Ah, thanks, I'd forgotten the exact mechanism. However it works, if you just make up a nine-digit number there's a nonzero chance that it cannot be an SSN, which at least discourages large-scale naive fakery.
Anyway my point was that the privacy problem is not that SSNs are stored everywhere, but that they are used to gain access to other information they cannot and never were meant to secure. The sole legitimate use of SSNs is such that only a fool would use a stolen one, but they've been put to illegitimate uses which endanger information that *should* be secret. If only your payroll office used your SSN, and they only used it to communicate to IRS, then you could tattoo the number on your forehead with no (further) loss of real privacy.
(It appears that even IRS misuses the SSN, since they seem to use it to key their own records. It should be strictly a pass-through to SSA, whom they are serving as collection agent, and the TIN should be entirely separate.)
And the University's lawyers will laugh at them, unless he used those trademarks in such a way as to promote his own business. Your local newspaper can't be sued for trademark infringement just for printing an article mentioning the company or its products by name.
If he'd called it _The Official cisco Systems New CCNA/CCNP Training Book_ then they'd likely have grounds for complaint.
There is no other form of VBscript than the source. There is no other place for the app. to be. And I've seen "obfuscated" script code -- it's painful to read, but far from unreadable. If *you* can't understand it, neither can the interpreter.
I'll have to grant you the graphics stuff, 'cos although I've written a pile of VBscript none of it ever had any visual interface; it's all commandline stuff to be run as workstation startup scripts or administrator tools or periodic auto-management tasks.
So they leave dud laws unchallenged instead of making an example of them? I find their dereliction of duty...disturbing. The best way to get rid of a bad law is to expose it, not cover it up.
This is a problem because they are wrong. There's no way to know who it is that just reeled off nine digits which pass the SSN checksum test. Your SSN says very little about the identity of the person producing it, but some people who should know better treat it as the Golden Ticket to lots of other information.
I don't have a problem with identifying myself in sensible circumstances. I have a big problem with people who think that knowledge of my SSN means that someone is me.
The problem with the SSN is not that it's widely available but that it's widely used for a purpose it cannot properly serve.
When the car comes back down, it actually has to *get rid of* all that energy it pumped into itself on the way up. So "it all comes back, except for one teaspoon". The energy cost of a round trip is basically the heat losses in the propulsion system plus a modest amount spent on environmental control and lighting.
I would *love* to receive fewer offers from Best Buy. The flyer in the Sunday paper is quite enough for me. I need something, I come to the store. I see what I like at a price I can live with, I hand over the price and walk away with the thing. THAT is the Shopping Experience; all else is unnecessary.
All that CRM stuff is things that only management likes -- many customers would be happier to avoid all the hassle.
Of course some dimwits will do it anyway, and cause trouble before they are caught, and we'll wind up with laws requiring the telcos to allow a subscriber to opt out of having his property tagged, and then the thing will die off and the three or four people who actually found a reason to read the tags will be upset.
Don't forget the really big rocket you need to attach to the kitchen sink in order to kill nearly all of its momentum so it doesn't just sit there in orbit with you making you look really foolish.
A billion tons of cable and you think a couple thousand pounds of shielding is too much? You'd need extremely sensitive instruments to even notice when a 100-ton car was hung on the cable.
Indeed, the main reason a lot of people set sail for The New World was that there was nothing there (aside from "Indians", but they didn't seem to own any of it according to European notions). Some of them just wanted enough room to move around in without bumping against their neighbors. Well, there's enough room in space to go off in a billion different directions and never bump anyone.
If someone crashed an airliner into a space elevator, the likely result is that the two halves of the airplane would fall out of the sky and the elevator operators would notice a minor vibration.
Yes, imagine how dangerously wrathful that country would become if someone deliberately knocked down its space elevator. The psychological value of a terrorist act is that it makes the survivors angry enough to destroy you no matter what the cost. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
"Don't you suppose the right to redistribute is granted pretty much automatically for a virus?"
How amusing if it weren't. Maybe the authors could be prosecuted for circumventing a protection device *on their own property*. The sound of mental fuses popping would be deafening.
TFA reports cisco as saying that they don't make any money off the training materials. Those are a cost of doing business, where in this case "doing business" is growing the market by turning out CCNAs and CCNPs. It's good to see a company remembering what its actual products are.
And their product manuals are available for free on their site. Another wise investment, and a very inexpensive one.
About the only areas where he'd have to be careful is others' copyrighted material (as mentioned above) and use of others' trademarks. Prof.s learn early how to avoid those problems or they don't remain prof.s very long.
Now, if cisco didn't like this, they *could* apply pressure through the institution's relationship with them as a training site. But it sounds like they are going to avoid PR disaster and work with the author instead of against him. Good for them. I and my shares approve of listening to customers' concerns about our documentation.
One other thing you then have to take into account is whether all of these factors are employed by your state's weights and measures standards. You could get a different result because you asked a different question.
I don't know the answer, but there is one method I can think of (probably impractical for aircraft). The beam in a microbalance doesn't rest on the knife-edges *all* the time; you only let it down to measure, then lift it again to load or unload the pan. You *could* do the same thing to protect your weight-sensor thingy from damaging transients.
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Ah, thanks, I'd forgotten the exact mechanism. However it works, if you just make up a nine-digit number there's a nonzero chance that it cannot be an SSN, which at least discourages large-scale naive fakery.
Anyway my point was that the privacy problem is not that SSNs are stored everywhere, but that they are used to gain access to other information they cannot and never were meant to secure. The sole legitimate use of SSNs is such that only a fool would use a stolen one, but they've been put to illegitimate uses which endanger information that *should* be secret. If only your payroll office used your SSN, and they only used it to communicate to IRS, then you could tattoo the number on your forehead with no (further) loss of real privacy.
(It appears that even IRS misuses the SSN, since they seem to use it to key their own records. It should be strictly a pass-through to SSA, whom they are serving as collection agent, and the TIN should be entirely separate.)
And the University's lawyers will laugh at them, unless he used those trademarks in such a way as to promote his own business. Your local newspaper can't be sued for trademark infringement just for printing an article mentioning the company or its products by name.
If he'd called it _The Official cisco Systems New CCNA/CCNP Training Book_ then they'd likely have grounds for complaint.
There is no other form of VBscript than the source. There is no other place for the app. to be. And I've seen "obfuscated" script code -- it's painful to read, but far from unreadable. If *you* can't understand it, neither can the interpreter.
I'll have to grant you the graphics stuff, 'cos although I've written a pile of VBscript none of it ever had any visual interface; it's all commandline stuff to be run as workstation startup scripts or administrator tools or periodic auto-management tasks.
So they leave dud laws unchallenged instead of making an example of them? I find their dereliction of duty...disturbing. The best way to get rid of a bad law is to expose it, not cover it up.
This is a problem because they are wrong. There's no way to know who it is that just reeled off nine digits which pass the SSN checksum test. Your SSN says very little about the identity of the person producing it, but some people who should know better treat it as the Golden Ticket to lots of other information.
I don't have a problem with identifying myself in sensible circumstances. I have a big problem with people who think that knowledge of my SSN means that someone is me.
The problem with the SSN is not that it's widely available but that it's widely used for a purpose it cannot properly serve.
When the car comes back down, it actually has to *get rid of* all that energy it pumped into itself on the way up. So "it all comes back, except for one teaspoon". The energy cost of a round trip is basically the heat losses in the propulsion system plus a modest amount spent on environmental control and lighting.
I would *love* to receive fewer offers from Best Buy. The flyer in the Sunday paper is quite enough for me. I need something, I come to the store. I see what I like at a price I can live with, I hand over the price and walk away with the thing. THAT is the Shopping Experience; all else is unnecessary.
All that CRM stuff is things that only management likes -- many customers would be happier to avoid all the hassle.
Aw, if he's gonna do that, why not just phone the police directly?
Uhhuh. Logged, with your phone number. Not smart.
Of course some dimwits will do it anyway, and cause trouble before they are caught, and we'll wind up with laws requiring the telcos to allow a subscriber to opt out of having his property tagged, and then the thing will die off and the three or four people who actually found a reason to read the tags will be upset.
"What is the obsession with keeping SSNs secret anyway?"
Some people seem to think that asking for your SSN is a way of identifying you. I dunno where they get that idea.
What would be the point of misusing something nobody's going to read?
Don't forget the really big rocket you need to attach to the kitchen sink in order to kill nearly all of its momentum so it doesn't just sit there in orbit with you making you look really foolish.
A billion tons of cable and you think a couple thousand pounds of shielding is too much? You'd need extremely sensitive instruments to even notice when a 100-ton car was hung on the cable.
Indeed, the main reason a lot of people set sail for The New World was that there was nothing there (aside from "Indians", but they didn't seem to own any of it according to European notions). Some of them just wanted enough room to move around in without bumping against their neighbors. Well, there's enough room in space to go off in a billion different directions and never bump anyone.
If someone crashed an airliner into a space elevator, the likely result is that the two halves of the airplane would fall out of the sky and the elevator operators would notice a minor vibration.
Yes, imagine how dangerously wrathful that country would become if someone deliberately knocked down its space elevator. The psychological value of a terrorist act is that it makes the survivors angry enough to destroy you no matter what the cost. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
_The Fountains of Paradise_, by Clarke. A good read, too!
Sold your soul? I think you found it!
"Don't you suppose the right to redistribute is granted pretty much automatically for a virus?"
How amusing if it weren't. Maybe the authors could be prosecuted for circumventing a protection device *on their own property*. The sound of mental fuses popping would be deafening.
Um, the source for a VBscript app. *is* the app. It is kind of hard to execute a VBscript if you didn't get the script.
*sigh* Please don't release another anti-virus-virus. The last one was at least as much a pain as the one it was supposed to cure.
This cuts both ways. I took one class in which the text was so new it wasn't published yet; the prof. handed out photocopies of a work-in-progress.
TFA reports cisco as saying that they don't make any money off the training materials. Those are a cost of doing business, where in this case "doing business" is growing the market by turning out CCNAs and CCNPs. It's good to see a company remembering what its actual products are.
And their product manuals are available for free on their site. Another wise investment, and a very inexpensive one.
About the only areas where he'd have to be careful is others' copyrighted material (as mentioned above) and use of others' trademarks. Prof.s learn early how to avoid those problems or they don't remain prof.s very long.
Now, if cisco didn't like this, they *could* apply pressure through the institution's relationship with them as a training site. But it sounds like they are going to avoid PR disaster and work with the author instead of against him. Good for them. I and my shares approve of listening to customers' concerns about our documentation.
One other thing you then have to take into account is whether all of these factors are employed by your state's weights and measures standards. You could get a different result because you asked a different question.
I don't know the answer, but there is one method I can think of (probably impractical for aircraft). The beam in a microbalance doesn't rest on the knife-edges *all* the time; you only let it down to measure, then lift it again to load or unload the pan. You *could* do the same thing to protect your weight-sensor thingy from damaging transients.