Maybe I'm missing something but isn't the entire point of the fuckbeta campaign to ruin the experience of coming here, to demonstrate to the idiots in charge of Slashdot that their website is worthless without our cooperative participation and contributions? By doing your best to quell our political dissent it could be said that it is you who are collaborating with Dice to flush our mutually favorite website down the toilet of corporate mediocrity.
The one last desperate chance we have to save this site (such as it is) is to destroy it, at least temporarily. I apologize for inconveniencing you during our brief struggle with corporate greed/stupidity.
And no, I will not hide behind anonymity.
Hopefully it's going to get real quiet in here in about twelve hours and you and your fellow collaborators can feel free to get together and blow smoke up each other's butts and pretend nothing is wrong in the resulting echo chamber.
Fuck beta, and boycott Slashdot Feb. 10th to 17th.
Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?
With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?
Having recently become much more educated than I used to be on this subject, I now find it hilarious (and a bit frightening) how disconnected modern society has become from good old Mother Nature. If you'll stop and think a moment you'll realize that we live on the surface of a planet where quadrillions of living organisms have been living, dying, urinating and defecating for billions of years, and until a veritable blink-of-an-eye ago there were no "waste treatment facilities" anywhere to be found. The very fact that our civilization requires artificial "waste treatment facilities" in order to survive is a symptom of just how totally disconnected we are from the natural cycles of life. Every living thing that has ever existed here for billions of years has lived by recycling nutrients from the bodily decay or waste products of other living things.
So, asking "if there is a way" to process waste to remove pathogens is a question that should answer itself now that we are all in the correct mindset. The answer of course is that nature _is_ a gigantic and unbelievably effective and efficient waste reprocessing facility. Step out of the door of your artificial housing construct and walk to any nearby location where you might be able to grow a plant and look down. That stuff underneath your feet is called "dirt". It's composed of minerals extracted from the air by plants, leeched out of rocks by water, and more rock bits ground up by glaciers. But most importantly it's composed of lots of chemicals and compounds that either used to be part of the body of some animal or plant, or was a waste product of a living organism. If dirt, the infinitely reprocessed waste product of billions of previous excreting organisms, was going to hurt us we'd already all be long dead.
The bacteria and other organisms that live in dirt evolved to live on the kinds of things we refer to as "waste". They reprocess it into yummy fertilized soil that plants love to grow in, and in the process kill off all the things we call "pathogens" that evolved to live inside us and are excreted in our waste. The worms and soil bacteria and the eventual heat of the full composting process creates a perfectly safe fertilizer from any kind of animal "manure", including human. They even have a name for the manure that comes from us: Humanure.
Using this purifying ability of nature, we can even make cheap and highly effective water filters that work by letting the soil bacteria in a column of sand kill off the "pathogens" in contaminated water as it trickles through the filter. The soil bacteria just gobbles up and destroys everything that we would refer to as a pathogen. Chemical toxins of course are a different matter. Many of those are unnatural to the environment and have to be dealt with in other ways, unfortunately. But animal waste? No problem. Nature takes care of that quite easily.
Now, the issue of urine separation turns out to be interesting for multiple reasons. Using urine separating toilets not only makes it immensely easier to separately process and use the urine for fertilizer, it also allows one to have a composting toilet that doesn't smell bad and holds a surprising amount of waste before it needs to be emptied. Apparently that horrible latrine, RV/boat holding tank smell is caused not by the solid waste itself but by mixing the urine and solids. Separating the urine and throwing a layer of something organic like peat moss
Does the article really need to begin with ridiculous generalization? "We all talk about the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf as if electric cars are brand-new. In fact, electric cars were around long before you were alive, or your father, or maybe even your grandfather. It turns out...." Yes, yes - the readers on slashdot are morons, who have absolutely no idea about most basic technology. "We all" are so dumb, we think the wheel was invented yesterday. Hurr-durr...
I may know that the first electric batteries were created thousands of years ago, but I had never realized or come across information that anyone had made a functional electric car so long ago, and with a range of nearly fifty miles, no less. I find this information new, interesting and fascinating. Lacking this information makes me ignorant on this particular subject, not stupid.
There's only one jackass here making ridiculous generalizations. Knowing a fact that someone else doesn't know does not mean you are smarter than them. It just means you're temporarily more knowledgeable on that particular subject. Ignorance is easily corrected. Stupidity, not so much.
There is another aspect to this that nobody seems to be mentioning (or maybe not aware of): Tires. I would suspect that a lot of the people in southern places where it is normally quite warm all year round (and very hot in the summer) are driving on what are called "summer" tires. Out of the three general grades of tire (summer, all-season, and mud+snow/winter), summer tires use the hardest rubber formula to maintain a useful lifetime and have the appropriate level of road grip in high temperatures, and on top of that they have relatively smooth tread patterns with few edges to present to the road surface.
Unfortunately in colder temperatures the rubber in summer tires becomes very hard and inflexible, like plastic. They're basically completely useless below about 45-55 degrees F. You might as well be riding a plastic sled down the road when it's icy. Your winter driving skills make very little difference when you literally have no traction whatsoever. You can slide hundreds of feet down any slight grade on summer tires with the brakes on all the way, and all the traction control and ABS in the world, and never even slow down until you physically hit something. I believe this tire issue is a hidden but important contributor to the relative chaos that occurs when it snows or ices up in southern latitudes.
Meanwhile, people living in more northern latitudes almost exclusively drive on what are referred to as "all-season" tires, which are a compromise tire using slightly softer rubber and more complex tread patterns with more angles and edges. They wear out faster in hot weather, but if one drives slowly and is _very_ careful, it is usually possible to drive fairly safely in cold weather, even in bare ice conditions (as long as the road is fairly flat). With most all-season tires you'll still only have about 10-20% of your normal warm-weather traction in freezing weather, but the difference between 10% and 0% traction is huge.
Note that if you live in an area where temperatures are mostly within 15-20 degrees of freezing (or below), you really should be driving on true "winter" tires during the colder parts of the year, even if the temperature rarely drops near or below freezing. This is especially true if the weather is often wet in your area. Also note that a lot of "mud+snow" tires are often just all-season tires with certain tread patterns and many M+S tires can't hold a candle to the traction of many of the true winter tires that have come out in the last decade. The best winter tires that have come out in recent years make driving on wet ice feel almost like driving on dry pavement. They are truly amazing. Educate yourself if you live in a colder climate. It could save your life.
My favorite winter tire video, a new tire from Nokian Tyres (the Finnish company that supposedly created the world's first winter tire back in the 1930s) which has its own built in grit(!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Speaking of WWII and Japan, we encouraged them to eat more dolphin and whale when we were rebuilding them. Custom? Please. It's a dying generation remembering what they ate in grade school because that was the cheapest meat available, and an industry which doesn't want to admit to it's shareholders that it's time to fold.
The funniest part of this whole affair to me is two things (if the movie The Cove is to be believed). First, the people trying to protect the dolphins apparently offered to pay the dolphin fishermen more than the dolphin meat was worth in exchange for NOT killing the dolphins. The fisherman refused (allegedly). So clearly the dolphin killing is not about making money, but rather a sort of local cultural thing they've become very stubbornly and emotionally attached to. They'd rather kill dolphins and make less money than not kill dolphins and make more money.
Second, dolphins and whales, being at the top of their respective food chains, have highly toxic levels of mercury in their tissues and are basically unfit for human consumption, and probably will be until we can completely clear the oceanic food chain of mercury and other bio-accumulative toxins. Yet this prefecture not only sells this meat in local grocery stores but also for a while forced it to be used as part of their school lunch programs, causing an epidemic of mercury-induced mental retardation in their children. Even better, Japanese school children are required to eat what they are given in school, so it's not like you could tell your kid to opt out of eating the mercury-laden dolphin meat.
I like a lot of things about Japan and Japanese culture. But there is one thing that cannot be argued with. They are really some of the weirdest people on Earth in many ways, and it's very difficult for an outsider to understand a lot of their cultural motivations. The way that they continue to stubbornly fight for their right to slaughter dolphins for food, and to take whales in international waters for "research" (and then sell the whale meat for food) even though the meat has such toxic levels of mercury is something that confounds my understanding. My best guess is that it has something to do with the whole Asian "saving face" concept as well as nostalgia. I get the feeling that they feel they would be dishonored as a culture and made to appear weak if they admitted that they were doing something most of the rest of the world now finds highly repugnant, so they continue to insist that there is absolutely nothing wrong with what they are doing. The only way to get them to stop is to find a way to let them stop doing it without looking like they're backing down and admitting they're doing something "wrong". But it's become at this point so much of a "Japan against the World" scenario that a resolution is going to be very difficult.
But I'm sure the issue is actually a great deal more complicated than it appears on the surface, involving not just culture and honor and nostalgia but politics and lots of money as well. It may be easier to find peace in the Middle East than to get the Japanese to stop whaling and killing dolphins. If they ever do stop it will likely be something they decide to do on their own from the pressure of some internal cultural change.
Every Ask Slashdot gets a comment pointing out that it's the dumbest Ask Slashdot ever, I know.
This time, it's really, really the case.
On the contrary. Unless you have a definitive and provably correct answer to this particular Ask Slashdot, which I didn't notice you providing, I would assert that it's an interesting question and you're just being a jackass.
So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?
Popped in here hoping to see some insightful discussion about the future of Java, to help inform my possible decision as to whether or not to spend a lot of time and effort becoming a Java developer. So far, sadly disappointed. Nothing but Java and Oracle jokes as old as the hills.
Then again, this is Slashdot. I don't know why I was expecting any kind of mature conversation about Java.
Knowing Microsoft, this is what they're going to do:
- Remove Right-Click capability - Remove all menu bars and hotkeys - Require SuperAdmin privileges for everything from resizing a window to shutting down the computer - Make MSOffice 100% touch-screen compatible, removing all mouse compatibility - Make ribbons 60% bigger - Remove ability to save over existing files
Sounds funny now, but come back in five years and marvel at how prescient and insightful you were.
These days, every ridiculous internet joke seems to end up coming true in spades in real life.
Legal liability aside, there is another layer to this issue of self driving cars that I don't really see anyone discussing.
Unlike human drivers who may be statistically identical in aggregate in their reactions, a self driving vehicle AI will essentially be identical to every other self driving AI of the same version produced by the same AI manufacturer. We take individual human drivers off the road when they demonstrate that they can't be trusted to drive safely. But when it comes to AI drivers people will realize that it is as if the same individual human were driving half a million different cars, therefore if there is a problem with one AI there could be the same problem in all the other AIs of the same type. If you thought the Tesla fire reporting was ridiculous, just wait until a half dozen self driving cars get into fatal accidents within a few days of each other. Given the public's typical poor understanding of software they will demand the immediate recall if not just a single revision of a specific AI but the recall or disabling of all autonomous AIs on the road, pending a full safety investigation.
Given a sufficient number of self driving cars being driven in sufficiently bad weather and/or traffic conditions, I would say that multiple fatal crashes and the ensuing negative public reaction will be inevitable. It may not even get that far. Who wants to bet that about the third or fourth child verifiably run down and killed by a self driving car won't bring the entire self driving car industry to an abrupt halt? Anyone?
The way I see it, self driving vehicles should remain restricted to tracks for now, and AI should continue to be applied to passenger vehicles the way it's already starting to be applied, as automatic safety features that kick in to help you avoid backing over children, falling asleep at the wheel, getting into a collision when a car up ahead suddenly slams on the brakes and things like that. For now, the human should continue to be fully in charge, alert and aware of what's going on, with the AI being an emergency backup in extreme circumstances. Going full AI on roads with mixed AI and human traffic is just a really bad idea that will eventually backfire in a big way and turn public opinion entirely against the idea of self driving vehicles. It really won't matter if self driving vehicles are provably statistically safer than humans or not. In order to be trusted their record will need to be beyond spotless, which is of course impossible.
It's very weird to me that I've been reading/. and other geeky websites for a decade and a half and I've never, ever heard of this "The Geek Group" with 25,000 members and a 42,000 square foot headquarters/lab facility. What is their purpose? Should I have heard of them? Where would I hear about them, if not here? Am I supposed to turn in my geek card if I have no idea who these people are? Are they the ones that issue geek cards in the first place?
The problem you're describing could be mitigated somewhat if the glasses had forward-facing LEDs which turn on whenever the camera is engaged. Then you could be reasonably sure that most people are not, in fact, videoing you all the time. For the small percent who want to do this anyway, sure they could paint over the LEDs, but then they could just wear a buttonhole camera anyway. You're not going to stop surreptitious recording now that the technology is small enough.
Here's one other way it can go down, though:
The next generation of teenagers becomes the first wide adopters of the technology. You can guess the marketing strategies: have pop idols be seen with them, have the next generation's Hannah Montana wearing them. They're fun, kids! Record good times with your friends! Record that important history class for a friend who's sick! Record a POV of your mad skateboarding skills and upload instantly to {hot social media platform du jour}.
In short, produce a generation that is used to filming and being filmed 24/7/365. The same way we've produced a generation that's used to being online all the time. It's possible, right? Especially if the parents are resisting it, the kids'll be wild for it.
This kind of thing always sounds great on paper, until this new adventurous and uninhibited UNDERAGE generation ends up "accidentally" recording and sharing videos of themselves in the nude, showering, taking a dump, and having sexy time with themselves and others in their age group. Until society at large, and especially law enforcement, learns to accept and avoid overreacting to underage nudity and erotic activities that any fool already knows underage people in every generation engage in almost without exception, the advent of truly ubiquitous 24/7/365 recording of human life is going to be an absolute disaster for millions of individuals in coming decades. It's going to set off a whole new epic level of moral panic.
Many young people who had the temerity to turn 18 while in possession of old nude camera phone images of themselves or their girlfriend/boyfriend taken while someone was still underage have already started to get into serious legal trouble, so don't even pretend this isn't going to be a huge issue once everyone starts walking around with a permanently attached and active video camera on their almost-invisible stereo bluetooth headset. Yeah, we'll see lots of cool POV skateboarding tricks and crazy base jumping and stuff like that, but we'll also see a whole bunch of things that tens of millions of really uptight adults are absolutely not ready to see being broadcast to the public on the FaceBooks of the near future.
Mark my words. Universal recording is something that's really going to knock society on its ear, and it will take quite a long time before things settle down. Probably two or three generations at least.
As long as Google Glass looks like Locutus-of-Borg cosplay, there will be pushback from people who don't want to be seen with it.
The display needs to be embedded transparently in the lenses itself, and the other components need to be integrated into a thin, ordinary-looking temple piece.
That will just make it worse.
If it becomes difficult for people to tell that you're wearing something like Google Glass versus just a regular pair of glasses, this is going to become a very unpleasant world to live in for those of us who require corrective lenses and who don't want to or cannot wear contacts. As the technology improves over time it becomes inevitable that "smart" glasses will become indistinguishable from normal glasses, but long before it becomes literally true the public will start to believe that it's already true. We're going to start having irrational assholes everywhere, even in completely public places, going up to people and demanding they take off their glasses and "stop recording me!". This will of course include some of the biggest assholes of all: law enforcement officers.
As a wearer of corrective lenses I do not look forward to this brave new world where everyone who wears glasses will be subjected to suspicious glares or even physically accosted for no good reason because no one can tell whether or not you're surreptitiously recording them. As we all know too well, when people aren't sure about something they instinctively default to "Kill it with Fire!".
Thanks a lot, Google. Like we needed another witch hunt trigger. I guess I better start saving up for Lasik treatments.
When we finally perfect wireless bionic retinal implants with decent resolution the world is going to go absolutely apeshit with paranoia about being secretly recorded.
Kind of surprised nobody has mentioned LogMeIn. It's free for personal use on up to 10 computers. There's a LogMeIn app for iOS and Android, which is free*. Then there's LogMeIn Ignition ($30), which lets you do file transfers, printing and other useful things if you're using LogMeIn Pro on the computers, which I think is something like $70 per computer per year. I bought LogMeIn Ignition for my iPad a couple years back and I've been using the free version of LogMeIn to connect remotely to Windows and Macs for years. Seems to work well even on relatively slow connections and on networks with fairly restricted firewall setups on either or both ends. I've even used it over a 3G connection, connecting to a 27" iMac no less.
LogMeIn are the ones who bought Hamachi, which lets you easily set up secure private networks between collections of Macs and PCs. Also free for personal use, up to five computers or something like that. Been using Hamachi to get secure remote access to certain oddball ports/services on remote computers for several years now. Hamachi however seems to have trouble connecting if certain ports are blocked on the network, so I've had much better luck using LogMeIn for remote desktop connections.
Not affiliated, just a satisfied user of both products. I haven't had any significant experience with TeamViewer so I can't make any direct comparisons, but I do know that when I was checking them out I didn't much care for how anal retentive TeamViewer is about licensing.
* I can't find the free LogMeIn app for Android. Maybe there isn't one. So I guess that leaves LogMeIn Ignition for Android, which is $30. It's one of the most expensive apps I ever put on my iPad (1st Gen), but it's been helpful enough and reliable enough that I think I can recommend purchasing it for Android if you like LogMeIn, especially if you want to do easy file transfers between your computer and your device.
So, this effectively means that either US authorities on some levels were engaging in awfully dangerous and illegal activities by shortening yellow light time or that shortening is purely perceptual. I'm not sure which one it is:).
You got it. It's the first one. Dangerous and illegal. As measured in the real world. How are you not sure? I just told you which it is.
But RLCs have really nothing to do with any of this. If some authority can go against the law and make yellow light shorter than required - that is the problem unrelated to RLCs. It's like banning bullet proof vests after some policeman suffocates his wife in it.
RLCs act as a deterrent for some drivers to run red lights, and as such they can save lives, and so they should be used, not banned.
Wait, no, you didn't get it at all. And that's the most nonsensical analogy I've heard in a long time.
Statistically red light cameras DO NOT increase safety. Statistically they DECREASE safety. We have years of actual traffic and accident data now to support the statistics. These are now established facts. We know WHY they don't increase safety. How the hell is this difficult to understand? Stop listening to the echo in your own head. Just because you think something SHOULD work in theory doesn't mean that it WILL work in the real world. Red light cameras DON'T work to increase traffic safety in the real world. Fact, not opinion.
I can't rightly fathom how anyone could have such poor reading comprehension as to continue to fail to understand how the yellow light delays and increase in accidents at red lights is directly related to the (usually marred by corrupt profit motives) installation of red light cameras. I was as explicit and thorough as I could be. I'm sorry that I've failed you.
Simple question: If they set yellow light delays in your area to be so short that the yellow light changes before you can count to "one" out loud, would you blame yourself for running all the red lights, or do you think you might start blaming some external cause?
If you could get off the moralistic "I'm superior to everyone else" high-horse tirade for a moment you might be able to open your eyes to the fact that yellow light delay timing has been routinely shortened at traffic stops where red light cameras are installed. There are documented cases of the delay being shortened from something reasonable and safe like 4 seconds to something completely UNREASONABLE and UNSAFE like 0.9 seconds. Yes, that's zero-point-nine seconds. This has two side effects. First, it makes it almost physically impossible to successfully come to a safe stop from the posted speed limit without running the red light. Your moral fortitude or superior driving ability will not help you do the impossible. At least, not safely.
Second, after local drivers (even morally-superior drivers just like you!) get a few red light tickets in the mail, it strongly encourages one of two behaviors (or both): (1) Approaching all traffic lights at a crawl in order to have some chance of avoiding a red light ticket, or (2) slamming on the brakes as hard as possible the instant you see the yellow light. Both of these behaviors, in direct response to the shortened yellow light delays, have drastically increased the risk of both rear-ending and t-boning accidents at traffic lights where red light cameras are installed. Of course I guess it also encourages drivers to slam on the gas and try to get through the intersection if they happen to think they're close enough and can't stop in time. So, short yellow light delays are bad news all around.
Couple this with the fact that this shortening of the yellow light delay provides an increased revenue stream to both the local law enforcement department and THE COMPANY THAT INSTALLED AND RUNS THE RED LIGHT CAMERAS, and you have what some people like to refer to as a HIGHLY CORRUPT MONEY GRAB that just makes red light stops far more dangerous than they ever have been. The accident statistics at RLC stops speak for themselves. An increase in accidents are in fact being CAUSED by the installation of red light cameras and the corresponding shortening of yellow light delays, and the corresponding behaviors that are a DIRECT response to the new traffic signal conditions.
This is absolutely NOT just a bunch of bad drivers complaining about getting tickets and blaming the red light cameras for their own bad behavior. Believe me, I'll be happy to go on all day about bad drivers and the stupidity of insisting we both have the right and that it's perfectly safe to constantly drive 15 MPH above any posted speed limits and follow too closely at freeway speeds and other things like that, but this is not a case of bad drivers being stupid. This is a case of humans being human and physics being physics and corrupt and unsafe law enforcement practices being corrupt and unsafe law enforcement practices. And we need to put this unsafe practice to a stop or put some very tight regulations on how the departments are allowed to set up an RLC stop, such as mandating that they absolutely WILL NOT under any circumstances shorten the yellow light delay. That delay should be entirely up to the D.O.T. traffic safety studies and I don't know how anybody got away with changing it in the first place.
And you know, the world is not just a black & white choice between ultra-draconian law enforcement and total anarchy. There is usually a place somewhere in the middle where things actually work out pretty well. Your attitude reminds of the classic Reagan-era Bloom County strip where they had a hooded executioner posted at the checkout counter of a supermarket to execute people for silly things like squeezing the Charmin. But hey, I'm all for jailing the corrupt creeps in
Look closer. It's not the part of a URL - it's a part of form data.
If you track back, you'll see that URL is just "http://gmail.com/", and then follows "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", which contains that login and password.
It doesn't show up on the screen like that - it's sent as a POST request, and "restoring the session" this way in this specific case sounds weird - there's that thing called "cookie", which keeps your session open between browser shutdowns, is not replayable and doesn't contain the auth info to steal...
If this is true (and it certainly appears to be), then I guess that implies that the user credential data was in fact constructed by Safari and not included in a URL by the website, and I'm a moron and most of my previous posts should be modded down to oblivion. Also, Apple should be slapped for bad security practices and revealing user passwords and logins in plain text outside of the keychain. Unfortunately I am at my limit of knowing how to parse the information from the screenshot and know where it really came from. So, I'll shut up now.
I can at least confirm that passwords are not revealed in this way with Safari 7.0 on Mavericks. When I log in to Gmail and grep for my password in LastSession.plist I get no match.
The LastSession.plist file stores way, way more data than just URL's.
When I log into my bank account, my username and password are not in the URL and certainly not passed unencrypted over the wire. They are happily stored in the LastSession.plist file though.
I'm using Safari 7 on Mavericks, so it clearly isn't fixed in the latest version.
So you're saying you found your banking website login credentials stored in plain text in your LastSession.plist file while you were using Safari 7, and that information is absolutely not in the URL of the web page?
I can't replicate this using my banking site with Safari 7.0 on Mavericks. Nothing shows up when I grep my LastSession.plist file after logging in to my bank's website. Not my username or my password. By all means report it if true. I can't imagine how Apple would really be dumb enough to store secure login data that belongs in the keychain in a simple plain text plist file, but if you have evidence that they are that dumb, reveal it. They should by all means be slapped if so.
The only evidence that I've so far seen is a screenshot of login credentials revealed in a URL, which they just didn't encrypt in exactly the same way that bookmarks aren't encrypted. What you're claiming you've seen would be a far worse security screw up than just storing URLs unencrypted.
SSL (https) only sends the HOST as part of the request header unencrypted, the/GET (i.e. path and variables) are transmitted encrypted. Therefore the full URL with paths and variables exposes more than what would normally be visible "over the wire".
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Nevertheless the practice of putting login credentials in the URL is extremely bad and the session file with saved URLs is just one of several places where someone accessing your computer can see URLs, like in the address bar itself and in saved bookmarks. Encrypting the session file is sort of like putting a bandaid on a severed femoral artery. Another bandaid would be encrypting HTTPS bookmarks and obscuring the text in the address bar on HTTPS sites unless you enter a master password to reveal it. But that would be kind of ridiculous, wouldn't it?
The websites that are still putting your username and password in their URLs are the ones who should be named and shamed. Whether they are using SSL or not, it's a terrible practice, for precisely the reason that you have no idea how the URLs may be stored or revealed by the end user's computer.
...Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
along with the password and login.
from the article: "the login and password are not encrypted (see the red oval in the screenshot).
Yes, I know. The login and password credentials in the red oval are encoded in the stored URL of a web page that was open in a tab in a Safari browsing session. Those URLs are created by the websites you visit, not by Safari. Safari just stores the URLs so that your tabs can be reloaded when you reopen the browser. Safari isn't secretly copying your login data in plain text and then failing to encrypt it, it's just storing the URLs you currently have open in your browsing session. There's nothing sinister or incompetent going on here.
It's good that they are now encrypting the stored browser session file. It certainly doesn't hurt anything to have another layer of protection. But that same URL information will be stored, unencrypted, in any bookmark that you make when visiting such a website while you are logged in. If someone sits at your computer and examines your bookmarks or looks at the URL in your open tabs they will see your login credentials in such URLs. Unless you want to be forced to enter a master password every time you try to edit a bookmark, use a bookmark, or examine the URL in the address bar, there is no solution to this. The solution for protecting the saved session file is FileVault, and locking your computer when you aren't sitting in front of it, which is exactly the same way you protect all the other vulnerable data in your user account.
The root cause of the login credentials being revealed in plain text in bookmarks, the session file and the address bar is the deplorable practice of websites putting your login and password in the URL in plain text. The solution to this is to smack the websites upside the head until they modify their security practices.
First, it's previous versions of Safari that are affected. Interesting how that isn't even mentioned.
Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
If you're encrypting your drive with FileVault and have a decent password on your user account, this becomes entirely an issue with the piss-poor security practices of the STUPID WEBSITES that are revealing your login information in plain text right in the URL. Any bookmark of such a URL with also "reveal" your "unencrypted" login credentials. Which is entirely the fault of the website.
It bugs me to see the crap google gets when they are the least abusive of all big companies by just about any measure, and actually HAVE fought for the user on several occasions (China, warrantless data requests, posting takedowns to Chilling Effects / working with the EFF).
I guess why it irritates me so much is that Google really does seem to try to be the good guy, and they get crap for it because people seem to want to forget what their business model is and give them a hard time for being for-profit. Maybe we should boycott them, THAT will teach them to fight extrajudicial data requests!
I imagine the baitfish has a similar mental state at any point in time prior to being eaten by an anglerfish.
Any perceived benevolence, animosity or innocuousness in a completely amoral organism like a corporation is an illusion. For your own safety you should learn to pierce that illusion. There is no reason to "feel bad" for a steamroller when its operator is being reprimanded for running over a dog. The fact that the steamroller was, up until that moment, being used to help create a road system that you will personally benefit from does not negate nor excuse the canine compression incident. It is the dog and/or the machine operator that you should have an emotional interaction with. Not the machine.
Google is neither friend nor foe overall, and is quite capable of being commanded by its human operators to perform both highly benevolent and highly antagonistic activities simultaneously at any given point in space and time. Also, its past behavior has little bearing on its present or future behavior. Your entire argument is therefore pointless.
The truly unfortunate thing about this article is that the only way to complain that it is pure unadulterated trolling clickbait that should never have appeared on Slashdot is to come in here and comment... which is exactly what they want us to do. More comments and more eyeballs means more ad impressions. They get rewarded for being stupid.
This is exactly how all the major news networks devolved from actual journalism into nothing but talking-head pundits screaming anti-factual idiocy at each other to feed their chosen audience's pre-conceived biases.
There really needs to be a separate, independent website somewhere where we can all get together and plan mini-boycotts every time the Slashdot editors put something utterly idiotic and biased like this in the lineup. Maybe after literally NOBODY comes in and comments on the stupider articles they'll get the picture and hire some smarter editors. Maybe in this way we could keep Slashdot from descending into total tabloidism and paid slashvertising.
Something simple, like the ability to nominate and then vote yea or nay on boycotting a nominated Slashdot article. Maybe the ability to make a one-line comment explaining your vote. If it gets too many nays, we boycott that particular Slashdot article by neither entering that page nor commenting on it. Thus, drastically reduced ad impressions for bad posts. Posts that aren't stupid enough don't get nominated, or don't get enough nays. Simple. A meta-Slashdot.
Maybe somebody could even turn it into a browser plugin that would let us nominate, vote and check the boycott/no-boycott status of each article on the main page by injecting some code right into the page as it loads, like a GreaseMonkey script.
Hit 'em where it hurts. In the coin purse. No pun intended.
Cancer doesn't just happen. If you can, avoid all the synthetic chemicals you get in your system from your food and environment. Avoid processed foods, and those full of food colorings, sweeteners, preservatives, and others. Get rid of all the plastics from your kitchen, and if you can, avoid food that comes in plastic containers, especially wet foods with extreme shelf life that sit and soak in the plastic container for months before being consumed. Put more fat, protein and fiber in your diet and get rid of the carb. Avoid the typical western high-carb diet which is rocket fuel for cancer cells.
Yes, that's why all of Asia has extremely high incidence of cancer, because they eat nothing but carbs. Oh, wait...
Cancer does in fact "just happen" all the time. In fact you have cancerous cells inside you right now. Normally, the immune system targets them and kills them. Sometimes they get out of control, which we refer to as "having cancer".
All those things you mention are just loosely correlated risk factors. But by all means keep ignorantly telling everyone you know how to prevent all forms of cancer. It's hilarious.
That's all this is. "Look, normal weight people can be unhealthy too!" (So it's okay that I'm obese...) "Personal responsibility never works!" (So I shouldn't even try...)
If we really want to solve the societal pandemic of obesity we need to completely discard the idea that it's caused by some personal moral failing
(It's not my fault that I can't control my diet or be bothered to exercise regularly. It's society!)
I've little doubt that this post will justify that package of Oreos you'll shovel down later. Damn society, keeping you fat.
No, it's called science, jackass. I never said anything about blaming "society" for any individual's obesity. That would be silly.
Feel free to go lecture the ever-increasing numbers of morbidly obese six-month-old infants about how they're using "junkie logic" and failing to take "personal responsibility" for their lives. You can start out early telling them how they're useless losers who are just a drag on society while they giggle and drool and chew on their little fat fingers. You'll still be wrong, and you'll still be an ignorant asshole.
By all means tell us how it's all their parents' fault and how it's been perfectly normal throughout human history to put INFANTS on restricted calorie diets and forced exercise programs to keep them from becoming MORBIDLY OBESE starting IN THE WOMB.
The war on fat will continue to be precisely as effective as the war on drugs as long as yours is the prevailing attitude.
In other words, it will continue to be a dismal and ever-more-costly failure that is damaging our society rather than helping it.
The tone of the following should be interpreted as: Congenially argumentative.
Okay, let me see if I can be even more clear. You don't seem to understand what I actually mean when I say "very loosely linked" and "co-incidental". So let me spell out what I've been trying to say. What it means is exactly this:
The condition of having excess deposits of adipose tissue is CANNOT be referred to as the _CAUSE_ of ANY of the associated diseases we are discussing, and it is MEDICALLY DETRIMENTAL to continue to imply that excess adipose tissue is even a partial cause. Period.
REPHRASING: The entire idea of obesity being the CAUSE of any of the related conditions is COMPLETELY WRONG.
By implying that obesity even partially helps to CAUSE any of the SOMETIMES co-incidental diseases you simply continue to feed into the already almost unassailable idea that the obese, and obesity itself, is the root cause of our societal health issues and increased health care costs, when it straight-up flat-out IS NOT.
REPHRASING AGAIN: Medical science is telling us quite clearly that having excess adipose tissue is NOT UNHEALTHY in and of itself, therefore promoting the decrease of excess adipose tissue CANNOT and WILL NOT result in increased "health" because it does NOTHING to address the ACTUAL CAUSES of disease, and just feeds into the stereotype that the obese are "unhealthy" which is contributing to societal blindness about the fact that both obese and non-obese people are dying of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in droves, and it has NOTHING to do with the obesity or lack thereof. The "link" between obesity and disease is statistically NON-EXISTENT. It isn't just "weak".
REPHRASING YET A THIRD TIME: Excessive adipose tissue storage is NOT a disease that needs to be treated. Rather, it is an almost entirely medically HARMLESS symptom of a broken homeostatic metabolic system that normally regulates adipose tissue storage with mind-boggling accuracy. Accuracy that is actually completely impossible for anyone to consciously replicate. Discarding such non-solutions as "diet pills" outright will help us focus on finding and fixing the actual root cause of all these metabolic issues, and when we succeed all the related SYMPTOMS will go away BY THEMSELVES as ACTUAL "HEALTH" INCREASES.
Let me restate that last part because it's very important. Fixing the underlying root cause of these metabolic issues will cause the obese to simply start automatically losing excess adipose deposits, in exactly the same way they started automatically gaining excess adipose deposits, without any conscious planning, until eventually we will be back to 10% or lower societal obesity. Without dieting or diet pills.
I stand by my original assertion that "diet pills", no matter how effective or side-effect free, cannot increase the "health" of any individual or group, and are quite likely to be detrimental to "health".
I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to clarify how I communicate about this issue. Have a great day.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm missing something but isn't the entire point of the fuckbeta campaign to ruin the experience of coming here, to demonstrate to the idiots in charge of Slashdot that their website is worthless without our cooperative participation and contributions? By doing your best to quell our political dissent it could be said that it is you who are collaborating with Dice to flush our mutually favorite website down the toilet of corporate mediocrity.
The one last desperate chance we have to save this site (such as it is) is to destroy it, at least temporarily. I apologize for inconveniencing you during our brief struggle with corporate greed/stupidity.
And no, I will not hide behind anonymity.
Hopefully it's going to get real quiet in here in about twelve hours and you and your fellow collaborators can feel free to get together and blow smoke up each other's butts and pretend nothing is wrong in the resulting echo chamber.
Fuck beta, and boycott Slashdot Feb. 10th to 17th.
Since epidemiology is well outside my area of expertise, I have to ask: would this be safe?
With artificial fertilizers we don't have to be concerned about the purity of the material, whereas if we were to use natural fertilizers (animal or otherwise) it introduces all of the impurities and other undesirable byproducts that come with waste. And if we're talking about human waste in particular, does that mean this would create a new cycle for pathogens? Or is there a way to process waste to remove pathogens?
Having recently become much more educated than I used to be on this subject, I now find it hilarious (and a bit frightening) how disconnected modern society has become from good old Mother Nature. If you'll stop and think a moment you'll realize that we live on the surface of a planet where quadrillions of living organisms have been living, dying, urinating and defecating for billions of years, and until a veritable blink-of-an-eye ago there were no "waste treatment facilities" anywhere to be found. The very fact that our civilization requires artificial "waste treatment facilities" in order to survive is a symptom of just how totally disconnected we are from the natural cycles of life. Every living thing that has ever existed here for billions of years has lived by recycling nutrients from the bodily decay or waste products of other living things.
So, asking "if there is a way" to process waste to remove pathogens is a question that should answer itself now that we are all in the correct mindset. The answer of course is that nature _is_ a gigantic and unbelievably effective and efficient waste reprocessing facility. Step out of the door of your artificial housing construct and walk to any nearby location where you might be able to grow a plant and look down. That stuff underneath your feet is called "dirt". It's composed of minerals extracted from the air by plants, leeched out of rocks by water, and more rock bits ground up by glaciers. But most importantly it's composed of lots of chemicals and compounds that either used to be part of the body of some animal or plant, or was a waste product of a living organism. If dirt, the infinitely reprocessed waste product of billions of previous excreting organisms, was going to hurt us we'd already all be long dead.
The bacteria and other organisms that live in dirt evolved to live on the kinds of things we refer to as "waste". They reprocess it into yummy fertilized soil that plants love to grow in, and in the process kill off all the things we call "pathogens" that evolved to live inside us and are excreted in our waste. The worms and soil bacteria and the eventual heat of the full composting process creates a perfectly safe fertilizer from any kind of animal "manure", including human. They even have a name for the manure that comes from us: Humanure.
Using this purifying ability of nature, we can even make cheap and highly effective water filters that work by letting the soil bacteria in a column of sand kill off the "pathogens" in contaminated water as it trickles through the filter. The soil bacteria just gobbles up and destroys everything that we would refer to as a pathogen. Chemical toxins of course are a different matter. Many of those are unnatural to the environment and have to be dealt with in other ways, unfortunately. But animal waste? No problem. Nature takes care of that quite easily.
Now, the issue of urine separation turns out to be interesting for multiple reasons. Using urine separating toilets not only makes it immensely easier to separately process and use the urine for fertilizer, it also allows one to have a composting toilet that doesn't smell bad and holds a surprising amount of waste before it needs to be emptied. Apparently that horrible latrine, RV/boat holding tank smell is caused not by the solid waste itself but by mixing the urine and solids. Separating the urine and throwing a layer of something organic like peat moss
Does the article really need to begin with ridiculous generalization?
"We all talk about the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf as if electric cars are brand-new. In fact, electric cars were around long before you were alive, or your father, or maybe even your grandfather. It turns out...."
Yes, yes - the readers on slashdot are morons, who have absolutely no idea about most basic technology. "We all" are so dumb, we think the wheel was invented yesterday. Hurr-durr...
I may know that the first electric batteries were created thousands of years ago, but I had never realized or come across information that anyone had made a functional electric car so long ago, and with a range of nearly fifty miles, no less. I find this information new, interesting and fascinating. Lacking this information makes me ignorant on this particular subject, not stupid.
There's only one jackass here making ridiculous generalizations. Knowing a fact that someone else doesn't know does not mean you are smarter than them. It just means you're temporarily more knowledgeable on that particular subject. Ignorance is easily corrected. Stupidity, not so much.
There is another aspect to this that nobody seems to be mentioning (or maybe not aware of): Tires. I would suspect that a lot of the people in southern places where it is normally quite warm all year round (and very hot in the summer) are driving on what are called "summer" tires. Out of the three general grades of tire (summer, all-season, and mud+snow/winter), summer tires use the hardest rubber formula to maintain a useful lifetime and have the appropriate level of road grip in high temperatures, and on top of that they have relatively smooth tread patterns with few edges to present to the road surface.
Unfortunately in colder temperatures the rubber in summer tires becomes very hard and inflexible, like plastic. They're basically completely useless below about 45-55 degrees F. You might as well be riding a plastic sled down the road when it's icy. Your winter driving skills make very little difference when you literally have no traction whatsoever. You can slide hundreds of feet down any slight grade on summer tires with the brakes on all the way, and all the traction control and ABS in the world, and never even slow down until you physically hit something. I believe this tire issue is a hidden but important contributor to the relative chaos that occurs when it snows or ices up in southern latitudes.
Meanwhile, people living in more northern latitudes almost exclusively drive on what are referred to as "all-season" tires, which are a compromise tire using slightly softer rubber and more complex tread patterns with more angles and edges. They wear out faster in hot weather, but if one drives slowly and is _very_ careful, it is usually possible to drive fairly safely in cold weather, even in bare ice conditions (as long as the road is fairly flat). With most all-season tires you'll still only have about 10-20% of your normal warm-weather traction in freezing weather, but the difference between 10% and 0% traction is huge.
Note that if you live in an area where temperatures are mostly within 15-20 degrees of freezing (or below), you really should be driving on true "winter" tires during the colder parts of the year, even if the temperature rarely drops near or below freezing. This is especially true if the weather is often wet in your area. Also note that a lot of "mud+snow" tires are often just all-season tires with certain tread patterns and many M+S tires can't hold a candle to the traction of many of the true winter tires that have come out in the last decade. The best winter tires that have come out in recent years make driving on wet ice feel almost like driving on dry pavement. They are truly amazing. Educate yourself if you live in a colder climate. It could save your life.
An instructive video is here, showing just how useless summer tires are on ice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
My favorite winter tire video, a new tire from Nokian Tyres (the Finnish company that supposedly created the world's first winter tire back in the 1930s) which has its own built in grit(!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Speaking of WWII and Japan, we encouraged them to eat more dolphin and whale when we were rebuilding them. Custom? Please. It's a dying generation remembering what they ate in grade school because that was the cheapest meat available, and an industry which doesn't want to admit to it's shareholders that it's time to fold.
The funniest part of this whole affair to me is two things (if the movie The Cove is to be believed). First, the people trying to protect the dolphins apparently offered to pay the dolphin fishermen more than the dolphin meat was worth in exchange for NOT killing the dolphins. The fisherman refused (allegedly). So clearly the dolphin killing is not about making money, but rather a sort of local cultural thing they've become very stubbornly and emotionally attached to. They'd rather kill dolphins and make less money than not kill dolphins and make more money.
Second, dolphins and whales, being at the top of their respective food chains, have highly toxic levels of mercury in their tissues and are basically unfit for human consumption, and probably will be until we can completely clear the oceanic food chain of mercury and other bio-accumulative toxins. Yet this prefecture not only sells this meat in local grocery stores but also for a while forced it to be used as part of their school lunch programs, causing an epidemic of mercury-induced mental retardation in their children. Even better, Japanese school children are required to eat what they are given in school, so it's not like you could tell your kid to opt out of eating the mercury-laden dolphin meat.
I like a lot of things about Japan and Japanese culture. But there is one thing that cannot be argued with. They are really some of the weirdest people on Earth in many ways, and it's very difficult for an outsider to understand a lot of their cultural motivations. The way that they continue to stubbornly fight for their right to slaughter dolphins for food, and to take whales in international waters for "research" (and then sell the whale meat for food) even though the meat has such toxic levels of mercury is something that confounds my understanding. My best guess is that it has something to do with the whole Asian "saving face" concept as well as nostalgia. I get the feeling that they feel they would be dishonored as a culture and made to appear weak if they admitted that they were doing something most of the rest of the world now finds highly repugnant, so they continue to insist that there is absolutely nothing wrong with what they are doing. The only way to get them to stop is to find a way to let them stop doing it without looking like they're backing down and admitting they're doing something "wrong". But it's become at this point so much of a "Japan against the World" scenario that a resolution is going to be very difficult.
But I'm sure the issue is actually a great deal more complicated than it appears on the surface, involving not just culture and honor and nostalgia but politics and lots of money as well. It may be easier to find peace in the Middle East than to get the Japanese to stop whaling and killing dolphins. If they ever do stop it will likely be something they decide to do on their own from the pressure of some internal cultural change.
Every Ask Slashdot gets a comment pointing out that it's the dumbest Ask Slashdot ever, I know.
This time, it's really, really the case.
On the contrary. Unless you have a definitive and provably correct answer to this particular Ask Slashdot, which I didn't notice you providing, I would assert that it's an interesting question and you're just being a jackass.
So is Slashdot not capable of having any kind of informative conversation about one of the most commercially popular and long-lived everyday programming languages, because "Oracle, LOL" and "Java applets suck"?
Popped in here hoping to see some insightful discussion about the future of Java, to help inform my possible decision as to whether or not to spend a lot of time and effort becoming a Java developer. So far, sadly disappointed. Nothing but Java and Oracle jokes as old as the hills.
Then again, this is Slashdot. I don't know why I was expecting any kind of mature conversation about Java.
Knowing Microsoft, this is what they're going to do:
- Remove Right-Click capability
- Remove all menu bars and hotkeys
- Require SuperAdmin privileges for everything from resizing a window to shutting down the computer
- Make MSOffice 100% touch-screen compatible, removing all mouse compatibility
- Make ribbons 60% bigger
- Remove ability to save over existing files
Sounds funny now, but come back in five years and marvel at how prescient and insightful you were.
These days, every ridiculous internet joke seems to end up coming true in spades in real life.
Legal liability aside, there is another layer to this issue of self driving cars that I don't really see anyone discussing.
Unlike human drivers who may be statistically identical in aggregate in their reactions, a self driving vehicle AI will essentially be identical to every other self driving AI of the same version produced by the same AI manufacturer. We take individual human drivers off the road when they demonstrate that they can't be trusted to drive safely. But when it comes to AI drivers people will realize that it is as if the same individual human were driving half a million different cars, therefore if there is a problem with one AI there could be the same problem in all the other AIs of the same type. If you thought the Tesla fire reporting was ridiculous, just wait until a half dozen self driving cars get into fatal accidents within a few days of each other. Given the public's typical poor understanding of software they will demand the immediate recall if not just a single revision of a specific AI but the recall or disabling of all autonomous AIs on the road, pending a full safety investigation.
Given a sufficient number of self driving cars being driven in sufficiently bad weather and/or traffic conditions, I would say that multiple fatal crashes and the ensuing negative public reaction will be inevitable. It may not even get that far. Who wants to bet that about the third or fourth child verifiably run down and killed by a self driving car won't bring the entire self driving car industry to an abrupt halt? Anyone?
The way I see it, self driving vehicles should remain restricted to tracks for now, and AI should continue to be applied to passenger vehicles the way it's already starting to be applied, as automatic safety features that kick in to help you avoid backing over children, falling asleep at the wheel, getting into a collision when a car up ahead suddenly slams on the brakes and things like that. For now, the human should continue to be fully in charge, alert and aware of what's going on, with the AI being an emergency backup in extreme circumstances. Going full AI on roads with mixed AI and human traffic is just a really bad idea that will eventually backfire in a big way and turn public opinion entirely against the idea of self driving vehicles. It really won't matter if self driving vehicles are provably statistically safer than humans or not. In order to be trusted their record will need to be beyond spotless, which is of course impossible.
It's very weird to me that I've been reading /. and other geeky websites for a decade and a half and I've never, ever heard of this "The Geek Group" with 25,000 members and a 42,000 square foot headquarters/lab facility. What is their purpose? Should I have heard of them? Where would I hear about them, if not here? Am I supposed to turn in my geek card if I have no idea who these people are? Are they the ones that issue geek cards in the first place?
Questions abound.
The problem you're describing could be mitigated somewhat if the glasses had forward-facing LEDs which turn on whenever the camera is engaged. Then you could be reasonably sure that most people are not, in fact, videoing you all the time. For the small percent who want to do this anyway, sure they could paint over the LEDs, but then they could just wear a buttonhole camera anyway. You're not going to stop surreptitious recording now that the technology is small enough.
Here's one other way it can go down, though:
The next generation of teenagers becomes the first wide adopters of the technology. You can guess the marketing strategies: have pop idols be seen with them, have the next generation's Hannah Montana wearing them. They're fun, kids! Record good times with your friends! Record that important history class for a friend who's sick! Record a POV of your mad skateboarding skills and upload instantly to {hot social media platform du jour}.
In short, produce a generation that is used to filming and being filmed 24/7/365. The same way we've produced a generation that's used to being online all the time. It's possible, right? Especially if the parents are resisting it, the kids'll be wild for it.
This kind of thing always sounds great on paper, until this new adventurous and uninhibited UNDERAGE generation ends up "accidentally" recording and sharing videos of themselves in the nude, showering, taking a dump, and having sexy time with themselves and others in their age group. Until society at large, and especially law enforcement, learns to accept and avoid overreacting to underage nudity and erotic activities that any fool already knows underage people in every generation engage in almost without exception, the advent of truly ubiquitous 24/7/365 recording of human life is going to be an absolute disaster for millions of individuals in coming decades. It's going to set off a whole new epic level of moral panic.
Many young people who had the temerity to turn 18 while in possession of old nude camera phone images of themselves or their girlfriend/boyfriend taken while someone was still underage have already started to get into serious legal trouble, so don't even pretend this isn't going to be a huge issue once everyone starts walking around with a permanently attached and active video camera on their almost-invisible stereo bluetooth headset. Yeah, we'll see lots of cool POV skateboarding tricks and crazy base jumping and stuff like that, but we'll also see a whole bunch of things that tens of millions of really uptight adults are absolutely not ready to see being broadcast to the public on the FaceBooks of the near future.
Mark my words. Universal recording is something that's really going to knock society on its ear, and it will take quite a long time before things settle down. Probably two or three generations at least.
As long as Google Glass looks like Locutus-of-Borg cosplay, there will be pushback from people who don't want to be seen with it.
The display needs to be embedded transparently in the lenses itself, and the other components need to be integrated into a thin, ordinary-looking temple piece.
That will just make it worse.
If it becomes difficult for people to tell that you're wearing something like Google Glass versus just a regular pair of glasses, this is going to become a very unpleasant world to live in for those of us who require corrective lenses and who don't want to or cannot wear contacts. As the technology improves over time it becomes inevitable that "smart" glasses will become indistinguishable from normal glasses, but long before it becomes literally true the public will start to believe that it's already true. We're going to start having irrational assholes everywhere, even in completely public places, going up to people and demanding they take off their glasses and "stop recording me!". This will of course include some of the biggest assholes of all: law enforcement officers.
As a wearer of corrective lenses I do not look forward to this brave new world where everyone who wears glasses will be subjected to suspicious glares or even physically accosted for no good reason because no one can tell whether or not you're surreptitiously recording them. As we all know too well, when people aren't sure about something they instinctively default to "Kill it with Fire!".
Thanks a lot, Google. Like we needed another witch hunt trigger. I guess I better start saving up for Lasik treatments.
When we finally perfect wireless bionic retinal implants with decent resolution the world is going to go absolutely apeshit with paranoia about being secretly recorded.
Kind of surprised nobody has mentioned LogMeIn. It's free for personal use on up to 10 computers. There's a LogMeIn app for iOS and Android, which is free*. Then there's LogMeIn Ignition ($30), which lets you do file transfers, printing and other useful things if you're using LogMeIn Pro on the computers, which I think is something like $70 per computer per year. I bought LogMeIn Ignition for my iPad a couple years back and I've been using the free version of LogMeIn to connect remotely to Windows and Macs for years. Seems to work well even on relatively slow connections and on networks with fairly restricted firewall setups on either or both ends. I've even used it over a 3G connection, connecting to a 27" iMac no less.
LogMeIn are the ones who bought Hamachi, which lets you easily set up secure private networks between collections of Macs and PCs. Also free for personal use, up to five computers or something like that. Been using Hamachi to get secure remote access to certain oddball ports/services on remote computers for several years now. Hamachi however seems to have trouble connecting if certain ports are blocked on the network, so I've had much better luck using LogMeIn for remote desktop connections.
Not affiliated, just a satisfied user of both products. I haven't had any significant experience with TeamViewer so I can't make any direct comparisons, but I do know that when I was checking them out I didn't much care for how anal retentive TeamViewer is about licensing.
* I can't find the free LogMeIn app for Android. Maybe there isn't one. So I guess that leaves LogMeIn Ignition for Android, which is $30. It's one of the most expensive apps I ever put on my iPad (1st Gen), but it's been helpful enough and reliable enough that I think I can recommend purchasing it for Android if you like LogMeIn, especially if you want to do easy file transfers between your computer and your device.
I must say I do not associate myself with any political party and do not even live in US.
But anyway, since you mentioned DOT, I'd assume you are in US. And as a matter of fact there is a standard 'Yellow change intervals' in US: http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/traffops/signtech/signdel/trafficmanual-current.htm , chapter 9, section 9-04.5. It didn't take me too long to find that.
So, this effectively means that either US authorities on some levels were engaging in awfully dangerous and illegal activities by shortening yellow light time or that shortening is purely perceptual. I'm not sure which one it is :).
You got it. It's the first one. Dangerous and illegal. As measured in the real world. How are you not sure? I just told you which it is.
But RLCs have really nothing to do with any of this. If some authority can go against the law and make yellow light shorter than required - that is the problem unrelated to RLCs. It's like banning bullet proof vests after some policeman suffocates his wife in it.
RLCs act as a deterrent for some drivers to run red lights, and as such they can save lives, and so they should be used, not banned.
Wait, no, you didn't get it at all. And that's the most nonsensical analogy I've heard in a long time.
Statistically red light cameras DO NOT increase safety. Statistically they DECREASE safety. We have years of actual traffic and accident data now to support the statistics. These are now established facts. We know WHY they don't increase safety. How the hell is this difficult to understand? Stop listening to the echo in your own head. Just because you think something SHOULD work in theory doesn't mean that it WILL work in the real world. Red light cameras DON'T work to increase traffic safety in the real world. Fact, not opinion.
I can't rightly fathom how anyone could have such poor reading comprehension as to continue to fail to understand how the yellow light delays and increase in accidents at red lights is directly related to the (usually marred by corrupt profit motives) installation of red light cameras. I was as explicit and thorough as I could be. I'm sorry that I've failed you.
Wow. Lemme guess. Ultra-conservative Republican?
Simple question: If they set yellow light delays in your area to be so short that the yellow light changes before you can count to "one" out loud, would you blame yourself for running all the red lights, or do you think you might start blaming some external cause?
If you could get off the moralistic "I'm superior to everyone else" high-horse tirade for a moment you might be able to open your eyes to the fact that yellow light delay timing has been routinely shortened at traffic stops where red light cameras are installed. There are documented cases of the delay being shortened from something reasonable and safe like 4 seconds to something completely UNREASONABLE and UNSAFE like 0.9 seconds. Yes, that's zero-point-nine seconds. This has two side effects. First, it makes it almost physically impossible to successfully come to a safe stop from the posted speed limit without running the red light. Your moral fortitude or superior driving ability will not help you do the impossible. At least, not safely.
Second, after local drivers (even morally-superior drivers just like you!) get a few red light tickets in the mail, it strongly encourages one of two behaviors (or both): (1) Approaching all traffic lights at a crawl in order to have some chance of avoiding a red light ticket, or (2) slamming on the brakes as hard as possible the instant you see the yellow light. Both of these behaviors, in direct response to the shortened yellow light delays, have drastically increased the risk of both rear-ending and t-boning accidents at traffic lights where red light cameras are installed. Of course I guess it also encourages drivers to slam on the gas and try to get through the intersection if they happen to think they're close enough and can't stop in time. So, short yellow light delays are bad news all around.
Couple this with the fact that this shortening of the yellow light delay provides an increased revenue stream to both the local law enforcement department and THE COMPANY THAT INSTALLED AND RUNS THE RED LIGHT CAMERAS, and you have what some people like to refer to as a HIGHLY CORRUPT MONEY GRAB that just makes red light stops far more dangerous than they ever have been. The accident statistics at RLC stops speak for themselves. An increase in accidents are in fact being CAUSED by the installation of red light cameras and the corresponding shortening of yellow light delays, and the corresponding behaviors that are a DIRECT response to the new traffic signal conditions.
This is absolutely NOT just a bunch of bad drivers complaining about getting tickets and blaming the red light cameras for their own bad behavior. Believe me, I'll be happy to go on all day about bad drivers and the stupidity of insisting we both have the right and that it's perfectly safe to constantly drive 15 MPH above any posted speed limits and follow too closely at freeway speeds and other things like that, but this is not a case of bad drivers being stupid. This is a case of humans being human and physics being physics and corrupt and unsafe law enforcement practices being corrupt and unsafe law enforcement practices. And we need to put this unsafe practice to a stop or put some very tight regulations on how the departments are allowed to set up an RLC stop, such as mandating that they absolutely WILL NOT under any circumstances shorten the yellow light delay. That delay should be entirely up to the D.O.T. traffic safety studies and I don't know how anybody got away with changing it in the first place.
And you know, the world is not just a black & white choice between ultra-draconian law enforcement and total anarchy. There is usually a place somewhere in the middle where things actually work out pretty well. Your attitude reminds of the classic Reagan-era Bloom County strip where they had a hooded executioner posted at the checkout counter of a supermarket to execute people for silly things like squeezing the Charmin. But hey, I'm all for jailing the corrupt creeps in
Look closer. It's not the part of a URL - it's a part of form data.
If you track back, you'll see that URL is just "http://gmail.com/", and then follows "application/x-www-form-urlencoded", which contains that login and password.
It doesn't show up on the screen like that - it's sent as a POST request, and "restoring the session" this way in this specific case sounds weird - there's that thing called "cookie", which keeps your session open between browser shutdowns, is not replayable and doesn't contain the auth info to steal...
If this is true (and it certainly appears to be), then I guess that implies that the user credential data was in fact constructed by Safari and not included in a URL by the website, and I'm a moron and most of my previous posts should be modded down to oblivion. Also, Apple should be slapped for bad security practices and revealing user passwords and logins in plain text outside of the keychain. Unfortunately I am at my limit of knowing how to parse the information from the screenshot and know where it really came from. So, I'll shut up now.
I can at least confirm that passwords are not revealed in this way with Safari 7.0 on Mavericks. When I log in to Gmail and grep for my password in LastSession.plist I get no match.
The LastSession.plist file stores way, way more data than just URL's.
When I log into my bank account, my username and password are not in the URL and certainly not passed unencrypted over the wire. They are happily stored in the LastSession.plist file though.
I'm using Safari 7 on Mavericks, so it clearly isn't fixed in the latest version.
So you're saying you found your banking website login credentials stored in plain text in your LastSession.plist file while you were using Safari 7, and that information is absolutely not in the URL of the web page?
I can't replicate this using my banking site with Safari 7.0 on Mavericks. Nothing shows up when I grep my LastSession.plist file after logging in to my bank's website. Not my username or my password. By all means report it if true. I can't imagine how Apple would really be dumb enough to store secure login data that belongs in the keychain in a simple plain text plist file, but if you have evidence that they are that dumb, reveal it. They should by all means be slapped if so.
The only evidence that I've so far seen is a screenshot of login credentials revealed in a URL, which they just didn't encrypt in exactly the same way that bookmarks aren't encrypted. What you're claiming you've seen would be a far worse security screw up than just storing URLs unencrypted.
SSL (https) only sends the HOST as part of the request header unencrypted, the /GET (i.e. path and variables) are transmitted encrypted. Therefore the full URL with paths and variables exposes more than what would normally be visible "over the wire".
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Nevertheless the practice of putting login credentials in the URL is extremely bad and the session file with saved URLs is just one of several places where someone accessing your computer can see URLs, like in the address bar itself and in saved bookmarks. Encrypting the session file is sort of like putting a bandaid on a severed femoral artery. Another bandaid would be encrypting HTTPS bookmarks and obscuring the text in the address bar on HTTPS sites unless you enter a master password to reveal it. But that would be kind of ridiculous, wouldn't it?
The websites that are still putting your username and password in their URLs are the ones who should be named and shamed. Whether they are using SSL or not, it's a terrible practice, for precisely the reason that you have no idea how the URLs may be stored or revealed by the end user's computer.
...Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
along with the password and login.
from the article: "the login and password are not encrypted (see the red oval in the screenshot).
Yes, I know. The login and password credentials in the red oval are encoded in the stored URL of a web page that was open in a tab in a Safari browsing session. Those URLs are created by the websites you visit, not by Safari. Safari just stores the URLs so that your tabs can be reloaded when you reopen the browser. Safari isn't secretly copying your login data in plain text and then failing to encrypt it, it's just storing the URLs you currently have open in your browsing session. There's nothing sinister or incompetent going on here.
It's good that they are now encrypting the stored browser session file. It certainly doesn't hurt anything to have another layer of protection. But that same URL information will be stored, unencrypted, in any bookmark that you make when visiting such a website while you are logged in. If someone sits at your computer and examines your bookmarks or looks at the URL in your open tabs they will see your login credentials in such URLs. Unless you want to be forced to enter a master password every time you try to edit a bookmark, use a bookmark, or examine the URL in the address bar, there is no solution to this. The solution for protecting the saved session file is FileVault, and locking your computer when you aren't sitting in front of it, which is exactly the same way you protect all the other vulnerable data in your user account.
The root cause of the login credentials being revealed in plain text in bookmarks, the session file and the address bar is the deplorable practice of websites putting your login and password in the URL in plain text. The solution to this is to smack the websites upside the head until they modify their security practices.
Again?
First, it's previous versions of Safari that are affected. Interesting how that isn't even mentioned.
Second, as already pointed out on the MacRumors forums, the stored "session" data is merely the URLs of the web pages you have open, which is passed over the wire in plain text anyway when you open or reopen the URL.
If you're encrypting your drive with FileVault and have a decent password on your user account, this becomes entirely an issue with the piss-poor security practices of the STUPID WEBSITES that are revealing your login information in plain text right in the URL. Any bookmark of such a URL with also "reveal" your "unencrypted" login credentials. Which is entirely the fault of the website.
Also, it's fixed in latest Safari.
So... yeah. End of the world, apparently.
It bugs me to see the crap google gets when they are the least abusive of all big companies by just about any measure, and actually HAVE fought for the user on several occasions (China, warrantless data requests, posting takedowns to Chilling Effects / working with the EFF).
I mean I guess you can cross your fingers and hope that companies like Yahoo and MS dont do things like spill the beans on Chinese dissident bloggers or work with the Chinese gov't to create a bugged version of Skype for China, but I wouldnt hold your breath.
I guess why it irritates me so much is that Google really does seem to try to be the good guy, and they get crap for it because people seem to want to forget what their business model is and give them a hard time for being for-profit. Maybe we should boycott them, THAT will teach them to fight extrajudicial data requests!
I imagine the baitfish has a similar mental state at any point in time prior to being eaten by an anglerfish.
Any perceived benevolence, animosity or innocuousness in a completely amoral organism like a corporation is an illusion. For your own safety you should learn to pierce that illusion. There is no reason to "feel bad" for a steamroller when its operator is being reprimanded for running over a dog. The fact that the steamroller was, up until that moment, being used to help create a road system that you will personally benefit from does not negate nor excuse the canine compression incident. It is the dog and/or the machine operator that you should have an emotional interaction with. Not the machine.
Google is neither friend nor foe overall, and is quite capable of being commanded by its human operators to perform both highly benevolent and highly antagonistic activities simultaneously at any given point in space and time. Also, its past behavior has little bearing on its present or future behavior. Your entire argument is therefore pointless.
The truly unfortunate thing about this article is that the only way to complain that it is pure unadulterated trolling clickbait that should never have appeared on Slashdot is to come in here and comment... which is exactly what they want us to do. More comments and more eyeballs means more ad impressions. They get rewarded for being stupid.
This is exactly how all the major news networks devolved from actual journalism into nothing but talking-head pundits screaming anti-factual idiocy at each other to feed their chosen audience's pre-conceived biases.
There really needs to be a separate, independent website somewhere where we can all get together and plan mini-boycotts every time the Slashdot editors put something utterly idiotic and biased like this in the lineup. Maybe after literally NOBODY comes in and comments on the stupider articles they'll get the picture and hire some smarter editors. Maybe in this way we could keep Slashdot from descending into total tabloidism and paid slashvertising.
Something simple, like the ability to nominate and then vote yea or nay on boycotting a nominated Slashdot article. Maybe the ability to make a one-line comment explaining your vote. If it gets too many nays, we boycott that particular Slashdot article by neither entering that page nor commenting on it. Thus, drastically reduced ad impressions for bad posts. Posts that aren't stupid enough don't get nominated, or don't get enough nays. Simple. A meta-Slashdot.
Maybe somebody could even turn it into a browser plugin that would let us nominate, vote and check the boycott/no-boycott status of each article on the main page by injecting some code right into the page as it loads, like a GreaseMonkey script.
Hit 'em where it hurts. In the coin purse. No pun intended.
Cancer doesn't just happen. If you can, avoid all the synthetic chemicals you get in your system from your food and environment. Avoid processed foods, and those full of food colorings, sweeteners, preservatives, and others. Get rid of all the plastics from your kitchen, and if you can, avoid food that comes in plastic containers, especially wet foods with extreme shelf life that sit and soak in the plastic container for months before being consumed. Put more fat, protein and fiber in your diet and get rid of the carb. Avoid the typical western high-carb diet which is rocket fuel for cancer cells.
Yes, that's why all of Asia has extremely high incidence of cancer, because they eat nothing but carbs. Oh, wait...
Cancer does in fact "just happen" all the time. In fact you have cancerous cells inside you right now. Normally, the immune system targets them and kills them. Sometimes they get out of control, which we refer to as "having cancer".
All those things you mention are just loosely correlated risk factors. But by all means keep ignorantly telling everyone you know how to prevent all forms of cancer. It's hilarious.
Junkie logic.
That's all this is. "Look, normal weight people can be unhealthy too!" (So it's okay that I'm obese...) "Personal responsibility never works!" (So I shouldn't even try...)
If we really want to solve the societal pandemic of obesity we need to completely discard the idea that it's caused by some personal moral failing
(It's not my fault that I can't control my diet or be bothered to exercise regularly. It's society!)
I've little doubt that this post will justify that package of Oreos you'll shovel down later. Damn society, keeping you fat.
No, it's called science, jackass. I never said anything about blaming "society" for any individual's obesity. That would be silly.
Feel free to go lecture the ever-increasing numbers of morbidly obese six-month-old infants about how they're using "junkie logic" and failing to take "personal responsibility" for their lives. You can start out early telling them how they're useless losers who are just a drag on society while they giggle and drool and chew on their little fat fingers. You'll still be wrong, and you'll still be an ignorant asshole.
By all means tell us how it's all their parents' fault and how it's been perfectly normal throughout human history to put INFANTS on restricted calorie diets and forced exercise programs to keep them from becoming MORBIDLY OBESE starting IN THE WOMB.
The war on fat will continue to be precisely as effective as the war on drugs as long as yours is the prevailing attitude.
In other words, it will continue to be a dismal and ever-more-costly failure that is damaging our society rather than helping it.
The tone of the following should be interpreted as: Congenially argumentative.
Okay, let me see if I can be even more clear. You don't seem to understand what I actually mean when I say "very loosely linked" and "co-incidental". So let me spell out what I've been trying to say. What it means is exactly this:
The condition of having excess deposits of adipose tissue is CANNOT be referred to as the _CAUSE_ of ANY of the associated diseases we are discussing, and it is MEDICALLY DETRIMENTAL to continue to imply that excess adipose tissue is even a partial cause. Period.
REPHRASING: The entire idea of obesity being the CAUSE of any of the related conditions is COMPLETELY WRONG.
By implying that obesity even partially helps to CAUSE any of the SOMETIMES co-incidental diseases you simply continue to feed into the already almost unassailable idea that the obese, and obesity itself, is the root cause of our societal health issues and increased health care costs, when it straight-up flat-out IS NOT.
REPHRASING AGAIN: Medical science is telling us quite clearly that having excess adipose tissue is NOT UNHEALTHY in and of itself, therefore promoting the decrease of excess adipose tissue CANNOT and WILL NOT result in increased "health" because it does NOTHING to address the ACTUAL CAUSES of disease, and just feeds into the stereotype that the obese are "unhealthy" which is contributing to societal blindness about the fact that both obese and non-obese people are dying of diabetes and cardiovascular disease in droves, and it has NOTHING to do with the obesity or lack thereof. The "link" between obesity and disease is statistically NON-EXISTENT. It isn't just "weak".
REPHRASING YET A THIRD TIME: Excessive adipose tissue storage is NOT a disease that needs to be treated. Rather, it is an almost entirely medically HARMLESS symptom of a broken homeostatic metabolic system that normally regulates adipose tissue storage with mind-boggling accuracy. Accuracy that is actually completely impossible for anyone to consciously replicate. Discarding such non-solutions as "diet pills" outright will help us focus on finding and fixing the actual root cause of all these metabolic issues, and when we succeed all the related SYMPTOMS will go away BY THEMSELVES as ACTUAL "HEALTH" INCREASES.
Let me restate that last part because it's very important. Fixing the underlying root cause of these metabolic issues will cause the obese to simply start automatically losing excess adipose deposits, in exactly the same way they started automatically gaining excess adipose deposits, without any conscious planning, until eventually we will be back to 10% or lower societal obesity. Without dieting or diet pills.
I stand by my original assertion that "diet pills", no matter how effective or side-effect free, cannot increase the "health" of any individual or group, and are quite likely to be detrimental to "health".
I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to clarify how I communicate about this issue. Have a great day.