and version control turned out to be much bigger problems than anyone realized at the time. Then JavaScript was extended and made to do all sorts of unsecure things. AJAX came along and broke the request/response document retrieval model for good. Things got slow again, especially on newer mobile platforms. Now the w3c wants to figure out how to run fat applications on this platform, ostensibly because it's shared in common across OSes.
Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd has been busy filing similar types of class-action suits, as a quick check on its Web site makes clear. (Or, as the August 12 press release more delicately puts it: "Robbins Geller... has expertise in prosecuting investor class actions and extensive experience in actions involving financial fraud.")
These people are like ambulance chasers, and their intended customers are big institutional investors like pension funds and hedge funds. Mom and Pop investors will likely never see a dime. I've been notified about being in-class in two stockholder class action suits like this, and even though I owned the stock in question during the stated period and spent time filling out and filing paperwork in both cases, I was rejected on some capricious technicality both times. A pipefitters local in Ohio and Calpers made out big time, though. Go figure!
I now regard these actions as akin to Samsung suing Apple over the dimensions of rectangles. And let the casual stock buyer beware, as usual. You ain't getting nothing out of this.
Surely a science fiction concept with a female lead can be developed outside of the current Dr. Who franchise. Or, a spin-off series featuring a female timelord can be developed in parallel, like Star Trek did with Voyager. The can have separate adventures and then guest star from time to time on each others' shows. Seems like you get more audience that way. Why is there a need to take an established character and turn it into something completely different?
Dr. Who will always be Tom Baker in my imagination anyway.
The IRS scrutinizes many groups, some of which happen to be liberal-leaning AND the IRS singled out 100% of Tea-party affiliated groups. Draw a Venn diagram if you still have trouble with the logical consistency of these two statements.
'Disputes over software patents are among the most common, expensive, and counterproductive. Their exclusion from the patent system would discourage some software innovations, but the saving from litigation costs over disputed patent rights would more than compensate the economy for that cost.'
I'm trying to think of some examples of software innovations that would be discouraged by excluding them from the patent system.
If one wrote software that made some process more efficient, wouldn't one want that process to be more efficient anyway, regardless of the patent status?
Nate Nickerson, associate vice president for communications at MIT, said that the university was not trying to block release, simply trying to ensure the safety of MIT employees and security of university networks was protected, particularly after a hoax gunman report in February was linked to Swartz’s death.
“The basic idea is we want to do this quickly, and have a process where we can take a look and propose redactions based on those two characteristics [employee safety and network security],”
FOIA requests can be redacted to protect the identities of agents in ongoing or sensitive investigations or to protect things like social security numbers whose release could abet fraud. They cannot be redacted to protect institutions from embarrassing imbroglios and bad decisions. That is the whole point of FOIA: the public has a right to know.
Thinking about it again, I'm not sure if said person was reacting to the level of the degree or the fact that it was not coming from a "top tier" research institution. I may be getting my academic prejudices crossed.
I can tell you that with out a PhD, your are viewed as little more than a trained chimp. Masters in both CS and Applied Math seemed to mean nothing, the fact that these so called doctors were incapable of writing more than 4 lines of intelligible code was beside the point.
It was fairly annoying, and none of my work is cited in their papers.
This is like a walk down memory lane. Along the way in my journey from the research world to the programming world, I embarked upon getting a master's in CS. A colleague of mine said at the time, "Why would you want to do that? It's a totally worthless degree!"
I'm not claiming all researchers are like this, but it is a de ja vu for sure.
By no direct access I meant that there is no path to reaching the upper or even middle echelons of academia - as a reasearch programmer he would always remain in a supporting role. Which is fine if that's what he wants. But it doesn't sound like that's what he wants.
I actually moved in the opposite direction from a pure research position in the hard sciences to a programming position in support of research. At the time, I received similar advice from a senior researcher. It was a little more strident though, something like: "What are you nuts? You won't ever be able to propose research again and no one will ever take you seriously."
This is proof that Obama is better than Bush. When color coding was applied to terror threat levels, the Bush Administration failed miserably at taking something as complex as terrorism and boiling it down into 5 colors. The Obama Administration is pure genius because they can take health care insurance, arguably even more complex than terror threat assessments, and boil it down into 3 colors. Amazing!
Maybe someday someone will invent an app that can deliver a self-satisfying glow of moral superiority to the user **without** any adverse side effects on everyone else.
Eventually, a criminal will use the information provided by the app to profile a victim, or an innocent party will get slandered by the app. I hope the good professor is ready to lawyer up.
I don't care what the EULA says or the disclaimers - you can't make a contract to break the law or likewise hide behind a EULA to innoculate yourself against recklessly produced products.
It is legalese - in other words, if you give a buyer a lower (better) price than offered, or a seller a higher (better) price than bid, then the regulators won't come after you.
It is the complementary case where you give a buyer a higher (worse) price than offered or a seller a lower (worse) price than bid that attracts regulatory attention.
I don't see Bruce complaining about UPS, FedEx, etc. doing the same. Get over it
The primary worry being oppression by the government based on political sentiments, the focus is off the USPS because most political organizing, ranting and pontificating happens online these days. If the government relied on USPS generated metadata to determine who was a member of various political organizations, they would probably find the typical MoveOn.org member was over 65 and receiving paper social security checks.
All of the cascading corrections to unexpected ramifications of and earlier corrections to Obamacare remind me of this Simpson's vignette:
KENT
Our top story, the population of parasitic tree lizards has exploded, and local citizens couldn't be happier! It seems the rapacious reptiles have developed a taste for the common pigeon, also known as the 'feathered rat', or the 'gutter bird'. For the first time, citizens need not fear harassment by flocks of chattering disease-bags.
SKINNER
Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA
But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER
No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA
But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER
Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA
But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER
No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
I'm curious, what does this mean for Grid Computing? I thought it was the principal solution for distributing the analysis of CERN data to participating institutions around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Thought I'd look at my own data, but when they started asking for the last 4 digits of my SSN I decided I didn't care so much about what they knew about me...
Phishing, anyone? I get the feeling that they don't actually have (or perhaps aren't sure of) my personal information like address, full name, DOB, or last 4 digits of SSN linked to my email address, and are using this as a gimmick to get goobers to add value to their proprietary data for free.
If they wanted to actually provide information to curious people securely, they could have provided a form that asked for a public email address only, and then emailed a report directly to that address. Surely they can look up your info based on an email address. Scumbags.
Yeah, and once it is in the TOS I wonder if using Twitter like this will become a criminal offense under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, "having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access" ?
Brilliant. That way BA wouldn't even have to pay for their own lawyers' time in a libel suit. Instead it would all be US prosecutors on the US taxpayer's dime.
More like Element 386.
Trioctosexium?
Ugh. Sounds like it was named by swingers.
... burning hydrocarbons is really cheap.
That's probably pretty close to what they did to fix it.
It seems like Craigslist had to pass two hurdles to get to this result. First, they sent a cease and desist letter to 3taps which effectively withdrew authorization to use their website for scraping. Second, they put up a technological barrier (albeit a token one) to prevent 3taps from scraping. 3taps subsequently ignored the cease and desist letter willfully, as demonstrated by their use of proxies. I don't think 3taps has any legs to stand on.
Anyone who uses a proxy does not have to worry about violating the CFAA unless they are doing it specifically to get somewhere they have been explicitly banned from. 3taps apparently was taking ads from Craiglist and pawning them off on some other website. Sorry, you can't ethically do that any more than I could scrape comments off of this site and pass them off as coming from pishpot.org.
I do think that it is inane to call this a criminal matter, however. As it was inane in the Schwarz/JSTOR case too. Over-criminalization is a general problem.
And don't forget that government support of public universities has been cut dramatically over the years. Many large public research institutions ceased being "state supported" universities and instead became "state located" universities in the past two decades. It's only going to get worse as the tea baggers insist on deeper and deeper cuts to everything but the defense budget.
This is a non-sequitur. The criticism is that universities have bloated their facilities, infrastructure and administrative headcount beyond what is necessary to deliver a decent educational outcome. The observation is that universities have no real incentive to restrain that bloat because the costs are borne by third parties, like the government or a loan underwriter. Trying to make the case that university costs jump because some public monies are no longer available to subsidize a student is like claiming the cost of producing bedsheets jumps when one shops at Kohl's without a coupon.
It seems like some of the problem here is that Javascript is the Lingua Franca, and also that it has to use the web pages DOM. If the system were being designed from scratch, it seems unlikely this would be the choice.
I think there is a Peter Principle for technology: Every good, proven technology gets extended, extended, and extended until it breaks. Back in the day, the web was a fast, simple, stateless request/response document retrieval system. Then some markup was added to make the documents look pretty. Then CGI and server-side processing were added to make the content more dynamic. Then tricks were applied (eg- cookies) to break the statelessness, albeit in a limited way. Then the prettiness of documents were improved with CSS and liquid design. Things got slow. Then the scalability of the server side was improved with various frameworks like JSP, Struts, Rails, etc. Applets had been tried, but they didn't take off because security and version control turned out to be much bigger problems than anyone realized at the time. Then JavaScript was extended and made to do all sorts of unsecure things. AJAX came along and broke the request/response document retrieval model for good. Things got slow again, especially on newer mobile platforms. Now the w3c wants to figure out how to run fat applications on this platform, ostensibly because it's shared in common across OSes.
Rinse, Repeat. Everything old is new again.
These people are like ambulance chasers, and their intended customers are big institutional investors like pension funds and hedge funds. Mom and Pop investors will likely never see a dime. I've been notified about being in-class in two stockholder class action suits like this, and even though I owned the stock in question during the stated period and spent time filling out and filing paperwork in both cases, I was rejected on some capricious technicality both times. A pipefitters local in Ohio and Calpers made out big time, though. Go figure!
I now regard these actions as akin to Samsung suing Apple over the dimensions of rectangles. And let the casual stock buyer beware, as usual. You ain't getting nothing out of this.
Surely a science fiction concept with a female lead can be developed outside of the current Dr. Who franchise. Or, a spin-off series featuring a female timelord can be developed in parallel, like Star Trek did with Voyager. The can have separate adventures and then guest star from time to time on each others' shows. Seems like you get more audience that way. Why is there a need to take an established character and turn it into something completely different?
Dr. Who will always be Tom Baker in my imagination anyway.
No, they were not. At least not according to the IRS IG: http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/domestic-taxes/308131-ig-liberal-groups-not-targeted-like-tea-party
The IRS scrutinizes many groups, some of which happen to be liberal-leaning AND the IRS singled out 100% of Tea-party affiliated groups. Draw a Venn diagram if you still have trouble with the logical consistency of these two statements.
I'm trying to think of some examples of software innovations that would be discouraged by excluding them from the patent system.
If one wrote software that made some process more efficient, wouldn't one want that process to be more efficient anyway, regardless of the patent status?
FOIA requests can be redacted to protect the identities of agents in ongoing or sensitive investigations or to protect things like social security numbers whose release could abet fraud. They cannot be redacted to protect institutions from embarrassing imbroglios and bad decisions. That is the whole point of FOIA: the public has a right to know.
PhD in Computer Science
Thinking about it again, I'm not sure if said person was reacting to the level of the degree or the fact that it was not coming from a "top tier" research institution. I may be getting my academic prejudices crossed.
I can tell you that with out a PhD, your are viewed as little more than a trained chimp. Masters in both CS and Applied Math seemed to mean nothing, the fact that these so called doctors were incapable of writing more than 4 lines of intelligible code was beside the point.
It was fairly annoying, and none of my work is cited in their papers.
This is like a walk down memory lane. Along the way in my journey from the research world to the programming world, I embarked upon getting a master's in CS. A colleague of mine said at the time, "Why would you want to do that? It's a totally worthless degree!"
I'm not claiming all researchers are like this, but it is a de ja vu for sure.
By no direct access I meant that there is no path to reaching the upper or even middle echelons of academia - as a reasearch programmer he would always remain in a supporting role. Which is fine if that's what he wants. But it doesn't sound like that's what he wants.
I actually moved in the opposite direction from a pure research position in the hard sciences to a programming position in support of research. At the time, I received similar advice from a senior researcher. It was a little more strident though, something like: "What are you nuts? You won't ever be able to propose research again and no one will ever take you seriously."
Silver, Gold or Platinum?
This is proof that Obama is better than Bush. When color coding was applied to terror threat levels, the Bush Administration failed miserably at taking something as complex as terrorism and boiling it down into 5 colors. The Obama Administration is pure genius because they can take health care insurance, arguably even more complex than terror threat assessments, and boil it down into 3 colors. Amazing!
Maybe someday someone will invent an app that can deliver a self-satisfying glow of moral superiority to the user **without** any adverse side effects on everyone else.
Eventually, a criminal will use the information provided by the app to profile a victim, or an innocent party will get slandered by the app. I hope the good professor is ready to lawyer up.
I don't care what the EULA says or the disclaimers - you can't make a contract to break the law or likewise hide behind a EULA to innoculate yourself against recklessly produced products.
It is legalese - in other words, if you give a buyer a lower (better) price than offered, or a seller a higher (better) price than bid, then the regulators won't come after you.
It is the complementary case where you give a buyer a higher (worse) price than offered or a seller a lower (worse) price than bid that attracts regulatory attention.
I don't see Bruce complaining about UPS, FedEx, etc. doing the same. Get over it
The primary worry being oppression by the government based on political sentiments, the focus is off the USPS because most political organizing, ranting and pontificating happens online these days. If the government relied on USPS generated metadata to determine who was a member of various political organizations, they would probably find the typical MoveOn.org member was over 65 and receiving paper social security checks.
All of the cascading corrections to unexpected ramifications of and earlier corrections to Obamacare remind me of this Simpson's vignette:
KENT Our top story, the population of parasitic tree lizards has exploded, and local citizens couldn't be happier! It seems the rapacious reptiles have developed a taste for the common pigeon, also known as the 'feathered rat', or the 'gutter bird'. For the first time, citizens need not fear harassment by flocks of chattering disease-bags.
SKINNER Well, I was wrong. The lizards are a godsend.
LISA But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
SKINNER No problem. We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
LISA But aren't the snakes even worse?
SKINNER Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
LISA But then we're stuck with gorillas!
SKINNER No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.
Oceania has always been at war with East Asia.
I'm curious, what does this mean for Grid Computing? I thought it was the principal solution for distributing the analysis of CERN data to participating institutions around the world.
http://home.web.cern.ch/about/computing/worldwide-lhc-computing-grid