Thank you for your gratuitous insult. I'm glad to see that you totally missed the humor attempt and focused only on your pet theory.
To compound things, on top of being uselessly rude, you're wrong. Computers *are* at a point where you can reasonably expect a machine not to get infected by spyware and keyloggers after simply visiting a page.
From the article: [T]he extortion gangs control hundreds of thousands, often the personal computers of people with high-speed DSL lines or cable modems. Most of the PCs were compromised with a series of worms and viruses that began appearing last summer. They spread most easily to machines without firewalls and automated patching from security companies.
Alas, the article doesn't give you a clue about what OS these mysterious PC are running. They are easily 0wnable, they are trojaned and zombified to death. I wonder what they run? BSD? Geez, PCDOS 3.3 maybe?
Of course not. They all run Windows. I'll even go further and bet that they run IE or Outlook, the most effective Trojan and virus vectors ever.
Yet nobody is suggesting that MS might have some responsability in the $90 million losses mentioned in the article. Everybody is comfortably numb accepting IE in computing the way you have to accept gravitation in physics.
Well, sorry, but IE and Outlook are just programs, not a religion. People can change if you push them hard enough to overcome their natural inertia. What we need is a bit of, well, push.
And we have the motivation to pay for it, all right. NINETY MILLIONS losses, the article said. For one case. At this price, financial companies all over the world might save themselves a bundle if they start requiring non-IE browsers and non-Outlook mail clients, actively enforcing it at their web site. Imagine getting the following popup at your bank web site when Joe Q Fartbrain logs on:
"WARNING: IE detected. You clueless moron, you are running IE for your online banking! I cannot believe it! As we speak, your password has probably been keylogged a dozen times and is used by a Russian drug addict mobster to siphon off your account! Gay pedophiles are buying hamsters and duct tape with your credit card and sending pictures to your mom from your AOL account! Do mankind a favor and burn off your PC now! And STAY OFF THE NET until you get a clue, you twit!"
Now, wouldn't that be a better prevention than the usual useless generalities about ID theft that you see on bank web sites these days?
While it may affect NASA, I doubt it will cripple them. Commercial flights are going to focus on getting people in to space (for large sums of money). NASA will focus on sending large, heavy payloads in to space, like communications satellites.
As you said, NASA's focus should be on research. Sending a load to orbit is a trucking job best left to private companies. Each time NASA launches a commercial or military satellite (that is, not a science mission), they waste money twice:
1. by using Federal fund for a mundane trucking job;
2. by competing against the private sector and depriving them from the commercial satellite launch market, thus slowing down their growth.
A NASA focusing on science would allow a private launch industry to take off (literally) and decrease the cost of access to orbit per kilogram. Which in turn would make science missions cheaper. Everyone wins.
So why doesn't NASA just do this? Because they inherited an army of 20.000 engineers from the Appolo program, and like in every bureaucracy, feeding the troops and sustaining the status quo takes precedence over the Good of Mankind. It's only human to want to keep one's job. Meanwhile, the space program is dead.
Absolutely right. From the article:
Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at passport control. The upshot of this is that travelers carrying around RFID passports are broadcasting their identity.
So if that's the big issue, keep the passport in a shielded pouch (an antistatic bag would do). Heck, in a pinch, keep it between two pieces of aluminum foils. Problem solved.
Now, if the issue is a precedent about tagging ID documents, that needs to be addressed separately.
One of my uncles was a union negociator. He was called whenever the discussions between management and unions went south and his job was to mend things.
Once, he was called in a machine shop where workers had gone on strike after fighting with management over apparently irrelevant issues.
After peeling the various layers of gripes, it became clear that tempers had flared for no real discernable reason. And then, my uncle noticed something: It was really warm in the floor (this was in the winter).
It turned out that the temperature for both the machine floor and the offices were controlled by a thermostat that was in the office of the boss' secretary, an older woman who liked it warm.
The thermostat was moved to the floor, the boss got a space heater for her secretary, and the work relationships improved markedly.
So maybe this study is relevant for nine female underactive office clerks. But put machine shop workers wearing their full security attire in a 77F environment, and they will mill your butt off!
In the study, which was conducted at Insurance Office of America's headquarters in Orlando, Fla., each of nine workstations was equipped with a miniature personal environment-sensor for sampling air temperature every 15 minutes.
So 9 induhviduals is a valid sample for the good Professor? Where is the control group?
I can see why clueless media would report such tripe. However, I cannot believe that a scientist would actually put his name on such a "study". Prof Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell's Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, a pox on your house for your lousy work and your low standards. You just gave a bad name to Cornell.
At the risk of repeating myself, spamgourmet solved my problem. It's a free and open source disposable email address system that is traceable and also good for anti-phishing measures.
Let's say your spamgourmet account is joeblow. This gives you unlimited addresses of the form prefix.accountname_at_spamgourmet.com.You post on some web forum with the address web.forum.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. But you
give your bank the address mybank.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. If a spammer collects the address from the web forum and sends you a phishing message, you can 1. disable the web.forum.joeblow address except for some selected senders, 2. immediately know that the phishing message is a scam because your bank would not write you to this address.
Note: Yes, I _did_ have to abandon my old email address because it was mass-spammed all the time. The spamgourmet server filters out the crap (spammed addresses are disabled) and then forwards my email to a private "secret" address.
There are also various features that limit the ability of a random spammer to attack your account.
The code is free. Right now there is only one public spamgourmet server. It would be nice if someone picked the code and created his own replica. And of course, the project could use more coders.
Thanks for your informative answer (moderators: hint hint).
Do you happen to know which multiplexed bus system Renault is now using? It's not CAN, is it? VAN maybe?
As I said in the previous discussion: The driver probably either 1. mixed up the brake and gas pedals as you mentioned, or 2. saw the telltale flash of an automatic speed-trap radar in his rearview mirror and decided to create that story in a silly attempt to escape the fine and loss of points on his license.
Suing your customer might not be the smartest thing to do, but Renault might need to make an example. The Vel Satis is its flagship, and while it does have its share of software bugs (like every recent code-heavy embedded system), Renault cannot let any random joker build up a mad car story.
You're right. The driver probably either 1. mixed up the brake and gas pedals as you mentioned, or 2. saw the telltale flash of an automatic speed-trap radar in his rearview mirror and decided to create that story in a silly attempt to escape the fine and loss of points on his license.
Renault, as of Oct 6, announced that a detailed examination of the car showed no fault and that they are going to sue the driver for misrepresentation and false declaration.
From the article:
"I used to be heavy into basketball," he says of his days before Socom. "Now I've been playing basketball again, I've been going to high school football games. I've been going to that youth group with friends. . . . We're trying to keep my schedule busy."
Poor guy. I understand the problem. A lot of sports, when practiced intensely, are
linked to drug abuse. This poor kid is probably doped up to his eyes. His parents must, for his own good, take him off these dangerous sports fields and let him stay home! Why not buy him a couple of video games?
Says the article: Gates said, "If you don't want to create jobs or intellectual property, then there is a tendency to develop open source," according to Asia Computer Weekly. Gates knows that competitors are taking in billions of dollars in open-source-related revenue.
IBM is creating almost 20,000 jobs this year and
has a booming intellectual property business, fuelled by the record 3000 patents granted yearly to Bug Blue.Yet, IBM is developping a large number of open source projects.
Good points. Yes, there are vulns on Linux, hence the occasionally patched libs. However, scrip-kiddie exploits in the wild would be a completely different matter. Listening to Symantec, you'd think that Linux data centers are under the same kind of constant patch-or-die frenzy as Windows. That's not what my experience tells me.
Quoteth the ZDNet article: Donovan predicts that phishing and spam will increase by the next report, and open-source software, such as Linux, will become a bigger target on the hacker agenda.
"We're seeing an attempt in exploiting Linux environment and as it becomes more widely deployed it will become more of a target," he said.
Oh really? Donovan being the Director of Symantec, this means his company is seeing exploits on Linux?
That's front page news. Who? Where? What vuln? Which distro?
Or do you mean "we think we will see"? That's not quite the same thing, Sym-boy. Careful with that FUD gun, will ya. You're gonna shoot your other foot too.
Then again, if you think of it, companies like Symantec are part of the vast cottage industry that popped up for the sole purpose of plugging the leaks of Windows. The last thing they need is more Linux boxes around. Hence the FUD.
My current project involves successive refinements on a networked music player (in my living room) that grabs OGG and MP3 files from a server machine (in my office) and plays them on the stereo. The successive refinements involve cutting down the minimum hardware requirements (pricewise more than MIPS-wise).
Mom:"Peter, what are you reading?"
16-yr old Peter:"The newspaper. The history teacher wants us to know more about current events. He wants us to read what happened today."
Mom: "That's great! So what did you read about?"
Peter: "Garfield ate Jon's lunch."
You have a point here. The saddest thing is that many (if not most) of these anti-semitic graffitis and vandalism sprees are committed by people who either are complete idiots who just look for ways to shock the clueless bourgeois, or by Muslim activits who get a kick at frightening old Jewish ladies.
Seems to work, too.
As recent incidents in French schools showed, people who harass Jewish students these days are not paragons of the Aryan race, but pro-Palestinian Muslims.
Quoteth the article: "Administration of the list clearly needs to be changed and consolidated to be government-managed," Hatfield said.
The government-run TSA will certainly benefit (read porkbarrel) from more government management. However, more Federal inefficiency and centralized mishandling will certainly not fix the inherently broken No-Fly list system.
According to the book "Dark Waters" (a book about the cold-war nuclear mini-sub NR-1), an incident of this sort really happened to Admiral Rickover, the colorful and fearsome head of the US Navy nuclear submarine program.
Somehow I am not surprised. Working under Windows already has many similarlies with a Road Runner cartoon. You get this awkward contraption and you try to use it in order to earn your food, and it always ends up in a spectacular failure followed by a painful crash.
Windows XP my ass. They should rename it the ACME Operating System.
I completely agree. These people were dumb enough to install machines running Windows XP -- a system known for its vulnerabilities and its constant need for patching -- in places where it would be almost impossible to remotely patch them. Hello? It's not like there aren't gazillions of alternatives for such a simple function.
Then this company disconnected customers that couldn't pay because of the aforementioned harebrained system. So innocent people were shafted because of this fine example of coroporate cluelessness.
The blubbering fools that selected XP for the payment system should be personally held responsible for the lost of revenue. After being fired, they should be flogged by irrate customers.
But fortunately, thanks to the local monopolies enjoyed by power companies, said fool will be able to convince the board that he brilliantly overcame the major crisis: "Our revenue stream was blocked when the Internet was hacked by a virus or something, anyway it was some computer thing and I fixed it." And he will be promoted by bemused board member who expect their laptops to crash three times during each Powerpoint presentation.
More to the point, we don't really know how climate change will play out in specific regions, and that's actually the data we most need to make decisions about what to do
OK, I'm impressed. I was ready to read another misguided rant filed with half-baked theories and unsubstantiated jumps to conclusions, but the guy is actually displaying the exact right mindset.
He is humble.
In any debate on this subject, many people get into a religious frenzy and froth at the mouth when you present evidence that reality might be more complex than what they believe. It's refreshing to see a guy who actually explains that we mostly don't have enough data to make even educated guesses.
This is very different from the movie, of course, which is about as scientific as your average Star Trek show.
Slashdot Mirror
To compound things, on top of being uselessly rude, you're wrong. Computers *are* at a point where you can reasonably expect a machine not to get infected by spyware and keyloggers after simply visiting a page.
Alas, the article doesn't give you a clue about what OS these mysterious PC are running. They are easily 0wnable, they are trojaned and zombified to death. I wonder what they run? BSD? Geez, PCDOS 3.3 maybe?
Of course not. They all run Windows. I'll even go further and bet that they run IE or Outlook, the most effective Trojan and virus vectors ever.
Yet nobody is suggesting that MS might have some responsability in the $90 million losses mentioned in the article. Everybody is comfortably numb accepting IE in computing the way you have to accept gravitation in physics.
Well, sorry, but IE and Outlook are just programs, not a religion. People can change if you push them hard enough to overcome their natural inertia. What we need is a bit of, well, push.
And we have the motivation to pay for it, all right. NINETY MILLIONS losses, the article said. For one case. At this price, financial companies all over the world might save themselves a bundle if they start requiring non-IE browsers and non-Outlook mail clients, actively enforcing it at their web site. Imagine getting the following popup at your bank web site when Joe Q Fartbrain logs on:
"WARNING: IE detected. You clueless moron, you are running IE for your online banking! I cannot believe it! As we speak, your password has probably been keylogged a dozen times and is used by a Russian drug addict mobster to siphon off your account! Gay pedophiles are buying hamsters and duct tape with your credit card and sending pictures to your mom from your AOL account! Do mankind a favor and burn off your PC now! And STAY OFF THE NET until you get a clue, you twit!"
Now, wouldn't that be a better prevention than the usual useless generalities about ID theft that you see on bank web sites these days?
As you said, NASA's focus should be on research. Sending a load to orbit is a trucking job best left to private companies. Each time NASA launches a commercial or military satellite (that is, not a science mission), they waste money twice:
A NASA focusing on science would allow a private launch industry to take off (literally) and decrease the cost of access to orbit per kilogram. Which in turn would make science missions cheaper. Everyone wins.
So why doesn't NASA just do this? Because they inherited an army of 20.000 engineers from the Appolo program, and like in every bureaucracy, feeding the troops and sustaining the status quo takes precedence over the Good of Mankind. It's only human to want to keep one's job. Meanwhile, the space program is dead.
So if that's the big issue, keep the passport in a shielded pouch (an antistatic bag would do). Heck, in a pinch, keep it between two pieces of aluminum foils. Problem solved.
Now, if the issue is a precedent about tagging ID documents, that needs to be addressed separately.
One of my uncles was a union negociator. He was called whenever the discussions between management and unions went south and his job was to mend things.
Once, he was called in a machine shop where workers had gone on strike after fighting with management over apparently irrelevant issues.
After peeling the various layers of gripes, it became clear that tempers had flared for no real discernable reason. And then, my uncle noticed something: It was really warm in the floor (this was in the winter).
It turned out that the temperature for both the machine floor and the offices were controlled by a thermostat that was in the office of the boss' secretary, an older woman who liked it warm.
The thermostat was moved to the floor, the boss got a space heater for her secretary, and the work relationships improved markedly.
So maybe this study is relevant for nine female underactive office clerks. But put machine shop workers wearing their full security attire in a 77F environment, and they will mill your butt off!
In the study, which was conducted at Insurance Office of America's headquarters in Orlando, Fla., each of nine workstations was equipped with a miniature personal environment-sensor for sampling air temperature every 15 minutes.
So 9 induhviduals is a valid sample for the good Professor? Where is the control group?
I can see why clueless media would report such tripe. However, I cannot believe that a scientist would actually put his name on such a "study". Prof Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis and director of Cornell's Human Factors and Ergonomics Laboratory, a pox on your house for your lousy work and your low standards. You just gave a bad name to Cornell.
That will save him the trouble of eating a raw volatile.
Here is the story link, ironically in a Canadian web site.
Now, don"t you feel safer?
Let's say your spamgourmet account is joeblow. This gives you unlimited addresses of the form prefix.accountname_at_spamgourmet.com.You post on some web forum with the address web.forum.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. But you give your bank the address mybank.joeblow_at_spamgourmet.com. If a spammer collects the address from the web forum and sends you a phishing message, you can 1. disable the web.forum.joeblow address except for some selected senders, 2. immediately know that the phishing message is a scam because your bank would not write you to this address.
Note: Yes, I _did_ have to abandon my old email address because it was mass-spammed all the time. The spamgourmet server filters out the crap (spammed addresses are disabled) and then forwards my email to a private "secret" address.
There are also various features that limit the ability of a random spammer to attack your account.
The code is free. Right now there is only one public spamgourmet server. It would be nice if someone picked the code and created his own replica. And of course, the project could use more coders.
Thanks for your informative answer (moderators: hint hint). Do you happen to know which multiplexed bus system Renault is now using? It's not CAN, is it? VAN maybe?
Suing your customer might not be the smartest thing to do, but Renault might need to make an example. The Vel Satis is its flagship, and while it does have its share of software bugs (like every recent code-heavy embedded system), Renault cannot let any random joker build up a mad car story.
Renault, as of Oct 6, announced that a detailed examination of the car showed no fault and that they are going to sue the driver for misrepresentation and false declaration.
Poor guy. I understand the problem. A lot of sports, when practiced intensely, are linked to drug abuse. This poor kid is probably doped up to his eyes. His parents must, for his own good, take him off these dangerous sports fields and let him stay home! Why not buy him a couple of video games?
IBM is creating almost 20,000 jobs this year and has a booming intellectual property business, fuelled by the record 3000 patents granted yearly to Bug Blue.Yet, IBM is developping a large number of open source projects.
So the gorilla's logic is flawed.
Good points. Yes, there are vulns on Linux, hence the occasionally patched libs. However, scrip-kiddie exploits in the wild would be a completely different matter. Listening to Symantec, you'd think that Linux data centers are under the same kind of constant patch-or-die frenzy as Windows. That's not what my experience tells me.
"We're seeing an attempt in exploiting Linux environment and as it becomes more widely deployed it will become more of a target," he said.
Oh really? Donovan being the Director of Symantec, this means his company is seeing exploits on Linux?
That's front page news. Who? Where? What vuln? Which distro?
Or do you mean "we think we will see"? That's not quite the same thing, Sym-boy. Careful with that FUD gun, will ya. You're gonna shoot your other foot too.
Then again, if you think of it, companies like Symantec are part of the vast cottage industry that popped up for the sole purpose of plugging the leaks of Windows. The last thing they need is more Linux boxes around. Hence the FUD.
My current project involves successive refinements on a networked music player (in my living room) that grabs OGG and MP3 files from a server machine (in my office) and plays them on the stereo. The successive refinements involve cutting down the minimum hardware requirements (pricewise more than MIPS-wise).
This reminds me of an old Foxtrot strip:
Mom:"Peter, what are you reading?"
16-yr old Peter:"The newspaper. The history teacher wants us to know more about current events. He wants us to read what happened today."
Mom: "That's great! So what did you read about?"
Peter: "Garfield ate Jon's lunch."
As recent incidents in French schools showed, people who harass Jewish students these days are not paragons of the Aryan race, but pro-Palestinian Muslims.
The government-run TSA will certainly benefit (read porkbarrel) from more government management. However, more Federal inefficiency and centralized mishandling will certainly not fix the inherently broken No-Fly list system.
Meanwhile, we passengers are screwed.
According to the book "Dark Waters" (a book about the cold-war nuclear mini-sub NR-1), an incident of this sort really happened to Admiral Rickover, the colorful and fearsome head of the US Navy nuclear submarine program.
Hey, moderators, you blew it. This was humor, not MS bashing!
Windows XP my ass. They should rename it the ACME Operating System.
Does someone else have these visions of a penguin emerging from a hole and asking "Hey, what's up, Steve" to a round-headed, baby-faced bald guy with murderous intents?
Then this company disconnected customers that couldn't pay because of the aforementioned harebrained system. So innocent people were shafted because of this fine example of coroporate cluelessness.
The blubbering fools that selected XP for the payment system should be personally held responsible for the lost of revenue. After being fired, they should be flogged by irrate customers.
But fortunately, thanks to the local monopolies enjoyed by power companies, said fool will be able to convince the board that he brilliantly overcame the major crisis: "Our revenue stream was blocked when the Internet was hacked by a virus or something, anyway it was some computer thing and I fixed it." And he will be promoted by bemused board member who expect their laptops to crash three times during each Powerpoint presentation.
OK, I'm impressed. I was ready to read another misguided rant filed with half-baked theories and unsubstantiated jumps to conclusions, but the guy is actually displaying the exact right mindset.
He is humble.
In any debate on this subject, many people get into a religious frenzy and froth at the mouth when you present evidence that reality might be more complex than what they believe. It's refreshing to see a guy who actually explains that we mostly don't have enough data to make even educated guesses.
This is very different from the movie, of course, which is about as scientific as your average Star Trek show.