It is very much about the principles. Consider the following scenarios:
A) The police suspects a specific person of a specific crime, goes to the courts and gets a warrant to intercept communication in order to gather evidence - and so on.
B) The police suspects someone may be committing a crime and request (no warrant needed) all logs in order to comb them for possible suspects and gather evidence against these suspects, if any.
No question that option B is the easiest for the police, but it is extremely invasive and makes the ISP a part of the policing system. Option A also requires actual police work in advance, in order to put a name on the suspect and to get enough circumstantial evidence in order to get a warrant.
The argument for B has always been the quest for terrorists. But so far all terrorists arrested have left enough data on their PCs for the authorities to compile and use in a trial. None have been found through this generic logging and the logging will not yield information not already available on the suspects computers.
The logging from B is useless against encrypted communication and the primary terrorist forums already use encrypted chat forums. You can log that there was traffic to the IP of the website with the chat but not whether the suspect actually joined the chat or what was said in it. It is useless as both an information gathering device and as evidence (looking at a website isn't a crime for instance). In other words you have something that's expensive, invasive and useless.
I've said it several times... Look for the author in his mothers basement somewhere, not in some gleaming government-funded cyber-warfare bunker...
If it were government cyber-warfare we should expect the sites to literally blow up, not just shut down. They would want radioactive pollution in order to make the sites unusable both short term and long term. Just shutting them down for a few days or weeks surely isn't worth the effort.
My favorite DVD store had a break-in a few years back where the thief 'tunneled' through a brick wall (quite a bit harder than drywall) and quite literally emptied the store. Empty covers were left but everything else was taken. They did not touch the money in the register, nor did they take computers etc. - just the DVDs, but all of them. An obvious made-to-order crime.
It was estimated that making the hole in the wall took about 3-4 hours as no power tools were used. The building has residential tenants just over the shop so machine noise from a closed and darkened shop would have been very suspicious and sure to raise suspicion.
Once in, the thieves did their deed in less than 16 minutes as that was the response time of the alarm company. They found the shop empty and no sign of the thieves. Kinda amazing as that shop recently closed down and all the mechandise had to be packed for shipment to the primary store, and just packing took a full day for two people. The thieves had to get their loot out a small hole, up almost a floor (it's a basement shop) into their getaway vehicle and get away before the time was up. Pretty amazing actually. If only such people put their talents to good use instead of crime...
It has been said countless times that if everybody paid their taxes, we'd all have to pay a lot less. That is probably true, although lowering the tax will 'reset' the tax screw and open op for more spending and thus raising the tax again.
There are two things that makes people try to avoid taxing. The first is simple greed and really not that interesting. The other is the feeling of being overtaxed which may or may not be justified. It is a fact that many countries, especially the European ones, have a proportional tax system where the percentage increases as your income increase. It is a socialistic thing ("the widest shoulders have to carry the greatest load") of course which in itself makes some people take offense from a political point of view.
But a lot of people also see it as unfair on several levels, mostly because they not only have to pay the most, they're also the ones making the least use of the system (less in need of health care, social security, unemployment benefits, public schools etc.) and thus feel double-taxed. Add to this a lot of extra burden on the system from people not seen as part of the system (not contributing), especially 'chronic losers' (drug addicts, homeless, refugees, an-alphabetic immigrants and so on), and people feel yet more burdened by what could be (has been) described as 'freeloaders' or 'leeches on the system'.
So instead of just chasing tax evaders, some effort should be put into making people more happy to pay their taxes. A beginning would be to take a good, long and hard look at what the tax is used for, and then to make the taxing more fair, for instance by allowing for 'opting out' of certain public services. If you know you don't want to use the public schools or government health care you don't have to pay for these but cannot make use of them either. After all, it really isn't fair that these people pays for both the public schools and the private school they chose for their kids to attend. Also an effort should be put into making the tax more fair in itself. You should not be punished for working more or for spending more. Both these are really good for the community on several levels so it should really be taxed less, not more.
So maybe tax evaders are really freedom fighters, not just criminals...;)
I'm certain that a lot of the people hiding money will move them now in order to claim "false or fabricated information!" - and that will hurt the banks, including PostFinance.
But stupid record labels are killing the media using ancient business models and really bad business skills.
Most labels sit on a valuable back catalog, and surprisingly many just let it sit there. No re-issues. So, if you discover a new band, chances are that you might be able to find the latest release in your local record store, maybe one more title as well. Sometimes an online store might sit on an additional title. The rest? - Well, you're out of luck. That is... until you Google for it. Pirated copies are usually available on the net of every title ever released. So people end up downloading illegally - because they have no choice. They simply have no way of paying for it.
There's also the issue of geo-discrimination, i.e. releasing stuff in one territory only. The issue is less of a bother with physical media because you can buy it over the net and have it shipped. But electronic-only releases? - You're out of luck. For instance, I wanted a certain EP that was released electronic-only and only in the US. I can see it in iTunes but cannot buy it because I'm in the wrong country. It's been two years now but it's still not out anywhere else. It's a Christmas thing so every year in November or December (2008 and 2009) I searched for it unsuccessfully, but this year (2010) I found it pirated and grabbed it. The artist is on twitter so I asked her how I could compensate her and instead of me sending her a dollar (about twice what she'd get from a sale) she suggested sending the money to 'her' charity which I did. I actually sent ten dollars because one dollar is rather pathetic. So the biggest loser is... the label. They didn't want the sale and so they didn't get it. Kinda stupid business practice, huh?
But new titles also often end up being pirated, here mostly due to the stupid practice of 'boosting' through prereleasing new titles weeks or months in advance to radio stations and reviewers. The idea is to create a 'feeding frenzy' leading up to the general release so that it'll sell massively in the first few days, sending it to the top of the sales charts, something that often leads to even more sales. It used to work but today people won't wait. The hits quickly gets recorded or copied and put online, and people don't have to wait for the general release. They can just grab it (illegally) off the net and that's what they do. Then they listen to the track again and again until they tire of it. Some time later, the song gets released officially and nobody buys it because they've all 'been there, done that'. Then the label cry "piracy kills the business!" and shut down CD plants. But it's the prerelease concept that's killing the business. Piracy just fills the void where the labels fail.
But give me a CD any day. I love the physical media. But I usually already have the music when I buy the CD - because I've also downloaded it days/weeks prior to the general release, usually to test it, but also because I grow tired of waiting.
Oh, and listening posts at the record shops are also going out of fashion; the only way to 'test' an album before buying is to either listen to super-crappy worse-than-a-bad-phone-connection 30-second samples of unrepresentative parts of the songs online, or to download a full pirated copy from the net. Guess what most people choose to do? - Right. There's really no choice. Again the labels have an epic fail because most people don't bother buying it afterwards (I do though but it's because I'm conscious about it).
I'm sick of the widespread mentality that cheating is not only desirable but necessary, and that if done for the purpose of "getting ahead", it's alright. I sure wouldn't want a doctor or a lawyer who cheated their way through. I want one who took every test honestly and demonstrated they actually learned the material.
Exams don't work. Never did actually. At least they don't test for anything really usable except the ability to memorize textbooks, and the ability to utilize this under 'planned stress' on the specific day of the exam, maybe combined with luck as to which questions are on the test. If you happen to have a bad day, or get severely nervous waiting for the exam, you test a lot worse than your real level of expertise.
Remember, the real world does not in any way resemble the exam situation. In the real world, pressure usually comes unexpected when something breaks down, when random factors suddenly force a change and you have to solve something unexpected with a tight deadline. Regular work can be stressful of course but you can plan ahead and prepare as you go along.
A true test should involve a lot more than a fixed set of questions and no outside help.
What you want is the ability to solve problems using whatever means necessary to finish and get the job done quickly and correctly. Solving it using only memorized techniques requires photographic memory or another form of flawless and total recall. If you fail while still being certain that you're right can kill people, especially if you're a doctor. I would much prefer to have a doctor that knows his limits, that verifies diagnosis and treatment with colleagues or references (textbooks, reference works or the net), than one know-it-all who think he's infallible (which he isn't of course. Nobody is).
Now, rumor has it that Tunisia blocks HTTPS towards www.facebook.com so defaults or not, it wouldn't have worked.
No, sites should use HTTPS exclusively so blocking it would be impossible except in the face of a massive public outcry. Then eavesdropping would be much harder and everybody is much happier (except the oppressive governments of course).
I've said it before. WikiLeaks lost the high ground when they started releasing the diplomatic cables for no other reason than retaliation. They decided to go to war. That Anonymous is supporting them is sad. The only thing I can say is that at least Julian Assange isn't hiding behind anonymity. Gotta give him props for that. I supported Anonymous' when they went after Scientology. But this time they're supporting a would-be journalist, attention whore who I hope gets what he deserves.
You're mistaken if you think they only released the diplomatic cables in order to retaliate. They release what needs to be released, which is everything. Information wants to be free, remember?
The entire diplomatic corps is sinking in a swamp of secrecy. Lying, speaking with two tongues, telling the public one thing while doing something completely different is the core rot of the democracy. It's not diplomacy to tell lies. It's diplomacy to tell the truth - even when it hurts - without insulting anyone. Lying is too easy and only works because it can be drowned in secrecy.
It all needs to be exposed and used however it can. Then we need to learn and stop abusing secrecy to hide everything from opinions, over various forms of abuse, to downright betrayals and failures. Wikileaks are doing the right thing although it might have been done more gracefully and without the Assange mess.
FYI, DDoS is not juvenile by any means. They work. That's why they're used all the time. Nothing like blackmail from a bot-herder offering to end a DDoS-attack for the right payoff... It's big business because it works and because it can cost a lot of money or very life of a business if their network presence is severely hampered or destroyed. The Russian Mob knows this and Anonymous/4chan knows this.
On the other hand, Rick-rolling is pretty juvenile...;)
It actually does everything asked for here because to can specify which commands any user can run as root. Don't allow people to run shells and you get the fine grained control asked for. It's actually pretty simple.
I'm referring to the request for release of information. One thing is that they are required to release information on people named as suspects in an investigation, but 99.9% of those followers have ZERO connection to the leaks other than casual interest, so they cannot be implicated nor the subject of investigation.
It's equivalent to searching the homes of everybody in a major city because someone there might have talked to someone they suspect of a crime. Very vague connection and extreme overkill.
Who's responsible for the errors in the first place?
Either some developer didn't test his product properly, or his employer failed to do so before accepting it and putting it into production.
Anyone who has done Computer Science 101 at a decent university or college knows that you can design tests and run those to prove 100% that no flaws exist in your code. It's usually called 'internal testing' and basically you test everything from the inside out, starting with the smallest 'lego' (typically helper algorithms) and work your way up into the more complex structures. As you know the building blocks works (because you already have tested those), testing the more complex things becomes easy, although extremely tedious. Back when I did CS we made a small 'chess display' program (show a chess board, enter moves and it validates the input then validate the moves according to the rules and finally update the board and wait for the next input) which took about 200 lines of code (Pascal I think it was). Testing this thing took well over 1.000 individual tests but then we could prove that it would behave exactly as it should no matter what input you gave it - barring hardware and OS malfunctions of course.
Testing something like an operating system with millions of lines of code would require trillions of tests, but these could fairly easily be machine generated while parsing the code and batch executed.
I have no idea how complex the 'operating system' for a slot machine is, but it can be tested just like everything else, and failing to do so is a major mistake in my book, one that should cost.
If I were to decide I'd make the slot machine provider/developer liable for the losses incurred by casinos in cases like this. They provided the means for the fraud to take place and should thus be liable for damages. I do know of a case where a manufacturer of roulette tables that knew about some imbalance in the wheel but didn't fix it, ended up covering the losses incurred by casinos where the knowledge was exploited to place winning bets.
Even better would be a app that - once the phone is unlocked - expects a certain action (key press, gesture, physical movement etc.) by the user within a certain time frame (fully configurable of course) and if it doesn't happen simply wipes the phone and bricks it.
This way you can provide the correct password, or the authorities could have obtained it through other means, and the phone will unlock as always. But a few seconds later it suddenly bricks... This way you cannot be blamed for it (the phone is in police hands after all) and the presence of this bricking program cannot be proved because the phone is... well wiped and bricked. You can even sue the police for damaging your phone...;)
4chan wasn't down due to DDoS but due to scheduled updates... Go figure...
The update apparently included one of moot's usual shenanigans - adding obnoxious music to/b/ and messing with the stylesheet... Well, actually he replaced a Christmas theme (with an obnoxious Christmas song) with a very yellow theme and Rednex "Cotton Eye Joe" as obnoxious soundtrack...
Always fun to see all the n00bs whining about how to turn off the music...;)
Well, if your bad driving was the cause of an accident, isn't it fair that you get punished for it?
There's far too many bad drivers out there, or drivers doing everything but pay attention to the road while driving, and I'd love for them to be scared shitless over being the cause of an accident, which makes them wake up and pay attention to their driving. No more cellphones, fiddling with the radio, lighting a cigarette, looking the girlfriend deep into her eyes, arguing with the people in the back seat and so on. Just both hands on the wheel and all attention deeply focused on the road ahead. Will save a lot of lives too.
That contract only applies to COMMERCIAL emails. You can email Dan as much as you like as long as the emails are non-commercial in nature, but there's no reason to send him commercial emails because - well, he doesn't want any. That really cannot be hard to understand?!
How hard can it be to limit your emails to people having opted-in to receiving those? - That's really all he's asking for.
Yes, just as much as NOT screening the guys with unlimited access to the cargo holds, the fuel, the gear hydraulics, the flaps and probably all the avionics as well... After all, it's much more likely that a random family father brings liquid explosive in a soda bottle that an Al-Queda agent gets a job cleaning muck around a parked plane (background checks are non-existent in almost every airport in the world) and places a huge crate filled with explosive in a cargo hold... So we confiscate the bottle just in case and just stop worrying about the nameless staff messing around the parked planes... they wouldn't do anything... after all, they work there you know!
Olivia Wilde was very attractive indeed! - Quite a breakthrough for her I think.
But I also found the 'Sirens' (the four girls attending to to Flynn when he first arrives) pretty attractive, especially Beau Garretts "Gem" who we meet again later when going to that 'club in the sky' (never caught the name if it had one) where Daft Punk actually DJ'ed.
I started blocking ads when they started blocking me or my use of webpages.
Static banner ads were okay, but as soon as they started blinking, jumping, making noise, popping up or sliding in front, they were unacceptable and had to go. It's a simple as that.
Using Adblock Plus with NoScript have made sure I've yet to experience my first ad-borne infection.
Clearly you haven't reviewed the latest procedures...
Well, let's just say that lines of little grey aliens are forming in front of TSA education centers. They're ditching their anal probes in favor of the new and much more invasive techniques the TSA is bringing forth...
"We can't really hate them for bowing to pressure from the most powerful country in the world."
They already did that with the highly illegal raid against The Pirate Bay... An attorney general cannot legally sign a search warrant regardless of being a judge and all. The separation of powers specifically forbids this. Yet it happened in Sweden where the separation of powers traditionally are strong. That's bowing to pressure for you.
There's no evidence that the inclusion of British soldiers in patrols (they were never part of any units or similar) was done solely to circumvent international law. Making joint patrols makes sense in so many ways, both strategic and logistically.
Basically, it makes all the sense in the world to turn over prisoners to the local authorities following an arrest. It would be wrong to create a parallel legal system with own courts and prisons. If the local authorities employ torture or similar it is their problem and the international community needs to take it up with them. It's plain stupid to simply not hand over prisoners to them and think it's all fine. They need to stop using torture and that's all there is to it.
There is no evidence that the police units that received the prisoners actually engaged in torture. They were suspected of torture but those suspecting it had political reasons to make false accusations of this nature so their claim is suspect at best.
Actually it'd you that need to learn some economics... Nothing is ever so simple as you seem to make it, even though the morons at MPAA and RIAA still seems to think so.
Sounds simple enough: If you don't pay for something, someone loses money, i.e. it hurts someone.
But it's never that simple.
First up there's the question whether the 'thief' would have paid for the merchandise if he/she couldn't get it for free. Studies have shown that most pirates pay later when it comes to music and movies; they only pirate stuff due to lack of availability. Dunno about games which might be different. In any case, a pirated copy is is either paid for later or never a sale to begin with, i.e. no lost sale.
Next up is the question whether a digital copy actually is a loss on any level. Ordinary theft consists of two sides, the loss incurred by the owner and the gain incurred by the thief, either in the form of the item itself or its value when sold to a fence. A digital copy does not include the immediate loss as we're talking about a copy. And loss of sale is questionable at best.
Now we move on to the next level. Going after your (potential) customers while feeding lies to the media is not good marketing. It's actually hurting sales - quite a bit actually. So would-be customers might actually chose a different product based on this negative reputation. Now that is a clear loss.
You might even generate generic hostility against your business in general, making people take action against you and your business practices. We're talking something akin to picketing the head office or sales outlets, generating more negative press. That's even more loss.
So, going after pirates might cost you a lot more than you 'lose' in 'lost sales' (which doesn't exist for the most part). It is good business sense then to ignore 'pirating', and even better business sense to try to find out why people pirate your stuff and see if it's something you could turn into profit. Prices too high? - Lower them! Missing back catalogue titles? - Release it! Inability to obtain something in a certain geographical area? - Release it there! - And so on and so forth. Most of the solutions are easy and right there - if there's a will to actually do business as opposed to alienating your customers.
Slashdot Mirror
It is very much about the principles. Consider the following scenarios:
A) The police suspects a specific person of a specific crime, goes to the courts and gets a warrant to intercept communication in order to gather evidence - and so on.
B) The police suspects someone may be committing a crime and request (no warrant needed) all logs in order to comb them for possible suspects and gather evidence against these suspects, if any.
No question that option B is the easiest for the police, but it is extremely invasive and makes the ISP a part of the policing system. Option A also requires actual police work in advance, in order to put a name on the suspect and to get enough circumstantial evidence in order to get a warrant.
The argument for B has always been the quest for terrorists. But so far all terrorists arrested have left enough data on their PCs for the authorities to compile and use in a trial. None have been found through this generic logging and the logging will not yield information not already available on the suspects computers.
The logging from B is useless against encrypted communication and the primary terrorist forums already use encrypted chat forums. You can log that there was traffic to the IP of the website with the chat but not whether the suspect actually joined the chat or what was said in it. It is useless as both an information gathering device and as evidence (looking at a website isn't a crime for instance). In other words you have something that's expensive, invasive and useless.
I've said it several times... Look for the author in his mothers basement somewhere, not in some gleaming government-funded cyber-warfare bunker...
If it were government cyber-warfare we should expect the sites to literally blow up, not just shut down. They would want radioactive pollution in order to make the sites unusable both short term and long term. Just shutting them down for a few days or weeks surely isn't worth the effort.
My favorite DVD store had a break-in a few years back where the thief 'tunneled' through a brick wall (quite a bit harder than drywall) and quite literally emptied the store. Empty covers were left but everything else was taken. They did not touch the money in the register, nor did they take computers etc. - just the DVDs, but all of them. An obvious made-to-order crime.
It was estimated that making the hole in the wall took about 3-4 hours as no power tools were used. The building has residential tenants just over the shop so machine noise from a closed and darkened shop would have been very suspicious and sure to raise suspicion.
Once in, the thieves did their deed in less than 16 minutes as that was the response time of the alarm company. They found the shop empty and no sign of the thieves. Kinda amazing as that shop recently closed down and all the mechandise had to be packed for shipment to the primary store, and just packing took a full day for two people. The thieves had to get their loot out a small hole, up almost a floor (it's a basement shop) into their getaway vehicle and get away before the time was up. Pretty amazing actually. If only such people put their talents to good use instead of crime...
It has been said countless times that if everybody paid their taxes, we'd all have to pay a lot less. That is probably true, although lowering the tax will 'reset' the tax screw and open op for more spending and thus raising the tax again.
There are two things that makes people try to avoid taxing. The first is simple greed and really not that interesting. The other is the feeling of being overtaxed which may or may not be justified. It is a fact that many countries, especially the European ones, have a proportional tax system where the percentage increases as your income increase. It is a socialistic thing ("the widest shoulders have to carry the greatest load") of course which in itself makes some people take offense from a political point of view.
But a lot of people also see it as unfair on several levels, mostly because they not only have to pay the most, they're also the ones making the least use of the system (less in need of health care, social security, unemployment benefits, public schools etc.) and thus feel double-taxed. Add to this a lot of extra burden on the system from people not seen as part of the system (not contributing), especially 'chronic losers' (drug addicts, homeless, refugees, an-alphabetic immigrants and so on), and people feel yet more burdened by what could be (has been) described as 'freeloaders' or 'leeches on the system'.
So instead of just chasing tax evaders, some effort should be put into making people more happy to pay their taxes. A beginning would be to take a good, long and hard look at what the tax is used for, and then to make the taxing more fair, for instance by allowing for 'opting out' of certain public services. If you know you don't want to use the public schools or government health care you don't have to pay for these but cannot make use of them either. After all, it really isn't fair that these people pays for both the public schools and the private school they chose for their kids to attend. Also an effort should be put into making the tax more fair in itself. You should not be punished for working more or for spending more. Both these are really good for the community on several levels so it should really be taxed less, not more.
So maybe tax evaders are really freedom fighters, not just criminals... ;)
HA!! - It's the perfect payback!
I'm certain that a lot of the people hiding money will move them now in order to claim "false or fabricated information!" - and that will hurt the banks, including PostFinance.
But stupid record labels are killing the media using ancient business models and really bad business skills.
Most labels sit on a valuable back catalog, and surprisingly many just let it sit there. No re-issues. So, if you discover a new band, chances are that you might be able to find the latest release in your local record store, maybe one more title as well. Sometimes an online store might sit on an additional title. The rest? - Well, you're out of luck. That is... until you Google for it. Pirated copies are usually available on the net of every title ever released. So people end up downloading illegally - because they have no choice. They simply have no way of paying for it.
There's also the issue of geo-discrimination, i.e. releasing stuff in one territory only. The issue is less of a bother with physical media because you can buy it over the net and have it shipped. But electronic-only releases? - You're out of luck. For instance, I wanted a certain EP that was released electronic-only and only in the US. I can see it in iTunes but cannot buy it because I'm in the wrong country. It's been two years now but it's still not out anywhere else. It's a Christmas thing so every year in November or December (2008 and 2009) I searched for it unsuccessfully, but this year (2010) I found it pirated and grabbed it. The artist is on twitter so I asked her how I could compensate her and instead of me sending her a dollar (about twice what she'd get from a sale) she suggested sending the money to 'her' charity which I did. I actually sent ten dollars because one dollar is rather pathetic. So the biggest loser is... the label. They didn't want the sale and so they didn't get it. Kinda stupid business practice, huh?
But new titles also often end up being pirated, here mostly due to the stupid practice of 'boosting' through prereleasing new titles weeks or months in advance to radio stations and reviewers. The idea is to create a 'feeding frenzy' leading up to the general release so that it'll sell massively in the first few days, sending it to the top of the sales charts, something that often leads to even more sales. It used to work but today people won't wait. The hits quickly gets recorded or copied and put online, and people don't have to wait for the general release. They can just grab it (illegally) off the net and that's what they do. Then they listen to the track again and again until they tire of it. Some time later, the song gets released officially and nobody buys it because they've all 'been there, done that'. Then the label cry "piracy kills the business!" and shut down CD plants. But it's the prerelease concept that's killing the business. Piracy just fills the void where the labels fail.
But give me a CD any day. I love the physical media. But I usually already have the music when I buy the CD - because I've also downloaded it days/weeks prior to the general release, usually to test it, but also because I grow tired of waiting.
Oh, and listening posts at the record shops are also going out of fashion; the only way to 'test' an album before buying is to either listen to super-crappy worse-than-a-bad-phone-connection 30-second samples of unrepresentative parts of the songs online, or to download a full pirated copy from the net. Guess what most people choose to do? - Right. There's really no choice. Again the labels have an epic fail because most people don't bother buying it afterwards (I do though but it's because I'm conscious about it).
Catch more of them!
I'm sick of the widespread mentality that cheating is not only desirable but necessary, and that if done for the purpose of "getting ahead", it's alright. I sure wouldn't want a doctor or a lawyer who cheated their way through. I want one who took every test honestly and demonstrated they actually learned the material.
Exams don't work. Never did actually. At least they don't test for anything really usable except the ability to memorize textbooks, and the ability to utilize this under 'planned stress' on the specific day of the exam, maybe combined with luck as to which questions are on the test. If you happen to have a bad day, or get severely nervous waiting for the exam, you test a lot worse than your real level of expertise.
Remember, the real world does not in any way resemble the exam situation. In the real world, pressure usually comes unexpected when something breaks down, when random factors suddenly force a change and you have to solve something unexpected with a tight deadline. Regular work can be stressful of course but you can plan ahead and prepare as you go along.
A true test should involve a lot more than a fixed set of questions and no outside help.
What you want is the ability to solve problems using whatever means necessary to finish and get the job done quickly and correctly. Solving it using only memorized techniques requires photographic memory or another form of flawless and total recall. If you fail while still being certain that you're right can kill people, especially if you're a doctor. I would much prefer to have a doctor that knows his limits, that verifies diagnosis and treatment with colleagues or references (textbooks, reference works or the net), than one know-it-all who think he's infallible (which he isn't of course. Nobody is).
Now, rumor has it that Tunisia blocks HTTPS towards www.facebook.com so defaults or not, it wouldn't have worked.
No, sites should use HTTPS exclusively so blocking it would be impossible except in the face of a massive public outcry. Then eavesdropping would be much harder and everybody is much happier (except the oppressive governments of course).
I've said it before. WikiLeaks lost the high ground when they started releasing the diplomatic cables for no other reason than retaliation. They decided to go to war. That Anonymous is supporting them is sad. The only thing I can say is that at least Julian Assange isn't hiding behind anonymity. Gotta give him props for that. I supported Anonymous' when they went after Scientology. But this time they're supporting a would-be journalist, attention whore who I hope gets what he deserves.
You're mistaken if you think they only released the diplomatic cables in order to retaliate. They release what needs to be released, which is everything. Information wants to be free, remember?
The entire diplomatic corps is sinking in a swamp of secrecy. Lying, speaking with two tongues, telling the public one thing while doing something completely different is the core rot of the democracy. It's not diplomacy to tell lies. It's diplomacy to tell the truth - even when it hurts - without insulting anyone. Lying is too easy and only works because it can be drowned in secrecy.
It all needs to be exposed and used however it can. Then we need to learn and stop abusing secrecy to hide everything from opinions, over various forms of abuse, to downright betrayals and failures. Wikileaks are doing the right thing although it might have been done more gracefully and without the Assange mess.
This scores as "insightful"?!
FYI, DDoS is not juvenile by any means. They work. That's why they're used all the time. Nothing like blackmail from a bot-herder offering to end a DDoS-attack for the right payoff... It's big business because it works and because it can cost a lot of money or very life of a business if their network presence is severely hampered or destroyed. The Russian Mob knows this and Anonymous/4chan knows this.
On the other hand, Rick-rolling is pretty juvenile... ;)
You obviously never have worked with sudo, right?
It actually does everything asked for here because to can specify which commands any user can run as root. Don't allow people to run shells and you get the fine grained control asked for. It's actually pretty simple.
I'm referring to the request for release of information. One thing is that they are required to release information on people named as suspects in an investigation, but 99.9% of those followers have ZERO connection to the leaks other than casual interest, so they cannot be implicated nor the subject of investigation.
It's equivalent to searching the homes of everybody in a major city because someone there might have talked to someone they suspect of a crime. Very vague connection and extreme overkill.
Who's responsible for the errors in the first place?
Either some developer didn't test his product properly, or his employer failed to do so before accepting it and putting it into production.
Anyone who has done Computer Science 101 at a decent university or college knows that you can design tests and run those to prove 100% that no flaws exist in your code. It's usually called 'internal testing' and basically you test everything from the inside out, starting with the smallest 'lego' (typically helper algorithms) and work your way up into the more complex structures. As you know the building blocks works (because you already have tested those), testing the more complex things becomes easy, although extremely tedious. Back when I did CS we made a small 'chess display' program (show a chess board, enter moves and it validates the input then validate the moves according to the rules and finally update the board and wait for the next input) which took about 200 lines of code (Pascal I think it was). Testing this thing took well over 1.000 individual tests but then we could prove that it would behave exactly as it should no matter what input you gave it - barring hardware and OS malfunctions of course.
Testing something like an operating system with millions of lines of code would require trillions of tests, but these could fairly easily be machine generated while parsing the code and batch executed.
I have no idea how complex the 'operating system' for a slot machine is, but it can be tested just like everything else, and failing to do so is a major mistake in my book, one that should cost.
If I were to decide I'd make the slot machine provider/developer liable for the losses incurred by casinos in cases like this. They provided the means for the fraud to take place and should thus be liable for damages. I do know of a case where a manufacturer of roulette tables that knew about some imbalance in the wheel but didn't fix it, ended up covering the losses incurred by casinos where the knowledge was exploited to place winning bets.
Even better would be a app that - once the phone is unlocked - expects a certain action (key press, gesture, physical movement etc.) by the user within a certain time frame (fully configurable of course) and if it doesn't happen simply wipes the phone and bricks it.
This way you can provide the correct password, or the authorities could have obtained it through other means, and the phone will unlock as always. But a few seconds later it suddenly bricks... This way you cannot be blamed for it (the phone is in police hands after all) and the presence of this bricking program cannot be proved because the phone is... well wiped and bricked. You can even sue the police for damaging your phone... ;)
4chan wasn't down due to DDoS but due to scheduled updates... Go figure...
The update apparently included one of moot's usual shenanigans - adding obnoxious music to /b/ and messing with the stylesheet... Well, actually he replaced a Christmas theme (with an obnoxious Christmas song) with a very yellow theme and Rednex "Cotton Eye Joe" as obnoxious soundtrack...
Always fun to see all the n00bs whining about how to turn off the music... ;)
Well, if your bad driving was the cause of an accident, isn't it fair that you get punished for it?
There's far too many bad drivers out there, or drivers doing everything but pay attention to the road while driving, and I'd love for them to be scared shitless over being the cause of an accident, which makes them wake up and pay attention to their driving. No more cellphones, fiddling with the radio, lighting a cigarette, looking the girlfriend deep into her eyes, arguing with the people in the back seat and so on. Just both hands on the wheel and all attention deeply focused on the road ahead. Will save a lot of lives too.
That contract only applies to COMMERCIAL emails. You can email Dan as much as you like as long as the emails are non-commercial in nature, but there's no reason to send him commercial emails because - well, he doesn't want any. That really cannot be hard to understand?!
How hard can it be to limit your emails to people having opted-in to receiving those? - That's really all he's asking for.
Yes, just as much as NOT screening the guys with unlimited access to the cargo holds, the fuel, the gear hydraulics, the flaps and probably all the avionics as well... After all, it's much more likely that a random family father brings liquid explosive in a soda bottle that an Al-Queda agent gets a job cleaning muck around a parked plane (background checks are non-existent in almost every airport in the world) and places a huge crate filled with explosive in a cargo hold... So we confiscate the bottle just in case and just stop worrying about the nameless staff messing around the parked planes... they wouldn't do anything... after all, they work there you know!
Olivia Wilde was very attractive indeed! - Quite a breakthrough for her I think.
But I also found the 'Sirens' (the four girls attending to to Flynn when he first arrives) pretty attractive, especially Beau Garretts "Gem" who we meet again later when going to that 'club in the sky' (never caught the name if it had one) where Daft Punk actually DJ'ed.
I started blocking ads when they started blocking me or my use of webpages.
Static banner ads were okay, but as soon as they started blinking, jumping, making noise, popping up or sliding in front, they were unacceptable and had to go. It's a simple as that.
Using Adblock Plus with NoScript have made sure I've yet to experience my first ad-borne infection.
Clearly you haven't reviewed the latest procedures...
Well, let's just say that lines of little grey aliens are forming in front of TSA education centers. They're ditching their anal probes in favor of the new and much more invasive techniques the TSA is bringing forth...
"We can't really hate them for bowing to pressure from the most powerful country in the world."
They already did that with the highly illegal raid against The Pirate Bay... An attorney general cannot legally sign a search warrant regardless of being a judge and all. The separation of powers specifically forbids this. Yet it happened in Sweden where the separation of powers traditionally are strong. That's bowing to pressure for you.
There's no evidence that the inclusion of British soldiers in patrols (they were never part of any units or similar) was done solely to circumvent international law. Making joint patrols makes sense in so many ways, both strategic and logistically.
Basically, it makes all the sense in the world to turn over prisoners to the local authorities following an arrest. It would be wrong to create a parallel legal system with own courts and prisons. If the local authorities employ torture or similar it is their problem and the international community needs to take it up with them. It's plain stupid to simply not hand over prisoners to them and think it's all fine. They need to stop using torture and that's all there is to it.
You forget one important word: "knowingly"
There is no evidence that the police units that received the prisoners actually engaged in torture. They were suspected of torture but those suspecting it had political reasons to make false accusations of this nature so their claim is suspect at best.
Actually it'd you that need to learn some economics... Nothing is ever so simple as you seem to make it, even though the morons at MPAA and RIAA still seems to think so.
Sounds simple enough: If you don't pay for something, someone loses money, i.e. it hurts someone.
But it's never that simple.
First up there's the question whether the 'thief' would have paid for the merchandise if he/she couldn't get it for free. Studies have shown that most pirates pay later when it comes to music and movies; they only pirate stuff due to lack of availability. Dunno about games which might be different. In any case, a pirated copy is is either paid for later or never a sale to begin with, i.e. no lost sale.
Next up is the question whether a digital copy actually is a loss on any level. Ordinary theft consists of two sides, the loss incurred by the owner and the gain incurred by the thief, either in the form of the item itself or its value when sold to a fence. A digital copy does not include the immediate loss as we're talking about a copy. And loss of sale is questionable at best.
Now we move on to the next level. Going after your (potential) customers while feeding lies to the media is not good marketing. It's actually hurting sales - quite a bit actually. So would-be customers might actually chose a different product based on this negative reputation. Now that is a clear loss.
You might even generate generic hostility against your business in general, making people take action against you and your business practices. We're talking something akin to picketing the head office or sales outlets, generating more negative press. That's even more loss.
So, going after pirates might cost you a lot more than you 'lose' in 'lost sales' (which doesn't exist for the most part). It is good business sense then to ignore 'pirating', and even better business sense to try to find out why people pirate your stuff and see if it's something you could turn into profit. Prices too high? - Lower them! Missing back catalogue titles? - Release it! Inability to obtain something in a certain geographical area? - Release it there! - And so on and so forth. Most of the solutions are easy and right there - if there's a will to actually do business as opposed to alienating your customers.