Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was. There's a compatibility list of all PS2 games somewhere, and the compatibility varies wildly between the first five PS3 models. The ones with the actual PS2 hardware in them support some games but not others, and the ones with the software emulation support games the hardware-based ones didn't but then don't support some of the games the hardware-based ones did. What "non-compatible" means can also vary wildly: I specifically remember that Persona 3 (the base game before the FES expansion) had an issue where it would randomly wipe/corrupt save files at a point thirty or more hours into the game on some systems and not on others, while the FES expansion had the same issue but with different versions.
The other problem was that Sony had no way of patching most of these bugs since in a lot of cases they resulted from ugly hacks in the code that were used to make the game run properly on the PS2 hardware and short of re-coding large portions of each non-compatible game there was no real fix for it.
They absolutely can. In late 2011, one of the graphics card manufacturers did a promotion where they bundled Steam keys for Dirt 3 (which was a $60 game at the time) with their cards. The exact delivery system involved something like entering a code from a piece of paper inside the card box into a thing on the manufacturer's site, which would then spit out a Steam key.
Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that you could access a directory on the manufacturer's website that had a single.txt file with all of the keys (several thousand of them) listed inside. The list circulated around the internet, and as a result a whole bunch of people got the game for free. The manufacturer found out a few days later what had happened and went to Valve, who immediately began revoking the game from people's accounts. I don't know how far they actually got, since a couple of people I know who did it still have the game on their accounts today - though I think that might be because they figured out that some of the keys had been used by people who had actually bought the videocard and were now confused as to why access to their game had suddenly been revoked.
The problem for Valve is that it's really hard to make a working policy on this sort of thing. Years ago, they used to lock or ban accounts for receiving gifted games that came from a stolen credit card or if the card used to make the purchase had been issued a chargeback. The problem there became that you'd have people banned for no reason other than that they accepted a gift from someone who later had their credit card stolen or had the charge disputed for some other reason. I can recall at least one instance where someone got banned trying to get around the censorship restrictions in Germany by having someone from the US buy them a US copy of the game.. only to find out that the person in the US was a minor using their parent's credit card and that the parent disputed the charge, resulting in a ban. They've since changed their policy slightly (in that they'll usually only ban the person who made the actual transaction and not the person who received the gift) but it's still imperfect.
At the same time, Valve also had the same issues with Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike: GO. There were numerous reported cases of Russian or Chinese credit card thieves using stolen credit cards to make in-game purchases (usually "keys" to unlock potentially valuable items) which they would then trade to an unsuspecting victim knowing that Valve was reluctant to delete in-game items once they'd been traded. The scammer would then take whatever they'd gotten in trade and sell it at a fraction of market value. There was one notable Russian scammer who was moving several thousand dollars in TF2 items a week this way. Valve's response to this was to introduce one of the most user-hostile systems ever invented: you either attach a phone number to your Steam account or become almost unable to trade with 20+ day waiting periods involved.
It's not uncommon in some countries for the postal service to offer services that have nothing to do with mail. In Japan, for instance, their postal service is also one of the country's largest banks. The USPS is more the exception with their sole focus being mail than the rule.
Bitcoin being currency really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The only reason Bitcoin has value to anyone is because it can be exchanged for real currency - if it were not for the exchanges, Bitcoin would be totally worthless. I really don't see how this is any different from, say, the supposed credit card thieves buying $1500 of precious metals or stocks or baseball cards from someone while making the claim that they're going to use the metals/stocks/baseball cards to purchase stolen credit cards - and I think in any of those situations, no one would make the claim that money laundering occurred because it is clear that none of those things are currency.
For Bitcoin to be a currency, it would have to be as widely accepted as cash.. and not just by a few restaurants and a plastic surgeon, as the article states.
I'm legitimately suprised that the studio withdrew its offer on the polygraph test, given that polygraphs are a pseudoscience and that if they hired the right examiner they could easily get a result that the person is lying on every possible count.
No. Laws that require the government to prioritize US goods when purchasing things are not bills of attainder because they do not specifically identify any person or corporation not to buy goods from - "non-US entities" is a grouping that encompasses thousands of different companies. Similarly, laws requiring the purchase of supplies from approved vendors are also not bills of attainder as any vendor could potentially be approved.
The reason this bill is a bill of attainder is because it specifically names and punishes Apple without a trial.
The chemicals they're using for this sound similar to the ones used in tracer ammo. Tracer ammo is notorious for causing unintentional fires, and if this stuff has to burn hot enough to melt the lead bullets I can only imagine how effective it must be at starting fires.
While I will agree with you on the idea that decrypting phones does present the issue of usage creep, the latter part of your statement is incorrect. The Supreme Court has said that the police cannot search your locked phone without an order by a judge - ie; a police officer who wants to check your phone because they suspect they will find something on it can't stop you for an unrelated reason (dead light on your car) and demand that you hand over/unlock your phone so they can see it.
In this case, a judge has issued an order that the phone is allowed to be searched. There is absolutely nothing improper here that would conflict with the Supreme Court ruling.
The problem isn't that the GPS is wrong, the problem is that the user is in error. In the Iceland case, the driver made a typo and wound up going to a similarly-named road 250 miles away. Had he entered the correct street name, he would likely have made it to his destination without a problem. I'm guessing the Belgium-Croatia case is similar.
I've noticed that when companies start doing this sort of thing it's because they're losing money, corporate is not pleased, and they need a convienient bogeyman to blame their decreased revenues on. It will only be once they've implemented their futile anti-Adblock methods and are still losing money six months to a year down the road that they will be forced to address the real, underlying issues (a decline in article quality, a decline in relevance to their readers) that are causing them to fail.
It's funny how most cable companies allow their subscribers to purchase their own cable modems and routers, but now those same companies balk at the idea of their subscribers buying their own set-top box.
From what I recall, the attack on HBGary was actually clever social engineering, emailing one of the secretaries for one of the executives pretending to be a high-up who needed his password reset. All they really did was use the stolen login credentials to get the emails and other data off HBGary's servers and then deface their website. The subsequent "hacks" were the result of Barr using a universal password.
The problem with that statement is that HR professionals are usually required to have some knowledge of employment law. For this person, this means one of two things:
Either he saw the agreement and had no idea it could be in violation of employment law, which means he was incompetent at his own job; or he saw the agreement, knew it could be a violation and instead decided to ignore that and willfully proceed to fire these people without reporting it.
Given the level of training most companies do these days to ensure that no one violates antitrust or other employment laws, it's likely that the second one is the case.
Hopefully, AMX will be buried by thousands of incoming lawsuits for this childish behavior. The article never mentions what this backdoor would actually let someone with access to it do, but I'm assuming that the possibility existed for someone to use that backdoor to obtain classified or proprietary information. That they tried to hide the backdoor once it was discovered rather than immediately patching it out is just another piece of evidence usable by anyone wishing to sue them. I can foresee a large-scale data audit in AMX's near future as any business owning their software tries to determine whether any of their information was taken, on purpose or inadvertently.
What I don't understand is how none of these politicians who want backdoors into all encryption fail to understand that it would be just as easy for IS or Al-Qaeda or any other group that considers themselves enemies of the United States (North Korea, Iran, etc) to find and use the same backdoors against them. Sure, the government would likely continue using encryption themselves, but what's to stop IS from finding the backdoor and exploiting it to hack into the phones of foreign journalists or contractors? When (not if) IS or another group find their own way into that backdoor, they'll have essentially obtained a way of finding foreigners to behead for propaganda purposes, or to hold hostage for money in the case of Al-Qaeda or Iran, complete with real-time GPS tracking data.
What proof does she have that her husband's killers were recruited by IS via Twitter? Absolutely none. Most of IS's recruiting is done physically in person, and for obvious reasons (Twitter is a hell of a lot easier for the NSA and military to track). Hell, almost every story I've heard about people joining IS is virtually the same: they met with a person at their mosque who saw them as an impressionable target and convinced them over a long period of time that they are being oppressed by the west and need to fight back.
Most of what IS posts on Twitter is not meant for their own members but to instill fear in the people they consider their enemies.
Ever since game devs started using Denuvo, I've refused to buy anything that uses it on the grounds that it unfairly punishes the paying end-user. The devteam behind Lords of the Fallen, which was one of the first games to use Denuvo, admitted that they were sacrificing large amounts of performance (as much as 10 to 15 percent framerate) in order to use it. There were also a lot of concerns from SSD users, because Denuvo uses up a ton of read/write operations due to constantly encrypting and decrypting files, putting far more stress on an SSD than a non-Denuvo game does.
If game developers are going to sacrifice performance and the potential for mod support to use the most draconian DRM they can find, I'm not going to be buying it.
Actually, the going rate for discovery is much lower than that. There are external firms that hire people to process discovery documents - I work for one and it's the worst job I've ever had. People at this company get paid $13 an hour to prepare, scan, and index documents into a database that the actual attorneys can browse at their leisure. As an actual example from my company (which they've explicitly told me not to post in addition to the fact that I should never, ever post anything online so they can fuck right off):
My company does discovery processing for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield network of insurance companies. We get handed thousands of boxes full of paperwork dating back to the early 90s and get told to process everything. A lot of the crap - things like lunch menus, copies of publicly-released promotional material, handwritten notes about the office's Secret Santa pool - gets weeded out at this level so that no one needs to bother to look at it. I've personally seen an entire folder full of printed copies of emails that were less than five words each, something like "This is okay" or "Send back for revision" and another that contained nothing but press releases in Chinese from a firm that Blue Cross either partnered with or was considering partnering with ten-plus years ago.
Honestly, just from a common-sense perspective, 75% of the stuff we scan is so non-controversial that it is highly unlikely that it would ever appear as discovery in a lawsuit and there's really no reason that someone couldn't have just thrown it out years ago. I highly doubt that a potential insurance lawsuit is going to request copies of lunch menus from 2001 when they have the full meeting agenda available.
The workers where I am are treated like garbage. Mandatory 12-hour days to meet deadlines are common (I actually just got home from one two hours ago) and losing contracts even moreso. The pay is low, the managers are assholes, and I'm quitting in two weeks so I can try to get any job that isn't this one.
It's "voluntary" in the same way that the drinking age being 21 is voluntary. The federal government actually does not have the right to regulate drinking age: that actually falls to the states. The "mandatory" part is that the federal government will deny highway funding to any state with a drinking age under 21, which is why every state has 21 as the drinking age. While the feds likely could not say "no one without a Real ID compliant license flies" I'm sure they could stir up trouble in other ways with states that don't comply.
Asset seizures and forfeiture, especially without charges or conviction, are inherently unconstitutional.
Well see, yes and no. Asset forfeiture came about as a means of stopping organized crime - the same reason that RICO exists. The idea was to prevent the mafia from hiding all of its money, which was a legal seizure because it had come about as the result of criminal activity. Essentially, the police are using an anti-mafia law against regular people now that the mafia has largely been wiped out in the United States.
The entire reason asset forfeiture is still legal is because technically, you do have recourse if the police take your money. The problem is getting the proof together to do so.
I get that "slant-eyed" is a racist description of Asians, but there is absolutely nothing racist about the word "slant". Hell, it even mentions that the band is Asian-American.
While I understand the charges are likely based on political paranoia within Venezuela's government and a desire to find a scapegoat for their financial issues, how could a website that merely reports an exchange rate (the site in question appears to be a news site and not an actual currency exchange) be guilty of racketeering? If the exchange rate was wrong, no one would use them as a reliable source of information in the first place. This would be like trying to charge the New York Times with securities fraud because they report stock prices.
Actually, archive.org makes a pretty big impact in a lot of fields, most notably data-based journalism and computer-assisted reporting. There are a lot of government agencies that will have story-relevant data up that they then wind up taking down - sometimes because of storage costs, other times because they're trying to hide something.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was. There's a compatibility list of all PS2 games somewhere, and the compatibility varies wildly between the first five PS3 models. The ones with the actual PS2 hardware in them support some games but not others, and the ones with the software emulation support games the hardware-based ones didn't but then don't support some of the games the hardware-based ones did. What "non-compatible" means can also vary wildly: I specifically remember that Persona 3 (the base game before the FES expansion) had an issue where it would randomly wipe/corrupt save files at a point thirty or more hours into the game on some systems and not on others, while the FES expansion had the same issue but with different versions.
The other problem was that Sony had no way of patching most of these bugs since in a lot of cases they resulted from ugly hacks in the code that were used to make the game run properly on the PS2 hardware and short of re-coding large portions of each non-compatible game there was no real fix for it.
They absolutely can. In late 2011, one of the graphics card manufacturers did a promotion where they bundled Steam keys for Dirt 3 (which was a $60 game at the time) with their cards. The exact delivery system involved something like entering a code from a piece of paper inside the card box into a thing on the manufacturer's site, which would then spit out a Steam key.
Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that you could access a directory on the manufacturer's website that had a single .txt file with all of the keys (several thousand of them) listed inside. The list circulated around the internet, and as a result a whole bunch of people got the game for free. The manufacturer found out a few days later what had happened and went to Valve, who immediately began revoking the game from people's accounts. I don't know how far they actually got, since a couple of people I know who did it still have the game on their accounts today - though I think that might be because they figured out that some of the keys had been used by people who had actually bought the videocard and were now confused as to why access to their game had suddenly been revoked.
The problem for Valve is that it's really hard to make a working policy on this sort of thing. Years ago, they used to lock or ban accounts for receiving gifted games that came from a stolen credit card or if the card used to make the purchase had been issued a chargeback. The problem there became that you'd have people banned for no reason other than that they accepted a gift from someone who later had their credit card stolen or had the charge disputed for some other reason. I can recall at least one instance where someone got banned trying to get around the censorship restrictions in Germany by having someone from the US buy them a US copy of the game.. only to find out that the person in the US was a minor using their parent's credit card and that the parent disputed the charge, resulting in a ban. They've since changed their policy slightly (in that they'll usually only ban the person who made the actual transaction and not the person who received the gift) but it's still imperfect.
At the same time, Valve also had the same issues with Team Fortress 2 and Counterstrike: GO. There were numerous reported cases of Russian or Chinese credit card thieves using stolen credit cards to make in-game purchases (usually "keys" to unlock potentially valuable items) which they would then trade to an unsuspecting victim knowing that Valve was reluctant to delete in-game items once they'd been traded. The scammer would then take whatever they'd gotten in trade and sell it at a fraction of market value. There was one notable Russian scammer who was moving several thousand dollars in TF2 items a week this way. Valve's response to this was to introduce one of the most user-hostile systems ever invented: you either attach a phone number to your Steam account or become almost unable to trade with 20+ day waiting periods involved.
It's not uncommon in some countries for the postal service to offer services that have nothing to do with mail. In Japan, for instance, their postal service is also one of the country's largest banks. The USPS is more the exception with their sole focus being mail than the rule.
Bitcoin being currency really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The only reason Bitcoin has value to anyone is because it can be exchanged for real currency - if it were not for the exchanges, Bitcoin would be totally worthless. I really don't see how this is any different from, say, the supposed credit card thieves buying $1500 of precious metals or stocks or baseball cards from someone while making the claim that they're going to use the metals/stocks/baseball cards to purchase stolen credit cards - and I think in any of those situations, no one would make the claim that money laundering occurred because it is clear that none of those things are currency.
For Bitcoin to be a currency, it would have to be as widely accepted as cash.. and not just by a few restaurants and a plastic surgeon, as the article states.
I'm legitimately suprised that the studio withdrew its offer on the polygraph test, given that polygraphs are a pseudoscience and that if they hired the right examiner they could easily get a result that the person is lying on every possible count.
If the first deadly accident with these jumper cables happened in January of last year, why did they wait so long to close down to inspect?
No. Laws that require the government to prioritize US goods when purchasing things are not bills of attainder because they do not specifically identify any person or corporation not to buy goods from - "non-US entities" is a grouping that encompasses thousands of different companies. Similarly, laws requiring the purchase of supplies from approved vendors are also not bills of attainder as any vendor could potentially be approved.
The reason this bill is a bill of attainder is because it specifically names and punishes Apple without a trial.
The chemicals they're using for this sound similar to the ones used in tracer ammo. Tracer ammo is notorious for causing unintentional fires, and if this stuff has to burn hot enough to melt the lead bullets I can only imagine how effective it must be at starting fires.
While I will agree with you on the idea that decrypting phones does present the issue of usage creep, the latter part of your statement is incorrect. The Supreme Court has said that the police cannot search your locked phone without an order by a judge - ie; a police officer who wants to check your phone because they suspect they will find something on it can't stop you for an unrelated reason (dead light on your car) and demand that you hand over/unlock your phone so they can see it.
In this case, a judge has issued an order that the phone is allowed to be searched. There is absolutely nothing improper here that would conflict with the Supreme Court ruling.
The problem isn't that the GPS is wrong, the problem is that the user is in error. In the Iceland case, the driver made a typo and wound up going to a similarly-named road 250 miles away. Had he entered the correct street name, he would likely have made it to his destination without a problem. I'm guessing the Belgium-Croatia case is similar.
I've noticed that when companies start doing this sort of thing it's because they're losing money, corporate is not pleased, and they need a convienient bogeyman to blame their decreased revenues on. It will only be once they've implemented their futile anti-Adblock methods and are still losing money six months to a year down the road that they will be forced to address the real, underlying issues (a decline in article quality, a decline in relevance to their readers) that are causing them to fail.
It's funny how most cable companies allow their subscribers to purchase their own cable modems and routers, but now those same companies balk at the idea of their subscribers buying their own set-top box.
From what I recall, the attack on HBGary was actually clever social engineering, emailing one of the secretaries for one of the executives pretending to be a high-up who needed his password reset. All they really did was use the stolen login credentials to get the emails and other data off HBGary's servers and then deface their website. The subsequent "hacks" were the result of Barr using a universal password.
The problem with that statement is that HR professionals are usually required to have some knowledge of employment law. For this person, this means one of two things:
Either he saw the agreement and had no idea it could be in violation of employment law, which means he was incompetent at his own job;
or he saw the agreement, knew it could be a violation and instead decided to ignore that and willfully proceed to fire these people without reporting it.
Given the level of training most companies do these days to ensure that no one violates antitrust or other employment laws, it's likely that the second one is the case.
One wonders if they would've had better results if they had been The Men Who Stare at Goatse instead.
Hopefully, AMX will be buried by thousands of incoming lawsuits for this childish behavior. The article never mentions what this backdoor would actually let someone with access to it do, but I'm assuming that the possibility existed for someone to use that backdoor to obtain classified or proprietary information. That they tried to hide the backdoor once it was discovered rather than immediately patching it out is just another piece of evidence usable by anyone wishing to sue them. I can foresee a large-scale data audit in AMX's near future as any business owning their software tries to determine whether any of their information was taken, on purpose or inadvertently.
What I don't understand is how none of these politicians who want backdoors into all encryption fail to understand that it would be just as easy for IS or Al-Qaeda or any other group that considers themselves enemies of the United States (North Korea, Iran, etc) to find and use the same backdoors against them. Sure, the government would likely continue using encryption themselves, but what's to stop IS from finding the backdoor and exploiting it to hack into the phones of foreign journalists or contractors? When (not if) IS or another group find their own way into that backdoor, they'll have essentially obtained a way of finding foreigners to behead for propaganda purposes, or to hold hostage for money in the case of Al-Qaeda or Iran, complete with real-time GPS tracking data.
What proof does she have that her husband's killers were recruited by IS via Twitter? Absolutely none. Most of IS's recruiting is done physically in person, and for obvious reasons (Twitter is a hell of a lot easier for the NSA and military to track). Hell, almost every story I've heard about people joining IS is virtually the same: they met with a person at their mosque who saw them as an impressionable target and convinced them over a long period of time that they are being oppressed by the west and need to fight back.
Most of what IS posts on Twitter is not meant for their own members but to instill fear in the people they consider their enemies.
Ever since game devs started using Denuvo, I've refused to buy anything that uses it on the grounds that it unfairly punishes the paying end-user. The devteam behind Lords of the Fallen, which was one of the first games to use Denuvo, admitted that they were sacrificing large amounts of performance (as much as 10 to 15 percent framerate) in order to use it. There were also a lot of concerns from SSD users, because Denuvo uses up a ton of read/write operations due to constantly encrypting and decrypting files, putting far more stress on an SSD than a non-Denuvo game does.
If game developers are going to sacrifice performance and the potential for mod support to use the most draconian DRM they can find, I'm not going to be buying it.
Actually, the going rate for discovery is much lower than that. There are external firms that hire people to process discovery documents - I work for one and it's the worst job I've ever had. People at this company get paid $13 an hour to prepare, scan, and index documents into a database that the actual attorneys can browse at their leisure. As an actual example from my company (which they've explicitly told me not to post in addition to the fact that I should never, ever post anything online so they can fuck right off):
My company does discovery processing for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield network of insurance companies. We get handed thousands of boxes full of paperwork dating back to the early 90s and get told to process everything. A lot of the crap - things like lunch menus, copies of publicly-released promotional material, handwritten notes about the office's Secret Santa pool - gets weeded out at this level so that no one needs to bother to look at it. I've personally seen an entire folder full of printed copies of emails that were less than five words each, something like "This is okay" or "Send back for revision" and another that contained nothing but press releases in Chinese from a firm that Blue Cross either partnered with or was considering partnering with ten-plus years ago.
Honestly, just from a common-sense perspective, 75% of the stuff we scan is so non-controversial that it is highly unlikely that it would ever appear as discovery in a lawsuit and there's really no reason that someone couldn't have just thrown it out years ago. I highly doubt that a potential insurance lawsuit is going to request copies of lunch menus from 2001 when they have the full meeting agenda available.
The workers where I am are treated like garbage. Mandatory 12-hour days to meet deadlines are common (I actually just got home from one two hours ago) and losing contracts even moreso. The pay is low, the managers are assholes, and I'm quitting in two weeks so I can try to get any job that isn't this one.
It's "voluntary" in the same way that the drinking age being 21 is voluntary. The federal government actually does not have the right to regulate drinking age: that actually falls to the states. The "mandatory" part is that the federal government will deny highway funding to any state with a drinking age under 21, which is why every state has 21 as the drinking age. While the feds likely could not say "no one without a Real ID compliant license flies" I'm sure they could stir up trouble in other ways with states that don't comply.
Asset seizures and forfeiture, especially without charges or conviction, are inherently unconstitutional.
Well see, yes and no. Asset forfeiture came about as a means of stopping organized crime - the same reason that RICO exists. The idea was to prevent the mafia from hiding all of its money, which was a legal seizure because it had come about as the result of criminal activity. Essentially, the police are using an anti-mafia law against regular people now that the mafia has largely been wiped out in the United States.
The entire reason asset forfeiture is still legal is because technically, you do have recourse if the police take your money. The problem is getting the proof together to do so.
I get that "slant-eyed" is a racist description of Asians, but there is absolutely nothing racist about the word "slant". Hell, it even mentions that the band is Asian-American.
While I understand the charges are likely based on political paranoia within Venezuela's government and a desire to find a scapegoat for their financial issues, how could a website that merely reports an exchange rate (the site in question appears to be a news site and not an actual currency exchange) be guilty of racketeering? If the exchange rate was wrong, no one would use them as a reliable source of information in the first place. This would be like trying to charge the New York Times with securities fraud because they report stock prices.
Actually, archive.org makes a pretty big impact in a lot of fields, most notably data-based journalism and computer-assisted reporting. There are a lot of government agencies that will have story-relevant data up that they then wind up taking down - sometimes because of storage costs, other times because they're trying to hide something.