Let's be reasonable -- this is a report by a group of people who have a bug up their rear about religion to the extent they want their shoes to be atheist. (Puns aside, what's religious about shoes, anyway, for Hitchens' sake?) I'm not particularly interested in reports like this from someone pushing an agenda that hard.
Likewise, I wouldn't be interested in hearing from the Phelps cult about packages festooned with their "God hates fags" crap getting lost in the mail, either.
If IE 10+ is actually standards complient, what will break if it's "Firefox impersonation" causes web sites to treat it as if were standards complient?
I really don't see the problem here. Those antique versions of IE from the last century will still identify the same way, so the web sites designed to cater to crufty old browsers from the previous century won't treat them any differently than they do now.
The obvious potential problem would be that if Microsoft went back to do their old trick of making up their own standards incompatible with everyone else, then web pages wouldn't work with the new browser. But I think the web environment has changed enough that if they were to do that, the rest of the world wouldn't go along with it. I suspect the folks at Microsoft are aware that such a move would accelerate the switch to Firefox, Chrome, etc.
Not quite true. Your company might rely on "software as a service" companies (ironically companies just like phishme,) which means you will get a lot of false positives!
Consider Joe Lowlypeon getting an email from Jane Q. Important, the Senior VP of HR, asking them to take an employee satisfaction survey, and it contains a link to surveymonkey.com.
This.
At a previous employer, I got an email "from" the HR department that hit every "phish/scam" warning. There was nothing in the Received: header IP addresses or the actual domains in the links that had anything to do with the company. The HREFs in the email were of the classic "fraudulent link" form <a href="12horses.com/long-serial-number-path"> hr.companydomain.com </a>. I had never heard of, "12 Horses", which name (before I knew who they were) just screams "Fly-by-night randomly generated domain."
At first glance, obvious phish. After careful examination of the email, I concluded it was obvious phish. Carefully crafted spear-phishing, but definitely phish. Everybody in the email security group said it looked like phish. So, I sounded the alarm, that we were under attack. Then HR admitted it really was theirs. (Actually, indignantly declared it was legit, and why would anyone ever question it?)
In that kind of environment, how is the average user, who doesn't examine Received headers or HTML source code, going to cope?
Too many of these ideas are tossed out by people who don't really understand the issues, and it shows.
But hey, since when did that ever stop anyone, me included?
My thought on the subject: The government doesn't get to decide that a company is "too big to fail" and step in -- until it does fail. At that point, part of the rules of the bailout are: (1) the company gets split up into parts that are not too big to fail, (2) none of the current officers of the company are permitted to have any position as an officer or board member of any of the pieces, and (3) none of the pieces are permitted to merge with or aquire each other for (x) years.
The "7 round limit" bans just about every sidearm used by every law enforcement officer in the entire country. Few LEOs still use revolvers or the 1911.45. Most other pistols used by law enforcement hold at least 10 rounds.
If you call the police and say: "somebody is trying to kill me", you will have a whole bunch of police units coming to you to protect you. See witness protection, for examples.
Google "Bonnie Elmasri". Sure worked for her and her children, didn't it? Oh, wait, it didn't.
Problem -- This is something you would like to avoid doing in general, because you don't want to let the spammer know that the email was sent to a mailbox that is read. With these, you can't avoid it, alas.
On the other hand, just the fact of obfuscation of this sort can be taken as evidence that the sender of the email has something to hide. Are there any non-phishy reasons for an email sender to do this? I can think of some plausible legitimate reasons that someone might think it was a good idea... but these days, if you don't want your email blocked, you will find it necessary to avoid doing anything that might be interpreted as spammy-looking.
(If you really have a legitimate need to discuss ED drugs in email... Oh, well, sucks to be you. Or use PGP.)
It looks like they're using "Shapelock" plastic -- this is marvelous stuff. I got 2 kilos of the generic (polycaprolactone plastic beads) a while back, and it's great for all kinds of projects. I haven't used it for earbuds, though.
Don't leave it in your car on a hot day, though... it will melt. (I found that out with the "windshield washer jet cleaner" I made using it.)
Let's face the facts: Psychopaths like this do this sort of thing for one reason and one reason only: They have a narcissitic need to get their names on TV and in the newspapers and have the whole country talking about them, and they know from past history that this sort of atrocity will get them exactly what they crave.
If it wasn't guns, it'd be a propane tank -- and if the psychopath knew enough to BLEVE the tank, he could take out ten times as many kids as this one did.
If I may make a modest proposal, if you really want to prevent these things, what needs to be done is shut down the sensastionalistic reporting of these incidents. Don't give the psychopaths what they want, and they won't do it. Outlaw reporting of these incidents. Send any reporters who violate the ban to prison, and shut down the media outlets that violate the ban.
Do it for the children.
(Constitution? What's this Constitution you speak of? Haven't we aready established that it's a dead letter if you intone that "Do it for the children" incantation?
Personally, I have my doubts that the people claiming "Global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels, and it will kill us all if we don't STOP RIGHT NOW" folks really believe what they claim to believe.
If they believed it, wouldn't they be gung-ho to replace all our fossil-fuel-burning energy with a source capable of powering industrial/technological civilization that doesn't release CO2?
You'd think so, but (yes, there are exceptions) for the most part, those most gung-ho on the "Stop releasing CO2" thing are also the most vehement "No Nukes Shut Them All Down NOW" folks.
Instead, they pretend to believe, and ask those of us who can do arithmetic to believe, that industrial/technological civilization can be entirely powered by "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy.
When the nuclear power plants are coming off the assembly line and being hooked up to the grid by the dozens, to the cheering of the AGW crowd (instead of omni-obstructionism)... then I will believe that they belive it.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
I would actually expect global warming (assuming it exists) to make hurricanes weaker. It warms the temperate and polar regions more than it warms the tropical and sub-tropical -- resulting in less temperature differential, which means less available energy to run those massive heat engines we call hurricanes. (Or cyclones, or typhoons...)
So, the people who are supporting this think it's a good idea to set a precedent that the way to outlaw people offending you is to go on a bloody berserk rampage killing random uninvolved people whenever you are offended?
Even if it were made illegal to offend Wahabiists, and that miraculously caused them to become peaceful, is this really a precedent anyone wants to set? Do we really want the Scientologists to pick up on that lesson?
Getting away from the whole "undead felines" thing, what are the implications for what was supposed to be the next big thing for secure communications, Quantum Encryption?
My understanding of quantum encryption was that what theoretically made it secure was that any attempt to read the data by a man in the middle would necessarily corrupt the data, making the tap obvious. But if the man in the middle is able to read the qbits without changing them, doesn't the whole concept of quantum encryption fail?
I personally have met no "Nutcase A's" among Obama supporters,...
Check out the "Zombietime" web site, and you'll get pictures and descriptions of a number of the Bay Area's finest examples of the type. (Note: parts of this site are bodaciously NSFW... The Full Monty of the Bay Area tradition of naked protestors is on display here. What Has Been Seen Can Not Be Un-seen.)
Yes, I know, "Zombie" has (his/her) biases. and yes, does have an agenda. It was quite interesting to see wider views of the same scene shown on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, to see the "spontaneous" demonstration being orchestrated by a woman with a bullhorn wearing a North Korean flag T-shirt.
Yes, I am also aware that that woman, and many of the protestors in the area, are far from Obama supporters, and actually consider him to be a far-right-winger.
What astonishes me is that people aren't installing more of these Philips lights—they are amazing
At about $30 each? "Well, there's your problem right there!"
I'd love to replace all my incandescents with these. I think the color of them will result in a higher Wife Acceptance Factor than CFLs, which I've encountered a lot of resistance to. But at that price? No. Bring them down under $10, and I'll start buying a bunch.
Note that I said "taxpayers fleeing the state", not "corporations".
Almost everything in the replies to my posting has been sloganeering with little apparent thought, a whole lot of assumptions (mostly wildly wrong) about what I was saying, and not much understanding of what I actually said.
It's not just massive corporations fleeing California. Massive corporations can usually get a tax and regulatory environment they can live with, with the added "bonus" that it shuts down upstart competition. One of the examples I bring up from time to time, from back before digital had almost completely engulfed the photography market, was an article written by the owner of a small photo shop in the Bay Area who wanted to expand his shop into the vacant store next to his in the strip mall. After spending a few thousand dollars and the better part of a year on bureacratic paperwork hoops, and no end in sight, he took a short vacation to Reno, and just for giggles, decided to check on how expensive it would be to open a shop in Nevada. Not planning to move or anything, just out of curiosity.
He got his business license on the spot.
When he got home, he closed his shop, sold everything, and moved to Nevada, where he was doing pretty well at the time. Doubtless, the digital revolution has done him in, too, along with most of the rest of the "chemicals and darkrooms" photography industry, but that would have happened if he'd stayed in California, too.
State-by-state solutions are doomed in the US because of regulatory arbitrage.
In other words, because California can't put up an iron curtain blocking the freeways leaving the state, they can't keep the over-milked taxpayers from fleeing the state.
This... What's more, when someone claims to be oh so very concerned about CO2, but not only doesn't support nuclear power, but agitates against nuclear power -- they aren't really concerned about CO2. Not really. They either just flat out do not care enough about the issue to take any effort at all educate themselves, or they have another agenda entirely.
I also installed WOT with NoScript, which lets me (with some inconvenience... it should be a single click, or hover-over popup, rather than several clicks) see what each kind of site blocked by NoScript is. If it's advertising, I mark it "Untrusted."
Slashdot Mirror
Fuel reprocesssing != breeder reactors. Though, of course, breeder reactors will also need reprocessing infrastructure.
That TED debate has a quote from Stuart Brand that stries me as very insightful, going straight to the heart of the matter:
"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithmetic."
The "sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" folks just won't do the arithmetic.
So, I've started calling them "Arithmetic Deniers".
Let's be reasonable -- this is a report by a group of people who have a bug up their rear about religion to the extent they want their shoes to be atheist. (Puns aside, what's religious about shoes, anyway, for Hitchens' sake?) I'm not particularly interested in reports like this from someone pushing an agenda that hard.
Likewise, I wouldn't be interested in hearing from the Phelps cult about packages festooned with their "God hates fags" crap getting lost in the mail, either.
If IE 10+ is actually standards complient, what will break if it's "Firefox impersonation" causes web sites to treat it as if were standards complient?
I really don't see the problem here. Those antique versions of IE from the last century will still identify the same way, so the web sites designed to cater to crufty old browsers from the previous century won't treat them any differently than they do now.
The obvious potential problem would be that if Microsoft went back to do their old trick of making up their own standards incompatible with everyone else, then web pages wouldn't work with the new browser. But I think the web environment has changed enough that if they were to do that, the rest of the world wouldn't go along with it. I suspect the folks at Microsoft are aware that such a move would accelerate the switch to Firefox, Chrome, etc.
Not quite true. Your company might rely on "software as a service" companies (ironically companies just like phishme,) which means you will get a lot of false positives!
Consider Joe Lowlypeon getting an email from Jane Q. Important, the Senior VP of HR, asking them to take an employee satisfaction survey, and it contains a link to surveymonkey.com.
This.
At a previous employer, I got an email "from" the HR department that hit every "phish/scam" warning. There was nothing in the Received: header IP addresses or the actual domains in the links that had anything to do with the company. The HREFs in the email were of the classic "fraudulent link" form <a href="12horses.com/long-serial-number-path"> hr.companydomain.com </a>. I had never heard of, "12 Horses", which name (before I knew who they were) just screams "Fly-by-night randomly generated domain."
At first glance, obvious phish. After careful examination of the email, I concluded it was obvious phish. Carefully crafted spear-phishing, but definitely phish. Everybody in the email security group said it looked like phish. So, I sounded the alarm, that we were under attack. Then HR admitted it really was theirs. (Actually, indignantly declared it was legit, and why would anyone ever question it?)
In that kind of environment, how is the average user, who doesn't examine Received headers or HTML source code, going to cope?
Too many of these ideas are tossed out by people who don't really understand the issues, and it shows.
But hey, since when did that ever stop anyone, me included?
My thought on the subject: The government doesn't get to decide that a company is "too big to fail" and step in -- until it does fail. At that point, part of the rules of the bailout are: (1) the company gets split up into parts that are not too big to fail, (2) none of the current officers of the company are permitted to have any position as an officer or board member of any of the pieces, and (3) none of the pieces are permitted to merge with or aquire each other for (x) years.
The "7 round limit" bans just about every sidearm used by every law enforcement officer in the entire country. Few LEOs still use revolvers or the 1911 .45. Most other pistols used by law enforcement hold at least 10 rounds.
If you call the police and say: "somebody is trying to kill me", you will have a whole bunch of police units coming to you to protect you. See witness protection, for examples.
Google "Bonnie Elmasri". Sure worked for her and her children, didn't it? Oh, wait, it didn't.
Problem -- This is something you would like to avoid doing in general, because you don't want to let the spammer know that the email was sent to a mailbox that is read. With these, you can't avoid it, alas.
On the other hand, just the fact of obfuscation of this sort can be taken as evidence that the sender of the email has something to hide. Are there any non-phishy reasons for an email sender to do this? I can think of some plausible legitimate reasons that someone might think it was a good idea ... but these days, if you don't want your email blocked, you will find it necessary to avoid doing anything that might be interpreted as spammy-looking.
(If you really have a legitimate need to discuss ED drugs in email... Oh, well, sucks to be you. Or use PGP.)
It looks like they're using "Shapelock" plastic -- this is marvelous stuff. I got 2 kilos of the generic (polycaprolactone plastic beads) a while back, and it's great for all kinds of projects. I haven't used it for earbuds, though.
Don't leave it in your car on a hot day, though... it will melt. (I found that out with the "windshield washer jet cleaner" I made using it.)
Let's face the facts: Psychopaths like this do this sort of thing for one reason and one reason only: They have a narcissitic need to get their names on TV and in the newspapers and have the whole country talking about them, and they know from past history that this sort of atrocity will get them exactly what they crave.
If it wasn't guns, it'd be a propane tank -- and if the psychopath knew enough to BLEVE the tank, he could take out ten times as many kids as this one did.
If I may make a modest proposal, if you really want to prevent these things, what needs to be done is shut down the sensastionalistic reporting of these incidents. Don't give the psychopaths what they want, and they won't do it. Outlaw reporting of these incidents. Send any reporters who violate the ban to prison, and shut down the media outlets that violate the ban.
Do it for the children.
(Constitution? What's this Constitution you speak of? Haven't we aready established that it's a dead letter if you intone that "Do it for the children" incantation?
Everybody knows that the laws of physics are written in Washington DC, right? Pass a law, and reality must bend.
Well, everyone in Washington DC thinks so, anyway.
Personally, I have my doubts that the people claiming "Global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels, and it will kill us all if we don't STOP RIGHT NOW" folks really believe what they claim to believe.
If they believed it, wouldn't they be gung-ho to replace all our fossil-fuel-burning energy with a source capable of powering industrial/technological civilization that doesn't release CO2?
You'd think so, but (yes, there are exceptions) for the most part, those most gung-ho on the "Stop releasing CO2" thing are also the most vehement "No Nukes Shut Them All Down NOW" folks.
Instead, they pretend to believe, and ask those of us who can do arithmetic to believe, that industrial/technological civilization can be entirely powered by "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy.
When the nuclear power plants are coming off the assembly line and being hooked up to the grid by the dozens, to the cheering of the AGW crowd (instead of omni-obstructionism) ... then I will believe that they belive it.
Sandy was a category 1 hurricane. In 1938, landfall was made by a category 3 hurricane. So is global warming making the hurricanes weaker?
I would actually expect global warming (assuming it exists) to make hurricanes weaker. It warms the temperate and polar regions more than it warms the tropical and sub-tropical -- resulting in less temperature differential, which means less available energy to run those massive heat engines we call hurricanes. (Or cyclones, or typhoons...)
http://www.hulu.com/watch/30476
So, the people who are supporting this think it's a good idea to set a precedent that the way to outlaw people offending you is to go on a bloody berserk rampage killing random uninvolved people whenever you are offended?
Even if it were made illegal to offend Wahabiists, and that miraculously caused them to become peaceful, is this really a precedent anyone wants to set? Do we really want the Scientologists to pick up on that lesson?
Getting away from the whole "undead felines" thing, what are the implications for what was supposed to be the next big thing for secure communications, Quantum Encryption?
My understanding of quantum encryption was that what theoretically made it secure was that any attempt to read the data by a man in the middle would necessarily corrupt the data, making the tap obvious. But if the man in the middle is able to read the qbits without changing them, doesn't the whole concept of quantum encryption fail?
I personally have met no "Nutcase A's" among Obama supporters,...
Check out the "Zombietime" web site, and you'll get pictures and descriptions of a number of the Bay Area's finest examples of the type. (Note: parts of this site are bodaciously NSFW... The Full Monty of the Bay Area tradition of naked protestors is on display here. What Has Been Seen Can Not Be Un-seen.)
Yes, I know, "Zombie" has (his/her) biases. and yes, does have an agenda. It was quite interesting to see wider views of the same scene shown on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, to see the "spontaneous" demonstration being orchestrated by a woman with a bullhorn wearing a North Korean flag T-shirt.
Yes, I am also aware that that woman, and many of the protestors in the area, are far from Obama supporters, and actually consider him to be a far-right-winger.
What astonishes me is that people aren't installing more of these Philips lights—they are amazing
At about $30 each? "Well, there's your problem right there!"
I'd love to replace all my incandescents with these. I think the color of them will result in a higher Wife Acceptance Factor than CFLs, which I've encountered a lot of resistance to. But at that price? No. Bring them down under $10, and I'll start buying a bunch.
Note that I said "taxpayers fleeing the state", not "corporations".
Almost everything in the replies to my posting has been sloganeering with little apparent thought, a whole lot of assumptions (mostly wildly wrong) about what I was saying, and not much understanding of what I actually said.
It's not just massive corporations fleeing California. Massive corporations can usually get a tax and regulatory environment they can live with, with the added "bonus" that it shuts down upstart competition. One of the examples I bring up from time to time, from back before digital had almost completely engulfed the photography market, was an article written by the owner of a small photo shop in the Bay Area who wanted to expand his shop into the vacant store next to his in the strip mall. After spending a few thousand dollars and the better part of a year on bureacratic paperwork hoops, and no end in sight, he took a short vacation to Reno, and just for giggles, decided to check on how expensive it would be to open a shop in Nevada. Not planning to move or anything, just out of curiosity.
He got his business license on the spot.
When he got home, he closed his shop, sold everything, and moved to Nevada, where he was doing pretty well at the time. Doubtless, the digital revolution has done him in, too, along with most of the rest of the "chemicals and darkrooms" photography industry, but that would have happened if he'd stayed in California, too.
State-by-state solutions are doomed in the US because of regulatory arbitrage.
In other words, because California can't put up an iron curtain blocking the freeways leaving the state, they can't keep the over-milked taxpayers from fleeing the state.
Tough cookies.
This... What's more, when someone claims to be oh so very concerned about CO2, but not only doesn't support nuclear power, but agitates against nuclear power -- they aren't really concerned about CO2. Not really. They either just flat out do not care enough about the issue to take any effort at all educate themselves, or they have another agenda entirely.
My immediate thought was...
http://xkcd.com/327/
One would hope that a bank or other financial institution would do a better job than Little Tommy Tables' school.
But I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't.
Shouldn't this be considered a third strike for the whole concept of automated DMCA takedowns?
I also allow ads, but not scripts in ads.
I also installed WOT with NoScript, which lets me (with some inconvenience... it should be a single click, or hover-over popup, rather than several clicks) see what each kind of site blocked by NoScript is. If it's advertising, I mark it "Untrusted."
Nobody needs to run a script to show me their ad.