I used to subscribe to TotalFark for $5 per month, it was worth it for the ability to see and comment on all of the non-greenlit stories. When Fark started going downhill, reddit came about; now I pay them $4 a month to suppress ads (natively) and access extended features. I see a lot of promise in the "freemium" model, not just for discussion sites but for pretty much any type of service. You build out something basic and provide that for free, then offer some combination of ad removal, better access, and bonus features for those who are willing to fork over a couple of bucks.
I haven't yet found a compelling reason to pay for Slashdot, though. Maybe if they gave subscribers a Bennett filter?
OK Genius, if piracy becomes the norm, how does new content get paid for?
Piracy has been the norm for 20 years and has been mainstream for at least 10 of those years. There is no lack of new content that I've noticed. Lack of new ideas, maybe; recently we've seen that even Sony's own employees are tired of the same formulaic Adam Sandler dreck coming out year after year...
Enjoy a future full of Amish Mafia, Real Housewives of what-the-fuck and other horrible drivel because that's going to be the only kind of content that makes money and it's going to push all high quality content off the airwaves.
Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, there's a lot of quality programming recently that's making money hand over fist, piracy or no piracy. Half of it is even on free-to-air TV channels to start with.
I think his point is that even billion-dollar enterprises, who can well afford to hire entire teams of information security and risk management professionals if they cared to do so, frequently don't bother. While IT in general is seen as a cost center and is often woefully underfunded, it at least exists, because management recognizes at some level that without employees to build and maintain that infrastructure, they wouldn't be able to check their email or load up their dashboards and revenue charts. Information security has no such tangible or visible benefit, and thus falls into the category of "why would we pay people for that?"
The Sony case is interesting because this time around, unlike TJ Maxx, Target, Home Depot, et al it wasn't millions of faceless plebeian customers who got fucked over. No, this time the victim is the company itself. Nobody's going to fix this by issuing a boilerplate apology and offering victims a free year of useless credit monitoring service. The corporation is the one suffering (oh, the schadenfreude!); this actually scares enterprise management types, it's a threat that can be quantified. Sony's misfortune comes with the benefit that it's certainly cajoling a few other companies into taking a second look at their own security situations.
You can opt out of the binding arbitration clause, not that they advertise this fact. I believe you're "supposed" to complete the form within 30 days of commencement of service, but I don't know whether or not that requirement itself is legally binding.
If you really want to avoid detection and behavior tracking, I highly suggest you entirely disable cookies entirely (yes, I realize this is not worth it at all), otherwise you will not have accomplished what you had hoped.
Self-Destructing Cookies is pretty nice for those who find it impractical to disable cookies entirely.
So, if an insurance company thinks you are lying about your disability claim, they could ask law enforcement to grab up the X-ray of that broken ankle you suffered playing in the beer softball league.
If an insurance company thinks you're lying about a disability claim, they aren't going to bother with law enforcement or medical records or some dubious fitness app. They'll hire a $300/day private investigator to follow you around for a few days and get photos of you at the golf course. He'll be checking all of your social media, he's probably going to be in your credit and phone records as well, via legal gray areas. If it's a worker's comp claim, they'll have him tail you until the day you go back to work. Insurance will happily pay a PI $10K a month to follow a suspected fraudster on a $100K claim. They only have to win that bet one out of ten times to break even.
A by-internet operated drone brings no such level of responsibility or accountability.
Internet operated drones? Even with the more modern RCs, even with higher-end transmitters, you still need line of sight to operate them; we're generally talking 2.4 GHz here. Aside from the military, I don't think anyone is sitting around in their flight ops chair controlling RCs miles away. If you encounter a "drone" somewhere, the operator is nearby.
Well there's one camp very actively pushing the speculation that North Koreans did this because they're butthurt about "The Interview." At the same time, several articles report there's evidence that the breach may have been ongoing for more than a year. These two things don't line up; "The Interview" hadn't been promoted or even publicly announced a year ago, so there would have been nothing for the North Koreans to be upset about.
I'm still waiting for the official announcement from Sony and Mandiant (wasn't that supposed to have happened already?) but in any event I'm not sold on the whole Nork idea.
Well that explains... Something. To me, that icon with three horizontal lines looks like it's supposed to be for paragraph layout or something, so I've never touched it. I had zero clue that's where the settings had gone to, I thought it was some kind of inline HTML formatter.
I could say the same for algebra, and yet I feel that I'm much better off for having learned it. French? Je parle ne plus pas, which isn't likely to be entirely accurate for "I don't speak very much," but I haven't studied it in 20 years and still know enough to get a few points across. I don't agree at all that "most people don't ever use this" is a valid reason not to teach something.
There is an entire generation of people, perhaps almost two now, who have grown up on the idea of text shortcuts and it's only getting worse. "lvu grl u hot af cu tmw" Many of the younger folks can communicate that way, does that mean that we should stop teaching English? That grammar is no longer important, and that it's no use teaching? I'm not on board with that, although I enjoy the idea of being forever in demand as someone capable of speaking and writing correctly. And even writing in cursive, should some arcane need arise.
People should simply be charged with whatever the crime they are accused of committing.
I agree, in that prosecutors shouldn't be able to threaten charges of more grievous crimes as a bargaining chip. But one problem is that even the truly applicable charges can compound just as quickly; even given a reasonable prosecutor, the law allows and sometimes requires that they file multiple charges for the same crime.
I'll give an example. About 10 years ago, I was called for jury duty and selected for a case. I was dismissed during voir dire after expressing favorable opinions about firearms, but I was around long enough that I got to learn a bit about the case, the defendant, and the charges. In a nutshell, some guy got pulled over for a traffic violation and the cop subsequently found a gun and a blunt in his car. It was his bad luck that the traffic stop took place near a school.
For this, there was a laundry list of charges; something like:
Disregarding a traffic control device
Reckless endangerment
Motor vehicle violation in a designated school zone
Possession of narcotics
Possession of narcotics within 1 mile of a school
Possession of drug paraphernalia
Possession of drug paraphernalia within 1 mile of a school
Unlawful possession of a firearm
Unlawful possession of a firearm within 1 mile of a school
Unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon
Unlawful possession of a firearm by a convicted felon within 1 mile of a school
Everything he did, he was charged for again because the event took place near a school. Having some weed got him 4 misdemeanor charges (the cigar portion of the blunt was "paraphernalia" so they charged for that in addition to the weed). Having one handgun on him got him 4 separate felony charges. And here's the one that blew my mind, there was another charge worded something like "going armed during the commission of a felony." The felony he committed was being armed; it's a felony for a convicted felon to have a gun. So because he was armed while he committed that crime - yeah, seriously! - they tacked on another charge.
Wrap your head around that one:
Because you were carrying a gun while you were carrying a gun, we're going to charge you again.
It's like people who get arrested for resisting arrest; the circular logic is a complete perversion of justice. IIRC, it was that "going armed during the commission of a felony" charge that threatened the longest possible sentence out of all the infractions, and it was a completely bullshit charge to begin with.
Anyway, my point here is that the problem runs deeper than the prosecutors. The problem begins with the laws themselves. There are a lot of prosecutors out there who don't go overboard and reach for the stars, charging a jaywalker with murder or what have you. They don't need to, most of the time; the "legitimate" charges will stack up to enormous sentences all by themselves. We aren't going to get away from that until we revisit the vast corpus of shitty laws out there, especially the ones that require mandatory charges and leave no discretion to the prosecutor.
Surveying friends and family (including a couple hundred facebook friends), calls at first seemed random, but in more recent months, appear to specifically be targeting people over 50. The most recent calls have asked for me by name. This leads me to believe that they're using someone's pilfered (or purchased?) address list. Has AARP had any breaches lately?
Curious, what type of lines are the calls coming in on? There's a huge list of folks, mostly over 50, listed by name, freely available to scammers... The White Pages. Many of them are online and easy to spider. Most telcos still print the physical books, too, although you have to request one now instead of having them dropped off by default. Since these directories are comprised primarily of landlines, it's a safe bet that whoever answers most of the calls will be a baby boomer.
No, but I know a lot of people who still use Yahoo Mail; they've had their accounts forever and aren't likely to change unless Yahoo Mail goes tits-up. They don't necessarily use Yahoo for search (yet), but their eyeballs are on a Yahoo property every single day. It would benefit both parties to this agreement if Yahoo placed a little Firefox promo somewhere in the Yahoo Mail interface, much as I often see promos for Chrome when I hit GMail and other Google services.
Early this morning, someone re-issued an old tornado watch from 2010, which was apparently distributed over official channels (not EAS, though). Everyone who saw it and possesses half a brain knew it was obviously a mistake of some kind, of course that didn't stop the news from making a big deal out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you or I have access to that database? No. It isn't open to the public, which makes it private.
I have used both MIT's, Berkeley's, and Yale's audio lectures.
Not for mathematics, I hope!
removing a man's body
I don't think the SJWs could have stated their goal more clearly themselves!
I used to subscribe to TotalFark for $5 per month, it was worth it for the ability to see and comment on all of the non-greenlit stories. When Fark started going downhill, reddit came about; now I pay them $4 a month to suppress ads (natively) and access extended features. I see a lot of promise in the "freemium" model, not just for discussion sites but for pretty much any type of service. You build out something basic and provide that for free, then offer some combination of ad removal, better access, and bonus features for those who are willing to fork over a couple of bucks.
I haven't yet found a compelling reason to pay for Slashdot, though. Maybe if they gave subscribers a Bennett filter?
OK Genius, if piracy becomes the norm, how does new content get paid for?
Piracy has been the norm for 20 years and has been mainstream for at least 10 of those years. There is no lack of new content that I've noticed. Lack of new ideas, maybe; recently we've seen that even Sony's own employees are tired of the same formulaic Adam Sandler dreck coming out year after year...
Enjoy a future full of Amish Mafia, Real Housewives of what-the-fuck and other horrible drivel because that's going to be the only kind of content that makes money and it's going to push all high quality content off the airwaves.
Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, House of Cards, Breaking Bad, there's a lot of quality programming recently that's making money hand over fist, piracy or no piracy. Half of it is even on free-to-air TV channels to start with.
I think his point is that even billion-dollar enterprises, who can well afford to hire entire teams of information security and risk management professionals if they cared to do so, frequently don't bother. While IT in general is seen as a cost center and is often woefully underfunded, it at least exists, because management recognizes at some level that without employees to build and maintain that infrastructure, they wouldn't be able to check their email or load up their dashboards and revenue charts. Information security has no such tangible or visible benefit, and thus falls into the category of "why would we pay people for that?"
The Sony case is interesting because this time around, unlike TJ Maxx, Target, Home Depot, et al it wasn't millions of faceless plebeian customers who got fucked over. No, this time the victim is the company itself. Nobody's going to fix this by issuing a boilerplate apology and offering victims a free year of useless credit monitoring service. The corporation is the one suffering (oh, the schadenfreude!); this actually scares enterprise management types, it's a threat that can be quantified. Sony's misfortune comes with the benefit that it's certainly cajoling a few other companies into taking a second look at their own security situations.
You can opt out of the binding arbitration clause, not that they advertise this fact. I believe you're "supposed" to complete the form within 30 days of commencement of service, but I don't know whether or not that requirement itself is legally binding.
If you really want to avoid detection and behavior tracking, I highly suggest you entirely disable cookies entirely (yes, I realize this is not worth it at all), otherwise you will not have accomplished what you had hoped.
Self-Destructing Cookies is pretty nice for those who find it impractical to disable cookies entirely.
So, if an insurance company thinks you are lying about your disability claim, they could ask law enforcement to grab up the X-ray of that broken ankle you suffered playing in the beer softball league.
If an insurance company thinks you're lying about a disability claim, they aren't going to bother with law enforcement or medical records or some dubious fitness app. They'll hire a $300/day private investigator to follow you around for a few days and get photos of you at the golf course. He'll be checking all of your social media, he's probably going to be in your credit and phone records as well, via legal gray areas. If it's a worker's comp claim, they'll have him tail you until the day you go back to work. Insurance will happily pay a PI $10K a month to follow a suspected fraudster on a $100K claim. They only have to win that bet one out of ten times to break even.
A by-internet operated drone brings no such level of responsibility or accountability.
Internet operated drones? Even with the more modern RCs, even with higher-end transmitters, you still need line of sight to operate them; we're generally talking 2.4 GHz here. Aside from the military, I don't think anyone is sitting around in their flight ops chair controlling RCs miles away. If you encounter a "drone" somewhere, the operator is nearby.
Well there's one camp very actively pushing the speculation that North Koreans did this because they're butthurt about "The Interview." At the same time, several articles report there's evidence that the breach may have been ongoing for more than a year. These two things don't line up; "The Interview" hadn't been promoted or even publicly announced a year ago, so there would have been nothing for the North Koreans to be upset about.
I'm still waiting for the official announcement from Sony and Mandiant (wasn't that supposed to have happened already?) but in any event I'm not sold on the whole Nork idea.
Also in one of the other stories about this hack i read that they had access for over a year.
Interesting. That points in a direction entirely separate from the "North Korea did it because they hate 'The Interview' film" narrative...
Who are you going to sue? The federal government must explicitly allow you to sue them. Guess what, they don't do that very often.
Trouble is they're all marked up with Sharpie around the outside...
In case anyone else was looking for the missing link in TFS, Kevin Roose's article at Fusion is here.
You've been calling Hezbollah tech support again?
Well that explains... Something. To me, that icon with three horizontal lines looks like it's supposed to be for paragraph layout or something, so I've never touched it. I had zero clue that's where the settings had gone to, I thought it was some kind of inline HTML formatter.
I could say the same for algebra, and yet I feel that I'm much better off for having learned it. French? Je parle ne plus pas, which isn't likely to be entirely accurate for "I don't speak very much," but I haven't studied it in 20 years and still know enough to get a few points across. I don't agree at all that "most people don't ever use this" is a valid reason not to teach something.
There is an entire generation of people, perhaps almost two now, who have grown up on the idea of text shortcuts and it's only getting worse. "lvu grl u hot af cu tmw" Many of the younger folks can communicate that way, does that mean that we should stop teaching English? That grammar is no longer important, and that it's no use teaching? I'm not on board with that, although I enjoy the idea of being forever in demand as someone capable of speaking and writing correctly. And even writing in cursive, should some arcane need arise.
Just show it your penis. The drone will overheat and self-destruct trying to zoom in far enough to get a good picture.
Please don't use left going forward, it's really confusing for the drivers behind you.
People should simply be charged with whatever the crime they are accused of committing.
I agree, in that prosecutors shouldn't be able to threaten charges of more grievous crimes as a bargaining chip. But one problem is that even the truly applicable charges can compound just as quickly; even given a reasonable prosecutor, the law allows and sometimes requires that they file multiple charges for the same crime.
I'll give an example. About 10 years ago, I was called for jury duty and selected for a case. I was dismissed during voir dire after expressing favorable opinions about firearms, but I was around long enough that I got to learn a bit about the case, the defendant, and the charges. In a nutshell, some guy got pulled over for a traffic violation and the cop subsequently found a gun and a blunt in his car. It was his bad luck that the traffic stop took place near a school.
For this, there was a laundry list of charges; something like:
Everything he did, he was charged for again because the event took place near a school. Having some weed got him 4 misdemeanor charges (the cigar portion of the blunt was "paraphernalia" so they charged for that in addition to the weed). Having one handgun on him got him 4 separate felony charges. And here's the one that blew my mind, there was another charge worded something like "going armed during the commission of a felony." The felony he committed was being armed; it's a felony for a convicted felon to have a gun. So because he was armed while he committed that crime - yeah, seriously! - they tacked on another charge.
Wrap your head around that one:
Because you were carrying a gun while you were carrying a gun, we're going to charge you again.
It's like people who get arrested for resisting arrest; the circular logic is a complete perversion of justice. IIRC, it was that "going armed during the commission of a felony" charge that threatened the longest possible sentence out of all the infractions, and it was a completely bullshit charge to begin with.
Anyway, my point here is that the problem runs deeper than the prosecutors. The problem begins with the laws themselves. There are a lot of prosecutors out there who don't go overboard and reach for the stars, charging a jaywalker with murder or what have you. They don't need to, most of the time; the "legitimate" charges will stack up to enormous sentences all by themselves. We aren't going to get away from that until we revisit the vast corpus of shitty laws out there, especially the ones that require mandatory charges and leave no discretion to the prosecutor.
Surveying friends and family (including a couple hundred facebook friends), calls at first seemed random, but in more recent months, appear to specifically be targeting people over 50. The most recent calls have asked for me by name. This leads me to believe that they're using someone's pilfered (or purchased?) address list. Has AARP had any breaches lately?
Curious, what type of lines are the calls coming in on? There's a huge list of folks, mostly over 50, listed by name, freely available to scammers... The White Pages. Many of them are online and easy to spider. Most telcos still print the physical books, too, although you have to request one now instead of having them dropped off by default. Since these directories are comprised primarily of landlines, it's a safe bet that whoever answers most of the calls will be a baby boomer.
I think that's Marissa tooting her own horn more than anything else. Gotta periodically remind the board why you're captain of the ship.
No, but I know a lot of people who still use Yahoo Mail; they've had their accounts forever and aren't likely to change unless Yahoo Mail goes tits-up. They don't necessarily use Yahoo for search (yet), but their eyeballs are on a Yahoo property every single day. It would benefit both parties to this agreement if Yahoo placed a little Firefox promo somewhere in the Yahoo Mail interface, much as I often see promos for Chrome when I hit GMail and other Google services.
Early this morning, someone re-issued an old tornado watch from 2010, which was apparently distributed over official channels (not EAS, though). Everyone who saw it and possesses half a brain knew it was obviously a mistake of some kind, of course that didn't stop the news from making a big deal out of it.