TOR apologists, no fair modding down these comments just because you don't like them.
I wish the holier than thous behind the Tor movement would stop with their outrageous and indefensible claims about the protections Tor allegedly provides.
I tried to have this discussion with, among others, people who've made "names for themselves" traveling from conference to conference blustering about how Tor is making the Internet safe for unpopular opinions in places where an unpopular opinion can get you disappeared right quick (hello China)... shouted down every time because it's not a POPULAR point of view.
I see that I'm not the only one in this discussion with concerns. Thank god things are changing.
This is why i said "Tor movement" not "authors of Tor"
It doesn't matter. The innocent, non-techies are not hearing from "the authors of Tor". They're hearing from others who are running around promoting it as the salvation of free speech in non-free places... and they are believed.
I wish the holier than thous behind the Tor movement would stop with their outrageous and indefensible claims about the protections Tor allegedly provides.
I tried to have this discussion with, among others, people who've made "names for themselves" traveling from conference to conference blustering about how Tor is making the Internet safe for unpopular opinions in places where an unpopular opinion can get you disappeared right quick (hello China)... shouted down every time because it's not a POPULAR point of view.
I see that I'm not the only one in this discussion with concerns. Thank god things are changing.
Books in the public domain are about ten billion years old in reading/writing-years and not highly relevant to any serious discussion about "reading books".. they are, however, a serious distraction to a serious discussion about electronic books. (nothing against old books, but it's a crappy hedge to say "well, but ther are some books in the world that are not locked down with DRM and thus totally at risk on a Kindle or equivalent).
I'll Believe once contemporary, NY Times Book Review publications by current authors are available in an open format. The sites offered a a counter-example carry anything but that... because no site does.
Oh, booksonboard has books by current authors? Sure. Some. Maybe you missed the fine print: Adobe Digital Edition Copy Permissions: Disabled Print Permissions: Disabled Lend Permissions: Disabled Read Aloud Feature: Disabled
i suppose that's kinda-open but it's not open-open.
Ah, they don't need to MARKET the customer service stuff, they need to DO it.
Even without the $$$ lock-in, there is an implicit switching cost to changing carriers, consisting of the search-and-compare cost + time spent making the actual change.
I'm suggesting they spend some money on retention rather than spending most of it on attempts to snipe from other carriers. This is the basis of the downward spiral to price-based differentiation.
I suspect that the primary motive to jump carriers is to get a free new phone as it's presently fashion-forward to have the latest handheld, whatever that may be this week. T-Mobile used to offer cheap or free periodic upgrades to existing customers, but stopped.... and I just checked and it looks like the upgrade offer is back again. They've also cut some service costs and removed a number of services whose explanations were incoherent at best. Maybe there's hope after all. I thank government-mandated number portability for this breakthrough.
While it's not true for every company in every business, cellular companies in particular might, just for a change, try to avoid the "profit-killing, competing-on-price, race to the bottom" by offering other, non-price-bound differentiators.
An obvious differentiator would be some combination of responsive customer service + treating-customers-like-adults + a clear explanation of services available for purchase.
Right now all the money that would go into creating such differentiators is being poured into advertising apparently-identically-abusive companies that compete on price price price.
The carriers have created this reality by talking ad nauseum AT the market when they should instead be listening to current customers.
The phrase "extreme programming" appears in the text..
It's just the SlashAI embellishing the story, like when the Boston Herald runs an online story about a shooting, and the CMS provides helpful team stats and other stuff: The shooter was wearing a Red Sox [Standings | Schedule | Tonight's game] hat when caught by police near the Riverside T stop.
1. Not necessarily an error, but SecureIX is pretty much out of business and "looking for a buyer":
We are looking for someone that has more time than us to take over this service. There is definantly a need and demand for this type of service, but we have other buisnesses to run and this needs a full time owner/manager. What is included: the secureix.com domain, all the custom written software that makes this service possible, and help getting your initial servers running. Until the sale is complete we will not accept new sign ups.
Email six@secureix.com with any offers/questions.
Here are some FAQ about this auction:
You will need one very basic Dual P4 server per 128-256 premium customers.
You will need about 75 mbits avg. per 256 premium customers.
Income potential is limitless.
Nearly 200,000 people have visted our site and signed up for some level of service.
Seems to me ya don't exit a business where the "income potential is limitless" lo+l
2. Relakks charges EU$5 so thats USD$7.50-8/month, not $5
*nod*. I don't wear glasses, and was recently "forced" into a glossy screen because the rest of this laptop was exactly what I wanted. I perceive it as brighter and cleaner than the several non-glossy displays that preceded it. This surprised me as I thought I'd hate it. But on the balance i am not at all unhappy, after an adjustment period of maybe a week or two. For a while I had both laptops and the "old one" seemed dim and less sharp. I agree with posters who have written that reading dark text on white has a sense of "text on paper" on the glossy screen, while the matte screens look like computer displays.
I agree that you can't hide something that's orbiting the planet.
Nonetheless, isn't it also true that the amateur spotters and their extensive records are providing a lot of data points that other governments could not amass on their own without a lot of work? In the past a government might have had some home-based resources for this kind of tracking, with data collected at intervals and lots of gaps. But with the hobbyists they've now got an international network of tracker/spotters and more continuous datasets.
There must be some value to unfriendlys in having that kind of information, both for the information itself, and for the stresses the release of the information imposes on the operators of the satellites.
I would expect a true "spatially-designed interface" to not only behave that way, but also to allow me to even have multiple files with the same name in the same place if i wanted to. The file name is not the object. It's just a label for the object.
But the spatially-designed interface should not allow me to place two objects in the same place. Done right, clever designers would then implement "layers" so the objects could identify the same XY location but on different planes.
somehow emergencies were dealt with reasonably well before cell phones. jam the bastards. the restaurants cited have landlines and can make a call to 911 when necessary.
I didn't write the comment, but it's probably significant that they've already established that $4,000 is "enough" to settle the cases and to recover whatever was "lost" to the music bandits.
So, they are rational actors if they spend up to $4,000, and no more, to bring each complaint. But nobody wins all the time. If they expect to win, say 3 cases out of 4, then they can rationally drop only up to $3,000 per case, but no more.
The problem is, you can't get much lawyerin', research or expert assistance for $4,000... even less for $3,000.
So if they're spending a rational amount, then they aren't proceeding to court with very good data (a single, simple letter from an ordinary neighborhood attorney can cost $200 to $400).
And if they're spending lots more than $4,000, that's bad too. Nobody with clean hands and honest motives spends $40,000 to recover $4,000.
Civil courts can't do much more than award cash to fix boo-boo's. Considering that, the settlement amounts, and the cost of attorney-time, there's a strong suggestion that the RIAA has some unspoken motive and is simply using the court to advance it. That sort of thing doesn't look good at all, and IMO tends to catch the attention and ire of courts.
Good luck if you ever want to move a domain OUT Of yahoo.
Also, they require you to put a credit card on file, and there is no way to remove the card from your account unless you "cancel all services" beforehand... including domain hosting.
so, that's nuts.
There also (as of the time I finally got some domains out of there) was no way to NOT automatically renew a domain registration... and this happens somewhere around 30+ days before expiration, no way to turn it off unless you've managed to transfer it out before then.
And their control panel for domain registration is completely nonsensical, like it was designed from people who had never seen either Yahoo or domain registration process before building it. If you want a Yahoo-centered world, it might make sense. Then again, don't get stuck in there like a few of my domains did.
I have been a credit card merchant from time to time (direct contracts, not through some middleman like Paypal) and I know the rules fairly well.
The card company didn't even question my dispute of the charges. In fact, the service agent went out of her way to mention that with "this vendor" they don't even give them a change before processing the dispute to let them "prove" the billings were legit.. because there were so many chargebacks against their account.
Here I should point out that chargebacks could be the result of bad conduct by RegisterFly, or could be the result of frauds against them. I suppose there could be a lot of fraud in domain name buying, considering the virtual nature of the transactions.
So the card company did all that it could, short of terminating their card processing agreement... I think this happens to very small merchants, but doesn't seem to happen to any very large merchants, unfortunately.
Chargebacks aren't free, so it did get their attention... at which point they seized my property - the other domains - and threatened to sell or cancel them unless I paid a ransom immediately.
I think the greater crime here was the taking of the domains, even though they were paid up and entirely uninvolved in the disputed transactions. I would have liked to have pursued this in the New Jersey courts, but really didn't have time to take it up at the time. I was just thinking about this the other day. Maybe I should re-visit the issue.
I believe that "taking" of this nature is illegal and would have liked to have had a day in court to find out for sure.
Definitely I'd advise continuing to be a cheapwad, and then coming back to Slashdot to whine to people who can't possibly help you, about how you were "victimized."
yes, definitely do that. It'll be amusing. Not interesting really, but amusing in an "oh there goes another cheapwad, who saw his fate in the future and ignored it" sort of way, which makes it slightly more interesting.
They ripped me off for the price of two transfers-in that never happened ($15) then when I disputed the charges on the credit card (the money was charged but never refunded), RegisterFly "seized" a dozen totally diffent paid-up domains of mine and marked them "fraudulent," taking them offline with no notice.
These domains were completely unrelated to the two that were never transferred in but for which I was billed. RegisterFly staff called me names on the phone, and finally handed them back in exchange for my payment of a $75 ransom over their threats that if I didn't pay up, they'd sell them, as was their "right" under their unconscionable contract terms.
I hope everyone affiliated with running the scam known as Registerfly burns in hell.. and my friends who didn't listen to my advice to get out of their while they still could: sorry suckers, but i tried to warn you.
I did too. Speak up, or it will never get any better.
Are you seriously afraid? please.
I'm mostly now embarrassed about a connection to that place, but the IT department have always had a perverse and questionable interest in what everyone else was up to.
This overview of "Fraud Vulnerabilities in SiteKey Security at Bank of America" is written for a non-technical audience. Some details have been greatly simplified, and some new material is presented. Readers seeking more depth of coverage should consult the original paper, available at the above URL.
Although this report discusses SiteKey at Bank of America Corporation, the general risks discussed here apply to all SiteKey sites including ING Direct and Vanguard.com, and they apply even more generally to any security method that relies solely on server-side interventions to detect and stop online fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
You add the little stand-with-keyboard dock thingy for making gobs of text.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/IPAD_KBDOCK
TOR apologists, no fair modding down these comments just because you don't like them.
I wish the holier than thous behind the Tor movement would stop with their outrageous and indefensible claims about the protections Tor allegedly provides.
I tried to have this discussion with, among others, people who've made "names for themselves" traveling from conference to conference blustering about how Tor is making the Internet safe for unpopular opinions in places where an unpopular opinion can get you disappeared right quick (hello China)... shouted down every time because it's not a POPULAR point of view.
I see that I'm not the only one in this discussion with concerns. Thank god things are changing.
This is why i said "Tor movement" not "authors of Tor"
It doesn't matter. The innocent, non-techies are not hearing from "the authors of Tor". They're hearing from others who are running around promoting it as the salvation of free speech in non-free places... and they are believed.
I wish the holier than thous behind the Tor movement would stop with their outrageous and indefensible claims about the protections Tor allegedly provides.
I tried to have this discussion with, among others, people who've made "names for themselves" traveling from conference to conference blustering about how Tor is making the Internet safe for unpopular opinions in places where an unpopular opinion can get you disappeared right quick (hello China)... shouted down every time because it's not a POPULAR point of view.
I see that I'm not the only one in this discussion with concerns. Thank god things are changing.
Wow. I had forgotten all about Packard Bell. OMG. The pain. The paaaaaaaaiiiiinnnnnnnnn.
they're using the "Dell Method"
Books in the public domain are about ten billion years old in reading/writing-years and not highly relevant to any serious discussion about "reading books".. they are, however, a serious distraction to a serious discussion about electronic books. (nothing against old books, but it's a crappy hedge to say "well, but ther are some books in the world that are not locked down with DRM and thus totally at risk on a Kindle or equivalent).
I'll Believe once contemporary, NY Times Book Review publications by current authors are available in an open format. The sites offered a a counter-example carry anything but that... because no site does.
Oh, booksonboard has books by current authors? Sure. Some.
Maybe you missed the fine print:
Adobe Digital Edition
Copy Permissions: Disabled
Print Permissions: Disabled
Lend Permissions: Disabled
Read Aloud Feature: Disabled
i suppose that's kinda-open but it's not open-open.
Ah, they don't need to MARKET the customer service stuff, they need to DO it.
Even without the $$$ lock-in, there is an implicit switching cost to changing carriers, consisting of the search-and-compare cost + time spent making the actual change.
I'm suggesting they spend some money on retention rather than spending most of it on attempts to snipe from other carriers. This is the basis of the downward spiral to price-based differentiation.
I suspect that the primary motive to jump carriers is to get a free new phone as it's presently fashion-forward to have the latest handheld, whatever that may be this week. T-Mobile used to offer cheap or free periodic upgrades to existing customers, but stopped.... and I just checked and it looks like the upgrade offer is back again. They've also cut some service costs and removed a number of services whose explanations were incoherent at best. Maybe there's hope after all. I thank government-mandated number portability for this breakthrough.
While it's not true for every company in every business, cellular companies in particular might, just for a change, try to avoid the "profit-killing, competing-on-price, race to the bottom" by offering other, non-price-bound differentiators.
An obvious differentiator would be some combination of responsive customer service + treating-customers-like-adults + a clear explanation of services available for purchase.
Right now all the money that would go into creating such differentiators is being poured into advertising apparently-identically-abusive companies that compete on price price price.
The carriers have created this reality by talking ad nauseum AT the market when they should instead be listening to current customers.
Venture capitalists say lots of things. They talk constantly, actually.
That doesn't mean the statements are necessarily true, or even worth hearing.
The phrase "extreme programming" appears in the text..
It's just the SlashAI embellishing the story, like when the Boston Herald runs an online story about a shooting, and the CMS provides helpful team stats and other stuff:
The shooter was wearing a Red Sox [Standings | Schedule | Tonight's game] hat when caught by police near the Riverside T stop.
could someone remind me again what this "NBC" thing is, and why I should care?
thankx.
We are looking for someone that has more time than us to take over this service. There is definantly a need and demand for this type of service, but we have other buisnesses to run and this needs a full time owner/manager. What is included: the secureix.com domain, all the custom written software that makes this service possible, and help getting your initial servers running.
Seems to me ya don't exit a business where the "income potential is limitless" lo+lUntil the sale is complete we will not accept new sign ups.
Email six@secureix.com with any offers/questions.
Here are some FAQ about this auction:
You will need one very basic Dual P4 server per 128-256 premium customers.
You will need about 75 mbits avg. per 256 premium customers.
Income potential is limitless.
Nearly 200,000 people have visted our site and signed up for some level of service.
2. Relakks charges EU$5 so thats USD$7.50-8/month, not $5
*nod*. I don't wear glasses, and was recently "forced" into a glossy screen because the rest of this laptop was exactly what I wanted. I perceive it as brighter and cleaner than the several non-glossy displays that preceded it. This surprised me as I thought I'd hate it. But on the balance i am not at all unhappy, after an adjustment period of maybe a week or two. For a while I had both laptops and the "old one" seemed dim and less sharp. I agree with posters who have written that reading dark text on white has a sense of "text on paper" on the glossy screen, while the matte screens look like computer displays.
:)
Hey, anyone remember 16-color EGA?
I agree that you can't hide something that's orbiting the planet.
Nonetheless, isn't it also true that the amateur spotters and their extensive records are providing a lot of data points that other governments could not amass on their own without a lot of work? In the past a government might have had some home-based resources for this kind of tracking, with data collected at intervals and lots of gaps. But with the hobbyists they've now got an international network of tracker/spotters and more continuous datasets.
There must be some value to unfriendlys in having that kind of information, both for the information itself, and for the stresses the release of the information imposes on the operators of the satellites.
wow. that was cold.
congratulations on all your success and for being bred as one of the true survivors.
you are the future of the human race, or something. yay.
No.
I would expect a true "spatially-designed interface" to not only behave that way, but also to allow me to even have multiple files with the same name in the same place if i wanted to. The file name is not the object. It's just a label for the object.
But the spatially-designed interface should not allow me to place two objects in the same place. Done right, clever designers would then implement "layers" so the objects could identify the same XY location but on different planes.
yay.
oh yawn.
somehow emergencies were dealt with reasonably well before cell phones.
jam the bastards. the restaurants cited have landlines and can make a call to 911 when necessary.
I didn't write the comment, but it's probably significant that they've already established that $4,000 is "enough" to settle the cases and to recover whatever was "lost" to the music bandits.
So, they are rational actors if they spend up to $4,000, and no more, to bring each complaint. But nobody wins all the time. If they expect to win, say 3 cases out of 4, then they can rationally drop only up to $3,000 per case, but no more.
The problem is, you can't get much lawyerin', research or expert assistance for $4,000... even less for $3,000.
So if they're spending a rational amount, then they aren't proceeding to court with very good data (a single, simple letter from an ordinary neighborhood attorney can cost $200 to $400).
And if they're spending lots more than $4,000, that's bad too. Nobody with clean hands and honest motives spends $40,000 to recover $4,000.
Civil courts can't do much more than award cash to fix boo-boo's. Considering that, the settlement amounts, and the cost of attorney-time, there's a strong suggestion that the RIAA has some unspoken motive and is simply using the court to advance it. That sort of thing doesn't look good at all, and IMO tends to catch the attention and ire of courts.
Good luck if you ever want to move a domain OUT Of yahoo.
Also, they require you to put a credit card on file, and there is no way to remove the card from your account unless you "cancel all services" beforehand... including domain hosting.
so, that's nuts.
There also (as of the time I finally got some domains out of there) was no way to NOT automatically renew a domain registration... and this happens somewhere around 30+ days before expiration, no way to turn it off unless you've managed to transfer it out before then.
And their control panel for domain registration is completely nonsensical, like it was designed from people who had never seen either Yahoo or domain registration process before building it. If you want a Yahoo-centered world, it might make sense. Then again, don't get stuck in there like a few of my domains did.
Anyway, not friendly.
I have been a credit card merchant from time to time (direct contracts, not through some middleman like Paypal) and I know the rules fairly well.
The card company didn't even question my dispute of the charges. In fact, the service agent went out of her way to mention that with "this vendor" they don't even give them a change before processing the dispute to let them "prove" the billings were legit.. because there were so many chargebacks against their account.
Here I should point out that chargebacks could be the result of bad conduct by RegisterFly, or could be the result of frauds against them. I suppose there could be a lot of fraud in domain name buying, considering the virtual nature of the transactions.
So the card company did all that it could, short of terminating their card processing agreement... I think this happens to very small merchants, but doesn't seem to happen to any very large merchants, unfortunately.
Chargebacks aren't free, so it did get their attention... at which point they seized my property - the other domains - and threatened to sell or cancel them unless I paid a ransom immediately.
I think the greater crime here was the taking of the domains, even though they were paid up and entirely uninvolved in the disputed transactions. I would have liked to have pursued this in the New Jersey courts, but really didn't have time to take it up at the time. I was just thinking about this the other day. Maybe I should re-visit the issue.
I believe that "taking" of this nature is illegal and would have liked to have had a day in court to find out for sure.
Definitely I'd advise continuing to be a cheapwad, and then coming back to Slashdot to whine to people who can't possibly help you, about how you were "victimized."
yes, definitely do that. It'll be amusing. Not interesting really, but amusing in an "oh there goes another cheapwad, who saw his fate in the future and ignored it" sort of way, which makes it slightly more interesting.
They ripped me off for the price of two transfers-in that never happened ($15) then when I disputed the charges on the credit card (the money was charged but never refunded), RegisterFly "seized" a dozen totally diffent paid-up domains of mine and marked them "fraudulent," taking them offline with no notice.
These domains were completely unrelated to the two that were never transferred in but for which I was billed. RegisterFly staff called me names on the phone, and finally handed them back in exchange for my payment of a $75 ransom over their threats that if I didn't pay up, they'd sell them, as was their "right" under their unconscionable contract terms.
I hope everyone affiliated with running the scam known as Registerfly burns in hell.. and my friends who didn't listen to my advice to get out of their while they still could: sorry suckers, but i tried to warn you.
I did too. Speak up, or it will never get any better.
Are you seriously afraid? please.
I'm mostly now embarrassed about a connection to that place, but the IT department have always had a perverse and questionable interest in what everyone else was up to.
Discussion and links to papers here:
e y-cant-save-you.html
http://bbaadd.com/blog/2006/08/security-why-sitek
This overview of "Fraud Vulnerabilities in SiteKey Security at Bank of America" is written for a non-technical audience. Some details have been greatly simplified, and some new material is presented. Readers seeking more depth of coverage should consult the original paper, available at the above URL.
Although this report discusses SiteKey at Bank of America Corporation, the general risks discussed here apply to all SiteKey sites including ING Direct and Vanguard.com, and they apply even more generally to any security method that relies solely on server-side interventions to detect and stop online fraud.