A car left idling with the door open advertises itself.
No, it doesn't. A car left idling with the door open may tempt people to come in, but it doesn't invite people in. There's a difference.
In law there is kind of negligence called an "attractive nuisance". For example, if you have an un-fenced swimming pool in your backyard and the neighbor's kid drowns you will be held responsible even though you didn't specifically invite the kid into your yard.
If you have an unsecured WiFi access point and the neighbor's under-age kid gets caught downloading porn then you are very likely to be held responsible even if you didn't invite him to use your network.
FWIW, where I live it is specifically illegal to leave your car running when unattended. I guess the law-makers didn't want people arguing over whether a running car was an attractive nuisance or not.
I don't mind if people want to check their e-mail on my WAP. I do mind when they idle on file sharing services, using lots of bandwidth and exposing me to potential legal liability.
The bandwidth part is easy to handle, assuming you've got a Linux box between the WAP and the gateway. Amonth the various iptables modules are ones that do rate-limit matching and per-IP queueing. You could easily give each poacher access to the internet without restricting the available ports but at a rate that resembles a 4800 baud modem. That way they would have enough bandwidth to download email and surf essential web sites but not enough to get you into trouble with warez traders.
The amazing thing is that google, by page-ranking these pages higher, I believe it will do more to improve web accessibility than any law or standards organisation could.
Now if only they would do the same thing to down-list sites that are "Optimised for IE6" (or any other browser). The standards already exist, but for most content creators there is no incentive to follow them as long as the majority of their visitors are happy. Google is uniquely capable of reducing the number of visitors....
There is an entire support structure built around virtualizing the important aspects of their learning experience.
All you really have to do is look at the Australian "School of the Air". For 54 years they've been teaching kids remotely, originally using HF radio and more recently using sat-phone internet technology. Most of those kids don't have a non-family member living within 100km because they are all living on vast cattle ranches, etc.
Distance education doesn't have to be the same as "computer based education". In Australia's case, the kids are enrolled in "classrooms" and have real teachers and real classmates. They simply don't sit in the same room.
BTW, to help with socialization, the kids get together for one week each year to play sports and have fun while their parents meet with the teachers.
Judge Wells supports her decisions in a manner that effectively prevents them from being appealed.
She's also entertaining. I would have expected most legal decisions to be dry and technical, but she uses some layman concepts that suggest she's well aware her audience includes a lot of non-lawyers. My favorite item is on page 34:
Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that "you know what you stole so I'm not telling." Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say "its in there somewhere, you figure it out."
The problem with Slashdotters using encryption for everything is that we're such a small minority of the ISP population that we will become both obvious and "bite-sized" targets for extra attention. The odds of ever reaching the tipping point where encryption isn't automatically considered reasonable evidence of guilt (except where the IP resolves to a bank) is probably quite low.
This proposed "warrantless" internet surveillance bill will encounter a great deal of resistance in Canada, and with a minority government it's passage is by no means guaranteed.
Both of your assumptions are likely to be proven false.
Although the current Conservative government is a minory government, they have been reading/swaying public opinion rather well and some of their other recent announcements have been met with everything from total apathy to considerable support.
For example, hot on the tails of the filing of the $30,000,000 MySpace lawsuit (14-year-old girl assaulted by 19-year-old boy she met online), the Canadian government announced that it intends to raise the age of consent in Canada "to protect 14 year old girls from adult predators". The local talk/news radio stations started doing polling and found out that about 97% of respondents were in favour of a revised law. The thing that makes this interesting isn't the law - it was part of the election platform - but the fact that they waited until there was a high-profile case in the media to lubricate its entry into the House. If not for the high-profile MySpace lawsuit then the bill would have received higher scrutiny and people would be less afraid to point out its shortcomings. As it is now, anyone who objects to the new law is painted as coddling pedophiles...
The fact that the police arrested terrorists in Toronto should prove that a new surveillance law isn't required, but instead it simply scared people into thinking that trading liberty for security is a good idea, the same way 9/11 did in the USA.
Conservative politicians use FUD to push their anti-liberty, legislated morality agendas on people on both sides of the Canada/USA border.
I refuse to spend my life doing things I don't like because of some outmoded notion of 'have to.'
Isn't it ironic that we spend our teenage years being warned about the dangers of peer pressure, only to turn into adults who are then expected to modify our behavior in order to "fit in" with our neighbors or coworkers?
which answering machine has the ability to ring or not-ring based on caller-id info
The Caller-ID information is sent between the first and second ring, so the only way to avoid ringing is to drop the first ring 100% of the time. On the occasions where you do want to talk to someone, the time left to get to the phone is that much shorter.
I have an AASTRA talking Caller-ID box in my house. It does a great job of managing the phone. If the caller has intentionally blocked their Caller-ID information then it automatically answers after one ring and tells them I don't accept blocked calls (which are inevitably from telemarketers) and they should call back with Caller-ID enabled. For the rest, it speaks the phone number so I know who it is before I get to the phone. If it's someone I don't want to talk to then I just let it ring until the answering machine cuts in. It supports blacklisting so that people who annoy me don't even get to leave a message. One interesting feature is that I can record a short audio clip and have it matched to a specific name or number so that it will play that audio clip instead of speaking the number. That's a great help with things like payphones which I will always want to answer no matter what the number is (my telco sends "payphone" as the Caller-ID name).
I didn't know Myspace was a pre-requisite for the exchange of emails and phone calls, nor that the going rate for "facilitating" rape was thirty fucking million dollars.
Even if Myspace *was* a pre-requisite for email, the rape didn't occur on-line. She met someone on-line and then decided to follow-up with a personal get-together. Where was her mother when she was getting ready for her "date"? What kind of mother teaches a 14-year-old girl that it's OK to meet strange guys? Finally, what's to say that age-verification would have prevented the rape? Do they really think that she would have been totally safe if she was meeting a completely anonymous boy her own age?
I can set my page layout using css and html divs but this results in the styling being in the css sheet, the data in the html and the layout sort of strewn between the two with the result that there is no one document I can look at which would give me a good idea whatthe page will actually look like.
I use 4 different web browsers depending on where I am and what I am doing. Very few sites render on all 4 of them, mainly because people assume the client is running on a graphical desktop with a large display area. On my PDA, sites that use nested tables for layout end up wider than the embedded browser can handle and I have to side-scroll to read text or else get
sites
that
run
down
the
screen
in one column of words because the nested tables cause the content to get squished to the point of being unreadable.
CSS allows you to specify layout in such a way that the site can gracefully degrade if the client needs to alter the layout to suit the hardware. That was the point of one of the other posts in this thread - if you use tables then you are using content-description tags as if they were layout tags. The solution is not to have a third file for layout, but to realize that the problem you are having with layout being strewn among several files is an artificial one that would go away if people would simply stop using tables for non-tabular data.
The first thing I do when I find a USB stick is to plug it in and open up documents to see who's it is. I mostly find them around campus, so a name on a paper lets me do a school directory look up. Shame to think I could get a virus from trying to help someone out, good idea and interesting application of USB sticks.
I was thinking the same thing. When I was on vacation I found a 1Gb SD card lying on the floor of a crowded ferry. Assuming it was from a digital camera, I put it straight into my PDA so I could look at the pictures and maybe see a face I recognized so I could find the owner. After all, I know *I* would appreciate not losing a whole day's worth of photographs.
While an SD card is not effective as an attack vector (the PDA doesn't perform auto-run), I would probably have done the same thing if I was carrying a laptop and found a USB drive, simply because a ferry ride is time-limited and it would be virtually impossible to find the owner after the ferry docked.
The bottom line is that this bit of social engineering works because it's new and (potentially) plays on people's desire to be helpful even if they aren't greedy or nosy.
The problem is that you take it to mean they think that committed to CVS is the same as fixed.
In some cases that seems to be accurate. On one software system I use, the developer has had a lot of media attention which has attracted a lot of non-programmers to use his software. For a period of several months people were commenting on specific bugs and would be told over and over again "that's fixed in CVS" with an url. Well, this system didn't have stable/testing/unstable, so any time you grab from CVS you're playing Russian Roulette. After a bug trashed several hundred users' filesystems, the developer blamed the users for being stupid enough to use the CVS link HE gave to them.
The problem here was clearly not that the developer didn't have time to make fixes, but that every point release was a major rewrite that took 6-9 months and created more bugs than it fixed. Incremental releases would have solved a lot...
No, an airport is national territory. And by convention an airplane becomes part of the national territory the moments the doors open (with doors closed different regulations apply (Warsaw Convention, Montreal Convention))
That may be true in theory, but the USA has passed a law requiring all overflights to submit a passenger list prior to the flight. So yes, that would mean Uncle Sam knows which Canadians are flying to Cuba for their winter vacation.
Most International Airports have designated transit area for passengers transiting a country to save them from the hassle of immigration and emigration - Except for the US
Many airports (including those in the USA) have a configurable wall/door system that can be used to isolate areas from each other. Last time I was in Honolulu they *did* have a holding area for transit passengers, however it was simply a room in the departures area that was temporarily isolated and would normally be used as another generic waiting room. The issue isn't that the USA *can't* handle transit passengers easily, but that they have a great incentive NOT to.
Incidentally, the USA isn't the only country that has heavy security. I took a NWA flight from Seattle->Tokyo->Shanghai in 2002, and when we got into Tokyo the Japanese authorities had the entire airplane emptied and searched, and every passenger had to go through X-ray screening again even though we never passed through customs in either direction. It's just the way they do business.
What kind of web sites will you see with banners telling the user to switch?
Well, my bank used to have a banner that told me their site would not work because I was not using IE.... True to their word, their site DIDN'T work on FireFox or any of the other browsers I tried. They even put it in their FAQ because of all the customers complaining about it. Then after about a year of complaining they finally made a version that works on FF. I don't know if they do browser detection or if they simply started designing to standards (and don't care), but I'm glad they changed their ways, because I was starting to look for another bank.
You don't want Ricardo. You want Michael Kitchen. This idea of doing someone else's job has already been turned into a "reality TV" series called Faking It, in which contestants train for a career very unlike their own and then try to fool a panel of judges. For example, in one show a beer-guzzling football fan was trained to be a sommelier and then worked an evening at an A-list restaurant where he managed to fool 3 out of 4 guest wine experts into thinking he was a real sommelier and one of the other restaurant employees was the faker...
you should be aware of the fact that anyone who has been doing martial arts for *that* long is probably an exceedingly quick sonofabitch
Indeed, the Biography Channel episode for Bruce Lee mentioned that he was far quicker than most fans ever realized, and quite often they had to shoot scenes over again because Lee's actions were too fast for the 24fps film they were using.
Many of the major Canadian recording artists and all of the indie labels have pulled out of a music industry organization (similar to the RIAA) and formed a new collective that directly opposes the DMCA and the anti-download and IP-is-protected-forever laws being created in the USA and elsewhere. They issued statements calling on the Canadian government to reject attempts to pass DMCA-style laws in Canada and want to see MP3 downloading made 100% legal for non-commercial users.
The article paints a rosy success story, but consider the source. This is a Red Hat press release.
I don't know about the numbers (and the news story was cut off when I tried to access it), but the migration is real and the numbers don't seem unrealistic. They replaced a bunch of HP C360 machines running HP/UX with Intel-based RHEL boxes. This reduced the per-seat license costs while upgrading hardware to support more users.
This system in question runs Volpe's Enhanced Traffic Management System (aka "flow control") and is commonly seen on news stories about ATC as it has a very public-friendly display with national/state borders and little airplane symbols. For example, all the news stories on 9/11 that showed the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean being rerouted were filming ETMS displays.
I keep a machine with Windows legally installed on it for a variety of reasons - one being is that certain software like tax preparation stuff just isn't available for Linux.
That's the excuse I used last year, too. My bank's web site used to be IE-only, but now it supports Firefox. Ditto for at least one Canadian on-line tax-preparation site.
the chinese internet excutives' point of view is that censorship isn't an issue sinse chinese aren't interested in the censored content anyway. Makes you wonder why there's so much effort put into censoring it in the first place.
The reason is simple - although there will always be people who are aware of censored content at the time it is censored, that cultural memory is fairly short. If the Chinese government can keep unwanted material out of sight long enough then people will stop looking for it.
"Frontline" had an interesting show last week called "The Tank Man", in which they revealed that even in the heart of Beijing today almost nobody under the age of 25 has ever heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In June of 1989 the government/military couldn't hide the fact that they were shooting people in the back as they tried to leave the square (although they did search all the known journalists and confiscated almost all film of the event). The local media put a government-friendly spin on the story and then dropped it completely. There is almost no record of the event available from inside China, and (needless to say) Google blocks all search results that would cover that incident. We in the west can Google for "Tienanmen Square" and get 70,000+ results, with 8 out of 10 on the first page referring to 1989. The Chinese Google returns about 60 results, all of which resemble THIS ONE.
Slashdot Mirror
In law there is kind of negligence called an "attractive nuisance". For example, if you have an un-fenced swimming pool in your backyard and the neighbor's kid drowns you will be held responsible even though you didn't specifically invite the kid into your yard.
If you have an unsecured WiFi access point and the neighbor's under-age kid gets caught downloading porn then you are very likely to be held responsible even if you didn't invite him to use your network.
FWIW, where I live it is specifically illegal to leave your car running when unattended. I guess the law-makers didn't want people arguing over whether a running car was an attractive nuisance or not.
A friend of mine set up his router with the ID "Free_Viruses". Nobody ever connects.
The bandwidth part is easy to handle, assuming you've got a Linux box between the WAP and the gateway. Amonth the various iptables modules are ones that do rate-limit matching and per-IP queueing. You could easily give each poacher access to the internet without restricting the available ports but at a rate that resembles a 4800 baud modem. That way they would have enough bandwidth to download email and surf essential web sites but not enough to get you into trouble with warez traders.
Now if only they would do the same thing to down-list sites that are "Optimised for IE6" (or any other browser). The standards already exist, but for most content creators there is no incentive to follow them as long as the majority of their visitors are happy. Google is uniquely capable of reducing the number of visitors....
All you really have to do is look at the Australian "School of the Air". For 54 years they've been teaching kids remotely, originally using HF radio and more recently using sat-phone internet technology. Most of those kids don't have a non-family member living within 100km because they are all living on vast cattle ranches, etc.
Distance education doesn't have to be the same as "computer based education". In Australia's case, the kids are enrolled in "classrooms" and have real teachers and real classmates. They simply don't sit in the same room.
BTW, to help with socialization, the kids get together for one week each year to play sports and have fun while their parents meet with the teachers.
She's also entertaining. I would have expected most legal decisions to be dry and technical, but she uses some layman concepts that suggest she's well aware her audience includes a lot of non-lawyers. My favorite item is on page 34:
The problem with Slashdotters using encryption for everything is that we're such a small minority of the ISP population that we will become both obvious and "bite-sized" targets for extra attention. The odds of ever reaching the tipping point where encryption isn't automatically considered reasonable evidence of guilt (except where the IP resolves to a bank) is probably quite low.
Both of your assumptions are likely to be proven false.
Although the current Conservative government is a minory government, they have been reading/swaying public opinion rather well and some of their other recent announcements have been met with everything from total apathy to considerable support.
For example, hot on the tails of the filing of the $30,000,000 MySpace lawsuit (14-year-old girl assaulted by 19-year-old boy she met online), the Canadian government announced that it intends to raise the age of consent in Canada "to protect 14 year old girls from adult predators". The local talk/news radio stations started doing polling and found out that about 97% of respondents were in favour of a revised law. The thing that makes this interesting isn't the law - it was part of the election platform - but the fact that they waited until there was a high-profile case in the media to lubricate its entry into the House. If not for the high-profile MySpace lawsuit then the bill would have received higher scrutiny and people would be less afraid to point out its shortcomings. As it is now, anyone who objects to the new law is painted as coddling pedophiles...
The fact that the police arrested terrorists in Toronto should prove that a new surveillance law isn't required, but instead it simply scared people into thinking that trading liberty for security is a good idea, the same way 9/11 did in the USA.
Conservative politicians use FUD to push their anti-liberty, legislated morality agendas on people on both sides of the Canada/USA border.
The Caller-ID information is sent between the first and second ring, so the only way to avoid ringing is to drop the first ring 100% of the time. On the occasions where you do want to talk to someone, the time left to get to the phone is that much shorter.
I have an AASTRA talking Caller-ID box in my house. It does a great job of managing the phone. If the caller has intentionally blocked their Caller-ID information then it automatically answers after one ring and tells them I don't accept blocked calls (which are inevitably from telemarketers) and they should call back with Caller-ID enabled. For the rest, it speaks the phone number so I know who it is before I get to the phone. If it's someone I don't want to talk to then I just let it ring until the answering machine cuts in. It supports blacklisting so that people who annoy me don't even get to leave a message. One interesting feature is that I can record a short audio clip and have it matched to a specific name or number so that it will play that audio clip instead of speaking the number. That's a great help with things like payphones which I will always want to answer no matter what the number is (my telco sends "payphone" as the Caller-ID name).
Even if Myspace *was* a pre-requisite for email, the rape didn't occur on-line. She met someone on-line and then decided to follow-up with a personal get-together. Where was her mother when she was getting ready for her "date"? What kind of mother teaches a 14-year-old girl that it's OK to meet strange guys? Finally, what's to say that age-verification would have prevented the rape? Do they really think that she would have been totally safe if she was meeting a completely anonymous boy her own age?
Let me be the first to say: Eww, gross! Even queer people have limits. I'd prefer to screw my lawyer figuratively.
I use 4 different web browsers depending on where I am and what I am doing. Very few sites render on all 4 of them, mainly because people assume the client is running on a graphical desktop with a large display area. On my PDA, sites that use nested tables for layout end up wider than the embedded browser can handle and I have to side-scroll to read text or else get
sites
that
run
down
the
screen
in one column of words because the nested tables cause the content to get squished to the point of being unreadable.
CSS allows you to specify layout in such a way that the site can gracefully degrade if the client needs to alter the layout to suit the hardware. That was the point of one of the other posts in this thread - if you use tables then you are using content-description tags as if they were layout tags. The solution is not to have a third file for layout, but to realize that the problem you are having with layout being strewn among several files is an artificial one that would go away if people would simply stop using tables for non-tabular data.
The biggest danger is probably that you'll run out of battery much quicker than if you turn of BT when you're not using it. The same goes for WiFi.
I was thinking the same thing. When I was on vacation I found a 1Gb SD card lying on the floor of a crowded ferry. Assuming it was from a digital camera, I put it straight into my PDA so I could look at the pictures and maybe see a face I recognized so I could find the owner. After all, I know *I* would appreciate not losing a whole day's worth of photographs.
While an SD card is not effective as an attack vector (the PDA doesn't perform auto-run), I would probably have done the same thing if I was carrying a laptop and found a USB drive, simply because a ferry ride is time-limited and it would be virtually impossible to find the owner after the ferry docked.
The bottom line is that this bit of social engineering works because it's new and (potentially) plays on people's desire to be helpful even if they aren't greedy or nosy.
In some cases that seems to be accurate. On one software system I use, the developer has had a lot of media attention which has attracted a lot of non-programmers to use his software. For a period of several months people were commenting on specific bugs and would be told over and over again "that's fixed in CVS" with an url. Well, this system didn't have stable/testing/unstable, so any time you grab from CVS you're playing Russian Roulette. After a bug trashed several hundred users' filesystems, the developer blamed the users for being stupid enough to use the CVS link HE gave to them.
The problem here was clearly not that the developer didn't have time to make fixes, but that every point release was a major rewrite that took 6-9 months and created more bugs than it fixed. Incremental releases would have solved a lot...
That may be true in theory, but the USA has passed a law requiring all overflights to submit a passenger list prior to the flight. So yes, that would mean Uncle Sam knows which Canadians are flying to Cuba for their winter vacation.
Many airports (including those in the USA) have a configurable wall/door system that can be used to isolate areas from each other. Last time I was in Honolulu they *did* have a holding area for transit passengers, however it was simply a room in the departures area that was temporarily isolated and would normally be used as another generic waiting room. The issue isn't that the USA *can't* handle transit passengers easily, but that they have a great incentive NOT to.
Incidentally, the USA isn't the only country that has heavy security. I took a NWA flight from Seattle->Tokyo->Shanghai in 2002, and when we got into Tokyo the Japanese authorities had the entire airplane emptied and searched, and every passenger had to go through X-ray screening again even though we never passed through customs in either direction. It's just the way they do business.
Well, my bank used to have a banner that told me their site would not work because I was not using IE.... True to their word, their site DIDN'T work on FireFox or any of the other browsers I tried. They even put it in their FAQ because of all the customers complaining about it. Then after about a year of complaining they finally made a version that works on FF. I don't know if they do browser detection or if they simply started designing to standards (and don't care), but I'm glad they changed their ways, because I was starting to look for another bank.
You don't want Ricardo. You want Michael Kitchen. This idea of doing someone else's job has already been turned into a "reality TV" series called Faking It, in which contestants train for a career very unlike their own and then try to fool a panel of judges. For example, in one show a beer-guzzling football fan was trained to be a sommelier and then worked an evening at an A-list restaurant where he managed to fool 3 out of 4 guest wine experts into thinking he was a real sommelier and one of the other restaurant employees was the faker...
You don't get karma for "+1 Funny", but you lose carma for "-1 Overrated". If you just want to be funny then AC is much safer.
Indeed, the Biography Channel episode for Bruce Lee mentioned that he was far quicker than most fans ever realized, and quite often they had to shoot scenes over again because Lee's actions were too fast for the 24fps film they were using.
The story is covered HERE
I don't know about the numbers (and the news story was cut off when I tried to access it), but the migration is real and the numbers don't seem unrealistic. They replaced a bunch of HP C360 machines running HP/UX with Intel-based RHEL boxes. This reduced the per-seat license costs while upgrading hardware to support more users.
This system in question runs Volpe's Enhanced Traffic Management System (aka "flow control") and is commonly seen on news stories about ATC as it has a very public-friendly display with national/state borders and little airplane symbols. For example, all the news stories on 9/11 that showed the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean being rerouted were filming ETMS displays.
That's the excuse I used last year, too. My bank's web site used to be IE-only, but now it supports Firefox. Ditto for at least one Canadian on-line tax-preparation site.
The reason is simple - although there will always be people who are aware of censored content at the time it is censored, that cultural memory is fairly short. If the Chinese government can keep unwanted material out of sight long enough then people will stop looking for it.
"Frontline" had an interesting show last week called "The Tank Man", in which they revealed that even in the heart of Beijing today almost nobody under the age of 25 has ever heard of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. In June of 1989 the government/military couldn't hide the fact that they were shooting people in the back as they tried to leave the square (although they did search all the known journalists and confiscated almost all film of the event). The local media put a government-friendly spin on the story and then dropped it completely. There is almost no record of the event available from inside China, and (needless to say) Google blocks all search results that would cover that incident. We in the west can Google for "Tienanmen Square" and get 70,000+ results, with 8 out of 10 on the first page referring to 1989. The Chinese Google returns about 60 results, all of which resemble THIS ONE.