Ironically, when I clicked that link, I thought "Woah! The server's trying to send me a file that's not an image! It's must be 0wned!"
But I carried on anyway because of my blind faith in all things Google, and was greeted by a rather ugly screenshot. And maybe an infected desktop or something...
Wouldn't it be easy if you had one card for ID, public transport, payments, building access, getting your treatment, etc?
If you are willing to give up essential liberties for mere convenience, you don't deserve those liberties. Go ahead and apply for the card. Just don't complain when your life gets turned upside down when somethinggoeswrong.
I can understand why people would be against software patents for obvious ideas, such as the one-click patent. But are these folks against all software patents, no matter how innovative and complex? If so, why? What makes software patents so special that they should not be allowed?
There are various arguments for disallowing all software (and similar "business methods" patents), as they are currently outlawed in Europe. However, the main one is that software is basically too slippery for any patents office adequately to adjudicate on. Physical inventions are far easier to award patents for because things like prior art have a least some chance of being discovered and you can't easily derive a machine from another machine.
This is of course an unfortunate state of affairs for the writers of software. We all know that writing genuinely innovative algorithms is just as hard as inventing a method for stripping the wings off flies. Perhaps in the far future, super-human intelligence will be able to judge the originality of software and business methods to award bone fide innovators with patents. But until that happy day, we'll be stuck with the likes of Darl McBride trying to rip us all off and work the system.
"Over the period 2004-2007 the final energy consumption in the EU-27 Member States decreased, while electricity end-use consumption in EU-27 continued to grow, but at a lower rate than the economic growth."
How about this: the color of the light emitted by CFLs and LEDs is ugly, and sometimes even hard on the eyes (especially with LEDs).
So fruckingh what? I also love the taste of bluefin tuna, but at least I wonder whether I should be eating it.
In any case, the fact that you're used to yellowish light is just personal preference. I assume you've never stayed in a house in a place like Japan or China, where the default domestic light is usually provided by cold white neon bulbs.
Wifi detector cars. Sniff the connection, if there's an encrypted connection that doesn't use a government-approved private key
Hm. Well, just tunnel in that case I suppose. Still, it's hard to imagine any democratic government being successful in pushing through laws that mandated government-approved keys for general encryption. At least, they tried something similar with the Clipper Chip and it didn't get far.
My prediction: it'll meet with a similar fate to Apple TV. It's bravely entering the market to change the game, but there's there's no real game to change.
For a moment I thought: "Huh, a brown-skinned asian, that's rather unusual!"
Then I got it: in UK, when you say "Asian", you mean Indian or Pakistani. Technically, that is not wrong; but in most other countries, I believe, if you say "Asian", everyone will think of a person from the Far East -- i.e., Japan, China, Korea. And even if you do say "Indian", you still have to specify: Indian as one from India, not the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The reason why people in the UK do not refer to Asians as "Indians" is because of a county called Pakistan. I am Scottish, and if you called me English I would, respectfully, rip your teeth out.
Dropping connections that want to hanshake encryptions / look encrypted.
IP-bans of proxies; general useleness of open proxies; ease of proxy detections.
---
Do not solve social problem with technical means, it will never work (see: drm).
That's probably true, but I wonder how far things will go? For example, where I live, there are already kids setting up local wireless mesh networks to share their music collections and other stuff around. Sure, these are small and operated by pizza-munching geeks, but if the idea gained general traction and the Internet as we know it simply became something similar to cable TV today (plus perhaps a comms network similar to email), would not the people be able to steal the Internet revolution back? I'm also interested in whether this might mean a return in some form at least to the ancient (and perhaps default) mode of human life: that of small, tightly-knit communities.
Totally agree with that. Bandwidth costs money, sure the cost might be dropping, but why would you (as an ISP) actually WANT your consumers to go using all that bandwidth that you are selling them?
At the risk of taking this way OT, why does it cost money? I mean, I know why it costs some money (everything costs money), but why does it cost so much money that ISP will actively pursue the prosecution of their own customers to stop too much use of it?
Go ahead. It won't bite. Some things are over-engineered.
I am not a programmer, but in my experience most (good, productive, well thought-of) programmers always seem to default to writing stuff from the ground up rather than grab a library or consider an existing framework from a 3rd party. At least, it's annoyed the hell out of me on more than several occasions when devs take ages writing stuff, only for us to find out later that they could have just used an existing library.
Call it "stakeholder syndrome" - I don't give much of a crap about whether something is elegant under the hood. I just want it to work, keep working, and be maintainable by others when the original developer leaves the building.
In fact... this is exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was written for. "The people" defending themselves from attack.
I'm afraid you'll find that armed conflict has progressed rather in favour of the state since that amendment was written. At least, it's fairly difficult for private citizens to own tanks and helicopter gun-ships. How long you think a few thousand people carrying small arms are going to last against a fuel air explosive? One, perhaps two seconds maximum I would say.
No. The 2nd amendment is there to make sure certain, shall we say, "special" interest groups in the population can keep certain others at bay. Let's leave it there before anyone mentions the Ku Klux Klan.
I understand the somewhat easy humor here, but I've never completely understood the desire to intentionally offend people often displayed by the most rampant cussers out there. I think that somehow people who intentionally cuss think they are "stickin' it to the Man", when "the Man" is nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps, but swearing is a very mysterious thing and the whole attitude against it baffles me. Depending on the context, swearing can cause as much comfort and amusement as it does shock and anger. Personally, I find swearing uplifting if it's done well (google Philip Larkin), and simply embarrassing if not. 10 year-old doesn't know how to swear - its a bit like hearing a beginner playing a violin. Adults generally do, and it aids their communication no end. Emotional connection is greatly curtailed by not swearing under some circumstances.
I dunno, perhaps it's a cultural thing. It always seems to be Americans who care about swearing. The rest of the (English-speaking) world cares a bit, but not nearly as much I think. Just as the Aussies.
That's why its best to use the middle way. Have own domain and some way to quickly create a new address on it (even if they all go to same mailbox). Always use a new address for different sites and purposes. That way if one of them starts to get problems with spam, you know who sold your address and can easily disable it.
Yeah - trouble with that is you then get wildcard spam. Once the bots realise your mail server will accept anything on your domain - boosh - 10,000% permanent increase. This means that disabling one address reduces the onslaughts by an amount vanishingly close to zero.
Log on to Facebook and pick some random college dudes and duettes, and ask them to friend you. Most of them will oblige.
Now marvel at the incredibly unintelligible friends feed you will start to see. It's fascinating. So too is their willingness for their friends to friend you, even though nobody knows who the hell you are.
I am not sure whether this indicates a lowering of level or just a change in the way the world works. Latin got obsoleted in "serious" scientific publications. Could correct English become obsolete in the same way ?
Not really, since Latin was an advanced language in many ways as rich as English, it's just that it wasn't being spoken and didn't have the necessary lexical input so it was replaced by English over time. But even so, I suppose the real test of your idea would be whether the same ideas could be communicated just as well using a modified form of English. After all, who cares if I'm using "cuz" rather than "because" or "lol" rather than whatever the correct form of "lol" is in standard English? If what I'm telling you makes sense to you, and it's what I want to communicate to you, then that's all that matters.
Try reading some English written a couple of hundred years ago (for example here) . It's not exactly fluent, and contains many things we might today call grammatical mistakes.
I am a UI designer with an interest in security-related human factors.
3DS as deployed by MasterCard is also fundamentally insecure because its based on an anti-pattern: trust by proxy without offering any easy way to verify that trust. Visa's implementation is marginally better becuase it echoes a "secret phrase" to you on the screen before you input your pin, thereby allowing you to verify that it's them, and not some random phisher.
The trouble is most people just trust in the application of the anti-pattern. How then can anyone make sense of the fact that on the one hand, their bank exhorts them to be on the lookout for fraudulent emails and websites pretending to be their bank, while on the other hand their bank does EXACTLY that with 3DS.
Not only that, but there are apparently exploits in the wild that deploy browser-based man-in-the-middle attacks by throwing up fake 3DS forms on checkout pages. I recently received a mail from Zopa (a financial services website) that said the following:
"Thanks to one of our members who reported that during the process of paying funds into his lender account, he was presented with a ‘verified by Visa’ screen that requested his ATM pin code. Suffice it to say that Zopa does not use this kind of verification so you should never submit any passwords or codes should you be prompted to do so via such a screen when using the Zopa site.
We have investigated the issue and can confirm that the problem is an issue entirely localized to this member’s local environment and does not affect the Zopa site or its servers. Nevertheless, we wanted to make you aware so that you can avoid filling in your details should you be presented with a similar screen. "
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.
And Google turns up rather a lot of reported incidents of chips and their readers being compromised on a grand scale. Here are just the first three I found:
American news is the best you can get in the world. Woodward and Bernstein were able to publish news so scandalous it forced Nixon to resign. Does any other government allow that?
It was a mistake. Governments learned their lesson so Watergate won't happen again. Just ask the boys and girls down in Mexico talking (in secret) about ACTA.
Slashdot Mirror
"Nina Maria Kleivan said she chose to dress her year-old daughter Faustina up to explore "the meaning of evil".
That's what you call a Faustian pact then.
<rimshot>
Ironically, when I clicked that link, I thought "Woah! The server's trying to send me a file that's not an image! It's must be 0wned!"
But I carried on anyway because of my blind faith in all things Google, and was greeted by a rather ugly screenshot. And maybe an infected desktop or something...
Wouldn't it be easy if you had one card for ID, public transport, payments, building access, getting your treatment, etc?
If you are willing to give up essential liberties for mere convenience, you don't deserve those liberties. Go ahead and apply for the card. Just don't complain when your life gets turned upside down when something goes wrong.
I can understand why people would be against software patents for obvious ideas, such as the one-click patent. But are these folks against all software patents, no matter how innovative and complex? If so, why? What makes software patents so special that they should not be allowed?
There are various arguments for disallowing all software (and similar "business methods" patents), as they are currently outlawed in Europe. However, the main one is that software is basically too slippery for any patents office adequately to adjudicate on. Physical inventions are far easier to award patents for because things like prior art have a least some chance of being discovered and you can't easily derive a machine from another machine.
This is of course an unfortunate state of affairs for the writers of software. We all know that writing genuinely innovative algorithms is just as hard as inventing a method for stripping the wings off flies. Perhaps in the far future, super-human intelligence will be able to judge the originality of software and business methods to award bone fide innovators with patents. But until that happy day, we'll be stuck with the likes of Darl McBride trying to rip us all off and work the system.
There's more mercury in a can of tuna.
(Apparently.)
Apparently? Citation needed.
Never mind, I got one:
"Over the period 2004-2007 the final energy consumption in the EU-27 Member States decreased, while electricity end-use consumption in EU-27 continued to grow, but at a lower rate than the economic growth."
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/energyefficiency/pdf/EnEff_Report_2009.pdf
So - nice try Mr Trollhat, your bullshit has now been called.
Now that most of the European Union has effectively outlawed incadescents and replaced them with CFLs, has the EU power demand dropped?
Nope.
Citation needed (sigh).
How about this: the color of the light emitted by CFLs and LEDs is ugly, and sometimes even hard on the eyes (especially with LEDs).
So fruckingh what? I also love the taste of bluefin tuna, but at least I wonder whether I should be eating it.
In any case, the fact that you're used to yellowish light is just personal preference. I assume you've never stayed in a house in a place like Japan or China, where the default domestic light is usually provided by cold white neon bulbs.
Wifi detector cars. Sniff the connection, if there's an encrypted connection that doesn't use a government-approved private key
Hm. Well, just tunnel in that case I suppose. Still, it's hard to imagine any democratic government being successful in pushing through laws that mandated government-approved keys for general encryption. At least, they tried something similar with the Clipper Chip and it didn't get far.
So it's a mobile media displayer? That's it?
My prediction: it'll meet with a similar fate to Apple TV. It's bravely entering the market to change the game, but there's there's no real game to change.
For a moment I thought: "Huh, a brown-skinned asian, that's rather unusual!"
Then I got it: in UK, when you say "Asian", you mean Indian or Pakistani. Technically, that is not wrong; but in most other countries, I believe, if you say "Asian", everyone will think of a person from the Far East -- i.e., Japan, China, Korea. And even if you do say "Indian", you still have to specify: Indian as one from India, not the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
The reason why people in the UK do not refer to Asians as "Indians" is because of a county called Pakistan. I am Scottish, and if you called me English I would, respectfully, rip your teeth out.
Dropping connections that want to hanshake encryptions / look encrypted.
IP-bans of proxies; general useleness of open proxies; ease of proxy detections.
---
Do not solve social problem with technical means, it will never work (see: drm).
That's probably true, but I wonder how far things will go? For example, where I live, there are already kids setting up local wireless mesh networks to share their music collections and other stuff around. Sure, these are small and operated by pizza-munching geeks, but if the idea gained general traction and the Internet as we know it simply became something similar to cable TV today (plus perhaps a comms network similar to email), would not the people be able to steal the Internet revolution back? I'm also interested in whether this might mean a return in some form at least to the ancient (and perhaps default) mode of human life: that of small, tightly-knit communities.
Totally agree with that. Bandwidth costs money, sure the cost might be dropping, but why would you (as an ISP) actually WANT your consumers to go using all that bandwidth that you are selling them?
At the risk of taking this way OT, why does it cost money? I mean, I know why it costs some money (everything costs money), but why does it cost so much money that ISP will actively pursue the prosecution of their own customers to stop too much use of it?
Go ahead. It won't bite. Some things are over-engineered.
I am not a programmer, but in my experience most (good, productive, well thought-of) programmers always seem to default to writing stuff from the ground up rather than grab a library or consider an existing framework from a 3rd party. At least, it's annoyed the hell out of me on more than several occasions when devs take ages writing stuff, only for us to find out later that they could have just used an existing library.
Call it "stakeholder syndrome" - I don't give much of a crap about whether something is elegant under the hood. I just want it to work, keep working, and be maintainable by others when the original developer leaves the building.
In fact... this is exactly the sort of thing the 2nd amendment was written for. "The people" defending themselves from attack.
I'm afraid you'll find that armed conflict has progressed rather in favour of the state since that amendment was written. At least, it's fairly difficult for private citizens to own tanks and helicopter gun-ships. How long you think a few thousand people carrying small arms are going to last against a fuel air explosive? One, perhaps two seconds maximum I would say.
No. The 2nd amendment is there to make sure certain, shall we say, "special" interest groups in the population can keep certain others at bay. Let's leave it there before anyone mentions the Ku Klux Klan.
"On Ubuntu, FlightGear can now be installed using the "synaptic" tool"
Nope. It's on 1.9.1-1ubuntu1 as far as I can see.
I understand the somewhat easy humor here, but I've never completely understood the desire to intentionally offend people often displayed by the most rampant cussers out there. I think that somehow people who intentionally cuss think they are "stickin' it to the Man", when "the Man" is nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps, but swearing is a very mysterious thing and the whole attitude against it baffles me. Depending on the context, swearing can cause as much comfort and amusement as it does shock and anger. Personally, I find swearing uplifting if it's done well (google Philip Larkin), and simply embarrassing if not. 10 year-old doesn't know how to swear - its a bit like hearing a beginner playing a violin. Adults generally do, and it aids their communication no end. Emotional connection is greatly curtailed by not swearing under some circumstances.
I dunno, perhaps it's a cultural thing. It always seems to be Americans who care about swearing. The rest of the (English-speaking) world cares a bit, but not nearly as much I think. Just as the Aussies.
That's why its best to use the middle way. Have own domain and some way to quickly create a new address on it (even if they all go to same mailbox). Always use a new address for different sites and purposes. That way if one of them starts to get problems with spam, you know who sold your address and can easily disable it.
Yeah - trouble with that is you then get wildcard spam. Once the bots realise your mail server will accept anything on your domain - boosh - 10,000% permanent increase. This means that disabling one address reduces the onslaughts by an amount vanishingly close to zero.
when seated at my desktop computer, I still prefer to use the iPhone app over the full-size web browser
Bzzzzt! WHat?
Log on to Facebook and pick some random college dudes and duettes, and ask them to friend you. Most of them will oblige.
Now marvel at the incredibly unintelligible friends feed you will start to see. It's fascinating. So too is their willingness for their friends to friend you, even though nobody knows who the hell you are.
I am not sure whether this indicates a lowering of level or just a change in the way the world works. Latin got obsoleted in "serious" scientific publications. Could correct English become obsolete in the same way ?
Not really, since Latin was an advanced language in many ways as rich as English, it's just that it wasn't being spoken and didn't have the necessary lexical input so it was replaced by English over time. But even so, I suppose the real test of your idea would be whether the same ideas could be communicated just as well using a modified form of English. After all, who cares if I'm using "cuz" rather than "because" or "lol" rather than whatever the correct form of "lol" is in standard English? If what I'm telling you makes sense to you, and it's what I want to communicate to you, then that's all that matters.
Try reading some English written a couple of hundred years ago (for example here) . It's not exactly fluent, and contains many things we might today call grammatical mistakes.
... maybe:
http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/05/11/235953/Is-the-Microsoft-public-sector-deal-good-value-for-Britain.htm
I am a UI designer with an interest in security-related human factors.
3DS as deployed by MasterCard is also fundamentally insecure because its based on an anti-pattern: trust by proxy without offering any easy way to verify that trust. Visa's implementation is marginally better becuase it echoes a "secret phrase" to you on the screen before you input your pin, thereby allowing you to verify that it's them, and not some random phisher.
The trouble is most people just trust in the application of the anti-pattern. How then can anyone make sense of the fact that on the one hand, their bank exhorts them to be on the lookout for fraudulent emails and websites pretending to be their bank, while on the other hand their bank does EXACTLY that with 3DS.
Not only that, but there are apparently exploits in the wild that deploy browser-based man-in-the-middle attacks by throwing up fake 3DS forms on checkout pages. I recently received a mail from Zopa (a financial services website) that said the following:
"Thanks to one of our members who reported that during the process of paying funds into his lender account, he was presented with a ‘verified by Visa’ screen that requested his ATM pin code.
Suffice it to say that Zopa does not use this kind of verification so you should never submit any passwords or codes should you be prompted to do so via such a screen when using the Zopa site.
We have investigated the issue and can confirm that the problem is an issue entirely localized to this member’s local environment and does not affect the Zopa site or its servers. Nevertheless, we wanted to make you aware so that you can avoid filling in your details should you be presented with a similar screen. "
Words fail me.
You can't clone a chip, period. The devices which read them are tamper resistant and tamper evident. It's not been cracked yet. It's been done really well - unsurprisingly, because the stakes are so high.
Really?
You'd better tell the people whose chip cards have been cloned.
And Google turns up rather a lot of reported incidents of chips and their readers being compromised on a grand scale. Here are just the first three I found:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2963534/Three-fraudsters-jailed-for-elaborate-petrol-station-credit-card-scam.html
http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/Cards-compromised-in-petrol-station.4870282.jp
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=1025761
American news is the best you can get in the world. Woodward and Bernstein were able to publish news so scandalous it forced Nixon to resign. Does any other government allow that?
It was a mistake. Governments learned their lesson so Watergate won't happen again. Just ask the boys and girls down in Mexico talking (in secret) about ACTA.