Why bother scrambling when we already know that chrome puts saved passwords in a clear text unencrypted text file?
Because those passwords are stored with the explicit permission of the user, and because they need to be accessible so they can be used to fill in forms. On the other hand, to simply check if you have typed the Google password doesn't need the clear text password, so best practice says it should be hashed, err, I mean scrambled.
Years ago I was in the carpool lane driving with my daughter in a car seat in the back seat of my truck, which due to the vehicle's height made her invisible from outside the truck. I got pulled over, and when the officer came up to my door, he saw her, simply said "Sorry", then walked away without another word. About two weeks later I was in a similar situation in the carpool lane watching the cop come up fast behind me. I told my daughter to raise and waive her arms which made her visible. Just as the cop looked ready to turn on his lights, he suddenly dropped back and pulled out of traffic onto the left shoulder. While I wasn't guilty and didn't get a ticket in either case, having to pull over and waste the time on the first occasion, not to mention the effects of adrenaline both events caused, was not fun.
In my opinion we would be better off with absolutely no limits on free speech.
Slandering some, threatening someone, revealing people's private information like their SSN and credit card info, committing fraud, committing treason. Just a few things I can think of off the top of my head that can happen through speech that I think are valid limits on free speech. Or would you not mind if any or all of these were committed against you (minus treason since that is done against a state)?
Stuxnet was first therefore title should say, Chinese are following US footsteps, or Chinese are caching up to Americans, etc.
Getting malware onto air-gapped machines through covert means predates stuxnet by a large amount (decades), with the Russians being one of the earliest practicers.
It seems that this group managed to spread their malware via USB sticks. The modern equivalent of floppy disk viruses. But in all of the classified networks that I've seen, you can bring your USB drive into the secure area, but it can't be removed. So even if I managed to get my malware on a machine and then somehow got the sensitive data onto some sort of external media, I still don't have anything useful. Not that I wouldn't want to defend against the malware, but it seems that the air gap really is doing it's job.
There are ways for a machine to transmit information other than a wire, that can be detected by other devices. The infected air-gapped machine could send information out through its speakers that a microphone elsewhere could hear. It could flash its screen in binary in the middle of the night that someone outside the building might see through a window. It can raise and lower its power usage through various means that might be detected at the power feed. There was even an article a month ago talking about changing the heat output of the air-gapped machine that could be detected by the thermal sensors in a nearby computer. And there are even more that I won't go into.
So there are ways to send information out even if the USB drive doesn't leave.
Freedom of information is one of those ideas that's such a popular idea no-one will touch the legislation, but the law is typically worded so vaguely that it causes real problems.
Are legislators just lazier than they used to be?
They are not lazier. You can find laws from a century ago that are also vague. In fact, making laws vague is and has been common for a very good reason - the drafter knows he can't anticipate all situations, so he deliberately makes the law overly broad and assumes/hopes it is used appropriately and with discretion and thought. The flip side though is when a law is overly broad it opens up the possibilities like this where a person can argue, perhaps correctly, that the letter of the law allows something the drafters never intended.
The same thing also happens in criminal laws where laws are made vague so unusual or unforeseeable situations can also be covered, but then you have a cop with an attitude citing or arresting people for things which almost everyone would agree isn't a crime, but which if you look at the law in the right way, is. An example near where I live is a person grew some vegetables in their back yard, and their small plot did so well, they had more than they personally could use. They tried to sell their excess, but the city found out and said that makes them a farm and the permits were thousands of dollars since the laws for the permits only anticipated big farms, not home farming. The city official admitted it was wrong, but said until the council changes the law, that is what she has to follow. The homeowner gave up and began donating the food to a shelter since paying thousands of dollars to sell a few vegetables was ridiculous.
Why? At least for mobile, most of the unlimited plans are grandfathered.
That is one of the points of this lawsuit - these were grandfathered plans created under the promise of unlimited data, but AT&T went and created an effective cap by throttling the data rate. They weren't throttling the other customers so the cap wasn't a technical limitation, rather it was a punishment to the grandfathered plans to try and force them into a metered plan, which is more profitable for AT&T. The point is when a carrier, whether for mobile or wired, advertises that the data is unlimited then put arbitrary limits on the customer's ability to use the service, especially when such limits don't apply to other customers paying for different plans, then they are committing fraud by advertising it as "unlimited".
The number of account holders that have them can only decrease.
And one of AT&T's goals is to force the users to give up their "unlimited" plans since those are throttled, and to sign up for the metered plans which are not throttled. What AT&T is doing is fraud by my understanding. My original comment is that until now carriers have been arguing that this throttling was merely a network management function and not a force-the-user-to-change-plans measure, which is bullshit. We need a court to call them on it so others can cite the case for precedent and bitch slap them silly.
So now we'll all have advertised 3GB data caps. In the end, you still don't have quality service past the arbitrary threshold. It doesn't really improve anything for us.
It would be nice though if a carrier advertised and sold a service as unlimited that they do what they said instead of applying arbitrary thresholds to degrade the delivered service to force the users to change plans to ones that are metered/limited (and more profitable for the carriers).
I just hope this case finally sets a precedent that "unlimited" means UNLIMITED, you know, that they advertised! I am looking at you Comcast (and all your industry siblings).
Well, if you're referring to a iPhone or something similar, they need a warrant to access it, IIRC.
To look at the contents on the iPhone, yes, the court said a warrant is required, but what about the cell tower info that tracks your location whenever the phone is on, i.e. "metadata"? Most people nowadays are always with their phone and their phones are always on, so effectively people are providing the GPS trackers for the police. It is the people that don't always carry their phone, or turn them off at key times, namely that know about this tracking potential, that force law enforcement to extraordinary measures like placing a special tracking device on the person, their car, or something they are know to carry.
Except in this case the email was sent to just one person, though the wrong one. The issue is that the sender started to type a name or email address, and Outlook helpfully autocompleted the address (with the wrong one) which the sender then used.
I used to have this happen to me a lot at my last company where there was another person with a similar name, except my name came before his alphabetically so the autocomplete would helpfully fill in my name for people when they started typing his, and they would click send without ever realizing they were sending to the wrong person. I kept having to forward his mail to him.
I don't think the crown will win this, or at least I hope they won't.
The Crown may lose the immediate case, but if they do, give Parliament a little time and they will "fix" that problem, so for the public it is lose-lose.
These companies are like a hydra. Cut off one head and one or more grow back. That is why the FTC wants to find a better solution that can find and block them.
I have also still been getting calls from many scam companies. When Rachel from Credit Card Services calls, if I have time I press one and engage the person. Sometimes I ask them for their company's name, then address, which normally results in hangup. Once I had a person who must have been new and who seemed genuine give me a real address that was an old office building in NY, but normally if they don't hang up at the question they say something like they aren't allowed to give that out. When asked for their contact number, they typically say it is the one my phone is showing, but I had one guy recently give me a number that when I looked it up was the Chase VISA 800 number. I have also at times started the conversation by telling the person that I was confused since the call said it was from Rachel, and I had read the police had arrested her - followed soon by them hanging up. I sometimes ask them if they are calling from my bank, which causes half to hangup, and the other half to say or imply yes they are, which causes them great trouble with my following questions. It always ends the same though where they discover they have been recognized or backed into a corner and they break the connection. They don't seem to learn though that my number isn't worth calling and the calls keep coming.
For the others like the medical device companies where I "was referred by my doctor or family member", I ask them who referred me, or challenge them that since I share the phone I want to make sure they got the right person and what the name is that they have, which of course they can't answer. As others have said, if I have the time when they call, I want to keep a live person on the line for a while to increase their costs, and to some degree provide entertainment for me. The best tools the consumers currently have to fight these scams is to make it cost more than the scammers get out of it.
Could you use multiple independent lasers all aimed simultaneously at the same target to increase the effective yield to a power greater than what a single laser could achieve?
Does it matter? Do violations become more palatable depending on who started it, or whether it is condoned by your party?
When people try to blame events on one side even though both side are to blame, then yes, pointing out the violations of what they consider the "good" side matter to help people see reality. In my post that you responded to I didn't make a claim about who started it. In fact I was responding to a poster who clearly DID label a party as being the one who started it, by listing examples that predated it of similar actions. I however do understand that a person could take my earliest counterexample, either Clinton or Truman depending on post, and say I was trying to blame them, which I was not. There is no clear beginning to this, unless you are a fundamentalist and say it was Eve looking around to see if anyone was watching before picking the fruit.
If Joe is a villain, it doesn't imply that Jack is a saint.
Where did anyone here say that?
Stop blaming. Do something. Shout loud and clear "No more".
Probably unlike most here, I am, just not in a way Slashdot readers can see.
CIA was created in 1947 and the NSA in 1952, both under Truman, a Democrat. Due to domestic spying abuses (by both sides), Executive Order 12333 was passed to curtail it in 1991 by Reagan, a Republican.
Both sides have used and abused their authorities regarding monitoring of US person, though be careful when trying to throw stones. The issues you bring up did not first appear under Bush, but each president has had the power to address it, and so far I only see Reagan made a decent attempt at trying to stop it.
Generally in small claims court you can not sue for court costs.
Where I live, in small claims court the filing fees are automatically added onto the judgement amount if the plaintiff wins. The fees run $35 to $80 per case depending on amount being sued for. Other costs, like time for the plaintiff to go to court, travel, making copies of documents, etc., however are not claimable. Not sure about fees to have the defendant served.
That was an editing error, not a spelling error, since I changed the sentence structure and failed to correct the syntax. Still my error though, and especially tough for me since I try hard to get my contractions and homonyms correct. Thank you Russ. (Bows head in shame)
We're not talking about them blocking wireless hotspots in guest's rooms, that's just overlap. The issue is that they were blocking wireless hotspots in convention space they were renting out, so the individual conventioneers and exhibitors HAD to buy the Marriot wi-fi package at exorbitant prices.
How could they be sure it wasn't an exhibit attendee. Attendees don't sign agreements before entering that promise not to use personal WiFi, so what if the hotel stomped on them? What about someone physically outside the convention space, but close enough that due to signal reflections the hotel equipment decided was inside the hall? Is stomping on them OK since they seemed to be in the hall? I am sure there are more examples where innocent people could get targetted by such a device.
I think the Slashdot editors actually take pride in screwing up.
Just like you did. It Marriott, not Mariott. And the summary spelled it Marriot, not Mariot as you wrote.
In partial fairness to the Slashdot editor, the linked BBC article has the title "Marriot hotels do U-turn over wi-fi hotspot blocks", and the first use of the hotel's name in the article uses the same misspelling. Later uses in the article get it right though. Still confused as to how a BBC article got this so wrong, especially since it has both the right and wrong spelling in the same article. Your misspelling on the other hand has no excuse.
True, but the flesh-and-blood player faces the same probability decisions as the robot so there is no advantage after a large number of hands. The real difference here is the robot could potentially read the live players body language to gain additional information that it incorporates into its decisions, but the reverse isn't true.
Wouldn't another robot which knows of all possible decisions of this particular robot be better that this "Perfect Robotic Player"?
No, the best that should happen is they both win the same amount after a large number of hands (note the phrase "given enough hands" so the law of large numbers is involved). Since the decisions are based on probability given the known cards (or so I assume since I haven't read the article), any decisions by the second robot trying to beat the first that went against the probability tree would be sub-optimal and cause it to slowly lose.
Slashdot Mirror
Using the same logic, using a bus or going by train is also more efficient since the many seats versus a couple is also true.
That should read using a BUS. Damn autocorrect.
Using the same logic, using a but or going by train is also more efficient since the many seats versus a couple is also true.
Why bother scrambling when we already know that chrome puts saved passwords in a clear text unencrypted text file?
Because those passwords are stored with the explicit permission of the user, and because they need to be accessible so they can be used to fill in forms. On the other hand, to simply check if you have typed the Google password doesn't need the clear text password, so best practice says it should be hashed, err, I mean scrambled.
Years ago I was in the carpool lane driving with my daughter in a car seat in the back seat of my truck, which due to the vehicle's height made her invisible from outside the truck. I got pulled over, and when the officer came up to my door, he saw her, simply said "Sorry", then walked away without another word. About two weeks later I was in a similar situation in the carpool lane watching the cop come up fast behind me. I told my daughter to raise and waive her arms which made her visible. Just as the cop looked ready to turn on his lights, he suddenly dropped back and pulled out of traffic onto the left shoulder. While I wasn't guilty and didn't get a ticket in either case, having to pull over and waste the time on the first occasion, not to mention the effects of adrenaline both events caused, was not fun.
In my opinion we would be better off with absolutely no limits on free speech.
Slandering some, threatening someone, revealing people's private information like their SSN and credit card info, committing fraud, committing treason. Just a few things I can think of off the top of my head that can happen through speech that I think are valid limits on free speech. Or would you not mind if any or all of these were committed against you (minus treason since that is done against a state)?
Stuxnet was first therefore title should say, Chinese are following US footsteps, or Chinese are caching up to Americans, etc.
Getting malware onto air-gapped machines through covert means predates stuxnet by a large amount (decades), with the Russians being one of the earliest practicers.
It seems that this group managed to spread their malware via USB sticks. The modern equivalent of floppy disk viruses. But in all of the classified networks that I've seen, you can bring your USB drive into the secure area, but it can't be removed. So even if I managed to get my malware on a machine and then somehow got the sensitive data onto some sort of external media, I still don't have anything useful. Not that I wouldn't want to defend against the malware, but it seems that the air gap really is doing it's job.
There are ways for a machine to transmit information other than a wire, that can be detected by other devices. The infected air-gapped machine could send information out through its speakers that a microphone elsewhere could hear. It could flash its screen in binary in the middle of the night that someone outside the building might see through a window. It can raise and lower its power usage through various means that might be detected at the power feed. There was even an article a month ago talking about changing the heat output of the air-gapped machine that could be detected by the thermal sensors in a nearby computer. And there are even more that I won't go into.
So there are ways to send information out even if the USB drive doesn't leave.
Freedom of information is one of those ideas that's such a popular idea no-one will touch the legislation, but the law is typically worded so vaguely that it causes real problems.
Are legislators just lazier than they used to be?
They are not lazier. You can find laws from a century ago that are also vague. In fact, making laws vague is and has been common for a very good reason - the drafter knows he can't anticipate all situations, so he deliberately makes the law overly broad and assumes/hopes it is used appropriately and with discretion and thought. The flip side though is when a law is overly broad it opens up the possibilities like this where a person can argue, perhaps correctly, that the letter of the law allows something the drafters never intended.
The same thing also happens in criminal laws where laws are made vague so unusual or unforeseeable situations can also be covered, but then you have a cop with an attitude citing or arresting people for things which almost everyone would agree isn't a crime, but which if you look at the law in the right way, is. An example near where I live is a person grew some vegetables in their back yard, and their small plot did so well, they had more than they personally could use. They tried to sell their excess, but the city found out and said that makes them a farm and the permits were thousands of dollars since the laws for the permits only anticipated big farms, not home farming. The city official admitted it was wrong, but said until the council changes the law, that is what she has to follow. The homeowner gave up and began donating the food to a shelter since paying thousands of dollars to sell a few vegetables was ridiculous.
Why? At least for mobile, most of the unlimited plans are grandfathered.
That is one of the points of this lawsuit - these were grandfathered plans created under the promise of unlimited data, but AT&T went and created an effective cap by throttling the data rate. They weren't throttling the other customers so the cap wasn't a technical limitation, rather it was a punishment to the grandfathered plans to try and force them into a metered plan, which is more profitable for AT&T. The point is when a carrier, whether for mobile or wired, advertises that the data is unlimited then put arbitrary limits on the customer's ability to use the service, especially when such limits don't apply to other customers paying for different plans, then they are committing fraud by advertising it as "unlimited".
The number of account holders that have them can only decrease.
And one of AT&T's goals is to force the users to give up their "unlimited" plans since those are throttled, and to sign up for the metered plans which are not throttled. What AT&T is doing is fraud by my understanding. My original comment is that until now carriers have been arguing that this throttling was merely a network management function and not a force-the-user-to-change-plans measure, which is bullshit. We need a court to call them on it so others can cite the case for precedent and bitch slap them silly.
So now we'll all have advertised 3GB data caps. In the end, you still don't have quality service past the arbitrary threshold. It doesn't really improve anything for us.
It would be nice though if a carrier advertised and sold a service as unlimited that they do what they said instead of applying arbitrary thresholds to degrade the delivered service to force the users to change plans to ones that are metered/limited (and more profitable for the carriers).
I just hope this case finally sets a precedent that "unlimited" means UNLIMITED, you know, that they advertised! I am looking at you Comcast (and all your industry siblings).
Well, if you're referring to a iPhone or something similar, they need a warrant to access it, IIRC.
To look at the contents on the iPhone, yes, the court said a warrant is required, but what about the cell tower info that tracks your location whenever the phone is on, i.e. "metadata"? Most people nowadays are always with their phone and their phones are always on, so effectively people are providing the GPS trackers for the police. It is the people that don't always carry their phone, or turn them off at key times, namely that know about this tracking potential, that force law enforcement to extraordinary measures like placing a special tracking device on the person, their car, or something they are know to carry.
Except in this case the email was sent to just one person, though the wrong one. The issue is that the sender started to type a name or email address, and Outlook helpfully autocompleted the address (with the wrong one) which the sender then used.
I used to have this happen to me a lot at my last company where there was another person with a similar name, except my name came before his alphabetically so the autocomplete would helpfully fill in my name for people when they started typing his, and they would click send without ever realizing they were sending to the wrong person. I kept having to forward his mail to him.
I don't think the crown will win this, or at least I hope they won't.
The Crown may lose the immediate case, but if they do, give Parliament a little time and they will "fix" that problem, so for the public it is lose-lose.
These companies are like a hydra. Cut off one head and one or more grow back. That is why the FTC wants to find a better solution that can find and block them.
I have also still been getting calls from many scam companies. When Rachel from Credit Card Services calls, if I have time I press one and engage the person. Sometimes I ask them for their company's name, then address, which normally results in hangup. Once I had a person who must have been new and who seemed genuine give me a real address that was an old office building in NY, but normally if they don't hang up at the question they say something like they aren't allowed to give that out. When asked for their contact number, they typically say it is the one my phone is showing, but I had one guy recently give me a number that when I looked it up was the Chase VISA 800 number. I have also at times started the conversation by telling the person that I was confused since the call said it was from Rachel, and I had read the police had arrested her - followed soon by them hanging up. I sometimes ask them if they are calling from my bank, which causes half to hangup, and the other half to say or imply yes they are, which causes them great trouble with my following questions. It always ends the same though where they discover they have been recognized or backed into a corner and they break the connection. They don't seem to learn though that my number isn't worth calling and the calls keep coming.
For the others like the medical device companies where I "was referred by my doctor or family member", I ask them who referred me, or challenge them that since I share the phone I want to make sure they got the right person and what the name is that they have, which of course they can't answer. As others have said, if I have the time when they call, I want to keep a live person on the line for a while to increase their costs, and to some degree provide entertainment for me. The best tools the consumers currently have to fight these scams is to make it cost more than the scammers get out of it.
Could you use multiple independent lasers all aimed simultaneously at the same target to increase the effective yield to a power greater than what a single laser could achieve?
Does it matter? Do violations become more palatable depending on who started it, or whether it is condoned by your party?
When people try to blame events on one side even though both side are to blame, then yes, pointing out the violations of what they consider the "good" side matter to help people see reality. In my post that you responded to I didn't make a claim about who started it. In fact I was responding to a poster who clearly DID label a party as being the one who started it, by listing examples that predated it of similar actions. I however do understand that a person could take my earliest counterexample, either Clinton or Truman depending on post, and say I was trying to blame them, which I was not. There is no clear beginning to this, unless you are a fundamentalist and say it was Eve looking around to see if anyone was watching before picking the fruit.
If Joe is a villain, it doesn't imply that Jack is a saint.
Where did anyone here say that?
Stop blaming. Do something. Shout loud and clear "No more".
Probably unlike most here, I am, just not in a way Slashdot readers can see.
Sorry for the typo, EO12333 was signed end of 1981, by Reagan within his first year after taking office.
CIA was created in 1947 and the NSA in 1952, both under Truman, a Democrat. Due to domestic spying abuses (by both sides), Executive Order 12333 was passed to curtail it in 1991 by Reagan, a Republican.
Both sides have used and abused their authorities regarding monitoring of US person, though be careful when trying to throw stones. The issues you bring up did not first appear under Bush, but each president has had the power to address it, and so far I only see Reagan made a decent attempt at trying to stop it.
Generally in small claims court you can not sue for court costs.
Where I live, in small claims court the filing fees are automatically added onto the judgement amount if the plaintiff wins. The fees run $35 to $80 per case depending on amount being sued for. Other costs, like time for the plaintiff to go to court, travel, making copies of documents, etc., however are not claimable. Not sure about fees to have the defendant served.
It's more like a 419 scam. They are called 419 because that's the law that makes them *legal*.
Hopefully that was a typo. It is called 419 because that is the section of Nigerian law that makes it illegal.
That was an editing error, not a spelling error, since I changed the sentence structure and failed to correct the syntax. Still my error though, and especially tough for me since I try hard to get my contractions and homonyms correct. Thank you Russ. (Bows head in shame)
We're not talking about them blocking wireless hotspots in guest's rooms, that's just overlap. The issue is that they were blocking wireless hotspots in convention space they were renting out, so the individual conventioneers and exhibitors HAD to buy the Marriot wi-fi package at exorbitant prices.
How could they be sure it wasn't an exhibit attendee. Attendees don't sign agreements before entering that promise not to use personal WiFi, so what if the hotel stomped on them? What about someone physically outside the convention space, but close enough that due to signal reflections the hotel equipment decided was inside the hall? Is stomping on them OK since they seemed to be in the hall? I am sure there are more examples where innocent people could get targetted by such a device.
It's Mariott, not Mariot
I think the Slashdot editors actually take pride in screwing up.
Just like you did. It Marriott, not Mariott. And the summary spelled it Marriot, not Mariot as you wrote.
In partial fairness to the Slashdot editor, the linked BBC article has the title "Marriot hotels do U-turn over wi-fi hotspot blocks", and the first use of the hotel's name in the article uses the same misspelling. Later uses in the article get it right though. Still confused as to how a BBC article got this so wrong, especially since it has both the right and wrong spelling in the same article. Your misspelling on the other hand has no excuse.
True, but the flesh-and-blood player faces the same probability decisions as the robot so there is no advantage after a large number of hands. The real difference here is the robot could potentially read the live players body language to gain additional information that it incorporates into its decisions, but the reverse isn't true.
Wouldn't another robot which knows of all possible decisions of this particular robot be better that this "Perfect Robotic Player"?
No, the best that should happen is they both win the same amount after a large number of hands (note the phrase "given enough hands" so the law of large numbers is involved). Since the decisions are based on probability given the known cards (or so I assume since I haven't read the article), any decisions by the second robot trying to beat the first that went against the probability tree would be sub-optimal and cause it to slowly lose.