Apparently Facebook's security officer identified this particular account as the target. I haven't seen any discussion as to what evidence he's basing that on, but I'm guessing he didn't just pick a random account out of the air.
A sizable number of news stories these days are already just thinly-veiled press releases. Further starving news sites of revenue from labeled advertising will only accelerate this trend. Of course, given the generally accepted principle in our economy that anything other than constant growth in profits is failure, the move toward more and more advertising masquerading as news is probably inevitable anyway.
Okay, so the fact that all of these sites are reporting on a temporary outage on a social networking site says more about the overall decline in the mainstream media than CNN specifically.
Also, as of right now, I don't see the story on the front page of the BBC. Fox News now has it listed as "Urgent" and has the headline in huge letters on the front page. CNN currently shows it as its top story. Reuters has it much further down the page, but it's still there.
Reporting on a story like this deep in the Technology section is one thing, but displaying it prominently as major breaking news is entirely another.
I expect bloggers to go nuts about this sort of thing. What's truly disheartening to me is that a formerly relevant news site like cnn.com has it on their front page. Oh CNN, I remember when you used to report actual news...now look what you've become.
Sure, but if you're stationed in Iraq, you're basically "on the job" 24/7, with long periods of complete boredom. Further, you're unlikely to have your own computer equipment to use, and are totally dependent on the military to provide it for you. Social networking sites can offer a good way for soldiers to keep in touch with family and friends and relieve some of the loneliness they feel during their deployments. I'm sure the military monitors every packet going out through their wires anyway, so it's not like someone is going to be able to use these sites to reveal secret plans without being caught pretty quickly. I really don't see what the big deal is about allowing these sites.
If you are in an industry where your internal communications/documents/etc should or must remain confidential, than you cannot trust any Internet-based system as your free platform for email/document creation/document storage.
FTFY. If your documents exist on the Internet, especially unencrypted, they won't be confidential for very long. Whether or not Google as a company is trustworthy or not is irrelevant. If anyone hacked into your Google account, they would have access to everything. If a random employee at Google decided to sell your stuff to a tabloid, there's nothing you could do to stop them until it was already too late. Without ironclad confidentiality agreements with real penalties for breaking said agreements, you shouldn't be trusting any third party with this stuff, and you certainly shouldn't have it on the Internet.
MADD has morphed over the years from an organization with a laudable enough goal (reduce drunk driving deaths) into a neo-prohibitionist organization that is waging a war on all drinking. If they had their way, booze would be taxed at a higher rate than tobbaco and every car sold in the US would have an ignition interlock system. The Founder of the organization left it sometime ago in disgust at what it has become.
This is a problem with interest groups in general. Most are formed with a specific goal in mind. However, they also employ people and generally give a lot of people a sense of belonging that they don't want to give up. So, once the goal they were created for is reached, they don't disband like they should. Instead, they just set new, generally more extreme goals, until they eventually degenerate into a fringe group of wackos. Unfortunately, the disproportionate political influence they gained from fighting for their earlier, more generally supported, cause is often maintained far longer than it ought to be, so many of their extremist garbage ends up being discussed, and even acted on by Congress, more than most people would like.
I knew a guy in college who could smell weed from miles away. No matter where you were, if you broke out a joint, he would magically show up within minutes. Hiring guys like that has to be cheaper than these devices.
The whole tone of your post makes it obvious which side you're on. Shoveling scorn on one side of an argument while proclaiming to be neutral is intellectually dishonest.
Good thing you made that correction...socialism is the exact opposite of corporatism. Fascism, at least the way it was implemented by Mussolini and Hitler, was very much corporatist, though. It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government. We are much closer to the latter.
Once I buy the device, it's mine, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If I, say, decide to make a bomb with it and blow something up, you can prosecute me for blowing something up, and for possessing explosive materials, but not for the act of fiddling with the device. Saying most people who do X do so because of Y doesn't mean that doing X should be illegal. People who buy bongs or make pipes out of random household materials do so in order to smoke weed, but buying bongs or fashioning pipes out of weird shit is not illegal. Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal.
This is how law enforcement works: Go after the low hanging fruit, generate press about it, and people think you're doing a great job. Solving major crimes is HARD. Much easier to just round up some petty criminals like pot smokers and "console hackers". That way, you can say you put away so many thousands of criminals this year, and everyone will want to give you a big fat raise and a pat on the back for being "tough on crime". Meanwhile, the really dangerous criminals get to go about their business, and you don't have to worry about doing any actual police work.
The biggest problem with transition lenses is the UV coating on your car's windshield renders them totally ineffective. The windshield filters the UV light the transitions use to increase their tint, so they never get dark when you're driving.
My wife got transition lenses specifically because she wanted to be able to use them while driving and didn't want a separate pair of prescription sunglasses to have to keep track of. Turns out, the transitions were completely useless for the one thing she wanted them for. Having a manually adjustable tint would definitely solve this problem without having to carry around a separate device (separate pair of glasses, those stupid clip-on things, or whatever else).
Repeat after me: Funny mods do not add to your karma.
Your problem is you go for the joke exclusively. I like to go for the joke quite a bit myself, but you have to sprinkle in some actually worthwhile (or at least karma whoring) posts more often, or your starting score will render you invisible to the vast majority of Slashdot readers. Building up karma on this site is easy. You already know that the majority of mod points are spent early in threads, so if you're looking to rebuild your karma, post something on-topic early in the thread that you know will be modded up. For extra points, start your post with "I know I'll be modded down for this" and then post something that's clearly in line with the prevailing Slashdot groupthink.
Example for this thread:
I know I'll be modded down for this, but it seems to me these ISPs need to stop bowing down to the **AA and start doing what's best for their customers. Why should I be cut off because I want to use bittorrent to download the latest Ubuntu release? This is why we need to support Net Neutrality!
Had you made that the first post instead of what you posted, you would have been guaranteed a +5, Insightful and would be well on your way to re-earning that karma bonus.
Join us next week when we'll discuss how to craft a proper car analogy on Slashdot in order to hit the coveted trifecta of vaguely on-topic, completely nonsensical, and +5 moderated.
Call me crazy, but I think it might be for storing and processing data.
This is a state government, they have data necessary to deliver government services of various kinds to the 6.5 million Washington residents. I'm not sure what the number of employees they have has to do with anything.
Personally, I'd be hesitant to build one giant data center just because you then have a single point of failure, unless their budget includes a disaster recovery site somewhere else. However, shifting personal data to "the cloud" of a for-profit company, especially when the security of cloud architecture is still being scrutinized, would scare me even more.
Seriously guys, this is why scientists can't get dates. You have a requirement for female volunteers to come to your lab and eat chocolate...this may be the experiment that actually gets you a woman for once. Then, you screw it all up by requiring that the women be post-menopausal with type 2 diabetes, guaranteeing you're going to get a bunch of fat old chicks. Seriously guys, if you really want to have fun with this study, you need to require that the women be 18-25, physically fit, and sexually attracted to glasses and pocket protectors. You know, for science. Surely you could come up with some sort of sciency rationalizations to justify those requirements.
Dude, this is America! We don't wait for things! Even the 6 months it takes to get to Mars is pushing it...the way our attention span is, we'd probably launch the astronauts to Mars, and then 3 months later some Congresscritter would recommend cutting out this silly "Mars mission" from the budget, because no one even remembers what that was for, and use the money to build a new movie theater in his district (named after him, naturally). They'd lay off everyone at Mission Control, and the astronauts up in their capsule would wonder why no one is answering their transmissions anymore.
Talking about something that would take 200 years? Hell, when Voyager was (briefly) back in the news a couple of years ago, most people probably didn't even know what the hell it was, other than some vague memory in the deep recesses of their brains that it had something to do with Star Trek, much less what it was supposed to be doing out there. 200 years from now, people will probably think the transmissions coming from your proposed spacecraft are from some alien race and freak out.
My prediction is that this whole process results in some pretty exciting plans, which will all be canceled after NASA's budget gets slashed yet again.
They failed to take into account the meteor that will strike Earth in 2027, knocking it into a different orbit, and therefore changing the timing and characteristics of future eclipses. VH1 is really going to regret running that "I Love the Solar Eclipses of the 2000s" show so early.
GoDaddy's massive marketing apparatus generates more domain registrations than would otherwise exist. They convince people to buy domains they would not otherwise buy. The total number of registrations would likely go down without them, which would directly impact ICANN's revenue stream.
The fact that they get paid per domain of course is what gives them the motivation to dramatically increase the TLD space to the point where the whole concept of a TLD is completely meaningless. This also is a flawed part of the system.
The thing with the registrars, though, is that ICANN is effectively at the mercy of the registrars due to how the whole system is set up. ICANN can't just unilaterally block a major registrar, because then that registrar's customer's will be adrift, and of course the registrar will tell all of them that it's all ICANN's fault their domains don't work anymore. So, ICANN gets massive pressure from the registrar's customers (who are all losing millions per minute of course) to fix their domains, and ICANN has little choice but to comply. If they take a hard line, those customers may eventually move to another registrar, but they'll carry a lot of bitterness toward ICANN, and maybe they start lobbying their Congresspeople to pull ICANN's charter.
Add to all of this that the number of domains registered is heavily dependent on the amount of marketing these registrars do to try to convince people they need their own domain names, and it becomes apparent that ICANN is really completely beholden to the registrars, even though they technically have the ability to shut them all down.
The entire purpose of the Domain Name System is, or was, to enforce structure in naming on the Internet. When it was under the purview of the old Network Solutions, under the guidance of the NSF, domains were well-organized, expensive enough to deter squatting, and TLDs actually meant something.
Under ICANN, the whole system has descended into chaos. It's laughable to see ICANN trying to exert any sort of control over the registrars now, when they've spent the last 10 years doing whatever the hell the registrars wanted them to. The whole system is broken, and ICANN has no effective authority to do anything about it. Some sort of regulation with teeth is badly needed, and ICANN is completely unequipped for that sort of thing. Their feeble attempts to assert authority this late in the game are laughable.
Don't get too excited just yet. Just because they're soliciting feedback doesn't mean they'll listen to it. More than likely, they'll cherry pick public responses that support what they were going to do anyway, and use them to claim they have "public support".
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Apparently Facebook's security officer identified this particular account as the target. I haven't seen any discussion as to what evidence he's basing that on, but I'm guessing he didn't just pick a random account out of the air.
A sizable number of news stories these days are already just thinly-veiled press releases. Further starving news sites of revenue from labeled advertising will only accelerate this trend. Of course, given the generally accepted principle in our economy that anything other than constant growth in profits is failure, the move toward more and more advertising masquerading as news is probably inevitable anyway.
Okay, so the fact that all of these sites are reporting on a temporary outage on a social networking site says more about the overall decline in the mainstream media than CNN specifically.
Also, as of right now, I don't see the story on the front page of the BBC. Fox News now has it listed as "Urgent" and has the headline in huge letters on the front page. CNN currently shows it as its top story. Reuters has it much further down the page, but it's still there.
Reporting on a story like this deep in the Technology section is one thing, but displaying it prominently as major breaking news is entirely another.
I expect bloggers to go nuts about this sort of thing. What's truly disheartening to me is that a formerly relevant news site like cnn.com has it on their front page. Oh CNN, I remember when you used to report actual news...now look what you've become.
Sure, but if you're stationed in Iraq, you're basically "on the job" 24/7, with long periods of complete boredom. Further, you're unlikely to have your own computer equipment to use, and are totally dependent on the military to provide it for you. Social networking sites can offer a good way for soldiers to keep in touch with family and friends and relieve some of the loneliness they feel during their deployments. I'm sure the military monitors every packet going out through their wires anyway, so it's not like someone is going to be able to use these sites to reveal secret plans without being caught pretty quickly. I really don't see what the big deal is about allowing these sites.
If you are in an industry where your internal communications/documents/etc should or must remain confidential, than you cannot trust any Internet-based system as your free platform for email/document creation/document storage.
FTFY. If your documents exist on the Internet, especially unencrypted, they won't be confidential for very long. Whether or not Google as a company is trustworthy or not is irrelevant. If anyone hacked into your Google account, they would have access to everything. If a random employee at Google decided to sell your stuff to a tabloid, there's nothing you could do to stop them until it was already too late. Without ironclad confidentiality agreements with real penalties for breaking said agreements, you shouldn't be trusting any third party with this stuff, and you certainly shouldn't have it on the Internet.
MADD has morphed over the years from an organization with a laudable enough goal (reduce drunk driving deaths) into a neo-prohibitionist organization that is waging a war on all drinking. If they had their way, booze would be taxed at a higher rate than tobbaco and every car sold in the US would have an ignition interlock system. The Founder of the organization left it sometime ago in disgust at what it has become.
This is a problem with interest groups in general. Most are formed with a specific goal in mind. However, they also employ people and generally give a lot of people a sense of belonging that they don't want to give up. So, once the goal they were created for is reached, they don't disband like they should. Instead, they just set new, generally more extreme goals, until they eventually degenerate into a fringe group of wackos. Unfortunately, the disproportionate political influence they gained from fighting for their earlier, more generally supported, cause is often maintained far longer than it ought to be, so many of their extremist garbage ends up being discussed, and even acted on by Congress, more than most people would like.
I knew a guy in college who could smell weed from miles away. No matter where you were, if you broke out a joint, he would magically show up within minutes. Hiring guys like that has to be cheaper than these devices.
The whole tone of your post makes it obvious which side you're on. Shoveling scorn on one side of an argument while proclaiming to be neutral is intellectually dishonest.
Good thing you made that correction...socialism is the exact opposite of corporatism. Fascism, at least the way it was implemented by Mussolini and Hitler, was very much corporatist, though. It's really kind of funny how much people scream "socialism" these days when we're so much closer to corporatism than we are to socialism. In socialism, the government controls the industry. In corporatism, the industry (the corporations) control the government. We are much closer to the latter.
Once I buy the device, it's mine, and I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If I, say, decide to make a bomb with it and blow something up, you can prosecute me for blowing something up, and for possessing explosive materials, but not for the act of fiddling with the device. Saying most people who do X do so because of Y doesn't mean that doing X should be illegal. People who buy bongs or make pipes out of random household materials do so in order to smoke weed, but buying bongs or fashioning pipes out of weird shit is not illegal. Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal.
This is how law enforcement works: Go after the low hanging fruit, generate press about it, and people think you're doing a great job. Solving major crimes is HARD. Much easier to just round up some petty criminals like pot smokers and "console hackers". That way, you can say you put away so many thousands of criminals this year, and everyone will want to give you a big fat raise and a pat on the back for being "tough on crime". Meanwhile, the really dangerous criminals get to go about their business, and you don't have to worry about doing any actual police work.
The biggest problem with transition lenses is the UV coating on your car's windshield renders them totally ineffective. The windshield filters the UV light the transitions use to increase their tint, so they never get dark when you're driving.
My wife got transition lenses specifically because she wanted to be able to use them while driving and didn't want a separate pair of prescription sunglasses to have to keep track of. Turns out, the transitions were completely useless for the one thing she wanted them for. Having a manually adjustable tint would definitely solve this problem without having to carry around a separate device (separate pair of glasses, those stupid clip-on things, or whatever else).
I agree, I read at -1 exclusively. I do lament at the quality of the trolls though...the good ones are few and far between these days.
Your problem is you go for the joke exclusively. I like to go for the joke quite a bit myself, but you have to sprinkle in some actually worthwhile (or at least karma whoring) posts more often, or your starting score will render you invisible to the vast majority of Slashdot readers. Building up karma on this site is easy. You already know that the majority of mod points are spent early in threads, so if you're looking to rebuild your karma, post something on-topic early in the thread that you know will be modded up. For extra points, start your post with "I know I'll be modded down for this" and then post something that's clearly in line with the prevailing Slashdot groupthink.
Example for this thread:
I know I'll be modded down for this, but it seems to me these ISPs need to stop bowing down to the **AA and start doing what's best for their customers. Why should I be cut off because I want to use bittorrent to download the latest Ubuntu release? This is why we need to support Net Neutrality!
Had you made that the first post instead of what you posted, you would have been guaranteed a +5, Insightful and would be well on your way to re-earning that karma bonus.
Join us next week when we'll discuss how to craft a proper car analogy on Slashdot in order to hit the coveted trifecta of vaguely on-topic, completely nonsensical, and +5 moderated.
Just what is the data center for?
Call me crazy, but I think it might be for storing and processing data.
This is a state government, they have data necessary to deliver government services of various kinds to the 6.5 million Washington residents. I'm not sure what the number of employees they have has to do with anything.
Personally, I'd be hesitant to build one giant data center just because you then have a single point of failure, unless their budget includes a disaster recovery site somewhere else. However, shifting personal data to "the cloud" of a for-profit company, especially when the security of cloud architecture is still being scrutinized, would scare me even more.
Seriously guys, this is why scientists can't get dates. You have a requirement for female volunteers to come to your lab and eat chocolate...this may be the experiment that actually gets you a woman for once. Then, you screw it all up by requiring that the women be post-menopausal with type 2 diabetes, guaranteeing you're going to get a bunch of fat old chicks. Seriously guys, if you really want to have fun with this study, you need to require that the women be 18-25, physically fit, and sexually attracted to glasses and pocket protectors. You know, for science. Surely you could come up with some sort of sciency rationalizations to justify those requirements.
Dude, this is America! We don't wait for things! Even the 6 months it takes to get to Mars is pushing it...the way our attention span is, we'd probably launch the astronauts to Mars, and then 3 months later some Congresscritter would recommend cutting out this silly "Mars mission" from the budget, because no one even remembers what that was for, and use the money to build a new movie theater in his district (named after him, naturally). They'd lay off everyone at Mission Control, and the astronauts up in their capsule would wonder why no one is answering their transmissions anymore.
Talking about something that would take 200 years? Hell, when Voyager was (briefly) back in the news a couple of years ago, most people probably didn't even know what the hell it was, other than some vague memory in the deep recesses of their brains that it had something to do with Star Trek, much less what it was supposed to be doing out there. 200 years from now, people will probably think the transmissions coming from your proposed spacecraft are from some alien race and freak out.
My prediction is that this whole process results in some pretty exciting plans, which will all be canceled after NASA's budget gets slashed yet again.
They failed to take into account the meteor that will strike Earth in 2027, knocking it into a different orbit, and therefore changing the timing and characteristics of future eclipses. VH1 is really going to regret running that "I Love the Solar Eclipses of the 2000s" show so early.
GoDaddy's massive marketing apparatus generates more domain registrations than would otherwise exist. They convince people to buy domains they would not otherwise buy. The total number of registrations would likely go down without them, which would directly impact ICANN's revenue stream.
The fact that they get paid per domain of course is what gives them the motivation to dramatically increase the TLD space to the point where the whole concept of a TLD is completely meaningless. This also is a flawed part of the system.
The thing with the registrars, though, is that ICANN is effectively at the mercy of the registrars due to how the whole system is set up. ICANN can't just unilaterally block a major registrar, because then that registrar's customer's will be adrift, and of course the registrar will tell all of them that it's all ICANN's fault their domains don't work anymore. So, ICANN gets massive pressure from the registrar's customers (who are all losing millions per minute of course) to fix their domains, and ICANN has little choice but to comply. If they take a hard line, those customers may eventually move to another registrar, but they'll carry a lot of bitterness toward ICANN, and maybe they start lobbying their Congresspeople to pull ICANN's charter.
Add to all of this that the number of domains registered is heavily dependent on the amount of marketing these registrars do to try to convince people they need their own domain names, and it becomes apparent that ICANN is really completely beholden to the registrars, even though they technically have the ability to shut them all down.
ICANN gets most (all?) of its money from the registrars it's supposed to be policing. There's an inherent conflict of interest there.
The entire purpose of the Domain Name System is, or was, to enforce structure in naming on the Internet. When it was under the purview of the old Network Solutions, under the guidance of the NSF, domains were well-organized, expensive enough to deter squatting, and TLDs actually meant something.
Under ICANN, the whole system has descended into chaos. It's laughable to see ICANN trying to exert any sort of control over the registrars now, when they've spent the last 10 years doing whatever the hell the registrars wanted them to. The whole system is broken, and ICANN has no effective authority to do anything about it. Some sort of regulation with teeth is badly needed, and ICANN is completely unequipped for that sort of thing. Their feeble attempts to assert authority this late in the game are laughable.
Don't get too excited just yet. Just because they're soliciting feedback doesn't mean they'll listen to it. More than likely, they'll cherry pick public responses that support what they were going to do anyway, and use them to claim they have "public support".
Slashdot isn't slow, it's just buggy as hell.