So you're wafer thin alibi is that someone else is cow-trolling every article as an AC, and you came to this article and found the cow-troll had forgot to do his work, so you did it for him. But just this one time.
My suspicion is that you are all sexconcker. Sexconker says cows say moo. (moo moo moo, moo-trolls say moo). You cow-troll!
I agree, but at the same time, have a think about how many people you know to whom you can say: "I found a way to defraud a company of 14 million and you can have half but I need you to put your name to it."
Rule out all your acquaintances who aren't smart enough to avoid fucking it up, plus those who you can't trust, and rule out friends with kids or a job who are afraid of jail time, and people who can't keep a secret from their own friends and family who might fuck it up. And remember, for each person who says "no" to your plan, you've just created someone who can testify against you or blackmail you.
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Finding an accomplice for a big illegal act isn't *that* easy.
> Facebook doesn't have [...] verifiable identities and proof of cheating
I think you'll find it has both.
If an account has been posting photos of your personal life and having chats with your spouse, your family and your friends, do you really think anyone needs more verification that it's your accounts? Even if the account is under your nickname, everyone who knows you through that account knows that you are you.
And if you're cheating and you met this person via Facebook, or communicated with them via Facebook then just try denying it when your spouse sees the chat logs.
I mean, getting 37 million would only require access to a quarter of a percent of Facebook's data, so a hack on this scale shouldn't be hard to imagine.
I'm not happy this is happening, but I do hope that when things like this happen it makes people think critically about putting their private lives and their means of communication on other peoples servers (i.e. "the cloud").
It's folly to think that 37 million Facebook accounts, with all their private messages and chats, won't be the next.
Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”
The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.
Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.
“We’re not denying this happened,” Biderman said. “Like us or not, this is still a criminal act.”
Besides snippets of account data apparently sampled at random from among some 40 million users across ALM’s trio of properties, the hackers leaked maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.
The compromise comes less than two months after intruders stole and leaked online user data on millions of accounts from hookup site AdultFriendFinder.
In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.
According to the hackers, although the “full delete” feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”
Their demands continue:
“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.”
A snippet of the message left behind by the Impact Team.
It’s unclear how much of the AshleyMadison user account data has been posted online. For now, it appears the hackers have published a relatively small percentage of AshleyMadison user account data and are planning to publish more for each day the company stays online.
“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers continued. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”
ALM CEO Biderman declined to discuss specifics of the company’s investigation, which he characterized as ongoing and fast-moving. But he did suggest that the incident may have been the work
> it would be good to have universal fonts that can render > any Unicode character correctly for anyone in the world
But a line has to be drawn between substance and style. There are two (main) ways to draw the number 4. One has a slanty line and is closed at the top, the other is made of straight lines and is open at the top. Or the number 7. For English speakers it's two lines, but for French speakers there's also a horizontal bar across the middle. Should unicode have two 4's and two 7's, or should this be left to the font? The unicode consortium (AFAIK) has decided to give 4 and 7 just one code point each and let the font decide how to display it.
If you agree 4 and 7 should only have one code point then you agree that some unification is good. The question is the degree. It seems that for East Asian languages unicode started off conservative and they're adding more code points based on real world feedback. That sounds like a reasonable approach (given that there was no perfect approach they could have adopted from the start).
(Or if you think 4 and 7 should each have (at least) two code points, then I think you're creating an impossible and impractical system which covers every way of writing every symbol.)
Can Shift JIS display Chinese and Korean? If it can't then it "solves" the problem by ignoring the problem. Some people might find it better today, but unicode has a chance to eventually do what Shift JIS can do, and Shift JIS will never be able to do what unicode can do, so the eventual winner seems clear.
> Even when [unicode] is implemented, it tends to be broken.
Not really unicode's fault. Yes, they keep adding new code points (although this is partly because East Asian languages create new ideographs), and yes unicode is newer so application/font developers have had less time to implement it, but this is true of any big new project that's working on something massively complex and isn't finished yet.
Can you give me an example of a Japanese name that can't be written in unicode? I keep hearing English speakers mention this problem but I've never seen exactly what the problem is.
Example: the story of the man who tried to eat ten lions:
Shí shì sh shì sh shì, shì sh, shì shí shí sh. Shì shí shí shì shì shì sh. Shí shí, shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí, shì Sh shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí sh, shì shì shì, sh shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí shì shí sh sh, shì shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shù shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shí shì shí sh. Shí shí, sh shì shì shí sh sh, shí shí sh. Shì shì shì shì
For the Chinese ideograph version and English translation, see slides 12 and 13 of
A lot of people complain about the idea of unification without understanding it. I can't judge if unicode's unification is great or awful. The English-speaking media constantly says it's awful, but it's usually clear the authors don't know what unification is, who's driving it, or how unicode's work compares to what existed beforehand, so they can only be ignored. (They're sometimes trying to spin up some clickbait about ignorant westerners imposing blah blah blah on Asia, which just shows they no nothing about the topic.)
The issue:
There's a certain number of symbols which have been copied from one East Asian language to another. They're the same symbol, so unicode has one slot for that symbol. Then there's a second category where the symbol has been copied, but one group draws it a little different (the Japanese might like to put a little flick at the end of one line, or the Chinese draw the line a little slantier). And a third category where one group has developed a simplified symbol, which means again the traditional and the simplified symbols are the same thing but drawn differently. The two symbols are equivalent, the new one is just a new suggestion for how to draw it.
Unification is about having one slot for the symbols in categories two and three and leaving it to the font to decide how to display it.
(Unicode uses more precise terms, but I'm calling them "symbols" and "slots" for simplicity.)
A disadvantage to this approach is that there can't be a font which would display a symbol both the way a Japanese would draw it and the way a Chinese would draw it. Fonts have to choose one style to draw each unified symbol.
An advantage of this approach is that new languages and dialects can be added supported without needing another 100,000 slots per language or dialect (we do all know there are more than three East Asian languages, don't we?), and it's much easier for fonts to add support for all the East Asian languages because once they've done Chinese, Japanese is automatically almost finished.
(All that said, it's been years since I looked into this so there's a chance I've gotten some detail wrong, but I'm confident it's a good summary of the issue.)
Cash transactions aren't linked to your name and stored in a database forever, and the cash in your pocket can't be deactivated by banks or a government.
(Yes, some smart Alec will point out ways to track and block bank notes, but this is waaaaaaaaay more difficult and waaaaaaaaaaaay less effective than what banks and governments can do to electronic money.)
From the summary: "Any area of life where we currently use chronological age is faulty, if we knew more about biological age we could be more fair and egalitarian,"
That depends. Should people with a higher biological age retire earlier? Kinda unfair to people who looked after themselves.
Of course I can also see ways to make good use of this: It would be interesting to see if certain jobs are linked to people ageing faster. Maybe (maybe) people in those jobs should be give the option of retiring earlier, with pensions adjusted somehow.
That sounds like a good solution in a computer game. In the real world, do you really think a currency formed by the weakest economies in a region would be a viable currency?
Do you really think a line could be drawn (France, in, Italy, out), and people would accept it?
Where would Ireland go? Today you could say "They took a bailout, so they should have been in the 'Euro Light' zone of weak economies" - but Ireland was one of Europe's strongest economies before this crisis.
In the country where I live, I don't think criminal records are available via on-line services but employers do ask for a copy of your police record. Employers obviously have a bias against anyone who's record isn't blank.
IMO, asking for such a record should be illegal and instead, employers (subject to signing an NDA) should be allowed to ask the police to verify that the person in question has no convictions *relevant to the job being applied for*.
I thought I still had mod points. The above comment is the only comment so far worth up-modding.
I've been reading this type of story for years, and then the election unfolds just as the polls predicted.
My guess is that the sellers of newspapers etc. are just trying to convince people that this is an exciting topic, so they publish these anti-poll theories and a few suggested explanations that they reckon are credible.
Slashdot Mirror
And it's Scrablé, if you don't mind.
Right.
So you're wafer thin alibi is that someone else is cow-trolling every article as an AC, and you came to this article and found the cow-troll had forgot to do his work, so you did it for him. But just this one time.
My suspicion is that you are all sexconcker. Sexconker says cows say moo. (moo moo moo, moo-trolls say moo). You cow-troll!
Good evening, User sexconker (1179573), you didn't to tick the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Just to summarise your plan: When the investigator asks you why winner Dave wants the 14 million to go into your account, you answer "I don't know".
That's the extent of your plan?!
You don't cash $14 million tickets in a corner shop, you know that, right?
AC, you've just been removed from my list of possible accomplices.
> he was an idiot for buying the ticket himself.
I agree, but at the same time, have a think about how many people you know to whom you can say: "I found a way to defraud a company of 14 million and you can have half but I need you to put your name to it."
Rule out all your acquaintances who aren't smart enough to avoid fucking it up, plus those who you can't trust, and rule out friends with kids or a job who are afraid of jail time, and people who can't keep a secret from their own friends and family who might fuck it up. And remember, for each person who says "no" to your plan, you've just created someone who can testify against you or blackmail you.
And then your accomplice has to get your half to you. A bank transfer of seven million is a little incriminating, or if they give you a suitcase of cash, you can't just lodge it into your account. "Enjoying" your money isn't so easy when you have to avoid ever creating a record of having the money.
Finding an accomplice for a big illegal act isn't *that* easy.
Excellent. I wish I'd found that when writing my comment. I'd read a printed version so I was just happy to find any version of it online.
> Facebook doesn't have [...] verifiable identities and proof of cheating
I think you'll find it has both.
If an account has been posting photos of your personal life and having chats with your spouse, your family and your friends, do you really think anyone needs more verification that it's your accounts? Even if the account is under your nickname, everyone who knows you through that account knows that you are you.
And if you're cheating and you met this person via Facebook, or communicated with them via Facebook then just try denying it when your spouse sees the chat logs.
> You mean 1.44 billion?
I mean, getting 37 million would only require access to a quarter of a percent of Facebook's data, so a hack on this scale shouldn't be hard to imagine.
I'm not happy this is happening, but I do hope that when things like this happen it makes people think critically about putting their private lives and their means of communication on other peoples servers (i.e. "the cloud").
It's folly to think that 37 million Facebook accounts, with all their private messages and chats, won't be the next.
Large caches of data stolen from online cheating site AshleyMadison.com have been posted online by an individual or group that claims to have completely compromised the company’s user databases, financial records and other proprietary information. The still-unfolding leak could be quite damaging to some 37 million users of the hookup service, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair.”
The data released by the hacker or hackers — which self-identify as The Impact Team — includes sensitive internal data stolen from Avid Life Media (ALM), the Toronto-based firm that owns AshleyMadison as well as related hookup sites Cougar Life and Established Men.
Reached by KrebsOnSecurity late Sunday evening, ALM Chief Executive Noel Biderman confirmed the hack, and said the company was “working diligently and feverishly” to take down ALM’s intellectual property. Indeed, in the short span of 30 minutes between that brief interview and the publication of this story, several of the Impact Team’s Web links were no longer responding.
“We’re not denying this happened,” Biderman said. “Like us or not, this is still a criminal act.”
Besides snippets of account data apparently sampled at random from among some 40 million users across ALM’s trio of properties, the hackers leaked maps of internal company servers, employee network account information, company bank account data and salary information.
The compromise comes less than two months after intruders stole and leaked online user data on millions of accounts from hookup site AdultFriendFinder.
In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee.
According to the hackers, although the “full delete” feature that Ashley Madison advertises promises “removal of site usage history and personally identifiable information from the site,” users’ purchase details — including real name and address — aren’t actually scrubbed.
“Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It’s also a complete lie,” the hacking group wrote. “Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed.”
Their demands continue:
“Avid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms, or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails. The other websites may stay online.”
A snippet of the message left behind by the Impact Team.
It’s unclear how much of the AshleyMadison user account data has been posted online. For now, it appears the hackers have published a relatively small percentage of AshleyMadison user account data and are planning to publish more for each day the company stays online.
“Too bad for those men, they’re cheating dirtbags and deserve no such discretion,” the hackers continued. “Too bad for ALM, you promised secrecy but didn’t deliver. We’ve got the complete set of profiles in our DB dumps, and we’ll release them soon if Ashley Madison stays online. And with over 37 million members, mostly from the US and Canada, a significant percentage of the population is about to have a very bad day, including many rich and powerful people.”
ALM CEO Biderman declined to discuss specifics of the company’s investigation, which he characterized as ongoing and fast-moving. But he did suggest that the incident may have been the work
> it would be good to have universal fonts that can render
> any Unicode character correctly for anyone in the world
But a line has to be drawn between substance and style. There are two (main) ways to draw the number 4. One has a slanty line and is closed at the top, the other is made of straight lines and is open at the top. Or the number 7. For English speakers it's two lines, but for French speakers there's also a horizontal bar across the middle. Should unicode have two 4's and two 7's, or should this be left to the font? The unicode consortium (AFAIK) has decided to give 4 and 7 just one code point each and let the font decide how to display it.
If you agree 4 and 7 should only have one code point then you agree that some unification is good. The question is the degree. It seems that for East Asian languages unicode started off conservative and they're adding more code points based on real world feedback. That sounds like a reasonable approach (given that there was no perfect approach they could have adopted from the start).
(Or if you think 4 and 7 should each have (at least) two code points, then I think you're creating an impossible and impractical system which covers every way of writing every symbol.)
Can Shift JIS display Chinese and Korean? If it can't then it "solves" the problem by ignoring the problem. Some people might find it better today, but unicode has a chance to eventually do what Shift JIS can do, and Shift JIS will never be able to do what unicode can do, so the eventual winner seems clear.
> Even when [unicode] is implemented, it tends to be broken.
Not really unicode's fault. Yes, they keep adding new code points (although this is partly because East Asian languages create new ideographs), and yes unicode is newer so application/font developers have had less time to implement it, but this is true of any big new project that's working on something massively complex and isn't finished yet.
Thanks for this reply!
Can you give me an example of a Japanese name that can't be written in unicode? I keep hearing English speakers mention this problem but I've never seen exactly what the problem is.
> you are summarizing A issue, not THE issue the author was making up.
Yes, my post only relates to the last line of the summary.
Example: the story of the man who tried to eat ten lions:
Shí shì sh shì sh shì, shì sh, shì shí shí sh. Shì shí shí shì shì shì sh. Shí shí, shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí, shì Sh shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí sh, shì shì shì, sh shì shí sh shì shì. Shì shí shì shí sh sh, shì shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shù shí shì. Shí shì shì, shì sh shì shí shì shí sh. Shí shí, sh shì shì shí sh sh, shí shí sh. Shì shì shì shì
For the Chinese ideograph version and English translation, see slides 12 and 13 of
https://web.csulb.edu/~txie/38...
A lot of people complain about the idea of unification without understanding it. I can't judge if unicode's unification is great or awful. The English-speaking media constantly says it's awful, but it's usually clear the authors don't know what unification is, who's driving it, or how unicode's work compares to what existed beforehand, so they can only be ignored. (They're sometimes trying to spin up some clickbait about ignorant westerners imposing blah blah blah on Asia, which just shows they no nothing about the topic.)
The issue:
There's a certain number of symbols which have been copied from one East Asian language to another. They're the same symbol, so unicode has one slot for that symbol. Then there's a second category where the symbol has been copied, but one group draws it a little different (the Japanese might like to put a little flick at the end of one line, or the Chinese draw the line a little slantier). And a third category where one group has developed a simplified symbol, which means again the traditional and the simplified symbols are the same thing but drawn differently. The two symbols are equivalent, the new one is just a new suggestion for how to draw it.
Unification is about having one slot for the symbols in categories two and three and leaving it to the font to decide how to display it.
(Unicode uses more precise terms, but I'm calling them "symbols" and "slots" for simplicity.)
A disadvantage to this approach is that there can't be a font which would display a symbol both the way a Japanese would draw it and the way a Chinese would draw it. Fonts have to choose one style to draw each unified symbol.
An advantage of this approach is that new languages and dialects can be added supported without needing another 100,000 slots per language or dialect (we do all know there are more than three East Asian languages, don't we?), and it's much easier for fonts to add support for all the East Asian languages because once they've done Chinese, Japanese is automatically almost finished.
Here are some example symbols:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
unicode.org's FAQ also has clarifications:
If the character shapes are different in different parts of East Asia, why were the characters unified?
http://www.unicode.org/faq/han...
Isn't it true that some Japanese can't write their own names in Unicode?
http://www.unicode.org/faq/han...
(All that said, it's been years since I looked into this so there's a chance I've gotten some detail wrong, but I'm confident it's a good summary of the issue.)
> For contactless, we have Apple Pay / Google Wallet
Who's "we" pale face?
I won't be giving those companies control of my money, thanks.
Cash transactions aren't linked to your name and stored in a database forever, and the cash in your pocket can't be deactivated by banks or a government.
(Yes, some smart Alec will point out ways to track and block bank notes, but this is waaaaaaaaay more difficult and waaaaaaaaaaaay less effective than what banks and governments can do to electronic money.)
> This is a curse for politicians, bureaucrats and profiteering corporations.
Whatever. Technology has been advancing since those institutions began, and they've only gotten more powerful.
No advance in technology will strip them of their power unless it's created by a concerted effort to do so. It won't happen by chance.
From the summary: "Any area of life where we currently use chronological age is faulty, if we knew more about biological age we could be more fair and egalitarian,"
That depends. Should people with a higher biological age retire earlier? Kinda unfair to people who looked after themselves.
Of course I can also see ways to make good use of this: It would be interesting to see if certain jobs are linked to people ageing faster. Maybe (maybe) people in those jobs should be give the option of retiring earlier, with pensions adjusted somehow.
For example, do you think the Canadian dollar could be split into one dollar for the economically stronger regions and a "floppy Canadian dollar"?
That sounds like a good solution in a computer game. In the real world, do you really think a currency formed by the weakest economies in a region would be a viable currency?
Do you really think a line could be drawn (France, in, Italy, out), and people would accept it?
Where would Ireland go? Today you could say "They took a bailout, so they should have been in the 'Euro Light' zone of weak economies" - but Ireland was one of Europe's strongest economies before this crisis.
In the country where I live, I don't think criminal records are available via on-line services but employers do ask for a copy of your police record. Employers obviously have a bias against anyone who's record isn't blank.
IMO, asking for such a record should be illegal and instead, employers (subject to signing an NDA) should be allowed to ask the police to verify that the person in question has no convictions *relevant to the job being applied for*.
I thought I still had mod points. The above comment is the only comment so far worth up-modding.
New Zealand ISPs cave and support Geoblocking
I've been reading this type of story for years, and then the election unfolds just as the polls predicted.
My guess is that the sellers of newspapers etc. are just trying to convince people that this is an exciting topic, so they publish these anti-poll theories and a few suggested explanations that they reckon are credible.