"If we can have BOFH's as sysadmins, I don't know why the banks couldn't use them to good effect."
Because sysadmins actually understand security and intrusion because it is a high profile part of their job. There is a lot of emphasis on security in the design of systems in the IT community. Bank managers know about banking. Yes, security is part of their job but here in Canada, by and large, they just don't seem to get it, especially when computers are involved and the fraudster is well versed in social engineering.
This one bank manager from RBC Financial (formerly Royal Bank) of Canada actually asked me to send her details of my account in an E-MAIL and she did not provide a PGP key or anything. She thought that e-mail was quite secure and only the owners of the inboxes could access them.
Well I think it is proven that different people see different things when looking at these shapes. Here is a complation of what people have said so far. And yes, it did take friggin' long to compile this:
Please blame the lameness of the formatting of this list on slashcode: "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 20.0)."
Image 1: -butterfly swimmer, Snooty Nose, mantle, Mask and dress, Mugatu from Zoolander, Person with hands behind back looking at feet -Two birds on a tree with two dogs breathing fire -on them, Angry hippie, diablo howling into the air, A rabbit with horns lifting weights, Angry robot with guns -Strongbad, Fighter Plane, Two birds singing, Missouri, tripod mortar
Image 2: -fat person stretching, Christian Slater, Bear in a T-shirt, Board Meeting, Gravity challenged lady in lycra super hero outfit doing the splits -Sumo wrestler on his ass, Jabba the hutt wearing a cape, fat sumo man in his fight stance, Squatting sumo, Cartman (I haven't even seen many SP episodes) -Headboard or a bed, A gorilla in sweats doing a split, Fat woman stretching, linebacker, Kneeling fat man, recycle logo
Image 3: -WWE Smackdown Enterance, Transformer, two hands, Zoro meets Willie Nelson, Someone eating coffee grounds from a filter with chopsticks -Bob the Tomato from Veggie Tales, Someone drawing with both hands, Knitting a fez, one of the things from the movie Gremlins, An ambidexterous person writing with both hands -Two bunny rabits eating guts, Bee face close up, Cockpit, Tropical island with two palms without tops, Obviously Goatse, buglike jetboat
Image 4: -bushy woman on the shitter, Oak leaf, Hands washing black socks, LAN Party, Woman with grey arms force feeding candy to two children -Batman's crotch, A large table saw designed to work in a gravity-less environment run by a tip driving magnetic motor, pelvic bone yo -Hands full of glue, I have no idea. Nothing comes up., Comfy slippers , Feet of a reclining person -Woman with panties down doing the Charleston, knees, Earmuffs, Evil Eyes
Image 5: -Person Gasping, Pierre and Pierre, two faces, Two green berets talking, Two ice cream cones, Arab looking in a mirror, Two weeping men with large green hats -Rastafarian argument, two men crying as they face eachother with big puffy green hats, two frogs wearing hats sticking their tongues out, Two green berets with black eyes, Two malnourished mullah's with camouflaged hats discussing the art of fellatio, -Osama, Two boys playing soldiers, Trent Reznor, two eyes with big green brows
Image 6: -grinning insect mouth, Edmonton (Canada), Camp entrance, Bloody Chest, Super hero adjusting bra -Football shoulder pads, a person's hat with fake hair and pigtails attached, another pelvic bone? -Hands holding a brassiere, Spider, Monkey doing telepathy -A headless woman, Man hiding eyes, spider, Mittens, Person Gasping
Image 7: -Turtle man, Flying Monkey, flying frog, Flyman, A frog in an apron, Frog with wings in apron, Mean green fly, Dragonfly frog, totally a flying frog chef duh! -A winged frog wearing coveralls, Fairy frog wearing an apron, Jack Osbourne dressed as an angel, Frog Ferry, Green winged mole, Letter label, Yoda with bug wings
Image 8: -The fat blue guys from yellow dubmarine shooting condoms out of their bellies -Yugos -Blue rabbits smoking. -Globe -Two Blue Meanies looking at a big butterfly -Two sheep heads crapped on by a butterfly -2 dinosaurs watching a large butterfly -two men in suits watching a butterfly fly between them -Tying a bowtie -Dino men from Super Mario Brothers movie -RC controllers -Snapping fingers -Two men shot in their heads thinking about bras. -smoking -Two Aliens -Boys Spitting
Image 9: -Batman fighting -Bird in the hand -demon -Italian man twirling two pizzas. -Batman peeing
1. A rabbit with horns lifing weights 2. Jabba the hutt wearing a cape 3. An ambidexterous person writing with both hands 4. A large table saw designed to work in a gravity-less environment 5. two frogs wearing hats sticking their tongues out 6. a person's hat with fake hair and pigtails attached 7. A winged frog wearing coveralls 8. 2 dinosaurs watching a large butterfly 9. a really strong guy holding giant cucumbers 10. it did not load
"Pre-supposing I'm American, or live in America. Which I don't. I don't have an SSN. I have a National Insurance number, but it serves no purpose in identifying me to anyone except the inland revenue, when assessing how much income tax I'm due to pay after changing jobs."
I'm not american or living in the USA either. It sounds to me like the system equivalent to the SSN in your country is more intelligently administered than the one in the US (which is not saying much.) Since this is a US-centric site, I was using the US example which is also probably the worst case scenario as well.
In my country, the social insurance number is also used (by law) only for purposes related to paying government taxes.
But in the USA, a lot of people think the SSN is a unique identifier (but supposedly it's not) and it's used all over the place in databases. For example a bunch of SSNs were compromised some months back when cell phone user databases were compromised. Supposedly it's not required in the USA to give your SSN for stuff like that but they expect everyone to give it so there might not be an alternate way to sign up for services.
"No, then they will ask me my pre-arranged security question, to which the fraudster will not know the answer. (unless he's a bank insider, in which case I'm bjorked anyway)."
Sounds like the bankers have some sense in your country. Good for them.
"Wow, hell of an insecure country you've got there..."
If you look at my original post, you will see that I said I am glad I do not live in the United States;-)
"Or better yet just don't place any value in someone else's insecure closed proprietary system, like the SSN. I give away all this crap to anyone who asks for it."
I never said that I liked the way the USA handles SSN or that it was a good system. But I am thankful that I am not living in that country.
"I don't care what my credit record says about me. I buy everything with the cash I have earned. Fuck credit and fuck you for telling me its somehow important. What do you know."
Some employers use credit checks as part of a background check whether it's legal or not. It's not like they tell you. Maybe you might get turned down when you apply for your next job. There goes your cash supply.
And what about the new Big Brother anti-terrorist systems that are being proposed? Some of them use credit rating information to determine how likely you are to try to commit terrorist actions. Even if you deal only in cash, you still have to protect your own credit report because the System still assumes that you use credit cards like a good little consumer.
And if someone opens up a line of credit in your name and you never look at your own credit report and notice it, the first wind you will get of the situation is a nasty call from the collection agency's goons or your bank.
"Nobody seems to know anything about anything, they just follow the herd like good little sheeple. I'm only hoping all the lemmings someday get led to the sea so the rest of us can get on with our lives."
I never said that any of the SSN or credit systems were 'good things.' But they exist and it's what everyone uses so it makes sense to know how they work even if it's only to fight them. I still know all about troubleshooting Windows computers and how they work even though my own computer runs OS X. It comes in handy when securing jobs that give me a cash flow or dealing with "sheeple."
"Oh, no. You're Brazil-like system attached fraudly claims to my number."
Please learn how to write in English and try to avoid the infantile obscenities that only make you look like a whiney brat. I don't even know what you're attempting to say here and I don't care to try to reverse engineer what you were thinking. Have a nice day.
"Enlighten me. Given that I properly destroy PIN numbers and the like, what use could my financial information (bank statements, credit card bills, etc) be to anybody else?"
Having worked at a bank and received anti-fraud and anti-identity-theft training, I know that there is a lot of evil stuff that could be done with that information.
For example that government tax document that wasn't shredded probably has your Social Security Number, your name and your address. The SSN is one of the most prized possessions among fraudsters. Just that information alone is enough to do evil things like apply for new credit cards in your name that you don't know about. Or open lines of credit or bank accounts, cell phone accounts, etc. in your name. Of course if you haven't paid for a credit check document lately you won't see all of these accounts in your name.
That bank statement with recent bank activity can also be used to impersonate you. You could do telephone banking, tell them you forgot your "secret word" and then they will ask you about recent transactions, what other accounts you have with them, etc. and then assume that the fraudster is the genuine article. And they have access to all of your bank funds via telephone banking. They could start requesting replacement credit cards and bank cards with new PIN numbers.
At this point, you are thoroughly hosed for life and even if you do manage to clean it up, it will be hell opening a bank account or credit card because all of the fraud warnings on your name. You'll have a lot of trouble getting leasing on a car or taking advantage of one of those "don't pay until 2005" deals at the furniture store.
The moral of the story: SHRED YOUR DOCUMENTS. And for goodness sakes, use your other hand to cover that PIN entry keypad whenever you're using your bank card.
"Step 2: Toss it in the fireplace at home, one fistfull at a time, so that it doesn't put out too much black smoke"
Exactly. The output from the home shredder at my place is used as fire kindling for our fireplace. It's really an excellent substitute for little chips of wood.
"While I can see your point, the fact that shredders are so cheap ($20-50) and quick (4-10 sheets at a time) makes it fairly easy to give yourself a more secure feeling."
True, but don't undestimate the clogging power of glossy documents. One time a few months ago I received some snail mail spam from MSFT... something about them wanting me to sign up for a.NET course for business techies. It was on this really high grade glossy paper that was very colourful and attractive.
Thanks to Microsoft, I now know that one piece of high grade glossy paper is equal to about six pieces of regular 20 lb white copier paper when passing it through a shredder. So if you get such mail from MSFT and have a shredder that does at most 20 pages at once, please shred only 3 glossy pages at a time.
"Safari rocks. Of course MS gets scared and stops making IE for Mac."
Safari was just an excuse. MSFT was planning on discontinuing IE for the mac for a long time now and Apple knew it. MSFT will use a backwards version of the tactic they used to oust netscape from the browser market. They will use their browser monopoly and IE features integrated into Longhorn OS to marginalise the OS market. You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users. That way they attack Apple and any other OS rivals simultaneously. Damn those MSFT busienss strategists are smart...
"They are gonna have a hard time when they send a notice to the address I had my card & reader shipped to:
COD
John Smith
UPS Customer Counter - Hold for Pickup
(my local UPS counter addy)"
Of course they will get your credit card number in those raids too and your bank will have your billing address...
In cases like this, I would expect the sites that sell this stuff to periodically wipe their databases so that there is nothing to get if they experience a DMCA raid.
Re:CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip dri
on
DVD Burner Round-up
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· Score: 1
Arg. Sorry about that last post. The first "sentence" was not a complete sentence.
Re:CDBurners not the end for high-capacity Zip dri
on
DVD Burner Round-up
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· Score: 1
"Why carry around a 100meg disc and have to have a drive installed on both ends (or have to carry the drive itself around) when you can simply stick this pen-sized piece of plastic into the back of a USB port (one of the reasons new models have additional USB ports up front), and boom!, instant 32-256 meg filesystems."
Because the 100 MB zip disks still costs a lost less than a 128 MB keychain drive and if your friend loses the zip disk it's not so much of a loss as the whole keychain drive.
Nevertheless, I still ditched the zip drive storage and have a 256 MB Jumpdrive keychain drive from Lexar. And FYI I have seen these thing up to 2 GB in size (at insane price points to boot.) I just wanted to make a point. [Sorry, I can't link to the lexarmedia.com page with the Jumpdrive I have because I am on a POS Win95 machine with only MSIE4.0 behind an NTLM proxy and lexar's page redirects you to a web standards site.]
And one other important bit of advice if you are looking for a USB thumb drive: They have those tricky USB naming conventions in full swing: USB 2.0 AKA USB 2.0 "full speed" is not as good as USB 2.0 "hi-speed." Most of the cheaper drives advertise themselves as USB 2.0 even though they only do 11 Mbit/s. The one I got actually reads and writes using true USB 2.0 speeds. The only reliable way I have found of distinguishing this is to look at the actual advertised read and write speeds. Do your homework!
"The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did."
Actually WinME and on supported the keychain drives. For win98/se you need a special downloaded driver. For win95 you simply can't use them because it does not support USB. (Well there was limited USB support in Win95 OSR2.5/C but not enough for these drives.)
Re:OOP for the procedural programmer
on
Head First Java
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· Score: 1
"I realize that you are comparing to Microsoft languages, but I am skeptical of your claim of 10. Reducing code size is not one of the top OO claims. Then again, there is no top claim that I can find. It used to be "reuse", but that fell out of style as a selling point."
The part about reducing code length was mainly in reference to polymorphic code. OOP helps and I you can't really do poly without it, but it's mainly the polymorphic references that do the most toward reducing code size in this case.
Re:OOP for the procedural programmer
on
Head First Java
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· Score: 2, Informative
"I too had some problems w/understanding object-oriented programming. I was strong w/procedural languages, and your standard top-down programming style, but I struggled grasping the concepts of OOP.
I found "The Object-Oriented Thought Process" [amazon.com] to be a great jumping-off point in helping me familiarize myself with how to think in-terms of OOP."
If you're going to do Java, OOP is essential IMO.
I'm working on a project right now at work (in MSAccess VBA, ugh) where Java would be a godsend. Using overloaded constructors for objects, polymorphic programming and OO techniques would probably reduce the quantity of code for this project by a factor of 10.
So if you're learning java, make a point of learning how to build those basic abstractions like nodes, linked lists, stacks, queues, binary trees, AVL trees, etc as object oriented structures. IMO it's way easier than doing it in C with structs and pointers to the moon and back. (Don't get me wrong, C has its strong suits. For example you get to create a celebration dance to perform when you eliminate all memory leaks.) In the end, however, if you build the basic abstractions it will help you both in creating efficient alogrithms in all languages and in learning how OOP really should work.
"Mozilla will never knock IE down.
Why?
Because I know HUNDREDS of people that refer to IE as "the internet".
If the IE shortcut gets deleted? "My internet is gone." "
That's why I just put an IE theme on mozilla and link the IE icon to mozilla. It's good for the user because they won't get drive-by activeX spyware and good for me because I don't have to clean their machines.
I really with firebird had an IE theme, it's even faster than mozilla. I still use mozilla at work with an IE theme because it raises fewer eyebrows.
"It is official; Netcraft confirms: Gecko Browser Engine is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Gecko Browser Engine community when IDC confirmed that Gecko Browser Engine market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers."
Would I be taking the bait of I labelled this as an obvious troll?
Re:Apples and Oranges.
on
All The Rave
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· Score: 1
"What happens with regards to bittorrent is exactly what would happen if bandwidth were simply higher... people would post stuff to websites, and people would download it. The only difference with bittorrent is it helps lighten the load."
I'm not saying that bittorrent is the same as kazaa, so apples and oranges is right. For example, the best anime release sites have a real community where everyone helps by seeding. It's a give and take relationship and that's what makes it work. They give you what you want at very high quality, and you help distribute it to the world. It reminds me of communism, actually, and that's why it works.
And also, the last line of my previous comment should have read, "I would never have have reshared something like that on Napster or Kazaa."
Re:What's the appeal
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All The Rave
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"I never understood the appeal of Napster. I tried to use it a few times, but the signal to noise ratio was so pathetic it wasn't worth the effort. Nice try, interesting concept, largely unusable in my experience."
This is why I love bittorrent. It's not one large searchable network but the signal to noise ratio is extremely good. I have never gotten anything that was mislabelled and the actual quality of what you download is really high. And if you go to one of the 'torrent sites' you can search a large number of back-archives of old torrents, effectively creating a lot of searchable mini-torrent networks. Different sites specialise in different thigns: Apps, Movies, Music, Anime, Pr0n, etc. And no, I will not overload my favourite sites by providing links here. Go an google for them.
The other great thing about bittorrent is that there is a lot more 'sharing ethics' in the community. People seed files using their own bandwidth just for the heck of it, they don't just download and disconnect. One 2 GB Anime chunk I finished downloading 10 hours ago is still seeding on my machine because I want to help other people get it. I would have have shared something like that on Napster or Kazaa.
"No self-respecting culture maven can deny their love affair with Napster. If you weren't spending your spare time in the years 99-00 downloading MP3s like a champ, it's likely you were still in diapers or dancing with wolves."
Or on dialup. 28.8 dialup. On a 5 machine home LAN.
It is painful living in a rural area, there's still no broadband.
Slashdot Mirror
Dang it, you are correct. This means that prices for Microsoft Linux will rise. I'll have to revise my bugets. Damn you SCO!!!
There. I am now an EFF member.
Because sysadmins actually understand security and intrusion because it is a high profile part of their job. There is a lot of emphasis on security in the design of systems in the IT community. Bank managers know about banking. Yes, security is part of their job but here in Canada, by and large, they just don't seem to get it, especially when computers are involved and the fraudster is well versed in social engineering.
This one bank manager from RBC Financial (formerly Royal Bank) of Canada actually asked me to send her details of my account in an E-MAIL and she did not provide a PGP key or anything. She thought that e-mail was quite secure and only the owners of the inboxes could access them.
Well I think it is proven that different people see different things when looking at these shapes. Here is a complation of what people have said so far. And yes, it did take friggin' long to compile this:
Please blame the lameness of the formatting of this list on slashcode: "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 20.0)."
Image 1:
-butterfly swimmer, Snooty Nose, mantle, Mask and dress, Mugatu from Zoolander, Person with hands behind back looking at feet
-Two birds on a tree with two dogs breathing fire -on them, Angry hippie, diablo howling into the air, A rabbit with horns lifting weights, Angry robot with guns
-Strongbad, Fighter Plane, Two birds singing, Missouri, tripod mortar
Image 2:
-fat person stretching, Christian Slater, Bear in a T-shirt, Board Meeting, Gravity challenged lady in lycra super hero outfit doing the splits
-Sumo wrestler on his ass, Jabba the hutt wearing a cape, fat sumo man in his fight stance, Squatting sumo, Cartman (I haven't even seen many SP episodes)
-Headboard or a bed, A gorilla in sweats doing a split, Fat woman stretching, linebacker, Kneeling fat man, recycle logo
Image 3:
-WWE Smackdown Enterance, Transformer, two hands, Zoro meets Willie Nelson, Someone eating coffee grounds from a filter with chopsticks
-Bob the Tomato from Veggie Tales, Someone drawing with both hands, Knitting a fez, one of the things from the movie Gremlins, An ambidexterous person writing with both hands
-Two bunny rabits eating guts, Bee face close up, Cockpit, Tropical island with two palms without tops, Obviously Goatse, buglike jetboat
Image 4:
-bushy woman on the shitter, Oak leaf, Hands washing black socks, LAN Party, Woman with grey arms force feeding candy to two children
-Batman's crotch, A large table saw designed to work in a gravity-less environment run by a tip driving magnetic motor, pelvic bone yo
-Hands full of glue, I have no idea. Nothing comes up., Comfy slippers , Feet of a reclining person
-Woman with panties down doing the Charleston, knees, Earmuffs, Evil Eyes
Image 5:
-Person Gasping, Pierre and Pierre, two faces, Two green berets talking, Two ice cream cones, Arab looking in a mirror, Two weeping men with large green hats
-Rastafarian argument, two men crying as they face eachother with big puffy green hats, two frogs wearing hats sticking their tongues out, Two green berets with black eyes, Two malnourished mullah's with camouflaged hats discussing the art of fellatio,
-Osama, Two boys playing soldiers, Trent Reznor, two eyes with big green brows
Image 6:
-grinning insect mouth, Edmonton (Canada), Camp entrance, Bloody Chest, Super hero adjusting bra
-Football shoulder pads, a person's hat with fake hair and pigtails attached, another pelvic bone?
-Hands holding a brassiere, Spider, Monkey doing telepathy
-A headless woman, Man hiding eyes, spider, Mittens, Person Gasping
Image 7:
-Turtle man, Flying Monkey, flying frog, Flyman, A frog in an apron, Frog with wings in apron, Mean green fly, Dragonfly frog, totally a flying frog chef duh!
-A winged frog wearing coveralls, Fairy frog wearing an apron, Jack Osbourne dressed as an angel, Frog Ferry, Green winged mole, Letter label, Yoda with bug wings
Image 8:
-The fat blue guys from yellow dubmarine shooting condoms out of their bellies
-Yugos
-Blue rabbits smoking.
-Globe
-Two Blue Meanies looking at a big butterfly
-Two sheep heads crapped on by a butterfly
-2 dinosaurs watching a large butterfly
-two men in suits watching a butterfly fly between them
-Tying a bowtie
-Dino men from Super Mario Brothers movie
-RC controllers
-Snapping fingers
-Two men shot in their heads thinking about bras.
-smoking
-Two Aliens
-Boys Spitting
Image 9:
-Batman fighting
-Bird in the hand
-demon
-Italian man twirling two pizzas.
-Batman peeing
Not my company apparently. I just received the e-mail notice that the patch will be applied toute suite.
1. A rabbit with horns lifing weights
2. Jabba the hutt wearing a cape
3. An ambidexterous person writing with both hands
4. A large table saw designed to work in a gravity-less environment
5. two frogs wearing hats sticking their tongues out
6. a person's hat with fake hair and pigtails attached
7. A winged frog wearing coveralls
8. 2 dinosaurs watching a large butterfly
9. a really strong guy holding giant cucumbers
10. it did not load
No, I tape those up on the door of my wardrobe for posterity ;-)
I'm not american or living in the USA either. It sounds to me like the system equivalent to the SSN in your country is more intelligently administered than the one in the US (which is not saying much.) Since this is a US-centric site, I was using the US example which is also probably the worst case scenario as well.
In my country, the social insurance number is also used (by law) only for purposes related to paying government taxes.
But in the USA, a lot of people think the SSN is a unique identifier (but supposedly it's not) and it's used all over the place in databases. For example a bunch of SSNs were compromised some months back when cell phone user databases were compromised. Supposedly it's not required in the USA to give your SSN for stuff like that but they expect everyone to give it so there might not be an alternate way to sign up for services.
"No, then they will ask me my pre-arranged security question, to which the fraudster will not know the answer. (unless he's a bank insider, in which case I'm bjorked anyway)."
Sounds like the bankers have some sense in your country. Good for them.
"Wow, hell of an insecure country you've got there..."
If you look at my original post, you will see that I said I am glad I do not live in the United States ;-)
I never said that I liked the way the USA handles SSN or that it was a good system. But I am thankful that I am not living in that country.
"I don't care what my credit record says about me. I buy everything with the cash I have earned. Fuck credit and fuck you for telling me its somehow important. What do you know."
Some employers use credit checks as part of a background check whether it's legal or not. It's not like they tell you. Maybe you might get turned down when you apply for your next job. There goes your cash supply.
And what about the new Big Brother anti-terrorist systems that are being proposed? Some of them use credit rating information to determine how likely you are to try to commit terrorist actions. Even if you deal only in cash, you still have to protect your own credit report because the System still assumes that you use credit cards like a good little consumer.
And if someone opens up a line of credit in your name and you never look at your own credit report and notice it, the first wind you will get of the situation is a nasty call from the collection agency's goons or your bank.
"Nobody seems to know anything about anything, they just follow the herd like good little sheeple. I'm only hoping all the lemmings someday get led to the sea so the rest of us can get on with our lives."
I never said that any of the SSN or credit systems were 'good things.' But they exist and it's what everyone uses so it makes sense to know how they work even if it's only to fight them. I still know all about troubleshooting Windows computers and how they work even though my own computer runs OS X. It comes in handy when securing jobs that give me a cash flow or dealing with "sheeple."
"Oh, no. You're Brazil-like system attached fraudly claims to my number."
Please learn how to write in English and try to avoid the infantile obscenities that only make you look like a whiney brat. I don't even know what you're attempting to say here and I don't care to try to reverse engineer what you were thinking. Have a nice day.
Having worked at a bank and received anti-fraud and anti-identity-theft training, I know that there is a lot of evil stuff that could be done with that information.
For example that government tax document that wasn't shredded probably has your Social Security Number, your name and your address. The SSN is one of the most prized possessions among fraudsters. Just that information alone is enough to do evil things like apply for new credit cards in your name that you don't know about. Or open lines of credit or bank accounts, cell phone accounts, etc. in your name. Of course if you haven't paid for a credit check document lately you won't see all of these accounts in your name.
That bank statement with recent bank activity can also be used to impersonate you. You could do telephone banking, tell them you forgot your "secret word" and then they will ask you about recent transactions, what other accounts you have with them, etc. and then assume that the fraudster is the genuine article. And they have access to all of your bank funds via telephone banking. They could start requesting replacement credit cards and bank cards with new PIN numbers.
At this point, you are thoroughly hosed for life and even if you do manage to clean it up, it will be hell opening a bank account or credit card because all of the fraud warnings on your name. You'll have a lot of trouble getting leasing on a car or taking advantage of one of those "don't pay until 2005" deals at the furniture store.
The moral of the story: SHRED YOUR DOCUMENTS. And for goodness sakes, use your other hand to cover that PIN entry keypad whenever you're using your bank card.
Exactly. The output from the home shredder at my place is used as fire kindling for our fireplace. It's really an excellent substitute for little chips of wood.
Of course not everyone has a home fireplace ;-)
True, but don't undestimate the clogging power of glossy documents. One time a few months ago I received some snail mail spam from MSFT ... something about them wanting me to sign up for a .NET course for business techies. It was on this really high grade glossy paper that was very colourful and attractive.
Thanks to Microsoft, I now know that one piece of high grade glossy paper is equal to about six pieces of regular 20 lb white copier paper when passing it through a shredder. So if you get such mail from MSFT and have a shredder that does at most 20 pages at once, please shred only 3 glossy pages at a time.
This has been a public service annoucement.
Do Apple's DRM (yes, it is DRM) and Ogg Vorbis's specifications play nicely together? I do not know...
Safari was just an excuse. MSFT was planning on discontinuing IE for the mac for a long time now and Apple knew it. MSFT will use a backwards version of the tactic they used to oust netscape from the browser market. They will use their browser monopoly and IE features integrated into Longhorn OS to marginalise the OS market. You'll need Longhorn to access web services (banking, bill payment, etc.) that Microsoft plans to make "essential" and exclusive to windows users. That way they attack Apple and any other OS rivals simultaneously. Damn those MSFT busienss strategists are smart...
Why? Because it makes sense.
Oh, I thought COD was part of your address or something...
Of course they will get your credit card number in those raids too and your bank will have your billing address...
In cases like this, I would expect the sites that sell this stuff to periodically wipe their databases so that there is nothing to get if they experience a DMCA raid.
Arg. Sorry about that last post. The first "sentence" was not a complete sentence.
Because the 100 MB zip disks still costs a lost less than a 128 MB keychain drive and if your friend loses the zip disk it's not so much of a loss as the whole keychain drive.
Nevertheless, I still ditched the zip drive storage and have a 256 MB Jumpdrive keychain drive from Lexar. And FYI I have seen these thing up to 2 GB in size (at insane price points to boot.) I just wanted to make a point. [Sorry, I can't link to the lexarmedia.com page with the Jumpdrive I have because I am on a POS Win95 machine with only MSIE4.0 behind an NTLM proxy and lexar's page redirects you to a web standards site.]
And one other important bit of advice if you are looking for a USB thumb drive: They have those tricky USB naming conventions in full swing: USB 2.0 AKA USB 2.0 "full speed" is not as good as USB 2.0 "hi-speed." Most of the cheaper drives advertise themselves as USB 2.0 even though they only do 11 Mbit/s. The one I got actually reads and writes using true USB 2.0 speeds. The only reliable way I have found of distinguishing this is to look at the actual advertised read and write speeds. Do your homework!
"The only significant delay was Windows 98 first edition and Win95, neither of which supported filesystems on USB devices. 98SE and beyond did."
Actually WinME and on supported the keychain drives. For win98/se you need a special downloaded driver. For win95 you simply can't use them because it does not support USB. (Well there was limited USB support in Win95 OSR2.5/C but not enough for these drives.)
The part about reducing code length was mainly in reference to polymorphic code. OOP helps and I you can't really do poly without it, but it's mainly the polymorphic references that do the most toward reducing code size in this case.
If you're going to do Java, OOP is essential IMO.
I'm working on a project right now at work (in MSAccess VBA, ugh) where Java would be a godsend. Using overloaded constructors for objects, polymorphic programming and OO techniques would probably reduce the quantity of code for this project by a factor of 10.
So if you're learning java, make a point of learning how to build those basic abstractions like nodes, linked lists, stacks, queues, binary trees, AVL trees, etc as object oriented structures. IMO it's way easier than doing it in C with structs and pointers to the moon and back. (Don't get me wrong, C has its strong suits. For example you get to create a celebration dance to perform when you eliminate all memory leaks.) In the end, however, if you build the basic abstractions it will help you both in creating efficient alogrithms in all languages and in learning how OOP really should work.
That's why I just put an IE theme on mozilla and link the IE icon to mozilla. It's good for the user because they won't get drive-by activeX spyware and good for me because I don't have to clean their machines.
I really with firebird had an IE theme, it's even faster than mozilla. I still use mozilla at work with an IE theme because it raises fewer eyebrows.
Would I be taking the bait of I labelled this as an obvious troll?
I'm not saying that bittorrent is the same as kazaa, so apples and oranges is right. For example, the best anime release sites have a real community where everyone helps by seeding. It's a give and take relationship and that's what makes it work. They give you what you want at very high quality, and you help distribute it to the world. It reminds me of communism, actually, and that's why it works.
And also, the last line of my previous comment should have read, "I would never have have reshared something like that on Napster or Kazaa."
This is why I love bittorrent. It's not one large searchable network but the signal to noise ratio is extremely good. I have never gotten anything that was mislabelled and the actual quality of what you download is really high. And if you go to one of the 'torrent sites' you can search a large number of back-archives of old torrents, effectively creating a lot of searchable mini-torrent networks. Different sites specialise in different thigns: Apps, Movies, Music, Anime, Pr0n, etc. And no, I will not overload my favourite sites by providing links here. Go an google for them.
The other great thing about bittorrent is that there is a lot more 'sharing ethics' in the community. People seed files using their own bandwidth just for the heck of it, they don't just download and disconnect. One 2 GB Anime chunk I finished downloading 10 hours ago is still seeding on my machine because I want to help other people get it. I would have have shared something like that on Napster or Kazaa.
Or on dialup. 28.8 dialup. On a 5 machine home LAN.
It is painful living in a rural area, there's still no broadband.