That incident has since made me paranoid of using the rm command directly from the shell.... Although I recovered everything I had lost from the nightly backup, much of that day's work was still gone, and it was still a painful experience to reset many of the main configurations that were not part of my/home folder from the defaults back to my desired preferences.
So now, whenever I am about to rm anything, whether I am root or not, I always initially type it as 'echo rm....' and look at the output to make sure I have typed it correctly. If I have, I then hit up-arrow and delete the first word.
I haven't had any scares since I started doing this.
I just realized that the poster to who I had responded above was talking about the backslash key, when for some reason I had parsed that as talking about the backspace key, even though he had typed it as '\'. I must have read the '\' as a backslash, and then somehow further mutated that in my brain to 'backspace'.
Having had a less than ideal misttyped rm command go awry on me at one time, I now *always* preface any initial intent to rm anything from the shell with 'echo'. I do this whether or not I am root, look at the output, and if it all looks good, I then repeat the command without 'echo' by hitting the up arrow and deleting the first word.
That exact accidental scenario happened to me once.... while I was root, when I was intending to erase the contents of only one directory off of root. I aborted the command with ctrl-c immediately, but the command had already done irreparable damage. Fortunately, this was before UEFI, so I was able to reinstall the OS from scratch and restore my user folders from a nightly backup.
I had heard rumors that facebook was going to add an effective "dislike" button.... I guess this "reactions" is it. Maybe facebook was worried that "disliking" something would turn into a form of cyber bullying.
Except It's not *YOUR* IP address, even if it using one that it gets from your router. Your ISP can probably tell the difference between IP's that it gives to people that are connecting to your router as a hotspot and the IP that it gave you, specifically.
Where I live, at least, it requires submitting subscriber information once (per device you own) to even be able to connect to such hotspots, so whatever IP address you get still corresponds with a specific subscriber, regardless of which home modem one might be connecting to.
And really, if you can even afford broadband internet service in the first place you can probably afford the additional electricity it costs for other people to use it... we're talking about maybe a few bucks a year, at most.
It's not meaningless... it differentiates between daylight savings time and not. EST during daylight savings time is EDT, so the states that use daylight savings time in that time zone switch their time zone to EDT for the summer, while those that do not use it remain on EST.
Evaluating every board combination to search-tree depth isn't intelligence. If anything, its a parlor trick that shows that a system with *absolutely no intelligence of its own whatsoever* can be designed to play a game with sufficient apparent skill that it can beat a human player.
When you are evaluating so many orders of magnitude more board combinations than a human could ever hope to, it seems inevitable that at some point, you will eventually find a tipping point that overwhelms human capacity to defeat. The degree to which I would suggest that this is progress towards machine intelligence is approximately the same as the fact that they can perform math operations billions of times faster than people too.
An intelligent game-playing system should not have to evaluate many more moves than the very best players in the world in order to beat anyone. If you want to build an intelligent system, figure out exactly how so few board combinations need to really be evaluated by people in order to play with high competency, and replicate *THAT*.
The page you provide a link to kind of supports what I was saying.... that human beings can't accurately time anything with millisecond precision. If those graphs are accurate, then I was pretty close to being on the mark when I suggested 10 milliseconds is probably a more reasonable accuracy estimate. The only ones that show a consistent accuracy better than that are the ones that used a click track.
If they don't want to do it, then either you need to find someone who is willing to work on-site, or else you need to pay them enough money that they are willing to do so.
If a person lives too far away from where they work for a daily commute to be viable, then they either need to move closer to work or else find a job closer to home, IMO.
Sure everyone knows they generate location data.... but that location data is *NOT* automatically public information unless the public actually has a direct way to receive and analyze it. Obtaining it for another person typically requires the explicit cooperation of a third party. Therefore, it should require a warrant.
I'm not suggesting that.... I'm only suggesting that its effect will probably be minimal, and regardless, it will be positively *DWARFED* by the increased work that law enforcement will then have to undertake in order to try and protect innocent parties from being exploited by the weaker security that they have been compelled by law to use, so the net effect is *MORE* work for law enforcement, not less.
But it is actually IN-effective because of the extra work that they will create for themselves trying to protect innocent people from opportunistic criminals that will try and use those same backdoors to cause harm to people that otherwise could have enjoyed at least a first layer of defense via strong encryption. This extra work will tie up resources that they could otherwise use to be catching the people that they are alleging that having such backdoors would simplify.
So yeah.... it's automatically a losing situation for them, as well as for the general public.
One does not need to be a security expert to know how to use strong encryption today, and one wouldn't need to be any more of an expert if the technology were suddenly illegal. The only thing one would have to show some competence at doing in order to use strong encryption under such a system is getting access to equipment that happens to be illegal in the first place. If it suddenly became law right now that phone manufacturers had to be able to decrypt customer content on demand by law enforcement, all a person would have to do to bypass this is use a phone that was made before today, because the number of innocent people that use such phones is too high to distinguish any of them from someone with criminal intent.
I suggested that *competent* criminals would use good encryption, and it is a specious claim that an ability for law-enforcement to decrypt communications as needed would actually significantly increase the number of criminals that they would catch. It may make some difference, but it would not be significant. As has been noted elsewhere, many criminals don't even use encryption at all. Considering how much EXTRA work it would create trying to protect innocent parties from being exploited by opportunistic criminals taking advantage of the holes that would necessarily exist in security if strong encryption were actually outlawed, the result is net loss for law enforcement, and a net loss for the general public. Only the criminals would stand to gain.
Some people might even suggest that is actually the whole idea, but I don't want to get into that kind of political argument, I only argue that the viewpoint exists.
Third, and this is reiterating the point that I made above, even *IF* the government could be completely trusted to not abuse the ability to decrypt the general public's communications when so needed by law enforcement, and no matter how benign their intention may be, if law enforcement can decrypt such communications, then so can the bad guys, because while making something illegal may possibly dissuade some significant percentage of people from doing that thing, it is by no means proof against people doing that thing (if it were, there would be no traffic tickets, for instance). And suddenly, law enforcement has *MORE* work to do, trying to protect the general public from harm that may be caused by opportunistic bad guys exploiting the weaker security measures that wouldn't even have been a potential attack vector in the first place if the government wouldn't outlaw strong encryption.
... that it be illegal for phone manufacturers, such as Apple, to *NOT* be able to decrypt customer data upon request by law-enforcement.
The problem with this of course, is that it will not really stop the really bad guys from using strong security, since they are going ahead and breaking the law anyways, and while it might stop the otherwise too incompetent person who wouldn't know how to use such facilities from getting away with something they might have otherwise, in general, all this does is mean that most of the stuff that law enforcement is able to access is stuff that is entirely benign and wouldn't be of interest to them.
But of course, no matter how well intentioned the government and law enforcement may claim to be, and even if they *COULD* be fully trusted to not abuse such access to the general public's highly confidential and private data (leaving aside the whole matter that they may not be as trustworthy as they claim aside, and suggesting that even *IF* they could be trusted so completely), if they can decrypt it, then so can the bad guys, who will abuse it and invariably cause harm to completely innocent people. And suddenly, law enforcement actually has a harder job than they had before, because while their job may have become slightly easier with respect to catching otherwise incompetent criminals that don't know how to use strong encryption that isn't legally available, and that they might have been able to catch in other ways anyhow, now they *ALSO* have to work harder to protect the public from the new potential attack vector on completely innocent parties that such regulations would give the bad guys.
Again, however, pay as you go cards are verifiable as such by the merchant. I have seen places that will refuse online processing of pay-as-you-go card that are not tied to any particular billing address, although this is usually done by merchants that are not immediately billing for the full amount that may be expected to be paid. While certainly entirely legitimate use exists for pay-as-you-go cards, the arguments for genuinely needing such a card to pay for absolutely everything, especially utilities, when other payment options may exist such as simple monthly invoicing, or even cheque-free billing/automatic payments are tenuous, at best.... specious at worst.
Slashdot Mirror
.... who thinks this is actually really cool?
That incident has since made me paranoid of using the rm command directly from the shell.... Although I recovered everything I had lost from the nightly backup, much of that day's work was still gone, and it was still a painful experience to reset many of the main configurations that were not part of my /home folder from the defaults back to my desired preferences.
So now, whenever I am about to rm anything, whether I am root or not, I always initially type it as 'echo rm ....' and look at the output to make sure I have typed it correctly. If I have, I then hit up-arrow and delete the first word.
I haven't had any scares since I started doing this.
I just realized that the poster to who I had responded above was talking about the backslash key, when for some reason I had parsed that as talking about the backspace key, even though he had typed it as '\'. I must have read the '\' as a backslash, and then somehow further mutated that in my brain to 'backspace'.
Having had a less than ideal misttyped rm command go awry on me at one time, I now *always* preface any initial intent to rm anything from the shell with 'echo'. I do this whether or not I am root, look at the output, and if it all looks good, I then repeat the command without 'echo' by hitting the up arrow and deleting the first word.
That exact accidental scenario happened to me once.... while I was root, when I was intending to erase the contents of only one directory off of root. I aborted the command with ctrl-c immediately, but the command had already done irreparable damage. Fortunately, this was before UEFI, so I was able to reinstall the OS from scratch and restore my user folders from a nightly backup.
Did Netcraft confirm that?
I had heard rumors that facebook was going to add an effective "dislike" button.... I guess this "reactions" is it. Maybe facebook was worried that "disliking" something would turn into a form of cyber bullying.
From 0 Hz to 6.2e34 Hz?
Somehow, I doubt that.
Except It's not *YOUR* IP address, even if it using one that it gets from your router. Your ISP can probably tell the difference between IP's that it gives to people that are connecting to your router as a hotspot and the IP that it gave you, specifically.
Where I live, at least, it requires submitting subscriber information once (per device you own) to even be able to connect to such hotspots, so whatever IP address you get still corresponds with a specific subscriber, regardless of which home modem one might be connecting to.
And really, if you can even afford broadband internet service in the first place you can probably afford the additional electricity it costs for other people to use it... we're talking about maybe a few bucks a year, at most.
Sheesh.... talk about first world problems.
It's not meaningless... it differentiates between daylight savings time and not. EST during daylight savings time is EDT, so the states that use daylight savings time in that time zone switch their time zone to EDT for the summer, while those that do not use it remain on EST.
Evaluating every board combination to search-tree depth isn't intelligence. If anything, its a parlor trick that shows that a system with *absolutely no intelligence of its own whatsoever* can be designed to play a game with sufficient apparent skill that it can beat a human player.
When you are evaluating so many orders of magnitude more board combinations than a human could ever hope to, it seems inevitable that at some point, you will eventually find a tipping point that overwhelms human capacity to defeat. The degree to which I would suggest that this is progress towards machine intelligence is approximately the same as the fact that they can perform math operations billions of times faster than people too.
An intelligent game-playing system should not have to evaluate many more moves than the very best players in the world in order to beat anyone. If you want to build an intelligent system, figure out exactly how so few board combinations need to really be evaluated by people in order to play with high competency, and replicate *THAT*.
The page you provide a link to kind of supports what I was saying.... that human beings can't accurately time anything with millisecond precision. If those graphs are accurate, then I was pretty close to being on the mark when I suggested 10 milliseconds is probably a more reasonable accuracy estimate. The only ones that show a consistent accuracy better than that are the ones that used a click track.
If they don't want to do it, then either you need to find someone who is willing to work on-site, or else you need to pay them enough money that they are willing to do so.
If a person lives too far away from where they work for a daily commute to be viable, then they either need to move closer to work or else find a job closer to home, IMO.
(Yeah, I'm a sympathetic bastard, aren't I?)
So that perhaps on April 1, nobody will be able to tell the difference?
Maybe within 10 milliseconds, perhaps... but a millisecond is far too brief a duration for a human being to assess or even respond with muscle memory.
Sure everyone knows they generate location data.... but that location data is *NOT* automatically public information unless the public actually has a direct way to receive and analyze it. Obtaining it for another person typically requires the explicit cooperation of a third party. Therefore, it should require a warrant.
I'm not suggesting that.... I'm only suggesting that its effect will probably be minimal, and regardless, it will be positively *DWARFED* by the increased work that law enforcement will then have to undertake in order to try and protect innocent parties from being exploited by the weaker security that they have been compelled by law to use, so the net effect is *MORE* work for law enforcement, not less.
But it is actually IN-effective because of the extra work that they will create for themselves trying to protect innocent people from opportunistic criminals that will try and use those same backdoors to cause harm to people that otherwise could have enjoyed at least a first layer of defense via strong encryption. This extra work will tie up resources that they could otherwise use to be catching the people that they are alleging that having such backdoors would simplify.
So yeah.... it's automatically a losing situation for them, as well as for the general public.
One does not need to be a security expert to know how to use strong encryption today, and one wouldn't need to be any more of an expert if the technology were suddenly illegal. The only thing one would have to show some competence at doing in order to use strong encryption under such a system is getting access to equipment that happens to be illegal in the first place. If it suddenly became law right now that phone manufacturers had to be able to decrypt customer content on demand by law enforcement, all a person would have to do to bypass this is use a phone that was made before today, because the number of innocent people that use such phones is too high to distinguish any of them from someone with criminal intent.
I suggested that *competent* criminals would use good encryption, and it is a specious claim that an ability for law-enforcement to decrypt communications as needed would actually significantly increase the number of criminals that they would catch. It may make some difference, but it would not be significant. As has been noted elsewhere, many criminals don't even use encryption at all. Considering how much EXTRA work it would create trying to protect innocent parties from being exploited by opportunistic criminals taking advantage of the holes that would necessarily exist in security if strong encryption were actually outlawed, the result is net loss for law enforcement, and a net loss for the general public. Only the criminals would stand to gain.
Some people might even suggest that is actually the whole idea, but I don't want to get into that kind of political argument, I only argue that the viewpoint exists.
PPM is more like building an open system that only coincidentally appears closed because we don't yet know how it it is not closed.
Third, and this is reiterating the point that I made above, even *IF* the government could be completely trusted to not abuse the ability to decrypt the general public's communications when so needed by law enforcement, and no matter how benign their intention may be, if law enforcement can decrypt such communications, then so can the bad guys, because while making something illegal may possibly dissuade some significant percentage of people from doing that thing, it is by no means proof against people doing that thing (if it were, there would be no traffic tickets, for instance). And suddenly, law enforcement has *MORE* work to do, trying to protect the general public from harm that may be caused by opportunistic bad guys exploiting the weaker security measures that wouldn't even have been a potential attack vector in the first place if the government wouldn't outlaw strong encryption.
From your response, I can only conclude that you didn't bother reading the third paragraph.
The problem with this of course, is that it will not really stop the really bad guys from using strong security, since they are going ahead and breaking the law anyways, and while it might stop the otherwise too incompetent person who wouldn't know how to use such facilities from getting away with something they might have otherwise, in general, all this does is mean that most of the stuff that law enforcement is able to access is stuff that is entirely benign and wouldn't be of interest to them.
But of course, no matter how well intentioned the government and law enforcement may claim to be, and even if they *COULD* be fully trusted to not abuse such access to the general public's highly confidential and private data (leaving aside the whole matter that they may not be as trustworthy as they claim aside, and suggesting that even *IF* they could be trusted so completely), if they can decrypt it, then so can the bad guys, who will abuse it and invariably cause harm to completely innocent people. And suddenly, law enforcement actually has a harder job than they had before, because while their job may have become slightly easier with respect to catching otherwise incompetent criminals that don't know how to use strong encryption that isn't legally available, and that they might have been able to catch in other ways anyhow, now they *ALSO* have to work harder to protect the public from the new potential attack vector on completely innocent parties that such regulations would give the bad guys.
Again, however, pay as you go cards are verifiable as such by the merchant. I have seen places that will refuse online processing of pay-as-you-go card that are not tied to any particular billing address, although this is usually done by merchants that are not immediately billing for the full amount that may be expected to be paid. While certainly entirely legitimate use exists for pay-as-you-go cards, the arguments for genuinely needing such a card to pay for absolutely everything, especially utilities, when other payment options may exist such as simple monthly invoicing, or even cheque-free billing/automatic payments are tenuous, at best.... specious at worst.