It's the microphone I'm worried about. At least the camera usually has an LED so you can see it is on, but there is no way of knowing if the microphone is active. It's also harder to block - tape helps but won't completely stop it hearing ambient sound. Also, microphones have been demonstrated as a way to secretly communicate without generating suspicious network traffic, using ultrasound.
The only way to be sure is to open the laptop and unplug it.
Plugging in an empty 3.5 mm plug connected to nothing might switch in circuitry from the built in Mic to the non existent "plugged in" Mic
I wouldn't count on any software fix that disables something. That can be worked around with the right software.
Scary how much this ficticious movie is getting close to reality.
It's not fiction. It's a future documentary from an alternate universe. The Time Macheen depicted in the movie is real. The only thing is it malfunctions and each time it's run (that is, each time the heroes realize it doesn't exist) it bumps that universe over one and closer to ours.
That's why our universe gets more and more like the movie every day.
Or, you could... you know... just build stuff IN ORBIT where raw materials cost 87 thousand times what it would cost on the surface.
Moving and parking that thing would be a bitch, but it's value as raw materials to make things in space would be immense.
Especially true if it's made of metals. You could do all kinds of things, make reaction mass for out of Earth orbit craft, make beams and struts to put together a station, use it for soil, counterweights, etc.
If it's not metal, you could get gasses or possibly water or other materials from it.
That's after it's been studied well of course.
The thing came to us after all, it's ours. we can consume it if we want... all of these worlds are yours except for Europa. Attempt no landings there.
From perusing the table of contents, it looks like almost all of this is already well known (see the last couple weeks of NYT for articles about what a horrible real estate business man, husband, father, uncle, and University executive Trump has been).
Indeed many of the items listed are actually marketed as Trump himself and his followers as selling points (offensive and demeaning attitude to foreigners, for example).
But in the end, none of it matters. His followers are willing to forgive any behavior, no matter how crass, ignorant, or even downright evil. Trump literally would be able, as he pointed out, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected president. They just don't care. And in fact will see this "oppo" research as more proof that the establishment is "out to get him" and so therefore must be elected.
If your opinion already has some of the Trump platform in agreement, this document is more of an advertisement of Trump than anything else. The DNC thinks he's going to do this stuff too!
That said, there were OTHER documents taken that are rumored to be attack plans along the lines of "start a riot here by doing XYZ"
It's going to be a long summer. Arm yourselves, democrats are out there.
All of them. I haven't got the email warnings yet, but both of the forums that I subscribe to there have a new boilerplate message about upcoming password changes... without mentioning why.
Unsubscribing to the forums is damn near impossible; something that I just learned. The only way that your account can be closed is if you prove too damn obnoxious. But the sites are run from Canada. Being obnoxious can be difficult there.
BTW, my corresponding email _was_ hacked within the last week. Barn door left open since February; too late. So I'll have to close that account.
Now before all of the smarmy IT "Professionals" start going on about Password "Security"; note that no Password Ninja broke into my house and stole the keyboard sticky. IT "Professionals" need to understand that these breaches are _their_ fault. _They_ can't secure their systems. They can't even be bothered to warn us in a timely manner about their screwups.
So Screw them.
You are correct. It is becoming more clear that having similar or reusing passwords is really stupid bad.
Also, writing passwords down (because now instead of four, there are 45) will have to be the new norm.
Back when people had ONE business password and it let them get in payroll it was bad to have them written down, because it was right where it would do some damage. Now that the average person has Google, email, a forum or two, Facebook or other social media, online banking, store credit card account, Amazon, maybe other online shopping... now a self-managed list written down or on a phone is the way to go.
Gawker outed Thiel as a fag. So that's why he's got it in for them. Waging war by proxy is a time-honoured tradition. (or should I say, homoured.)
It's not exactly random, "could happen to you next!" as the activists like to say.
Why would they do that?
Either, a) they are just digging up dirt to get clicks
Or b) they are a similar attack dog for someone else
Who the fuck is Theil? (ok, no a) is out)
Someone is just destroying someone else's attack dog. Big fucking deal, who cares.
Worry about Soros and the Koch brothers are doing, worry about big money manipulation from Saudi Arabia on Clinton instead. That's much more dangerous to YOU.
There are 1.6 billion Muslims. They must not be very good muslims, if they don't start killing the rest right now.
Or perhaps it is people and not the religion that kills, like guns.
You are correct.
Peaceful muslems exist IN SPITE OF the contents of their doctrine and scripture, not BECAUSE OF it.
If you think otherwise, you are simply ignorant of islam. So are the people who are peaceful and follow it. Some people can manage to take any doctrine and make a positive life with it, however that does not change the fact that islam, in it's pure form is NASTY.
Go educate yourself with Bill Warner's lectures on Youtube, or his books. Warner is an physicist that pulls the whole thing apart and explains what is going on. So he should be very approachable to the/. crowd. He shows the writings of islam are very strict, that THEY are the last and only word to follow, and the basic premises of the whole thing is suppression and dominance of others, sexual abuse of women and a lot of bits that will end up making an authoritarian and brutal society. What you think you know about the Crusades is a LIE. (Oh, did you know a muslem can LIE to you any time for any reason that includes the benefit of him or islam?)
You will find the bullshit going on with ISIS right now, throwing gays off buildings, killing lots of folks, taking sex slaves, brutal executions, continual warfare is the natural state of islam and everybody else is a perversion of it. ISIS... IS islam.
What's worse, is there is no provision and no way to have a "reform" and make it nice. There is no provision to reinterpret. No provision to revise, pick a nicer guy to lead, or any of that. "Religion of Peace" refers to what happens after every other religion and secular society has been wiped out. When they say that, they mean "we are going to destroy you and be happy about it."
Now here's the real problem, if you take a functioning society of the "in spite of" people and let it persist based on islam, eventually some unstable asshole reads the thing again, islamifies himself, and goes into brutality mode. Yes, it's "people that kill" however islam provides a framework to take a malfunctioning person and orient them into intense brutality. To stop random attacks on what islam doesn't like, you would have to get rid of islam. (Not going to happen.) And if you could, you would then also have to get rid of all the copies of the documents, and we all know how easy that is to do.
Self actualizing spontaneous terrorism is the natural state of, and part of the purpose of islam. We will be dealing with it until the end of humanity.That is how it was spread, from the beginning. (ok, about 100 years in) The entire thing is one gigantic asshole-creation meme. Having it around means you are always going to have people spontaneously going into "destroyer mode." It _can't_ be stopped. What you CAN do, is learn how to recognize the bad guys to stop them early, or harden yourself against when they do attack by being able to fight back.
Also, perhaps someone should dig deeper into this "start-up", because this almost smells State-sponsored. Can't think of too many other entities that would be data-mining like this.
Are you kidding? Landlords would chew their arm off to use this service. No sinister state sponsored motive required.
Quite possibly you are right.
On the other hand, a credit check and a simple "must be above this point" criteria works wonders for landlords. (Or so they tell me.) It's simple, will be fair because it's both open and everybody has an equal chance to get approved.
I am not sure most landlords would really care about it as long as the checks clear on time and the place isn't trashed or there are complaints by other tenants.
As a tenant myself, I LIKE the fact that the landlord is weeding out people that can't pay. It's a nicer place to live as a result. Plus it makes me more willing to positively contribute if everybody else is also.
Sony put PS2 or a PS3 (can't remember which) capability in their Blu-Ray players. So, if you want, you can pay a too large monthly fee, hook up a controller, and play games streamed to it from the internet. They are trying all the same stuff everybody else is; music, streaming games, movies, books, etc.
Why the fuck does the FBI have a problem with getting a warrant? This isn't Apple's ridiculous refusal to decrypt data when the owner of the phone had consented. This is actually private data and should be protected accordingly. If there's a legitimate reason to access the data, then there shouldn't be any difficulty in obtaining a warrant to obtain access.
They don't have a problem getting warrants.
They want to not be observed to, or have any trace of, who and what they watch.
Or is simply offline, or forgets to pay their domain name, or you are on someone elses computer because IT guys sometimes get vacations too, etc.
This is going to be one of those things where "what is best to do" depends on the person, their mental capabilities, their assets online, and the cost for having the passwords breeched.
Having Joe the teenager lose is Steam account is a different thing than Hillary at the state department using "12345" . Passwords and security should reflect the asset protected.
20 character random password generated by KeePass. I have a fairly long 20+ character master password for my password file. Generate a new password for every site in case of a breach. Use 2-Factor authentication wherever possible, especially your email address is this is basically a master key to all your other accounts due to the password reset feature.
Why bother? Just make it 20 characters you make up.
Because, you are going to run into "helpful password strength monitors" that want "at least one capital, one lower case, one number and one punctuation character". But which ALSO have a bunch of non-stated rules like "must not have three of the same characters in a row" and "must not begin with punctuation or ";" " and so on.... and you'll still have to search your generated password to remove or change it to suit the dumb JavaScript applet. Or worse, "must not contain words" when it sees "cat" in there somewhere.
Half the time, the service itself prevents using good passwords.
And must people keep using the normally beautiful word "free" in such an Orwellian context? There is literally a whole world of unseen (a la Bastiat) opportunity costs behind this overbuilt boondoggle, especially in a country largely still mired in poverty.
"Mired in poverty"?
Get your facts straight. Chile's numbers are similar to hellholes such as South Korea, Japan, and Denmark.
When there is an active shooter, the police move very slowly entering the site. I guess they are claiming that the robot could have showed them that the shooter was dead, and they would have entered sooner and possibly would have been able to rendered aid
Read something written in the last decade.
Those policies ended after Columbine where "wait and form up" did cost lives. Now it's "pair up and go in find/eliminate the shooter" or just go in alone.
Example: the gun fight in the parking lot and lobby at the Sikh Temple in Milwaukee. The first cop on scene stopped it and the second finished it.
I was under the impression that this had little to do with the browser and more to do with how someone programmed the site. I see this behaviour quite inconsistently across both web forms and dodgy pop-up advertising that sneaks through the adblocker.
Perhaps the web sites that fuck with the focus of your cursor should be the ones you are mad at? Grabbing focus with a large shadowbox and a nag form about a spammy email newsletter is the problem, not the browser.
I'm not a chrome user so I have to ask: was backspace == back button really default behaviour? Because if so that's possibly the dumbest thing I've heard of in a long time (except for the bonnet glue story, obviously... that took stupid to a whole new level).
It's been the default behavior of every major browser since around Netscape 3 / IE 4.
I don't get what the big deal is, pay attention to the focus of the cursor and it's not a problem. Backspace never has and doesn't now, jump you out of a form field.
Using a variety of browsers with wildly different UIs, the backspace is useful when searching for something in a mystery-meat poorly designed for mobile web site. Mashing the button is faster than locating where ever the idiots decided to put the back and forward buttons this week on that browser.
I'll pay some sales tax if my "2-day" shipping often means "next day"
It doesn't, and it won't. Even with Prime.
The new Amazon facility in WI (near the IL border and Chicago) was put there to service the area, and IF there are faster shipping from it it's for a tiny fraction of the actual goods available.
Most stuff still comes from TX, CA, TN, GA, etc. or wherever.
Don't forget the biggest threat to civilisation; Islam. They live in the dark ages and want to force everyone else to do the same.
That, and democracies and other "run by the citizens" societies last until the "citizens" realize they can vote themselves stuff from the government coffers.
A point at which almost every successful civilization / nation state on the planet has already reached.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I was the one that deleted all those emails on hitlary clinton's illegal exchange server.
Come get me you useless FBI faggot leftist cunt lap dogs.
It's the microphone I'm worried about. At least the camera usually has an LED so you can see it is on, but there is no way of knowing if the microphone is active. It's also harder to block - tape helps but won't completely stop it hearing ambient sound. Also, microphones have been demonstrated as a way to secretly communicate without generating suspicious network traffic, using ultrasound.
The only way to be sure is to open the laptop and unplug it.
Plugging in an empty 3.5 mm plug connected to nothing might switch in circuitry from the built in Mic to the non existent "plugged in" Mic
I wouldn't count on any software fix that disables something. That can be worked around with the right software.
Already done: http://www.intellectualventure... http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
It's only "done" when you can get on Amazon or got to Wal-mart and buy one.
That shit has been vaporware for over 10 years. Still nothing, nada, nobody can get one, even if they would spend $500 for one.
So no, not "done". Vaporware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zNsUTWsOc
Scary how much this ficticious movie is getting close to reality.
It's not fiction. It's a future documentary from an alternate universe. The Time Macheen depicted in the movie is real. The only thing is it malfunctions and each time it's run (that is, each time the heroes realize it doesn't exist) it bumps that universe over one and closer to ours.
That's why our universe gets more and more like the movie every day.
Or, you could... you know... just build stuff IN ORBIT where raw materials cost 87 thousand times what it would cost on the surface.
Moving and parking that thing would be a bitch, but it's value as raw materials to make things in space would be immense.
Especially true if it's made of metals. You could do all kinds of things, make reaction mass for out of Earth orbit craft, make beams and struts to put together a station, use it for soil, counterweights, etc.
If it's not metal, you could get gasses or possibly water or other materials from it.
That's after it's been studied well of course.
The thing came to us after all, it's ours. we can consume it if we want... all of these worlds are yours except for Europa. Attempt no landings there.
From perusing the table of contents, it looks like almost all of this is already well known (see the last couple weeks of NYT for articles about what a horrible real estate business man, husband, father, uncle, and University executive Trump has been).
Indeed many of the items listed are actually marketed as Trump himself and his followers as selling points (offensive and demeaning attitude to foreigners, for example).
But in the end, none of it matters. His followers are willing to forgive any behavior, no matter how crass, ignorant, or even downright evil. Trump literally would be able, as he pointed out, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and still get elected president. They just don't care. And in fact will see this "oppo" research as more proof that the establishment is "out to get him" and so therefore must be elected.
If your opinion already has some of the Trump platform in agreement, this document is more of an advertisement of Trump than anything else. The DNC thinks he's going to do this stuff too!
That said, there were OTHER documents taken that are rumored to be attack plans along the lines of "start a riot here by doing XYZ"
It's going to be a long summer. Arm yourselves, democrats are out there.
All of them. I haven't got the email warnings yet, but both of the forums that I subscribe to there have a new boilerplate message about upcoming password changes... without mentioning why. Unsubscribing to the forums is damn near impossible; something that I just learned. The only way that your account can be closed is if you prove too damn obnoxious. But the sites are run from Canada. Being obnoxious can be difficult there. BTW, my corresponding email _was_ hacked within the last week. Barn door left open since February; too late. So I'll have to close that account.
Now before all of the smarmy IT "Professionals" start going on about Password "Security"; note that no Password Ninja broke into my house and stole the keyboard sticky. IT "Professionals" need to understand that these breaches are _their_ fault. _They_ can't secure their systems. They can't even be bothered to warn us in a timely manner about their screwups. So Screw them.
You are correct. It is becoming more clear that having similar or reusing passwords is really stupid bad.
Also, writing passwords down (because now instead of four, there are 45) will have to be the new norm.
Back when people had ONE business password and it let them get in payroll it was bad to have them written down, because it was right where it would do some damage. Now that the average person has Google, email, a forum or two, Facebook or other social media, online banking, store credit card account, Amazon, maybe other online shopping... now a self-managed list written down or on a phone is the way to go.
Gawker outed Thiel as a fag. So that's why he's got it in for them. Waging war by proxy is a time-honoured tradition. (or should I say, homoured.)
It's not exactly random, "could happen to you next!" as the activists like to say.
Why would they do that?
Either, a) they are just digging up dirt to get clicks
Or b) they are a similar attack dog for someone else
Who the fuck is Theil? (ok, no a) is out)
Someone is just destroying someone else's attack dog. Big fucking deal, who cares.
Worry about Soros and the Koch brothers are doing, worry about big money manipulation from Saudi Arabia on Clinton instead. That's much more dangerous to YOU.
There are 1.6 billion Muslims. They must not be very good muslims, if they don't start killing the rest right now. Or perhaps it is people and not the religion that kills, like guns.
You are correct.
Peaceful muslems exist IN SPITE OF the contents of their doctrine and scripture, not BECAUSE OF it.
If you think otherwise, you are simply ignorant of islam. So are the people who are peaceful and follow it. Some people can manage to take any doctrine and make a positive life with it, however that does not change the fact that islam, in it's pure form is NASTY.
Go educate yourself with Bill Warner's lectures on Youtube, or his books. Warner is an physicist that pulls the whole thing apart and explains what is going on. So he should be very approachable to the /. crowd. He shows the writings of islam are very strict, that THEY are the last and only word to follow, and the basic premises of the whole thing is suppression and dominance of others, sexual abuse of women and a lot of bits that will end up making an authoritarian and brutal society. What you think you know about the Crusades is a LIE. (Oh, did you know a muslem can LIE to you any time for any reason that includes the benefit of him or islam?)
You will find the bullshit going on with ISIS right now, throwing gays off buildings, killing lots of folks, taking sex slaves, brutal executions, continual warfare is the natural state of islam and everybody else is a perversion of it. ISIS... IS islam.
What's worse, is there is no provision and no way to have a "reform" and make it nice. There is no provision to reinterpret. No provision to revise, pick a nicer guy to lead, or any of that. "Religion of Peace" refers to what happens after every other religion and secular society has been wiped out. When they say that, they mean "we are going to destroy you and be happy about it."
Now here's the real problem, if you take a functioning society of the "in spite of" people and let it persist based on islam, eventually some unstable asshole reads the thing again, islamifies himself, and goes into brutality mode. Yes, it's "people that kill" however islam provides a framework to take a malfunctioning person and orient them into intense brutality. To stop random attacks on what islam doesn't like, you would have to get rid of islam. (Not going to happen.) And if you could, you would then also have to get rid of all the copies of the documents, and we all know how easy that is to do.
Self actualizing spontaneous terrorism is the natural state of, and part of the purpose of islam. We will be dealing with it until the end of humanity.That is how it was spread, from the beginning. (ok, about 100 years in) The entire thing is one gigantic asshole-creation meme. Having it around means you are always going to have people spontaneously going into "destroyer mode." It _can't_ be stopped. What you CAN do, is learn how to recognize the bad guys to stop them early, or harden yourself against when they do attack by being able to fight back.
I hear that every single time when someone mentions 'gun control'. In what percentage of cases has this line of thought actually ever worked?
A pathetic argument.
How would we know? They always find "gun free zones". The shooters themselves are selecting them. That should be proof enough.
Also, perhaps someone should dig deeper into this "start-up", because this almost smells State-sponsored. Can't think of too many other entities that would be data-mining like this.
Are you kidding? Landlords would chew their arm off to use this service. No sinister state sponsored motive required.
Quite possibly you are right.
On the other hand, a credit check and a simple "must be above this point" criteria works wonders for landlords. (Or so they tell me.) It's simple, will be fair because it's both open and everybody has an equal chance to get approved.
I am not sure most landlords would really care about it as long as the checks clear on time and the place isn't trashed or there are complaints by other tenants.
As a tenant myself, I LIKE the fact that the landlord is weeding out people that can't pay. It's a nicer place to live as a result. Plus it makes me more willing to positively contribute if everybody else is also.
Sorry Julian, you aren't Snowden.
P.S. get back on your meds.
Sony put PS2 or a PS3 (can't remember which) capability in their Blu-Ray players. So, if you want, you can pay a too large monthly fee, hook up a controller, and play games streamed to it from the internet. They are trying all the same stuff everybody else is; music, streaming games, movies, books, etc.
Why the fuck does the FBI have a problem with getting a warrant? This isn't Apple's ridiculous refusal to decrypt data when the owner of the phone had consented. This is actually private data and should be protected accordingly. If there's a legitimate reason to access the data, then there shouldn't be any difficulty in obtaining a warrant to obtain access.
They don't have a problem getting warrants.
They want to not be observed to, or have any trace of, who and what they watch.
The goal is "Watching with NO RECORDS OF IT."
Not "recording" as in " keeping a copy"
But, monitoring what's going on by streaming sounds picked up by the microphone? Sure! That's not "recording"!
Or is simply offline, or forgets to pay their domain name, or you are on someone elses computer because IT guys sometimes get vacations too, etc.
This is going to be one of those things where "what is best to do" depends on the person, their mental capabilities, their assets online, and the cost for having the passwords breeched.
Having Joe the teenager lose is Steam account is a different thing than Hillary at the state department using "12345" . Passwords and security should reflect the asset protected.
20 character random password generated by KeePass. I have a fairly long 20+ character master password for my password file. Generate a new password for every site in case of a breach. Use 2-Factor authentication wherever possible, especially your email address is this is basically a master key to all your other accounts due to the password reset feature.
Why bother? Just make it 20 characters you make up.
Because, you are going to run into "helpful password strength monitors" that want "at least one capital, one lower case, one number and one punctuation character". But which ALSO have a bunch of non-stated rules like "must not have three of the same characters in a row" and "must not begin with punctuation or ";" " and so on.... and you'll still have to search your generated password to remove or change it to suit the dumb JavaScript applet. Or worse, "must not contain words" when it sees "cat" in there somewhere.
Half the time, the service itself prevents using good passwords.
And must people keep using the normally beautiful word "free" in such an Orwellian context? There is literally a whole world of unseen (a la Bastiat) opportunity costs behind this overbuilt boondoggle, especially in a country largely still mired in poverty.
"Mired in poverty"?
Get your facts straight. Chile's numbers are similar to hellholes such as South Korea, Japan, and Denmark.
When there is an active shooter, the police move very slowly entering the site. I guess they are claiming that the robot could have showed them that the shooter was dead, and they would have entered sooner and possibly would have been able to rendered aid
Read something written in the last decade.
Those policies ended after Columbine where "wait and form up" did cost lives. Now it's "pair up and go in find/eliminate the shooter" or just go in alone.
Example: the gun fight in the parking lot and lobby at the Sikh Temple in Milwaukee. The first cop on scene stopped it and the second finished it.
I was under the impression that this had little to do with the browser and more to do with how someone programmed the site. I see this behaviour quite inconsistently across both web forms and dodgy pop-up advertising that sneaks through the adblocker.
Perhaps the web sites that fuck with the focus of your cursor should be the ones you are mad at? Grabbing focus with a large shadowbox and a nag form about a spammy email newsletter is the problem, not the browser.
I'm not a chrome user so I have to ask: was backspace == back button really default behaviour? Because if so that's possibly the dumbest thing I've heard of in a long time (except for the bonnet glue story, obviously... that took stupid to a whole new level).
It's been the default behavior of every major browser since around Netscape 3 / IE 4.
I don't get what the big deal is, pay attention to the focus of the cursor and it's not a problem. Backspace never has and doesn't now, jump you out of a form field.
Using a variety of browsers with wildly different UIs, the backspace is useful when searching for something in a mystery-meat poorly designed for mobile web site. Mashing the button is faster than locating where ever the idiots decided to put the back and forward buttons this week on that browser.
How did "antibiotics" get extended to "cleaning products" in your mind?
Really, what's the difference?
I am sure disguising it as something else would be easy enough.
Someone has a sense of humor.
I'll pay some sales tax if my "2-day" shipping often means "next day"
It doesn't, and it won't. Even with Prime.
The new Amazon facility in WI (near the IL border and Chicago) was put there to service the area, and IF there are faster shipping from it it's for a tiny fraction of the actual goods available.
Most stuff still comes from TX, CA, TN, GA, etc. or wherever.
Don't forget the biggest threat to civilisation; Islam. They live in the dark ages and want to force everyone else to do the same.
That, and democracies and other "run by the citizens" societies last until the "citizens" realize they can vote themselves stuff from the government coffers.
A point at which almost every successful civilization / nation state on the planet has already reached.