"The school maintains that they only use the webcams to take a still photo when a laptop has been reported stolen, to aid in recovering it."
Again, the school never claimed that. Read carefully: "... the security plan was developed by the technology department to give the District the ability to recover lost, stolen or missing student laptops". There's no claim that the plan was in fact followed faithfully.
My mistake. Apparently I misread this statement:
"...this feature was... to help locate the reported missing, lost, or stolen computer (this includes tracking down a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus)....In every one of the fewer than 50 instances in which the tracking software was used this school year, its sole purpose was to try to track down and locate a student's computer."
I thought it said they've only used it to try to track down a computer that had been reported lost or stolen, but it doesn't quite say that. It says they've only used it to try to locate a computer, but this could include computers that were not reported lost or stolen.
There's one way the school could be telling the truth about this. They didn't say this explicitly, so it's not clear, but:
The lawsuit alleges that the school accused the student of inappropriate behavior. That behavior could have been reporting his laptop as "stolen", then continuing to use it. The school maintains that they only use the webcams to take a still photo when a laptop has been reported stolen, to aid in recovering it. If the laptop was reported stolen, the school took a picture, they saw that the student who reported it was the one using it, and they confronted the student with this evidence, that would explain both the lawsuit and the school's position.
Sort of odd that the school's response wouldn't explain that, if that is indeed what happened. But people tend to omit important details like that when there's a lawsuit pending, on advice of counsel...
From the way I see people write about it, is that they want to punish these as bad as possible and the fact that breaking privacy won't do that enough says more about how important people value their privacy more then anything else.
I don't think that's it at all. It's not that we want these school administrators to be punished more harshly than privacy laws would allow for - I'm sure their punishment for breaking privacy laws would be sufficient. Rather, we're unfairly generalizing, and making the assumption that the school administrators who did this are the same kind of people who have been pushing for tougher penalties for sex crimes. It would be a sweet irony if they had to face the same hell that they've been promoting for others.
Reverse engineering in a cleanroom environment will protect you from copyright infringement, but not patent infringement. If it's patented, it doesn't matter if you come up with the idea independently; whoever was awarded the patent owns the idea until the patent expires and you cannot implement it without a license from them.
Surely you've seen those absolutely horrid web sites that have nothing but a bunch of useless-looking unlabeled buttons, where an obnoxiously animated label appears only on mouseover?
Basically, if your e-mail is already subject to draconian regulations and every e-mail message you've ever sent or received has been archived by a third party and someone in your company's (or your broker-dealer's) compliance department regularly reads your e-mail to make sure you haven't said anything you're not supposed to and every once in awhile FINRA auditors come by to make sure the compliance department is really reviewing your e-mail like they say they are, and now your company wants to start using Twitter for business communications, you can expect the same level of scrutiny of your tweets that you've come to enjoy with your e-mail.
If none of the above applies to you, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Also, since all that e-mail compliance stuff only applies to business e-mail and not personal e-mail, the same should be true of Twitter. Keep your personal Twitter account separate from your business Twitter account, just like you do with your personal and business e-mail accounts, and everything is fine.
Most security flaws are found by white-hats, who report the flaw to the vendor and keep their mouth shut until the vendor releases a patch - and even then, the details of exactly how to exploit it are usually not disclosed right away. However, as soon as the patch is released, the black-hats (who had previously been unaware that the flaw existed) now begin analyzing the patch itself, to see what it changes - and they soon figure out how to exploit the flaw in unpatched systems.
If Microsoft releases patches immediately as soon as the patches are available, the black-hats will begin working on them immediately and will have an exploit soon. But although individual consumers might have automatic updates enabled, corporate IT departments prefer to test things before deployment, and this is much easier to do when patches are released on a schedule - for example, if all patches are always released on the second Tuesday of the month, then an IT department can plan to begin testing new patches on that day, push out updates to workstations Wednesday night, and schedule downtime to update production servers Friday night. If they work this into their schedule, patches will get deployed quickly, and with any luck, the black-hats won't hit them with an exploit within those few days.
But if patches are released whenever they become available, IT departments can't prepare for them, and are more likely to put them off until it's convenient. Maybe that'll be a couple of weeks - but maybe it'll be a couple of months, because there is no coherent plan for deploying updates at all. This gives the black-hats plenty of time to weaponize the exploit, and script kiddies to start using it.
So, if you assume that in most cases the black-hats don't find bugs before the patch is released, Microsoft's strategy is actually good. The danger, of course, is that if the black-hats discover the flaws before a patch has been made available, and are quietly exploiting them without drawing attention to themselves, then Microsoft's strategy is bad.
Good for the ones you rejected on such a stupid criteria. They probably found real jobs with real companies with real people.
Actually this is a great point. It's not that the employer is stupid for rejecting candidates based on their e-mail address, but to do so reflects a certain philosophy, and the company will function better if its employees share that philosophy. Any applicant who uses an @aol.com address clearly does not share the companies philosophy about such things, and would therefore not be a good fit.
Precisely. It should be patently obvious to anyone with a functional brain that rocks to do not evolve. If you know what evolution is, and you know what rocks are, you should immediately recognize this.
This is different than, for example, disagreements about abortion. There, you're arguing matters of opinion and philosophy, what should be, what is right and what is wrong. Here, you're talking about what is, and the basic definitions of common words. Rocks change, but they do not evolve. The word "evolution" means something that rocks do not do. You don't get to make up your own definitions of words that disagree with what everybody else means, then use your new definitions as the basis for your argument.
Civility, logic, and finding common ground are excellent suggestions for debates over topics like health care reform, capital punishment, or text editor superiority. But rocks do not evolve.
...but the Kindle is a hardware platform. It's the hardware that makes it compelling, not the software. If you don't care about the hardware, and are only interested in the content, then all you're really looking for is an alternative to Amazon's e-book store - not an alternative to the Kindle.
The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.
What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the.NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...
Um, customers do love 2MB printer drivers; it's the 300MB printer drivers that are a bit tough to swallow.
Funny, but seriously, NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 don't crash the way 95/98/ME did. I almost never have to reboot a Vista machine due to software failure; it'll reboot itself in the middle of the night for an automatic update (a feature easily disabled, but I'm glad it's on by default) but apart from that it's pretty stable.
Compare that with Windows 98, which I couldn't use for more than six hours without a BSOD. Literally, the first thing I would do when I got to work every morning was reboot my PC, and I'd reboot it again when I left for lunch. If I skipped that lunchtime reboot (say, I decided to eat at my desk while surfing the web or something), the machine wouldn't make it to the end of the day. I was doing tech support for an ISP, so I'd be on the phone trying to fix somebody's problem, and I'd have to put them on hold while waiting for my PC to reboot a couple hours after lunchtime.
This exact behavior was true at two completely different ISPs running both Win95 and Win98. When I got a job at a place running Win2k I had no more trouble.
I still don't get why you Americans insist on naming things after the most popular brand name when they already have proper names either, to the rest of the world it's like calling all card Fords or all computers IBMs.
The generic name used in the US is acetaminophen; this is the first time I've ever heard of paracetamol. Strangely, though, the most common labeling used by generic brands is "non-aspirin", with "acetaminophen" in tiny print. That's obviously dumb.
You recall incorrectly. First of all, there can only be a single digital-to-analog conversion anywhere on the line for 56k to work, otherwise there's too much noise and you'll fall back to 33.6. The only way for 56k to work is if the ISP end is all digital - the signal comes in on a T1 line, and the modems are all digital. Secondly, 56k is only 56k downstream; uploading is still limited to 33.6 - so if you could connect two modems on a phone line that was clean enough for 56k to work, you couldn't download faster than the other modem could upload anyway. The digital modems used by ISPs are reversed, of course.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.:-)
Those were the days when passengers could depend on their captors not being suicidal.
Precisely. When the hijackers aren't suicidal, you know they want to land the plane safely, and your best chance of survival is to not do anything crazy to attract unnecessary attention to yourself before the plane is on the ground. After 9/11 we know that this is no longer the case; there are suicidal hijackers out there who have no intention of landing the plane safely. In that case, your best chance of survival is to stop the hijackers at all costs. This is why there cannot be another 9/11, and whatever TSA does on the ground is irrelevant.
I still don't understand how a company like Apple can get an award from Greenpeace for being environmentally friendly when they produce such disposable crap and go out of their way to enforce planned obsolescense.
They got that because they have an environmental policy. Doesn't really matter what's in the policy, but Greenpeace condemned them for not having one, then Apple released a policy, and Greenpeace rejoiced, even though Apple hadn't actually changed anything they were doing.
It doesn't need to be a super-powerful computer which can... calculate Pi to 1 million digits in 30 seconds. The most processor-intensive task it should have to handle is handwriting recognition.
Calculating pi to a million digits is a lot easier for the average computer than performing good handwriting recognition.
People have some pretty warped ideas about what is simple and easy vs. what is complicated and difficult.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me either. Perhaps it was wasn't really IE6 they had originally standardized on, but an older version of IE, and perhaps it was before the US relaxed their export restrictions (there used to be a 40-bit international version of all the major browsers) so they had to roll their own. I don't know. In any case, for whatever reason, the Koreans started using some sort of ActiveX thing and locked themselves into IE.
That's true, but in Korea there's also an issue with secure banking web sites; apparently they all standardized on some proprietary encryption technology that only worked in IE6, before the rest of the world had really standardized on anything, so they're locked in - they've mostly updated for IE7/8 now, but the percentage of IE users there is MUCH higher than in other countries - and since everybody uses IE, you might as well keep designing sites that only work in IE, right?
Slashdot Mirror
"The school maintains that they only use the webcams to take a still photo when a laptop has been reported stolen, to aid in recovering it."
Again, the school never claimed that. Read carefully: "... the security plan was developed by the technology department to give the District the ability to recover lost, stolen or missing student laptops". There's no claim that the plan was in fact followed faithfully.
My mistake. Apparently I misread this statement:
"...this feature was... to help locate the reported missing, lost, or stolen computer (this includes tracking down a loaner computer that, against regulations, might be taken off campus). ...In every one of the fewer than 50 instances in which the tracking software was used this school year, its sole purpose was to try to track down and locate a student's computer."
I thought it said they've only used it to try to track down a computer that had been reported lost or stolen, but it doesn't quite say that. It says they've only used it to try to locate a computer, but this could include computers that were not reported lost or stolen.
There's one way the school could be telling the truth about this. They didn't say this explicitly, so it's not clear, but:
The lawsuit alleges that the school accused the student of inappropriate behavior. That behavior could have been reporting his laptop as "stolen", then continuing to use it. The school maintains that they only use the webcams to take a still photo when a laptop has been reported stolen, to aid in recovering it. If the laptop was reported stolen, the school took a picture, they saw that the student who reported it was the one using it, and they confronted the student with this evidence, that would explain both the lawsuit and the school's position.
Sort of odd that the school's response wouldn't explain that, if that is indeed what happened. But people tend to omit important details like that when there's a lawsuit pending, on advice of counsel...
From the way I see people write about it, is that they want to punish these as bad as possible and the fact that breaking privacy won't do that enough says more about how important people value their privacy more then anything else.
I don't think that's it at all. It's not that we want these school administrators to be punished more harshly than privacy laws would allow for - I'm sure their punishment for breaking privacy laws would be sufficient. Rather, we're unfairly generalizing, and making the assumption that the school administrators who did this are the same kind of people who have been pushing for tougher penalties for sex crimes. It would be a sweet irony if they had to face the same hell that they've been promoting for others.
Reverse engineering in a cleanroom environment will protect you from copyright infringement, but not patent infringement. If it's patented, it doesn't matter if you come up with the idea independently; whoever was awarded the patent owns the idea until the patent expires and you cannot implement it without a license from them.
Surely you've seen those absolutely horrid web sites that have nothing but a bunch of useless-looking unlabeled buttons, where an obnoxiously animated label appears only on mouseover?
Basically, if your e-mail is already subject to draconian regulations and every e-mail message you've ever sent or received has been archived by a third party and someone in your company's (or your broker-dealer's) compliance department regularly reads your e-mail to make sure you haven't said anything you're not supposed to and every once in awhile FINRA auditors come by to make sure the compliance department is really reviewing your e-mail like they say they are, and now your company wants to start using Twitter for business communications, you can expect the same level of scrutiny of your tweets that you've come to enjoy with your e-mail.
If none of the above applies to you, then you have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Also, since all that e-mail compliance stuff only applies to business e-mail and not personal e-mail, the same should be true of Twitter. Keep your personal Twitter account separate from your business Twitter account, just like you do with your personal and business e-mail accounts, and everything is fine.
Microsoft's reasoning is this:
Most security flaws are found by white-hats, who report the flaw to the vendor and keep their mouth shut until the vendor releases a patch - and even then, the details of exactly how to exploit it are usually not disclosed right away. However, as soon as the patch is released, the black-hats (who had previously been unaware that the flaw existed) now begin analyzing the patch itself, to see what it changes - and they soon figure out how to exploit the flaw in unpatched systems.
If Microsoft releases patches immediately as soon as the patches are available, the black-hats will begin working on them immediately and will have an exploit soon. But although individual consumers might have automatic updates enabled, corporate IT departments prefer to test things before deployment, and this is much easier to do when patches are released on a schedule - for example, if all patches are always released on the second Tuesday of the month, then an IT department can plan to begin testing new patches on that day, push out updates to workstations Wednesday night, and schedule downtime to update production servers Friday night. If they work this into their schedule, patches will get deployed quickly, and with any luck, the black-hats won't hit them with an exploit within those few days.
But if patches are released whenever they become available, IT departments can't prepare for them, and are more likely to put them off until it's convenient. Maybe that'll be a couple of weeks - but maybe it'll be a couple of months, because there is no coherent plan for deploying updates at all. This gives the black-hats plenty of time to weaponize the exploit, and script kiddies to start using it.
So, if you assume that in most cases the black-hats don't find bugs before the patch is released, Microsoft's strategy is actually good. The danger, of course, is that if the black-hats discover the flaws before a patch has been made available, and are quietly exploiting them without drawing attention to themselves, then Microsoft's strategy is bad.
I'd say the Internet has proven that somebody can get sexually aroused by anything.
I'll be kinder than the AC I was agreeing with:
Kindly go away.
Thank you.
Good for the ones you rejected on such a stupid criteria. They probably found real jobs with real companies with real people.
Actually this is a great point. It's not that the employer is stupid for rejecting candidates based on their e-mail address, but to do so reflects a certain philosophy, and the company will function better if its employees share that philosophy. Any applicant who uses an @aol.com address clearly does not share the companies philosophy about such things, and would therefore not be a good fit.
Precisely. It should be patently obvious to anyone with a functional brain that rocks to do not evolve. If you know what evolution is, and you know what rocks are, you should immediately recognize this.
This is different than, for example, disagreements about abortion. There, you're arguing matters of opinion and philosophy, what should be, what is right and what is wrong. Here, you're talking about what is, and the basic definitions of common words. Rocks change, but they do not evolve. The word "evolution" means something that rocks do not do. You don't get to make up your own definitions of words that disagree with what everybody else means, then use your new definitions as the basis for your argument.
Civility, logic, and finding common ground are excellent suggestions for debates over topics like health care reform, capital punishment, or text editor superiority. But rocks do not evolve.
...but the Kindle is a hardware platform. It's the hardware that makes it compelling, not the software. If you don't care about the hardware, and are only interested in the content, then all you're really looking for is an alternative to Amazon's e-book store - not an alternative to the Kindle.
In fact, hold
Ideally it should use an offset from the current date (which assumes the system clock is correct, but on a mail server it really REALLY should be).
The first thing that comes to my mind is huge bloated printer drivers that are constantly updating.
What? I thought customers and admins *loved* their 2 MB printer drivers to come bundled with the .NET framework and constant reminders to buy ink when levels dropped below 75%...
Um, customers do love 2MB printer drivers; it's the 300MB printer drivers that are a bit tough to swallow.
isn't it the duty of Yahoo! to provide accurate results to its customers?
You make the mistake of assuming that the users are the customers, rather than the product being sold.
I like the version in which the "woodsman" is really a Swedish yodeler who's practicing for a role in a TV commercial (he got a callback).
"Paul's Bunion Cream has the soothing formula to make the bunions head for the hills!"
Funny, but seriously, NT/2k/XP/Vista/7 don't crash the way 95/98/ME did. I almost never have to reboot a Vista machine due to software failure; it'll reboot itself in the middle of the night for an automatic update (a feature easily disabled, but I'm glad it's on by default) but apart from that it's pretty stable.
Compare that with Windows 98, which I couldn't use for more than six hours without a BSOD. Literally, the first thing I would do when I got to work every morning was reboot my PC, and I'd reboot it again when I left for lunch. If I skipped that lunchtime reboot (say, I decided to eat at my desk while surfing the web or something), the machine wouldn't make it to the end of the day. I was doing tech support for an ISP, so I'd be on the phone trying to fix somebody's problem, and I'd have to put them on hold while waiting for my PC to reboot a couple hours after lunchtime.
This exact behavior was true at two completely different ISPs running both Win95 and Win98. When I got a job at a place running Win2k I had no more trouble.
It's a web programming language, not something a 12 year old should be using to have fun messing around and maybe trying out some 3D stuff.
That hasn't stopped people from trying out some 3D stuff.
I still don't get why you Americans insist on naming things after the most popular brand name when they already have proper names either, to the rest of the world it's like calling all card Fords or all computers IBMs.
The generic name used in the US is acetaminophen; this is the first time I've ever heard of paracetamol. Strangely, though, the most common labeling used by generic brands is "non-aspirin", with "acetaminophen" in tiny print. That's obviously dumb.
You recall incorrectly. First of all, there can only be a single digital-to-analog conversion anywhere on the line for 56k to work, otherwise there's too much noise and you'll fall back to 33.6. The only way for 56k to work is if the ISP end is all digital - the signal comes in on a T1 line, and the modems are all digital. Secondly, 56k is only 56k downstream; uploading is still limited to 33.6 - so if you could connect two modems on a phone line that was clean enough for 56k to work, you couldn't download faster than the other modem could upload anyway. The digital modems used by ISPs are reversed, of course.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. :-)
Those were the days when passengers could depend on their captors not being suicidal.
Precisely. When the hijackers aren't suicidal, you know they want to land the plane safely, and your best chance of survival is to not do anything crazy to attract unnecessary attention to yourself before the plane is on the ground. After 9/11 we know that this is no longer the case; there are suicidal hijackers out there who have no intention of landing the plane safely. In that case, your best chance of survival is to stop the hijackers at all costs. This is why there cannot be another 9/11, and whatever TSA does on the ground is irrelevant.
I still don't understand how a company like Apple can get an award from Greenpeace for being environmentally friendly when they produce such disposable crap and go out of their way to enforce planned obsolescense.
They got that because they have an environmental policy. Doesn't really matter what's in the policy, but Greenpeace condemned them for not having one, then Apple released a policy, and Greenpeace rejoiced, even though Apple hadn't actually changed anything they were doing.
It doesn't need to be a super-powerful computer which can... calculate Pi to 1 million digits in 30 seconds. The most processor-intensive task it should have to handle is handwriting recognition.
Calculating pi to a million digits is a lot easier for the average computer than performing good handwriting recognition.
People have some pretty warped ideas about what is simple and easy vs. what is complicated and difficult.
Yeah, it doesn't make much sense to me either. Perhaps it was wasn't really IE6 they had originally standardized on, but an older version of IE, and perhaps it was before the US relaxed their export restrictions (there used to be a 40-bit international version of all the major browsers) so they had to roll their own. I don't know. In any case, for whatever reason, the Koreans started using some sort of ActiveX thing and locked themselves into IE.
That's true, but in Korea there's also an issue with secure banking web sites; apparently they all standardized on some proprietary encryption technology that only worked in IE6, before the rest of the world had really standardized on anything, so they're locked in - they've mostly updated for IE7/8 now, but the percentage of IE users there is MUCH higher than in other countries - and since everybody uses IE, you might as well keep designing sites that only work in IE, right?