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User: Severus+Snape

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  1. Re:ThreeUK's "All You Can Eat" plan is the dog's b on Ten Lies T-Mobile Told Me About My Data Plan · · Score: 1

    Three haven't always been that good - a good few years ago (2009?), I was on an 'unlimited' data package with them, few months in to the contract I received a text citing changes they had made, my unlimited data was now limited to 500MB under "fair usage". I could not fucking believe it. It was in one of my parents name at the time, they kicked up a fuss for me but didn't get very far.

    I hope the rug isn't swiped from underneath you too.

  2. Re:Close, but the answer is encryption. on Ask Slashdot: What Will It Take To End Mass Surveillance? · · Score: 1

    Correct, encryption is essential. We need to get better at it too as shown by recent leaks. The unfortunate truth is though the bad guys have got way too good at signals intelligence. If they aren't screwing you by asking companies very nicely for your data, they are taking it through secret court orders, and if that fails, hell there is always the cable taps, oh, and the majority of our encryption is broken. Using a VPN/Tor/whatever? Yeap, we are interested in breaking that too.

    It's going to be a slow maybe impossible struggle to move towards linking our communities in a real mesh networks. Maybe the Internet of Things will help, I'm skeptical at best though. I can't imagine any happy ending if we continue with the same infrastructure we are using now.

  3. Re:Secretive courts? on UK's Most Secretive Court Rules GCHQ Mass Internet Surveillance Was Unlawful · · Score: 1

    How in hell the voters from Britain as well as from America allow such things to happen in the first place??

    Yeah, because us plebs have a choice in the matter.

  4. Re:VPN. on Fixing Verizon's Supercookie · · Score: 1

    VPN's have always seemed to be the sensible way of keeping your data secured, but after the recent Snowden leaks showing their progress sabotaging them, total privacy now seems to be a myth.

  5. Re:Adblock, FTW on Adobe's Latest Zero-Day Exploit Repurposed, Targeting Adult Websites · · Score: 1

    Considering ad revenue is the biggest revenue stream for the internet. I'd say quite a lot of people.

  6. Bureaucrats defining "public interest" on Calls For European ISPs To Filter Content Could Be Illegal · · Score: 2

    Here is a crazy idea, don't block any content and let the public decide as individuals what content they want to look at, and what content they don't. That would actually be the definition of the phrase itself so lets not get our hopes up.

  7. Slashdot covered this on a previous release? on Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins · · Score: 1

    Didn't we all talk about this ages ago and the firm conclusion was MtGox used the bug the transaction malleability bug to their full advantage and ran off with everyones money?

  8. Game of Thrones, on Designing the Best Board Game · · Score: 1

    is pretty great. My group of friends have got deeply in to it recently, most of them being people who would never play board games and hadn't watched the show (or read the books). It's clear they took a lot of inspiration from Risk but has more than enough new elements to stop any sort of comparisons.

    The design is well thought out, each house needs a completely different strategy and tactics which keeps it from going stale. Forming alliances (which to win you are going to have to betray at some point) always makes things interesting.

  9. Re:Ten years? A lifetime in tech! on Ask Slashdot: What Tech Companies Won't Be Around In 10 Years? · · Score: 1

    I remember reading about that HP initiative on /. a year or two ago, and the consensus was "vapor," but /. is very, very cynical. Regardless, I haven't heard a thing about it since. Is there any evidence it's not vapor?

    A little while back HP did a big reveal on everything they've been working on, basically with the intention of getting other stakeholders involved. The impression I got was there is one or two roadblocks left, but couldn't be described as vapor. Worst case scenario is they'll cover their loses selling the tech on.

  10. Pretty cool vulnerability but.. on Thunderbolt Rootkit Vector · · Score: 3, Informative

    If I have physical access to your machine, I'm going to get you one way or another.

  11. Bitcoin =! anonymous. on Bitcoin Exec To Spend Two Years Behind Bars For Silk Road Transactions · · Score: 2

    Slashdot is the last place I would expect to see this myth.

  12. Re:So basically on Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power · · Score: 1

    Sorry for the late reply, I hope you still read this!

    I don't think the issue is the size of governence, more it must be decentralised. Power needs to be close to the people whom it effects with their needs and wants important to the decision making, only then is it effective.

    We call our western societies democractic, but are they really? It is what differentiates us from those scary crazy dictatoriships, but we are not much different. I find it hard to imagine the will of the people being pro to everything Snowden has leaked. It has infact shown that the domestic population are the enemy of the state, no matter what way the media and politicians try to spin it. At the heart of anarchism and social libertarian ideals is direct democracy, where indiviudals vote on policies directly instead of electing people to do that for us. Our representational democracy system may sound great on paper but as we see in practice it doesn't really work. I don't see benevolent dicatoriship as ideal at all, that is centralisation of power which is everything libertarian ideals are against.

  13. Re:So basically on Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power · · Score: 1

    ...and become anarchists?

    Moded parent funny, decided to reply now though..

    It's worth mentioning that the word libertarian means something completely different in America as to the rest of the world. I'm European, I don't like using the word anarchist in describing my political opinions, because of the connotations of the word. I can happily use Libertarian-(Socialist) though. Libertarianism under capitalism is getting rid of one of the bad guys, and letting the other bad guy multiply ten times in size. Both are incompatible with each other.

  14. Damn pesky Russians! on State Department Joins NOAA, USPS In Club of Hacked Federal Agencies · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hot on the heels of recent cyber attacks on NOAA, the USPS, and the White House, the New York Times Reports that the U.S. State Department has also suffered an online security breach, though it's not clear who to blame.

    For a moment there I thought TFA was not going to blindly name drop China or Russia. Don't worry folks, they did not forget!

  15. Re:80$ components =/= 1500$ price tag on For Some Would-Be Google Glass Buyers and Devs, Delays May Mean Giving Up · · Score: 2

    Wearables just aren't ready yet for mainstream consumers. Tablets existed way before the iPad and worked relatively well, but had many shortcomings that prevented them from becoming synonyms with day to day life (battery life, desktop interface, too heavy and bulky, wifi infrastructure, to name a few) the iPad came at the right time and became a massive success. Google are being pretty smart I think, they could be selling it for 200$, lots of people would flock to buy it, but that would be stupid. They know it isn't ready, so keeping it within the hands of few, learning what isn't quite right with it and improving it version by version is the right play.

  16. Business model of the 90's != today. on Linux Foundation Comments On Microsoft's Increasing Love of Linux · · Score: 2

    To put it bluntly, Microsoft's past is full of a lot of sleazy shit with their boot attempting to stamp all over the Linux ecosystem many times. To this day I still can't believe they threw over one hundred million dollars (at least, we only have leaked but confirmed information to go on) to SCO (a competitor!) just to hurt Linux. Balmer and Gates built a massive business on the back of their shenanigans, and kudos to them, the game is capitalism at the end of the day.

    Is it the same company today? I'm not so sure. I'm sure some of the internal company culture is still there but they have a different vision and direction. Today they announced open sourcing the whole entire .net stack with OS X and Linux support. Any suggestion of that a few years ago and the internet would ridicule you in to crying in a corner.

    We should still be wary, that's for sure. They are not the same evil beast they once were though.

  17. Lessons previous learned: on More Tor .Onion Sites May Get Digital Certificates Soon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Lavabit.

    You would need to be a fucking moron to not believe there is not a warrant drafted for the FISC court already. Trust in any US web stakeholders for any users privacy is fallacy. Never mind when getting up to illegal shenanigans found on .onion like Silk Road.

  18. Balmer is a smart man. on Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a "Real Business" · · Score: 2

    He knows fine well Amazon could start generating profits whenever they want. It is a crazy business model they have but it continues to work well for them. Every year they have more fingers in a plethora of interconnected pies.

  19. So.. on Silk Road Lawyers Poke Holes In FBI's Story · · Score: 3, Insightful

    FBI: We got the evidence through illict methods, so here is a nice little story we made up that is designed to be difficult to argue against.

  20. What is this guy smoking.. on Scotland's Independence Vote Could Shake Up Industry · · Score: 1

    The Yes and Better Together campaigns have sensationalised both sides of the argument, it has been very unfortunate that unbiased and impartial facts and information have been so out of reach. While I have no doubt the owner of the startup TFA is talking to has a much greater depth of knowledge in his field than a mere CompSci student like myself and if he feels a no vote is best for his company, then who am I to argue but some of his points are borderline repeat drivile of 'the world is going to fall down' propoganda that have been relented on Scotland increasingly as the referendum has got closer. It worked well for Canada, so it was to be expected for the No side at least. That said..

    For tech start-ups, funding will be tougher to find and more expensive, there will be no local banks, access to EU markets and the freedom of movement will be curtailed.

    His first argument about funding, who the hell even knows, he might be right, he might be wrong, it could be exactly the same. That really all depends on the policies of a government that would get voted in next year after a yes vote. Nobody has any idea what party that would be or what policies that party might have. Banks are going absolutely nowhere, two banks (RBS and Lloyds, who are both overwelmingly owned by the UK government is must be mentioned) have said they would move their registered address to London, and quite frankly this is a good thing. Their reckless gambling in part of the economic crash almost brought the UK economy in to chaos. We, the UK taxpayer woke up that day to be informed we bailed them out to the tune for trillions of pounds, and we better just deal with it. Of course it is in their best interests to be registered with a government who will tolerate such recklessness. The biggest threat to Scotland's membership of the EU is the UK wide referendum proposed in 2017. The current Scottish government has spent the last parliment drafting European Law in to Scots Law to make the process as easy as possible. Many of the arguments used to say rentry to the EU after a yes vote would take so long are based around examples like Turkey who are just a mile off meeting the many requirements set for EU entry.

    Some countries may veto Scotland's entry into the EU because "they do not want their own secessionist regions to go for independence,"

    Some countries with their own scessionist regions wanting independence have already stated that if Scotland votes for independence it will have no problem agreeing to her entry to the EU because the referendum is taken place in full agreement with the UK government. (He is referring to Catalonia in Spain)

  21. Re:The UK would just have them moved... on Would Scottish Independence Mean the End of UK's Nuclear Arsenal? · · Score: 1

    Way to go for the most uninformed comment in this thread. They are stored under a mountain, nukes aren't exactly front lawn material. The cost of building a new complex to store them would be high and would take a considerable amount of time.

  22. Here is what would happen on Would Scottish Independence Mean the End of UK's Nuclear Arsenal? · · Score: 1

    Scotland wants a formal currency union.
    Rest of the UK needs their nukes and has no place to put them.

    A deal would be done where Scotland keeps the nukes on her shores until a suitable replacement site can be built, this would take a least 10 years, it's been suggested privately already by some Tory minister (I'm sure it was The Guardian that ran the story at the time). That said, this is all moot since the vote isn't going to pass unfortunetly.

  23. Re:I'd love some free Google classes on Google Is Offering Free Coding Lessons To Women and Minorities · · Score: 1

    But I'm a white male. I have nothing Google wants. :(

    Modded parent funny, assuming sarcasm now I'm not so sure..

  24. No, just no. The quality of OSS is too bad. Well, let's not say bad per se, but it varies a lot. What you win in software licensing costs, you lose in fighting all the bugs. Too many of your support calls will be wasting your time with silly glitches.

    Unity (back in 2011 remember) is a very twisted example to go for, a piece of very immature software. Part of Ubuntu 11.10 which was an non LTS release. If any IT manager deploys that in the first place you've got much bigger problems than painful support calls.

  25. Made it to Slashdot. on Band Releases Album As Linux Kernel Module · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd say publicity mission successfully.