Worry over spying may cause people to take more interest in protecting their privacy, which may break Google's business model.
Boo hoo.
The problem isn't really with Google's business model.
It also is not limited to the US government.
Think back to various releases. News stories of the US government intercepting Cisco equipment shipments, installing back doors, and sealing them back in their original boxes with new factory seals. There are many news stories of logs with people communicating over supposedly secure connections and exchanging honeypot URLs, only to have the honeypot link hit several hours later by government-owned IP blocks or sometimes Microsoft or Apple IP blocks when using their 'secure' products.
As a result of those we set up honeypot links of our own, and I've seen reports that a percent of our site-to-site messages with honeypot links really are being visited by IP blocks from several nations. This is not just the US government, multiple governments and probably multiple big businesses have their spying tendrils inside businesses. We're looking for and slowly tightening down on potential leaks, either that or the assorted groups are slowly hitting our honeypots less and less. I used to think some of our security policies were draconian, but seeing how many probably-government groups are watching internal messages, I've become quite paranoid myself.
If someone cannot trust that their encrypted, supposedly secure communications are safe, they will stop using the products. When a government IP address hits a honeypot link shared over Apple's iMessage, does that mean Apple is a willing participant forwarding the messages while telling the public it is secured, or does that mean Apple is a victim too? Either way, iMessage is now one of many banned products in our workplace, sending any type of secure business information over it (or over Lync or Google's services or any but a short list of secure communications programs) has become a fire-able offense.
When the news broke on the Cisco equipment being intercepted this spring, their stock price plummeted and orders slowed. I know in my organization there were several major purchasing announcements, and they only buy HP equipment now (although I'm sure those are intercepted just as readily). Cisco went directly to the POTUS both publicly and privately to tell them to stop harming the company. I would not be surprised if their lawyers are nearly ready to file lawsuits for tortuous interference.
This is about far more than Google's business model. People cannot communicate within their own company infrastructure about business needs without some sort of government espionage or corporate spying. It is completely out of control.
It is very nearly eradicated globally. Good thing too.
The paralysis aspect is horrible. Those who got the disease didn't know if they would be hit by the paralysis. Those who were hit with the paralysis didn't know if it would become permanent.
Some people who had the paralysis hit lungs or heart and didn't make it to the hospital quickly enough were occasionally considered lucky. Some very unfortunate people were condemned to spend the rest of their lives on a ventilator. I knew several people (most are dead today) who had deformed faces, arms, and legs from the virus resulting in permanent paralysis. I knew several older folks with a gravely whispered voice as a result of the paralysis. I heard horror stories about people fighting in lines as the vaccine became available in the 1960s.
Last year the WHO declared a surge in polio as a world health emergency, it had jumped from below 200 globally known cases to over 400.
It is a horrible, destructive disease. The Gates Foundation has made enormous donations, $1.8B last year. This year the Larry Ellison foundation threw in another $100M. The disease is so incredibly close to global eradication, it just needs that one final little nudge to the finish line.
And those unfortunate enough not to be able to be vaccinated.
Not that much of an issue really in western europe or even europe.
So many responses are like "meh, polio, who cares."
The devastating effects of this virus are obviously forgotten by this generation. It results in paralysis that is fatal when it hits things like lungs and hearts, and results in sometimes temporary, sometimes life-long paralysis in many victims. I knew people who permanently lost their ability to talk, others with one paralyzed leg, others who lost an arm, others with distorted facial muscles and other ugly effects. In the early 1960s when it was released people lined up for the vaccine, they would lie, cheat, and steal to get the vaccine when supplies were still limited.
In you're case, you're basically discounting anyone under age 6? Polio is a 4-dose vaccination where the last dose usually isn't until age 4-6. Google says that is a half million people in Belgium. That's "not much of an issue"?
Anyone who has had a reaction to one of the components and cannot have the series, they also are irrelevant? It's probably a million or so of the population. Again, you're okay with them getting a permanently disabling disease?
The vaccines are not 100% effective, many people who were vaccinated according to schedule are still able to become sick. No idea what the percentage is, but anything other than 0 is too much. Are they really not that important?
What would you think if it was YOU or a loved one in the hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were paralyzed, hoping that the paralysis is temporary in your case.
Now, if we could limit the infections just to anti-vaxers (not the innocent children of anti-vaxers) that would be something else entirely. Anti-vax for chicken pox or milder diseases are not that bad, but anti-vax for polio and other seriously ravaging diseases is just stupid.
Polio is so close to global eradication. I applaud those like the Gates Foundation that are funding killing off the last few known wild cases.
As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.
Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.
On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.
For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements,
attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.
Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which
stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.
I don't know, we call just about everything a terrorist act these days. Anything high profile they try to announce that it WASN'T called a terrorist attack. Look at the Chicago airport issue last week, many news outlets lead with "In what is not a terrorist attack, a fire in an ATC building..." I've seen news reports that call simple street vandalism and muggings "domestic terrorism".
However, I completely agree with you. Holder's statement basically says personal devices should be inherently insecure, but it is okay for corporations to have a little bit of security. How many companies have BYOD policies? How many companies buy consumer parts?
Is he thinking the government can compel Apple to make "iPhone 7 Unencrypted Consumer Edition", and "iPhone 7 Corporate Secure Edition"? Or similarly force Android, with Google and LG and Samsung and others to split into an insecure consumer version and a more secure corporate version? I don't know, maybe they could. Of course, even the non-technical sheep could be taught to notice and push back.
My interpretation of the article: You can't teach height, but tall untrained basketball players can be beaten by shorter experts. To be the "world's best" you need both.
There is a difference between "expert" and "world's best".
When it comes to expert, guided practice and training is generally enough. Even if you are short I can still teach you to be an expert at basketball. Others can still teach you how to block, how to dribble, how to pass, how to shoot, how to referee, how to coach, and how to be an expert.
When it comes to world's best, sure, there is often a genetic component. Most people, no matter how much you train them, will never become the world's best. They can be expert and still judge and teach and work the field, being expert is not the same as being world's best. Similarly, some people, no matter how much they try to work with numbers, struggle to handle them intuitively. Given enough effort they can be taught all the way through college math and become experts, but that doesn't mean they'll become the world's expert on mathematics. Just because someone is tall doesn't make them a world-class basketball player, training is still needed. Just because someone has a pretty voice doesn't make them an automatic world's best vocalist, just because someone has a more intuitive grasp of spatial representations doesn't make them a world renown mathematician, training is still needed.
You can become expert with guided practice, even without much natural ability. To become world's best you need both guided practice AND a genetic predisposition.
If you buy today and the stock goes down, people like those in TFA will continue to say it was overpriced and you are a bad investor.
If you buy today and the stock keeps going up, then you become praised as an early adopter.
Unfortunately my crystal ball is broken so I cannot tell which direction the investment will go. I'm either making a bad investment or becoming an early adopter, only time will tell which.
You are right that they are operating outside their area, and they ought to be going after things inside their area.
But if they are going to go after infringement, let's have them start going after corporations that are engaged in wholesale copyright violations, not just individuals involved in it.
Sites like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and other clickbait sites that take images from the little guys, use the images in their clickbaiting business, and profit from the copyright infringement. Just take a moment to search for the assorted sites, " stolen images". Buzzfeed and HuffPo are currently fighting many such lawsuits, yet they continue to use random images found online without permission and without compensation to the photographers.
It would be nice if the City of London police started by black holing those sites, too.
So those medieval barber-surgeons were right, and blood-letting has health benefits after all?
Simply: Yes.
Regular donations help (causal relationship) with iron balance since you cannot donate if iron is low and it reduces your iron if it is high, can (causally) help slightly with weight loss as you lose a glob of body material without kidney filtering plus it works to replace it, is associated with (correlation) reduced risk of certain cancers, associated with (correlation) reduced risk of heart attacks, and is associated with (correlation) a slightly longer, higher-quality life. There are also short-term benefits for issues like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and other metabolic problems.
My firewall is whitelist-based. This means if a site uses stuff hosted off-site (jquery, googleapis) it probably isn't going to load. The net affect is that while I can browse such storefronts, I have to do work to buy from them. So I buy elsewhere. They might learn, eventually.
They won't notice or care. Why would they? You aren't doing anything to trip any kinds of alarms or alerts with them.
If you want them to do something, call their help desk and act like an incompetent computer user. "My kids set up this newfangled computer and I can't buy from you..." If enough people did that it might make a blip on their stats that "JavaScript All The Things!" menatlity will cost them in support calls and possibly lost business.
I'm gonna go build my own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers!
... I think the bar should be much higher..
Wait... old slashdot, blackjack, hookers, AND a bar designed for tall people? Shut up and take my money.
Okay.
On a more serious note, I'm one of many that would be willing to a pay a small amount for an ad-free Facebook experience. Remove the ads and the buzzfeeds, the link-spam, and remove everything with more than 10 'shares' or reposts. Show me only my actual friend updates and comments and photos. In fact, that was in the news last year. Social Fixer is good for a workaround, but the company could make people the customer instead of the product if they wanted.
I learned a fun one from a particularly annoying call.
Get them to repeat the messages. They rattle off the instructions, wait ten seconds, then ask them to repeat it. Alternatively, wait until they have rattled of the entire instruction, then slowly repeat the exact words from the beginning "first.. press.. the.. start.. button.. and.. type.. in.. "
Tell them you need to write it down first to make sure you do it correctly. Since you as the 'victim' don't want the infection to be worse you obviously should write it down to make sure you do it exactly right.
Naturally you can use the time for more productive things, like looking up ways to best take up the time of the scammer.
It is actually illegal. You can't deliberate engage in activities to make it more expensive or complex for law enforcement to search subpoenaed records. That's contempt of court.
Emphasis in your quote.
As gets mentioned every time this story appears on slashdot, this is a warrant not a subpoena. The two are different tools. Both are used to find things but one is clean and neat, the other broad and aggressive. As a parallel, a subpoena is a scalpel and a warrant is a chainsaw.
A subpoena says 'We know you have this specific information, provide it to us within a time frame'. They get subpoenas of this type all the time. There is no dispute a subpoena would get the document no matter where in the world Microsoft held it.
A warrant says 'We will search for and take anything even remotely related to this, search it ourselves on our own terms.' When they demanded dumps of servers and copies of databases they were told the servers were in another nation and were not subject to a US warrant.
As was discussed in the previous incarnations of this story, the warrants are rather broad demanding they turn over everything related to the email address and user in question even if it isn't related to a criminal investigation. They want it all, everything the user ever touched or potentially touched, everything sent to the user, everything related to the user. While government investigators can usually get that through a broad warrant, they cannot get that with a subpoena. A subpoena would give them the specific emails related to the crime under investigation, but it is quite likely they already have the specific documents they could ask for.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. We've all seen the recent stats on similar stories. Over half of all gamers are female. Less than 1/5 are under the age 18. The stereotypical teenage boy gamer is a small component of the "gamer" culture.
I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
So you don't think the government should step in if the big guys are abusing their monopoly? You don't think the voters in a municipality should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want the government to establish broadband services for their own use? I know it's a popular meme to presume that governments are nothing but incompetent but the reality is that sometimes the government is the best way to get something done. If the existing ISPs find it not worthwhile to serve a population I see no credible argument why the local government couldn't fill that role if the taxpayers want them to. Might not be economically ideal but sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
My region (the 2M people metro area) is going through municipal broadband fights. They started the fights back in 2002.
The group got an initial rollout in a few of the smaller cities, roughly 11,000 people got hooked up. Then the entrenched monopolies kicked in.
Some highlights:
* Lawsuits from both the incumbent megacorps on cable-based and phone-based Internet on the claim that it was unlawful and anti-competitive for a state agency to compete with an established business. The lawsuits took several years and cost millions. The judges and the appeals court found that government is allowed to provide services, similar to how they provide municipal trash services and still businesses compete; nothing prevents the cable and phone companies from competing if they want.
* Every year state legislators keep introducing new bills prohibiting government agencies from competing with existing businesses, or requiring that governments cannot provide information services to the public without high fees and those fees should go to education, or that any group providing Internet services have so many billions in assets to mitigate risk of disaster, and other variations. Invariably a little research shows the legislators get money from the phone and cable companies, and the company lobbyists vocally support them. The municipal fiber groups have needed to spend several million dollars to fight these as well.
* In a few cities installation was unexpectedly stopped again when some of the smaller cities discovered their own contracts with the megacorps demanded that they couldn't build their own systems until after a multi-year vetting process with the megacorps plus giving them another multi-year opportunity for megacorps to adjust prices and to improve their infrastructure. Basically the smaller city and town governments signed deals for their own cheap Internet that block municipal fiber within their limits for a decade or more. Since then the FCC and other groups have urged cities to be more careful in the contracts they sign.
* Incumbents even got the federal government to drop contracts. In one case they had a contract with the federal government for a $66M under the RUS. After the municipal system had invested and contracted based on that contract it was unexpectedly cancelled. Investigation showed the federal contract was cancelled because the federal RUS system was threatened by the megacorps. A chain of 'smoking gun' emails were discovered where Comcast and CenturyLink demanded the RUS cancel the contract or the two megacorps would act against it; a lawsuit on tortious interference is ongoing, but the cost will be several more million before any ruling will follow, in the mean time the municipal system is out the $66M plus all the interest they need to pay on the emergency loan they had to take out to avoid defaulting on the expenses.
* Because the megacorps have forced the municipal fiber system to spend hundreds of millions on lawsuits and illegally-broken contracts, and because the redirected money has resulted in higher interest rates and longer-term loans costing over $500M to date, they are leveraging it and constantly sponsoring print ads, billboards, and TV ads (on their own cable networks) making nonspecific claims about how the municipal fiber has collected so m
Looking over the USDOJ stats, it seems Rohypnol is a regional problem with relatively low use count. In many places it is listed as "the least accessible date-rape drug", in other regions it is a suspected factor in hundreds of rape cases. The numbers show it going from about 1000 suspected cases nationally in 1997 to it's modern level of being suspected use in 1.5% of rape cases, a few thousand cases per year. Consider: how many hundreds of thousands of dates where a drink is consumed are there every year? Millions of drinks? Hundreds of millions of drinks? On a per-drink basis the number of uses is a very small percentage. Since it is small as a percentage that suggests going after bigger percentages for the bigger reductions.
While any number bigger than 0 is a problem, as a statistic these two drugs are not used in a high percentage of rapes, and date rapes themselves are relatively rare. I'm not trying to trivialize it. As the parent post suggests, a very rare problem does not lend itself to a TSA-like drug test where millions of drinks are tested for something detectable only a few thousand times annually at a maximum. My rough estimate is around 100M drinks across the nation over the course of a year, roughly 3000 testable contaminated drinks, so 0.0003% of date drinks, or one in every 30,000. That's a lot of useless fingernail-dips.
I suppose if you do go that route, of the new products this one that continuously monitors your drink by the cup and straw changing color seems much better than nail polish you need to dip frequently. It is both passive and continuous. Someone could slip the drug in after you dunk your fingernail, but the sensor on the container or the straw is 'always on'.
If you only ever praise effort instead of achievement you will wind up with a generation of morons that think they're great just for trying even when they never get anything done.
Let's try again...
rewarding the effort and the completion of tasks rather than rewarding the natural state.
Trying to reward "being smart" is ineffectual at best. Similarly it is ineffectual to reward basketball players just for being tall, or reward a junior player simply for being young, or reward a senior player simply for being senior.
Rewarding effort and completion are effective at teaching students that those (rather than the grades or being first place) are important. If being first place is the only thing that matters then means are unimportant: break the opponent's equipment, or even put your opponent in the hospital, to reach the goal of being first. If grades are more important than learning, cheat from your neighbor or hack the grade book so you can get the rewarded grade.
When the rewards focus only on the final scores you get children who value the wrong things. Once their life of cheating in school is done, it transitions to the real world into lying, cheating, and stealing to get other outcomes without putting in effort or completing work. Or, if they use those patterns in management to try to encourage others they will be confused about why those same patterns fail to produce positive results.
Real world example:
At one place I worked several years ago there was a team of 6 salespeople. Management wanted to get the most sales out of them, so they created a reward. They made a big poster and charted sales, the highest sales would get a paid trip to a fabulous resort plus some spending money. Most of the salesfolk instantly gave up. In the first week there was a clear leader: The senior salesperson was about quadruple everyone else. By the end of the first month the senior person polished off another deal; they were at over $200K three were between $50K and $20K, and the two intern-type grunts were around $5k each. The reason was obvious to several of us, the senior salesperson worked with management to build and sign the corporate contracts, the three medium-tier people had a collection of established regular customers, and the entry level noobs were stuck with cold calls. After three months the senior salesperson acted all thankful and grateful for the challenge, the attitude of 'better luck next time' to those who obviously never had a chance. When I talked with the mangers about it they were confused about why the interns were upset and why the more experienced workers weren't putting in an effort to win. They couldn't understand it because their own value system only valued the end goal and competition rather than effort, cooperation, and completion. Their challenge rewarded tenure rather than growth. Sales were down significantly over those months. The end result was less money for the business, reduced morale, and one of the salesfolk quitting over it.
A far better system would have been to set an ambitious combined sales goal, and all those who helped cross some boundaries get the reward. The tenured staff then has an incentive to help the beginners succeed, and everyone has an incentive to increase total sales. Instead of rewarding the natural and immutable situation of tenure, they could have rewarded effort and completion of sales. Everyone whose efforts contribute to the completion of the goal gets the rewards. These systems tend to work well as incentives. For example, "If we meet X we'll have a team party", or "everyone who meets goal X will get two days off." Those who have crossed the threshold typically then help their peers to also cross the threshold.
Rewarding "You sure are smart", or "You sure are tall", or "you sure have tenure" is just plain stupid. It might feel good to the person giving the reward and the person getting the reward, but to outsiders it is usually painfully obvious that the system is broken.
Praise the kid for good ideas, but also ask your kid - how do you think this or that could be better?
Those are part of it, but really the report is just that Khan discovered something well-known in education.
Really, it is well known for everybody involved in motivation.
You get more of whatever you recognize.
Any school teacher can explain how when you point out the bad behavior, "Johnny, sit back down", you have rewarded the child. It may not be what most people think of as recognition, but it serves to reinforce the behavior.
When you recognize a child "You are smart", or "You are so fast", or other attributes that they cannot control, it can have many negative effects. One negative effect is the child can become complacent. They may think to themselves, I'm already good enough, I don't need to do any more. When that happens the child will quickly stop succeeding. Another negative effect is the child can become fearful. They may think to themselves, I don't know what I did to become smart, what if I'm not smart enough tomorrow? What if I lose it? I've seen this happen to several children who quickly break down.
Instead, educators are taught to reward effort when they see it. Publicly praise how Johnny has worked hard on the project. Comment about how it looks like Jenny spent many hours researching the detail. When you are uncertain, praise anyway, "It must have taken some effort to prepare all of this, good job."
Those families that encourage learning tend to also reward and encourage effort. There may be a few of the "you're so smart" complements, but there will also be statements like "Good job figuring those details out", "That looks complicated, it must have taken effort to understand", "You studied a lot", etc. Generally the focus is (and should be) on rewarding the effort and the completion of tasks rather than rewarding the natural state.
Rounding it out, for kids in sports you complement "Good job working hard at practice today" to reward the effort rather than "Good job at being so tall" which is something they cannot control.
It would really surprise me if your Android phone *doesn't* have this feature, because it *is* required by law. Mine certainly has it.
This is one of those funny cases were people accidentally out themselves as not securing their phone.
The phones legally must display it in most countries, but only if the phone is locked or password protected. If there is no password required to get in, just a "swipe to unlock" rather than a security system, the button does not appear.
Lack of emergency call button == unsecured smart phone.
(Or a fairly old phone, or a hacked phone that breaks the law in many nations.)
Right, because trial can set precedent and the city *really* doesn't want that.
Precedent is only part of the story.
A settlement comes with the clause that they do not admit to any guilt. If the courts get involved, and a guilty verdict comes down, it also comes down with the "under color of law" modifier. That comes with a year in prison at the lowest tier. If there was bodily injury if weapons were used or threat of weapons was used, it jumps to a ten year prison term. The third tier, which triggers if the acts result in death, threat of death, or if they include kidnapping (which false arrests can qualify under), attempt to kidnap, sexual abuse or its attempt, the punishment can grow to life in prison.
It doesn't matter what their original violation was, those are additional bonus punishments of up to a year, a decade, or life in jail.
They will fight in the courts right up until the court decides they are no longer immune. The moment the immunity is broken they will do anything to take a non-guilt settlement.
LEOs (both as individuals and as departments) will do all they can to avoid an actual guilty verdict when their own acts are done under color of law. They will try to get any other deal or settlement they can rather then spend time in the prisons they helped create.
Yes, countries spy on other countries. All of their hands are dirty to some extent.
The difference is the method and extent of targeting. As a wartime example, it is the difference between a sniper rifle vs Agent Orange.
There are various 'socially acceptable' levels of international espionage. Military groups are going to spy on other military groups, sure. Installing listening devices inside embassies, I understand that. Under international law it is well regarded that those INDIVIDUALS who engage in an activity against another party can be subject to similar activities by other nations. That is, government spying on government is okay. Government spying on citizenry is NOT okay.
The Geneva Convention implemented and now all nations are bound to treat non-combatant civilians as 'protected persons'. While they might be affected by actions, they are unlawful targets and violators are considered international war criminals. Those same protections should apply even during times of peace and apply to espionage, but unfortunately they don't.
"Ethical espionage" is not a contradiction in terms. Just as in traditional warfare the common citizenry are protected and are illegal targets, so to should they be off limits to espionage. The "Just War" doctrine, which currently includes details like only attacking war-related targets, ethical treatment of prisoners, post-war reconstruction and recovery for the citizens, should apply just as well to espionage.
Slashdot Mirror
Worry over spying may cause people to take more interest in protecting their privacy, which may break Google's business model.
Boo hoo.
The problem isn't really with Google's business model.
It also is not limited to the US government.
Think back to various releases. News stories of the US government intercepting Cisco equipment shipments, installing back doors, and sealing them back in their original boxes with new factory seals. There are many news stories of logs with people communicating over supposedly secure connections and exchanging honeypot URLs, only to have the honeypot link hit several hours later by government-owned IP blocks or sometimes Microsoft or Apple IP blocks when using their 'secure' products.
As a result of those we set up honeypot links of our own, and I've seen reports that a percent of our site-to-site messages with honeypot links really are being visited by IP blocks from several nations. This is not just the US government, multiple governments and probably multiple big businesses have their spying tendrils inside businesses. We're looking for and slowly tightening down on potential leaks, either that or the assorted groups are slowly hitting our honeypots less and less. I used to think some of our security policies were draconian, but seeing how many probably-government groups are watching internal messages, I've become quite paranoid myself.
If someone cannot trust that their encrypted, supposedly secure communications are safe, they will stop using the products. When a government IP address hits a honeypot link shared over Apple's iMessage, does that mean Apple is a willing participant forwarding the messages while telling the public it is secured, or does that mean Apple is a victim too? Either way, iMessage is now one of many banned products in our workplace, sending any type of secure business information over it (or over Lync or Google's services or any but a short list of secure communications programs) has become a fire-able offense.
When the news broke on the Cisco equipment being intercepted this spring, their stock price plummeted and orders slowed. I know in my organization there were several major purchasing announcements, and they only buy HP equipment now (although I'm sure those are intercepted just as readily). Cisco went directly to the POTUS both publicly and privately to tell them to stop harming the company. I would not be surprised if their lawyers are nearly ready to file lawsuits for tortuous interference.
This is about far more than Google's business model. People cannot communicate within their own company infrastructure about business needs without some sort of government espionage or corporate spying. It is completely out of control.
It is very nearly eradicated globally. Good thing too.
The paralysis aspect is horrible. Those who got the disease didn't know if they would be hit by the paralysis. Those who were hit with the paralysis didn't know if it would become permanent.
Some people who had the paralysis hit lungs or heart and didn't make it to the hospital quickly enough were occasionally considered lucky. Some very unfortunate people were condemned to spend the rest of their lives on a ventilator. I knew several people (most are dead today) who had deformed faces, arms, and legs from the virus resulting in permanent paralysis. I knew several older folks with a gravely whispered voice as a result of the paralysis. I heard horror stories about people fighting in lines as the vaccine became available in the 1960s.
Last year the WHO declared a surge in polio as a world health emergency, it had jumped from below 200 globally known cases to over 400.
They track the progress and update it weekly. the web site says there are 209 year to date with a new outbreak in Syria.
It is a horrible, destructive disease. The Gates Foundation has made enormous donations, $1.8B last year. This year the Larry Ellison foundation threw in another $100M. The disease is so incredibly close to global eradication, it just needs that one final little nudge to the finish line.
And those unfortunate enough not to be able to be vaccinated.
Not that much of an issue really in western europe or even europe.
So many responses are like "meh, polio, who cares."
The devastating effects of this virus are obviously forgotten by this generation. It results in paralysis that is fatal when it hits things like lungs and hearts, and results in sometimes temporary, sometimes life-long paralysis in many victims. I knew people who permanently lost their ability to talk, others with one paralyzed leg, others who lost an arm, others with distorted facial muscles and other ugly effects. In the early 1960s when it was released people lined up for the vaccine, they would lie, cheat, and steal to get the vaccine when supplies were still limited.
In you're case, you're basically discounting anyone under age 6? Polio is a 4-dose vaccination where the last dose usually isn't until age 4-6. Google says that is a half million people in Belgium. That's "not much of an issue"?
Anyone who has had a reaction to one of the components and cannot have the series, they also are irrelevant? It's probably a million or so of the population. Again, you're okay with them getting a permanently disabling disease?
The vaccines are not 100% effective, many people who were vaccinated according to schedule are still able to become sick. No idea what the percentage is, but anything other than 0 is too much. Are they really not that important?
What would you think if it was YOU or a loved one in the hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were paralyzed, hoping that the paralysis is temporary in your case.
Now, if we could limit the infections just to anti-vaxers (not the innocent children of anti-vaxers) that would be something else entirely. Anti-vax for chicken pox or milder diseases are not that bad, but anti-vax for polio and other seriously ravaging diseases is just stupid.
Polio is so close to global eradication. I applaud those like the Gates Foundation that are funding killing off the last few known wild cases.
As a counterpoint to this; I had a reasonable machine for work. Win7 Pro, then IT got hold of it and connected it to the new domain etc; now it is much slower. Booting, shutting down, launching programs...everything is slower then the day before.
Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.
On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.
For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements, attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.
Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.
I don't know, we call just about everything a terrorist act these days. Anything high profile they try to announce that it WASN'T called a terrorist attack. Look at the Chicago airport issue last week, many news outlets lead with "In what is not a terrorist attack, a fire in an ATC building..." I've seen news reports that call simple street vandalism and muggings "domestic terrorism".
However, I completely agree with you. Holder's statement basically says personal devices should be inherently insecure, but it is okay for corporations to have a little bit of security. How many companies have BYOD policies? How many companies buy consumer parts?
Is he thinking the government can compel Apple to make "iPhone 7 Unencrypted Consumer Edition", and "iPhone 7 Corporate Secure Edition"? Or similarly force Android, with Google and LG and Samsung and others to split into an insecure consumer version and a more secure corporate version? I don't know, maybe they could. Of course, even the non-technical sheep could be taught to notice and push back.
Even so, a backdoor on full disk encryption, though I suppose requiring physical access, is a security hole.
Yes, a security hole that will play wonderfully when it hits the news:
HEADLINE: Millions of credit cards stolen in latest data breach, NSA encryption backdoor blamed.
meh.
My interpretation of the article: You can't teach height, but tall untrained basketball players can be beaten by shorter experts. To be the "world's best" you need both.
There is a difference between "expert" and "world's best".
When it comes to expert, guided practice and training is generally enough. Even if you are short I can still teach you to be an expert at basketball. Others can still teach you how to block, how to dribble, how to pass, how to shoot, how to referee, how to coach, and how to be an expert.
When it comes to world's best, sure, there is often a genetic component. Most people, no matter how much you train them, will never become the world's best. They can be expert and still judge and teach and work the field, being expert is not the same as being world's best. Similarly, some people, no matter how much they try to work with numbers, struggle to handle them intuitively. Given enough effort they can be taught all the way through college math and become experts, but that doesn't mean they'll become the world's expert on mathematics. Just because someone is tall doesn't make them a world-class basketball player, training is still needed. Just because someone has a pretty voice doesn't make them an automatic world's best vocalist, just because someone has a more intuitive grasp of spatial representations doesn't make them a world renown mathematician, training is still needed.
You can become expert with guided practice, even without much natural ability. To become world's best you need both guided practice AND a genetic predisposition.
That's exactly the trouble.
If you buy today and the stock goes down, people like those in TFA will continue to say it was overpriced and you are a bad investor.
If you buy today and the stock keeps going up, then you become praised as an early adopter.
Unfortunately my crystal ball is broken so I cannot tell which direction the investment will go. I'm either making a bad investment or becoming an early adopter, only time will tell which.
You are right that they are operating outside their area, and they ought to be going after things inside their area.
But if they are going to go after infringement, let's have them start going after corporations that are engaged in wholesale copyright violations, not just individuals involved in it.
Sites like Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Upworthy, and other clickbait sites that take images from the little guys, use the images in their clickbaiting business, and profit from the copyright infringement. Just take a moment to search for the assorted sites, " stolen images". Buzzfeed and HuffPo are currently fighting many such lawsuits, yet they continue to use random images found online without permission and without compensation to the photographers.
It would be nice if the City of London police started by black holing those sites, too.
So those medieval barber-surgeons were right, and blood-letting has health benefits after all?
Simply: Yes.
Regular donations help (causal relationship) with iron balance since you cannot donate if iron is low and it reduces your iron if it is high, can (causally) help slightly with weight loss as you lose a glob of body material without kidney filtering plus it works to replace it, is associated with (correlation) reduced risk of certain cancers, associated with (correlation) reduced risk of heart attacks, and is associated with (correlation) a slightly longer, higher-quality life. There are also short-term benefits for issues like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, and other metabolic problems.
I can't wait for 'big veins' to become a new ethnic slur.
I'm not fat, I'm just big veined.
My firewall is whitelist-based. This means if a site uses stuff hosted off-site (jquery, googleapis) it probably isn't going to load. The net affect is that while I can browse such storefronts, I have to do work to buy from them. So I buy elsewhere. They might learn, eventually.
They won't notice or care. Why would they? You aren't doing anything to trip any kinds of alarms or alerts with them.
If you want them to do something, call their help desk and act like an incompetent computer user. "My kids set up this newfangled computer and I can't buy from you..." If enough people did that it might make a blip on their stats that "JavaScript All The Things!" menatlity will cost them in support calls and possibly lost business.
I'm gonna go build my own slashdot, with blackjack and hookers!
... I think the bar should be much higher..
Wait... old slashdot, blackjack, hookers, AND a bar designed for tall people? Shut up and take my money.
Okay.
On a more serious note, I'm one of many that would be willing to a pay a small amount for an ad-free Facebook experience. Remove the ads and the buzzfeeds, the link-spam, and remove everything with more than 10 'shares' or reposts. Show me only my actual friend updates and comments and photos. In fact, that was in the news last year. Social Fixer is good for a workaround, but the company could make people the customer instead of the product if they wanted.
I managed over an hour and a half the other day.
I learned a fun one from a particularly annoying call.
Get them to repeat the messages. They rattle off the instructions, wait ten seconds, then ask them to repeat it. Alternatively, wait until they have rattled of the entire instruction, then slowly repeat the exact words from the beginning "first.. press.. the.. start.. button.. and.. type.. in.. "
Tell them you need to write it down first to make sure you do it correctly. Since you as the 'victim' don't want the infection to be worse you obviously should write it down to make sure you do it exactly right.
Naturally you can use the time for more productive things, like looking up ways to best take up the time of the scammer.
It is actually illegal. You can't deliberate engage in activities to make it more expensive or complex for law enforcement to search subpoenaed records. That's contempt of court.
Emphasis in your quote.
As gets mentioned every time this story appears on slashdot, this is a warrant not a subpoena. The two are different tools. Both are used to find things but one is clean and neat, the other broad and aggressive. As a parallel, a subpoena is a scalpel and a warrant is a chainsaw.
A subpoena says 'We know you have this specific information, provide it to us within a time frame'. They get subpoenas of this type all the time. There is no dispute a subpoena would get the document no matter where in the world Microsoft held it.
A warrant says 'We will search for and take anything even remotely related to this, search it ourselves on our own terms.' When they demanded dumps of servers and copies of databases they were told the servers were in another nation and were not subject to a US warrant.
As was discussed in the previous incarnations of this story, the warrants are rather broad demanding they turn over everything related to the email address and user in question even if it isn't related to a criminal investigation. They want it all, everything the user ever touched or potentially touched, everything sent to the user, everything related to the user. While government investigators can usually get that through a broad warrant, they cannot get that with a subpoena. A subpoena would give them the specific emails related to the crime under investigation, but it is quite likely they already have the specific documents they could ask for.
Facebook has provided this. Just hit settings and turn off autoplay videos and you get a lovely little play icon.
This article is another big whine on behalf of users who don't bother to actually hit a settings button or Google a problem.
That's news to me. Thanks for telling me. Default setting adjusted.
Also relevant to your "everybody already knows" attitude, there's an XKCD for that. No, everybody does not know about it.
It doesn't seem to be pervasive. We've all seen the recent stats on similar stories. Over half of all gamers are female. Less than 1/5 are under the age 18. The stereotypical teenage boy gamer is a small component of the "gamer" culture.
I doubt this is "Misogyny In Gamer Culture". I think instead this is just a few vocal idiots.
Picking up phone calls over TV tuners is one thing. Buying and installing a product with a name like "VME Dominator".
One of those can happen by innocent mistake. The other sounds ... well, not so innocent.
So you don't think the government should step in if the big guys are abusing their monopoly? You don't think the voters in a municipality should be allowed to decide for themselves if they want the government to establish broadband services for their own use? I know it's a popular meme to presume that governments are nothing but incompetent but the reality is that sometimes the government is the best way to get something done. If the existing ISPs find it not worthwhile to serve a population I see no credible argument why the local government couldn't fill that role if the taxpayers want them to. Might not be economically ideal but sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.
My region (the 2M people metro area) is going through municipal broadband fights. They started the fights back in 2002.
The group got an initial rollout in a few of the smaller cities, roughly 11,000 people got hooked up. Then the entrenched monopolies kicked in. Some highlights:
* Lawsuits from both the incumbent megacorps on cable-based and phone-based Internet on the claim that it was unlawful and anti-competitive for a state agency to compete with an established business. The lawsuits took several years and cost millions. The judges and the appeals court found that government is allowed to provide services, similar to how they provide municipal trash services and still businesses compete; nothing prevents the cable and phone companies from competing if they want.
* Every year state legislators keep introducing new bills prohibiting government agencies from competing with existing businesses, or requiring that governments cannot provide information services to the public without high fees and those fees should go to education, or that any group providing Internet services have so many billions in assets to mitigate risk of disaster, and other variations. Invariably a little research shows the legislators get money from the phone and cable companies, and the company lobbyists vocally support them. The municipal fiber groups have needed to spend several million dollars to fight these as well.
* In a few cities installation was unexpectedly stopped again when some of the smaller cities discovered their own contracts with the megacorps demanded that they couldn't build their own systems until after a multi-year vetting process with the megacorps plus giving them another multi-year opportunity for megacorps to adjust prices and to improve their infrastructure. Basically the smaller city and town governments signed deals for their own cheap Internet that block municipal fiber within their limits for a decade or more. Since then the FCC and other groups have urged cities to be more careful in the contracts they sign.
* Incumbents even got the federal government to drop contracts. In one case they had a contract with the federal government for a $66M under the RUS. After the municipal system had invested and contracted based on that contract it was unexpectedly cancelled. Investigation showed the federal contract was cancelled because the federal RUS system was threatened by the megacorps. A chain of 'smoking gun' emails were discovered where Comcast and CenturyLink demanded the RUS cancel the contract or the two megacorps would act against it; a lawsuit on tortious interference is ongoing, but the cost will be several more million before any ruling will follow, in the mean time the municipal system is out the $66M plus all the interest they need to pay on the emergency loan they had to take out to avoid defaulting on the expenses.
* Because the megacorps have forced the municipal fiber system to spend hundreds of millions on lawsuits and illegally-broken contracts, and because the redirected money has resulted in higher interest rates and longer-term loans costing over $500M to date, they are leveraging it and constantly sponsoring print ads, billboards, and TV ads (on their own cable networks) making nonspecific claims about how the municipal fiber has collected so m
Agreed.
Looking over the USDOJ stats, it seems Rohypnol is a regional problem with relatively low use count. In many places it is listed as "the least accessible date-rape drug", in other regions it is a suspected factor in hundreds of rape cases. The numbers show it going from about 1000 suspected cases nationally in 1997 to it's modern level of being suspected use in 1.5% of rape cases, a few thousand cases per year. Consider: how many hundreds of thousands of dates where a drink is consumed are there every year? Millions of drinks? Hundreds of millions of drinks? On a per-drink basis the number of uses is a very small percentage. Since it is small as a percentage that suggests going after bigger percentages for the bigger reductions.
While any number bigger than 0 is a problem, as a statistic these two drugs are not used in a high percentage of rapes, and date rapes themselves are relatively rare. I'm not trying to trivialize it. As the parent post suggests, a very rare problem does not lend itself to a TSA-like drug test where millions of drinks are tested for something detectable only a few thousand times annually at a maximum. My rough estimate is around 100M drinks across the nation over the course of a year, roughly 3000 testable contaminated drinks, so 0.0003% of date drinks, or one in every 30,000. That's a lot of useless fingernail-dips.
I suppose if you do go that route, of the new products this one that continuously monitors your drink by the cup and straw changing color seems much better than nail polish you need to dip frequently. It is both passive and continuous. Someone could slip the drug in after you dunk your fingernail, but the sensor on the container or the straw is 'always on'.
If you only ever praise effort instead of achievement you will wind up with a generation of morons that think they're great just for trying even when they never get anything done.
Let's try again...
rewarding the effort and the completion of tasks rather than rewarding the natural state.
Trying to reward "being smart" is ineffectual at best. Similarly it is ineffectual to reward basketball players just for being tall, or reward a junior player simply for being young, or reward a senior player simply for being senior.
Rewarding effort and completion are effective at teaching students that those (rather than the grades or being first place) are important. If being first place is the only thing that matters then means are unimportant: break the opponent's equipment, or even put your opponent in the hospital, to reach the goal of being first. If grades are more important than learning, cheat from your neighbor or hack the grade book so you can get the rewarded grade.
When the rewards focus only on the final scores you get children who value the wrong things. Once their life of cheating in school is done, it transitions to the real world into lying, cheating, and stealing to get other outcomes without putting in effort or completing work. Or, if they use those patterns in management to try to encourage others they will be confused about why those same patterns fail to produce positive results.
Real world example:
At one place I worked several years ago there was a team of 6 salespeople. Management wanted to get the most sales out of them, so they created a reward. They made a big poster and charted sales, the highest sales would get a paid trip to a fabulous resort plus some spending money. Most of the salesfolk instantly gave up. In the first week there was a clear leader: The senior salesperson was about quadruple everyone else. By the end of the first month the senior person polished off another deal; they were at over $200K three were between $50K and $20K, and the two intern-type grunts were around $5k each. The reason was obvious to several of us, the senior salesperson worked with management to build and sign the corporate contracts, the three medium-tier people had a collection of established regular customers, and the entry level noobs were stuck with cold calls. After three months the senior salesperson acted all thankful and grateful for the challenge, the attitude of 'better luck next time' to those who obviously never had a chance. When I talked with the mangers about it they were confused about why the interns were upset and why the more experienced workers weren't putting in an effort to win. They couldn't understand it because their own value system only valued the end goal and competition rather than effort, cooperation, and completion. Their challenge rewarded tenure rather than growth. Sales were down significantly over those months. The end result was less money for the business, reduced morale, and one of the salesfolk quitting over it.
A far better system would have been to set an ambitious combined sales goal, and all those who helped cross some boundaries get the reward. The tenured staff then has an incentive to help the beginners succeed, and everyone has an incentive to increase total sales. Instead of rewarding the natural and immutable situation of tenure, they could have rewarded effort and completion of sales. Everyone whose efforts contribute to the completion of the goal gets the rewards. These systems tend to work well as incentives. For example, "If we meet X we'll have a team party", or "everyone who meets goal X will get two days off." Those who have crossed the threshold typically then help their peers to also cross the threshold.
Rewarding "You sure are smart", or "You sure are tall", or "you sure have tenure" is just plain stupid. It might feel good to the person giving the reward and the person getting the reward, but to outsiders it is usually painfully obvious that the system is broken.
Praise the kid for good ideas, but also ask your kid - how do you think this or that could be better?
Those are part of it, but really the report is just that Khan discovered something well-known in education.
Really, it is well known for everybody involved in motivation.
You get more of whatever you recognize.
Any school teacher can explain how when you point out the bad behavior, "Johnny, sit back down", you have rewarded the child. It may not be what most people think of as recognition, but it serves to reinforce the behavior.
When you recognize a child "You are smart", or "You are so fast", or other attributes that they cannot control, it can have many negative effects. One negative effect is the child can become complacent. They may think to themselves, I'm already good enough, I don't need to do any more. When that happens the child will quickly stop succeeding. Another negative effect is the child can become fearful. They may think to themselves, I don't know what I did to become smart, what if I'm not smart enough tomorrow? What if I lose it? I've seen this happen to several children who quickly break down.
Instead, educators are taught to reward effort when they see it. Publicly praise how Johnny has worked hard on the project. Comment about how it looks like Jenny spent many hours researching the detail. When you are uncertain, praise anyway, "It must have taken some effort to prepare all of this, good job."
Those families that encourage learning tend to also reward and encourage effort. There may be a few of the "you're so smart" complements, but there will also be statements like "Good job figuring those details out", "That looks complicated, it must have taken effort to understand", "You studied a lot", etc. Generally the focus is (and should be) on rewarding the effort and the completion of tasks rather than rewarding the natural state.
Rounding it out, for kids in sports you complement "Good job working hard at practice today" to reward the effort rather than "Good job at being so tall" which is something they cannot control.
It would really surprise me if your Android phone *doesn't* have this feature, because it *is* required by law. Mine certainly has it.
This is one of those funny cases were people accidentally out themselves as not securing their phone.
The phones legally must display it in most countries, but only if the phone is locked or password protected. If there is no password required to get in, just a "swipe to unlock" rather than a security system, the button does not appear.
Lack of emergency call button == unsecured smart phone.
(Or a fairly old phone, or a hacked phone that breaks the law in many nations.)
Right, because trial can set precedent and the city *really* doesn't want that.
Precedent is only part of the story.
A settlement comes with the clause that they do not admit to any guilt. If the courts get involved, and a guilty verdict comes down, it also comes down with the "under color of law" modifier. That comes with a year in prison at the lowest tier. If there was bodily injury if weapons were used or threat of weapons was used, it jumps to a ten year prison term. The third tier, which triggers if the acts result in death, threat of death, or if they include kidnapping (which false arrests can qualify under), attempt to kidnap, sexual abuse or its attempt, the punishment can grow to life in prison.
It doesn't matter what their original violation was, those are additional bonus punishments of up to a year, a decade, or life in jail.
They will fight in the courts right up until the court decides they are no longer immune. The moment the immunity is broken they will do anything to take a non-guilt settlement.
LEOs (both as individuals and as departments) will do all they can to avoid an actual guilty verdict when their own acts are done under color of law. They will try to get any other deal or settlement they can rather then spend time in the prisons they helped create.
Yes, countries spy on other countries. All of their hands are dirty to some extent.
The difference is the method and extent of targeting. As a wartime example, it is the difference between a sniper rifle vs Agent Orange.
There are various 'socially acceptable' levels of international espionage. Military groups are going to spy on other military groups, sure. Installing listening devices inside embassies, I understand that. Under international law it is well regarded that those INDIVIDUALS who engage in an activity against another party can be subject to similar activities by other nations. That is, government spying on government is okay. Government spying on citizenry is NOT okay.
The Geneva Convention implemented and now all nations are bound to treat non-combatant civilians as 'protected persons'. While they might be affected by actions, they are unlawful targets and violators are considered international war criminals. Those same protections should apply even during times of peace and apply to espionage, but unfortunately they don't.
"Ethical espionage" is not a contradiction in terms. Just as in traditional warfare the common citizenry are protected and are illegal targets, so to should they be off limits to espionage. The "Just War" doctrine, which currently includes details like only attacking war-related targets, ethical treatment of prisoners, post-war reconstruction and recovery for the citizens, should apply just as well to espionage.