How many customers asked for keys to be deleted? My guess is ZERO. And then we have the one port USB-C debacle of this year's MacBook. Soldered memory? No thanks.
I am the customer, and the customer is always right. If you don't want to offer me the products I want, I'll find someone who does.
Apple is going back to the bad-old-days, repeating the mistakes that got Steve Jobs fired.
corrupt regime shielding Hillary from indictment, nobody would care about the petty stuff. But instead, we have a candidate who should be in federal custody. The ethical challenge is not the incidental tidbits, it's how the media overlooked federal crimes and allowed her to get this far.
It important to remember that Edward Snowden was a contractor. Why did he work for NSA as a contractor instead of a regular employee? Because he had no degree. Such people are generally shunned by HR managers. But if they have the right skills, hiring managers will often use contractor status to circumvent their own HR dept.
Thanks to a number of lawsuits, most employers have mandatory time limits for contractors, typically 1-3 years. Although many employers promote their best contractors to regular employment, HR often balks at waiving a degree requirement, even for people who are doing excellent work without one.
All contractors know (or should know) how much time they have on the clock. Once they understand the time limit, every contractor needs an exit strategy in case the employer declines to offer full-time employment when the time limit expires.
Whatever Snowden did, he did it with the understanding that his time at NSA was limited, and crossing over to full-time employment was going to be a challenge. In other words, he had nothing to lose.
If employers didn't have to use contract employment to circumvent their self-imposed budget and HR obstacles, you wouldn't see so many contractors with incentives to take secrets put the door.
I'm wouldn't be surprised to see this scenario repeated many times at the NSA.
Someone's AI platform is smart enough to know that both candidates are ACTING. I would expect the average TV news anchor to outperform either of them, just by reading the teleprompter with a straight face.
For years, friends and relatives asked me to help with their Windows problems. After it became unbearable to fix my computers and fix theirs too, I switched to OS X. I told everyone that I no longer had a Windows machine and therefore could not help them. I advised everyone to switch when they could no longer tolerate their PC's behavior. Some people switched, some didn't. Those who switched never needed my help again. Those who didn't were on their own. Ultimately, my pro-bono support incidents dropped to ZERO.
Microsoft has made progress in recent years. And Apple has dropped the ball a few times, especially when they punish people who don't upgrade their computers and phones fast enough, or migrate their data to icloud. Even so, if you consider the cost of support labor and the lost productivity while waiting for help, Macs should have replaced PC's in corporate life years ago.
Google doesn't actually want your phone number for security. Google wants your phone number so that they can link the account in their database to other information that contains your phone number.
Correct. It's not Google that wants your phone number linked to your email account -- it's the NSA. Email accounts may be disposable and free, but every phone is costing somebody money. Unless you buy a burner phone and service cards for cash, there is a financial trail behind every phone that leads back to a person. Once the NSA knows the person's phone number, geolocating the phone (and therefore the email account owner) is child's play for the inventors of PRISM.
Even if you buy a burner phone and service for cash, and even if you turn off the phone after setting up your Gmail account, tracking down the account holder is as simple as forcing Google to "screw up" someone's password, forcing them to use the telephone-based password recovery protocol.
Once you understand the loss of privacy that comes from linking telephones to user accounts, it's much easier to understand how the real goal has nothing to do with making your account "secure". The real target is your privacy.
I have written 100% truthful, positive recommendations for some really good people. And some of those people have written 100% truthful, positive recommendations for me. But in the competitive marketplace, the value of this information is lost as truthful stories are diluted into an ocean of fiction.
The only thing LinkedIn is good for is entertainment. It's fun to visit the profile of known underachievers, just to see who is writing "quid pro quo" recommendations. I have seen stories about accomplishments that never happened, touting various achievements for projects that were spectacular failures.
And all of this is on top of imaginary degrees, fictional job titles at imaginary companies, or sometimes inflated job titles at real companies. Fact-checking this stuff is tougher than it looks. Most employers have a strict "no comment" policy regarding ex-employees. And then there are all the companies (and even colleges) that no longer exist. Even if a person can produce a reference to vouch for their story, it may turn out to be a case of one liar validating another. Background checks are definitely not working. I know of some people with fictional LinkedIn profiles, and somehow they bounce from one employer to the next with impunity.
Assuming the Russians have ALL of Hillary's emails (to be expected with her defenseless email server), why wouldn't they want her to win? How hard would it be to blackmail her into becoming Putin's puppet? If she loses the election, they squander the value of the work. If the Russians have a preference in this election, it's for a candidate who is easily controlled. Trump is utterly unpredictable, so it's hard to imagine why the Russians would work to promote him.
If (the original) Guccifer was a FSB asset, no way would he be extradited to the US. Based on what he revealed about Hillary's server, it could have been hacked by the Geek Squad from Moscow Best Buy.
No matter who these people turn out to be, they weren't the idiots who deployed the server, nor did they force Hillary to use it.
Blaming the Russians is just a political ploy to set expectations low. Don't expect anyone to get caught. Problem is, blaming the Russians isn't any more plausible than blaming the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video.
You bring up an interesting point. Recovery is the last line of defense. There may not BE a defense (at any price) to ward off the latest zero-day exploit. When security measures become difficult or expensive, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as 100% prevention. At some point, beefing up security reaches a point of diminishing returns. Although a business model MAY collapse due to security issues, it will SURELY collapse if overhead cost exceeds revenue.
Yes, limited storage IS a problem. On my phone, Facebook (and other assorted bloatware) is pre-installed. Although I can uninstall updates and disable the app, unless I root the phone, the space can never be truly recovered. For any new app I might want to install, at least one existing app needs to go.
And when you consider the tendency of apps to run processes in the background, it's time to think about memory, CPU, and battery life. The more apps you have, the slower your phone runs.
It seems the problem was Ireland's offer and Apple's acceptance of this incredibly generous tax agreement. It's a bit late for the EU to step in and try to retroactively rewrite the actions of a member state, while handing the bill to a company that negotiated in good faith, thinking they were dealing with a government that had the authority to regulate its own taxes.
That said, the business of foreign tax havens is extremely common throughout the corporate world. It's one of the most successful tax dodges on the planet. Worst of all, it encourages hoarding of cash in low-tax countries, which does nothing to help the economy in countries where products were sold and profit was earned. As much as I'd like to see the corporate tax havens disappear, that's not going to happen.
Only circumstantial evidence. Hackers who work for an intelligence service are never going to get caught, much less extradited. Of course, the same can be said of ANY elite hacker.
IMHO, it's not the Russians. They are widely suspected of getting Hillary's emails by monitoring the original "Guccifer". If so, they would want Hillary as POTUS because they could easily control her via blackmail. Hell, they don't even need the actual emails. The mere threat should be enough.
... Apple didn't combine their stale hardware with an unfortunate tendency to orphan it. The biggest risk seems to be video GPU chipsets. http://www.cultofmac.com/14695... [cultofmac.com]
What you say is true in the aggregate, but an insurer's book of business spans across many risk pools. Some are cash cows, and they subsidize losers. The insurers don't want the worst risks to forego insurance, they want these people paying as high a premium as can reasonably be collected, while the difference is allocated to other risk pools. To do otherwise is to invite the government to step in and offer to insure the worst risks, with the long-term effect of government taking over the insurance market altogether.
Remember also that the ratio of premiums to claims is artificially kept as close to 1:1 as possible, for a variety of reasons. This is easily accomplished by manipulating loss reserves. It comes in handy when it's time to hide profits from the IRS or to convince state insurance regulators that premiums need to increase because the insurers will go bankrupt otherwise.
Years ago, I developed a system to analyze stock option prices in real time for the purpose of automated trading. The algorithm was designed to detect overbought and oversold options, and trade ahead of the inevitable market correction.
Although the system worked, it occasionally lost scary amounts of (simulated) money. It seems that some people traded high volumes against the market, buying into options that were already overbought, selling even when the option was oversold. It seemed as if these traders knew something that everyone else didn't. Sure enough, the company would report something surprising, and the market would move in favor of the people who traded ahead of the news.
Ultimately, I abandoned the notition of automated options trading, but not before discovering how well the system could detect insider trading. The options market is subject to all sorts of shenanigans, but it's a pretty good advance indicator of the underlying stock. The more insider trading a company has, the better the algorithm works.
If these Anonymous people are conducting research and detecting public reporting anomalies, the path of maximum profit is to short sell the stock, knowing that the price will fall when the truth finally emerges. Using this method, you instruct your broker to " short sell" 1000 shares of XYZ Corp. The broker "borrows" the shares from someone else's account and sells them. You get the cash and the obligation to return the shares (cover the position) at a some future time. If all goes well, you can keep the position open as long as you like, wait for the stock to fall, and then cover (buy back and return) the borrowed shares at a lower price.
Looks like the hackers found a few cash cows. Good for them!
Infants learn language by immersion -- listening to adults. At first, they have no comprehension. After a while, they understand a little. After a year, they understand quite a bit. Pretty soon, they start using the language. Learning by immersion works so well that the CIA uses it to train people in new languages.
People improve their reading and writing by PRACTICING reading and writing. Coding works the same way. Immersion works well for beginners. They can start with simple algorithms; critical thinking and analysis can wait. Until they have a language to work with, they don't have a foundation to build on. People just have to remember that learning syntax is not the end of the journey, it's the beginning.
All Cruz proposes to do is admit that the research never really stopped, and take a look at deploying what we have. It would certainly be prudent to do SOMETHING to defend against rogue states (Iran, NK).
In a world in which everything bad is suddenly super-sized, it seems the Nissan pigeons are moving up to nuclear reactors. They used to limit their attacks to cars. https://youtu.be/OnZhPtpibSk
Yes, there are better ways to use browser agent id. But keeping Flash on the desktop means their HTML5 code does not need to be validated on lots of browsers. If the BBC implementation of HTML5 turned out to be buggy, the damage would be limited to platforms that couldn't run Flash anyway.
If I were in charge at BBC, I would use mobile/portable devices as a beta test for implementing HTML5. Sooner or later, they have to bring HTML5 to the desktop, but it can wait until more of the obsolescent browsers are gone. Maybe the next project is to implement adaptive style sheets to get one code base that suits all browsers on all devices. At that point, Flash can finally take its rightful place in the Recycle Bin.
When you have a huge user base and many of them are technologically illiterate, you end up doing things that are far from elegant. In a large organization, it takes longer than you would expect to get anything done.
Just because the transponder was manually turned off, that doesn't prove a terrorist forced the pilot to do it. Maybe it was an inside job. Why would it make sense for a plane to disappear? A Boeing 777 costs at least $200 million. The parts alone are worth many millions of dollars. Even though many of the parts have serial numbers, there are struggling airlines and outsourced maintenance depots that might be receptive to creatively sourced parts. Even if the plane was shredded for scrap, it's a lot of money for one day of work.
The privacy threat that people are MOST LIKELY TO FACE is the government investigating you as a "person of interest" for various reasons. Once they get your private messages, it's fairly easy to become a target for harassment. Sure, they could always get a search warrant and pressure you to decrypt the information. But hardly any of these "investigations" are backed by enough evidence to justify that tactic. The "invisible hand" prefers to work invisibly. Most email providers will quietly hand over your information to the government without so much as a whimper of protest.
Encryption that won't survive a subpoena of your ISP or email service provider is simply not worth doing. Client-based encryption is tough to set up because your contacts need to do the encryption and decryption on their machines. But it works.
This case really IS excessive; it goes well beyond what an individual user would reasonably use on their own.
Most of the OTHER cases (esp. cable companies) involve mysterious limits that individuals can break by watching (or downloading) too much online video. Of course, if you buy the cable company's overpriced TV services, you can watch as many shows as you like, on however many set top boxes you have, drawing down an unlimited volume of video-over-IP traffic to do it. Just don't watch video that competes with the cable provider, and it's all good.
Slashdot Mirror
How many customers asked for keys to be deleted? My guess is ZERO. And then we have the one port USB-C debacle of this year's MacBook. Soldered memory? No thanks.
I am the customer, and the customer is always right. If you don't want to offer me the products I want, I'll find someone who does.
Apple is going back to the bad-old-days, repeating the mistakes that got Steve Jobs fired.
corrupt regime shielding Hillary from indictment, nobody would care about the petty stuff. But instead, we have a candidate who should be in federal custody. The ethical challenge is not the incidental tidbits, it's how the media overlooked federal crimes and allowed her to get this far.
It important to remember that Edward Snowden was a contractor. Why did he work for NSA as a contractor instead of a regular employee? Because he had no degree. Such people are generally shunned by HR managers. But if they have the right skills, hiring managers will often use contractor status to circumvent their own HR dept.
Thanks to a number of lawsuits, most employers have mandatory time limits for contractors, typically 1-3 years. Although many employers promote their best contractors to regular employment, HR often balks at waiving a degree requirement, even for people who are doing excellent work without one.
All contractors know (or should know) how much time they have on the clock. Once they understand the time limit, every contractor needs an exit strategy in case the employer declines to offer full-time employment when the time limit expires.
Whatever Snowden did, he did it with the understanding that his time at NSA was limited, and crossing over to full-time employment was going to be a challenge. In other words, he had nothing to lose.
If employers didn't have to use contract employment to circumvent their self-imposed budget and HR obstacles, you wouldn't see so many contractors with incentives to take secrets put the door.
I'm wouldn't be surprised to see this scenario repeated many times at the NSA.
Someone's AI platform is smart enough to know that both candidates are ACTING. I would expect the average TV news anchor to outperform either of them, just by reading the teleprompter with a straight face.
For years, friends and relatives asked me to help with their Windows problems. After it became unbearable to fix my computers and fix theirs too, I switched to OS X. I told everyone that I no longer had a Windows machine and therefore could not help them. I advised everyone to switch when they could no longer tolerate their PC's behavior. Some people switched, some didn't. Those who switched never needed my help again. Those who didn't were on their own. Ultimately, my pro-bono support incidents dropped to ZERO.
Microsoft has made progress in recent years. And Apple has dropped the ball a few times, especially when they punish people who don't upgrade their computers and phones fast enough, or migrate their data to icloud. Even so, if you consider the cost of support labor and the lost productivity while waiting for help, Macs should have replaced PC's in corporate life years ago.
Google doesn't actually want your phone number for security. Google wants your phone number so that they can link the account in their database to other information that contains your phone number.
Correct. It's not Google that wants your phone number linked to your email account -- it's the NSA. Email accounts may be disposable and free, but every phone is costing somebody money. Unless you buy a burner phone and service cards for cash, there is a financial trail behind every phone that leads back to a person. Once the NSA knows the person's phone number, geolocating the phone (and therefore the email account owner) is child's play for the inventors of PRISM.
Even if you buy a burner phone and service for cash, and even if you turn off the phone after setting up your Gmail account, tracking down the account holder is as simple as forcing Google to "screw up" someone's password, forcing them to use the telephone-based password recovery protocol.
Once you understand the loss of privacy that comes from linking telephones to user accounts, it's much easier to understand how the real goal has nothing to do with making your account "secure". The real target is your privacy.
I have written 100% truthful, positive recommendations for some really good people. And some of those people have written 100% truthful, positive recommendations for me. But in the competitive marketplace, the value of this information is lost as truthful stories are diluted into an ocean of fiction.
The only thing LinkedIn is good for is entertainment. It's fun to visit the profile of known underachievers, just to see who is writing "quid pro quo" recommendations. I have seen stories about accomplishments that never happened, touting various achievements for projects that were spectacular failures.
And all of this is on top of imaginary degrees, fictional job titles at imaginary companies, or sometimes inflated job titles at real companies. Fact-checking this stuff is tougher than it looks. Most employers have a strict "no comment" policy regarding ex-employees. And then there are all the companies (and even colleges) that no longer exist. Even if a person can produce a reference to vouch for their story, it may turn out to be a case of one liar validating another. Background checks are definitely not working. I know of some people with fictional LinkedIn profiles, and somehow they bounce from one employer to the next with impunity.
That would explain it.
Vote "No" by avoiding venues that use this stuff.
Assuming the Russians have ALL of Hillary's emails (to be expected with her defenseless email server), why wouldn't they want her to win? How hard would it be to blackmail her into becoming Putin's puppet? If she loses the election, they squander the value of the work. If the Russians have a preference in this election, it's for a candidate who is easily controlled. Trump is utterly unpredictable, so it's hard to imagine why the Russians would work to promote him.
If (the original) Guccifer was a FSB asset, no way would he be extradited to the US. Based on what he revealed about Hillary's server, it could have been hacked by the Geek Squad from Moscow Best Buy.
No matter who these people turn out to be, they weren't the idiots who deployed the server, nor did they force Hillary to use it.
Blaming the Russians is just a political ploy to set expectations low. Don't expect anyone to get caught. Problem is, blaming the Russians isn't any more plausible than blaming the Benghazi attack on a YouTube video.
You bring up an interesting point. Recovery is the last line of defense. There may not BE a defense (at any price) to ward off the latest zero-day exploit. When security measures become difficult or expensive, it's important to remember that there is no such thing as 100% prevention. At some point, beefing up security reaches a point of diminishing returns. Although a business model MAY collapse due to security issues, it will SURELY collapse if overhead cost exceeds revenue.
Yes, limited storage IS a problem. On my phone, Facebook (and other assorted bloatware) is pre-installed. Although I can uninstall updates and disable the app, unless I root the phone, the space can never be truly recovered. For any new app I might want to install, at least one existing app needs to go.
And when you consider the tendency of apps to run processes in the background, it's time to think about memory, CPU, and battery life. The more apps you have, the slower your phone runs.
It seems the problem was Ireland's offer and Apple's acceptance of this incredibly generous tax agreement. It's a bit late for the EU to step in and try to retroactively rewrite the actions of a member state, while handing the bill to a company that negotiated in good faith, thinking they were dealing with a government that had the authority to regulate its own taxes.
That said, the business of foreign tax havens is extremely common throughout the corporate world. It's one of the most successful tax dodges on the planet. Worst of all, it encourages hoarding of cash in low-tax countries, which does nothing to help the economy in countries where products were sold and profit was earned. As much as I'd like to see the corporate tax havens disappear, that's not going to happen.
... fully funded by Congress, I have ZERO sympathy for politicians getting hacked.
Only circumstantial evidence. Hackers who work for an intelligence service are never going to get caught, much less extradited. Of course, the same can be said of ANY elite hacker.
IMHO, it's not the Russians. They are widely suspected of getting Hillary's emails by monitoring the original "Guccifer". If so, they would want Hillary as POTUS because they could easily control her via blackmail. Hell, they don't even need the actual emails. The mere threat should be enough.
... Apple didn't combine their stale hardware with an unfortunate tendency to orphan it. The biggest risk seems to be video GPU chipsets. http://www.cultofmac.com/14695... [cultofmac.com]
What you say is true in the aggregate, but an insurer's book of business spans across many risk pools. Some are cash cows, and they subsidize losers. The insurers don't want the worst risks to forego insurance, they want these people paying as high a premium as can reasonably be collected, while the difference is allocated to other risk pools. To do otherwise is to invite the government to step in and offer to insure the worst risks, with the long-term effect of government taking over the insurance market altogether.
Remember also that the ratio of premiums to claims is artificially kept as close to 1:1 as possible, for a variety of reasons. This is easily accomplished by manipulating loss reserves. It comes in handy when it's time to hide profits from the IRS or to convince state insurance regulators that premiums need to increase because the insurers will go bankrupt otherwise.
Years ago, I developed a system to analyze stock option prices in real time for the purpose of automated trading. The algorithm was designed to detect overbought and oversold options, and trade ahead of the inevitable market correction.
Although the system worked, it occasionally lost scary amounts of (simulated) money. It seems that some people traded high volumes against the market, buying into options that were already overbought, selling even when the option was oversold. It seemed as if these traders knew something that everyone else didn't. Sure enough, the company would report something surprising, and the market would move in favor of the people who traded ahead of the news.
Ultimately, I abandoned the notition of automated options trading, but not before discovering how well the system could detect insider trading. The options market is subject to all sorts of shenanigans, but it's a pretty good advance indicator of the underlying stock. The more insider trading a company has, the better the algorithm works.
If these Anonymous people are conducting research and detecting public reporting anomalies, the path of maximum profit is to short sell the stock, knowing that the price will fall when the truth finally emerges. Using this method, you instruct your broker to " short sell" 1000 shares of XYZ Corp. The broker "borrows" the shares from someone else's account and sells them. You get the cash and the obligation to return the shares (cover the position) at a some future time. If all goes well, you can keep the position open as long as you like, wait for the stock to fall, and then cover (buy back and return) the borrowed shares at a lower price.
Looks like the hackers found a few cash cows. Good for them!
Infants learn language by immersion -- listening to adults. At first, they have no comprehension. After a while, they understand a little. After a year, they understand quite a bit. Pretty soon, they start using the language. Learning by immersion works so well that the CIA uses it to train people in new languages.
People improve their reading and writing by PRACTICING reading and writing. Coding works the same way. Immersion works well for beginners. They can start with simple algorithms; critical thinking and analysis can wait. Until they have a language to work with, they don't have a foundation to build on. People just have to remember that learning syntax is not the end of the journey, it's the beginning.
All Cruz proposes to do is admit that the research never really stopped, and take a look at deploying what we have. It would certainly be prudent to do SOMETHING to defend against rogue states (Iran, NK).
In a world in which everything bad is suddenly super-sized, it seems the Nissan pigeons are moving up to nuclear reactors. They used to limit their attacks to cars. https://youtu.be/OnZhPtpibSk
Yes, there are better ways to use browser agent id. But keeping Flash on the desktop means their HTML5 code does not need to be validated on lots of browsers. If the BBC implementation of HTML5 turned out to be buggy, the damage would be limited to platforms that couldn't run Flash anyway.
If I were in charge at BBC, I would use mobile/portable devices as a beta test for implementing HTML5. Sooner or later, they have to bring HTML5 to the desktop, but it can wait until more of the obsolescent browsers are gone. Maybe the next project is to implement adaptive style sheets to get one code base that suits all browsers on all devices. At that point, Flash can finally take its rightful place in the Recycle Bin.
When you have a huge user base and many of them are technologically illiterate, you end up doing things that are far from elegant. In a large organization, it takes longer than you would expect to get anything done.
Just because the transponder was manually turned off, that doesn't prove a terrorist forced the pilot to do it. Maybe it was an inside job.
Why would it make sense for a plane to disappear? A Boeing 777 costs at least $200 million. The parts alone are worth many millions of dollars. Even though many of the parts have serial numbers, there are struggling airlines and outsourced maintenance depots that might be receptive to creatively sourced parts. Even if the plane was shredded for scrap, it's a lot of money for one day of work.
The privacy threat that people are MOST LIKELY TO FACE is the government investigating you as a "person of interest" for various reasons. Once they get your private messages, it's fairly easy to become a target for harassment. Sure, they could always get a search warrant and pressure you to decrypt the information. But hardly any of these "investigations" are backed by enough evidence to justify that tactic. The "invisible hand" prefers to work invisibly. Most email providers will quietly hand over your information to the government without so much as a whimper of protest.
Encryption that won't survive a subpoena of your ISP or email service provider is simply not worth doing. Client-based encryption is tough to set up because your contacts need to do the encryption and decryption on their machines. But it works.
This case really IS excessive; it goes well beyond what an individual user would reasonably use on their own.
Most of the OTHER cases (esp. cable companies) involve mysterious limits that individuals can break by watching (or downloading) too much online video. Of course, if you buy the cable company's overpriced TV services, you can watch as many shows as you like, on however many set top boxes you have, drawing down an unlimited volume of video-over-IP traffic to do it. Just don't watch video that competes with the cable provider, and it's all good.