As for dongles and keys they are pretty easy to lay hands on. A little skill as a social engineer and a pick pocket and you can have one.
The SecurID system (at least the way AOL has implemented it) requires a PIN as well as the code shown on the dongle/fob. So unless the employee has written the PIN on the back of the SecurID token (unlikely... can you imagine how quickly someone would get fired if anyone noticed that?), pickpocketing will just cost the company a replacement fee, not unrestricted access to their user database.
Neither the Inquirer article nor the Wired article shows any evidence that an actual break-in occurred. Of course an occasional account may have been compromised... big hairy deal. But nobody provided any proof that even a noticeable percentage of the 35 million (active or inactive, whatever) accounts has been touched.
The Wired article quotes sounded like a bunch of script kiddies, probably with their own AOL accounts, were making things up to sound important. (What? Online sources telling lies to seem cool? No way!) No evidence was provided in either article, and given the obvious safeguards (of which SecurID is a good one) it sounded like so much bull.
This all sounds like a standard "AOL sux!!!" kind of posting, elevated to seeming respectability by badly-researched articles in the almost-mainstream media.
*Not* Carol Channing?
on
Goodbye, Dolly
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· Score: 1, Funny
Whew. For a second there, I misunderstood that headline. What a relief. Although she is getting on in years... Who2 Profile
There are only four Macs among 2000 PCs where I work and those Mac users are considered pariahs. Trust me on this one -- I'm the support manager there. I know.
What kind of 7-year-olds do you work with that use co-workers' computer platforms to make them "pariahs"? My choice of platform doesn't affect any of my co-workers in any way, and if they decide to ostracize me for my computer choice, my response is usually "Are you kidding? Come back when you grow up."
Now, if they find I can't do my job because of my computer choice, that's a different issue. But only an idiot would ask for a tool that prevented him from doing his job.
I'm a big fan of cloning and all it can do for us, but I'd be interested to hear why they don't test and perfect their techniques on rats and pigs and sheep first. Why do they always go for the controversial human experiments before perfecting the much safer rhesus monkey tests?
I mean, Dolly the Sheep and the cloned cow both showed cellular problems that may well be due to the cloning process... so clearly, there's work to be done on mammalian cloning before it's ready for human tests. Why not give cloning the same respect as other techniques, and get it mostly right before using humans?
Tourist taxes only hit non-constituents
on
Add-Ons Add Up
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· Score: 1
Any tax on out-of-towners (business travelers, tourists, etc.) is levied because those who pay it don't vote in that district. It's much safer to tax people who aren't your constituents than those who are -- if you're a legislator, you can drum up lots of extra money by taxing hotels, car rentals, taxi fares, etc., risk-free.
The real question, in the U.S. anyway, is whether this is taxation without representation, and therefore unconstitutional?
California enacted a sweeping measure that mandates public disclosure of computer-security breaches in which confidential information may have been compromised.
This isn't nearly as bad as the alarmist description at the top of this story. This doesn't say that Company B has to announce that their Web server was hacked to say "1 0wn U!" It says that the people affected by a break in (i.e., the people whose confidential records were exposed) must be notified.
A couple of years ago, I had to cancel a credit card after some charges from Russia showed up. Eventually it came out that an online retailer had lost a bunch of card numbers. They should have told me when it happened, not after my credit card company was ripped off.
Yeah, and neither is making a backup CD in case your first one melts on the car dashboard. And neither is copying the songs into your computer or MP3 player or cassette tape so you can listen to them other places. And neither is excerpting 15 seconds from a song for a course on modern music or a review.
They did eventually let me in... By a stroke of luck, the last immigration counselor I talked to, graduated from the same school that I was about to start at.
I'm depressed by your statement. I'm happy your problem was resolved, but who went to school where is entirely the wrong reason for the right outcome. That's just another sign of how screwed up and corrupt the INS is.
A cheap webcam mounted on a light pole in her neighborhood could have brought the murderer to justice. But some people would rather indulge in 1984 fantasies....
It's a thing called "privacy," and it's not something to be given up lightly. Letting the police enter any home at will would, no doubt, find some evidence that would help solve crimes, but most people think there should be some limits on police powers.
Allowing the government to attach tracking devices to all citizens would prevent a few crimes, too, I think. Should we all go downtown to get our implants tomorrow?
For any hideous crime you can identify, there are some steps law enforcement could have taken ahead of time that would have prevented it, if only the general public didn't mind having their rights trampled. That's not a reason to hand over the house keys to the government.
It's not destruction of anybody's property if it's temporary, which is what the article suggests.
In fact, if he copyrights his own image, he's actually enforcing his rights, and any attempt to make the camera capture his image will then be a DMCA violation...
I'm curious - this is different to Windows in what way?
evilviper's original point was that Apple somehow requires a double-click to perform an action, which isn't true. (As a rule, that is... I wouldn't be surprised if there are some lamentable exceptions, but Apple doesn't always follow its own UI guidelines.)
As for Microsoft being somehow as good or better in the double-click world, it has always bugged me that you must either double-click or right-click a desktop icon in all flavors of Windows, because there is no universal menu bar to contain the File>Open command. Apple got it right with the universal menu bar, too...
You may have used a Mac, but you must not have read the Mac UI guidelines. A double-click is a shortcut, never the "primary" way to perform an action.
For example, the official way to launch a program in the Finder is to click once to select it, then choose Open from the File menu. Double-clicking is a shortcut.
Just because most users immediately take to double-clicking as a much more efficient way to use the UI doesn't mean double-clicking is required. It's not, and never should be. At least, that's what Apple says.
I agree, that's a good feature, and Apple has implemented it 1/2 way. I'm not sure why Apple didn't implement cutting and pasting files, but they did implement copying and pasting files.
In case you haven't seen it, control-click (or right-click, with your inexpensive, after-market two-button mouse) any file, choose Copy from the pop-up menu, go to the destination directory, and choose Paste. Very nice.
Maybe they saw cut-and-paste as a more dangerous feature, being more potentially destructive... I'm not sure.
a female Terminatrix whose powers and morphing abilities exceed that of their previous nemesis.
If it has such great morphing abilities, why refer to it with a gender at all? Surely that's a matter of pragmatism for the Terminator, who picks a gender (or none at all) depending on the situation).
I'll bet that gender-issue-phobic Hollywood, though, doesn't have the Terminator changing from female to male as needed. Besides which, that would involve changing actors.
Clones are produced from cells not intended for reproduction, and there are unknown consequences to this. It's entirely possible that a human produced through cloning will have severe developmental problems, even beyond simple genetic errors. That is my argument against cloning -- that we simply don't know enough at this point to say that it's safe.
Nobody's suggesting that imperfect cloning run rampant, creating individuals with a flawed method. All technology is flawed in the beginning, until they perfect their techniquest (antibiotics or nuclear energy, for example). Banning cloning because the current technology is flawed is short-sighted and stupid. They can't perfect the technology unless they're researching and practicing.
In other words, we can't say it's safe because there hasn't been enough research, and you want to ban research because we can't say it's safe. Using that argument, we wouldn't have light bulbs.
Laws against monopolies are great, but if nobody bothers to enforce them, they are USELESS.
Ummm... there are no laws against monopolies, at least not in the U.S. Monopolies exist all over the place. The laws are against abuse of monopoly power. And those laws are enforced, but rarely (as they should be).
If you don't have any resources unprotected on your network, why shouldn't the wireless network be wide open? My suggestion is to leave the network open, set up secure tunnels for the important stuff, and let passers-by use your 'net connection. Where's the harm in that?
That's probably what the 40% were doing, anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
As for dongles and keys they are pretty easy to lay hands on. A little skill as a social engineer and a pick pocket and you can have one.
The SecurID system (at least the way AOL has implemented it) requires a PIN as well as the code shown on the dongle/fob. So unless the employee has written the PIN on the back of the SecurID token (unlikely... can you imagine how quickly someone would get fired if anyone noticed that?), pickpocketing will just cost the company a replacement fee, not unrestricted access to their user database.
Neither the Inquirer article nor the Wired article shows any evidence that an actual break-in occurred. Of course an occasional account may have been compromised... big hairy deal. But nobody provided any proof that even a noticeable percentage of the 35 million (active or inactive, whatever) accounts has been touched.
The Wired article quotes sounded like a bunch of script kiddies, probably with their own AOL accounts, were making things up to sound important. (What? Online sources telling lies to seem cool? No way!) No evidence was provided in either article, and given the obvious safeguards (of which SecurID is a good one) it sounded like so much bull.
This all sounds like a standard "AOL sux!!!" kind of posting, elevated to seeming respectability by badly-researched articles in the almost-mainstream media.
Whew. For a second there, I misunderstood that headline. What a relief. Although she is getting on in years... Who2 Profile
There are only four Macs among 2000 PCs where I work and those Mac users are considered pariahs. Trust me on this one -- I'm the support manager there. I know.
What kind of 7-year-olds do you work with that use co-workers' computer platforms to make them "pariahs"? My choice of platform doesn't affect any of my co-workers in any way, and if they decide to ostracize me for my computer choice, my response is usually "Are you kidding? Come back when you grow up."
Now, if they find I can't do my job because of my computer choice, that's a different issue. But only an idiot would ask for a tool that prevented him from doing his job.
I'm a big fan of cloning and all it can do for us, but I'd be interested to hear why they don't test and perfect their techniques on rats and pigs and sheep first. Why do they always go for the controversial human experiments before perfecting the much safer rhesus monkey tests?
I mean, Dolly the Sheep and the cloned cow both showed cellular problems that may well be due to the cloning process... so clearly, there's work to be done on mammalian cloning before it's ready for human tests. Why not give cloning the same respect as other techniques, and get it mostly right before using humans?
Any tax on out-of-towners (business travelers, tourists, etc.) is levied because those who pay it don't vote in that district. It's much safer to tax people who aren't your constituents than those who are -- if you're a legislator, you can drum up lots of extra money by taxing hotels, car rentals, taxi fares, etc., risk-free.
The real question, in the U.S. anyway, is whether this is taxation without representation, and therefore unconstitutional?
From the article:
California enacted a sweeping measure that mandates public disclosure of computer-security breaches in which confidential information may have been compromised.
This isn't nearly as bad as the alarmist description at the top of this story. This doesn't say that Company B has to announce that their Web server was hacked to say "1 0wn U!" It says that the people affected by a break in (i.e., the people whose confidential records were exposed) must be notified.
A couple of years ago, I had to cancel a credit card after some charges from Russia showed up. Eventually it came out that an online retailer had lost a bunch of card numbers. They should have told me when it happened, not after my credit card company was ripped off.
Seems like a good law to me.
Yeah, and neither is making a backup CD in case your first one melts on the car dashboard. And neither is copying the songs into your computer or MP3 player or cassette tape so you can listen to them other places. And neither is excerpting 15 seconds from a song for a course on modern music or a review.
Oh, wait. Those things are all fair use. Oops.
They did eventually let me in... By a stroke of luck, the last immigration counselor I talked to, graduated from the same school that I was about to start at.
I'm depressed by your statement. I'm happy your problem was resolved, but who went to school where is entirely the wrong reason for the right outcome. That's just another sign of how screwed up and corrupt the INS is.
It's a thing called "privacy," and it's not something to be given up lightly. Letting the police enter any home at will would, no doubt, find some evidence that would help solve crimes, but most people think there should be some limits on police powers.
Allowing the government to attach tracking devices to all citizens would prevent a few crimes, too, I think. Should we all go downtown to get our implants tomorrow?
For any hideous crime you can identify, there are some steps law enforcement could have taken ahead of time that would have prevented it, if only the general public didn't mind having their rights trampled. That's not a reason to hand over the house keys to the government.
It's not destruction of anybody's property if it's temporary, which is what the article suggests.
In fact, if he copyrights his own image, he's actually enforcing his rights, and any attempt to make the camera capture his image will then be a DMCA violation...
I'm curious - this is different to Windows in what way?
evilviper's original point was that Apple somehow requires a double-click to perform an action, which isn't true. (As a rule, that is... I wouldn't be surprised if there are some lamentable exceptions, but Apple doesn't always follow its own UI guidelines.)
As for Microsoft being somehow as good or better in the double-click world, it has always bugged me that you must either double-click or right-click a desktop icon in all flavors of Windows, because there is no universal menu bar to contain the File>Open command. Apple got it right with the universal menu bar, too...
You may have used a Mac, but you must not have read the Mac UI guidelines. A double-click is a shortcut, never the "primary" way to perform an action.
For example, the official way to launch a program in the Finder is to click once to select it, then choose Open from the File menu. Double-clicking is a shortcut.
Just because most users immediately take to double-clicking as a much more efficient way to use the UI doesn't mean double-clicking is required. It's not, and never should be. At least, that's what Apple says.
I agree, that's a good feature, and Apple has implemented it 1/2 way. I'm not sure why Apple didn't implement cutting and pasting files, but they did implement copying and pasting files.
In case you haven't seen it, control-click (or right-click, with your inexpensive, after-market two-button mouse) any file, choose Copy from the pop-up menu, go to the destination directory, and choose Paste. Very nice.
Maybe they saw cut-and-paste as a more dangerous feature, being more potentially destructive... I'm not sure.
a female Terminatrix whose powers and morphing abilities exceed that of their previous nemesis.
If it has such great morphing abilities, why refer to it with a gender at all? Surely that's a matter of pragmatism for the Terminator, who picks a gender (or none at all) depending on the situation).
I'll bet that gender-issue-phobic Hollywood, though, doesn't have the Terminator changing from female to male as needed. Besides which, that would involve changing actors.
Nobody's suggesting that imperfect cloning run rampant, creating individuals with a flawed method. All technology is flawed in the beginning, until they perfect their techniquest (antibiotics or nuclear energy, for example). Banning cloning because the current technology is flawed is short-sighted and stupid. They can't perfect the technology unless they're researching and practicing.
In other words, we can't say it's safe because there hasn't been enough research, and you want to ban research because we can't say it's safe. Using that argument, we wouldn't have light bulbs.
Laws against monopolies are great, but if nobody bothers to enforce them, they are USELESS.
Ummm... there are no laws against monopolies, at least not in the U.S. Monopolies exist all over the place. The laws are against abuse of monopoly power. And those laws are enforced, but rarely (as they should be).If you don't have any resources unprotected on your network, why shouldn't the wireless network be wide open? My suggestion is to leave the network open, set up secure tunnels for the important stuff, and let passers-by use your 'net connection. Where's the harm in that?
That's probably what the 40% were doing, anyway...