but really, there wasn't much information on the Web that was useful for non-scientists back then
Actually, that's only partly true. Project Gutenberg had a head-start (I think from 1971) on the internet. That and lots of other material was available via UUCP and various BBS sites.
I really miss the 70s when college essays were hand written...
They were, but that didn't prevent some asshole from nicking my ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 11x14 inch fanfold that I had on the wall of my machine-room in 1976...
When I'm firing up a new system that has only just been connected to the internet, often to download graphics drivers, my first choice of browser is always lynx or links. IE of any version has never been an option.
That's true, but if you are using a credit card there is no pin.
Ah. Difference of implementation here, methinks. In Australia, a typical option with Visa/Mastercard transactions is "PIN or Sign". Always one or the other, and never neither. It's not an ideal system by any stretch, but it is usually sufficient authentication to resolve disputes.
Oracle has a lot less motivation to keep ZFS away from Linux than Sun did.
Hmmm. The guys at Oracle might be very nice people, but do you see them having a sufficiently wide streak of altruism to change their CDDL licence for ZFS to GPL? I wish I did.
Linux only gained traction because Sun gave x86 no respect.
I think Linux would have gained traction regardless. Sun has always had its diehards, often for very good reasons, but there are some serious players working with Linux (e.g. IBM and Cray, to name just two off the top of my head) who have seen enough value in that architecture to pursue it.
On the contrary... if you want zfs, and stability under load, there's nothing wrong with it.
I wouldn't disagree, but there are usually alternatives. I would personally never make a choice of OS on the availability of zfs (though I have no doubt the filesystem is quite nice). And stability under load can be had with any Linux or BSD with an appropriate configuration. So yes, there's nothing wrong with OpenSolaris, but then there's nothing so right with it that we can't afford to do without it.
I know there's a resistance among the various *Solaris/SunOS communities about the other UNIX variants, but it's time for these people to get over themselves. The world has moved on, and the alternatives are plenty mature enough to cope, and whining about them just makes these people look like craniorectal adolescents.
Funny that. I think our forefathers did just that i.e. they (unknowingly?) created backups when knowledge was written by hand...
Certainly not unknowingly. Many, if not most literate monks would have been perfectly aware of the fate of the Library of Alexandria. There is also evidence that there were also scribes who were not really literate in any language, but who were capable of reproducing a text without fully comprehending it. The only possible reason to do this would be to create a backup copy.
But in any case, it is worth mentioning that copying texts by hand has also been done in recent times in the form of Samizdat literature, a means of publication not uncommon even in the 1980s.
These devices don't rely on a camera, they recorded the PIN as it was punched in.
TFA says "The devices typically include a scanner, transmitter, camera, and, most recently, Bluetooth- or wireless-enabled links that shoot the stolen data back to the bad guys."
I can't see why they would need a camera if not to record a PIN being entered.
"personal crap" could be just as interesting and as important to future researchers.
Indeed it is. My great-grandmother was left living in the Channel Islands throughout the German occupation during WWII. Over those years she kept a series of diaries, handwritten with a fountain-pen on paper that is now disintegrating.
My mother has since transcribed those diaries, so although they are not yet available online (my mum is for some perverse reason opposed to that), they are at least preserved for posterity.
I have code and documents dating back to 1976 on a HDD on this machine. Until 15 years ago I had it all stored on 800BPI mag tapes, but before I left my last serious "big-iron mainframe" site I transferred it across to floppies. I doubt if I'll ever need the files again, but since they don't make any significant dent in my storage, there's no reason to throw them away.
I know many historians (in fact my wife is one), and one day someone might be more interested in a perspective on '70s and '80s programming than I am right now. If I throw it out, that information will be gone forever.
A reflective on one side, perfectly round disc? Looking at it under a microscope would no doubt show the presence of the "peaks and valleys" of digital data, and I think it would shortly fall into place.
I would have thought it more likely that a DVD or CD would be assumed to be a cheap, shiny thing used to scare off crows. It would just be too time-consuming to reverse-engineer and build a DVD reader from scratch.
Not too long ago, I threw out some 8" floppies I found in a cupboard. Readers for these are now almost non-existent, even though they're only about 30 years old. And the 5.5" and 3.5" floppies will soon become equally obsolete.
The only way to keep information preserved other than maintaining vast archives of acid-free paper or stone tablets is to *actively* maintain all of it online on multiple servers which are backed up verifiably. That means it either has to be stored in a format that doesn't become obsolete (ASCII) or it has to be routinely re-archived in other formats as they become fashionable. I still have a number of files created by WordPerfect 4.x which are (presumably) still readable by OpenOffice/NeoOffice, so I haven't worried about them, but that's not something I would count on forever. Sooner or later, if I want to preserve the content, I'm going to have to take the time to convert them to something more current.
IIRC a scammer replaced the reader on a supermarket checkout at one point and skimmed a lot of cards.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, there have been lots of cases where skimmers have been installed at fake food joints like McDonalds or Hungry Jack's.
Seriously... bikes work, even in the snow. 53 miles per burrito, baby!
OK guys, the bike suggestion has been mentioned already. Enough. It's fine, but doesn't help much if your card gets skimmed while you're buying a burrito to fuel it.
The fact that you can skim debit cards at the gas pump without spilling gas on yourself is a great technological improvement
Fortunately for the rest of us, it is usually reasonably easy to foil this kind of scam by making sure your hand is well covered as you key in your PIN, since most of these scams rely on a camera to record your PIN. Though I guess it should in some cases be possible to put in a fake keyboard with a keylogger.
There has been a rash of these operations with ATMs around where I live, and it's occasionally possible to spot the "bad guys" sitting in a car nearby with a laptop.
It's getting quite hard (even impossible in some cases) to distinguish dodgy machines from the OK ones. My suggestion is for all ATMs and EFT machines to be sealed with some kind of nationally or internationally agreed tamper-evident seal which can only be broken or replaced by the manufacturer or official service agent. Surely that can't be too hard.
Why? URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The whole point of it is to locate content. The fact that no-one has stood on the roof of the NSW parliament building yelling "Go to this address!" through a bullhorn doesn't mean it's "secret".
It certainly isn't secret if it is resolved through a standard DNS query. And since when is querying a DNS "morally suspect"?
Linux users are only better because that OS is so damn fucking hard to use, you HAVE to be computer savvy just to get the shit to work (not that you can actually do anything useful with it as a desktop OS once its running though).
I've been using Linux on the desktop for about 15 years or more, and I have a MacBook laptop. Linux is no harder to use than OS X. The only difference is that some of the buttons are in different places. If anything, I sometimes find it more frustrating to work with Windows machines, where for one reason or another settings that I made earlier somehow become "forgotten" and I have to go through the rigmarole of putting them back in place and trying to make them stick.
must be 4 digits and 4 letters, no vowels and no consecutive/repeated digits...
...which in itself is probably not so good, since they're limiting the number of characters you can use, and thus the number of potential combinations.
Everybody would be much better off if the bank would allow you to construct a single really good password of some decent length and keep using it for as long as nobody else knows it than forcing you to attempt to memorise a shorter, weaker password every month. This latter has a tendency to cause password overload, which puts users in a situation where they have to write the token down somewhere, which is an instant hole in security.
I'm not saying that the other tokens you mention aren't good, it just seems to me that too many organisations force users to use unecessarily dumb passwords.
This. Nevermind that Vista's added "security features" were poorly implemented...
What is it with all these posts prefaced with "This."? Is it some stupid internet meme? Either way, it is completely redundant and pointless. Stop it and write English like a human being.
Slashdot Mirror
but really, there wasn't much information on the Web that was useful for non-scientists back then
Actually, that's only partly true. Project Gutenberg had a head-start (I think from 1971) on the internet. That and lots of other material was available via UUCP and various BBS sites.
I really miss the 70s when college essays were hand written...
They were, but that didn't prevent some asshole from nicking my ASCII rendering of the Mona Lisa on 11x14 inch fanfold that I had on the wall of my machine-room in 1976...
If anyone actually funded its development to the tune of a billion dollars, it would be considered a catastrophic failure...
Yeah, right. If Linux is so inadequate that IBM and Cray should be interested in using it, then everybody else should shun it too.
Mozilla may be the first to tell you to upgrade to a current version.
Nobody would even notice. Does ANYBODY actually use Bing?
When I'm firing up a new system that has only just been connected to the internet, often to download graphics drivers, my first choice of browser is always lynx or links. IE of any version has never been an option.
That's true, but if you are using a credit card there is no pin.
Ah. Difference of implementation here, methinks. In Australia, a typical option with Visa/Mastercard transactions is "PIN or Sign". Always one or the other, and never neither. It's not an ideal system by any stretch, but it is usually sufficient authentication to resolve disputes.
Oracle has a lot less motivation to keep ZFS away from Linux than Sun did.
Hmmm. The guys at Oracle might be very nice people, but do you see them having a sufficiently wide streak of altruism to change their CDDL licence for ZFS to GPL? I wish I did.
Linux only gained traction because Sun gave x86 no respect.
I think Linux would have gained traction regardless. Sun has always had its diehards, often for very good reasons, but there are some serious players working with Linux (e.g. IBM and Cray, to name just two off the top of my head) who have seen enough value in that architecture to pursue it.
On the contrary... if you want zfs, and stability under load, there's nothing wrong with it.
I wouldn't disagree, but there are usually alternatives. I would personally never make a choice of OS on the availability of zfs (though I have no doubt the filesystem is quite nice). And stability under load can be had with any Linux or BSD with an appropriate configuration. So yes, there's nothing wrong with OpenSolaris, but then there's nothing so right with it that we can't afford to do without it.
I know there's a resistance among the various *Solaris/SunOS communities about the other UNIX variants, but it's time for these people to get over themselves. The world has moved on, and the alternatives are plenty mature enough to cope, and whining about them just makes these people look like craniorectal adolescents.
Funny that. I think our forefathers did just that i.e. they (unknowingly?) created backups when knowledge was written by hand...
Certainly not unknowingly. Many, if not most literate monks would have been perfectly aware of the fate of the Library of Alexandria. There is also evidence that there were also scribes who were not really literate in any language, but who were capable of reproducing a text without fully comprehending it. The only possible reason to do this would be to create a backup copy.
But in any case, it is worth mentioning that copying texts by hand has also been done in recent times in the form of Samizdat literature, a means of publication not uncommon even in the 1980s.
These devices don't rely on a camera, they recorded the PIN as it was punched in.
TFA says "The devices typically include a scanner, transmitter, camera, and, most recently, Bluetooth- or wireless-enabled links that shoot the stolen data back to the bad guys."
I can't see why they would need a camera if not to record a PIN being entered.
"personal crap" could be just as interesting and as important to future researchers.
Indeed it is. My great-grandmother was left living in the Channel Islands throughout the German occupation during WWII. Over those years she kept a series of diaries, handwritten with a fountain-pen on paper that is now disintegrating.
My mother has since transcribed those diaries, so although they are not yet available online (my mum is for some perverse reason opposed to that), they are at least preserved for posterity.
I have code and documents dating back to 1976 on a HDD on this machine. Until 15 years ago I had it all stored on 800BPI mag tapes, but before I left my last serious "big-iron mainframe" site I transferred it across to floppies. I doubt if I'll ever need the files again, but since they don't make any significant dent in my storage, there's no reason to throw them away.
I know many historians (in fact my wife is one), and one day someone might be more interested in a perspective on '70s and '80s programming than I am right now. If I throw it out, that information will be gone forever.
A reflective on one side, perfectly round disc? Looking at it under a microscope would no doubt show the presence of the "peaks and valleys" of digital data, and I think it would shortly fall into place.
I would have thought it more likely that a DVD or CD would be assumed to be a cheap, shiny thing used to scare off crows. It would just be too time-consuming to reverse-engineer and build a DVD reader from scratch.
Not too long ago, I threw out some 8" floppies I found in a cupboard. Readers for these are now almost non-existent, even though they're only about 30 years old. And the 5.5" and 3.5" floppies will soon become equally obsolete.
The only way to keep information preserved other than maintaining vast archives of acid-free paper or stone tablets is to *actively* maintain all of it online on multiple servers which are backed up verifiably. That means it either has to be stored in a format that doesn't become obsolete (ASCII) or it has to be routinely re-archived in other formats as they become fashionable. I still have a number of files created by WordPerfect 4.x which are (presumably) still readable by OpenOffice/NeoOffice, so I haven't worried about them, but that's not something I would count on forever. Sooner or later, if I want to preserve the content, I'm going to have to take the time to convert them to something more current.
IIRC a scammer replaced the reader on a supermarket checkout at one point and skimmed a lot of cards.
Here in Perth, Western Australia, there have been lots of cases where skimmers have been installed at fake food joints like McDonalds or Hungry Jack's.
Seriously... bikes work, even in the snow. 53 miles per burrito, baby!
OK guys, the bike suggestion has been mentioned already. Enough. It's fine, but doesn't help much if your card gets skimmed while you're buying a burrito to fuel it.
The fact that you can skim debit cards at the gas pump without spilling gas on yourself is a great technological improvement
Fortunately for the rest of us, it is usually reasonably easy to foil this kind of scam by making sure your hand is well covered as you key in your PIN, since most of these scams rely on a camera to record your PIN. Though I guess it should in some cases be possible to put in a fake keyboard with a keylogger.
There has been a rash of these operations with ATMs around where I live, and it's occasionally possible to spot the "bad guys" sitting in a car nearby with a laptop.
It's getting quite hard (even impossible in some cases) to distinguish dodgy machines from the OK ones. My suggestion is for all ATMs and EFT machines to be sealed with some kind of nationally or internationally agreed tamper-evident seal which can only be broken or replaced by the manufacturer or official service agent. Surely that can't be too hard.
If your server was left that wide open, you don't deserve any sympathy.
but now that their server has melted, at least nobody can "hack" it
No, these guys are so clueless, they probably just "solved" their little problem by pulling the power-plug.
It's legal, but morally suspect.
Why? URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The whole point of it is to locate content. The fact that no-one has stood on the roof of the NSW parliament building yelling "Go to this address!" through a bullhorn doesn't mean it's "secret".
It certainly isn't secret if it is resolved through a standard DNS query. And since when is querying a DNS "morally suspect"?
Linux users are only better because that OS is so damn fucking hard to use, you HAVE to be computer savvy just to get the shit to work (not that you can actually do anything useful with it as a desktop OS once its running though).
I've been using Linux on the desktop for about 15 years or more, and I have a MacBook laptop. Linux is no harder to use than OS X. The only difference is that some of the buttons are in different places. If anything, I sometimes find it more frustrating to work with Windows machines, where for one reason or another settings that I made earlier somehow become "forgotten" and I have to go through the rigmarole of putting them back in place and trying to make them stick.
must be 4 digits and 4 letters, no vowels and no consecutive/repeated digits...
...which in itself is probably not so good, since they're limiting the number of characters you can use, and thus the number of potential combinations.
Everybody would be much better off if the bank would allow you to construct a single really good password of some decent length and keep using it for as long as nobody else knows it than forcing you to attempt to memorise a shorter, weaker password every month. This latter has a tendency to cause password overload, which puts users in a situation where they have to write the token down somewhere, which is an instant hole in security.
I'm not saying that the other tokens you mention aren't good, it just seems to me that too many organisations force users to use unecessarily dumb passwords.
The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather?
Maybe they wanted to be back in time for tea.
Now that was actually funny. :-)
This. Nevermind that Vista's added "security features" were poorly implemented...
What is it with all these posts prefaced with "This."? Is it some stupid internet meme? Either way, it is completely redundant and pointless. Stop it and write English like a human being.