You are partially correct. It does marginally increase the cost of doing business for spammers, but remember that the major spam houses have the capital to lease major bandwidth, and have for some time. Having to madly swap domains to get is only going to swamp smaller spammers with enough extra cost to kill them. The big boys are going to keep chugging along, and the big boys are the biggest source of spam (obviously).
What I like about SPF is that as larger ISPs adopt it, I can stop worrying about accidently filtering their domains just because of the domain name on the From: header. I'm fully aware I'm still going to have to filter, but it's nice to know that "tightvagina@yahoo.com" actually came from an authorized Yahoo mail server. Combine that with any number of of rational filtering schemes, and you have a much lower false positive rate, with the bonus being that you didn't have to take the whole message from a sender who fails the SPF check.
Strictly speaking, no, China isn't going anywhere, except in terms of asiatic continental drift. However your comment about someone "taking a sledgehammer to their structure" is both valid,and more importantly, my point. China has risk factors associated with long term investment that are a great deal more subtle than elsewhere, precisely because it is China. I'd be reluctant to call it a "decrepit communist regime", because that description just seems to miss the mark with the weird sort of pseudo-reformed Maoist government in place right now.
On riots being unheard of, that's true. Of course that decrepit communist regime controls the media there, but I suppose that's one of the bad points you're speaking of.
Seriously, If I had a project of any size to run right now, China would be on my list of possible resources, along with several other global locations. However, since my background isn't cost accounting and I hate MBA-think, my definition of "value" includes a little more than dollar cost. It would be an interesting exercise.
Two side notes:
Your URL is broken.
Your sig isn't obviously a sig, so I reread my original response to make sure I'd typed "a lot", instead of "alot". Not a bad thing, but I was momentarily concerned. My dad would shoot me for a mistake like that!
If your company is counting on China to be "politically stable" over the next 10-15 year time frame, your executives need a refresher course in geopolitical realities. While I'll agree that your comapny isn't likely to have its facilities burned down next week in a riot (although it's not out of the realm of possibility), you're dealing with a regime under a lot of pressures, internal and external. I'd be surprised if China looks very much like it does now in 10 years.
I really wish people who develop this mildly insane desire to compare "speed" between languages would at least bother to aquire the compilers and expertise to fairly run the benchmarks.
Mark me redundant, but the Gnu suite has never been about performance, while the Sun JVMs are all about how fast what amounts to an interpretive language can actually run. Side note: IBM's JVMs still smoke Sun in real world apps.
You want to make useful comparisions? Benchmark.Net c# on doze vs. Sun's JVM on equiv intel hardware. That's real world, and a hell of a lot more relevant to the (F)OSS community.
They've had previous instances of this, in both the Cisco designed products and in stuff from vendors they bought. I was rather horrified to find out that there was a backdoor password into one of my customer's ATM switches (a large bank), and I wouldn't have discovered the fact except the support technician at Cisco was in a hurry to close the ticket I had open. (The customer had rightly changed the enable password, and I couldn't track down the guy who had the new pw).
The rule is that a tribe can have any type of gaming allowed under state law. So, if a state allows bingo for charity, then tribes within that state can have bingo for profit. Most tribes actually run their gaming operations under something called a Type II Gaming Compact, which has to be negotiated with the state and delivered to the BIA. The result is some pretty bizarre mutations, like "electronic bingo machines", which are really just slot machines with a different rule set, and pari-mutuel black jack (you play the other players, not the house).
As for the corruption and exploitation of Indian tribal councils by gaming companies, they're late comers to the party. The tribes have a long collective history of crooked chiefs and councils. At least with gaming, they don't have to wait for the Feds to dole out monies owed, as is the case for mineral and timber rights.
I'm going to probably repeat what a whole bunch of people have already said (probably better than I will), and go on a minor tear.
ATI is being silly. For that matter, so is Nvidia and anyone else who makes consumer products who insists that they are some how preserving comptetive advantage by not publishing driver source.
As someone who's worked in the gizmo world (read: consumer PC hardware), everyone knows there are no trade secrets in a product once it has been released. Every single company has at least one team of engineers disecting their competitors' products from the day they can lay hands on them, and that includes drivers. If anything, it's gotten cheaper and easier with the availablity of overseas engineering centers. The non-patented stuff that ATI spits out shows up in the next gen of the Nvidia cards (and Matrox, and all the rest). The patented stuff gets licensed if the respective companies are really interested.
Every video card producer makes design decisions that are going to be different than other video card producers, whether it be because of different target markets, or just plain old "we think this is more important". ATI is leading the gamer frame rate race right now. Nvidia has a better array of high end workstation products. Matrox is making very solid, inexpensive 2d chipsets with serious office productivity implications. The half dozen other video card producers all have areas of expertise, and any one of them could make an advance that puts them on the top of the charts in a given niche next week. And all of them are looking at all the other products out there, and clean rooming them.
I don't know. Maybe this is just a case of the first big producer saying "you know what? Screw it, we'll open source the drivers". Given what the GPL requires, the first one that does it is going to reap huge benefits for a long time to come. But I'm not holding my breath for that breakthrough in corporate thought.
The thing that strikes me is that the consumer networking world largely seems to understand the process.
-sigh-
In the the mean time, I'm going to forgo the the few frames per second advantage that ATI gives me and stick with Nvidia. Easier to lump into my custom setup, and that buys them a point advantage until someone gets smart and plays nice.
(Note: no invalid end-of-rant scope delimiter. I'm _so_ not done.)
First, in the current environment, you're not likely to have much luck in getting them to modify the agreement. These things are generally boilerplate, and deviations tend to have to be reviewed by the company attorney, which may be more hassle than they're willing to deal with unless you are someone they really, really want. I'd probably still ask, but expect a "no".
Second, if you create something on your own time, using your own resources, they will have trouble coming after you. Not that they won't, but generally speaking they will have trouble getting any kind of judgement against you.
Regardless, if you plan on persuing an outside project, get a lawyer specializing in employment law to review your agreements with the company. It will cost a couple hundred bucks, but it could save you some aggrevation down the line. Martindale is a good place to start.
Heh. Interesting point. Does anyone know if a 727 freighter is even capable of a barrel roll?
Re:Ouch for card counters...
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Casinos like to foster 2 myths about card counting. First, that it's illegal (it's not), and second that you'll be declared persona non grata if they "catch" you doing it. The truth is that casinos tolerate counters on a regular basis, for a number of reasons:
Card counting is damn hard. As an exercise, cut 20 random coupons out of the Sunday supplement, memorize the products and the discounts. Go to your local supermarket, buy a normal week's groceries, taking advantage of the coupons (without looking at them), and factoring in the "advantage buys". If you're single, buy 2 weeks, with an eye on the stuff you don't buy much (toilet paper, cleaning stuff). Keep a running total in your head. At checkout, if your total cost and total coupon savings are within 25 cents of the actuals, you may have a future as a card counter.
Given the fact that most people who try card counting are both bad and obvious, the casinos don't comp them, which cuts the cost of business. Overall, casinos understand shaving odds. After all, two single number bets on the roulette table shaves the house odds. Which brings me to the third point:
I know exactly zero card counting systems which push the player into postive odds. The really good systems cut the house advantage to.5% or slightly better, but the odds are still with the house in the long run. The counter is depending on a run to make his or her money, along with the right betting scheme (counters tend to be progressive bettors).
That being said, an extremely good counter can bet on (excuse the pun) being blacklisted in Las Vegas, but that's a tiny, tiny percentage of players overall. An average card counter will simply be denied perks, and be viewed with some suspicion. If you play 250-500 hands a year, the comps more than offset the average counter's edge. If you play more that that, it depends on how good a counter you are.
Now that I've vented, I'll get back on topic. RFIDs in casino chips bother me not. The privacy implications for someone who gambles are nil, and the advantage in more accurate play tracking so outweigh any privacy issues, it's not even funny. You don't take chips home (are you stupid? they have cash value only in the casino), the first thing you do when you sit at a table in Vegas is utter the words "I want to be rated", and _every casino wants to keep its player to itself. Hence their reluctance to sell their mailing lists.
A Final Thought: If you find yourself up $75k at the $20 minimum table and a host offers you a suite and RFB, ask for show tickets, take the deal and walk away. And send me some money for my sage advice.:)
I discovered long ago that Yahoo and other news consolidators have the habit of trimming articles, sometimes with severe consequences in apparent intent. I haven't compared the 2, but here's the original article.
It's not a question of hijacking an airport. Previous terror attacks include machine gunning anybody and everybody in a couple of airports in Europe (Rome and Vienna) in the mid 1980s. Large groups of people in relatively confined places make for tempting targets.
Partially true. There is a move to re-privatize the airport screener function. The difference is that the private companies would be under contract to the TSA, as opposed to the airlines. This provides a starting point, if anyone feels like digging through the laws and regs.
Oh, and I thought the guy's name was Dave Barry. But maybe we're talking about someone else.
Seriously, the only way this becomes a "test case" is if he gets sued, which I really doubt will happen. He is the legit owner of the digital file, he's made a good faith promise to transfer ownership, and he's not circumventing the DRM. The only real issue here is that Apple apparently lacks a transfer mechanism. At the moment, they can simply say it's not technically possible, but they can certainly provide one later (for a fee, of course). No one is going to court over this.
I'm more of a programmer then an Admin, yet even I know enough to get around any automated tool once I have root.
Obviously, you need to start that new career as a sooper-sekrat cracker. I'm sure you'll do wonderfully.
The person who did this exploit knew what they were doing and used the exploit to do something rather subtile. I.e. they were carfull not trigger any alarms, so the intrusion was only detectible by a live person.
You have absolutely no way of knowing that, unless you are personally maintaining those systems. Here are the known facts: sometime between the release of an exploit in ptrace and the time the system was patched to close that exploit, someone remote rooted the machine in question. Now, given that the admin(s) applied the patch, why didn't they check the system at that time? 4 months to realize that a production server that a large number of people depend on being secure is atrocious, despite your claim that it's "not surprising at all". If I allowed that to happen to my customers, I'd not only be fired, but probably sued.
If you could do better, I suggest you put your time where your typing finger is, and help out the FSF.
I could, but I'm not a big fan of RMS or many of the FSF policies. Both smell kinda funny to me.
The part where they don't discover the compromise until August. Seriously. There are plenty of known methods of verifying an exposed server on an ongoing basis. Why weren't any of them used here?
You're missing the point. The fact that I can hide an 8-bit game inside documentation is completely irrelevant. The sender of that letter is required to make a good faith effort to determine if the alledgedly infringing file is what they claim it is. In this case, I would suggest that they didn't do that.
"If groceries cost too much (in your estimation) in your area, do you swipe things from the shelves because those food megacorpora-conglomara-WTO-lovin' evildoers "owe" it to you because of their inherit badness?
This is just plain silly and tired. While sharing copyrighted materials across p2p networks is undoubtably a civil tort, it is neither the legal nor moral equivilant of walking out of a grocery store with a can of Boston Baked Beans in your shorts.
As to the previous poster's claim that downloading copyrighted materials off p2p nets is "getting back what's owed to you", I can only hope he was trolling.
"Sharing files with friends deprives him [the publisher] of that income."
This is one of the red herrings tossed out buy the RIAA and its ilk. The asumption is that every download results in a lost sale, which is clearly not the case. In fact, not even a traditionally pirated CD or DVD can really be counted as a lost sale, because the pirates sell at such a huge discount. There is also the issue of unreleased back catalogs, and the percentage of the networks that are trading in copyrighted materials no longer available from the publishers.
There is no real question that swapping copyrighted materials on p2p networks is currently illegal. The morality of it I will leave up to the reader. My own view is that there need to be some pretty drastic changes in both copyright laws and the business models of those who distribute easily digitizable media. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Heh! Wish I had moderator points today. I'd give a boost.
On the serious side, I'll add to your point:
A large number of American corporations have taken advantage of tax loopholes that allow them to transfer profits overseas and not pay taxes. (There are a couple of mechanisms for doing this, but I'm too lazy to get links now.) The EU currently has their knickers in twist about this because the view it as an illegal susbidy (rightly, IMO)>
The US Government buys software from companies with large development groups overseas. This strikes me as a huge potential risk, particularly on the military front. I mean, after that business of the PRC running off with nuclear weapons designs and satellite technology not long ago, hasn't it occurred to anyone inside the beltway that we could really be hurting ourselves here?
The US is by far the most expensive country for healthcare, all of which is due to high wages of medics and lawyers(!), as i believe a huge proportion of the cost is due to malpractice insurance.
Gee. Thanks for pointing that out. Obviously I was was confused before. I was under the mistaken impression that the US healthcare industry was a great deal more complex than that, with many, many factors going into the equation. You should be a politician, with that gift for simplification.
For as much money as Oracle support costs, I'd expect them to help me debug my Oracle issues. Of course, for commercial software running on linux, I tend to lie and say I'm running a supported Linux disto anyway. Then again, you can always gin up an RH install and see if you can duplicate your error. For Oracle in particular, I've found most problems occur across platforms anyway. If it craps out on Linux, it will probably crap out on Solaris and HP-UX, too.
A clause in your brokerage contract allowing your shares to be borrowed meets the definition of "explicit permission". It's fairly common, and I've forgotten exactly what the standard terms are. I believe it applies to shares held in trust by the brokerage for the client. Maybe it's a holdover from the days when you actually got paper certificates.
I don't have enough in the way of holdings, or trade often enough for this to bother me, but I've wondered what the effect could be on dividends and voting rights. I'm sure it's covered somewhere, but I'm too damn lazy to go digging at the moment.:)
Slashdot Mirror
What I like about SPF is that as larger ISPs adopt it, I can stop worrying about accidently filtering their domains just because of the domain name on the From: header. I'm fully aware I'm still going to have to filter, but it's nice to know that "tightvagina@yahoo.com" actually came from an authorized Yahoo mail server. Combine that with any number of of rational filtering schemes, and you have a much lower false positive rate, with the bonus being that you didn't have to take the whole message from a sender who fails the SPF check.
Strictly speaking, no, China isn't going anywhere, except in terms of asiatic continental drift. However your comment about someone "taking a sledgehammer to their structure" is both valid,and more importantly, my point. China has risk factors associated with long term investment that are a great deal more subtle than elsewhere, precisely because it is China. I'd be reluctant to call it a "decrepit communist regime", because that description just seems to miss the mark with the weird sort of pseudo-reformed Maoist government in place right now.
On riots being unheard of, that's true. Of course that decrepit communist regime controls the media there, but I suppose that's one of the bad points you're speaking of.
Seriously, If I had a project of any size to run right now, China would be on my list of possible resources, along with several other global locations. However, since my background isn't cost accounting and I hate MBA-think, my definition of "value" includes a little more than dollar cost. It would be an interesting exercise.
Two side notes:
If your company is counting on China to be "politically stable" over the next 10-15 year time frame, your executives need a refresher course in geopolitical realities. While I'll agree that your comapny isn't likely to have its facilities burned down next week in a riot (although it's not out of the realm of possibility), you're dealing with a regime under a lot of pressures, internal and external. I'd be surprised if China looks very much like it does now in 10 years.
For fooks sake,
.Net c# on doze vs. Sun's JVM on equiv intel hardware. That's real world, and a hell of a lot more relevant to the (F)OSS community.
I really wish people who develop this mildly insane desire to compare "speed" between languages would at least bother to aquire the compilers and expertise to fairly run the benchmarks.
Mark me redundant, but the Gnu suite has never been about performance, while the Sun JVMs are all about how fast what amounts to an interpretive language can actually run. Side note: IBM's JVMs still smoke Sun in real world apps.
You want to make useful comparisions? Benchmark
They've had previous instances of this, in both the Cisco designed products and in stuff from vendors they bought. I was rather horrified to find out that there was a backdoor password into one of my customer's ATM switches (a large bank), and I wouldn't have discovered the fact except the support technician at Cisco was in a hurry to close the ticket I had open. (The customer had rightly changed the enable password, and I couldn't track down the guy who had the new pw).
Kinda-sorta.
The rule is that a tribe can have any type of gaming allowed under state law. So, if a state allows bingo for charity, then tribes within that state can have bingo for profit. Most tribes actually run their gaming operations under something called a Type II Gaming Compact, which has to be negotiated with the state and delivered to the BIA. The result is some pretty bizarre mutations, like "electronic bingo machines", which are really just slot machines with a different rule set, and pari-mutuel black jack (you play the other players, not the house).
As for the corruption and exploitation of Indian tribal councils by gaming companies, they're late comers to the party. The tribes have a long collective history of crooked chiefs and councils. At least with gaming, they don't have to wait for the Feds to dole out monies owed, as is the case for mineral and timber rights.
-prong
Aw, jeeze.
I'm going to probably repeat what a whole bunch of people have already said (probably better than I will), and go on a minor tear.
ATI is being silly. For that matter, so is Nvidia and anyone else who makes consumer products who insists that they are some how preserving comptetive advantage by not publishing driver source.
As someone who's worked in the gizmo world (read: consumer PC hardware), everyone knows there are no trade secrets in a product once it has been released. Every single company has at least one team of engineers disecting their competitors' products from the day they can lay hands on them, and that includes drivers. If anything, it's gotten cheaper and easier with the availablity of overseas engineering centers. The non-patented stuff that ATI spits out shows up in the next gen of the Nvidia cards (and Matrox, and all the rest). The patented stuff gets licensed if the respective companies are really interested.
Every video card producer makes design decisions that are going to be different than other video card producers, whether it be because of different target markets, or just plain old "we think this is more important". ATI is leading the gamer frame rate race right now. Nvidia has a better array of high end workstation products. Matrox is making very solid, inexpensive 2d chipsets with serious office productivity implications. The half dozen other video card producers all have areas of expertise, and any one of them could make an advance that puts them on the top of the charts in a given niche next week. And all of them are looking at all the other products out there, and clean rooming them.
I don't know. Maybe this is just a case of the first big producer saying "you know what? Screw it, we'll open source the drivers". Given what the GPL requires, the first one that does it is going to reap huge benefits for a long time to come. But I'm not holding my breath for that breakthrough in corporate thought.
The thing that strikes me is that the consumer networking world largely seems to understand the process.
-sigh-
In the the mean time, I'm going to forgo the the few frames per second advantage that ATI gives me and stick with Nvidia. Easier to lump into my custom setup, and that buys them a point advantage until someone gets smart and plays nice.
(Note: no invalid end-of-rant scope delimiter. I'm _so_ not done.)
First, in the current environment, you're not likely to have much luck in getting them to modify the agreement. These things are generally boilerplate, and deviations tend to have to be reviewed by the company attorney, which may be more hassle than they're willing to deal with unless you are someone they really, really want. I'd probably still ask, but expect a "no".
Second, if you create something on your own time, using your own resources, they will have trouble coming after you. Not that they won't, but generally speaking they will have trouble getting any kind of judgement against you.
Regardless, if you plan on persuing an outside project, get a lawyer specializing in employment law to review your agreements with the company. It will cost a couple hundred bucks, but it could save you some aggrevation down the line. Martindale is a good place to start.
Heh. Interesting point. Does anyone know if a 727 freighter is even capable of a barrel roll?
That being said, an extremely good counter can bet on (excuse the pun) being blacklisted in Las Vegas, but that's a tiny, tiny percentage of players overall. An average card counter will simply be denied perks, and be viewed with some suspicion. If you play 250-500 hands a year, the comps more than offset the average counter's edge. If you play more that that, it depends on how good a counter you are.
Now that I've vented, I'll get back on topic. RFIDs in casino chips bother me not. The privacy implications for someone who gambles are nil, and the advantage in more accurate play tracking so outweigh any privacy issues, it's not even funny. You don't take chips home (are you stupid? they have cash value only in the casino), the first thing you do when you sit at a table in Vegas is utter the words "I want to be rated", and _every casino wants to keep its player to itself. Hence their reluctance to sell their mailing lists.
A Final Thought: If you find yourself up $75k at the $20 minimum table and a host offers you a suite and RFB, ask for show tickets, take the deal and walk away. And send me some money for my sage advice.
-Prong
I discovered long ago that Yahoo and other news consolidators have the habit of trimming articles, sometimes with severe consequences in apparent intent. I haven't compared the 2, but here's the original article.
It's not a question of hijacking an airport. Previous terror attacks include machine gunning anybody and everybody in a couple of airports in Europe (Rome and Vienna) in the mid 1980s. Large groups of people in relatively confined places make for tempting targets.
Partially true. There is a move to re-privatize the airport screener function. The difference is that the private companies would be under contract to the TSA, as opposed to the airlines. This provides a starting point, if anyone feels like digging through the laws and regs.
Oh, and I thought the guy's name was Dave Barry. But maybe we're talking about someone else.
You forgot to add your IANAL disclaimer.
Seriously, the only way this becomes a "test case" is if he gets sued, which I really doubt will happen. He is the legit owner of the digital file, he's made a good faith promise to transfer ownership, and he's not circumventing the DRM. The only real issue here is that Apple apparently lacks a transfer mechanism. At the moment, they can simply say it's not technically possible, but they can certainly provide one later (for a fee, of course). No one is going to court over this.
Back to topic, I need a .NET component programming book about as much as I need a Satanic ritual manual.
Are you a very proficient satanist, then?
Obviously, you need to start that new career as a sooper-sekrat cracker. I'm sure you'll do wonderfully.You have absolutely no way of knowing that, unless you are personally maintaining those systems. Here are the known facts: sometime between the release of an exploit in ptrace and the time the system was patched to close that exploit, someone remote rooted the machine in question. Now, given that the admin(s) applied the patch, why didn't they check the system at that time? 4 months to realize that a production server that a large number of people depend on being secure is atrocious, despite your claim that it's "not surprising at all". If I allowed that to happen to my customers, I'd not only be fired, but probably sued.
I could, but I'm not a big fan of RMS or many of the FSF policies. Both smell kinda funny to me.
BTW, your spelling is horrible.
The part where they don't discover the compromise until August. Seriously. There are plenty of known methods of verifying an exposed server on an ongoing basis. Why weren't any of them used here?
You're missing the point. The fact that I can hide an 8-bit game inside documentation is completely irrelevant. The sender of that letter is required to make a good faith effort to determine if the alledgedly infringing file is what they claim it is. In this case, I would suggest that they didn't do that.
"If groceries cost too much (in your estimation) in your area, do you swipe things from the shelves because those food megacorpora-conglomara-WTO-lovin' evildoers "owe" it to you because of their inherit badness?
This is just plain silly and tired. While sharing copyrighted materials across p2p networks is undoubtably a civil tort, it is neither the legal nor moral equivilant of walking out of a grocery store with a can of Boston Baked Beans in your shorts.
As to the previous poster's claim that downloading copyrighted materials off p2p nets is "getting back what's owed to you", I can only hope he was trolling.
Minor correction: 'crime' as opposed to 'tort'.
A misdemeanor is a crime, just a lesser one.
"Sharing files with friends deprives him [the publisher] of that income."
This is one of the red herrings tossed out buy the RIAA and its ilk. The asumption is that every download results in a lost sale, which is clearly not the case. In fact, not even a traditionally pirated CD or DVD can really be counted as a lost sale, because the pirates sell at such a huge discount. There is also the issue of unreleased back catalogs, and the percentage of the networks that are trading in copyrighted materials no longer available from the publishers.
There is no real question that swapping copyrighted materials on p2p networks is currently illegal. The morality of it I will leave up to the reader. My own view is that there need to be some pretty drastic changes in both copyright laws and the business models of those who distribute easily digitizable media. I'm not holding my breath, though.
Heh! Wish I had moderator points today. I'd give a boost.
On the serious side, I'll add to your point:
A large number of American corporations have taken advantage of tax loopholes that allow them to transfer profits overseas and not pay taxes. (There are a couple of mechanisms for doing this, but I'm too lazy to get links now.) The EU currently has their knickers in twist about this because the view it as an illegal susbidy (rightly, IMO)>
The US Government buys software from companies with large development groups overseas. This strikes me as a huge potential risk, particularly on the military front. I mean, after that business of the PRC running off with nuclear weapons designs and satellite technology not long ago, hasn't it occurred to anyone inside the beltway that we could really be hurting ourselves here?
Gee. Thanks for pointing that out. Obviously I was was confused before. I was under the mistaken impression that the US healthcare industry was a great deal more complex than that, with many, many factors going into the equation. You should be a politician, with that gift for simplification.
For as much money as Oracle support costs, I'd expect them to help me debug my Oracle issues. Of course, for commercial software running on linux, I tend to lie and say I'm running a supported Linux disto anyway. Then again, you can always gin up an RH install and see if you can duplicate your error. For Oracle in particular, I've found most problems occur across platforms anyway. If it craps out on Linux, it will probably crap out on Solaris and HP-UX, too.
A clause in your brokerage contract allowing your shares to be borrowed meets the definition of "explicit permission". It's fairly common, and I've forgotten exactly what the standard terms are. I believe it applies to shares held in trust by the brokerage for the client. Maybe it's a holdover from the days when you actually got paper certificates.
:)
I don't have enough in the way of holdings, or trade often enough for this to bother me, but I've wondered what the effect could be on dividends and voting rights. I'm sure it's covered somewhere, but I'm too damn lazy to go digging at the moment.