But there were two sources of randomness at play here. The first was the cocked-up algorithm, which turned out to not be "random." However, that source of randomness was not known nor understood by the the applicants. Applications came in essentially at random, too; at least they did not arrive in a way that was able to exploit the failed randomness of the selection algorithm.
So the first results were actually fair to the applicants. However, since they were not evenly distributed, they did not meet the goals of the DIV lottery.
The whole idea is really sad. The judge's order is basically "don't be a dick about this, we are trying to spare a family the additional pain of dealing with a bunch of idiots making death threats while they're already having a hard time dealing with the issue at hand."
If they were celebretards, I wouldn't care as much, because they have practice in dealing with the media and idiots. But these are just ordinary people who are already having a hell of a bad time.
I can't see the server side code. Is it possible to install your own server? Why do people still claim a software to be FLOSS if it requires proprietary server implementation to do something useful ?
Read the prey website. It doesn't "require" a proprietary server to be useful. You can set the client to periodically connect to the URL of your choosing, and the client triggers an alert when that URL returns 404. No alert is sent if it gets a 200 or 500 response, so if the page is up, or if the server is down, nothing happens. All open source, doesn't need an account, doesn't need to talk to the prey servers at all.
If you use their servers, they can provide you with a history of tracking info, set some filters on the alerts, remotely change some settings on the client, etc. The paid account allows you to change more of the client settings remotely. I suppose that since it's open source, you can write your own server to do the same things. Or you could support these guys by paying them. Your call.
Yay for flashblock and noscript. It is the only way to surf with any hope of safety from the drive-by crapware, and even then I don't have a lot of warm fuzzies.
The only sure thing the software could identify was that... someone was home and maybe the AC/Heater cycling. The eventual solution basically was to place a CT around every branch in the circuit break box
And that's the difference between traffic analysis and decryption. Traffic analysis is often all the info you need, depending on your goals. If I identify what looks to be your "leave home" profile and map that to your timecard punch in the mornings, perhaps I could guess that your commute is about an hour. If I chat you up over lunch, and get you to tell me your commute is indeed about an hour, then I've got pretty good confirmation.
For this purpose, I don't need to know exactly "water heater", "stove", "TV set", which would be the equivalent of decryption. I just need to know the difference between "occupied" and "unoccupied", which is traffic analysis.
So if your meter profiles indicate you've been leaving the house later, but your timecard punches are still spot-on every morning, maybe I should monitor the time clock to see if you're faking your timecard data.
leaving out the fact that most water heaters are gas-powered, how are you going to break out the water heater usage from the jumbled mess that is the household usage? even if you manage that, how do you know who's taking a shower if there's more than one person in a home?
In the warmer parts of the country, it's common to not have gas at all, or bottled LP gas for cooking only. The rest of the appliances are electric. Only here in the frozen north is it common to have natural gas pipes directly to homes, where gas furnaces are the norm.
And to answer your question, it's a simple matter of traffic analysis. Plot out an example home's electricity usage over time, and you'll see exactly why it's important. Midnight - 6:30 AM. Usage is night lights, clocks, cell phone chargers. Possibly a fan. Air conditioning kicks in once in a while. Low current draw with periodic A/C spikes. 6:30 Alarm awakens user, user arises and turns on bedroom and bathroom lights. The draw would go up by perhaps 0.1kWh from the overnight electric usage, stepping up over a minute or two. 6:45 User begins to shower. Large current drain of 2kWh for 30 minutes or so as the tank recovers. 7:00 User turns on TV and cooks breakfast. Slight increase from 2kWh to 2.2kWh from TV and kitchen lights, then another large current drain to 3.2kWh as stove or microwave overlaps water heater tank, then steps down after a few minutes once the food is cooked. 7:15 Tank recovered, drain down to a fairly low level 7:30 User shuts off TV, lights. Drain down to a very low level (parasitic drain from wall warts, clocks, etc.) 7:31 User opens garage door, leaves, closes garage door. Four minutes later, garage door opener light goes out. 7:35 - 17:00 House remains at consistently low level.
After watching this pattern Monday through Friday, week after week, you'll understand why it's not really a "jumbled mess" at all. With any external observation, it would be possible to see when various family members awaken, get ready, and leave. And for the "most interested observer", there's more activity:
7:36 Third party monitoring analysis reveals characteristic double spike of garage door opener and four minute timeout of light. 7:45 Van pulls up and burglars begin their day.
Making your hobby into your job is a sure-fire way to lose it as a hobby by the way, all the managerial crap that comes with a work environment is not something you want to asociate with your hobby
That depends entirely on the hobby. If you're into assembling toothpick models of landmarks, or carving tiny wooden models of classic sailing ships, it's probably a solo hobby, and if that's what floats your toyboat, fine. But if you're involved in something larger, say model railroading or auto racing, you realize that you'll probably be constrained by your own resources, and that a group, club, or society is a fun way to share and grow.
Once you get a club together, they generally require that somebody take on the extra managerial work and knowledge to make them run. My wife and I joined a hobby group, and they certainly can use the assistance. They need several people to help run it, and occasionally they need help in planning a big event. There's lots of requirements, data to be gathered, organization of the same, reporting on it, etc. So I trot out my day-job skills and pitch in. And no, I don't get paid for it. My wife is a bookkeeper. She also puts her skills to use as treasurer for some of the organizations she's been members of. She doesn't get paid for that work, either.
Back when my son was in Scouts, I got heavily involved so the organization would run better for him. And that was partly because I enjoyed the camping, too. But when he was in school/intramural athletics, I was content to let other parents do the coaching and planning. I figure if just a few people from each volunteer group take on something they're interested in and capable of, that's what keeps all of these organizations running.
Sometimes you have to step up and do the managerial work in order to better enjoy the things you want to do. And sometimes you can let others do it. The decision generally comes down to "are they doing it well enough on their own, or if I were to help, would it be even better?" I've found the old saw about "the world is run by the people who show up" is still true.
So, does putting day-job skills into a hobby make it more or less of a hobby? Everyone has to decide for themselves.
Even a trained sniper would have a really hard time hitting this at a few hundred feet up. Even if he could spot it, which seems unlikely, gun tripods aren't designed to allow you to shoot up in the air. The best rifles only have like 800m range.
The GP wasn't suggesting a sniper take out this drone. The GP was suggesting that the drone could be outfitted with a very lightweight weapon (such as a single.22 caliber round), and take out one valuable target.
Hand assembled wasn't the only misstatement in the article. It can't "ID" a person from 2 "miles" away. The narrator clearly says "with its 425mm equivalent zoom lens it can detect a human from over 2 kilometers away." Of course, we can blame jizmodo for these screwups, as it's their article which is quoted in TFS.
It depends on the topic. Coke and Pepsi are end-user consumables. I can readily substitute one for the other at any time. There is no cost of change. Contrast that with a more infrastructural component or protocol such as HD-DVD or BluRay. Both of those represent an investment in media as well as the cost of the player and pose a large cost of change.
Spotify has a delicate but good position. Apple has their proprietary DRM AAC format media, so the cost of change from them is high (lock-in). Spotify uses MP3 with a low cost of change. People can easily give up spotify and use anything else on a whim.
"Abbottabad? More like Abbottas-bad-as-it-gets . Worst customer service, couldn't even find the place. And worst of all their meals are loaded with trans-fatwas."
>He's never had to change a tire in his life where he didn't have washing facilities. Or even change a tire from the looks of the message.
I don't know about you, but when I have to change a tire, it's never in a convenient place where I can wash up. It's always out in the middle of nowhere.
Couple this with the incredible number of times we all touch our faces per hour unconsciously, and yep, you've got a vector.
-- BMO
On several occasions that I can remember when I've had to change a tire on the road, I've banged up my knuckles on something or other while loosening the lug nuts, or cut myself on some sharp bit of metal while raising the vehicle with the jack. There's reason enough to not want to have known pathogens hanging around your fenders.
Or, as I temporarily put on my vegetarian's advocate hat, just eat the grain and then some other non-meat sustenance and not kill any animals or contribute to the extra energy waste and pollution inherent in raising animals to eat.
Look in the mirror and open your mouth. See those incisors? They're for chewing meat. See those molars? They're for grinding grains.
Have you just ruined the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series for me?
No, the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever ruined it for themselves. If he spared you five minutes reading that...tripe... then you owe him for saving that five minutes of your life you wouldn't have otherwise gotten back.
Here's the story (still irritating a few of my braincells even after 25 years): bitter leper whose life sucks passes out and imagines he's now healthy in a faraway land of magic and swords. The first things he does in this new land are evil (rape and murder). Spends the rest of the book moping about it, and being generally shitty to everyone who might offer him redemption. Wakes up after a year to find out he's still a 20th century leper who just blacked out in his living room and whacked his head on the coffee table, and his real life still sucks ass. Repeat for at least two more sequels, at which point I realized just how much stupider I became for having read them.
Oh, here's a ***warning ***spoilers*** alert for the above. It was so bad, that's how much I care.
That was ordinary, garden variety, DLL-hell. Every Windows app suffered from it. Microsoft simply understood the details of how to leverage it to make sure their apps weren't on the receiving end of the fail stick.
Microsoft's version control universally sucked. Windows installers sucked even harder. Everyone suffered from that crappy architecture, including the competitors to Word.
With money to be made breaching networks, practitioners of one of the oldest professions in the world, will be learning to breach insecure WiFi networks
Hookers are taking hacking classes now? Finally some slashdotters are going to meet some women!
It's not an "if". Anyone who cares to has access to the signals your phone is sending through the air. Never forget that the act of transmitting radio signals is called broadcasting for a reason. Even if an eavesdropper can't decrypt your encrypted signal, they can do simple traffic analysis to identify when and where, and use other investigative methods to figure out who, and possibly what.
People don't really think about their own privacy much, and if they do they simply assume it just works via magic or something. They put on mental blinders, and pretend they're not being monitored. They even demand laws that say "you shouldn't listen to someone else's cell phone conversation" but they can't technically stop someone who is willing to violate the law.
Hey, if you want privacy, give up the tell-tale broadcaster in your pocket. Drive an old car that doesn't have a data recorder. Stay out of cities that are covered with cameras. Go live in a cave. The surveillance society has quietly but effectively emerged in the last 40 years. If you want to avoid it, you have to leave it.
It starts out as simple corruption. Like most jobs, cops are reviewed on how much output they produce. Yes, they may have found ticket quotas to be unconstitutional, but there is an understanding that if Officer Jones brings in 5 guys with 3 charges each, and Officer Smith brings in 5 guys with 1 charge each, guess who gets promoted to Lieutenant? Hint: it's Jones.
And they're not stupid. They're trained on techniques that bring in more bad guys. If Officer Jones really wants that Lieutenant rank, he's going to use them. They also don't have to be reasonable, because they can always leave it up to the judge to determine reasonableness. As long as they follow the rules to the letter, if they want to try things like warrantless searches just to boost their own image in the eyes of their boss, they will.
The thing is that many people don't view that as corruption. "He's a go-getter!" "He makes things happen!" Those are compliments. And if a cop uses a warrantless search and uncovers a guy who phoned a drug dealer, then uses that as probable cause to search for and find a joint in his car, politicians will celebrate a victory for the system -- never mind that the search was a fishing expedition launched for selfish corrupt reasons, and that they're prosecuting a guy for a victimless "crime". "He made things happen!" And if the dirt that led to the arrest is ever exposed, the politicians decry it as a "liberal judge legislating from the bench."
It's a corrupt system, yet for the most part it's still better than all the alternatives history has demonstrated.
But you did win the "Our Governor can beat up your Governor" contest.
Right up until the Gropenator took office. Remember The Running Man? Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) totally kicked Captain Freedom's (Ventura's) butt.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
But there were two sources of randomness at play here. The first was the cocked-up algorithm, which turned out to not be "random." However, that source of randomness was not known nor understood by the the applicants. Applications came in essentially at random, too; at least they did not arrive in a way that was able to exploit the failed randomness of the selection algorithm.
So the first results were actually fair to the applicants. However, since they were not evenly distributed, they did not meet the goals of the DIV lottery.
The whole idea is really sad. The judge's order is basically "don't be a dick about this, we are trying to spare a family the additional pain of dealing with a bunch of idiots making death threats while they're already having a hard time dealing with the issue at hand."
If they were celebretards, I wouldn't care as much, because they have practice in dealing with the media and idiots. But these are just ordinary people who are already having a hell of a bad time.
I can't see the server side code. Is it possible to install your own server? Why do people still claim a software to be FLOSS if it requires proprietary server implementation to do something useful ?
Read the prey website. It doesn't "require" a proprietary server to be useful. You can set the client to periodically connect to the URL of your choosing, and the client triggers an alert when that URL returns 404. No alert is sent if it gets a 200 or 500 response, so if the page is up, or if the server is down, nothing happens. All open source, doesn't need an account, doesn't need to talk to the prey servers at all.
If you use their servers, they can provide you with a history of tracking info, set some filters on the alerts, remotely change some settings on the client, etc. The paid account allows you to change more of the client settings remotely. I suppose that since it's open source, you can write your own server to do the same things. Or you could support these guys by paying them. Your call.
Yay for flashblock and noscript. It is the only way to surf with any hope of safety from the drive-by crapware, and even then I don't have a lot of warm fuzzies.
The only sure thing the software could identify was that... someone was home and maybe the AC/Heater cycling. The eventual solution basically was to place a CT around every branch in the circuit break box
And that's the difference between traffic analysis and decryption. Traffic analysis is often all the info you need, depending on your goals. If I identify what looks to be your "leave home" profile and map that to your timecard punch in the mornings, perhaps I could guess that your commute is about an hour. If I chat you up over lunch, and get you to tell me your commute is indeed about an hour, then I've got pretty good confirmation.
For this purpose, I don't need to know exactly "water heater", "stove", "TV set", which would be the equivalent of decryption. I just need to know the difference between "occupied" and "unoccupied", which is traffic analysis.
So if your meter profiles indicate you've been leaving the house later, but your timecard punches are still spot-on every morning, maybe I should monitor the time clock to see if you're faking your timecard data.
leaving out the fact that most water heaters are gas-powered, how are you going to break out the water heater usage from the jumbled mess that is the household usage? even if you manage that, how do you know who's taking a shower if there's more than one person in a home?
In the warmer parts of the country, it's common to not have gas at all, or bottled LP gas for cooking only. The rest of the appliances are electric. Only here in the frozen north is it common to have natural gas pipes directly to homes, where gas furnaces are the norm.
And to answer your question, it's a simple matter of traffic analysis. Plot out an example home's electricity usage over time, and you'll see exactly why it's important.
Midnight - 6:30 AM. Usage is night lights, clocks, cell phone chargers. Possibly a fan. Air conditioning kicks in once in a while. Low current draw with periodic A/C spikes.
6:30 Alarm awakens user, user arises and turns on bedroom and bathroom lights. The draw would go up by perhaps 0.1kWh from the overnight electric usage, stepping up over a minute or two.
6:45 User begins to shower. Large current drain of 2kWh for 30 minutes or so as the tank recovers.
7:00 User turns on TV and cooks breakfast. Slight increase from 2kWh to 2.2kWh from TV and kitchen lights, then another large current drain to 3.2kWh as stove or microwave overlaps water heater tank, then steps down after a few minutes once the food is cooked.
7:15 Tank recovered, drain down to a fairly low level
7:30 User shuts off TV, lights. Drain down to a very low level (parasitic drain from wall warts, clocks, etc.)
7:31 User opens garage door, leaves, closes garage door. Four minutes later, garage door opener light goes out.
7:35 - 17:00 House remains at consistently low level.
After watching this pattern Monday through Friday, week after week, you'll understand why it's not really a "jumbled mess" at all. With any external observation, it would be possible to see when various family members awaken, get ready, and leave. And for the "most interested observer", there's more activity:
7:36 Third party monitoring analysis reveals characteristic double spike of garage door opener and four minute timeout of light.
7:45 Van pulls up and burglars begin their day.
No... pirates never clean behind their ears.
I'm pretty sure I don't want to know how you got into a position to pick up that little chunk of knowledge.
He paid $2.00 for the knowledge. That comes out to a buck-an-ear.
<ducks/>
I think that really means 3,000 people wanted the movie, and 20,000 screwed up their searches and accidentally tried to download "The".
It's the only rational explanation.
And, how do you pronounce 'savages'?
WINN-dohs YUZ-ers
Making your hobby into your job is a sure-fire way to lose it as a hobby by the way, all the managerial crap that comes with a work environment is not something you want to asociate with your hobby
That depends entirely on the hobby. If you're into assembling toothpick models of landmarks, or carving tiny wooden models of classic sailing ships, it's probably a solo hobby, and if that's what floats your toyboat, fine. But if you're involved in something larger, say model railroading or auto racing, you realize that you'll probably be constrained by your own resources, and that a group, club, or society is a fun way to share and grow.
Once you get a club together, they generally require that somebody take on the extra managerial work and knowledge to make them run. My wife and I joined a hobby group, and they certainly can use the assistance. They need several people to help run it, and occasionally they need help in planning a big event. There's lots of requirements, data to be gathered, organization of the same, reporting on it, etc. So I trot out my day-job skills and pitch in. And no, I don't get paid for it. My wife is a bookkeeper. She also puts her skills to use as treasurer for some of the organizations she's been members of. She doesn't get paid for that work, either.
Back when my son was in Scouts, I got heavily involved so the organization would run better for him. And that was partly because I enjoyed the camping, too. But when he was in school/intramural athletics, I was content to let other parents do the coaching and planning. I figure if just a few people from each volunteer group take on something they're interested in and capable of, that's what keeps all of these organizations running.
Sometimes you have to step up and do the managerial work in order to better enjoy the things you want to do. And sometimes you can let others do it. The decision generally comes down to "are they doing it well enough on their own, or if I were to help, would it be even better?" I've found the old saw about "the world is run by the people who show up" is still true.
So, does putting day-job skills into a hobby make it more or less of a hobby? Everyone has to decide for themselves.
Even a trained sniper would have a really hard time hitting this at a few hundred feet up. Even if he could spot it, which seems unlikely, gun tripods aren't designed to allow you to shoot up in the air. The best rifles only have like 800m range.
The GP wasn't suggesting a sniper take out this drone. The GP was suggesting that the drone could be outfitted with a very lightweight weapon (such as a single .22 caliber round), and take out one valuable target.
No kidding. Hell, I just watched a TV game show where they held a sniper contest to see how quickly they could place a round on a target at 1000 yards. *spoiler* The winner sighted in using a couple of shots and hit the target in 31 seconds. The military sniper hit it in one shot, but took 33 seconds. Kind of an unfair outcome, but it's a TV show, not combat.
Hand assembled wasn't the only misstatement in the article. It can't "ID" a person from 2 "miles" away. The narrator clearly says "with its 425mm equivalent zoom lens it can detect a human from over 2 kilometers away." Of course, we can blame jizmodo for these screwups, as it's their article which is quoted in TFS.
It depends on the topic. Coke and Pepsi are end-user consumables. I can readily substitute one for the other at any time. There is no cost of change. Contrast that with a more infrastructural component or protocol such as HD-DVD or BluRay. Both of those represent an investment in media as well as the cost of the player and pose a large cost of change.
Spotify has a delicate but good position. Apple has their proprietary DRM AAC format media, so the cost of change from them is high (lock-in). Spotify uses MP3 with a low cost of change. People can easily give up spotify and use anything else on a whim.
"Abbottabad? More like Abbottas-bad-as-it-gets . Worst customer service, couldn't even find the place. And worst of all their meals are loaded with trans-fatwas."
>He's never had to change a tire in his life where he didn't have washing facilities. Or even change a tire from the looks of the message.
I don't know about you, but when I have to change a tire, it's never in a convenient place where I can wash up. It's always out in the middle of nowhere.
Couple this with the incredible number of times we all touch our faces per hour unconsciously, and yep, you've got a vector.
--
BMO
On several occasions that I can remember when I've had to change a tire on the road, I've banged up my knuckles on something or other while loosening the lug nuts, or cut myself on some sharp bit of metal while raising the vehicle with the jack. There's reason enough to not want to have known pathogens hanging around your fenders.
Or, as I temporarily put on my vegetarian's advocate hat, just eat the grain and then some other non-meat sustenance and not kill any animals or contribute to the extra energy waste and pollution inherent in raising animals to eat.
Look in the mirror and open your mouth. See those incisors? They're for chewing meat. See those molars? They're for grinding grains.
You're an omnivore. Fucking deal with it.
Have you just ruined the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series for me?
No, the entire Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever ruined it for themselves. If he spared you five minutes reading that ...tripe... then you owe him for saving that five minutes of your life you wouldn't have otherwise gotten back.
Here's the story (still irritating a few of my braincells even after 25 years): bitter leper whose life sucks passes out and imagines he's now healthy in a faraway land of magic and swords. The first things he does in this new land are evil (rape and murder). Spends the rest of the book moping about it, and being generally shitty to everyone who might offer him redemption. Wakes up after a year to find out he's still a 20th century leper who just blacked out in his living room and whacked his head on the coffee table, and his real life still sucks ass. Repeat for at least two more sequels, at which point I realized just how much stupider I became for having read them.
Oh, here's a ***warning ***spoilers*** alert for the above. It was so bad, that's how much I care.
. Sure, they won't get hurt, but they'll probably never even figure out how to start it.
That's pretty much the whole freakin' point. These are people too stupid to own computers.
That was ordinary, garden variety, DLL-hell. Every Windows app suffered from it. Microsoft simply understood the details of how to leverage it to make sure their apps weren't on the receiving end of the fail stick.
Microsoft's version control universally sucked. Windows installers sucked even harder. Everyone suffered from that crappy architecture, including the competitors to Word.
"Supposed to" and "are" are two different words.
Besides, it doesn't have to be PCI compliant if it's not customer data. They could be sniffing employees shopping on the web.
With money to be made breaching networks, practitioners of one of the oldest professions in the world, will be learning to breach insecure WiFi networks
Hookers are taking hacking classes now? Finally some slashdotters are going to meet some women!
It's not an "if". Anyone who cares to has access to the signals your phone is sending through the air. Never forget that the act of transmitting radio signals is called broadcasting for a reason. Even if an eavesdropper can't decrypt your encrypted signal, they can do simple traffic analysis to identify when and where, and use other investigative methods to figure out who, and possibly what.
People don't really think about their own privacy much, and if they do they simply assume it just works via magic or something. They put on mental blinders, and pretend they're not being monitored. They even demand laws that say "you shouldn't listen to someone else's cell phone conversation" but they can't technically stop someone who is willing to violate the law.
Hey, if you want privacy, give up the tell-tale broadcaster in your pocket. Drive an old car that doesn't have a data recorder. Stay out of cities that are covered with cameras. Go live in a cave. The surveillance society has quietly but effectively emerged in the last 40 years. If you want to avoid it, you have to leave it.
It starts out as simple corruption. Like most jobs, cops are reviewed on how much output they produce. Yes, they may have found ticket quotas to be unconstitutional, but there is an understanding that if Officer Jones brings in 5 guys with 3 charges each, and Officer Smith brings in 5 guys with 1 charge each, guess who gets promoted to Lieutenant? Hint: it's Jones.
And they're not stupid. They're trained on techniques that bring in more bad guys. If Officer Jones really wants that Lieutenant rank, he's going to use them. They also don't have to be reasonable, because they can always leave it up to the judge to determine reasonableness. As long as they follow the rules to the letter, if they want to try things like warrantless searches just to boost their own image in the eyes of their boss, they will.
The thing is that many people don't view that as corruption. "He's a go-getter!" "He makes things happen!" Those are compliments. And if a cop uses a warrantless search and uncovers a guy who phoned a drug dealer, then uses that as probable cause to search for and find a joint in his car, politicians will celebrate a victory for the system -- never mind that the search was a fishing expedition launched for selfish corrupt reasons, and that they're prosecuting a guy for a victimless "crime". "He made things happen!" And if the dirt that led to the arrest is ever exposed, the politicians decry it as a "liberal judge legislating from the bench."
It's a corrupt system, yet for the most part it's still better than all the alternatives history has demonstrated.
But you did win the "Our Governor can beat up your Governor" contest.
Right up until the Gropenator took office. Remember The Running Man? Ben Richards (Schwarzenegger) totally kicked Captain Freedom's (Ventura's) butt. :-)