maybe for your country - but for the rest of us Cuba is a rather popular tourist destination with as many tourists leaving the UK for cuba as, say, dominican republic.
The westernised cuban resorts are fairly well organised and tourists can expect a little more of the "off the beaten trail" feel without the risk.
1. The original plan for Java was as a language for embedded systems. The other applications were added as an afterthought, effectively.
this is not entirely correct; I met with Arthur van Hoff (he of java.lang.String fame) back in the late 90's when a large chunk of the original java team went to Marimba to develop Castanet - they really thought that the future of Java would be centralised software as a service style apps that would download to your thin 'pc' 'workstation' etc as you needed them and would always be up to date. I have a Java Kettle workstation in the loft that had the Java VM-hardware in it and ran only Java.
at that time, large organisations like reuters were spending a tonne of money using this paradigm to reinvent online applications. reuters had a huge team working on a java version of RT that sucked down java classes as it needed them - after all, the Internet/WWW hadn't quite taken off yet - sure web browsers were around, but in 1995/1996 functional web pages were rare and web sites not taken seriously. (ask Bill Gates).
the original java team were wrong of course, Java has taken off in an unimagineable way in enterprise middleware. large enterprise middleware such as trading systems, healthcare systems, enterprise messaging, ERP, etc etc totally rely on J2EE and J2EE implemented Service Oriented Architecture. RedHat/JBoss, Apache Jakarta, BEA/Oracle and IBM make a living selling enterprise Java systems.
The vast majority of Java coding is in Enterprise Middleware - e.g. trading systems, payment engines, SOA, eCommerce middleware, messaging buses, ERP, etc. typically run on JBoss, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere and Oracle OC4J. These are often part of larger SOA offerings such as: BEA Aqualogic, Oracle Fusion, JBoss/RedHat SOA platform - all are Java based.
The large finance orgs where I work have 100's, perhaps 1000's of java people for every C++ person.
You'd find that most designers/architects would not normally spec java as a front end technology and would *extremely rarely* spec C++ for middleware. For a time in the 90's, C++ middleware nearly took off using containers from folks like IONA - but I've not seen an enterprise middleware container for C++ for a while now thats anything like the spec of a J2EE container - with the exception of microsoft's.net framework that can use C# - which is probably more akin to java than C++.
Actually, if you look down that list of the top 20 or so products and pick out the computers (with an OS) you will find that only 2 are Vista machines:
Apple: 8
Linux: 6, Asus, Nokia
Vista: 2, HP
with HP branded vista machines placing at 4th and 9th. The other items in the list are screens mostly.
it makes me wonder what HP are going to do about this because they are the losers here - they could easily develop a Linux based system to rival the Macs or the Asus EEE's.
The blind and hard-of-sight have always been poorly served by what is a very visual medium.
This is not true, I once worked for a genius of an architect at a very large organisation - he was blind and told me that the web had opened up whole new avenues of access to research material that was not available as braille from the library etc. he used to clatter away on a braille 'screen' accessing google and so on.
I've said it on slashdot a few times, but I had to change a large banking authentication system in the UK from using CAPTCHA because the RNIB basically said that any large UK company using CAPTCHA would be taken to court (or the front page of the Daily Express - not sure which is worse) if an accessible alternative to CAPTCHA was not provided on the same page at no cost or hassle to the user. The Disability Discrimination Act states that 'reasonable measures' have to be taken to provide for visually impaired users, however, the RNIB has a very strong powerbase in the UK and have will fight an applicationthat has only CAPTCHA - of course, if you provide an alternative, what will the crackers use?
visual impairedness is more common than you think. many people are not registered blind, like my dad with his 19" screen and nose marks against it, doesn't call himself blind.
not in the UK. The RNIB are currently pursuing any bank that uses CAPTCHA that has no accessible alternative because it breaches the Disability Discrimination Act. Of course, if you supply a plain text version then the attackers will use the path of least resistance. Also, another problem that the DDA gives us is that customers are not compelled to declare their disability - so any accessibility options have to be provided at runtime - not some sort of setting at the bank.
Actually, an EMV card has 2 PINs, an online PIN and an Offline PIN but all banks that I know off set them to be the same data.
Think of the card as a computer. It exposes various methods to the host unit, such as getCardHolderName(), getCardISONumber(), getExpiryDate() etc. None of the private attributes are visible and there are no setter() methods that I know of. The card has internal mechanisms such as transaction counters that help prevent card copying attacks. Everything on the card is signed and secured by a digital certificate.
the handheld security module (in the UK) is an APACS standard Chip Authentication Programme reader that has 3 functions:
One time passcode (used by barclays): generates a code when the user enters their bank chip card and the card PIN.
Challenge/Response (used by natwest, RBS et al): generates a code when user enters a chip card and a number given to user at the time of the transaction
Signature (not used by anyone that I know of): generates a code when the user enters a chip card, an amount and a code given at the time of the transaction.
Certainly, Natwest and RBS have issued new Debit cards over the last few years that have CAP functionality and will work in any of the APACS readers from any bank. barclays, Natwest and RBS are giving the readers out for free because the business case for diminished fraud loss (currently £100m/year in the UK for ebanking) will more than pay for systems. The reader is a small unit (market leader for manufacturing is the french company Xiring and are powered by batteries and are not connected to the PC.
Also, with Faster Payments due in May - this is where anyone can wire money from any bank account to another in less than 30 seconds - banks have to implement security up front because they don't have the luxury of 3 days 'clearing' to find fraud.
Vulnerabilties: I'm a little concerned that people will enter their PIN into anything nowadays. The PIN used to be something you only entered into bank owned machinery - now the proliferation of 3rd party devices for Chip-and-PIN and the new CAP systems I think the value of the PIN is diminished. We've seen successful fraud at Shell petrol stations where customers entered their PIN into a fake card reader.
The cool thing about CAP is that the code that you get from the reader has passes back a bitmap in the not-really-random code that you see on the wee screen. So data from your card can be sent back to the bank - things like transaction counters and so on. Some banks don't use this data (hence they have weak systems), others do at the risk of unusability with locked out cards and so on.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
on
Matter
·
· Score: 1
Complicity was my first introduction to iain banks - largely because it mentions the three turquoise Fiat 126 cars that sat across the road from my parents house for 15 years. For those that have not read the Iain Banks novels, they are worth a try: Dead Air was my favourite - largely because I could relate to leaving a small Scottish village and living it up in london's east end. Crow Road et al encapsulate Scottish life.
Also worth a mention is iain banks non-fiction book "Raw Spirit" about a road trip round the Malt Whisky distillers in Scotland - worth a read - not only a great insight into the distilleries themselves but also a himself and a great road trip round Scotland. Ideal if you fancy coming to scotland on holiday and visiting the highlands.
As for the SF IMB novels, I've read all of them except Matter, my favourite is probably Excession or The Algebraist.
actually, I would choose the Nokia N95 8Gb (v2.0). The version 2 of the nokia n95 solves the slowness and hangs of the previous version and has all the features the pp mentions including GPS, good camera etc. It has 8Gb of internal storage and a slightly updated symbian OS. battery life is excellent - especially if you switch off WiFi, 3G and the GPS if you are not using them - they are on by default when you get the device.
Personally, I travel with an N95 and a lenovo thinkpad X41 (fedora 8) with a wee bluetooth usb key that helps to synchronise calendar on the N95 8GB with kontact using Multisync
I'm getting an eeepc for travelling where I can't take much (hand luggage only trips).
The parent poster has raised a good point. I'm an independent consultant who has helped large orgs use OSS and Linux in the UK. I'm currently at a large Life Assurance company who have just started using Linux and use Open Source software here and there (mainly in java dev). The software teams are energised about OSS and are keen to contribute back (with management approving time to do so).
However, the Group Legal folks are very concerned because the various GPL and other OSS licences do not protect the organisation sufficiently with regard to warranties. This is because in the Scotland it is impossible to disclaim all warranties - yet the GPL tries to do this. They are worried that one of our Developers contributes code that eventually causes a consequential loss that comes to court. Since we are a brand name insurance company - they are extra-special-nervous about this.
Management understand we can only get the best out of OSS by contributing back - but have found the US-centric legal approach very unhelpful.
We were contributing back through shell companies and "home" accounts but group legal have explicitly asked us not to do this because in Scotland a chain of liability could still lead back to the company...
any ideas gratefully received!
IDCALBTWFAU = "I did consult a lawyer but they were F.A. use"
Re:did china do this as well on the great wall?
on
Email In the 18th Century
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The roman signal stations are still on the Ordnance Survey maps in Perthshire with signal stations some 1km to 3 km apart on hill tops. This link shows a signal station proximity to a camp with a much bigger fort to the west. infact, this area of Scotland is littered with roman remains because they had to exit in a big hurry regularly as the Scots kicked italian ass on a regular basis.
they also had signal stations on the Antonine Wall which was some 100km north of the famous Hadrians Wall.
So this is very much email in the 122AD to 250AD century - although, it didn't help the romans much. they had too much physical infrastructure that was a big disadvantage in the guerrilla tactics of the Scots and thus were not flexible enough to change. There are lots of parallels with the US tactics in Iraq and one wanders whether the tacticians have been researching their roman history well enough before deploying assets in the middle east.
if there were indeed details of children on the CD then the CD itself would have been protectively marked at a minimum level of "Restricted".
I'm pretty sure restricted marked info can be sent in the Royal Mail (but not all couriers strangely enough) but has to be double bagged. The key thing about protectively marked documents is that their ownership has to be audited and to be fair, the audit process did actually discover that the CD's went missing - so that bit of the function must be working.
It sounds like it was a non-IT person (with CD Burning capability!?!) who basically created the breach by not protectively marking the data and not following general data protection principles.
I'm sure there is an international trade in fingerprints captured at border crossings - so if you get fingerprinted at a US Customs post then they'll be shared with the merry US/UK/CAN/AUS/NZ bunch (at least). I'm unsure how normal data protection laws apply in customs...
The thing I would say to potential travellers is that Narita Airport (the major hub airport some 90km from Tokyo) has enormously bureaucratic customs provision for gaijin. Last time I transited in 2002 for an overnight stay (no fingerprints back then) it took the best part of 4.5 hours to get through the non-residents queue. It seems it is the only function in the whole of Japan that is not super-efficient.
rd
Has it got working integration of ieee1394 & D
on
Fedora 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
I know that I should have participated in the test releases to check out the state of the new IEEE1394 system that was brought in (terribly) in Fedora 7, however has anyone tested to see if apps like dvgrab/kino work with the new IEEE1394 stuff in Fedora 8?
it's important that folks try out the test releases (I will do with 9 onwards) so that all the peculiar user functionality is tested and works. The Fedora 7 IEEE1394 bug happened because no one tried to grab a DV video stream from a video camera with Kino/Cinerella etc during the testing and so it went out broken. Fedora 7 brought in a new firewire system but the apps in the distro still expected the old firewire stuff to be there - no one noticed, so no one fixed it...
I was a consultant at a large UK retail bank and we were going to use a type of picture/CAPTCHA on the online banking solution. Except that the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) consultancy operation basically told us that if we went ahead they would be forced to "go to the newspapers" and also would consider taking action under DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) legislation.
It's really important to consider (in the UK at least) that around 10% of the online population will not be able to see or draw images clearly on a computer screen and therefore, whilst graphical authentication is fantastic security for most of us - it does not work for all of us. As soon as you present a 'way out' for those that cannot see as well as the average human, you have introduced a loophole in your security system and the investiment in CAPTCHA or imagery is threatened.
NB: in the UK, under DDA we have to provide "a reasonable alternative" for disabled users - however, the strength of the RNIB lobby is really turning that into "You must not discriminate in any way against a sight impaired user" - so by making it impossible for impaired sight users to use this strong authentication from TFA is in fact discriminatory against them...
what an inspiring parent-post; I have been tinkering with my first OSS project - but have been a bit nervous about when is it *ready* enough to publically display - i.e. it works and does what it is meant to but I'm finding myself polishing it more than I would for commercial code. I've gone a bit javadoc crazy.
I have a sourceforge account/project (not public yet) but am finding it a bit slow going to work out what to do with the gazillions of options especially when it's way more productive to work through my feature-list than spend time wrestling with sourceforge.
Any more experience from people who have started projects would be really helpful.
ex-Rio Karma owners who want Radio, USB mass storage, full support for Linux, gapless, colour screen, Ogg Vorbis - should really look at the Trekstor Vibez. It has the same software and sounds excellent - it's like a 2007 Karma.
If you just want to connectup the old karma to linux then look no further than the splendid karma on linux project. It's amazing what some seriously clever people, fuse and some helpful hints from Sigmatel folks can produce. it integrates with Amarok as well!
The english were given the option of regional assemblies that would have similar powers to the devolved Scottish parliment, but unfortunatley for the english, John "2 jags, 2 jabs" Prescott was in charge and royally cocked it up (and here. Wales decided not to go for a devolved parliment and Northern ireland is getting its government back in good shape now that weapons have been taken out of politics.
I am proud to be a graduate of the Scottish education system - a system that had free education for children 150 years before england. I think this is why the Scottish system has such a good reputation.
The rough similarities are:
Standard Grade (was O'grade) is similar to the english GSCE
Higher grade is equivalent to some of the diluted grade english A levels, and some AS levels.
Some Scottish students stay on for another year at high school to take A levels (to get into English unis who don't recognise the Scottish system) or to take "6th year certificates" or go to colleges to take more vocational courses.
Scottish kids can leave school at 16 and go to university. I was at uni at the age of 17 and graduated with a hons degree at the age of 21 (Scotland has 4 year courses for uni) - whereas, English students tend to leave school at 18 and do a 3 year university course. Being at Uni for a year whilst under the age of 18 made for some hasty exits from pubs on occasion...!
Scottish students do not pay university fees (except medics I think); English students have to pay fees of up to GBP3000 (US$ 6000) - and there is talk of bringing back grants for Scottish university students whose parents can't afford to pay for their kids rent and so on. The Scottish National Party currently are leading the Scottish Parliment and are embarking on a massive investment in schools. here in Stirling, there are 2 new schools being built.
Now there's a thought,
Antiguan Vista would have dialogue boxes that said:
[continue] [cancel] [maybe] [perhaps tomorrow] [whatever] [is that bob?]
did you know that the USA has an air force base there? I wonder how that would be used if the WTO ruling took effect? an up market Guantanamo for Antiguans perhaps?
my X41 (2525-3CG) with the Intel Pro Wireless card "just worked" with Fedora 7. Even got a huwaei E220 3G modem from (t-mobile UK) working (which I am using now).
I doubt this will be a single authentication factor in any banking/payment environment because the university researchers from the article just don't understand how complex payment systems are and how much interoperability between card schemes does not exist.
Where it will be used is in fraud scoring. The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service. Recognition is useful, but it will not be used to block transactions, it will mostly likely be used to raise a score on a fraud profile for a transaction.
This type of fraud profiling is becoming more important because the UK will be moving to Faster payments at the end of 2007 - where once banks had 3 days to run scanning products (for terrorist account activity and fraud) - they will only have a few minutes. The problem at the moment in the UK is that customers do a lot of electronic payments compared to USA - so many transactions will not have time for all the fraud checks.
so if someone who looks nothing like my description makes a transaction, then the score will increase on the account which can then implement further fraud checks in resulting transactions.
when I designed and built a fraud detection system for a UK mobile operator, we found that when a handset/number had fraud committed on it - it usually was usually picked up by lots of the fraud scanners and would stick out like a sore thumb. Each customer would have an associated fraud score and when it reached a certain point, the fraud team would get involved.
Slashdot Mirror
X41 (2525-3CG) - everything works including the SD card reader in Fedora
(A pile of dead bodies is universal code for, "Danger!, stay away from here!").
except for a bunch of wierdo kids, whose parents have defaulted on their mortgage and are looking for pirate treasure.
maybe for your country - but for the rest of us Cuba is a rather popular tourist destination with as many tourists leaving the UK for cuba as, say, dominican republic.
The westernised cuban resorts are fairly well organised and tourists can expect a little more of the "off the beaten trail" feel without the risk.
1. The original plan for Java was as a language for embedded systems. The other applications were added as an afterthought, effectively.
this is not entirely correct; I met with Arthur van Hoff (he of java.lang.String fame) back in the late 90's when a large chunk of the original java team went to Marimba to develop Castanet - they really thought that the future of Java would be centralised software as a service style apps that would download to your thin 'pc' 'workstation' etc as you needed them and would always be up to date. I have a Java Kettle workstation in the loft that had the Java VM-hardware in it and ran only Java.
at that time, large organisations like reuters were spending a tonne of money using this paradigm to reinvent online applications. reuters had a huge team working on a java version of RT that sucked down java classes as it needed them - after all, the Internet/WWW hadn't quite taken off yet - sure web browsers were around, but in 1995/1996 functional web pages were rare and web sites not taken seriously. (ask Bill Gates).
the original java team were wrong of course, Java has taken off in an unimagineable way in enterprise middleware. large enterprise middleware such as trading systems, healthcare systems, enterprise messaging, ERP, etc etc totally rely on J2EE and J2EE implemented Service Oriented Architecture. RedHat/JBoss, Apache Jakarta, BEA/Oracle and IBM make a living selling enterprise Java systems.
The vast majority of Java coding is in Enterprise Middleware - e.g. trading systems, payment engines, SOA, eCommerce middleware, messaging buses, ERP, etc. typically run on JBoss, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere and Oracle OC4J. These are often part of larger SOA offerings such as: BEA Aqualogic, Oracle Fusion, JBoss/RedHat SOA platform - all are Java based.
The large finance orgs where I work have 100's, perhaps 1000's of java people for every C++ person.
You'd find that most designers/architects would not normally spec java as a front end technology and would *extremely rarely* spec C++ for middleware. For a time in the 90's, C++ middleware nearly took off using containers from folks like IONA - but I've not seen an enterprise middleware container for C++ for a while now thats anything like the spec of a J2EE container - with the exception of microsoft's .net framework that can use C# - which is probably more akin to java than C++.
PC LOAD LETTERMAN
- Apple: 8
- Linux: 6, Asus, Nokia
- Vista: 2, HP
with HP branded vista machines placing at 4th and 9th. The other items in the list are screens mostly.it makes me wonder what HP are going to do about this because they are the losers here - they could easily develop a Linux based system to rival the Macs or the Asus EEE's.
This is not true, I once worked for a genius of an architect at a very large organisation - he was blind and told me that the web had opened up whole new avenues of access to research material that was not available as braille from the library etc. he used to clatter away on a braille 'screen' accessing google and so on.
I've said it on slashdot a few times, but I had to change a large banking authentication system in the UK from using CAPTCHA because the RNIB basically said that any large UK company using CAPTCHA would be taken to court (or the front page of the Daily Express - not sure which is worse) if an accessible alternative to CAPTCHA was not provided on the same page at no cost or hassle to the user. The Disability Discrimination Act states that 'reasonable measures' have to be taken to provide for visually impaired users, however, the RNIB has a very strong powerbase in the UK and have will fight an applicationthat has only CAPTCHA - of course, if you provide an alternative, what will the crackers use?
visual impairedness is more common than you think. many people are not registered blind, like my dad with his 19" screen and nose marks against it, doesn't call himself blind.
not in the UK. The RNIB are currently pursuing any bank that uses CAPTCHA that has no accessible alternative because it breaches the Disability Discrimination Act. Of course, if you supply a plain text version then the attackers will use the path of least resistance. Also, another problem that the DDA gives us is that customers are not compelled to declare their disability - so any accessibility options have to be provided at runtime - not some sort of setting at the bank.
Actually, an EMV card has 2 PINs, an online PIN and an Offline PIN but all banks that I know off set them to be the same data.
Think of the card as a computer. It exposes various methods to the host unit, such as getCardHolderName(), getCardISONumber(), getExpiryDate() etc. None of the private attributes are visible and there are no setter() methods that I know of. The card has internal mechanisms such as transaction counters that help prevent card copying attacks. Everything on the card is signed and secured by a digital certificate.
the handheld security module (in the UK) is an APACS standard Chip Authentication Programme reader that has 3 functions:
Certainly, Natwest and RBS have issued new Debit cards over the last few years that have CAP functionality and will work in any of the APACS readers from any bank. barclays, Natwest and RBS are giving the readers out for free because the business case for diminished fraud loss (currently £100m/year in the UK for ebanking) will more than pay for systems. The reader is a small unit (market leader for manufacturing is the french company Xiring and are powered by batteries and are not connected to the PC.
Also, with Faster Payments due in May - this is where anyone can wire money from any bank account to another in less than 30 seconds - banks have to implement security up front because they don't have the luxury of 3 days 'clearing' to find fraud.
Vulnerabilties: I'm a little concerned that people will enter their PIN into anything nowadays. The PIN used to be something you only entered into bank owned machinery - now the proliferation of 3rd party devices for Chip-and-PIN and the new CAP systems I think the value of the PIN is diminished. We've seen successful fraud at Shell petrol stations where customers entered their PIN into a fake card reader.
The cool thing about CAP is that the code that you get from the reader has passes back a bitmap in the not-really-random code that you see on the wee screen. So data from your card can be sent back to the bank - things like transaction counters and so on. Some banks don't use this data (hence they have weak systems), others do at the risk of unusability with locked out cards and so on.
Complicity was my first introduction to iain banks - largely because it mentions the three turquoise Fiat 126 cars that sat across the road from my parents house for 15 years. For those that have not read the Iain Banks novels, they are worth a try: Dead Air was my favourite - largely because I could relate to leaving a small Scottish village and living it up in london's east end. Crow Road et al encapsulate Scottish life.
Also worth a mention is iain banks non-fiction book "Raw Spirit" about a road trip round the Malt Whisky distillers in Scotland - worth a read - not only a great insight into the distilleries themselves but also a himself and a great road trip round Scotland. Ideal if you fancy coming to scotland on holiday and visiting the highlands.
As for the SF IMB novels, I've read all of them except Matter, my favourite is probably Excession or The Algebraist.
actually, I would choose the Nokia N95 8Gb (v2.0). The version 2 of the nokia n95 solves the slowness and hangs of the previous version and has all the features the pp mentions including GPS, good camera etc. It has 8Gb of internal storage and a slightly updated symbian OS. battery life is excellent - especially if you switch off WiFi, 3G and the GPS if you are not using them - they are on by default when you get the device.
Personally, I travel with an N95 and a lenovo thinkpad X41 (fedora 8) with a wee bluetooth usb key that helps to synchronise calendar on the N95 8GB with kontact using Multisync
I'm getting an eeepc for travelling where I can't take much (hand luggage only trips).
The parent poster has raised a good point. I'm an independent consultant who has helped large orgs use OSS and Linux in the UK. I'm currently at a large Life Assurance company who have just started using Linux and use Open Source software here and there (mainly in java dev). The software teams are energised about OSS and are keen to contribute back (with management approving time to do so).
However, the Group Legal folks are very concerned because the various GPL and other OSS licences do not protect the organisation sufficiently with regard to warranties. This is because in the Scotland it is impossible to disclaim all warranties - yet the GPL tries to do this. They are worried that one of our Developers contributes code that eventually causes a consequential loss that comes to court. Since we are a brand name insurance company - they are extra-special-nervous about this.
Management understand we can only get the best out of OSS by contributing back - but have found the US-centric legal approach very unhelpful.
We were contributing back through shell companies and "home" accounts but group legal have explicitly asked us not to do this because in Scotland a chain of liability could still lead back to the company...
any ideas gratefully received!
IDCALBTWFAU = "I did consult a lawyer but they were F.A. use"
The roman signal stations are still on the Ordnance Survey maps in Perthshire with signal stations some 1km to 3 km apart on hill tops. This link shows a signal station proximity to a camp with a much bigger fort to the west. infact, this area of Scotland is littered with roman remains because they had to exit in a big hurry regularly as the Scots kicked italian ass on a regular basis.
they also had signal stations on the Antonine Wall which was some 100km north of the famous Hadrians Wall.
So this is very much email in the 122AD to 250AD century - although, it didn't help the romans much. they had too much physical infrastructure that was a big disadvantage in the guerrilla tactics of the Scots and thus were not flexible enough to change. There are lots of parallels with the US tactics in Iraq and one wanders whether the tacticians have been researching their roman history well enough before deploying assets in the middle east.
if there were indeed details of children on the CD then the CD itself would have been protectively marked at a minimum level of "Restricted".
I'm pretty sure restricted marked info can be sent in the Royal Mail (but not all couriers strangely enough) but has to be double bagged. The key thing about protectively marked documents is that their ownership has to be audited and to be fair, the audit process did actually discover that the CD's went missing - so that bit of the function must be working.
It sounds like it was a non-IT person (with CD Burning capability!?!) who basically created the breach by not protectively marking the data and not following general data protection principles.
rd
I'm sure there is an international trade in fingerprints captured at border crossings - so if you get fingerprinted at a US Customs post then they'll be shared with the merry US/UK/CAN/AUS/NZ bunch (at least). I'm unsure how normal data protection laws apply in customs...
The thing I would say to potential travellers is that Narita Airport (the major hub airport some 90km from Tokyo) has enormously bureaucratic customs provision for gaijin. Last time I transited in 2002 for an overnight stay (no fingerprints back then) it took the best part of 4.5 hours to get through the non-residents queue. It seems it is the only function in the whole of Japan that is not super-efficient.
rdI know that I should have participated in the test releases to check out the state of the new IEEE1394 system that was brought in (terribly) in Fedora 7, however has anyone tested to see if apps like dvgrab/kino work with the new IEEE1394 stuff in Fedora 8?
it's important that folks try out the test releases (I will do with 9 onwards) so that all the peculiar user functionality is tested and works. The Fedora 7 IEEE1394 bug happened because no one tried to grab a DV video stream from a video camera with Kino/Cinerella etc during the testing and so it went out broken. Fedora 7 brought in a new firewire system but the apps in the distro still expected the old firewire stuff to be there - no one noticed, so no one fixed it...
rdI was a consultant at a large UK retail bank and we were going to use a type of picture/CAPTCHA on the online banking solution. Except that the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) consultancy operation basically told us that if we went ahead they would be forced to "go to the newspapers" and also would consider taking action under DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) legislation.
It's really important to consider (in the UK at least) that around 10% of the online population will not be able to see or draw images clearly on a computer screen and therefore, whilst graphical authentication is fantastic security for most of us - it does not work for all of us. As soon as you present a 'way out' for those that cannot see as well as the average human, you have introduced a loophole in your security system and the investiment in CAPTCHA or imagery is threatened.
NB: in the UK, under DDA we have to provide "a reasonable alternative" for disabled users - however, the strength of the RNIB lobby is really turning that into "You must not discriminate in any way against a sight impaired user" - so by making it impossible for impaired sight users to use this strong authentication from TFA is in fact discriminatory against them...
rd
what an inspiring parent-post; I have been tinkering with my first OSS project - but have been a bit nervous about when is it *ready* enough to publically display - i.e. it works and does what it is meant to but I'm finding myself polishing it more than I would for commercial code. I've gone a bit javadoc crazy.
I have a sourceforge account/project (not public yet) but am finding it a bit slow going to work out what to do with the gazillions of options especially when it's way more productive to work through my feature-list than spend time wrestling with sourceforge.
Any more experience from people who have started projects would be really helpful.
rd
If you just want to connectup the old karma to linux then look no further than the splendid karma on linux project. It's amazing what some seriously clever people, fuse and some helpful hints from Sigmatel folks can produce. it integrates with Amarok as well!
rd
I am proud to be a graduate of the Scottish education system - a system that had free education for children 150 years before england. I think this is why the Scottish system has such a good reputation.
The rough similarities are:
Scottish kids can leave school at 16 and go to university. I was at uni at the age of 17 and graduated with a hons degree at the age of 21 (Scotland has 4 year courses for uni) - whereas, English students tend to leave school at 18 and do a 3 year university course. Being at Uni for a year whilst under the age of 18 made for some hasty exits from pubs on occasion...!
Scottish students do not pay university fees (except medics I think); English students have to pay fees of up to GBP3000 (US$ 6000) - and there is talk of bringing back grants for Scottish university students whose parents can't afford to pay for their kids rent and so on. The Scottish National Party currently are leading the Scottish Parliment and are embarking on a massive investment in schools. here in Stirling, there are 2 new schools being built.
rd
Antiguan Vista would have dialogue boxes that said:
[continue] [cancel] [maybe] [perhaps tomorrow] [whatever] [is that bob?]
did you know that the USA has an air force base there? I wonder how that would be used if the WTO ruling took effect? an up market Guantanamo for Antiguans perhaps?
rd
my X41 (2525-3CG) with the Intel Pro Wireless card "just worked" with Fedora 7. Even got a huwaei E220 3G modem from (t-mobile UK) working (which I am using now).
Where it will be used is in fraud scoring. The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service. Recognition is useful, but it will not be used to block transactions, it will mostly likely be used to raise a score on a fraud profile for a transaction.
This type of fraud profiling is becoming more important because the UK will be moving to Faster payments at the end of 2007 - where once banks had 3 days to run scanning products (for terrorist account activity and fraud) - they will only have a few minutes. The problem at the moment in the UK is that customers do a lot of electronic payments compared to USA - so many transactions will not have time for all the fraud checks.
so if someone who looks nothing like my description makes a transaction, then the score will increase on the account which can then implement further fraud checks in resulting transactions.
when I designed and built a fraud detection system for a UK mobile operator, we found that when a handset/number had fraud committed on it - it usually was usually picked up by lots of the fraud scanners and would stick out like a sore thumb. Each customer would have an associated fraud score and when it reached a certain point, the fraud team would get involved.