This is a good Use Case for why Certificate Patrol can be invaluable. It stores certificates and notifies you when they change, and whether that change would be expected or maybe suspicious.
Because I was running Certificate Patrol, my browser had already saved the previous certificates from the bank websites and was in a position to automatically notifiy me if anything changes. (I've been seeing a lot of Certificate Patrol notifications recently across the web in general, right after this HeartBleed problem came out.)
As for the Canadian Banks, I can say that I saw no Certificate Fingerprint change in TD, RBC and Tangerine. But PC Financial had changed their certificate very recently. I don't use BMO or Scotia so I can't comment on those ones.
The root problem here is the monopoly on infrastructure owned by a company that also provides services. For years now, other competitors offered uncapped DSL using Bell's infrastructure, while Bell offered a fraction of the bandwidth for much greater prices (and hassles.) I guess enough people woke up and started switching away from Bell's native service and jumped to other providers. And naturally, Bell uses their governmental friends to kill the competition, instead of, you know, competing and improving their services. BELL CANADA IS THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. BELIEVE IT.
For much of the most densely populated area of Canada, Bell and Rogers own both the infrastructure and provide services to end users. I don't think that should be permitted. Companies should not be able to perform both functions. This is already what happened in our electricity industry in Ontario, when Ontario Hydro was broken up into separate generation and transmission entities.) Bell continues to use the CRTC, which is an impotent and ineffectual organization that seems to be on the leash of the same politicians that decided their friends at Bell would get a monopoly, to prevent other organizations from laying down wires underground in new residential developments.
This problem would not exist if a real competitive market was in place.
I am continually surprised by the amount of energy that Bell puts in to creative marketing, customer disservice, finding ways of adding hidden fees, and downright screwing people. If they just put a fraction of their efforts into actually improving their services, they would actually be a competitive company. But wait, they aren't interested in fair competition. Bell just wants passive income through forced usage of their monopolistic network.
By the way, it bears repeating again, Bell Canada is THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. I am seriously not joking. Imagine the incompetence, bureaucracy and arrogance of government incorporated into a business. Add the fact that it's their intent to screw you at every turn and "accidentally" add 48 month contracts onto every deal that to which you've never agreed, and for which they somehow lost the audio recording of that CSR's call. That's Bell. They're like government for much of the Canadian population because you pretty much HAVE TO USE THEM because they own the wires.
*Note for other Canadians: I am fully aware of the other Telus / MTS / and other monopolies outside of Ontario/Quebec.
I never had "fill in the blank" exams at school, and only some of the first or second year stuff was multiple choice. Most everything was mathematics, essay, or other long answer.
Although I graduated some years back, I still advocate the use of pen and paper to students because of final exams. You are going to be sitting in the gymnasiums writing 15 hours of exams in the space of a few days. By hand. On paper.
If you haven't been training up your hand all semester, your arm is going to break down after about 20 minutes because your muscles are not used to manual writing. Good luck being effective on your exams when your wrist is about to fall off.
I experienced this a couple of years out of school when I chose to write the Professional Practice Exam. About 45 minutes into the three hour exam in the freezing cold gym at University of Toronto, I just about gnawed my hand off.
"As opposed to a client-based email, where you can simply get it all through the filesystem? Physical access is game-over. So if you have 30min with your ex's machine, that's pretty much game over, if residing in clients."
I've been storing my Thunderbird folders inside a truecrypt container for some time now. It's peace of mind.
"I'm having trouble thinking of an organization I trust less than Canada's telecoms companies to handle my money."
You can say that again! I trust the telecoms even less than the Federal Government, and that's saying a lot!
I actually wrote a letter to the industry minister Jim Prentice protesting this new copyright issue.
I'm not sure if he even read my fax or what but I do feel a lot better knowing that I actually said something and did something instead of just cheerleading on message boards.
I'm on prepaid, only paying $10/mth+tax and nothing else. That's one of the reasons I picked prepaid to begin with; No system access fee, at least in Canada on Telus.
Depends on your service provider. Especially in North America where cell service is not as good, you may pay for incoming calls and even incoming texts. However we have free local calls from landlines so it balances out somewhat.
Back in 2003, a Maxtor HD at work went up in smoke just like in the article's pics. It happened right as the machine got turned on by a tech doing maintenance.
"as long as they trust the editor to catch their mistakes, they'll never actually learn to avoid them; they'll simply let the IDE be their guide and never learn it."
Quite right. My intro Java course was about 6 years ago and they did it with an IDE. Two years later they switched away from the IDEs because they realised that the students had no idea what they were really doing because the IDE took care of the details. Now it is all by command line.
This takes me all the way back to grade 12 mathematics:
During the final examination, a lightning storm raged outside. I was working furiously because I was behind, and then the power went out. Almost all the lights in the exam hall went out, and there were no windows as it was the gymnasium where basketballs normally fly here and there.
Of course everybody burst out laughing and the teachers tried to calm everybody down and prevent them from talking. Me, I just kept working frantically and finishing as many questions as possible with the tiny amount of light available. Most others were stalled because their calculators were solar power only, while mine was dual powered.
The lights came on after about five minutes, and the teachers gave us another five minutes in the alotted time. I have to thank the weather / diety / whatever for that power outage, because without the extra five minutes, I wouldn't have finished the exam.
Why are you carrying original CDs around in your car? In my opinion, it is one of the riskiest things you can do. Instead, buy a spindle of cheap CD-Rs and carry around burned copies, and keep the originals safe in a cabinet at home. Just reburn when the burned copy gets unusable. And if your car gets stolen, you won't have to worry about the fact that your insurance probably won't cover the replacement of those CD-Rs.
Seriously, when I get a new disc, it gets ripped to the computer ONCE and then I convert to mp3 and burn copies for backup and/or the car if necessary. It doesn't matter if it's copy protected, I haven't run into anything that wasn't cleanly rippable with a Plextor drive and Exact Audio Copy or Plextools.
Just another example of lame amazon profiling: I recently received this e-mail from amazon.com:
"Dear Amazon.com customer, Based on your previous apparel, jewelry, and kids' purchases, we thought you might like to know you can save 20% to 50% at the (retailer name removed) Half-Yearly Sale, going on now! Save on a great selection of apparel, shoes, and accessories for women and kids."
Of course there are holes in Amazon's logic:
1. I have never made any apparel, jewelry and kids' purchases at amazon.com
2. Amazon does not ship those things outside the US anyway and I'm in Canada so it's *impossible* for me to buy those things.
3. Even if I wanted to buy anything at this retailer's sale, they only ship apparel, shows and accessories within the US.
4. I am not a woman.
Great job, Amazon.com. Keep showing me, a heterosexual non-american male, all that gay-interest stuff in the gold box and I'm sure to bite sooner or later. Or maybe this is supposedly how homophobes think a person 'turns' gay.
"This multiple format business is a mess. Look at the problems with SACD and DVD-A. Nobody is buying them (and if the music industry stopped suing people and promoted those formats that are so much better than downloaded music they would actually make more money because there is new value there.) But back to the topic at hand: The industry would benefit more from having ONE SINGLE TRUE UNIFIED STANDARD as opposed to a couple of standards, which would confuse people. The public at large (Joe Sixpack) gets all confused with this 2-format thing. They want to buy a movie and play it, not worry about if this disc will play on their type of player. When we have one unified standard, confusion is reduced, people can just buy and make the industry happy. The the industry focus can be put on actually releasing content and worthwhile stuff, as opposed to teaching consumers that they need a different player for their Fox releases versus some other studio and then wondering why people don't buy any of these confusing and conflicting products."
"Microsoft Antispyware popped up a dialog informing me that the app was trying to register a new startup program and asked me to confirm. This impressed me and prompted me to put it on my own computer."
Couldn't many of these problems be avoided if retail shops printed their recepits on "special" paper that contains microprint, watermarks, thermal stripes, etc?
Use the Evil Laser Printer technology to "embed" serial codes along the recepit paper and keep an audio trail to see which receipt paper goes to which retail branch. This allows you to identify from which store(s) the inevitable employee-theft of receipts came from, and when they took place based on location of the gap in the serial codes.
While this won't help prevent theft where people return the wrong item with the real receipt, those people do it because they can't make a fake receipt to begin with. They are more easily deterred by salespeople who can identify whether or not the product being returned is actually the one printed on the receipt.
Slashdot Mirror
Because I was running Certificate Patrol, my browser had already saved the previous certificates from the bank websites and was in a position to automatically notifiy me if anything changes. (I've been seeing a lot of Certificate Patrol notifications recently across the web in general, right after this HeartBleed problem came out.)
As for the Canadian Banks, I can say that I saw no Certificate Fingerprint change in TD, RBC and Tangerine. But PC Financial had changed their certificate very recently. I don't use BMO or Scotia so I can't comment on those ones.
The root problem here is the monopoly on infrastructure owned by a company that also provides services. For years now, other competitors offered uncapped DSL using Bell's infrastructure, while Bell offered a fraction of the bandwidth for much greater prices (and hassles.) I guess enough people woke up and started switching away from Bell's native service and jumped to other providers. And naturally, Bell uses their governmental friends to kill the competition, instead of, you know, competing and improving their services. BELL CANADA IS THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. BELIEVE IT.
For much of the most densely populated area of Canada, Bell and Rogers own both the infrastructure and provide services to end users. I don't think that should be permitted. Companies should not be able to perform both functions. This is already what happened in our electricity industry in Ontario, when Ontario Hydro was broken up into separate generation and transmission entities.) Bell continues to use the CRTC, which is an impotent and ineffectual organization that seems to be on the leash of the same politicians that decided their friends at Bell would get a monopoly, to prevent other organizations from laying down wires underground in new residential developments.
This problem would not exist if a real competitive market was in place.
I am continually surprised by the amount of energy that Bell puts in to creative marketing, customer disservice, finding ways of adding hidden fees, and downright screwing people. If they just put a fraction of their efforts into actually improving their services, they would actually be a competitive company. But wait, they aren't interested in fair competition. Bell just wants passive income through forced usage of their monopolistic network.
By the way, it bears repeating again, Bell Canada is THE WORST COMPANY IN ALL OF CANADA. I am seriously not joking. Imagine the incompetence, bureaucracy and arrogance of government incorporated into a business. Add the fact that it's their intent to screw you at every turn and "accidentally" add 48 month contracts onto every deal that to which you've never agreed, and for which they somehow lost the audio recording of that CSR's call. That's Bell. They're like government for much of the Canadian population because you pretty much HAVE TO USE THEM because they own the wires.
*Note for other Canadians: I am fully aware of the other Telus / MTS / and other monopolies outside of Ontario/Quebec.
Thanks, much appreciated.
I never had "fill in the blank" exams at school, and only some of the first or second year stuff was multiple choice. Most everything was mathematics, essay, or other long answer.
Although I graduated some years back, I still advocate the use of pen and paper to students because of final exams. You are going to be sitting in the gymnasiums writing 15 hours of exams in the space of a few days. By hand. On paper.
If you haven't been training up your hand all semester, your arm is going to break down after about 20 minutes because your muscles are not used to manual writing. Good luck being effective on your exams when your wrist is about to fall off.
I experienced this a couple of years out of school when I chose to write the Professional Practice Exam. About 45 minutes into the three hour exam in the freezing cold gym at University of Toronto, I just about gnawed my hand off.
I've been storing my Thunderbird folders inside a truecrypt container for some time now. It's peace of mind.
It does not appear to flag "every" file related to iTunes, it is just the iTunesMiniPlayer.dll.
The workaround is to disable the real-time scanner.
However their latest update had fixed it, and my real-time scanner is running again without problem.
"I'm having trouble thinking of an organization I trust less than Canada's telecoms companies to handle my money." You can say that again! I trust the telecoms even less than the Federal Government, and that's saying a lot!
I did go ahead and line my wallet with aluminium foil. It actually does stop the reception for the wireless chip in my MasterCard.
I'm not sure if he even read my fax or what but I do feel a lot better knowing that I actually said something and did something instead of just cheerleading on message boards.
-Proud to be Canadian!
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Predator-Style-Hemlets-Allow-Pillots-To-See-Through-Planes-70542.shtml
I'm on prepaid, only paying $10/mth+tax and nothing else. That's one of the reasons I picked prepaid to begin with; No system access fee, at least in Canada on Telus.
Depends on your service provider. Especially in North America where cell service is not as good, you may pay for incoming calls and even incoming texts. However we have free local calls from landlines so it balances out somewhat.
Back in 2003, a Maxtor HD at work went up in smoke just like in the article's pics. It happened right as the machine got turned on by a tech doing maintenance.
Quite right. My intro Java course was about 6 years ago and they did it with an IDE. Two years later they switched away from the IDEs because they realised that the students had no idea what they were really doing because the IDE took care of the details. Now it is all by command line.
During the final examination, a lightning storm raged outside. I was working furiously because I was behind, and then the power went out. Almost all the lights in the exam hall went out, and there were no windows as it was the gymnasium where basketballs normally fly here and there.
Of course everybody burst out laughing and the teachers tried to calm everybody down and prevent them from talking. Me, I just kept working frantically and finishing as many questions as possible with the tiny amount of light available. Most others were stalled because their calculators were solar power only, while mine was dual powered.
The lights came on after about five minutes, and the teachers gave us another five minutes in the alotted time. I have to thank the weather / diety / whatever for that power outage, because without the extra five minutes, I wouldn't have finished the exam.
Seriously, when I get a new disc, it gets ripped to the computer ONCE and then I convert to mp3 and burn copies for backup and/or the car if necessary. It doesn't matter if it's copy protected, I haven't run into anything that wasn't cleanly rippable with a Plextor drive and Exact Audio Copy or Plextools.
Yes, it was sent to a dedicated sneakemail address I use only for amazon.ca and amazon.com.
Actually I was referring to a bunch of books that they were showing me in the Gold Box that I only knew about due to recommendations from gay friends.
"Dear Amazon.com customer, Based on your previous apparel, jewelry, and kids' purchases, we thought you might like to know you can save 20% to 50% at the (retailer name removed) Half-Yearly Sale, going on now! Save on a great selection of apparel, shoes, and accessories for women and kids."
Of course there are holes in Amazon's logic:
1. I have never made any apparel, jewelry and kids' purchases at amazon.com
2. Amazon does not ship those things outside the US anyway and I'm in Canada so it's *impossible* for me to buy those things.
3. Even if I wanted to buy anything at this retailer's sale, they only ship apparel, shows and accessories within the US.
4. I am not a woman.
Great job, Amazon.com. Keep showing me, a heterosexual non-american male, all that gay-interest stuff in the gold box and I'm sure to bite sooner or later. Or maybe this is supposedly how homophobes think a person 'turns' gay.
Previously reported on slashdot too.
If you're set on becoming a karma whore, try writing your own posts!
And to think I was about to mod you up...
You don't any MS program to do that. It's been available for years in other freeware.
Good thing someone still makes that design.
Use the Evil Laser Printer technology to "embed" serial codes along the recepit paper and keep an audio trail to see which receipt paper goes to which retail branch. This allows you to identify from which store(s) the inevitable employee-theft of receipts came from, and when they took place based on location of the gap in the serial codes.
While this won't help prevent theft where people return the wrong item with the real receipt, those people do it because they can't make a fake receipt to begin with. They are more easily deterred by salespeople who can identify whether or not the product being returned is actually the one printed on the receipt.