As others have said, even when they are legally in the wrong border security agents can still ruin your day or your entire trip—they can easily make you miss your domestic connecting flight. They can also keep your equipment for years—as they are doing in this very case. The simplest strategy is to not have any kind of valuable data on your electronic devices when you cross the border. You can send all of your data via the internet. Don't carry it on your person where you have to suffer harassment to protect it.
Your devices should look completely normal while containing no personal information about you. You should be able to hand them over to a border security agent and give a working password that has no relation to your usual one. When they log in, they should see a device with no personal information of any kind. No photos, no incoming text messages, no emails, no documents, no web browser history, etc.
A few people have suggested a dummy password that logs into a restricted access dummy account. That's risky. If they take your phone or laptop into another room for an hour they may discover that it has inaccessible data on it and the usual harassment will ensue. Setting your phone to wipe itself after three failed password attempts may work, but only if they can log in with the correct password after it’s been wiped and see what looks like a normal, working phone.
You have to do it every time, but wiping and preparing your devices before crossing the border is the most effective solution.
On a side note, my phone is a bit of a problem. So long as the SIM is in it, it will receive any incoming calls or text messages. I can wipe those just before I go through customs, but the agents can read anything that comes in while they have the phone. I could hide the SIM somewhere in my luggage, but then I'd have a suspicious phone and they might find the SIM and get angry. I guess the best strategy is to leave your SIM at home and buy a temporary phone plan and SIM at your destination.
I highly doubt all of the people currently holding the job title of Software Engineer here in Canada took an accredited engineering program though. The term Engineer is protected, but I don't know how well.
As for the US, I'm guessing it's not a protected term. They make a complete mockery of it.
This is a case of non-democracy - an executive decision by the PM.
In essence, the way you describe it is true, but it's not that simple. This is not something the Prime Minister of Canada has the direct authority to change. He is adding it to the upcoming budget, which is a piece of legislation that must receive a majority vote in parliament to pass. His decision can make this happen because his party currently holds a majority of the seats in parliament and they vote however he orders them to so long it's not something contentious enough to cause a revolt.
That was my guess. As soon as I read the problem I thought of the bug in the patriot missle software that the US ran into during the first Gulf war back in 1991.
In that case it was even worse. From the page I linked:
They told the Army that the Patriots suffered a 20% targeting inaccuracy after continuous operation for 8 hours.
More than that, Google is buying Twitch.tv. Adding these new features matches both Twitch.tv's video quality and viewer donation feature. This makes perfect sense if they are planning to buy them and partner more closely.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistake again by trying to link all Twitch.tv users to a Google+ account and generally break things.
Here in Canada we have a strategy that works. For tobacco, which is clearly proven to cause a range of costly health problems, we levy a tax that the government uses to cover the extra public healthcare costs that come from smoking. All Canadians get the same public funded healthcare. The ones who are doing something that clearly puts a larger burden on the system pay for it.
Someone mentioned it above. There is software called Windows Steadystate that keeps the base file system unwritable to regular users and instead lets them write changes to a journaled file system that can be selectively restored from the base.
It would be nice if the existing big studios were intelligent and competitive enough to eventually catch up with technology, but if even the piracy they rave and lobby the government over won't push them forward, they may never join the rest of us.
The future lies in content producers who already sell their work mainly online. It woudn't surprise me to see vhfx.tv releasing an app like Netflix, or adding their library to any number of other convenient online media stores. They get it. Digital distribution is better for them and their customers.
The existing large media companies will only follow suit long after we have all abandoned them for the ones who do things sensibly. However, that will never happen unless we stop giving them our money and start giving it to people who use services like vhfx.tv
An animator for the TV show Archer popped into Reddit's Linux section to point out an in-joke he'd placed in some code on an extra monitor in a scene. He says he's added many more gags like this.
There is no new TLD in that domain name. It's actually available. Register thatnoonewillevervisit.com and setup the obscurespecializeddomain.dreamedupbymarketingidiots subdomain for it.
Many organizations will be caught off guard by this and have their names grabbed under the new TLDs. On the bright side, this will temporarily give us a chance to grab decent names instead of paying a squatter. It also drops the value of their holdings.
Aside from that, looking at the list, I think some of these should have also had abbreviations..software,.engineer and.attorney look nice, but I would immediately want a shortened version as well.
According to Wikipedia, Tim Berners Lee mostly agrees with you on the URL format. From the Wikipedia page:
Berners-Lee later regretted the use of dots to separate the parts of the domain name within URIs, wishing he had used slashes throughout. For example, http://www.example.com/path/to/name would have been written http:com/example/www/path/to/name. Berners-Lee has also said that, given the colon following the URI scheme, the two slashes before the domain name were also unnecessary.
“retard” is a good word for this. For a server hosted inside the US, it makes things much more expensive (but not nearly impossible) for the NSA.
From the article you linked:
...there are other actions powerful adversaries could take. For example, they could convince the server operator to simply record all session keys.
So, the NSA cannot quickly pick out your server's traffic at their traffic hub monitors and decrypt it with the root SSL certificates they coerced vendors to give them.
What they can still do, if your server is in the US, is coerce the server operator to record all session keys so they can decrypt all traffic from that point onwards. This is much more expensive though.
The nice part about this is that a server hosted outside the US would only have to worry about less-powerful, less-funded government spies going through all of this. In Japan, the government may not do it at all unless your server's activity warrants a criminal investigation.
If you watch your server access logs, you will regularly see bots checking for common install URLs of popular website software. I'm blown away that vBulletin's hasn't been targeted for years.
There is a new product in pre-production the does exactly what you described. It's nutrition shake, not a solid food though. They should be shipping regular orders by sometime this fall.
For something closer to what you described, and more relevant to this post, NASA is funding research on a complete daily nutrition solid that may use an insect source for protein. This may be licensed as a commercial product sometime in the future.
In fact, we had it right here on Slashdot the day Gmail was announced. We panicked about Google reading our email. Then, if you follow to the bottom of that thread you will see the same conclusion we reached here today. No one is reading your email. An algorithm is parsing it the same way all spam filters do.
The people behind this new campaign at Microsoft either don't remember all of this, or they're smart enough to see that it's been long enough to sound like a new issue. Let's not treat it as one. This issue should not be news to anyone reading this site. The only news here is that Microsoft is trying to use this misunderstanding again, ie. that a person is reading your mail, not an algorithm.
I use a password manager to solve this problem. It stores all (or a large set of) my passwords in an encrypted database. I have one very strong password that lets me access the database. The passwords it stores are all strong (sometimes hard to remember) passwords that I do not have to store in my head.
I still have all of my eggs in one basket, but that basket is sealed in a solid iron box.
Slashdot Mirror
As others have said, even when they are legally in the wrong border security agents can still ruin your day or your entire trip—they can easily make you miss your domestic connecting flight. They can also keep your equipment for years—as they are doing in this very case. The simplest strategy is to not have any kind of valuable data on your electronic devices when you cross the border. You can send all of your data via the internet. Don't carry it on your person where you have to suffer harassment to protect it.
Your devices should look completely normal while containing no personal information about you. You should be able to hand them over to a border security agent and give a working password that has no relation to your usual one. When they log in, they should see a device with no personal information of any kind. No photos, no incoming text messages, no emails, no documents, no web browser history, etc.
A few people have suggested a dummy password that logs into a restricted access dummy account. That's risky. If they take your phone or laptop into another room for an hour they may discover that it has inaccessible data on it and the usual harassment will ensue. Setting your phone to wipe itself after three failed password attempts may work, but only if they can log in with the correct password after it’s been wiped and see what looks like a normal, working phone.
You have to do it every time, but wiping and preparing your devices before crossing the border is the most effective solution.
On a side note, my phone is a bit of a problem. So long as the SIM is in it, it will receive any incoming calls or text messages. I can wipe those just before I go through customs, but the agents can read anything that comes in while they have the phone. I could hide the SIM somewhere in my luggage, but then I'd have a suspicious phone and they might find the SIM and get angry. I guess the best strategy is to leave your SIM at home and buy a temporary phone plan and SIM at your destination.
The University of Waterloo has a Software Engineering program.
I highly doubt all of the people currently holding the job title of Software Engineer here in Canada took an accredited engineering program though. The term Engineer is protected, but I don't know how well.
As for the US, I'm guessing it's not a protected term. They make a complete mockery of it.
In essence, the way you describe it is true, but it's not that simple. This is not something the Prime Minister of Canada has the direct authority to change. He is adding it to the upcoming budget, which is a piece of legislation that must receive a majority vote in parliament to pass. His decision can make this happen because his party currently holds a majority of the seats in parliament and they vote however he orders them to so long it's not something contentious enough to cause a revolt.
That was my guess. As soon as I read the problem I thought of the bug in the patriot missle software that the US ran into during the first Gulf war back in 1991.
In that case it was even worse. From the page I linked:
More than that, Google is buying Twitch.tv. Adding these new features matches both Twitch.tv's video quality and viewer donation feature. This makes perfect sense if they are planning to buy them and partner more closely.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistake again by trying to link all Twitch.tv users to a Google+ account and generally break things.
Here in Canada we have a strategy that works. For tobacco, which is clearly proven to cause a range of costly health problems, we levy a tax that the government uses to cover the extra public healthcare costs that come from smoking. All Canadians get the same public funded healthcare. The ones who are doing something that clearly puts a larger burden on the system pay for it.
Someone mentioned it above. There is software called Windows Steadystate that keeps the base file system unwritable to regular users and instead lets them write changes to a journaled file system that can be selectively restored from the base.
It would be nice if the existing big studios were intelligent and competitive enough to eventually catch up with technology, but if even the piracy they rave and lobby the government over won't push them forward, they may never join the rest of us.
The future lies in content producers who already sell their work mainly online. It woudn't surprise me to see vhfx.tv releasing an app like Netflix, or adding their library to any number of other convenient online media stores. They get it. Digital distribution is better for them and their customers.
The existing large media companies will only follow suit long after we have all abandoned them for the ones who do things sensibly. However, that will never happen unless we stop giving them our money and start giving it to people who use services like vhfx.tv
An animator for the TV show Archer popped into Reddit's Linux section to point out an in-joke he'd placed in some code on an extra monitor in a scene. He says he's added many more gags like this.
There is no new TLD in that domain name. It's actually available. Register thatnoonewillevervisit.com and setup the obscurespecializeddomain.dreamedupbymarketingidiots subdomain for it.
Domain Squatters, start your engines.
Many organizations will be caught off guard by this and have their names grabbed under the new TLDs. On the bright side, this will temporarily give us a chance to grab decent names instead of paying a squatter. It also drops the value of their holdings.
Aside from that, looking at the list, I think some of these should have also had abbreviations. .software, .engineer and .attorney look nice, but I would immediately want a shortened version as well.
“retard” is a good word for this. For a server hosted inside the US, it makes things much more expensive (but not nearly impossible) for the NSA.
From the article you linked:
So, the NSA cannot quickly pick out your server's traffic at their traffic hub monitors and decrypt it with the root SSL certificates they coerced vendors to give them.
What they can still do, if your server is in the US, is coerce the server operator to record all session keys so they can decrypt all traffic from that point onwards. This is much more expensive though.
The nice part about this is that a server hosted outside the US would only have to worry about less-powerful, less-funded government spies going through all of this. In Japan, the government may not do it at all unless your server's activity warrants a criminal investigation.
If you watch your server access logs, you will regularly see bots checking for common install URLs of popular website software. I'm blown away that vBulletin's hasn't been targeted for years.
They had better cover Peter's Evil Overlord List or your career is as doomed as all that came before it.
— Steve Jobs in Robert X. Cringley’s “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview”
There is a new product in pre-production the does exactly what you described. It's nutrition shake, not a solid food though. They should be shipping regular orders by sometime this fall.
For something closer to what you described, and more relevant to this post, NASA is funding research on a complete daily nutrition solid that may use an insect source for protein. This may be licensed as a commercial product sometime in the future.
Based on another article I read, it only works in the Safari browser.
When I used to ride regularly, I had a rear-view mirror that attached to the end of my left handlebar.
It's not so surprising when you look at his username.
That also explains how he grabbed such a low user ID number.
Done. Emacs is now supreme.
I noticed that too. They should have ported PrBoom to the browser.
I am not a French Lawyer, but I think that would be coercion.
In fact, we had it right here on Slashdot the day Gmail was announced. We panicked about Google reading our email. Then, if you follow to the bottom of that thread you will see the same conclusion we reached here today. No one is reading your email. An algorithm is parsing it the same way all spam filters do.
That was 2004. We probably moved on after that, but about 4 years later Steve Ballmer himself started to use this misunderstanding to generate fear, uncertainty and doubt. A year after that, Google was sued over it.
The people behind this new campaign at Microsoft either don't remember all of this, or they're smart enough to see that it's been long enough to sound like a new issue. Let's not treat it as one. This issue should not be news to anyone reading this site. The only news here is that Microsoft is trying to use this misunderstanding again, ie. that a person is reading your mail, not an algorithm.
I use a password manager to solve this problem. It stores all (or a large set of) my passwords in an encrypted database. I have one very strong password that lets me access the database. The passwords it stores are all strong (sometimes hard to remember) passwords that I do not have to store in my head.
I still have all of my eggs in one basket, but that basket is sealed in a solid iron box.