There are phone scams elsewhere but it seems not to the same extent. In the UK we no longer have a nationalised phone service but the regulatory environment seems to be more successful in keeping the worst excesses under control.
I sometimes get calls from automated systems but they show up as International on the caller ID. I believe that the regulations for automated call systems are stricter and enforcement harsher here so they only operate from outside the UK jurisdiction. We also get free caller-id if you know how to sign up for it.
Calls to mobiles are charged entirely to the caller here and mobile numbers have a standard prefix anyway so we do not have two of the elements of the problem.
I did get some random cold calls on my mobile a while ago claiming to be from my mobile phone company and trying to sell me a new contract. The problem with that was that my phone is pay-as-you-go so there is no contract to expire. I think they were just calling all numbers that were first registered 18 months earlier because that is the usual first contract duration.
The problem that gets the most coverage here is reverse charged SMS messages where people say they did not request the messages. That seems to have died down a bit now; I believe that was as a result of the regulator making the mobile phone companies get their act together in responding to complaints.
There is a page at http://example.com/ so clearly the domain exists. It resolves to an IP address and there is a web server listening there. The page does say that the name and the.org and.net versions "are not available for registration" but that could be considered to apply to all names that are already registered. Note that this differs from the reserved TLDs. These domains are reserved for use in documentation so that you can be sure that your examples never refer to something with some other meaning.
If you look up the registration data for example.com then you can discover that it is registered by IANA. Apparently the registration will expire 13-aug-2011 but I suspect that it will be renewed in time!
A network has lots of things sending each other their addresses at various levels. Get a tool that gathers and analyses that data, a web search will turn up tools of various levels of sophistication. The documentation you create should be "how to use the network management tools". You will never have time to keep low level documentation up to date so automate that level and focus on making sure your successor has pointers on how to use the tools effectively.
The simple reason why these funds are going to a research group in an EU member state is that they come out of the EU budget. It is not the job of the European Union to make up for the research funding deficiencies of the United States of America. On the contrary, one of the goals of EU research funding is for the EU to not be dependent on non-EU countries for technology or at least to be strong enough to be an equal partner in collaborative ventures.
As for reinventing the wheel, these funds are going to an academic research group to do research on problems that have not yet been solved.
It is not only normal for other research groups to explore other approaches to solving the problems or to explore other problems in the same overall area, it is essential for progress that there are different groups looking at different ideas. Even if EU funding could go to a US research group it would not be sensible to channel all operating system research funding to the same group.
The licensing issue is what killed the possibility of using Gopher for an externally visible service where I was working at the time.
The real problem was that it would have meant asking the boss to do something; licenses require the involvement of a suitable corporate officer actually making a decision. Just putting up a web server on the machine that was hosting our FTP server to serve the content already approved for release in a nicer way took a little technical work and the absence of a decision from above.
The license may have been for the Gopher server code but there was no way we could have justified spending the time to do our own implementation.
We experimented with Gopher internally very briefly but the organisational obstacles killed it very quickly.
My memory of the machines of the era was that the Apple II was too expensive in the UK to be widely used as a home computer. Even the BBC Micro was a bit on the expensive side and most UK home users of the time had one of the Sinclair machines that were much cheaper.
The company I worked for had an Apple II bought specifically to run Visicalc. As far as I remember, this was the main driver for sales of Apple II in the UK until the arrival of the IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3.
In the TV programme, they showed documents that indicated that a ship was taking supplies to an English general who was engaged in a campaign to deny the Spanish access to deep water harbours in Northern France. The ship that sank near Alderney in the channel islands matches the description of the ship that failed to arrive. The recovered guns also had "F W" engraved on them indicating a link to Francis Walsingham, the man often described as Queen Elizabeth's "spymaster". There was no "Royal Navy" at the time but there are records.
Other artefacts recovered from the wreck are also useful in confirming the date. The musket recovered from the wreck was also a very significant find.
The TV program also mentioned that the muzzle velocity of the cannon, although impressive for its day, was known not to be a record at the time. One of the archaeologists mentioned that some of the cannon from the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, were larger and had a greater muzzle velocity.
The recovered guns were cast as a single piece (and for the replica they added appropriate impurities to get the same grade of iron that would have been available in Elizabethan times). Earlier guns had been made from strips of metal bound together with hoops.
The point emphasized a lot in the TV programme was that the ship had a uniform main armament and the need to raise two more cannon to see if they matched the one already recovered was to validate that hypothesis. With a uniform armament, there was no rooting around in the shot locker with a set of callipers looking for shot of the right size, the shot were all the same size. They also emphasized the tactic of firing a barrage from a set of smaller guns rather than individual shot from larger single guns. That is much easier if you do not have to worry about which shot and which powder charge go with which gun.
It was suggested that this allowed a change to the tactics of naval warfare. Up to that time the usual approach had been to come alongside the enemy and essentially fight a land battle on board ship. The uniform armament of moderate sized reasonably powerful guns apparently made it possible to stand off and fight ship to ship rather than hand to hand.
If you know my real name you can find out quite a few things about me as a result of things I have done for work without resorting to LinkedIn (where I do have an account). Publishing papers puts your name on the net and so do various other activities that have to be done with a real name.
I publish things I do not mind being public forever and will probably add more to my LinkedIn profile soon.
"Beginning is the easy part" - this is the most insightful comment I have seen for some time.
I have seen the same problem over and over again. Welcome to the first annual conference on whatever - nothing happens next year. Welcome to the first issue of our newsletter - there is no second issue. Welcome to our web site where you can find out the latest news about our organisation - as it was last year before it changed. Part of the problem is that those who start something are often hailed as heroes where those who keep it going are seen as a drain on resources.
If you look at the seminal works in computer security you will see that a lot of the most significant early ones were reports for the Electronic Systems Division of the Air Force Systems Command.
I don't know how much damage has been done to either or both of USAF and NSA by incompetent and technically illiterate managers and politicians since those days but a spy agency with expertise in cryptographic algorithms is not what you need in overall charge of the thinking about systems security. An organisation where systems must be usable by people overloaded with work in a high stress environment is more appropriate than one whose mission is to spy on foreigners and die rather than give up any information.
I would cite SELinux as an example in support of my argument. It is fine in theory but so hard to use in practice that the usual advice is to disable it if you want to get any work done. This fits the spy agency thinking that it is better for the system to be inoperable than for there to be any possibility of information leakage. That is totally unacceptable to anyone who needs to get a job done.
Having had my little rant, maybe I should read the article...
Lady Claire Macdonald runs the family home, Kinloch Lodge, as a hotel.
I suspect that a Scottish court might see Lord Macdonald, Godfrey Macdonald of Macdonald, High Chief of Clan Donald, or his wife, of having a stronger claim to the use of the name at least in Scotland than some interloper from the USA.
There is also a Macdonalds Restaurant & Guest House in Pitlochry. If I was visiting the area I might go there just to be able to say that I had at last found a Macdonalds Restaurant where the food was edible.
Let me introduce you to another word - homophone. And two more - homograph and homoglyph - so that we can all understand that these were not the issue in the P^n post.
About 20 years ago I was working for a company that used Xerox Star workstations. These had an optical mouse that needed a special pad with a pattern that the mouse could track. These pads were thin card and they would wear out after a while. We ordered some more and sure enough, they arrived individually wrapped in cardboard boxes about an inch thick with the whole lot in an outer cardboard box.
We went through all the same comments that are being posted here about inefficiency, why can't they put then all in one box, or just an envelope.
You may think that at least in that case there was a physical thing we needed rather than just the information on the paper but the Xerox laser printer we had attached to the network was perfectly capable of printing sheets of paper with the necessary pattern
Being older and wiser than I was then I now understand that it can be more expensive in resources as well as money to set up different processes for doing different things rather than having one process that does many things, albeit somewhat wastefully in some cases. If you must have a packing and shipping system for cardboard boxes and you also sometimes need to ship sheets of paper you either use the box shipping system with the apparent waste seen here or you set up a separate system to handle paper with its own environmental cost,
Well that may explain it. I am not in the USA, the phone at my home is what you call unlisted and the phone account is in my wife's name.
The impression I get is that people outside the USA, especially in the EU, have a higher expectation of privacy and the protection of personal data by companies to which it has been given. Companies such as Google that operate internationally need to take that into account.
Go to www.google.com and type your home phone number into the search box. Google will list your name, your address, and show a map on google maps satellite view of your house.
I just tried it for several variations of my home and work phone numbers - when quoted as a phrase with any of the usual variants of spaces, national or international prefix - no results found. With the parts of the numbers separately, lots of irrelevant stuff.
I tried looking for a site that does reverse phone lookup - one I found identified the city and the map it showed had an arrow pointing to a major road in the city centre. The location is about 15 minutes drive from where I live and that radius covers a lot of houses. Other sites that claimed to find anybody's details from a phone number either came up with nothing or in one case, something on the wrong continent!
I also tried a Google search for my name and the phrase "phone number" - several results (but not the majority) were pages that correctly found some of my online presence, but there was no telephone number to be found there. Searches for my name (just surname) and last part of the phone number also came up either empty or with a few irrelevant random pages.
There is a lot of data out there on the web and Google does a good job of finding things but it seems that my phone number is not out there and certainly not associated with my name.
I do not have a Google or gMail account; no plans to get one either.
"Nolan Waithe Grant was hired Aug. 16 to work at the university computer system's help desk at a salary of $21,626. Three years ago he pleaded guilty to hacking into the school's Unix computer network."
You may have been given a book that does name->phone-number lookups for those who have not chosen to opt out but I believe that it is very much harder to get access to the inverse function that does phone-number->name lookups. I suspect that it varies by jurisdiction but I believe that in some places at least, people can be in serious trouble for giving access to the database that performs that function to those who do not have the proper authorization.
Those who are familiar with security will know the concept of work-factor. You can reverse lookup with a phone book but if all you have is a printed copy it is a lot of work. The cost of doing that work is the deterrent. Modern technology has made it easier, but it is still costly. The idea is to adjust the cost/benefit ratio so that an attack is not worthwhile.
The concern for the revealing of names from addresses is that it makes it cheaper for confidence tricksters to deliver some plausible message that will trick people into giving them some of their money. If the average cost of creating the plausible message becomes less than the expected return then the level of scamming will increase. Those of us not taken in by the tricksters will still suffer from increased level of junk so it is in all our interests to take this kind of thing seriously.
MEPs do not read Slashdot, they read the original Directives and proposed amendments and perhaps analysis by people who have read the originals. If you are going to write to your MEP it would be a good idea to be at least as well informed as they are if you do not want to do more harm than good by giving the impression of being a ranting idiot. My reading of such originals as I can find suggests that ZeroPaid, La Quadrature and EDRI are just completely wrong about what the proposed amendments say. There may be stuff I have not seen on which they are basing their opinions but the sections they have quoted just do not support their arguments.
Please do not give your MEP the impression that those who are opposed to having the net controlled by content cartels are a bunch of clueless ranting idiots.
Having read the original Directive 2002/58/EC and the various documents that La Quadrature say are the proposed amendments I do not see a contradiction. I am afraid that "The paragraph immediately below that" is not a sufficiently specific reference for me to understand your point. The only thing to which 'that' might refer seems to be "the proposed amendments" and that just does not make sense to me.
Neither the Directive nor any of the amendments require ISPs "to do everything in their power to prevent customer copyright infringement" as far as I can see. If you think that they do can you please be specific about which part of which document you think says that.
I have mod points at the moment but I have already commented so I can't use one here.
The original Directive 2002/58/EC is all about "processing of personal data and the protection of privacy". The original Article 14 paragraph 1 is:
1. In implementing the provisions of this Directive, Member States shall ensure, subject to paragraphs 2 and 3, that no mandatory requirements for specific technical features are imposed on terminal or other electronic communication equipment which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States.
The amendment just makes it explicit that DRM is included in the equipment that must not be required by law. I am assuming that La Quadrature has reported the amendment correctly, I can't find a link to the original.
While some might like to prohibit the sale of equipment containing DRM I don't think that is going to happen. Permitting the sale of DRM-crippled systems does not prohibit the sale of non-DRM systems.
Reading the original directive is quite informative. It seems to me that the amendment just makes it clear that concern for enforcing copyright does not override the prohibition on requiring specific technical features.
My reading of the proposed amendment is the exact opposite - (my emphasis added):
Article 2 - point 5 a (new) amending Directive 2002/58/EC Article 14 - paragraph 1
1. In implementing the provisions of this Directive, Member States shall ensure, subject to paragraphs 2 and 3, that no mandatory requirements for specific technical features, including, without limitation, for the purpose of detecting,intercepting or preventing infringement of intellectual property rights by users, are imposed on terminal or other electronic communication equipment which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States.
It seems to me that this directive prohibits making it a legal requirement that equipment contains DRM or other control mechanisms. Manufacturers can put that stuff in their products if they want but it seems to me that this amendment says you can't stop manufacturers leaving it out and if they do you can't stop them shipping their products between member states.
I know it is probably too much to ask on Slashdot but could someone else read the proposed amendments carefully, think about them and if they think I have got it wrong explain exactly how and why they interpret the words in that way.
Is it just a coincidence that the daily Dilbert cartoon has gone Flash-only today?
I have never liked Flash, mainly because it was used as a distracting and irritating advertisement medium, but also because of the arrogant assumption that the Flash page author should be in control of what my machine does. I don't want my browsing experience reduced to some funereal pace at the whim of a marketing drone who thinks his tedious animation should occupy my time.
I was reconsidering my decision to give up reading Dilbert because of the switch to Flash, but now that I have read about this exploit I think I will stick to my No-Flash policy.
Yes I know, this exploit has been fixed in some version of Flash to which I may have upgraded but what about the next one?
The IRA is not a single coherent organisation. It split fairly early into "Official IRA" and "Provisional IRA" (aka The Provos). The "Official IRA" gave up violence before the other parts and later dropped the IRA name and became a political party with a mainly socialist agenda. The "Provisional IRA" is the part that adopted the gun in one hand and ballot box in the other strategy.
In the time when the Provisional IRA was running its bombing campaign it did issue bomb warnings but these were intentionally vague about times and places. According to some information that I have heard, the warning about the 1983 bomb planted in a street near Harrods in London suggested that the bomb was in Harrods and so evacuating people from the store into the street would have caused additional casualties. Fortunately the police had learned that the IRA warnings were really intended to placate the consciences of the IRA supporters in the USA rather than to be of any real value in reducing casualties.
When the Provisional IRA became somewhat less violent, splinter groups formed in order to continue the killing of random bystanders. One of these, the so-called "Real IRA" was responsible for the atrocity at Omagh
Do not fool yourself into thinking that terrorists who purport to be Catholic are any less violent and bloodthirsty than terrorists who purport to be Muslim. Some people say that non-violent Muslims should condemn those who claim to be being violent in the name of their religion but why should we expect that when the Pope, the head of the very hierarchical Roman Catholic Church, never excommunicated any members of the IRA for their violence.
The worst thing about the US-led "war on terror" is the undue emphasis on terrorists who purport to be Muslim. If we fail to condemn all terrorism we will fail to condemn any terrorism. One good thing that came out of the 9/11 WTC attack for the rest of the world is that the USA woke up to the fact that being a safe haven from which terrorists can conduct their campaigns is not such a good idea. Remember also that Osama Bin Laden is quite good at corrupting Islam in the cause of his violent political agenda because he was trained by the CIA.
There is no shortage of highly skilled computer scientists who know the theory and can program in any language, including ones they invent for themselves because the existing ones are not good enough. If there were a shortage then there would be head hunters out looking for people like that and offering big salaries and golden handshakes. The same is true for various other science and engineering disciplines.
When businessmen or politicians talk about that sort of shortage what they really mean is that these days there is a shortage of naive people who will spend many years racking up debts pursuing an advanced education and then work for a pittance afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
There are phone scams elsewhere but it seems not to the same extent. In the UK we no longer have a nationalised phone service but the regulatory environment seems to be more successful in keeping the worst excesses under control.
I sometimes get calls from automated systems but they show up as International on the caller ID. I believe that the regulations for automated call systems are stricter and enforcement harsher here so they only operate from outside the UK jurisdiction. We also get free caller-id if you know how to sign up for it.
Calls to mobiles are charged entirely to the caller here and mobile numbers have a standard prefix anyway so we do not have two of the elements of the problem.
I did get some random cold calls on my mobile a while ago claiming to be from my mobile phone company and trying to sell me a new contract. The problem with that was that my phone is pay-as-you-go so there is no contract to expire. I think they were just calling all numbers that were first registered 18 months earlier because that is the usual first contract duration.
The problem that gets the most coverage here is reverse charged SMS messages where people say they did not request the messages. That seems to have died down a bit now; I believe that was as a result of the regulator making the mobile phone companies get their act together in responding to complaints.
There is a page at http://example.com/ so clearly the domain exists. It resolves to an IP address and there is a web server listening there. The page does say that the name and the .org and .net versions "are not available for registration" but that could be considered to apply to all names that are already registered. Note that this differs from the reserved TLDs. These domains are reserved for use in documentation so that you can be sure that your examples never refer to something with some other meaning.
If you look up the registration data for example.com then you can discover that it is registered by IANA. Apparently the registration will expire 13-aug-2011 but I suspect that it will be renewed in time!
A network has lots of things sending each other their addresses at various levels. Get a tool that gathers and analyses that data, a web search will turn up tools of various levels of sophistication. The documentation you create should be "how to use the network management tools". You will never have time to keep low level documentation up to date so automate that level and focus on making sure your successor has pointers on how to use the tools effectively.
The simple reason why these funds are going to a research group in an EU member state is that they come out of the EU budget. It is not the job of the European Union to make up for the research funding deficiencies of the United States of America. On the contrary, one of the goals of EU research funding is for the EU to not be dependent on non-EU countries for technology or at least to be strong enough to be an equal partner in collaborative ventures.
As for reinventing the wheel, these funds are going to an academic research group to do research on problems that have not yet been solved.
It is not only normal for other research groups to explore other approaches to solving the problems or to explore other problems in the same overall area, it is essential for progress that there are different groups looking at different ideas. Even if EU funding could go to a US research group it would not be sensible to channel all operating system research funding to the same group.
The licensing issue is what killed the possibility of using Gopher for an externally visible service where I was working at the time.
The real problem was that it would have meant asking the boss to do something; licenses require the involvement of a suitable corporate officer actually making a decision. Just putting up a web server on the machine that was hosting our FTP server to serve the content already approved for release in a nicer way took a little technical work and the absence of a decision from above.
The license may have been for the Gopher server code but there was no way we could have justified spending the time to do our own implementation.
We experimented with Gopher internally very briefly but the organisational obstacles killed it very quickly.
My memory of the machines of the era was that the Apple II was too expensive in the UK to be widely used as a home computer. Even the BBC Micro was a bit on the expensive side and most UK home users of the time had one of the Sinclair machines that were much cheaper.
The company I worked for had an Apple II bought specifically to run Visicalc. As far as I remember, this was the main driver for sales of Apple II in the UK until the arrival of the IBM PC and Lotus 1-2-3.
In the TV programme, they showed documents that indicated that a ship was taking supplies to an English general who was engaged in a campaign to deny the Spanish access to deep water harbours in Northern France. The ship that sank near Alderney in the channel islands matches the description of the ship that failed to arrive. The recovered guns also had "F W" engraved on them indicating a link to Francis Walsingham, the man often described as Queen Elizabeth's "spymaster". There was no "Royal Navy" at the time but there are records.
Other artefacts recovered from the wreck are also useful in confirming the date. The musket recovered from the wreck was also a very significant find.
The TV program also mentioned that the muzzle velocity of the cannon, although impressive for its day, was known not to be a record at the time. One of the archaeologists mentioned that some of the cannon from the Mary Rose, Henry VIII's flagship, were larger and had a greater muzzle velocity.
The recovered guns were cast as a single piece (and for the replica they added appropriate impurities to get the same grade of iron that would have been available in Elizabethan times). Earlier guns had been made from strips of metal bound together with hoops.
The point emphasized a lot in the TV programme was that the ship had a uniform main armament and the need to raise two more cannon to see if they matched the one already recovered was to validate that hypothesis. With a uniform armament, there was no rooting around in the shot locker with a set of callipers looking for shot of the right size, the shot were all the same size. They also emphasized the tactic of firing a barrage from a set of smaller guns rather than individual shot from larger single guns. That is much easier if you do not have to worry about which shot and which powder charge go with which gun.
It was suggested that this allowed a change to the tactics of naval warfare. Up to that time the usual approach had been to come alongside the enemy and essentially fight a land battle on board ship. The uniform armament of moderate sized reasonably powerful guns apparently made it possible to stand off and fight ship to ship rather than hand to hand.
If you know my real name you can find out quite a few things about me as a result of things I have done for work without resorting to LinkedIn (where I do have an account). Publishing papers puts your name on the net and so do various other activities that have to be done with a real name.
I publish things I do not mind being public forever and will probably add more to my LinkedIn profile soon.
"Beginning is the easy part" - this is the most insightful comment I have seen for some time.
I have seen the same problem over and over again. Welcome to the first annual conference on whatever - nothing happens next year. Welcome to the first issue of our newsletter - there is no second issue. Welcome to our web site where you can find out the latest news about our organisation - as it was last year before it changed. Part of the problem is that those who start something are often hailed as heroes where those who keep it going are seen as a drain on resources.
If you look at the seminal works in computer security you will see that a lot of the most significant early ones were reports for the Electronic Systems Division of the Air Force Systems Command.
I don't know how much damage has been done to either or both of USAF and NSA by incompetent and technically illiterate managers and politicians since those days but a spy agency with expertise in cryptographic algorithms is not what you need in overall charge of the thinking about systems security. An organisation where systems must be usable by people overloaded with work in a high stress environment is more appropriate than one whose mission is to spy on foreigners and die rather than give up any information.
I would cite SELinux as an example in support of my argument. It is fine in theory but so hard to use in practice that the usual advice is to disable it if you want to get any work done. This fits the spy agency thinking that it is better for the system to be inoperable than for there to be any possibility of information leakage. That is totally unacceptable to anyone who needs to get a job done.
Having had my little rant, maybe I should read the article...
Lady Claire Macdonald runs the family home, Kinloch Lodge, as a hotel.
I suspect that a Scottish court might see Lord Macdonald, Godfrey Macdonald of Macdonald, High Chief of Clan Donald, or his wife, of having a stronger claim to the use of the name at least in Scotland than some interloper from the USA.
There is also a Macdonalds Restaurant & Guest House in Pitlochry. If I was visiting the area I might go there just to be able to say that I had at last found a Macdonalds Restaurant where the food was edible.
Let me introduce you to another word - homophone. And two more - homograph and homoglyph - so that we can all understand that these were not the issue in the P^n post.
About 20 years ago I was working for a company that used Xerox Star workstations. These had an optical mouse that needed a special pad with a pattern that the mouse could track. These pads were thin card and they would wear out after a while. We ordered some more and sure enough, they arrived individually wrapped in cardboard boxes about an inch thick with the whole lot in an outer cardboard box.
We went through all the same comments that are being posted here about inefficiency, why can't they put then all in one box, or just an envelope.
You may think that at least in that case there was a physical thing we needed rather than just the information on the paper but the Xerox laser printer we had attached to the network was perfectly capable of printing sheets of paper with the necessary pattern
Being older and wiser than I was then I now understand that it can be more expensive in resources as well as money to set up different processes for doing different things rather than having one process that does many things, albeit somewhat wastefully in some cases. If you must have a packing and shipping system for cardboard boxes and you also sometimes need to ship sheets of paper you either use the box shipping system with the apparent waste seen here or you set up a separate system to handle paper with its own environmental cost,
Well that may explain it. I am not in the USA, the phone at my home is what you call unlisted and the phone account is in my wife's name.
The impression I get is that people outside the USA, especially in the EU, have a higher expectation of privacy and the protection of personal data by companies to which it has been given. Companies such as Google that operate internationally need to take that into account.
I just tried it for several variations of my home and work phone numbers - when quoted as a phrase with any of the usual variants of spaces, national or international prefix - no results found. With the parts of the numbers separately, lots of irrelevant stuff.
I tried looking for a site that does reverse phone lookup - one I found identified the city and the map it showed had an arrow pointing to a major road in the city centre. The location is about 15 minutes drive from where I live and that radius covers a lot of houses. Other sites that claimed to find anybody's details from a phone number either came up with nothing or in one case, something on the wrong continent!
I also tried a Google search for my name and the phrase "phone number" - several results (but not the majority) were pages that correctly found some of my online presence, but there was no telephone number to be found there. Searches for my name (just surname) and last part of the phone number also came up either empty or with a few irrelevant random pages.
There is a lot of data out there on the web and Google does a good job of finding things but it seems that my phone number is not out there and certainly not associated with my name.
I do not have a Google or gMail account; no plans to get one either.
And according to this article:
The article does not say why he was fired.
You may have been given a book that does name->phone-number lookups for those who have not chosen to opt out but I believe that it is very much harder to get access to the inverse function that does phone-number->name lookups. I suspect that it varies by jurisdiction but I believe that in some places at least, people can be in serious trouble for giving access to the database that performs that function to those who do not have the proper authorization.
Those who are familiar with security will know the concept of work-factor. You can reverse lookup with a phone book but if all you have is a printed copy it is a lot of work. The cost of doing that work is the deterrent. Modern technology has made it easier, but it is still costly. The idea is to adjust the cost/benefit ratio so that an attack is not worthwhile.
The concern for the revealing of names from addresses is that it makes it cheaper for confidence tricksters to deliver some plausible message that will trick people into giving them some of their money. If the average cost of creating the plausible message becomes less than the expected return then the level of scamming will increase. Those of us not taken in by the tricksters will still suffer from increased level of junk so it is in all our interests to take this kind of thing seriously.
MEPs do not read Slashdot, they read the original Directives and proposed amendments and perhaps analysis by people who have read the originals. If you are going to write to your MEP it would be a good idea to be at least as well informed as they are if you do not want to do more harm than good by giving the impression of being a ranting idiot. My reading of such originals as I can find suggests that ZeroPaid, La Quadrature and EDRI are just completely wrong about what the proposed amendments say. There may be stuff I have not seen on which they are basing their opinions but the sections they have quoted just do not support their arguments.
Please do not give your MEP the impression that those who are opposed to having the net controlled by content cartels are a bunch of clueless ranting idiots.
Having read the original Directive 2002/58/EC and the various documents that La Quadrature say are the proposed amendments I do not see a contradiction. I am afraid that "The paragraph immediately below that" is not a sufficiently specific reference for me to understand your point. The only thing to which 'that' might refer seems to be "the proposed amendments" and that just does not make sense to me.
Neither the Directive nor any of the amendments require ISPs "to do everything in their power to prevent customer copyright infringement" as far as I can see. If you think that they do can you please be specific about which part of which document you think says that.
I have mod points at the moment but I have already commented so I can't use one here.
The original Directive 2002/58/EC is all about "processing of personal data and the protection of privacy". The original Article 14 paragraph 1 is:
The amendment just makes it explicit that DRM is included in the equipment that must not be required by law. I am assuming that La Quadrature has reported the amendment correctly, I can't find a link to the original.
While some might like to prohibit the sale of equipment containing DRM I don't think that is going to happen. Permitting the sale of DRM-crippled systems does not prohibit the sale of non-DRM systems.
Reading the original directive is quite informative. It seems to me that the amendment just makes it clear that concern for enforcing copyright does not override the prohibition on requiring specific technical features.
My reading of the proposed amendment is the exact opposite - (my emphasis added):
It seems to me that this directive prohibits making it a legal requirement that equipment contains DRM or other control mechanisms. Manufacturers can put that stuff in their products if they want but it seems to me that this amendment says you can't stop manufacturers leaving it out and if they do you can't stop them shipping their products between member states.
I know it is probably too much to ask on Slashdot but could someone else read the proposed amendments carefully, think about them and if they think I have got it wrong explain exactly how and why they interpret the words in that way.
Is it just a coincidence that the daily Dilbert cartoon has gone Flash-only today?
I have never liked Flash, mainly because it was used as a distracting and irritating advertisement medium, but also because of the arrogant assumption that the Flash page author should be in control of what my machine does. I don't want my browsing experience reduced to some funereal pace at the whim of a marketing drone who thinks his tedious animation should occupy my time.
I was reconsidering my decision to give up reading Dilbert because of the switch to Flash, but now that I have read about this exploit I think I will stick to my No-Flash policy.
Yes I know, this exploit has been fixed in some version of Flash to which I may have upgraded but what about the next one?
The IRA is not a single coherent organisation. It split fairly early into "Official IRA" and "Provisional IRA" (aka The Provos). The "Official IRA" gave up violence before the other parts and later dropped the IRA name and became a political party with a mainly socialist agenda. The "Provisional IRA" is the part that adopted the gun in one hand and ballot box in the other strategy.
In the time when the Provisional IRA was running its bombing campaign it did issue bomb warnings but these were intentionally vague about times and places. According to some information that I have heard, the warning about the 1983 bomb planted in a street near Harrods in London suggested that the bomb was in Harrods and so evacuating people from the store into the street would have caused additional casualties. Fortunately the police had learned that the IRA warnings were really intended to placate the consciences of the IRA supporters in the USA rather than to be of any real value in reducing casualties.
When the Provisional IRA became somewhat less violent, splinter groups formed in order to continue the killing of random bystanders. One of these, the so-called "Real IRA" was responsible for the atrocity at Omagh
Do not fool yourself into thinking that terrorists who purport to be Catholic are any less violent and bloodthirsty than terrorists who purport to be Muslim. Some people say that non-violent Muslims should condemn those who claim to be being violent in the name of their religion but why should we expect that when the Pope, the head of the very hierarchical Roman Catholic Church, never excommunicated any members of the IRA for their violence.
The worst thing about the US-led "war on terror" is the undue emphasis on terrorists who purport to be Muslim. If we fail to condemn all terrorism we will fail to condemn any terrorism. One good thing that came out of the 9/11 WTC attack for the rest of the world is that the USA woke up to the fact that being a safe haven from which terrorists can conduct their campaigns is not such a good idea. Remember also that Osama Bin Laden is quite good at corrupting Islam in the cause of his violent political agenda because he was trained by the CIA.
There is no shortage of highly skilled computer scientists who know the theory and can program in any language, including ones they invent for themselves because the existing ones are not good enough. If there were a shortage then there would be head hunters out looking for people like that and offering big salaries and golden handshakes. The same is true for various other science and engineering disciplines.
When businessmen or politicians talk about that sort of shortage what they really mean is that these days there is a shortage of naive people who will spend many years racking up debts pursuing an advanced education and then work for a pittance afterwards.