I have sometimes wondered if our ability to technologically compensate for previously fatal traits - like type II diabetes, say - means that we will encourage the growth of such undesirable traits through increased proliferation (e.g., spawning of child processes).
Also consider the up-tick in dangerous or non-neurotypical conditions in the first world (i.e., US) versus the third world: lower fertility rate, peanut allergies (does ANYBODY over 30 remember not bringing peanut butter to school?), and Autism-spectrum reorders.
(Most importantly, ObB5: Ambassador Londo Mollari: [wincing] You haven't changed. Timov: You have. You've devolved. )
Why make it so hard? Just hook the dynamo up to the turnstiles instead.
Two reasons:
South Station Railway station has no turnstiles, or anything of the sort. You need to descend to the T station to get to them. The T station doesn't have the sort of massive wandering foot traffic that the rail terminal does.
Boston doesn't have turnstiles anymore. We have magic slidey glass gates that whoosh out of the way when you present your charlie card (touch card to reader) or transit pass (insert into slot, whoosh, pass reappears a foot further on) or, when exiting, body/jacket/book/coworker (motion sensor detects you coming and opens up for you).
Meanwhile, just one commuter rail train coming in probably wastes more energy in braking along its route than a month of commuters could generate walking through the station courtyard.
Compulsory health insurance will just make the insurers raise their prices, because they know that everyone just has to put up with it.
Not necessarily. Also in Massachusetts, car insurance is mandatory. Rates are set by the state government and do not vary among providers, except possibly insofar as they offer rebates for things like anti-theft devices. There are fewer providers - many companies choose not to compete here because the rates are kept artificially level - but they are not kept so low that no-one will offer insurance, nor so high that residents feel they are being unfairly charged.
The best method of brewing is a Vacuum Pot. The technical reasoning is that it keeps the water at the optimum temperature during the brewing process, but my experience bears this out as well. For simplicity I use a Bodum Electric Vacuum Pot - don't get scared away by all the gas-lamp-heated ones you'll see online.
I have also experienced the difference that truly fresh beans can make. To get fresh coffee, I roast my own (an roaster goes for $100-$500 depending on quality). Once roasted, bean freshness degrades over a period of days or weeks; once ground, freshness degrades over a matter of hours. So I roast a small amount and try to use it within two weeks. I buy my green beans from Sweet Maria's and they've got lots of text on the site to get you educated.
> The mayor has to show that he has a tough stance on terrorism
Well, I think it has more to do with the "cult of Menino personality" than anything to do with Terrorism. Menino is a fascinating avatar of the Massachusetts political frictions in riptide.
These guys weren't doing this as any kind of prank; it was an advertising campaign. They should receive the same fine as anyone else who taped up paper advertisements
Well, not to reductio ad absurdium, but:
"This guy wasn't shooting someone as any kind of murder; it was an advertising campaign for the gun industry. He should receive the same fine as anyone else who handed out paper advertisements...
> > First for getting paid to do the stunt. > Getting paid was smart.
What, $200? Did you work out the hourly on that? They'd have been been better off, and more legally defensible, to do it gratis.
> > Second for placing the shit on highway supports. I don't care how harmless it looks, > In this post 9/11 world doing anything that scares the paranoid can be considered a crime.
I am sorry you consider an viewing an unidentified box affixed to a highway support as "paranoid." I don't think it is, really, and I don't think it's a post-9/11 viewpoint. I was rather more abhorred by the Boston jogger who said she'd run into one of the boxes while jogging and kicked it to see what it'd do. I'm sure that some of the pipe bombs that my brother played with as a kid would've made that quite the jolly go!
Look, this is a first-world country. It is so because, for the most part, the shit that's supposed to work, works. The roads work, the airlines work, the trains run, and interruptions to them are transient and not caused by foolish shit like farmers running their cows across the tracks, streakers from the local college dashing across the runway or pranksters placing queer stuff on highway supports. It isn't so because of the tight security - I think you and I agree that "the more you tighten your grip, the more starsystems will slip through your fingers." It's because most of our citizens are raised to behave responsibly and to not go screwing things up. Compare this to, say, Mexico, where the half-built shacks neighbor the streets of T-shirt shops guarded by M16-wielding militia.
My point? We depend on infrastructure, so don't screw with it. Even if you think it's harmless. (That alone doesn't make one an asshole, but it helps).
> > Thirdly for acting like complete and utter unrepentent assholes throughout the whole affiar. > Are you talking about the officials in Boston and people like yourself who call a litebrite box a "hoax" bomb?
Ah! Gasp! Et tu, emilng?
Neither, obviously. The officials did what they had to. If a T commuter sees a control box they never noticed before and mentions it to the MBTA police, and they don't recognize it, it's correct to run it up the line and check. If no one can identify it, it's correct to treat it as suspicious until proven otherwise. Now, if it was night, and it actually had a glowing cartoon character on it, that would be harder to defend, but during the day when it is anonymous? And why exactly was it so hard to identify these boxes without dark? There wasn't a single URL, company name, or other piece of identification on it? Stealth marketing doesn't need to be quite that stealthy.
Now, many have called me an asshole, most have been right, but not you, I suspect. I never called a "litebrite box" a "hoax bomb." Never said the defendants deserved what they got for hoaxing the city. No, they pranked the city, they did it in a way that common sense should have known to avoid, and anything they get they'll have earned through their application of vibrissal vociferation.
> > Fourthly, they're still facing charges and going to take a hit, and it's their own damn fault. > If I swing my arms like this and you happen to get in my way then it's your fault if you get hit.
If you aim to convince me I'm not arguing with a fourth-grader, you are not going about it in a convincing manner.
Let me rephrase it for you, perhaps this will help: "You know, the funny thing is, if they'd acted contrite at their arraignment they'd probably be off the hook the second this settlement went through."
> > Yes, I'm from Boston. No, the traffic didn't affect me. Doesn't make them any less assholes than they've acted like so far. > I'm from New York City and saw the WTC fall with my own eyes. Doesn't mean I'm going to jump at every single shadow I see.
Again, you misread me.
I didn't say, "Doesn't make this bomb hoax less of a scare," I
Affixing things to government property (even worse, DOT infrastructure). Illegal? Check.
Affixing things to (other people's) private property. Illegal? Check.
All these things done as part of a prank likely to be prosecuted with vigor? Not necessarily.
All these things done as part of a prank likely to be prosecuted with vigor if you go out of your way to thumb your nose at society, at the cops, at the judges, and generally act like an asshole who got out of high school a decade ago but never grew out of it? Likely, and let's hope so.
We know they did illegal things. We also know they acted like assholes. What we're discussing is whether they're going to be tried with any real vigor or not, and I think the answer to that is yes, exactly because they acted like assholes.
Mary Dyer was not popular, so when it came time to try her, they shifted her court appearance... over to Cambridge, which was an 8-mile trek, in the driving snow, on horses, with almost no notice to her. Do you think that was fair to her, or perhaps biased on the part of the court? If you treat the authorities like assholes, they'll rip you a new one. In her case, after she was banished to Rhode Island and she came back despite that, they just hung her. Eventually they decided that treating her like that because she was an asshole wasn't really defensible, and they put a statue of her next to the state house, but that was long after the rope went around her neck.
Second for placing the shit on highway supports. I don't care how harmless it looks, if it's a box and you lash it to one of those green steel beams, it's an issue here.
Thirdly for acting like complete and utter unrepentent assholes throughout the whole affiar.
Which is why:
Fourthly, they're still facing charges and going to take a hit, and it's their own damn fault.
Yes, I'm from Boston. No, the traffic didn't affect me. Doesn't make them any less assholes than they've acted like so far.
Read the article carefully. The ISP has the right to read the email, and pass it along to law enforcement.
USC 18, 2511(2)(a)(i):
It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for an operator of a switchboard,
or an officer, employee, or agent of a provider of wire or electronic
communication service, whose facilities are used in the transmission of a
wire or electronic communication, to intercept, disclose, or use that
communication in the normal course of his employment while engaged in any
activity which is a necessary incident to the rendition of his service or to
the protection of the rights or property of the provider of that service,
except that a provider of wire communication service to the public shall not
utilize service observing or random monitoring except for mechanical or
service quality control checks.
Translation: If dork-o sends three billion copies of his spam through your ISP, he is going to impact your service. You are then justified, as a system administrator, to view those messages as investigation in the course of "protection of the rights or propterty of the provider of that service" - it is one of the exceptions under which wiretap is allowed. Once you've added up enough costs to interest the appropriate government resource,you call them in, provide them with the information that they couldn't get without a warrant - but you could! - and they're off to the races.
I might add, it would be nice for people to REJECT spam rather than BOUNCE it. When you bounce it, innocent domains get an email complaining about the forged email. With these spambots, it adds up quick! Doing a reject also allows legitimate senders to discover their email was not delivered.
It would be nice, but unfortunately, that runs counter to the time-tested design of essentially every Mail Transfer Agent out there.
Any decent MTA will carefully ensure that the incoming mail message is written out, then signal acceptance of the message, marking that it is now solely responsible for delivery. If spam analysis engines are placed in between those two steps, then it introduces a soft real-time bottleneck and performance impact; it becomes straightforward to perform an email Denial-of-Service by thrashing the spam engine with a number of messages so the MTA can't accept more connections.
To be safe and efficient, then, MTAs will accept the message and drop the connection before performing any costly processing. Once they've done that, there's no way to reject the spam, it can only be dropped or bounced.
Although [before-queue, external, medium-weight filtering options] appear to be attractive, they have some serious limitations that you need to be aware of. First, content inspection software must finish in a limited amount of time; if content inspection needs too much time then incoming mail deliveries will time out. Second, content inspection software must run in a limited amount of memory; if content inspection needs too much memory then software will crash under a peak load. Before-queue inspection limits the peak load that your system can handle, and limits the sophistication of the content filter that you can use.
So someone has already been doing this. For money.
There's also a site called Don't Date Him Girl which apparently is a database of cheating men. It seems to me that these services would be subject to the same sort of privacy laws that appear to have been broken by this guy.
Or perhaps they'd be able to argue that there is no willful intent to do harm with the databases, while the callous outing this guy did clearly falls into willful intent territory.
I fail to see the benefit of using a supposedly secure browser. Any reasonably competent IT guy will see right trough it.
You aren't married, are you?
I can't find it now, but there was an article on/. a while back about a girl who dumped her boyfriend after loading Firefox onto her machine and it picked up the password database from his previous installation, which he had deleted to hide his dating site trolling. IIRC, the kicker was that the password database recorded that he didn't want to save a password for those sites, which kind of revealed exactly what he wanted hidden.
Anyways, my point is, something like this is aimed at home/family users with a shared PC environment (read: hubby surfs porn after wifey logs out of her blog-surfing for the night). That isn't to say many stupid people will try to avoid der IT ubermenschen with it, but they'll get what they deserve.
Based on the small sample of myself doing local research, town recycling programs won't take them, and the nice URL they give you on the box sends you to a database of, effectively, commercial recycling organizations which might talk to you if you're a decent sized company but aren't oriented toward consumer users.
Now, that's clearly not statistically valid. I'm very open to counterexamples and being proven wrong. But I think you'll find that in general there is no convenient recycling, and if recycling isn't convenient, no one does it anyway.
$50 bucks sez there will be no attack within the next 96 hours.
I'd give you 99% odds of being right.
Some percent of that is due, of course, to the publicity and the elevated 'alert levels'. Don't you think that, if all there was on the TV was smiling police patting each other on the back and over-confident newscasters explaining that the threat level has been lowered, the aggressors would be more likely to try something?
The rest of your 99%, of course, is a blind gamble that the aggressors are incapacitated or will back off. You may be willing to gamble with people's lives - anonymously, of course. I'm not, even pseudo-anonymously. Those who get elected or appointed based on their ability to protect the public certainly aren't, nor should they be - they'd be remiss in their duties if they gambled with people's lives.
I'm a bit confused about the 'alert levels'... They claim that the attack they have stopped wasn't going to happen today, are aware of no other impending attack and that the security measures are just precautionary and there is nothing to worry about. Yet they have used the highest alert level... Shouldn't that kinda be reserved for when they know an attack is about to happen?
Raising the alert level makes good tactical sense. Perhaps you have not thought it out fully.
Let's look at it from the aggressor point of view. They have a plan. This plan includes things like social engineering materials into position, explosives, detonation systems, and other details which have been painstakingly worked out. They have stockpiles of equipment which can be used in an attack. They are merrily moving along toward H-Hour.
Then, along comes Scotland Yard. In one fell swoop, they arrest some percent - let us say, for the sake of argument, 80% - of the people with enough knowledge of the plan and the materials to make the attack happen. They also capture 80% of the materials storage sites.
What is the next thing Scotland Yard will do?
They will perform forensic analysis on the materials and on any computers or plans left lying about. They will reconstruct the plan and the tools to be used in enough detail that detailed information and alerts can be formulated and handed out to sister agencies and airlines. They will gather the information required to track down the remaining 20% of the aggressor forces and materials. They will, in effect, provide the information required to precisely and correctly (if such a thing is possible) set the alert level.
This will take time. The forensic analysts on the computers may need to break encryption. The forensic analysts for the explosives won't be cutting any corners to save time, for the obvious reasons. From the aggressors point of view, there is a narrow window of opportunity - let us say, 24-48 hours - in which it is unlikely law enforcement will know enough details to be there waiting for you.
If you were the aggressor, what would you do in this case? Sit and wait for Scotland Yard to connect your name to the plot and come arrest you, or try to mount what small corner of the attack you can given the remaining available resources?
If you were the defender, what would you expect the aggressor to do? To sit and wait to be arrested? To panic (or not) and try to run? Or to attempt a very probably suicidal attack? Bear in mind that the aggressor profile matters - the IRA is not known for suicide missions, but Islamic terrorism is.
In short, the arrests are a stroke. The appropriate next step for the defender is to expect a counterstroke. Unfortunately, the counterstroke is both most likely and most dangerous right away, when the defender has the least information with which to fine-tune their defensive measures (read, "alert level"). Therefore the appropriate reaction is to raise your defenses, erring on the side of caution even if it means seeming to over-raise the alert level. Even if it gets you criticised by the crucial Slashdot block 8).
Seems to me this 'hack' gets the cart before the horse. If you are able to run malicious software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just compromise signed code authorization. Heck you could replace the whole OS. The point of security is to prevent unknown persons from being able to run malicious software in the first place.
Seems to me this 'post' puts the hay before the cart. If you are able to run unsigned software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just run malicious software. Heck you could replace the whole OS, which bypasses part of the purpose of requiring signed code. The point of signed code is to prevent known persons from being able to (intentionally or unintentionally) run malicious software in the first place.
1) Realize that the occupation in Israel creates more problems than it solves.
True, but abandoning a nuclear-armed state to the point where it feels cornered by its neighbors isn't really solving problems, it's setting them up. It is in everyone's best interests that Israel maintain non-nuclear technical superiority over its neighbors, which they might not be able to do without US support, because the alternative is worse.
2) Realize that the relationship with Saudi Arabia creates more problems than it solves.
We realized that. We took measures. We've begun shifting the political climate so that we can safely remove US troops from Saudi Arabia without worrying about them being overrun by the megalomaniacal dictator to their north.
3) Realize that the occupation in Iraq creates more problems than it solves.
Wait, I thought you wanted to solve the "infidel in the muslim holy land" problem? We can't get out of Saudi Arabia until Iraq is stable enough not to destabilize Saudi Arabia.
Deal with these three THIS MORNING and your problems with terrorism dry up THIS AFTERNOON.
If you're suggesting we'll have "peace in our time," I think you need to check more of your history. Washing our hands of the mess in the Middle East won't make it go away. We might concievably buy a few years of relative quiet while they have their own little bloodbath over there, but as soon as the nuts come out on top - and they will, without our involvement - they'll cast around looking for some Great Satan to use as an enemy to keep their people together, and we're still the best candidate.
I've had glasses since I was 11 months old, and as much as I'd like to get rid of them, getting flaps cut or 'ground down' just dont sound very appealing to me.
How about having cells ablated? That's actually what happens with PRK. They burn away cells with a laser, it's not like having sandpaper taken to your eyeballs. More like having some instant peeling from a bad sunburn, but without the pain.
It doesn't sound very appealing. But the actual discomfort involved is rather minimal. Something like 4 minutes in the room on an uncomfortable table with your eyelid tacked open and stuff being dripped into it while a laser thunks away. In and out of the room in 10-15 minutes if you include prep and setup time. A few headaches as you heal. Dry eyes for a bit.
And in return, freedom from glasses. No more fumbling for them to read the clock. No more juggling two pairs when it's sunny enough to require sunglasses. No more noticing one morning that they're covered with dust and that's why everything has looked washed out for the last week. No more wondering what the hell that was in the locker room, or who that is across the pool.
I had PRK and now have 20/20 or better now and love it. It's a huge quality of life issue. Don't reject it out of hand.
I'm sorry your admins don't know how to administer it.
I might go even further and pontificate upon the idiocy of attempting to lock developer's systems down, but I'd hate to cause you to vent any more of your spleen.
Cisco Security Agent is a close analog to the sort of comprehensive kernel security hooking that something like LIDS does on Linux. If you can do some research to determine how they're doing it, that'll be a start. They hook all sorts of things, from file and network opens to attempts to sniff keystrokes and executing dynamically modified memory.
Slashdot Mirror
I have sometimes wondered if our ability to technologically compensate for previously fatal traits - like type II diabetes, say - means that we will encourage the growth of such undesirable traits through increased proliferation (e.g., spawning of child processes).
Also consider the up-tick in dangerous or non-neurotypical conditions in the first world (i.e., US) versus the third world: lower fertility rate, peanut allergies (does ANYBODY over 30 remember not bringing peanut butter to school?), and Autism-spectrum reorders.
(Most importantly, ObB5:
Ambassador Londo Mollari: [wincing] You haven't changed.
Timov: You have. You've devolved.
)
Two reasons:
Meanwhile, just one commuter rail train coming in probably wastes more energy in braking along its route than a month of commuters could generate walking through the station courtyard.
Not necessarily. Also in Massachusetts, car insurance is mandatory. Rates are set by the state government and do not vary among providers, except possibly insofar as they offer rebates for things like anti-theft devices. There are fewer providers - many companies choose not to compete here because the rates are kept artificially level - but they are not kept so low that no-one will offer insurance, nor so high that residents feel they are being unfairly charged.
The best method of brewing is a Vacuum Pot. The technical reasoning is that it keeps the water at the optimum temperature during the brewing process, but my experience bears this out as well. For simplicity I use a Bodum Electric Vacuum Pot - don't get scared away by all the gas-lamp-heated ones you'll see online.
I have also experienced the difference that truly fresh beans can make. To get fresh coffee, I roast my own (an roaster goes for $100-$500 depending on quality). Once roasted, bean freshness degrades over a period of days or weeks; once ground, freshness degrades over a matter of hours. So I roast a small amount and try to use it within two weeks. I buy my green beans from Sweet Maria's and they've got lots of text on the site to get you educated.
> The mayor has to show that he has a tough stance on terrorism Well, I think it has more to do with the "cult of Menino personality" than anything to do with Terrorism. Menino is a fascinating avatar of the Massachusetts political frictions in riptide.
Well, not to reductio ad absurdium, but:
"This guy wasn't shooting someone as any kind of murder; it was an advertising campaign for the gun industry. He should receive the same fine as anyone else who handed out paper advertisements...
> > First for getting paid to do the stunt.
> Getting paid was smart.
What, $200? Did you work out the hourly on that? They'd have been been better off, and more legally defensible, to do it gratis.
> > Second for placing the shit on highway supports. I don't care how harmless it looks,
> In this post 9/11 world doing anything that scares the paranoid can be considered a crime.
I am sorry you consider an viewing an unidentified box affixed to a highway support as "paranoid." I don't think it is, really, and I don't think it's a post-9/11 viewpoint. I was rather more abhorred by the Boston jogger who said she'd run into one of the boxes while jogging and kicked it to see what it'd do. I'm sure that some of the pipe bombs that my brother played with as a kid would've made that quite the jolly go!
Look, this is a first-world country. It is so because, for the most part, the shit that's supposed to work, works. The roads work, the airlines work, the trains run, and interruptions to them are transient and not caused by foolish shit like farmers running their cows across the tracks, streakers from the local college dashing across the runway or pranksters placing queer stuff on highway supports. It isn't so because of the tight security - I think you and I agree that "the more you tighten your grip, the more starsystems will slip through your fingers." It's because most of our citizens are raised to behave responsibly and to not go screwing things up. Compare this to, say, Mexico, where the half-built shacks neighbor the streets of T-shirt shops guarded by M16-wielding militia.
My point? We depend on infrastructure, so don't screw with it. Even if you think it's harmless. (That alone doesn't make one an asshole, but it helps).
> > Thirdly for acting like complete and utter unrepentent assholes throughout the whole affiar.
> Are you talking about the officials in Boston and people like yourself who call a litebrite box a "hoax" bomb?
Ah! Gasp! Et tu, emilng?
Neither, obviously. The officials did what they had to. If a T commuter sees a control box they never noticed before and mentions it to the MBTA police, and they don't recognize it, it's correct to run it up the line and check. If no one can identify it, it's correct to treat it as suspicious until proven otherwise. Now, if it was night, and it actually had a glowing cartoon character on it, that would be harder to defend, but during the day when it is anonymous? And why exactly was it so hard to identify these boxes without dark? There wasn't a single URL, company name, or other piece of identification on it? Stealth marketing doesn't need to be quite that stealthy.
Now, many have called me an asshole, most have been right, but not you, I suspect. I never called a "litebrite box" a "hoax bomb." Never said the defendants deserved what they got for hoaxing the city. No, they pranked the city, they did it in a way that common sense should have known to avoid, and anything they get they'll have earned through their application of vibrissal vociferation.
> > Fourthly, they're still facing charges and going to take a hit, and it's their own damn fault.
> If I swing my arms like this and you happen to get in my way then it's your fault if you get hit.
If you aim to convince me I'm not arguing with a fourth-grader, you are not going about it in a convincing manner.
Let me rephrase it for you, perhaps this will help: "You know, the funny thing is, if they'd acted contrite at their arraignment they'd probably be off the hook the second this settlement went through."
> > Yes, I'm from Boston. No, the traffic didn't affect me. Doesn't make them any less assholes than they've acted like so far.
> I'm from New York City and saw the WTC fall with my own eyes. Doesn't mean I'm going to jump at every single shadow I see.
Again, you misread me.
I didn't say, "Doesn't make this bomb hoax less of a scare," I
Tresspassing. Illegal? Check.
Affixing things to government property (even worse, DOT infrastructure). Illegal? Check.
Affixing things to (other people's) private property. Illegal? Check.
All these things done as part of a prank likely to be prosecuted with vigor? Not necessarily.
All these things done as part of a prank likely to be prosecuted with vigor if you go out of your way to thumb your nose at society, at the cops, at the judges, and generally act like an asshole who got out of high school a decade ago but never grew out of it? Likely, and let's hope so.
We know they did illegal things. We also know they acted like assholes. What we're discussing is whether they're going to be tried with any real vigor or not, and I think the answer to that is yes, exactly because they acted like assholes.
Mary Dyer was not popular, so when it came time to try her, they shifted her court appearance... over to Cambridge, which was an 8-mile trek, in the driving snow, on horses, with almost no notice to her. Do you think that was fair to her, or perhaps biased on the part of the court? If you treat the authorities like assholes, they'll rip you a new one. In her case, after she was banished to Rhode Island and she came back despite that, they just hung her. Eventually they decided that treating her like that because she was an asshole wasn't really defensible, and they put a statue of her next to the state house, but that was long after the rope went around her neck.
Which makes them quadruply stupid.
First for getting paid to do the stunt.
Second for placing the shit on highway supports. I don't care how harmless it looks, if it's a box and you lash it to one of those green steel beams, it's an issue here.
Thirdly for acting like complete and utter unrepentent assholes throughout the whole affiar.
Which is why:
Fourthly, they're still facing charges and going to take a hit, and it's their own damn fault.
Yes, I'm from Boston. No, the traffic didn't affect me. Doesn't make them any less assholes than they've acted like so far.
Yeah, but...
Read the article carefully. The ISP has the right to read the email, and pass it along to law enforcement.
USC 18, 2511(2)(a)(i):
Translation: If dork-o sends three billion copies of his spam through your ISP, he is going to impact your service. You are then justified, as a system administrator, to view those messages as investigation in the course of "protection of the rights or propterty of the provider of that service" - it is one of the exceptions under which wiretap is allowed. Once you've added up enough costs to interest the appropriate government resource,you call them in, provide them with the information that they couldn't get without a warrant - but you could! - and they're off to the races.
It would be nice, but unfortunately, that runs counter to the time-tested design of essentially every Mail Transfer Agent out there.
Any decent MTA will carefully ensure that the incoming mail message is written out, then signal acceptance of the message, marking that it is now solely responsible for delivery. If spam analysis engines are placed in between those two steps, then it introduces a soft real-time bottleneck and performance impact; it becomes straightforward to perform an email Denial-of-Service by thrashing the spam engine with a number of messages so the MTA can't accept more connections.
To be safe and efficient, then, MTAs will accept the message and drop the connection before performing any costly processing. Once they've done that, there's no way to reject the spam, it can only be dropped or bounced.
There's some discussion of this in the Postfix Content Inspection README. To wit:
There's also a site called Don't Date Him Girl which apparently is a database of cheating men. It seems to me that these services would be subject to the same sort of privacy laws that appear to have been broken by this guy.
Or perhaps they'd be able to argue that there is no willful intent to do harm with the databases, while the callous outing this guy did clearly falls into willful intent territory.
You aren't married, are you?
I can't find it now, but there was an article on /. a while back about a girl who dumped her boyfriend after loading Firefox onto her machine and it picked up the password database from his previous installation, which he had deleted to hide his dating site trolling. IIRC, the kicker was that the password database recorded that he didn't want to save a password for those sites, which kind of revealed exactly what he wanted hidden.
Anyways, my point is, something like this is aimed at home/family users with a shared PC environment (read: hubby surfs porn after wifey logs out of her blog-surfing for the night). That isn't to say many stupid people will try to avoid der IT ubermenschen with it, but they'll get what they deserve.
Don't be silly - the Welsh were British long before the English showed up and ruined things.
Effectively - no.
Based on the small sample of myself doing local research, town recycling programs won't take them, and the nice URL they give you on the box sends you to a database of, effectively, commercial recycling organizations which might talk to you if you're a decent sized company but aren't oriented toward consumer users.
Now, that's clearly not statistically valid. I'm very open to counterexamples and being proven wrong. But I think you'll find that in general there is no convenient recycling, and if recycling isn't convenient, no one does it anyway.
I'd give you 99% odds of being right.
Some percent of that is due, of course, to the publicity and the elevated 'alert levels'. Don't you think that, if all there was on the TV was smiling police patting each other on the back and over-confident newscasters explaining that the threat level has been lowered, the aggressors would be more likely to try something?
The rest of your 99%, of course, is a blind gamble that the aggressors are incapacitated or will back off. You may be willing to gamble with people's lives - anonymously, of course. I'm not, even pseudo-anonymously. Those who get elected or appointed based on their ability to protect the public certainly aren't, nor should they be - they'd be remiss in their duties if they gambled with people's lives.
Raising the alert level makes good tactical sense. Perhaps you have not thought it out fully.
Let's look at it from the aggressor point of view. They have a plan. This plan includes things like social engineering materials into position, explosives, detonation systems, and other details which have been painstakingly worked out. They have stockpiles of equipment which can be used in an attack. They are merrily moving along toward H-Hour.
Then, along comes Scotland Yard. In one fell swoop, they arrest some percent - let us say, for the sake of argument, 80% - of the people with enough knowledge of the plan and the materials to make the attack happen. They also capture 80% of the materials storage sites.
What is the next thing Scotland Yard will do?
They will perform forensic analysis on the materials and on any computers or plans left lying about. They will reconstruct the plan and the tools to be used in enough detail that detailed information and alerts can be formulated and handed out to sister agencies and airlines. They will gather the information required to track down the remaining 20% of the aggressor forces and materials. They will, in effect, provide the information required to precisely and correctly (if such a thing is possible) set the alert level.
This will take time. The forensic analysts on the computers may need to break encryption. The forensic analysts for the explosives won't be cutting any corners to save time, for the obvious reasons. From the aggressors point of view, there is a narrow window of opportunity - let us say, 24-48 hours - in which it is unlikely law enforcement will know enough details to be there waiting for you.
If you were the aggressor, what would you do in this case? Sit and wait for Scotland Yard to connect your name to the plot and come arrest you, or try to mount what small corner of the attack you can given the remaining available resources?
If you were the defender, what would you expect the aggressor to do? To sit and wait to be arrested? To panic (or not) and try to run? Or to attempt a very probably suicidal attack? Bear in mind that the aggressor profile matters - the IRA is not known for suicide missions, but Islamic terrorism is.
In short, the arrests are a stroke. The appropriate next step for the defender is to expect a counterstroke. Unfortunately, the counterstroke is both most likely and most dangerous right away, when the defender has the least information with which to fine-tune their defensive measures (read, "alert level"). Therefore the appropriate reaction is to raise your defenses, erring on the side of caution even if it means seeming to over-raise the alert level. Even if it gets you criticised by the crucial Slashdot block 8).
Seems to me this 'post' puts the hay before the cart. If you are able to run unsigned software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just run malicious software. Heck you could replace the whole OS, which bypasses part of the purpose of requiring signed code. The point of signed code is to prevent known persons from being able to (intentionally or unintentionally) run malicious software in the first place.
True, but abandoning a nuclear-armed state to the point where it feels cornered by its neighbors isn't really solving problems, it's setting them up. It is in everyone's best interests that Israel maintain non-nuclear technical superiority over its neighbors, which they might not be able to do without US support, because the alternative is worse.
We realized that. We took measures. We've begun shifting the political climate so that we can safely remove US troops from Saudi Arabia without worrying about them being overrun by the megalomaniacal dictator to their north.
Wait, I thought you wanted to solve the "infidel in the muslim holy land" problem? We can't get out of Saudi Arabia until Iraq is stable enough not to destabilize Saudi Arabia.
If you're suggesting we'll have "peace in our time," I think you need to check more of your history. Washing our hands of the mess in the Middle East won't make it go away. We might concievably buy a few years of relative quiet while they have their own little bloodbath over there, but as soon as the nuts come out on top - and they will, without our involvement - they'll cast around looking for some Great Satan to use as an enemy to keep their people together, and we're still the best candidate.
In Boston this has been a noticeable problem over the last couple of winters. I don't recall any pedestrians, but several dogs.
Do you mind answering a few questions?
How about having cells ablated? That's actually what happens with PRK. They burn away cells with a laser, it's not like having sandpaper taken to your eyeballs. More like having some instant peeling from a bad sunburn, but without the pain.
It doesn't sound very appealing. But the actual discomfort involved is rather minimal. Something like 4 minutes in the room on an uncomfortable table with your eyelid tacked open and stuff being dripped into it while a laser thunks away. In and out of the room in 10-15 minutes if you include prep and setup time. A few headaches as you heal. Dry eyes for a bit.
And in return, freedom from glasses. No more fumbling for them to read the clock. No more juggling two pairs when it's sunny enough to require sunglasses. No more noticing one morning that they're covered with dust and that's why everything has looked washed out for the last week. No more wondering what the hell that was in the locker room, or who that is across the pool.
I had PRK and now have 20/20 or better now and love it. It's a huge quality of life issue. Don't reject it out of hand.
Wait, friend, be smart about this.
Buy the hammer from Amazon.
I'm sorry your admins don't know how to administer it.
I might go even further and pontificate upon the idiocy of attempting to lock developer's systems down, but I'd hate to cause you to vent any more of your spleen.
Cisco Security Agent is a close analog to the sort of comprehensive kernel security hooking that something like LIDS does on Linux. If you can do some research to determine how they're doing it, that'll be a start. They hook all sorts of things, from file and network opens to attempts to sniff keystrokes and executing dynamically modified memory.