It's just a list of which cameras produced the most pictures uploaded to flickr. The article itself points out that it's likely skewed because enthusiasts that spring for expensive cameras are also more likely to spring for premium flickr accounts where they can upload an unlimited number of photos.
So what does this list tell us? The people who spend a lot of money on their 'prosumer' cameras take a lot of pictures. Well, they would have to, otherwise they just wasted that money on their prosumer camera. And they're also more likely to spring for a premium flickr account. Well, they would have to, what with all the crappy pictures they have to take to legitimize buying an expensive camera. Even looking at the individual users pictures tells you nothing about the quality of their camera. They might just be really good photographers, or they just throw out 9 out of 10 shots because the camera sucks.
These statistics are pretty much useless to anyone. They're only useful to flickr itself; they can now dream up new ways of advertising, like show ads for camera accesories based on EXIF info.
Now, if they had a list of camera models by number of users, that would be more interesting (probably more accurate portrayal of marketshare than the manufacturers themselves give off). Or of models that are used to post the fewest pictures before the users photos suddenly change to another brand (in other words; quickly abandoned crappy models). Models that are used most for dark scenes with/without flash. That sort of thing.
I have a way to share a single profile across multiple sites. It's called; my website. Simple huh? Works with any webbrowser. If you're sick of filling in the same info for every site you come across, you can use the automagical form-filling thingy in your browser already. That is, if you even WANT to leave the same (presumably correct) information on sites like myspace. As far as I'm concerned, they'll get nothing more out of me than 90210 for a zipcode.
Please explain how a repository of personal contact information that you personally grant access permissions to on a user-by-user basis is a boon to marketing scumbags.
I have a website. It has a contact form. Wanna contact me, fill in the form, I gets e-mail and decide what to do with your request. Costs me less than $20/year, and it works with everybody's existing setup.
Single sign-on? Bah. Either I care about my "identity" on some site and create an account, or I'll just be an anonymous coward (or even create an account using spam.la).
Of course WoW seems different in that it results in deep friendships being forged.
If you think 'just games' never foster deep friendships.
However, other 'just games' seem to do pretty much the same. You could have poker buddies, bowling buddies, soccer buddies, chess buddies, darts buddies etc. etc. etc.
In none of those 'just games' (and sports), newbies are left entirely to their own devices. People help out newbies. And sometimes people get married.
You might as well say "Hey, this couple I know met AT WORK. How crazy is that, because as we all know, there is no social interactivity at all during any kind of paid activity! They must have a really different workplace from the typical workplace where people of generally mixed gender interact socially in a spirit of teamwork and/or competitiveness.." Oh. Wait.
How can this be if there aren't enough digits in a US phone number
Because it's a US phone number, and the article is about other, forrin countries as well.
(MS)ISDN E.164 numbers are 15 digits, including the country code. Even the North American Numbering Plan can be expanded vastly, from 11 digits (the one counts!) to 15; a factor 10,000.
Check out the price comparison on ISBN.NU. They even let you compare shipping rates. Unfortunately, bookpool (mentioned by a sibling poster) doesn't appear to be listed (for this book at least).
You say that as if they're a fundamentally different type of human. Maybe they are: maybe only sociopaths rise to that level. But maybe if you or I were on that board, in that situation, and had done all the things it takes to have gotten that far, it'd seem, at the time, like a completely reasonable action, or maybe it's just that the apparent risk/reward was worth it.
The problem with this is simply; they're not being paid to be ordinary. (Or to be sociopaths). I'm not 30, but I've learnt from my scant time on an association board, and from living in the corporate world, that in a position of leadership you just have to do better. You need to be prudent. There are always myriad opportunities for dirty tricks, and they always backfire -- unless you keep your eyes firmly on the fundamentals, you're nowhere. Even a company like Microsoft would be nowhere if their products really sucked; dirty tricks can only get you so far, and then usually only from a position of power to begin with.
As for Ms. Dunn, the Enron guys, etc.; most probably they are sociopaths. Sociopaths make great managers, going on their resumes (it's just that the people under them really suffer).
In my mind this is symptomatic of the corporate life in the higher echelons. Basically, these people at the top don't have te requisite life experience, or call it wisdom, or even common sense, to act like adults. Corporate life to these people is nothing more than a replay of high school. They're scheming, pulling pranks, cheating, and generally making stuff up as they go along.
It's not that there aren't established procedures and rules (and laws) of how to monitor employees (even board members). It's that this Ms. Dunn can't be bothered to look it up. Or even ask human resources. Making stuff up as you go along is what passes for "innovative", "bold", "leadership.
She's cut from the same jib as, say, those Enron guys. These are people who see life as a game, and yes, they're winning, if you keep score the way they do. Morally, as human beings, they're of course pieces of shit.
It's not surprising the rest of the board members stayed on board. They're used to treating people like children, and they've not fully grown up themselves, so this sort of irresponsible prank seems logical to them. They're the business equivalents of Bill O'Reilly - great ratings, but ultimately they're just spewing hot air, and their oversimplified black-and-white world is so disconnected from the real world, they wouldn't know it if it bit them in the ass.
But there you have it. Apparently the Chairwoman at HP is willing to go to great, and illegal lengths, to run the company. Will the shareholders say "hey, wait, maybe having someone at the top who's willing to commit felonies isn't such a great idea"? Only time will tell..
Honestly? McVeigh targetted a government facility. My definition of terrorist is someone who targets civilians.
The people in that government building were non-combatants though. Moreover, it's clear he couldn't have singlehandedly wiped out the US Government. What else then could his aim be, but to terrorize; to scare people into not wanting to work for the US Government. He just got caught earlier in his campaign than the unabomber did.
What I wonder is: why is it secured in the first place?
No really, why should a memory card containing results need to be secured with a coverplate? It's the contents of the card that matters. Can't the authenticity of the card's content be ascertained without needing it NOT to fall in wrong hands? Is there no encryption used, no message authentication? Is there no protocol whereby officials at least sign off on a print-out containing the count, and some checksums? Wouldn't there need to be no need to secure the card itself? I mean, the machine (and it's RAM), obviously, but the card should only contain a copy of the results - a copy that will be in tomorrows papers anyway.
The fact that someone (at Diebold even!) saw the need to put a coverplate in front of the memory card speaks volumes as to the system's design assumptions. That the machines are left with people overnight only makes things much, much worse.
And that website's "web 2.0" ajaxy slidey photo thingy makes me dizzy and kinda nauseuous..
A fundamental problem with these solutions, is that they're solutions looking for a problem. Yes, traditional radio communications for first responders don't interoperate well and aren't as 'advanced', but let's look at the solutions. They're proposing digital systems, transmitting in the 800 and 700Mhz range. In other words; microwave technology. Easily blocked by walls, not very long range.
If you wanted short range, but very advanced, digital communications, there are already solutions for that on the market. Cell-phones. 911 calls already take priority on cell networks, just tell the operators to reserve 10% bandwidth for emergency services, and you instantaneously have a huge network at your fingertips; well designed, more transmitters where there are more people, etc.
It still won't work properly in buildings. In Europe they're actually suggesting that the "next generation" system for first responders used here would mean forcing building owners to install repeaters on their sites (on their own dime, too). You just know that's going to be a success!
How to solve this? You really just need the best of both worlds. Make cell networks give you bandwidth and get some standard handsets with perhaps additional software for encryption/push-to-talk; and rely on a SECOND system (yes, I said it, a second system) for those hard to reach places where you need longer wave frequencies and more wattage to penetrate the walls. That'd be for tactical use, as a backup, etc. Good old, interoperable analogue.
Hey presto. Plenty of bandwidth, pretty good networks (which if need be, you can always spend additional tax payers' money on to upgrade in places where it's weak or to make it more disaster resistant*). Not needed; proprietory next-gen non-standard gear, extra frequencies, etc.
[*] if needed. In reality nowadays, cell networks are often up and running sooner after a disaster than other networks; just wheel in mobile base-stations with a generator and a microwave line-of-sight linkup (or even satellite) and you're golden.
Yes, you'd have to work out some issues, but overall this should be a better solution. Let's not forget that in Europe the railways have their own cell networks (GSM-R; 35 networks, all using nicely standardized off-the-shelve equipment).
Someone has to lose. In this case, it's the home owner and not the bona fide purchaser who took all the reasonable steps required of them under the law. To do otherwise would slow the economy, increase transaction costs and possibly kill the housing market as the ripple effect of the slowdown hit like a Tsunami.
I doubt it. Somehow the Canadian housing market managed to survive for a couple of hundred years before the law was changed.
The phrase "the joke went over their head" usually implies that the subject is too stupid to see the joke's ingenious twist. Simply regurgitating a line and giggling in a nerdish fashion whenever you hear a certain word (kind of reminds me of P.W.'s playhouse's secret word, actually) requires absolutely no intelligence whatever.
...but how would Slashdot investigate terrorism? Isn't some law enforcement agency going to have to gather data and sift through it to determine who is using the system to disguise terrorist activities (and I don't just mean bomb making or kidnapping conspiracies either, funding is a large part of the issue)? If terrorists are known to be using the FAFSA process to launder funds to aid terrorist activities domestically or abroad, doesn't it make sense to further investigate these records?
That's a big if. The kind of if that could easily be answered by relying on a simple process. It's called "getting a warrant". As it stands, of course, there is no indication whatever to suggest an evil scheme of siphoning off student loans to terrorists.
If there's proof of abuse, investigate it, write about it. If you're just fear-mongering and trying to become the next Woodward and Bernstein, then stop.
The onus is not on the public to proof government abuse of power, the onus is on the government to prove it is exercising the powers granted to it under the constitution, respecting the rights of the people.
Moreover, there is absolutely no requirement of proven abuse to look at a program like this and conclude that it's silly. Taxmoney can only be spent once over, and every dollar spent looking at these records is a dollar that can't be spent on, say, good old fashioned police work, infiltrating radical groups, or even, say, hurricane relief.
For that matter; roundabouts save lives, proven effective, and are much cheaper that panoptical government surveilance programs.
The problem is that the link between student loans and terrorism is pretty much ridiculous. What could those records conceivably contain that would help you identify a terrorist? (Never mind the question whether there actually are any terrorist groups active or dormant. For all the huff over terrorists, there hasn't been another attack - much unlike in countries where there actually are terrorist groups, like Northern Ireland's IRA or Spain's ETA).
I'll tell you the reason why they're sifting over these records. It's really quite simple.
If you just mention the word "terrorist", you get a budget, a project to work on, and possibly a promotion. The fact that you'll never catch a terrorist doesn't really matter, all that shows is how effective the US has gotten at preventing terrorism, a machinery you're a part of. Much like this rock I've got that keeps away tigers (never been bitten by a tiger yet!). And so you have eager young lads pooring over each and every database you can think of, and each and every federal agency complying with baseless, ineffective, but very politically correct (in the current political atmosphere) terrorism-inquiries. All of it is a collosal waste of resources, just like taking off your shoes to board a plane, or not being able to bring liquids.
It's the government equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" or "think of the children" - no one could object to fighting the terrorists. Your post is pretty much a proof of that.
How would we fight terrorists? The old-fashioned way! No need for PATRIOT acts, just good old honest police work, infiltration, some FISA court-approved wiretapping, and the odd tracking of weaponsdeals and shipments.
It's always tempting to speculate about "the one that got away", and to use it as a reason to spend even more money chasing ghosts. But there comes a point when you have to say "you know, if there are any unsavoury characters out there we haven't found yet, we're not likely to find them like this, perhaps we could spend our time and money more efficiently, like, on roundabouts or something".
Drunk driving kills ten thousand people a year. The 9/11 attacks killed 3000. We haven't suspended the bill of right for every potential drunk driver (actually, that's just about everybody!) so why should we do so for every potential terrorist (actually, that's just about everybody, too!).
I'm not quite sure what your comment means. As the heise.de article points out; the twins are of equal length - the file size would be the same. Finding hash twins whereby the chosen one is, oh, let's say 160 bits longer is a degree less sophisticated.
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP
Actually this is a very US phenomenon as far as I can tell. In the States there tends to be one newspaper per city - even for small cities, usually owned by a conglomerate and employing a tiny handful of journalists backed up by ad sales staff.
In the myriad of local, regional and national papers that appear in Europe, still most of the content is from newswires. Every European country tends to have its own newswire that covers both national stories and international ones. AFP (Agence France Press), one of the bigger national bureaus, competes with the likes of AP and Reuters.
It's not uncommon to find "RTR", "AFP", "DPA". "AP" etc. in the bylines of European papers - and, if lacking, telltale signs like a byline that says "(LONDON)", even though it reports on a story from India. Really, unless the byline specifies a reporter's name or employment by the paper, it's a syndicated story.
Rest asured that most of the paper is filled with syndicated content - the expensive homemade stuff gets top billing of course, but you wouldn't send out your journalists to report on 3-headed poodles born in Ohio - that's what the wires are for.
Television news of course is even more syndicated; a lot of feeds from the AP, CNN, BBC, Reuters, and ITN, amongst others.
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP. The news editor's job is to fill up the pages with both original content contributed by the newspaper's own writing staff, as well as to place the newswire stuff to fill the blanks. Newspaper editors also get to paraphrase newswire articles (much the same as doing a writeup for a blog) when the article itself is deemed to long and boring; but they can also edit down (or fluff up) AP pieces. The latter is not an option for blogs, since they don't have a license to distribute altered content - the newspaper have licenses from the newswires to cut up pieces.
So, no, these people would ordinarily be called 'editors' in journalism, though of the chimpy, intern-like status where they can't be trusted to actually edit pieces, just pick them out.
Storing account numbers for you bankaccounts (CDs, etc.) and insurance policies makes a lot of sense.
Given the chance, banks and insurers will gladly do everything they can to, well, forget to help you retrieve that information, especially if you're not sure where you got your CD/insurance policy..
If you could trust any program and any user to do the right thing, then you also wouldn't need file permissions. If that doesn't strike you as A Bad Idea, then there's nothing I really feel like doing to educate you.
Personal firewalls are snake oil, and considered harmful because it lulls the user into thinking they're secure when they're less secure than ever. 1) most users don't use exclusively harmless, peer reviewed, open source, trustworthy programs, and in that case your feat of logic goes up in a puff of smoke, and yes, software firewalls DO protect them. 2) I gave you an example of how I, myself, used non-GUI software firewalling to protect desktops from unruly software and users - that's an application of software firewalls that has nothing at all to do with nice splashy GUI graphics and "lulling the user into a false sense of security". You're argueing a straw man.
If they DIDN'T send a DMCA notice to the host. That pretty much tells you they KNOW they have no case.
(Apparently they don't want to sign a DMCA "under penalty of perjury" notification, even though they'd only be certifying that they represent a client and that the client claims something or other - that's a pretty low standard there. But if they won't even sign that..)
Problem: Personal software firewalls are nonfunctional snake oil. You need dedicated hardware to make a firewall, otherwise it's just feel-good, do-nothing masturbation. Especially when the underlying OS wasn't designed or properly secured for use as a security device.
Unlike hardware firewalls, software firewalls can monitor OUTGOING requests - AND they know which program is responsible. Hardware firewalls, lacking some sort of IDS detection - which will only stop known-bad worms and the like, won't prevent that game you just downloaded from uploading information to its masters. Software firewalls aren't about detecting attacks (after all, once detected, you'd expect them to be stopped) but about managing individual program's use of network resources.
Example? You start up winamp, it tries to call home, do we allow it? No. Would a hardware firewall allow it? Yes, since it's a humdrum connection to www.winamp.com:80 and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to go there. This just isn't one of them since I prefer to download updates manually.
Saying software firewalls are nonfunctional snake oil is like saying you don't need filesystem-level permissions, because you should write important files to read-only media like DVD which makes for a much better hardware barrier. It should be clear that that approach doesn't offer any granularity.
Software firewalls are VERY important and do much more than all but the most expensive and best managed hardware firewalls with stateful inspection and IDS will do for you. Relying solely on hardware firewalls is a huge step backwards - you now have to regard your workstation as one entity with one immutable set of permissions since you can't determine the user that is logged in and his/her permissions, let alone which software is running.
I once had the misfortune of being responsible for a computerlab where policy and an outdated OS (NT4) prevented me from denying users the privileges to execute unblessed executables (nowadays, with windows 2003 server, you could easily set up software restriction policies). Users could, and would, download irc programs and execute them for instance. But I did have a software firewall chugging away on all those workstations, preventing pretty much any application but internet explorer and a handful of other apps from getting any access to the network at all. Except if I logged in with my own user account. And it was a firewall with absolutely no graphical user interface of any kind, just a service running in the background with/etc-style text file configuration.
Do I also switch on the 'firewall' on my ADSL modem? Yes of course, if only to protect against massive scanning-attacks that target the OS's network stack itself. But it's just an additional layer.
Slashdot Mirror
It's just a list of which cameras produced the most pictures uploaded to flickr. The article itself points out that it's likely skewed because enthusiasts that spring for expensive cameras are also more likely to spring for premium flickr accounts where they can upload an unlimited number of photos.
So what does this list tell us?
The people who spend a lot of money on their 'prosumer' cameras take a lot of pictures. Well, they would have to, otherwise they just wasted that money on their prosumer camera. And they're also more likely to spring for a premium flickr account. Well, they would have to, what with all the crappy pictures they have to take to legitimize buying an expensive camera.
Even looking at the individual users pictures tells you nothing about the quality of their camera. They might just be really good photographers, or they just throw out 9 out of 10 shots because the camera sucks.
These statistics are pretty much useless to anyone. They're only useful to flickr itself; they can now dream up new ways of advertising, like show ads for camera accesories based on EXIF info.
Now, if they had a list of camera models by number of users, that would be more interesting (probably more accurate portrayal of marketshare than the manufacturers themselves give off). Or of models that are used to post the fewest pictures before the users photos suddenly change to another brand (in other words; quickly abandoned crappy models). Models that are used most for dark scenes with/without flash. That sort of thing.
I have a way to share a single profile across multiple sites.
It's called; my website.
Simple huh?
Works with any webbrowser.
If you're sick of filling in the same info for every site you come across, you can use the automagical form-filling thingy in your browser already. That is, if you even WANT to leave the same (presumably correct) information on sites like myspace. As far as I'm concerned, they'll get nothing more out of me than 90210 for a zipcode.
Please explain how a repository of personal contact information that you personally grant access permissions to on a user-by-user basis is a boon to marketing scumbags.
I have a website.
It has a contact form.
Wanna contact me, fill in the form, I gets e-mail and decide what to do with your request.
Costs me less than $20/year, and it works with everybody's existing setup.
Single sign-on? Bah. Either I care about my "identity" on some site and create an account, or I'll just be an anonymous coward (or even create an account using spam.la).
Solution looking for a problem?
Of course WoW seems different in that it results in deep friendships being forged.
If you think 'just games' never foster deep friendships.
However, other 'just games' seem to do pretty much the same. You could have poker buddies, bowling buddies, soccer buddies, chess buddies, darts buddies etc. etc. etc.
In none of those 'just games' (and sports), newbies are left entirely to their own devices. People help out newbies. And sometimes people get married.
You might as well say "Hey, this couple I know met AT WORK. How crazy is that, because as we all know, there is no social interactivity at all during any kind of paid activity! They must have a really different workplace from the typical workplace where people of generally mixed gender interact socially in a spirit of teamwork and/or competitiveness.." Oh. Wait.
How can this be if there aren't enough digits in a US phone number
Because it's a US phone number, and the article is about other, forrin countries as well.
(MS)ISDN E.164 numbers are 15 digits, including the country code. Even the North American Numbering Plan can be expanded vastly, from 11 digits (the one counts!) to 15; a factor 10,000.
Check out the price comparison on ISBN.NU. They even let you compare shipping rates. Unfortunately, bookpool (mentioned by a sibling poster) doesn't appear to be listed (for this book at least).
You say that as if they're a fundamentally different type of human. Maybe they are: maybe only sociopaths rise to that level. But maybe if you or I were on that board, in that situation, and had done all the things it takes to have gotten that far, it'd seem, at the time, like a completely reasonable action, or maybe it's just that the apparent risk/reward was worth it.
The problem with this is simply; they're not being paid to be ordinary. (Or to be sociopaths). I'm not 30, but I've learnt from my scant time on an association board, and from living in the corporate world, that in a position of leadership you just have to do better. You need to be prudent. There are always myriad opportunities for dirty tricks, and they always backfire -- unless you keep your eyes firmly on the fundamentals, you're nowhere. Even a company like Microsoft would be nowhere if their products really sucked; dirty tricks can only get you so far, and then usually only from a position of power to begin with.
As for Ms. Dunn, the Enron guys, etc.; most probably they are sociopaths. Sociopaths make great managers, going on their resumes (it's just that the people under them really suffer).
In my mind this is symptomatic of the corporate life in the higher echelons. Basically, these people at the top don't have te requisite life experience, or call it wisdom, or even common sense, to act like adults. Corporate life to these people is nothing more than a replay of high school. They're scheming, pulling pranks, cheating, and generally making stuff up as they go along.
It's not that there aren't established procedures and rules (and laws) of how to monitor employees (even board members). It's that this Ms. Dunn can't be bothered to look it up. Or even ask human resources. Making stuff up as you go along is what passes for "innovative", "bold", "leadership.
She's cut from the same jib as, say, those Enron guys. These are people who see life as a game, and yes, they're winning, if you keep score the way they do. Morally, as human beings, they're of course pieces of shit.
It's not surprising the rest of the board members stayed on board. They're used to treating people like children, and they've not fully grown up themselves, so this sort of irresponsible prank seems logical to them. They're the business equivalents of Bill O'Reilly - great ratings, but ultimately they're just spewing hot air, and their oversimplified black-and-white world is so disconnected from the real world, they wouldn't know it if it bit them in the ass.
But there you have it. Apparently the Chairwoman at HP is willing to go to great, and illegal lengths, to run the company. Will the shareholders say "hey, wait, maybe having someone at the top who's willing to commit felonies isn't such a great idea"? Only time will tell..
Honestly? McVeigh targetted a government facility. My definition of terrorist is someone who targets civilians.
The people in that government building were non-combatants though. Moreover, it's clear he couldn't have singlehandedly wiped out the US Government. What else then could his aim be, but to terrorize; to scare people into not wanting to work for the US Government. He just got caught earlier in his campaign than the unabomber did.
What I wonder is: why is it secured in the first place?
No really, why should a memory card containing results need to be secured with a coverplate? It's the contents of the card that matters. Can't the authenticity of the card's content be ascertained without needing it NOT to fall in wrong hands? Is there no encryption used, no message authentication? Is there no protocol whereby officials at least sign off on a print-out containing the count, and some checksums? Wouldn't there need to be no need to secure the card itself? I mean, the machine (and it's RAM), obviously, but the card should only contain a copy of the results - a copy that will be in tomorrows papers anyway.
The fact that someone (at Diebold even!) saw the need to put a coverplate in front of the memory card speaks volumes as to the system's design assumptions. That the machines are left with people overnight only makes things much, much worse.
And that website's "web 2.0" ajaxy slidey photo thingy makes me dizzy and kinda nauseuous..
A fundamental problem with these solutions, is that they're solutions looking for a problem.
Yes, traditional radio communications for first responders don't interoperate well and aren't as 'advanced', but let's look at the solutions. They're proposing digital systems, transmitting in the 800 and 700Mhz range. In other words; microwave technology. Easily blocked by walls, not very long range.
If you wanted short range, but very advanced, digital communications, there are already solutions for that on the market. Cell-phones. 911 calls already take priority on cell networks, just tell the operators to reserve 10% bandwidth for emergency services, and you instantaneously have a huge network at your fingertips; well designed, more transmitters where there are more people, etc.
It still won't work properly in buildings. In Europe they're actually suggesting that the "next generation" system for first responders used here would mean forcing building owners to install repeaters on their sites (on their own dime, too). You just know that's going to be a success!
How to solve this? You really just need the best of both worlds. Make cell networks give you bandwidth and get some standard handsets with perhaps additional software for encryption/push-to-talk; and rely on a SECOND system (yes, I said it, a second system) for those hard to reach places where you need longer wave frequencies and more wattage to penetrate the walls. That'd be for tactical use, as a backup, etc. Good old, interoperable analogue.
Hey presto. Plenty of bandwidth, pretty good networks (which if need be, you can always spend additional tax payers' money on to upgrade in places where it's weak or to make it more disaster resistant*). Not needed; proprietory next-gen non-standard gear, extra frequencies, etc.
[*] if needed. In reality nowadays, cell networks are often up and running sooner after a disaster than other networks; just wheel in mobile base-stations with a generator and a microwave line-of-sight linkup (or even satellite) and you're golden.
Yes, you'd have to work out some issues, but overall this should be a better solution. Let's not forget that in Europe the railways have their own cell networks (GSM-R; 35 networks, all using nicely standardized off-the-shelve equipment).
I heard they're not even including cables for the controllers on some of the new consoles!
Someone has to lose. In this case, it's the home owner and not the bona fide purchaser who took all the reasonable steps required of them under the law. To do otherwise would slow the economy, increase transaction costs and possibly kill the housing market as the ripple effect of the slowdown hit like a Tsunami.
I doubt it. Somehow the Canadian housing market managed to survive for a couple of hundred years before the law was changed.
WHOOSH as the joke goes right over your head.
The phrase "the joke went over their head" usually implies that the subject is too stupid to see the joke's ingenious twist. Simply regurgitating a line and giggling in a nerdish fashion whenever you hear a certain word (kind of reminds me of P.W.'s playhouse's secret word, actually) requires absolutely no intelligence whatever.
I thought the contemporary comparison was pretzels?
SOX only is enforced against public corporations where stock holders exist.
So if you aspire, as an accountant, to ever doing any work for any publicly listed corporation, you might want to get with the program...
Have you tried saying the magic word?
No, not "Please", but "Sarbanes-Oxley"
...but how would Slashdot investigate terrorism? Isn't some law enforcement agency going to have to gather data and sift through it to determine who is using the system to disguise terrorist activities (and I don't just mean bomb making or kidnapping conspiracies either, funding is a large part of the issue)? If terrorists are known to be using the FAFSA process to launder funds to aid terrorist activities domestically or abroad, doesn't it make sense to further investigate these records?
That's a big if. The kind of if that could easily be answered by relying on a simple process. It's called "getting a warrant". As it stands, of course, there is no indication whatever to suggest an evil scheme of siphoning off student loans to terrorists.
If there's proof of abuse, investigate it, write about it. If you're just fear-mongering and trying to become the next Woodward and Bernstein, then stop.
The onus is not on the public to proof government abuse of power, the onus is on the government to prove it is exercising the powers granted to it under the constitution, respecting the rights of the people.
Moreover, there is absolutely no requirement of proven abuse to look at a program like this and conclude that it's silly. Taxmoney can only be spent once over, and every dollar spent looking at these records is a dollar that can't be spent on, say, good old fashioned police work, infiltrating radical groups, or even, say, hurricane relief.
For that matter; roundabouts save lives, proven effective, and are much cheaper that panoptical government surveilance programs.
The problem is that the link between student loans and terrorism is pretty much ridiculous. What could those records conceivably contain that would help you identify a terrorist? (Never mind the question whether there actually are any terrorist groups active or dormant. For all the huff over terrorists, there hasn't been another attack - much unlike in countries where there actually are terrorist groups, like Northern Ireland's IRA or Spain's ETA).
I'll tell you the reason why they're sifting over these records. It's really quite simple.
If you just mention the word "terrorist", you get a budget, a project to work on, and possibly a promotion. The fact that you'll never catch a terrorist doesn't really matter, all that shows is how effective the US has gotten at preventing terrorism, a machinery you're a part of. Much like this rock I've got that keeps away tigers (never been bitten by a tiger yet!). And so you have eager young lads pooring over each and every database you can think of, and each and every federal agency complying with baseless, ineffective, but very politically correct (in the current political atmosphere) terrorism-inquiries. All of it is a collosal waste of resources, just like taking off your shoes to board a plane, or not being able to bring liquids.
It's the government equivalent of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" or "think of the children" - no one could object to fighting the terrorists. Your post is pretty much a proof of that.
How would we fight terrorists? The old-fashioned way! No need for PATRIOT acts, just good old honest police work, infiltration, some FISA court-approved wiretapping, and the odd tracking of weaponsdeals and shipments.
It's always tempting to speculate about "the one that got away", and to use it as a reason to spend even more money chasing ghosts. But there comes a point when you have to say "you know, if there are any unsavoury characters out there we haven't found yet, we're not likely to find them like this, perhaps we could spend our time and money more efficiently, like, on roundabouts or something".
Drunk driving kills ten thousand people a year. The 9/11 attacks killed 3000. We haven't suspended the bill of right for every potential drunk driver (actually, that's just about everybody!) so why should we do so for every potential terrorist (actually, that's just about everybody, too!).
I'm not quite sure what your comment means.
As the heise.de article points out; the twins are of equal length - the file size would be the same.
Finding hash twins whereby the chosen one is, oh, let's say 160 bits longer is a degree less sophisticated.
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP
Actually this is a very US phenomenon as far as I can tell. In the States there tends to be one newspaper per city - even for small cities, usually owned by a conglomerate and employing a tiny handful of journalists backed up by ad sales staff.
In the myriad of local, regional and national papers that appear in Europe, still most of the content is from newswires. Every European country tends to have its own newswire that covers both national stories and international ones. AFP (Agence France Press), one of the bigger national bureaus, competes with the likes of AP and Reuters.
It's not uncommon to find "RTR", "AFP", "DPA". "AP" etc. in the bylines of European papers - and, if lacking, telltale signs like a byline that says "(LONDON)", even though it reports on a story from India. Really, unless the byline specifies a reporter's name or employment by the paper, it's a syndicated story.
Rest asured that most of the paper is filled with syndicated content - the expensive homemade stuff gets top billing of course, but you wouldn't send out your journalists to report on 3-headed poodles born in Ohio - that's what the wires are for.
Television news of course is even more syndicated; a lot of feeds from the AP, CNN, BBC, Reuters, and ITN, amongst others.
Is this the start of a new type of journalism?
No. It's much the same as it ever was since the newswires popped up. Your average daily newspaper is composed of hundreds of stories straight of the AP. The news editor's job is to fill up the pages with both original content contributed by the newspaper's own writing staff, as well as to place the newswire stuff to fill the blanks. Newspaper editors also get to paraphrase newswire articles (much the same as doing a writeup for a blog) when the article itself is deemed to long and boring; but they can also edit down (or fluff up) AP pieces. The latter is not an option for blogs, since they don't have a license to distribute altered content - the newspaper have licenses from the newswires to cut up pieces.
So, no, these people would ordinarily be called 'editors' in journalism, though of the chimpy, intern-like status where they can't be trusted to actually edit pieces, just pick them out.
Storing account numbers for you bankaccounts (CDs, etc.) and insurance policies makes a lot of sense.
Given the chance, banks and insurers will gladly do everything they can to, well, forget to help you retrieve that information, especially if you're not sure where you got your CD/insurance policy..
If you could trust any program and any user to do the right thing, then you also wouldn't need file permissions.
If that doesn't strike you as A Bad Idea, then there's nothing I really feel like doing to educate you.
Personal firewalls are snake oil, and considered harmful because it lulls the user into thinking they're secure when they're less secure than ever.
1) most users don't use exclusively harmless, peer reviewed, open source, trustworthy programs, and in that case your feat of logic goes up in a puff of smoke, and yes, software firewalls DO protect them.
2) I gave you an example of how I, myself, used non-GUI software firewalling to protect desktops from unruly software and users - that's an application of software firewalls that has nothing at all to do with nice splashy GUI graphics and "lulling the user into a false sense of security". You're argueing a straw man.
Enough time wasted.
If they DIDN'T send a DMCA notice to the host. That pretty much tells you they KNOW they have no case.
(Apparently they don't want to sign a DMCA "under penalty of perjury" notification, even though they'd only be certifying that they represent a client and that the client claims something or other - that's a pretty low standard there. But if they won't even sign that..)
Problem: Personal software firewalls are nonfunctional snake oil. You need dedicated hardware to make a firewall, otherwise it's just feel-good, do-nothing masturbation. Especially when the underlying OS wasn't designed or properly secured for use as a security device.
/etc-style text file configuration.
Unlike hardware firewalls, software firewalls can monitor OUTGOING requests - AND they know which program is responsible. Hardware firewalls, lacking some sort of IDS detection - which will only stop known-bad worms and the like, won't prevent that game you just downloaded from uploading information to its masters. Software firewalls aren't about detecting attacks (after all, once detected, you'd expect them to be stopped) but about managing individual program's use of network resources.
Example? You start up winamp, it tries to call home, do we allow it? No. Would a hardware firewall allow it? Yes, since it's a humdrum connection to www.winamp.com:80 and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to go there. This just isn't one of them since I prefer to download updates manually.
Saying software firewalls are nonfunctional snake oil is like saying you don't need filesystem-level permissions, because you should write important files to read-only media like DVD which makes for a much better hardware barrier. It should be clear that that approach doesn't offer any granularity.
Software firewalls are VERY important and do much more than all but the most expensive and best managed hardware firewalls with stateful inspection and IDS will do for you. Relying solely on hardware firewalls is a huge step backwards - you now have to regard your workstation as one entity with one immutable set of permissions since you can't determine the user that is logged in and his/her permissions, let alone which software is running.
I once had the misfortune of being responsible for a computerlab where policy and an outdated OS (NT4) prevented me from denying users the privileges to execute unblessed executables (nowadays, with windows 2003 server, you could easily set up software restriction policies). Users could, and would, download irc programs and execute them for instance. But I did have a software firewall chugging away on all those workstations, preventing pretty much any application but internet explorer and a handful of other apps from getting any access to the network at all. Except if I logged in with my own user account. And it was a firewall with absolutely no graphical user interface of any kind, just a service running in the background with
Do I also switch on the 'firewall' on my ADSL modem? Yes of course, if only to protect against massive scanning-attacks that target the OS's network stack itself. But it's just an additional layer.