The Florida voter registration records fiasco before the last US presidential election was because of the same reason; removing people from the voter registration list based on names (and not even the whole name, but a few of the first letters, dumber than dumb), and some other criteria that practically ensured multiple people would match the criteria, when only one should.
Who designs these systems? If I were to design a "matching algorithm" like that at work, my boss would seriously question my competency.
They call them campaign contributions, I call them bribes.
They have nothing to do with getting re-elected. They've got everything to do with "getting access" to the "honorable" Orrin Hatch. i.e. getting to write legislation in Hollywood and RIAA HQ he then presents as his own.
I would start spreading rumors that terrorist cells have adopted the following aliases:
John Smith
George W. Bush George Bush Ariel Sharon Dick Cheney Colin Powell C. Rice (yea, I can't spell that name) etc.
No, I'm not kidding. From what I can tell from various stories about this no-fly list, it really would cause great havoc to the general public, if popular names would end up on that list. It would likely also make that list largely useless for its intended purpose.
Any system that flags people as a potential terrorist by the name they use is idiotic, insecure and completely useless.
You can say that again. A really surprising move from a conservative government.
Although, if I understand this right, this is still at a recommendation level, and would have to be made official policy first to become standard practise?
We'll see what happens after the lobbyists have done their job.
The article discusses other end-user fingerprinting applications, and mentions the US-VISIT program where every terrorist, uh, foreigner entering the United States will get fingerprinted and the fingerprints of THAT scan will be run against the FBI database.
The fingerprints taken to access lockers at the Statue of Liberty are NOT run against the FBI database.
You can't get rid of the leaders until the next election in the US unless:
a) the leaders do something extraordinarily stupid and commit an illegal act (Nixon) b) you ovrethrow them violently c) public protests lead to early elections
Option a) is the only option that could possibly happen. The last two are so extremely unlikely it's not even worth considering.
That's why politicians can lie through their teeth all throughout their campaigns, then get elected, do a 180 and continue to remain in office.
"Now, let's start with the assumption that the device works properly. (if you start to question that, you can't have any reasonable discussion anymore) So you were speeding. So you were breaking the law. So you were at fault. So you do deserve to be considered part of the problem."
You missed the point. What if the other dude was driving under the speed limit, but ran a red light. Not your fault.
What if the other dude's car didn't have the trackigng device, and was speeding more than you were. Not your fault, but you'd still get f***ed, because you were going 1mph over the speed limit.
Of course you're still f***ed, because the insurance company cartel will raise your insurance even if it wasn't your fault.
Since I worked at consultancies for most of my professional career, I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of computer professionals. Every new project, and there's a team of new people I worked with both with the clients and the companies I worked for.
In my experience the people with higher degrees, in general / by average / blah, are better than people with lesser or no degrees, given that all of them have about the same work experience.
I've worked with two PHds (that I know of) in my life and they just kicked ass. However, I've also worked with a handful of kick ass self-taught people, who have no degrees whatsoever. They, however, had started programming in their teens and had done stuff with computers for about 10 years already by the time I worked with them.
The absolute worst were the "programmers" working for some of my clients during the bubble years. This one dude I worked with didn't know HTML, Perl or CGI (this was before JSPs and ASPs got popular), but was somehow their lead web developer. He spent most of his time watching his stock options go up in value.
"Until we recognise that governments, law enforcement agencies, corporations and the RIAA are all just trying to control us."
While I agree with everything else you said, this is not quite the way I see it.
People in general are quite happy to act like cattle (or consumers, if you wish) without any active controlling by the corporations.
However, the corporations are trying, very hard, to control the legislators, who in their greed go along. It's sad that the people, who are supposed to represent the people choose to represent money instead.
Proletariat of the world, unite to vote out corrupt politicians (Orrin Hatch is the first in line)
I had the distinct "pleasure" of working with a lot of people who should not have been let anywhere near a computer, let alone pretend to do anything useful with them. I am not the least surprised there's less people in the industry now.
I used to work for a company that had proxy servers in all continents. The US proxies were configured to block just about everything, but not access to the other proxy servers. Kaching!:)
Anytime I couldn't get to a site I needed to (at one point, they blocked every commerce site out there, including book stores I was using to buy books I needed for work), I would just point my browser to one of the foreign proxies.
Worked for all the IM clients as well. US proxy blocked all IM traffic, the foreign ones didn't.
That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.
If the proxy is slow, use another one. I do it all the time.
My home country's laws about alocohol advertising used to require advertisers to block all access to websites advertising alcoholic products produced in my country to the residents of the country. All foreigners could access the sites all they could. It really didn't take long to find an open proxy outside the borders to check out what was on the site (wasn't worth the effort).
Slashdot Mirror
They don't know what pixel, clock cycle, graphics processor or any of that shit means. Why wouldn't they grant the patent?
Maybe 100 years ago. This is truly getting ridiculous.
Yet they seem unable to learn from past mistakes.
The Florida voter registration records fiasco before the last US presidential election was because of the same reason; removing people from the voter registration list based on names (and not even the whole name, but a few of the first letters, dumber than dumb), and some other criteria that practically ensured multiple people would match the criteria, when only one should.
Who designs these systems? If I were to design a "matching algorithm" like that at work, my boss would seriously question my competency.
They call them campaign contributions, I call them bribes.
They have nothing to do with getting re-elected. They've got everything to do with "getting access" to the "honorable" Orrin Hatch. i.e. getting to write legislation in Hollywood and RIAA HQ he then presents as his own.
I would start spreading rumors that terrorist cells have adopted the following aliases:
John Smith
George W. Bush
George Bush
Ariel Sharon
Dick Cheney
Colin Powell
C. Rice (yea, I can't spell that name)
etc.
No, I'm not kidding. From what I can tell from various stories about this no-fly list, it really would cause great havoc to the general public, if popular names would end up on that list. It would likely also make that list largely useless for its intended purpose.
Any system that flags people as a potential terrorist by the name they use is idiotic, insecure and completely useless.
There is no bug here. It's broken by design.
Orrin Hatch's campaign contributions just grew by hundredfold.
oops, made a typo, bad.
You can say that again. A really surprising move from a conservative government.
Although, if I understand this right, this is still at a recommendation level, and would have to be made official policy first to become standard practise?
We'll see what happens after the lobbyists have done their job.
Spamcop reports on SENDING IP addresses.
The study was reporting on who actually sent the spam.
It is widely known US based spammers use open proxies, zombies, open relays and paid foreign spammers abroad to hide their tracks.
So both studies are correct. It's just that they're reporting different things.
A study by the National Weather Service just found out sky is blue, most of the time.
The moderator changed the summary after posting it...
Read the damn article before posting it.
The article discusses other end-user fingerprinting applications, and mentions the US-VISIT program where every terrorist, uh, foreigner entering the United States will get fingerprinted and the fingerprints of THAT scan will be run against the FBI database.
The fingerprints taken to access lockers at the Statue of Liberty are NOT run against the FBI database.
You can't get rid of the leaders until the next election in the US unless:
a) the leaders do something extraordinarily stupid and commit an illegal act (Nixon)
b) you ovrethrow them violently
c) public protests lead to early elections
Option a) is the only option that could possibly happen. The last two are so extremely unlikely it's not even worth considering.
That's why politicians can lie through their teeth all throughout their campaigns, then get elected, do a 180 and continue to remain in office.
"Now, let's start with the assumption that the device works properly. (if you start to question that, you can't have any reasonable discussion anymore) So you were speeding. So you were breaking the law. So you were at fault. So you do deserve to be considered part of the problem."
You missed the point. What if the other dude was driving under the speed limit, but ran a red light. Not your fault.
What if the other dude's car didn't have the trackigng device, and was speeding more than you were. Not your fault, but you'd still get f***ed, because you were going 1mph over the speed limit.
Of course you're still f***ed, because the insurance company cartel will raise your insurance even if it wasn't your fault.
"something will arrive in a couple of years which nobody would have predicted"
Well, some experts are predicting a severe labor shortage in a decade or so in the United States, with or without off-sourcing.
It'll be interesting to see how that pans out.
Since I worked at consultancies for most of my professional career, I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of computer professionals. Every new project, and there's a team of new people I worked with both with the clients and the companies I worked for.
In my experience the people with higher degrees, in general / by average / blah, are better than people with lesser or no degrees, given that all of them have about the same work experience.
I've worked with two PHds (that I know of) in my life and they just kicked ass. However, I've also worked with a handful of kick ass self-taught people, who have no degrees whatsoever. They, however, had started programming in their teens and had done stuff with computers for about 10 years already by the time I worked with them.
The absolute worst were the "programmers" working for some of my clients during the bubble years. This one dude I worked with didn't know HTML, Perl or CGI (this was before JSPs and ASPs got popular), but was somehow their lead web developer. He spent most of his time watching his stock options go up in value.
The difference between the BBC and US News Media is that BBC reporters are reporters, the reporters in the US are by and large entertainers.
"But for most purposes, none of this information is used outside its intended purposes."
Obviously you're not familiar with Acxiom.
"Until we recognise that governments, law enforcement agencies, corporations and the RIAA are all just trying to control us."
While I agree with everything else you said, this is not quite the way I see it.
People in general are quite happy to act like cattle (or consumers, if you wish) without any active controlling by the corporations.
However, the corporations are trying, very hard, to control the legislators, who in their greed go along. It's sad that the people, who are supposed to represent the people choose to represent money instead.
Proletariat of the world, unite to vote out corrupt politicians (Orrin Hatch is the first in line)
I had the distinct "pleasure" of working with a lot of people who should not have been let anywhere near a computer, let alone pretend to do anything useful with them. I am not the least surprised there's less people in the industry now.
I don't think they will be streaming the Olympics over an IRC server...
I used to work for a company that had proxy servers in all continents. The US proxies were configured to block just about everything, but not access to the other proxy servers. Kaching! :)
Anytime I couldn't get to a site I needed to (at one point, they blocked every commerce site out there, including book stores I was using to buy books I needed for work), I would just point my browser to one of the foreign proxies.
Worked for all the IM clients as well. US proxy blocked all IM traffic, the foreign ones didn't.
That's why you check in advance whether the open proxy reveals the originating IP address or not.
If the proxy is slow, use another one. I do it all the time.
My home country's laws about alocohol advertising used to require advertisers to block all access to websites advertising alcoholic products produced in my country to the residents of the country. All foreigners could access the sites all they could. It really didn't take long to find an open proxy outside the borders to check out what was on the site (wasn't worth the effort).
Just use an open proxy in Europe and you'll be wathing the games live as well.