So we've got a creature with tentacles infiltrating a nuclear power plant in japan. All we need now is for them to get exposed to some of the radiation and we'll be all set for some real live bad hentai.
He used social engineering to figure out the code, thus circumventing the security and getting access to something he wasn't supposed to have. You're saying it wasn't a hack just because it was easy to do? Plenty of "real" hackers have broken into systems because the companies running them never changed the default password.
If big corporations want hacking systems and circumventing security to be a crime for us then it ought to be a crime for them as well, regardless of how hard or easy it was to circumvent that security.
The usual connotation (though not denotation) of "synthetic" is "an artificially made substance/thing that closely mimics a natural occurring substance/thing." Thus synthetic fiber, synthetic oil, and now synthetic organs.
I can't think of what the technical term would be for the things you're citing (cybernetic implants?) but that's not what's being discussed here. One is trying to restore lost functionality by duplicating lost or damaged parts of the body and the other is trying to add entirely new functionality by adding bits that never existed before.
Yeah, i've been paying attention and doing that too. I've been compartmentalizing my "personal profiles" and by now i've got at least a dozen different profiles on various "social" sites and i also have at least six different email addresses. However Google is the only company i've dealt that decided to take one of my pre-existing email addresses and convert it into a public social profile.
First of all that's kind of a pain, and second of all since many of your friends probably went along with Google's encouragement and used their real names it's possible that other people who aren't your friends could make the same inference as well, which could be a problem if privacy is of concern for you.
I'm not saying it's impossible to be at least somewhat private using Google+ and I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to be public and share that kind of info if they want, but the fact that Google tries to make it a "difficult to opt-out" scenario depending on what email name you chose for your original account bugs me a bit.
I have never used my "real" identity with Google, I do not know where you are getting the idea that you must?
Perhaps "force" is too strong a word, but it's certainly an attempt to encourage you to do so with some steps taken to enforce the encouragement.
The gripe i have in particular is that everything seems to be pretty publicly linked with your Google email account. In order to to use Buzz and now presumably Google+ you have to create a Google Profile and provide a "real" name. There's nothing stopping you from providing a fake name in the profile of course, but it's going to be publicly linked with your email account.
So _if_ you originally picked an email name (back when it seemed like all it was going to be was an email name) that is rather identifiable with your real life identity there's no way to hide behind an alias using that account, unlike a lot of other social services which doesn't automatically share the email address you used to sign up for the service with everyone.
Now of course there's nothing stopping you from creating a new email address and setting up a profile for that one (once it comes out of beta of course) but then you've got to deal with migrating relevant stuff over from your old account to your new account.
And of course that's not even considering the fact that because they publicly link your email address with your profile and encourage you to use your real name for your profile then it's quite likely that a number of the people you'd want to include in your friend circles (or whatever they're called) will be using their real names (or something that is trivially linked with their real identities) which means that pretty soon it will probably be possible to figure out your real identity just from social analysis based on your connections.
I'm still not happy with their attempt to force us to use our real identities for social networking (though to be fair, it's not that that's any different from what Facebook tries to do) but i am definitely happy that they're going with a by invite beta test this time rather than rolling it all out to _everyone_ at once, privacy "bugs" and all, like they did with Buzz.
I'm sure I saw in some BBC program (Horizon?) a claim that it was possible to use this technology to predict a person's action not only before they did it but before they even became *aware* of the decision they were going to make
Either bullshit or quite unsettling.
There is a middle ground in this case between "untrue" and "bad." I've seen the same studies, showing (theoretically) that what we're going to do is already decided before we actually carry out the action, but it doesn't necessarily negate the idea of freewill or anything like that. The mind is not a simple machine, it is incredibly complex and your consciousness only represents, and is only aware of, a fraction of all the activity going on. There are subconscious feelings you don't fully realize you have or don't realize how they will impact certain decisions, there are autonomous responses that will kick in before you get the chance to think about an action, there are trained reflexes that short-circuit the regular decision making process. At least one such study claims that many actions are started "automatically" but higher levels of consciousness then have the option to veto it before it's actually carried out. This is probably exactly how people can literally have second thoughts about actions (although for a lot of people there are unfortunate cases where the conscious mind is a little late and tries to veto the action after it's already being carried out.)
So no, neither our thoughts nor our actions are under 100% conscious control all the time, but that's not anything that anyone with even a basic understanding of human nature didn't know already.
Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook. I have an account there but i don't use it. However my sister posts to Facebook a lot. She tried to set up a group thing so she could just post updates(?) to certain people, but she found when she tried to add people that it was sharing the results of who she added in ways that she wasn't comfortable with. (Again, not being a Facebook user the details weren't entirely clear to me.) She ended up killing the group and apologizing to everyone about it.
So it seems that Facebook's version of groups is constructed in a way that a lot of people feel is kind of broken, whereas from the sounds of it G+'s version is constructed a lot more like the Friend Groups in LJ which she and i both find quite easy to work with.
I don't think the effect is huge, but since i switched from a Rav4 to a Prius i've noticed that my driving habits have gotten a little more conservative, and i think the main factor is the little current and cumulative "miles per gallon" readings on the display. Trying to keep it above 45 mpg can be kinda fun, and it really doesn't seem to affect how quickly i get anywhere very much.
I used to gun the motor a lot more in the Rav4 just cause it was fun and there wasn't much reason not to (the difference in mileage and thus the difference in how often i had to fill up seemed pretty marginal) but now that i've got direct and immediate feedback playing with the mpg gauges is also fun, even if in an entirely different way, and now it's the marginal difference in time that i'm dismissing rather than the marginal difference in mileage. (And i still drive faster than i probably ought to, and i still will gun my car from time to time just for the fun of it, just nowhere near as often.)
Are there any good before/after screenshot comparisons? (As in comparing now with a couple days ago, not the now and 1997 comparison in the linked article, and full screen rather than individual elements like in the other article.)
They already had some kind of bar at the top before, so the only difference i noticed is that it turned black. I figure if i don't immediately notice the change it _probably_ isn't that bad. Not like when they switched to the ugly new favicon or made the font size huge.
Well the one good thing we definitely seem to have gotten out of the Sony fiasco is the corporate realization that any company with a significant "social" or consumer side is much better off announcing at least some details as quickly as possible as soon as they realize they've been hacked.
One hopes that those same corporations have _also_ learned that better security is necessary, but even if they have we're not going to see the effects of _that_ lesson for awhile.
Considering you've been modded Insightful instead of Funny, I feel the need to point that this is not actually in the bible.
Are you aware that there are actually two versions of the ten commandments in the bible? And that the second set (after Moses broke the first tablets) starts with "Observe what I command you today. See, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites." Now you could argue about the exact wording but in the context it was pretty clear that god wasn't going to just convince them to get up and leave peacefully on their own, the jews were supposed to do their part by killing a whole bunch of them. That's certainly not the only example of violence being condoned or encouraged by the bible, but it's certainly one of the more prominent.
And before you get into the whole OT vs NT thing you seem to be getting into later in the thread, may i point out that your words are "I feel the need to point that this is not actually in the bible."
The last time i checked most versions of the christian bible included both the OT and the NT. We can get into a long debate about in what way the NT overrides the OT, and how god may have changed his mind about some things or whatever. But the god-approved killing and violence is most definitely in the bible.
Well i'm not suggesting that the decision should be accepted blindly either, just that we should be judging it on the technical merits, not based on the very recent (especially considering the pace at which the US government works) acquisition by Microsoft.
I wonder how many people are going to find a reason to complain about this? And i wonder how many of those people would have complained if the announcement had been made before Skype was purchased by Microsoft?
I ask this because i admit that my initial response was "oh look, the government is buying into the Microsoft monoculture once again" before i stopped myself and realized that wasn't very fair.
"Run FF with no plugins" seems to be a common suggestion, but it is not a good one. Mozilla makes a big deal out of how Firefox can be customized. They make adding add-ons as easy as possible with an option to search for and install them right in the menu. Regular users _like_ using plug-ins/add-ons to improve their browsing experience, and in this very article Mozilla's response to businesses complaining about the current situation is that they'd rather make things better for regular users than for Enterprise users.
Altogether that means that neither Mozilla nor any reasonable supporter of Mozilla can put forth "well just uninstall all your plugins" as the solution for every problem. (And i have seen it suggested as the response to complaints about memory usage, complaints about CPU usage, and complaints about stability issues.)
If regular users like using plug-ins and Mozilla really does want to make things better for regular users, then they need to figure out how to handle plug-ins better. (Assuming that the fault actually _is_ with the plug-ins and not Firefox itself.) Either that or just remove the ability to use plug-ins entirely, but i can't really see them being willing to go that route. It would be even more unpopular than simultaneously supporting them but telling users not to use them, which seems to be the current unofficial stance.
I've currently got three Firefox windows open with a total of about 35 tabs open between them. So i just started Chrome and created the same setup, three windows with 35 tabs between them. The one difference is that in chrome i just opened up 35 copies of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. (I can try a more thorough test later but that seemed like a reasonable compromise for expediency's sake.)
Firefox.exe of course has one process open, which according to Process Explorer is consuming 461,952 K private bytes and 884,152 K virtual bytes.
Chrome.exe has five process running. Private byte usage for those processes ranges from 15,000 K to 166,000 K and totals 390,000 K. Virtual size ranges from 148,000 K to 283,000 K and totals 1,061,000 K.
I have one extension installed in Chrome and a little under two dozen plugins and add-ons installed in Firefox.
So base memory usage for Chrome really doesn't seem any better than Firefox, it just makes it harder to keep track of by splitting the usage up into multiple processes. Now i know that Firefox has issues with memory bloat during long periods of continual use. I can't personally speak for Chrome since i don't use it very much (i'm not fond of the minimalist approach to UI) but i do have reasonably tech-savvy friends who use it extensively and complain about having to shut it down on a regular basis to recover memory.
...use Process Explorer, sort by process name, and total up (separately) the private bytes and virtual bytes? What's the non-trivial part that i'm not aware of?
Since Google is actually in the business of selling ads, i wonder if FTC would complain less if Google actually had one branch of the company pay another branch of the company for the ad space? It would be rather ironic if so, since that's the exact same technique movie studios use to hide profits from successful movies.
We are clearly having different experiences. When i actually totaled up all the separate chrome processes i found that the resource usage really wasn't all that disparate from Firefox.
Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.
I'm pretty sure "Johnny" isn't considering international trade relations and the resulting corporate offshoring when deciding what to do with his free time and/or study time. I certainly didn't give any kind of thought to that thing when i was a kid, and i expect the usual answers of "what do you want to be when you grow up" are based far more on what that individual finds cool than on a coldhearted analysis of future earning potential. By the time they reach middle school i expect most people are barely starting to get out of that mindset.
It's not exactly a technically innovative idea, but i like it a whole hell of a lot better than the "solution" most broadband companies seem to be deciding on, which is "more caps and more fees!"
So how do they make any money off of this? Is it all ads on their website? Or do they throw in a short commercial before they connect your call? I'm pretty sure the companies whose phone "security" they're bypassing aren't paying them for the privilege.
And technically speaking the minimum mpg for a car is zero (or perhaps undefined) since cars can have breakdowns, and failing to perform regular maintenance will screw over your average as well. Yet somehow we manage to have at least somewhat useful guidelines on what the mileage is for cars. There is some base level of minimum competency that even the government can and has met in the past. I think it's pretty silly to assume that they're going to get tripped up by something that obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
So we've got a creature with tentacles infiltrating a nuclear power plant in japan. All we need now is for them to get exposed to some of the radiation and we'll be all set for some real live bad hentai.
He used social engineering to figure out the code, thus circumventing the security and getting access to something he wasn't supposed to have. You're saying it wasn't a hack just because it was easy to do? Plenty of "real" hackers have broken into systems because the companies running them never changed the default password.
If big corporations want hacking systems and circumventing security to be a crime for us then it ought to be a crime for them as well, regardless of how hard or easy it was to circumvent that security.
The usual connotation (though not denotation) of "synthetic" is "an artificially made substance/thing that closely mimics a natural occurring substance/thing." Thus synthetic fiber, synthetic oil, and now synthetic organs.
I can't think of what the technical term would be for the things you're citing (cybernetic implants?) but that's not what's being discussed here. One is trying to restore lost functionality by duplicating lost or damaged parts of the body and the other is trying to add entirely new functionality by adding bits that never existed before.
Yeah, i've been paying attention and doing that too. I've been compartmentalizing my "personal profiles" and by now i've got at least a dozen different profiles on various "social" sites and i also have at least six different email addresses. However Google is the only company i've dealt that decided to take one of my pre-existing email addresses and convert it into a public social profile.
First of all that's kind of a pain, and second of all since many of your friends probably went along with Google's encouragement and used their real names it's possible that other people who aren't your friends could make the same inference as well, which could be a problem if privacy is of concern for you.
I'm not saying it's impossible to be at least somewhat private using Google+ and I'm not saying that people shouldn't be able to be public and share that kind of info if they want, but the fact that Google tries to make it a "difficult to opt-out" scenario depending on what email name you chose for your original account bugs me a bit.
I have never used my "real" identity with Google, I do not know where you are getting the idea that you must?
Perhaps "force" is too strong a word, but it's certainly an attempt to encourage you to do so with some steps taken to enforce the encouragement.
The gripe i have in particular is that everything seems to be pretty publicly linked with your Google email account. In order to to use Buzz and now presumably Google+ you have to create a Google Profile and provide a "real" name. There's nothing stopping you from providing a fake name in the profile of course, but it's going to be publicly linked with your email account.
So _if_ you originally picked an email name (back when it seemed like all it was going to be was an email name) that is rather identifiable with your real life identity there's no way to hide behind an alias using that account, unlike a lot of other social services which doesn't automatically share the email address you used to sign up for the service with everyone.
Now of course there's nothing stopping you from creating a new email address and setting up a profile for that one (once it comes out of beta of course) but then you've got to deal with migrating relevant stuff over from your old account to your new account.
And of course that's not even considering the fact that because they publicly link your email address with your profile and encourage you to use your real name for your profile then it's quite likely that a number of the people you'd want to include in your friend circles (or whatever they're called) will be using their real names (or something that is trivially linked with their real identities) which means that pretty soon it will probably be possible to figure out your real identity just from social analysis based on your connections.
I'm still not happy with their attempt to force us to use our real identities for social networking (though to be fair, it's not that that's any different from what Facebook tries to do) but i am definitely happy that they're going with a by invite beta test this time rather than rolling it all out to _everyone_ at once, privacy "bugs" and all, like they did with Buzz.
I'm sure I saw in some BBC program (Horizon?) a claim that it was possible to use this technology to predict a person's action not only before they did it but before they even became *aware* of the decision they were going to make
Either bullshit or quite unsettling.
There is a middle ground in this case between "untrue" and "bad." I've seen the same studies, showing (theoretically) that what we're going to do is already decided before we actually carry out the action, but it doesn't necessarily negate the idea of freewill or anything like that. The mind is not a simple machine, it is incredibly complex and your consciousness only represents, and is only aware of, a fraction of all the activity going on. There are subconscious feelings you don't fully realize you have or don't realize how they will impact certain decisions, there are autonomous responses that will kick in before you get the chance to think about an action, there are trained reflexes that short-circuit the regular decision making process. At least one such study claims that many actions are started "automatically" but higher levels of consciousness then have the option to veto it before it's actually carried out. This is probably exactly how people can literally have second thoughts about actions (although for a lot of people there are unfortunate cases where the conscious mind is a little late and tries to veto the action after it's already being carried out.)
So no, neither our thoughts nor our actions are under 100% conscious control all the time, but that's not anything that anyone with even a basic understanding of human nature didn't know already.
Disclaimer: I don't use Facebook. I have an account there but i don't use it. However my sister posts to Facebook a lot. She tried to set up a group thing so she could just post updates(?) to certain people, but she found when she tried to add people that it was sharing the results of who she added in ways that she wasn't comfortable with. (Again, not being a Facebook user the details weren't entirely clear to me.) She ended up killing the group and apologizing to everyone about it.
So it seems that Facebook's version of groups is constructed in a way that a lot of people feel is kind of broken, whereas from the sounds of it G+'s version is constructed a lot more like the Friend Groups in LJ which she and i both find quite easy to work with.
I don't think the effect is huge, but since i switched from a Rav4 to a Prius i've noticed that my driving habits have gotten a little more conservative, and i think the main factor is the little current and cumulative "miles per gallon" readings on the display. Trying to keep it above 45 mpg can be kinda fun, and it really doesn't seem to affect how quickly i get anywhere very much.
I used to gun the motor a lot more in the Rav4 just cause it was fun and there wasn't much reason not to (the difference in mileage and thus the difference in how often i had to fill up seemed pretty marginal) but now that i've got direct and immediate feedback playing with the mpg gauges is also fun, even if in an entirely different way, and now it's the marginal difference in time that i'm dismissing rather than the marginal difference in mileage. (And i still drive faster than i probably ought to, and i still will gun my car from time to time just for the fun of it, just nowhere near as often.)
Are there any good before/after screenshot comparisons? (As in comparing now with a couple days ago, not the now and 1997 comparison in the linked article, and full screen rather than individual elements like in the other article.)
They already had some kind of bar at the top before, so the only difference i noticed is that it turned black. I figure if i don't immediately notice the change it _probably_ isn't that bad. Not like when they switched to the ugly new favicon or made the font size huge.
Well the one good thing we definitely seem to have gotten out of the Sony fiasco is the corporate realization that any company with a significant "social" or consumer side is much better off announcing at least some details as quickly as possible as soon as they realize they've been hacked.
One hopes that those same corporations have _also_ learned that better security is necessary, but even if they have we're not going to see the effects of _that_ lesson for awhile.
Considering you've been modded Insightful instead of Funny, I feel the need to point that this is not actually in the bible.
Are you aware that there are actually two versions of the ten commandments in the bible? And that the second set (after Moses broke the first tablets) starts with "Observe what I command you today. See, I will drive out before you the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites." Now you could argue about the exact wording but in the context it was pretty clear that god wasn't going to just convince them to get up and leave peacefully on their own, the jews were supposed to do their part by killing a whole bunch of them. That's certainly not the only example of violence being condoned or encouraged by the bible, but it's certainly one of the more prominent.
And before you get into the whole OT vs NT thing you seem to be getting into later in the thread, may i point out that your words are "I feel the need to point that this is not actually in the bible."
The last time i checked most versions of the christian bible included both the OT and the NT. We can get into a long debate about in what way the NT overrides the OT, and how god may have changed his mind about some things or whatever. But the god-approved killing and violence is most definitely in the bible.
This is simple to fix! Everyone, make sure to start all your passcodes with "4" instead of "1" and this attack will be easily foiled!
Well i'm not suggesting that the decision should be accepted blindly either, just that we should be judging it on the technical merits, not based on the very recent (especially considering the pace at which the US government works) acquisition by Microsoft.
I wonder how many people are going to find a reason to complain about this? And i wonder how many of those people would have complained if the announcement had been made before Skype was purchased by Microsoft?
I ask this because i admit that my initial response was "oh look, the government is buying into the Microsoft monoculture once again" before i stopped myself and realized that wasn't very fair.
"Run FF with no plugins" seems to be a common suggestion, but it is not a good one. Mozilla makes a big deal out of how Firefox can be customized. They make adding add-ons as easy as possible with an option to search for and install them right in the menu. Regular users _like_ using plug-ins/add-ons to improve their browsing experience, and in this very article Mozilla's response to businesses complaining about the current situation is that they'd rather make things better for regular users than for Enterprise users.
Altogether that means that neither Mozilla nor any reasonable supporter of Mozilla can put forth "well just uninstall all your plugins" as the solution for every problem. (And i have seen it suggested as the response to complaints about memory usage, complaints about CPU usage, and complaints about stability issues.)
If regular users like using plug-ins and Mozilla really does want to make things better for regular users, then they need to figure out how to handle plug-ins better. (Assuming that the fault actually _is_ with the plug-ins and not Firefox itself.) Either that or just remove the ability to use plug-ins entirely, but i can't really see them being willing to go that route. It would be even more unpopular than simultaneously supporting them but telling users not to use them, which seems to be the current unofficial stance.
Solution: Run Chrome
I've currently got three Firefox windows open with a total of about 35 tabs open between them. So i just started Chrome and created the same setup, three windows with 35 tabs between them. The one difference is that in chrome i just opened up 35 copies of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. (I can try a more thorough test later but that seemed like a reasonable compromise for expediency's sake.)
Firefox.exe of course has one process open, which according to Process Explorer is consuming 461,952 K private bytes and 884,152 K virtual bytes.
Chrome.exe has five process running. Private byte usage for those processes ranges from 15,000 K to 166,000 K and totals 390,000 K. Virtual size ranges from 148,000 K to 283,000 K and totals 1,061,000 K.
I have one extension installed in Chrome and a little under two dozen plugins and add-ons installed in Firefox.
So base memory usage for Chrome really doesn't seem any better than Firefox, it just makes it harder to keep track of by splitting the usage up into multiple processes. Now i know that Firefox has issues with memory bloat during long periods of continual use. I can't personally speak for Chrome since i don't use it very much (i'm not fond of the minimalist approach to UI) but i do have reasonably tech-savvy friends who use it extensively and complain about having to shut it down on a regular basis to recover memory.
...use Process Explorer, sort by process name, and total up (separately) the private bytes and virtual bytes? What's the non-trivial part that i'm not aware of?
Since Google is actually in the business of selling ads, i wonder if FTC would complain less if Google actually had one branch of the company pay another branch of the company for the ad space? It would be rather ironic if so, since that's the exact same technique movie studios use to hide profits from successful movies.
We are clearly having different experiences. When i actually totaled up all the separate chrome processes i found that the resource usage really wasn't all that disparate from Firefox.
Get rid of offshoring, and Johnny will want to code.
I'm pretty sure "Johnny" isn't considering international trade relations and the resulting corporate offshoring when deciding what to do with his free time and/or study time. I certainly didn't give any kind of thought to that thing when i was a kid, and i expect the usual answers of "what do you want to be when you grow up" are based far more on what that individual finds cool than on a coldhearted analysis of future earning potential. By the time they reach middle school i expect most people are barely starting to get out of that mindset.
It's not exactly a technically innovative idea, but i like it a whole hell of a lot better than the "solution" most broadband companies seem to be deciding on, which is "more caps and more fees!"
So how do they make any money off of this? Is it all ads on their website? Or do they throw in a short commercial before they connect your call? I'm pretty sure the companies whose phone "security" they're bypassing aren't paying them for the privilege.
And technically speaking the minimum mpg for a car is zero (or perhaps undefined) since cars can have breakdowns, and failing to perform regular maintenance will screw over your average as well. Yet somehow we manage to have at least somewhat useful guidelines on what the mileage is for cars. There is some base level of minimum competency that even the government can and has met in the past. I think it's pretty silly to assume that they're going to get tripped up by something that obvious.