I don't agree with spamming and it doesn't prevent me from seeing that you are absolutely right. The guy will get hired* for the same reason notorious black hats and gray hats get hired:
He's good at what he did, and the employer's bottom line would be fattened up because someone known as 'The King' must have made some good profit. So thieves can make alliances when the goal is stolen cash. Even white hats might hire him to help "harden" their systems against his own old and new 'intellectual property.'
* assuming he won't work alone to avoid tipping off the feds, like all those "small fries" scammers operating in US jurisdictions.
I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
Scale. Gangs of thieves also don't get to have 100,000 employees worldwide. You can put a whole gang of thieves in jail, effectively dissolving their "corporation."
Thief corporations can only be dissolved and jail pretty much avoided in the USA --look at Bernie Madoff's cover-up of his 'nonexistent' accomplices. A result is that the same 100,000 thieves will be out there doing other thieving and banding together after a PR rebranding effort.
The question is which 'status' would most people choose given a default 'evil' mentality?
Back in those days my mac yawned at fruitless activeX exploits meant for WinIE5, and loled at those.EXE downloads ESPECIALLY if we were dumb enough to doubleclick them; Linux browsers are just as safe, the same as a fax can't load virus code meant for Outlook Express 4 from 10 years ago.
Looks like PP forgot to read the article they posted: targetting and succeeding (at infecting with a virus) are not the same thing
The word was that match.com contributed to 10% of US marriages some years ago. An online source didn't confirm this at the moment but says a 3-year study granted them a score of 17% couples married.
Without really developing MS office, how else do you convince people they have something new with each release other than re-arranging menus?
They don't. The automobile industry spends billions trying to convince the general public that expensive purchases must be made or what is basically supposed to be a lifetime purchase if the "product" isn't lemon-y. That is how most of the non-IT world analyzes purchases like that in the third world: because the kinda things money buys aren't gimmicky status symbols with expiration dates or yearly refresh cycles (except for the ever-evil ads for imported American cars).
The US is trying to push the idea that if it ain't broke, it's too old-fashioned next year, and the disposable-cash ADHD teens of today will be the buyers of tomorrow, pretty literally; today's older people don't "contribute" to the problem as much.
Sorry but I don't like searching for every single thing when I already know the address. This is just dumb. Far too much emphasis place on searching these days.
Some governments request Google's search data (remember google.ch and google Hong Kong issues last year) to help control and torture their dissidents. This is further removing the ability to cover your tracks since you're now creating additional middleman crumbs (and what BIG crumbs they are at google).
Basically it's enhancing the government's current tracking by putting in the equation google's analytics so the govt can catalogue of all your favorite revolutionary domains and previously hard-to-track "pirate" DNS-less IP addresses.
Funny off-topic. But on a similar vein, I've been trying to find a Microsoft tag (colorful triangle-barcodes) decoder, and it is a web-enabled-smartphone-only commodity.
Windows didn't get the decoder, and our perfectly good digital cameras go unused for "encoded" hyperlinks advertised on local newspapers. Heck, the MS page shows a train station advertising schedules and they assume even New York tourists in that lower-Manhattan area must have access to expensive phones with data plans. What gives?
We put a large weight on some unwritten code of conduct promising that signed-in users always read replies and feel remorse or learn something. Even "bad" signed in users know that negative-karma ID's can be replaced with blank karma ones for free.
It's a myth that arguing with a "known" and evil slashdot user does real life good. It doesn't achive more than boycotting a faceless AC. After all, there's no "signed in UID accident insurance"... on the internet we don't know your face, hear your exasperated sighing, or know whose door to knock for a mutual handshake of joy when a the comment causes a positive outcome. So it's about educating the forum reading that reply, rather than an individual AC or UID.
I'm not so sure about choosing to defy a single huge bully rather than many wimpy ones. At least with each little advertiser, one has your name, but not your birthday, or location, or preference in pr0n search terms. Google* being your "single point of failure" is very dangerous dangerous when the failure involves ALL your data at once.
Big bully means "Google" or Apple, or even our wife --all are bad but well-informed single points of failure. The point is that anyone that has enough confidential information can ruin you, and your "I will hear about it" only works out well if the transgression you "hear" about it is slow enough that you can jump ship without being affected, and obvious enough to be discovered and stopped. Think of how ineffective it is to "recover" by suing a person that already destroyed your liver prescribing the wrong medicine for years, or negligently crushed your spine with their car without your getting an advance permission slip in the mail:)
I have a few different versions of OO 3 and recent proof that more than paranoia keeps me from updating all to Oracle's. Why? My much-changed resume is a native Oracle OOo 3.2 file created in Ubuntu is having a problem I never saw while it was Sun's property. I just spent the last quarter hour seeking help for cross-platform corruption but found no relevant bug reports or solutions. It's the third time that the native format and the exported DOC file can't be opened in Windows' OOo and MS's Viewer --PDFs are safe for now. I can still edit them in Linux.
I keep several versions, some "e-mail obscured" to prevent job-board scammers from easily spamming me. When the job agents call and ID themselves (which spammers don't, and few scammers dare to) I e-mail them the "full" one. That's a pretty bad time to realize the file is corrupted.
I'll hit the LibreOffice repos and hope people there have fixed the problem. Oracle won't see me downloading their version starting with the next Ubuntu upgrade cycle.
There are plenty of Windows alternatives for those tired of this mad decline of quality in light of FF's success. The problem is that newbies have hardly a clue about what they are in Linux. In 15 years of dealing with newbies anyone will see that "what browser?" and "what Operating System do you use?" come back with blank stares even when the splash screens are displaying.
To even find an alternative like Midori, "A Web browser" (brand-free FF), Seamonkey, Konqueror* in the package managers, but they need to the keyword "browser", because Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and "Google Chrome" will return no results without presciently tweaking their sources.
* Many Ubuntu users have never walked outside of Gnome because they don't heard about KDE's platform, especially post 4.0, so Konqueror followers have suffered since FF is default everywhere in the Linux world now .
For the majority of us latitude isn't in that 45-50 deg range. It seems Auroramax offers live aurora streaming from one of those frigid locations in Canada. Search engine results don't seem too encouraging on variety for this, though.
Great... big scary companies that can't earn our trust force us to "sign up" by purchasing their replacements that we did trust. First it was USA banks getting gobbled up, and our diversity perks disappearing after the acquisition. Now, big web companies either create "sign into Yahoo with your Facebook ID" kind of mergers. TFA mentions the twitter question "dodge" very shortly, but to me it counts as guiltily "pleading the fifth"*. When they acquire twitter, they can get data on my habits that I chose NOT to give up when everybody opted-OUT of joining Google BUZZ exactly 12 months ago.
Youtube refused to let me in with my 4-year old YOUTUBE username to view a video yesterday... apparently they don't care; they want me to sign in with a Google address. Nothing is stopping me from faking data and so on, but nothing will fool their geolocation tracking and their silently associating my video playlists with the content of those emails I receive. Twitter data would provide my outing habits and random data to mine. Eventually it will be a giant single company out there with access to everything, and in the end, we'll have nobody left to trust.
* amendment of the USA constitution against self-incrimination
Regarding your final score, it's all about percentages --take what you believe to be a "good" decimal score with a galon of salt. For all you know, your 1 in 700k can mean "only ten others like you, but let's pretend 1/700,000 makes it all better" for a case of 7mil total in their data. Anyway, better numbers mean 1 in 60k, so that you're one a better "one in ten." With the anti-Anonymous-Wikileaks FBI chase, it's clear why being 1 in 10 masked men not as useful as 10,000 in 100,000 --you're still a single person and sheer volume helps drown out your particular masked individuality. Remember that they say "out of several million" and have a dataset only a year old, and make it ambiguous how many millions or dozens of millions, or hundreds of millions have been reviewed.
You'll stand out a lot more when you go to a mom-and-pop site than out at the paranoia-filled-audience seeing the EFF. Besides, the EFF is not a top-ten Facebook favorite. Stats at Panopticlick, therefore, lean HEAVILY toward cookie blocker types, and people blocking all scripts using non-IE browsers (lots of EFF checks are impossible to block in IE since public IE plugins are non-existent that uniformly make it look like your IE setup resembles other anons')
I played around refreshing after setting the user string to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6" Lying about my OS since Linux will stand out the second I go elsewhere with a smaller user set less likely to have my build. I spend a couple hours recently trimming Gecko, Firefox, the U, the language and the rv substrings, but that seemed to randomly make me lots more unique. Empty strings and "Mozilla/5.0" are still too unique for my taste, giving numbers like your 1 in 700k. The best bet is Flash disabled with Noscript, cookies ON (stick out otherwise). If scripts are on, your resolution is best set as 1024x768 or 1280x800 resolution (laptops). Flash on is what kills us, since it gives away our fonts (and maybe plugin fingerprint IIRC)
My DLINK 825 router supports v6 natively (enable tunnels till the ISP bites the bullet). ReFlashing is child's play. The problem is what seems like cumbersome tutorials for *WRT comparable to babying^W mastering a whole new Linux distro. IE: run this command to download ssl, this one to download v6, this one to chain scripts for your non-default firewall, that one to turn on the web GUI we all take for granted in all consumer routers... Please give it to me straight:
Are there binaries with the web interface enabled by default? Which of those is most usable? Out of Tomato / dd-wrt / Open-WRT, which do you rate best in terms of day-by-day stability / low maintenance? (Please, no modularity and scriptability)
Last month at my doctor's office elderly ladies mentioned some company had mailed one a contest entry form that she was excited about. I mentioned the Nigerian scamming, and international mules and check fraud, but they weren't completely sure that the company was trying to scam them. The lure was to guess "what ONE country has no letter A in its name" to win a lot of cash.
It was a language different to English, since Egipt, Mexico and Puerto Rico came to mind in a couple minutes, I told them nobody legit sets up such a contest --they're trying to make you think instead of "selecting you", you're selecting yourself thanks to your supposedly high luck. The punchline is that the scammers wanted $250 USD in cash to win the "unique" cash prize even if you knew the "one" answer.
Some company with a TAX ID equal to my father's SSN* had credit issues, so a random bank posted a stop to his SSN that got him in trouble with his own bank. We went to the random bank, where they realized the problem but would not reveal the client's information because we weren't the real consumer. They corrected it quickly.
However, with fraud the company authenticates you based on proof of ID, security questions and weighing the location-based activity that "proves" you are the original owner. The catch is that they have a profitable relationship on the other end (to them) that they do not want to sever lightly until they escalate and review. Being responsible for calling the cops on your "clients" isn't any rep's gateway to a promotion either. The bank has delicate procedures trying to keep people from calling the cops or taking the law into their own hands.
The problem is that the bad guys already have all the info on the victim's address, names, and so on. That causes a feeling of unfair treatment and dread: like the bad guys will end up incriminating us from behind their one-way glass if they feel like accusing us of being the fraudsters.
* It's stupid that the USA corporate tax ID numberspace and the individual taxpayers' have exactly 9 digits AND is allowed to have clashes, and that corporations and individuals legally sign many of the same documents without a checkbox clarifying which numberspace is to be used.
Your name, date of birth and address are not private. Your mother's maiden name is not private.
^--- THIS! If you google the name of any non-celebrity in the United States, there is MORE than just results from Facebook and LinkedIn. Companies digitize city databases and then dozens of freeloaders scrape and repost those with your city, approximate age and the names of suspected family members --that's free.
This all comes from records with your landlord if you rent, or home purchase records. Back 20 years you had to leave a trail by going to courthouses and other government agencies, but getting it online costs less than the price of gas, and saves you the waiting hassles involved with physical stacks. Pay a between 2 and 10 dollars to get a history of that victims's full known addresses, plus their known home number. MyLife et al. don't make it anything less than a pain to correct or remove such records, since they're making money off of squealing other people's records for a fee.
Remeber how shady companies pay steep fees on Job Boards like Careerbuilder and Monster in exchange for the chance to datamine and scam unknowing job seekers? Let's talk about "online credit reports." A legit company with a rogue staffer that got your bday and SSN can use the inexpensive reports above to pass basic "authentication" questions. At best it's just "which of these 3 addresses is not fake for your address history?"
Oh, Please... we all know how effective laws and petitions have been for 20 years to change the opt-out/opt-in "bit."
CDs/Thumb drives only work for secondary hardware that a user is perfectly willing to do some extra work to adapt to his machine. Who do you think might start losing buyers for "failing to deliver an out of the box experience that feels complete"?
SRW Iron (Chrome alt on windows) tends to be behind, and somehow I forgot to replace it w/Chromium on this PC, so I had no built-in autoupdate. A megavideo on-click-to-play-flash-movie event on that site always triggers some "benign" FLASH pop-up to reelhd.com and today the latter came with a payload. The usual site lie says I need to click to download *their own* xvid player. Except it the browser prompts me if I really want to DL the triggered installer's exe... and even though I scoffed and cancelled THAT it had already ran invisibly behind a decoy --no Java needed. MS security essentials log says it blocked Win32/ClickPotato adware for trying to run once, and a second time from my having tried to close the tab.
It seems I'll be adding reelhd and browserdl.com to my hostfile's blocked sites. I'll also hate to reconsider my usual stance of browser promiscuity.
FB turned 7 years old yesterday (+/- 1 day). It's cringe-worthy that up till year 6 FB still had a pivacy "bug" where such-like protected pages could be farmed to get all their friends' names by just refreshing. One the plus side, it really helped when the person didn't show their picture and had an ambiguous name.
I have a hard time understanding why large companies do it, in spite of what the other posters' answers to you. What I do get is that for SMALL companies, FB is a very affordable way to host a site and be guaranteed a lively guestbook. Compare that to how IT costs go up when you have entire GUIs to design, maintenance, downtime SLAs, databases to user-populate/de-spamify and so on... no wonder even some large companies that have done all that on their own end up burdenening their potential watchers with ads to balance those budgets.
The above is a daunting task that normally got outsourced to a trusted local company. Now it can be given to a single media/PR guy who posts updates through a user-friendly system all FB users are acquainted with, and generate reports based on who's been visiting and from where (I wonder if they also get the same free demographics data youtube analytics gives any ol' free subscriber.) Matter of fact, Youtube itself has become the defacto video-hosting site even for large companies --despite our knowledge that a corportate blocklist is MORE likely to deny youtube than apple.com. You can bet your hiney that it's due to the much-improved chances for going viral as well as getting trackable user-feedback to improve your future ad campaigns.
<rant> The XP designers in 2000 had plenty of time to copy OS X's then-beta functionality, and deliberately passed on giving XP OEM the CDR saving ability (and SP1, SP2 up to 2008's SP3.) To top it off, My Vista SP2 still doesn't offer that option 10 years later --thanks, Napster-era anti-piracy lobbyists! See for yourself: stick in any CD, let it spin up and rightclick the drive letter. Check the OS's single relevant context menu option: "Burn to disc" and feel disappointment when you click and it gives you a stupid window just stating that "There are no files to burn." The only feature I've seen is WMP's Audio-CD creator, and it's because it won't save your files as data MP3s. </rant>
So, without further ado:
Windows Disc Image Burner: Mac Disk Utility
I wonder if they finally bothered to implement NATIVE CD copying since I always need 3rd-party software for people to do more than just "backing up HD folders to CD-Rs".
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree with spamming and it doesn't prevent me from seeing that you are absolutely right. The guy will get hired* for the same reason notorious black hats and gray hats get hired:
He's good at what he did, and the employer's bottom line would be fattened up because someone known as 'The King' must have made some good profit. So thieves can make alliances when the goal is stolen cash. Even white hats might hire him to help "harden" their systems against his own old and new 'intellectual property.'
* assuming he won't work alone to avoid tipping off the feds, like all those "small fries" scammers operating in US jurisdictions.
I personaly don't see why people working together should have less rights than people working alone.
Scale. Gangs of thieves also don't get to have 100,000 employees worldwide. You can put a whole gang of thieves in jail, effectively dissolving their "corporation."
Thief corporations can only be dissolved and jail pretty much avoided in the USA --look at Bernie Madoff's cover-up of his 'nonexistent' accomplices. A result is that the same 100,000 thieves will be out there doing other thieving and banding together after a PR rebranding effort.
The question is which 'status' would most people choose given a default 'evil' mentality?
Back in those days my mac yawned at fruitless activeX exploits meant for WinIE5, and loled at those .EXE downloads ESPECIALLY if we were dumb enough to doubleclick them; Linux browsers are just as safe, the same as a fax can't load virus code meant for Outlook Express 4 from 10 years ago.
Looks like PP forgot to read the article they posted: targetting and succeeding (at infecting with a virus) are not the same thing
The word was that match.com contributed to 10% of US marriages some years ago. An online source didn't confirm this at the moment but says a 3-year study granted them a score of 17% couples married.
For the half-full means half-empty crowd, divorce is still winning offline and online.
Without really developing MS office, how else do you convince people they have something new with each release other than re-arranging menus?
They don't. The automobile industry spends billions trying to convince the general public that expensive purchases must be made or what is basically supposed to be a lifetime purchase if the "product" isn't lemon-y. That is how most of the non-IT world analyzes purchases like that in the third world: because the kinda things money buys aren't gimmicky status symbols with expiration dates or yearly refresh cycles (except for the ever-evil ads for imported American cars).
The US is trying to push the idea that if it ain't broke, it's too old-fashioned next year, and the disposable-cash ADHD teens of today will be the buyers of tomorrow, pretty literally; today's older people don't "contribute" to the problem as much.
Mod parent up.
You can google "anki exponential learning" (without the quotes) and download the program too. It's available at your repos as well.
Sorry but I don't like searching for every single thing when I already know the address. This is just dumb. Far too much emphasis place on searching these days.
Some governments request Google's search data (remember google.ch and google Hong Kong issues last year) to help control and torture their dissidents. This is further removing the ability to cover your tracks since you're now creating additional middleman crumbs (and what BIG crumbs they are at google).
Basically it's enhancing the government's current tracking by putting in the equation google's analytics so the govt can catalogue of all your favorite revolutionary domains and previously hard-to-track "pirate" DNS-less IP addresses.
But then how do you play Farmville?
Funny off-topic. But on a similar vein, I've been trying to find a Microsoft tag (colorful triangle-barcodes) decoder, and it is a web-enabled-smartphone-only commodity.
Windows didn't get the decoder, and our perfectly good digital cameras go unused for "encoded" hyperlinks advertised on local newspapers. Heck, the MS page shows a train station advertising schedules and they assume even New York tourists in that lower-Manhattan area must have access to expensive phones with data plans. What gives?
We put a large weight on some unwritten code of conduct promising that signed-in users always read replies and feel remorse or learn something. Even "bad" signed in users know that negative-karma ID's can be replaced with blank karma ones for free.
It's a myth that arguing with a "known" and evil slashdot user does real life good. It doesn't achive more than boycotting a faceless AC. After all, there's no "signed in UID accident insurance" ... on the internet we don't know your face, hear your exasperated sighing, or know whose door to knock for a mutual handshake of joy when a the comment causes a positive outcome. So it's about educating the forum reading that reply, rather than an individual AC or UID.
I'm not so sure about choosing to defy a single huge bully rather than many wimpy ones. At least with each little advertiser, one has your name, but not your birthday, or location, or preference in pr0n search terms. Google* being your "single point of failure" is very dangerous dangerous when the failure involves ALL your data at once.
Big bully means "Google" or Apple, or even our wife --all are bad but well-informed single points of failure. The point is that anyone that has enough confidential information can ruin you, and your "I will hear about it" only works out well if the transgression you "hear" about it is slow enough that you can jump ship without being affected, and obvious enough to be discovered and stopped. Think of how ineffective it is to "recover" by suing a person that already destroyed your liver prescribing the wrong medicine for years, or negligently crushed your spine with their car without your getting an advance permission slip in the mail :)
I have a few different versions of OO 3 and recent proof that more than paranoia keeps me from updating all to Oracle's.
Why? My much-changed resume is a native Oracle OOo 3.2 file created in Ubuntu is having a problem I never saw while it was Sun's property. I just spent the last quarter hour seeking help for cross-platform corruption but found no relevant bug reports or solutions. It's the third time that the native format and the exported DOC file can't be opened in Windows' OOo and MS's Viewer --PDFs are safe for now. I can still edit them in Linux.
I keep several versions, some "e-mail obscured" to prevent job-board scammers from easily spamming me. When the job agents call and ID themselves (which spammers don't, and few scammers dare to) I e-mail them the "full" one. That's a pretty bad time to realize the file is corrupted.
I'll hit the LibreOffice repos and hope people there have fixed the problem. Oracle won't see me downloading their version starting with the next Ubuntu upgrade cycle.
There are plenty of Windows alternatives for those tired of this mad decline of quality in light of FF's success. The problem is that newbies have hardly a clue about what they are in Linux. In 15 years of dealing with newbies anyone will see that "what browser?" and "what Operating System do you use?" come back with blank stares even when the splash screens are displaying.
To even find an alternative like Midori, "A Web browser" (brand-free FF), Seamonkey, Konqueror* in the package managers, but they need to the keyword "browser", because Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and "Google Chrome" will return no results without presciently tweaking their sources.
* Many Ubuntu users have never walked outside of Gnome because they don't heard about KDE's platform, especially post 4.0, so Konqueror followers have suffered since FF is default everywhere in the Linux world now .
For the majority of us latitude isn't in that 45-50 deg range. It seems Auroramax offers live aurora streaming from one of those frigid locations in Canada. Search engine results don't seem too encouraging on variety for this, though.
Except that to qualify to be near him and allow the punching exchange, you've agreed to a EULA giving up your ability to use your fancy lawyers.
Sad.
Great... big scary companies that can't earn our trust force us to "sign up" by purchasing their replacements that we did trust. First it was USA banks getting gobbled up, and our diversity perks disappearing after the acquisition. Now, big web companies either create "sign into Yahoo with your Facebook ID" kind of mergers. TFA mentions the twitter question "dodge" very shortly, but to me it counts as guiltily "pleading the fifth"*. When they acquire twitter, they can get data on my habits that I chose NOT to give up when everybody opted-OUT of joining Google BUZZ exactly 12 months ago.
Youtube refused to let me in with my 4-year old YOUTUBE username to view a video yesterday... apparently they don't care; they want me to sign in with a Google address. Nothing is stopping me from faking data and so on, but nothing will fool their geolocation tracking and their silently associating my video playlists with the content of those emails I receive. Twitter data would provide my outing habits and random data to mine. Eventually it will be a giant single company out there with access to everything, and in the end, we'll have nobody left to trust.
* amendment of the USA constitution against self-incrimination
Regarding your final score, it's all about percentages --take what you believe to be a "good" decimal score with a galon of salt. For all you know, your 1 in 700k can mean "only ten others like you, but let's pretend 1/700,000 makes it all better" for a case of 7mil total in their data. Anyway, better numbers mean 1 in 60k, so that you're one a better "one in ten." With the anti-Anonymous-Wikileaks FBI chase, it's clear why being 1 in 10 masked men not as useful as 10,000 in 100,000 --you're still a single person and sheer volume helps drown out your particular masked individuality. Remember that they say "out of several million" and have a dataset only a year old, and make it ambiguous how many millions or dozens of millions, or hundreds of millions have been reviewed.
You'll stand out a lot more when you go to a mom-and-pop site than out at the paranoia-filled-audience seeing the EFF. Besides, the EFF is not a top-ten Facebook favorite. Stats at Panopticlick, therefore, lean HEAVILY toward cookie blocker types, and people blocking all scripts using non-IE browsers (lots of EFF checks are impossible to block in IE since public IE plugins are non-existent that uniformly make it look like your IE setup resembles other anons')
I played around refreshing after setting the user string to "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6" Lying about my OS since Linux will stand out the second I go elsewhere with a smaller user set less likely to have my build. I spend a couple hours recently trimming Gecko, Firefox, the U, the language and the rv substrings, but that seemed to randomly make me lots more unique. Empty strings and "Mozilla/5.0" are still too unique for my taste, giving numbers like your 1 in 700k. The best bet is Flash disabled with Noscript, cookies ON (stick out otherwise). If scripts are on, your resolution is best set as 1024x768 or 1280x800 resolution (laptops). Flash on is what kills us, since it gives away our fonts (and maybe plugin fingerprint IIRC)
My DLINK 825 router supports v6 natively (enable tunnels till the ISP bites the bullet). ReFlashing is child's play. The problem is what seems like cumbersome tutorials for *WRT comparable to babying^W mastering a whole new Linux distro . IE: run this command to download ssl, this one to download v6, this one to chain scripts for your non-default firewall, that one to turn on the web GUI we all take for granted in all consumer routers... Please give it to me straight:
Are there binaries with the web interface enabled by default? Which of those is most usable?
Out of Tomato / dd-wrt / Open-WRT, which do you rate best in terms of day-by-day stability / low maintenance? (Please, no modularity and scriptability)
Thanks.
vlueboy.
Last month at my doctor's office elderly ladies mentioned some company had mailed one a contest entry form that she was excited about. I mentioned the Nigerian scamming, and international mules and check fraud, but they weren't completely sure that the company was trying to scam them. The lure was to guess "what ONE country has no letter A in its name" to win a lot of cash.
It was a language different to English, since Egipt, Mexico and Puerto Rico came to mind in a couple minutes, I told them nobody legit sets up such a contest --they're trying to make you think instead of "selecting you", you're selecting yourself thanks to your supposedly high luck. The punchline is that the scammers wanted $250 USD in cash to win the "unique" cash prize even if you knew the "one" answer.
Some company with a TAX ID equal to my father's SSN* had credit issues, so a random bank posted a stop to his SSN that got him in trouble with his own bank. We went to the random bank, where they realized the problem but would not reveal the client's information because we weren't the real consumer. They corrected it quickly.
However, with fraud the company authenticates you based on proof of ID, security questions and weighing the location-based activity that "proves" you are the original owner. The catch is that they have a profitable relationship on the other end (to them) that they do not want to sever lightly until they escalate and review. Being responsible for calling the cops on your "clients" isn't any rep's gateway to a promotion either. The bank has delicate procedures trying to keep people from calling the cops or taking the law into their own hands.
The problem is that the bad guys already have all the info on the victim's address, names, and so on. That causes a feeling of unfair treatment and dread: like the bad guys will end up incriminating us from behind their one-way glass if they feel like accusing us of being the fraudsters.
* It's stupid that the USA corporate tax ID numberspace and the individual taxpayers' have exactly 9 digits AND is allowed to have clashes, and that corporations and individuals legally sign many of the same documents without a checkbox clarifying which numberspace is to be used.
Your name, date of birth and address are not private. Your mother's maiden name is not private.
^--- THIS! If you google the name of any non-celebrity in the United States, there is MORE than just results from Facebook and LinkedIn. Companies digitize city databases and then dozens of freeloaders scrape and repost those with your city, approximate age and the names of suspected family members --that's free.
This all comes from records with your landlord if you rent, or home purchase records. Back 20 years you had to leave a trail by going to courthouses and other government agencies, but getting it online costs less than the price of gas, and saves you the waiting hassles involved with physical stacks. Pay a between 2 and 10 dollars to get a history of that victims's full known addresses, plus their known home number. MyLife et al. don't make it anything less than a pain to correct or remove such records, since they're making money off of squealing other people's records for a fee.
Remeber how shady companies pay steep fees on Job Boards like Careerbuilder and Monster in exchange for the chance to datamine and scam unknowing job seekers? Let's talk about "online credit reports." A legit company with a rogue staffer that got your bday and SSN can use the inexpensive reports above to pass basic "authentication" questions. At best it's just "which of these 3 addresses is not fake for your address history?"
Oh, Please... we all know how effective laws and petitions have been for 20 years to change the opt-out/opt-in "bit."
CDs/Thumb drives only work for secondary hardware that a user is perfectly willing to do some extra work to adapt to his machine.
Who do you think might start losing buyers for "failing to deliver an out of the box experience that feels complete"?
SRW Iron (Chrome alt on windows) tends to be behind, and somehow I forgot to replace it w/Chromium on this PC, so I had no built-in autoupdate. A megavideo on-click-to-play-flash-movie event on that site always triggers some "benign" FLASH pop-up to reelhd.com and today the latter came with a payload. The usual site lie says I need to click to download *their own* xvid player. Except it the browser prompts me if I really want to DL the triggered installer's exe ... and even though I scoffed and cancelled THAT it had already ran invisibly behind a decoy --no Java needed. MS security essentials log says it blocked Win32/ClickPotato adware for trying to run once, and a second time from my having tried to close the tab.
It seems I'll be adding reelhd and browserdl.com to my hostfile's blocked sites. I'll also hate to reconsider my usual stance of browser promiscuity.
FB turned 7 years old yesterday (+/- 1 day). It's cringe-worthy that up till year 6 FB still had a pivacy "bug" where such-like protected pages could be farmed to get all their friends' names by just refreshing. One the plus side, it really helped when the person didn't show their picture and had an ambiguous name.
I have a hard time understanding why large companies do it, in spite of what the other posters' answers to you.
What I do get is that for SMALL companies, FB is a very affordable way to host a site and be guaranteed a lively guestbook. Compare that to how IT costs go up when you have entire GUIs to design, maintenance, downtime SLAs, databases to user-populate/de-spamify and so on... no wonder even some large companies that have done all that on their own end up burdenening their potential watchers with ads to balance those budgets.
The above is a daunting task that normally got outsourced to a trusted local company. Now it can be given to a single media/PR guy who posts updates through a user-friendly system all FB users are acquainted with, and generate reports based on who's been visiting and from where (I wonder if they also get the same free demographics data youtube analytics gives any ol' free subscriber.) Matter of fact, Youtube itself has become the defacto video-hosting site even for large companies --despite our knowledge that a corportate blocklist is MORE likely to deny youtube than apple.com. You can bet your hiney that it's due to the much-improved chances for going viral as well as getting trackable user-feedback to improve your future ad campaigns.
<rant>
The XP designers in 2000 had plenty of time to copy OS X's then-beta functionality, and deliberately passed on giving XP OEM the CDR saving ability (and SP1, SP2 up to 2008's SP3.) To top it off, My Vista SP2 still doesn't offer that option 10 years later --thanks, Napster-era anti-piracy lobbyists! See for yourself: stick in any CD, let it spin up and rightclick the drive letter. Check the OS's single relevant context menu option: "Burn to disc" and feel disappointment when you click and it gives you a stupid window just stating that "There are no files to burn." The only feature I've seen is WMP's Audio-CD creator, and it's because it won't save your files as data MP3s.
</rant>
So, without further ado:
Windows Disc Image Burner: Mac Disk Utility
I wonder if they finally bothered to implement NATIVE CD copying since I always need 3rd-party software for people to do more than just "backing up HD folders to CD-Rs".