My Social Security Number (SSN) is an account number. Why is it used by so many companies as a form of authentication?
Especially considering that many of them have no interest at all in putting money into said account. Thus giving them the information makes about as much sense as giving them your bank account details.
The problem has never been that SSNs were widely known. Giving everybody a unique piece of information that can distinguish this John Smith from that John Smith is a very practical method.
Even then it's only intended for certain purposes. If a school needs to distinguish between two students with the same name it's really up to them to work out how to. Ditto for a bank with several customers having the same name.
I don't believe that any law changing this has ever passed. Companies and governments (State, local, and federal) just started using the SS# to ID people because every legal resident had one. Some states use the SS# as the drivers license #, some colleges use the SS# as the student ID. If my recollection of the wording of the SSA is correct this is technically a violation of it, but nobody ever enforces it
The longer this kind of abuse go on the harder it is to do anything about it.
The problem is that your SSN is both a public ID and a secret used to validate that ID. So long as a single bit of information is used as both the public and private bits of that equation there's no way to solve this problem no matter how many ID numbers you generate.
If anything declaring SSNs "private" is likely to make the problem worst as more fools will think it is secure in some way or other.
In any case, the media is working as hard as it can to link ANPR protesters to terrorism. Some guy has been sending letter bombs to organisations involved with ANPR and congestion charging.
As with the case of the BNP guy who was caught with bomb making materials the media appears to be trying hard to avoid using the word "terrorist" in relation to the letter bomb suspect. Maybe they are still trying to teach him Arabic...
Doesn't the toast need to be taped to the cat's feet instead? If the toast is taped to the cat's back, the cat will simply land on its feet and walk away with the toast intact (since the toast never touches the floor at all, the buttered-side-down rule would not be invoked)
You will also quickly find out the cat for "Get this thing off my back you stupid human":)
You're exactly right. But the common man doesn't understand 'efficiency gains' as something significant. Perceptually, people don't get how much energy is lost to waste heat.
They probably can understand better battery life for their laptop/phone as well as not burning their legs/ear though:) These being devices which can get obviously hot whilst in operation.
Besides, he could go after full penalties now, which is significantly more than 150 pounds. Sure, it's nothing to the MPAA, but still, it doesn't look good that they do so much to enforce IP then they lose in court for similar violations
If he sued for GPB150 he'd probably get a default judgement against them. Anything up to GBP 5,000 would be handled via the "Small Claims Procedure". Which means even if they can sucessfully defend against a claim they have no chance of getting any money they spend on lawyers back.
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining.
It rather depends what assets the MPAA itself has. If it has assets it can itself be sued (or counter sued). There are also things such as "Anton Piller Orders" (or similar) which can be employed against it.
If I torrent a movie and I get caught, can I simply delete it to solve the problem? No. you can bet your ass that the MPAA will jump into court as soon as the can and charge me with the highest crime possible,
Possibly the one thing they wouldn't want would for the case to actually come before a judge though...
If that is really their reponse, go ahead and substitute the word "Blog" with "Song", and throw it back at them.
Maybe "Movie" or "TV Show":)
Maybe a very dim light will start to glow in their puny little minds.
Assuming they came fitted with irony circuits. And these didn't burn out when they started producing better fiction about "pirates" than the entertainment which is ment to be their primary product...
Simply the fact that they went through the trouble of removing all the links and pictures tells me that this was a blatant attempt to scr*w the author out of his 25 Pounds. No-one goes through the trouble of doing this *ON A PUBLIC PRODUCTION WEBSERVER* just for testing.
More to the point no-one does this by "accident". These are the delibrate actions of someone who knows that they are enguaging "piracy". Interestingly most of the people the MPAA are making a fuss about tend to leave things such as credits and title sequences in. I.E. they don't try to pass off their warez as their own work!
Here, I suggest contact MPAA about the whole piracy issue and point them to the offending party; themselves.
Remember also to mention "This film is not yet rated" and any other examples you can find. It's also interesting that one of their catagories is "PARALLEL IMPORTS". They also greatly abuse the term "theft". About the only time the word is actually used correctly is "THEATRICAL PRINT THEFT". Wonder what they mean by "SIGNAL THEFT"...
An author or copyright holder may put whatever conditions he/she pleases on distribution; it is, after all, the point of the thing. Should you not want to accede to said conditions, your relief is to not make copies of the work.
Or to negotiate directly with the copyright holder. The point of attaching a distribution licence to a work is that it is generally both to the advantage of third parties and the copyright holder.
Let's just make that real clear for y'all, shall we? If a license were to be found invalid (highly unlikely, I don't know why so many believe it's liable to happen) the work covered would be illegal to copy/distribute for everybody but the copyright holder. Period.
It would also depend of the original licence terms, a court case may amend something like "... if A or B..." to "... if B...". Especially if the original text states something to the effect of "If any part of this is found to be against the law of the land, then the rest still stands."
It doesn't become public domain, and it doesn't become open season for anybody and everybody to use and distribute as they see fit. Can we please put that particular adolescent fantasy to bed now?
IIRC this is also SCO's belief. Though it probably would be quite just for a court to say "all of your stuff is in the public domain, now" to anyone who even tried to use this as a defence for copyright infringement.
It's not clear that copyright violation is occurring - because it is not clear that a linkware 'license' is a valid one under the law.
If the 'license' is invalid then it's absolutly the case that copyright infringement did take place. Since the default situation is that you need the permission of the copyright holder to make a copy. But these people went much further than simply copying they also apparently removed copyright notices and identification of the author from the code. Which makes this look like intentional software piracy.
Wouldn't it be nice to send the friendly folks from the BSA to do a complete software audit of the MPAA?
Maybe even the Business Software Alliance sponsored by Birmingham Small Arms. Possibly before applying a DMCA takedown notice to the MPAA's (entire) website.
There would be a standard period of time between the release of the first part and the issuance of the patent. During that period, if someone else can show how it is done, then the application is denied and all documents become public domain - both of the applicant's documents, and the second person's explanation.
What would happen if none of the submitted ideas closely match that of the patent applicant's, possibly they are all different. There's also the problem of determining a close match if the applicant has done something like using non-standard terms or language. In which case you might wind up with the situation of several responses which resemble each other, but not the patent application.
The USPTO needs to assemble a panel of 4-year-olds. Each time a patent application comes in, the panel would be asked how they would implement the title of the patent (they do not see the content). If the panel comes up with a process resembling the original patent, it would be denied.
Or maybe they could publish the title and have anyone interested try and come up with the rest of the patent. (Or explain that the title is nonsense.)
1. When a registrar uploads data to root DNS servers, it also puts some hash of the numbers in a lookup table.
2. Browsers are modified to lookup these hashes in #1 to determine if the DNS servers it is talking to are ok.
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings. i.e. with the default settings you could connect to it for configuration, but no Internet access until the password, SSID, etc had been changed.
Let me ask you this: when are children capable of exercising independent thought? I have a couple of kids, and I can tell you that it begins at a very early age. So, given that, it is to be expected that if a sample of 100 children are raised under identical circumstances at home, there will be a great deal of variance in their behaviors. Some will do exactly what they are told, some will explore the boundaries, and some will disobey every chance they get. How can any rational person conclude that the parents are culpable? Furthermore, how can any rational person believe that at 18 a person is mature enough to be responsible with tobacco, or that they become responsible in their consumption of alcohol at age 21? I read plenty of cases of people over 21 getting liquored up and driving, engaging in fights, and all sorts of other anti-social, irresponsible behavior ---- which gives lie to the assumption at a certain age people just automagically grow up.
It starts to look even more arbitraty the wider you look. Ages of consent vary widely (even in the US where they are set at state level, though the US tends towards the upper age range) ditto for ages of consuming certain recreational drugs. Even comparing the US with Canada and Mexico reveals some vastly different ages. Then to add to the mix you have the likes of Judaism considering women to be adult at 12 and men at 13. With Israeli law saying something else...
1) Porn blocking software that blocks legitemate content, as when, for instance a major software package that is supposed to be blocking porn, etc was blocking things like the Democratic Party website.
Many of the compilers of such blacklists appear to have rather extreme rightwing views. The greater risk is that the falsely lable as "porn" something a little more obscure than a major political party. Where it can be a lot less obvious to any random third party that there is a "mistake".
2) Laws requiring bad software like the above to be installed in schools and public libraries. I don't think most of us mind the idea of schools and workplaces blocking porn as long as that is really what they are blocking.
What many people fail to understand is that there need to be different blacklisting criteria for different environments. There's plenty of stuff that isn't in any way "offensive" but which desirable to (even aimed at) school students which has little to no educational value. Thus it's desirable to block in a school, whilst being fine at home or in a public library, because otherwise students will waste time and bandwidth. Conversely there is "offensive" material which might be an important part of the curriculum.
I doubt you could find a majority of slashdotters opposed to the idea of parents being given *working* tools to stem the tide of pornography flying before their toddlers' faces.
Thing is that toddlers don't know enough to be offended by pornography. Even pre-teens may well regard it as "noise".
(especially when the prosecutor and the government wants to suppress it, like when pushing for statutory rape cases for 17.5 year olds with fake IDs at bars, etc).
In such cases might it not make more sense for the law to protect other bar patrons. e.g. for the teens with fake IDs to be considered "rapists" in the same way that someone who drugs someone can be.
13 is pubecent... a guy attracted to a 13 year old is a male animal attracted to a fertile female animnal.... he is doing exaclty what millions of years of evolution taught him to do and society tried to unteach.... and on some level... failed.
I think thats my real problem. There is grass on the field. a 13 year old girl will often have a strong sex drive. The few women who I know that have been really open and honest about their teenage years have told me they would spend hours masturbating at that age.
Dispite sexist stereotypes not all women are "passive" when it comes to sexual encounters. Indeed a group of women with a high sex drive who tend to be ignored by most men may well be those most likely to reject such a stereotype.
Admittedly I was ignoring the fact that "sexual assault" includes "consensual" sex if the law says one of the parties "couldn't consent". The difference between everyday and technical legal use of terms can be head spinning.
There was a case not too long back where an underage girl got into a bar with a fake id, was picked up by a major league baseball player (ok this was maybe 6-8 years ago... doesn't seem that long ago).
Even though it was in a bar, and even though she had used fake id to get in, he was still convicted. Don't know if he appealed or the conviction got overturned, but I do remember being rather incensed that such a moronic verdict was handed down.
Indeed it would make more sense to consider him to have been the victim of "sexual assault", even "rape". If there was any cause for criminal charges to be brought. Any law which automatically lables someone "victim" or "perpetrator" simply because they are a member of some arbitary group, rather than actually looking at the facts of the case is fundermentally unjust. Even worst there will be people who will exploit their protected status.
Slashdot Mirror
My Social Security Number (SSN) is an account number. Why is it used by so many companies as a form of authentication?
Especially considering that many of them have no interest at all in putting money into said account. Thus giving them the information makes about as much sense as giving them your bank account details.
The problem has never been that SSNs were widely known. Giving everybody a unique piece of information that can distinguish this John Smith from that John Smith is a very practical method.
Even then it's only intended for certain purposes. If a school needs to distinguish between two students with the same name it's really up to them to work out how to. Ditto for a bank with several customers having the same name.
I don't believe that any law changing this has ever passed. Companies and governments (State, local, and federal) just started using the SS# to ID people because every legal resident had one. Some states use the SS# as the drivers license #, some colleges use the SS# as the student ID. If my recollection of the wording of the SSA is correct this is technically a violation of it, but nobody ever enforces it
The longer this kind of abuse go on the harder it is to do anything about it.
The problem is that your SSN is both a public ID and a secret used to validate that ID. So long as a single bit of information is used as both the public and private bits of that equation there's no way to solve this problem no matter how many ID numbers you generate.
If anything declaring SSNs "private" is likely to make the problem worst as more fools will think it is secure in some way or other.
In any case, the media is working as hard as it can to link ANPR protesters to terrorism. Some guy has been sending letter bombs to organisations involved with ANPR and congestion charging.
As with the case of the BNP guy who was caught with bomb making materials the media appears to be trying hard to avoid using the word "terrorist" in relation to the letter bomb suspect. Maybe they are still trying to teach him Arabic...
Doesn't the toast need to be taped to the cat's feet instead? If the toast is taped to the cat's back, the cat will simply land on its feet and walk away with the toast intact (since the toast never touches the floor at all, the buttered-side-down rule would not be invoked)
:)
You will also quickly find out the cat for "Get this thing off my back you stupid human"
You're exactly right. But the common man doesn't understand 'efficiency gains' as something significant. Perceptually, people don't get how much energy is lost to waste heat.
:) These being devices which can get obviously hot whilst in operation.
They probably can understand better battery life for their laptop/phone as well as not burning their legs/ear though
Besides, he could go after full penalties now, which is significantly more than 150 pounds. Sure, it's nothing to the MPAA, but still, it doesn't look good that they do so much to enforce IP then they lose in court for similar violations
If he sued for GPB150 he'd probably get a default judgement against them. Anything up to GBP 5,000 would be handled via the "Small Claims Procedure". Which means even if they can sucessfully defend against a claim they have no chance of getting any money they spend on lawyers back.
If the MPAA makes similar assumptions when suing people I don't think they can reasonably object to him using these assumptions.
The MPAA probably wouldn't understand the irony. A judge might though...
As it is now, the MPAA appears to exist for the sake of making lawsuits; its profit is based on the success of the lawsuits, and it is presumably paid by its members the startup cash needed to hire all those lawyers, to generate enough income to eventually make the lawsuit engine self-sustaining.
It rather depends what assets the MPAA itself has. If it has assets it can itself be sued (or counter sued). There are also things such as "Anton Piller Orders" (or similar) which can be employed against it.
If I torrent a movie and I get caught, can I simply delete it to solve the problem? No. you can bet your ass that the MPAA will jump into court as soon as the can and charge me with the highest crime possible,
Possibly the one thing they wouldn't want would for the case to actually come before a judge though...
If that is really their reponse, go ahead and substitute the word "Blog" with "Song", and throw it back at them.
:)
Maybe "Movie" or "TV Show"
Maybe a very dim light will start to glow in their puny little minds.
Assuming they came fitted with irony circuits. And these didn't burn out when they started producing better fiction about "pirates" than the entertainment which is ment to be their primary product...
Simply the fact that they went through the trouble of removing all the links and pictures tells me that this was a blatant attempt to scr*w the author out of his 25 Pounds. No-one goes through the trouble of doing this *ON A PUBLIC PRODUCTION WEBSERVER* just for testing.
More to the point no-one does this by "accident". These are the delibrate actions of someone who knows that they are enguaging "piracy". Interestingly most of the people the MPAA are making a fuss about tend to leave things such as credits and title sequences in. I.E. they don't try to pass off their warez as their own work!
Here, I suggest contact MPAA about the whole piracy issue and point them to the offending party; themselves.
Remember also to mention "This film is not yet rated" and any other examples you can find.
It's also interesting that one of their catagories is "PARALLEL IMPORTS". They also greatly abuse the term "theft". About the only time the word is actually used correctly is "THEATRICAL PRINT THEFT". Wonder what they mean by "SIGNAL THEFT"...
An author or copyright holder may put whatever conditions he/she pleases on distribution; it is, after all, the point of the thing. Should you not want to accede to said conditions, your relief is to not make copies of the work.
..." to "... if B ...". Especially if the original text states something to the effect of "If any part of this is found to be against the law of the land, then the rest still stands."
Or to negotiate directly with the copyright holder. The point of attaching a distribution licence to a work is that it is generally both to the advantage of third parties and the copyright holder.
Let's just make that real clear for y'all, shall we? If a license were to be found invalid (highly unlikely, I don't know why so many believe it's liable to happen) the work covered would be illegal to copy/distribute for everybody but the copyright holder. Period.
It would also depend of the original licence terms, a court case may amend something like "... if A or B
It doesn't become public domain, and it doesn't become open season for anybody and everybody to use and distribute as they see fit. Can we please put that particular adolescent fantasy to bed now?
IIRC this is also SCO's belief. Though it probably would be quite just for a court to say "all of your stuff is in the public domain, now" to anyone who even tried to use this as a defence for copyright infringement.
It's not clear that copyright violation is occurring - because it is not clear that a linkware 'license' is a valid one under the law.
If the 'license' is invalid then it's absolutly the case that copyright infringement did take place. Since the default situation is that you need the permission of the copyright holder to make a copy.
But these people went much further than simply copying they also apparently removed copyright notices and identification of the author from the code. Which makes this look like intentional software piracy.
Wouldn't it be nice to send the friendly folks from the BSA to do a complete software audit of the MPAA?
Maybe even the Business Software Alliance sponsored by Birmingham Small Arms. Possibly before applying a DMCA takedown notice to the MPAA's (entire) website.
There would be a standard period of time between the release of the first part and the issuance of the patent. During that period, if someone else can show how it is done, then the application is denied and all documents become public domain - both of the applicant's documents, and the second person's explanation.
What would happen if none of the submitted ideas closely match that of the patent applicant's, possibly they are all different. There's also the problem of determining a close match if the applicant has done something like using non-standard terms or language. In which case you might wind up with the situation of several responses which resemble each other, but not the patent application.
The USPTO needs to assemble a panel of 4-year-olds. Each time a patent application comes in, the panel would be asked how they would implement the title of the patent (they do not see the content). If the panel comes up with a process resembling the original patent, it would be denied.
Or maybe they could publish the title and have anyone interested try and come up with the rest of the patent. (Or explain that the title is nonsense.)
1. When a registrar uploads data to root DNS servers, it also puts some hash of the numbers in a lookup table.
2. Browsers are modified to lookup these hashes in #1 to determine if the DNS servers it is talking to are ok.
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings. i.e. with the default settings you could connect to it for configuration, but no Internet access until the password, SSID, etc had been changed.
Let me ask you this: when are children capable of exercising independent thought? I have a couple of kids, and I can tell you that it begins at a very early age. So, given that, it is to be expected that if a sample of 100 children are raised under identical circumstances at home, there will be a great deal of variance in their behaviors. Some will do exactly what they are told, some will explore the boundaries, and some will disobey every chance they get. How can any rational person conclude that the parents are culpable? Furthermore, how can any rational person believe that at 18 a person is mature enough to be responsible with tobacco, or that they become responsible in their consumption of alcohol at age 21? I read plenty of cases of people over 21 getting liquored up and driving, engaging in fights, and all sorts of other anti-social, irresponsible behavior ---- which gives lie to the assumption at a certain age people just automagically grow up.
It starts to look even more arbitraty the wider you look. Ages of consent vary widely (even in the US where they are set at state level, though the US tends towards the upper age range) ditto for ages of consuming certain recreational drugs. Even comparing the US with Canada and Mexico reveals some vastly different ages.
Then to add to the mix you have the likes of Judaism considering women to be adult at 12 and men at 13. With Israeli law saying something else...
1) Porn blocking software that blocks legitemate content, as when, for instance a major software package that is supposed to be blocking porn, etc was blocking things like the Democratic Party website.
Many of the compilers of such blacklists appear to have rather extreme rightwing views. The greater risk is that the falsely lable as "porn" something a little more obscure than a major political party. Where it can be a lot less obvious to any random third party that there is a "mistake".
2) Laws requiring bad software like the above to be installed in schools and public libraries. I don't think most of us mind the idea of schools and workplaces blocking porn as long as that is really what they are blocking.
What many people fail to understand is that there need to be different blacklisting criteria for different environments. There's plenty of stuff that isn't in any way "offensive" but which desirable to (even aimed at) school students which has little to no educational value. Thus it's desirable to block in a school, whilst being fine at home or in a public library, because otherwise students will waste time and bandwidth. Conversely there is "offensive" material which might be an important part of the curriculum.
I doubt you could find a majority of slashdotters opposed to the idea of parents being given *working* tools to stem the tide of pornography flying before their toddlers' faces.
Thing is that toddlers don't know enough to be offended by pornography. Even pre-teens may well regard it as "noise".
(especially when the prosecutor and the government wants to suppress it, like when pushing for statutory rape cases for 17.5 year olds with fake IDs at bars, etc).
In such cases might it not make more sense for the law to protect other bar patrons. e.g. for the teens with fake IDs to be considered "rapists" in the same way that someone who drugs someone can be.
13 is pubecent... a guy attracted to a 13 year old is a male animal attracted to a fertile female animnal.... he is doing exaclty what millions of years of evolution taught him to do and society tried to unteach.... and on some level... failed.
I think thats my real problem. There is grass on the field. a 13 year old girl will often have a strong sex drive. The few women who I know that have been really open and honest about their teenage years have told me they would spend hours masturbating at that age.
Dispite sexist stereotypes not all women are "passive" when it comes to sexual encounters. Indeed a group of women with a high sex drive who tend to be ignored by most men may well be those most likely to reject such a stereotype.
The decoy/actor is always over 18, and is therefore an adult.
If this person is anyone other than a professional actor it might not be a bad idea to question his/her state of mind.
Admittedly I was ignoring the fact that "sexual assault" includes "consensual" sex if the law says one of the parties "couldn't consent". The difference between everyday and technical legal use of terms can be head spinning.
There was a case not too long back where an underage girl got into a bar with a fake id, was picked up by a major league baseball player (ok this was maybe 6-8 years ago... doesn't seem that long ago).
Even though it was in a bar, and even though she had used fake id to get in, he was still convicted. Don't know if he appealed or the conviction got overturned, but I do remember being rather incensed that such a moronic verdict was handed down.
Indeed it would make more sense to consider him to have been the victim of "sexual assault", even "rape". If there was any cause for criminal charges to be brought.
Any law which automatically lables someone "victim" or "perpetrator" simply because they are a member of some arbitary group, rather than actually looking at the facts of the case is fundermentally unjust. Even worst there will be people who will exploit their protected status.