There is nothing I think worth adding to "Marlor's" post to Ars:
I can't comprehend the conspiracy theories flying around about this.
[TrueCyrpt] is a barely-maintained Open Source project (no updates in the past two years), with an outdated, messy code-base, serious build dependency problems, and lacking in full support for the newest Windows release. It likely only has a small development team - perhaps only one or two people.
The developers are absurdly secretive, and when they do come out of hiding to make a statement, they are confrontational (take, for example, their response to Fedora's queries over the clause in their license that reserves the right to sue for copyright infringement).
If this was any other project, we'd all just assume the developers had decided to call it a day. However, because of the nature of the software, everyone assumes security agencies or reptilians are involved.
Maybe the developer was a security researcher who has decided to retire to a tropical island. Or maybe there were two developers, and they have had a dispute. Maybe the primary developer took a job offer at a security firm, with a clause prohibiting him from working on external projects. There are an almost infinite range of possibilities... assuming that the cause was the devious acts of state-sponsored actors is leaping to a pretty big conclusion.
If I developed a piece of security software, and wanted to cease development, I'd make a similar statement.
"Don't use this anymore. It's not maintained, and should therefore be considered insecure".
Otherwise, if a vulnerability is discovered, everyone will scream: "Fix it now! Nobody told us to stop using it!"
The only other "Pandora" that comes to mind is a music streaming service and I doubt that anyone is going to confuse those.
If only life were that simple.
The WiFi Internet radio ships with Pandora.
The Pandora app is available for almost all mobile platforms including the Kindle.
During a presentation last week at RAIN Summit West in Las Vegas...Arbitron SVP Bill Rose and Edison Research President Larry Rosin offered some stats on Pandora, which has an impressive brand awareness recognition rate of 69% among adults 12+ in the US
It figures it'd be the LAPD. What other police force on the west coast would hunger for this kind of invasiveness?
There is nothing on the west coast like the LAPD.
With 10,023 officers and 2,879 civilian staff, it is the third-largest local law enforcement agency in the United States, after the New York City Police Department and the Chicago Police Department. The department serves an area of 498 square miles (1,290 km2) and a population of 3,792,621 people as of the 2010 Census.
The X6 is a spy drone with wireless video and still cameras (in hi-def, infra-red and 0 lux flavors) that can fly autonomously, or as a remote-controlled bot. It has 11 sensors (including gyros, accelerometers, barometers, magnetometers and GPS) and is so easy to pilot, a Wii gamer could do it. Now it will be used by the Ontario Provincial Police and the Saskatoon Police to patrol crime scenes and help gather evidence.
I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
Postal settlements for delivery abroad are made peer-to-peer.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU, French: Union postale universelle) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations.
In 1969, the UPU introduced a new system of payment where fees were payable between countries according to the difference in the total weight of mail between them. These fees were called terminal dues. Ultimately, this new system was fairer when traffic was heavier in one direction than the other. As a matter of example, in 2012, terminal dues for transit from China to the USA was 0.635 SDR/kg, or about 1 USD/kg.
As this affected the cost of the delivery of periodicals, the UPU devised a new ''threshold'' system, which it later implemented in 1991. The system sets separate letter and periodical rates for countries which receive at least 150 tonnes of mail annually. For countries with less mail, the original flat rate is still maintained. The United States has negotiated a separate terminal dues formula with thirteen European countries that includes a rate per piece plus a rate per kilogram; it has a similar arrangement with Canada.
One thing is to have financial information about individuals and their families scattered across multiple entities with defined boundaries and different search mechanisms -- it's another thing entirely to have the same financial info in one nice, convenient, easy-to-search, easy-to-abuse place.
How many private - corporate - entities have the resources needed to cross those boundaries and build a comprehensive, centralized, financial database of their own? How many of these databases already exist? How difficult are they to access?
This is BS. If you compare the amount of females in the IT pool to begin with its hardly surprising to find a similar ratio in the actually hired staff of any company.
Google isn't just any company.
It is a company with the wealth, presence and power needed to draw more women into the IT pool.
Imagine if instead of remaking a movie half a dozen times, we contented ourselves with the original and cultivated an appreciation for film as not just a disposable commodity but an art.
Then we would be forever restricted to watching the silent version of many a story as it was first produced between 1903 and 1929. There is no place in your world for July Garland and "Over The Rainbow" in a Technicolor re-make of "The Wizard of Oz."
No chance for Basil Rathbone. Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey, Jr., Jonny Lee Miller. or Benedict Cumberbatch to try their hand at playing Sherlock Holmes.
Now, on the other hand, can we address the reality that men are FAR more likely than women to be victims of violence, physical intimidation, violent crime, and other physical threats such as military hazards and other job-related physical danger?
My first response to up-modded but unsupported assertions like this is to look at the numbers.
Victims
Victimization rates for both males and females have been relatively stable since 2000.
Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).
Females were most likely to be victims of domestic homicides (63.7%) and sex-related homicides (81.7%)
Males were most likely to be victims of drug- (90.5%) and gang-related homicides (94.6%).
Offenders
Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90% of the total number of offenders.
Young adult black males had the highest homicide offending rate compared to offenders in other racial and sex categories.
White females of all ages had the lowest offending rates of any racial or age groups.
The overall offending rates for both males and females have declined since 1990.
Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was slightly higher than for biological mothers.
However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males.
[1980-2008 Stats sourced from a 2011 USDOJ report]
''Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.'' ----Neal Stephenson
If you take the set of people who might be willing to buy a self-driving car (a set underrepresented on/.)
Much more likely to be over-represented on Slashdot, I would think.
in the meantime, what better way to protect your users from liability than to make it impossible for them to have had any control of the vehicle?
In any activity that is inherently dangerous, the owner of a fully automated system of any kind would be held legally responsible for whatever injuries that are likely to follow.
Licensed by Disney for distribution through YouTube.
239.7 million views.
Searching YouTube for all things Frozen will return 23 million hits, a quarter million hits for the music and lyrics alone, again, all licensed content or "fair use."
Sorry, but, there comes a point where I think having your phone have more and more of this information is going to become more of a problem than a benefit.
If you have diabetes, respiratory problems, heart disease or anxiety disorders severe enough to warrant routine monitoring, chances are quite good your employers, insurance carriers, pharmacies, etc., already know about the problem.
If the Samsung smartphone could read blood sugar levels non-invasively, a diabetic and his insurance company could say goodbye forever to glucometers, lancets and test strips --- saving more than enough money to cover the cost of the phone.
she was 7 in '87, she would of been playing with dolls and kindergarten
You do know Chelsea holds two masters degrees and a newly minted doctorate from Oxford?
She attended Forest Park Elementary School, Booker Arts and Science Magnet Elementary School and Horace Mann Junior High School, which are public schools in Little Rock. She skipped the third grade.
At age four, Clinton had begun taking dance classes in Arkansas, and she continued her dance training at the Washington School of Ballet for several years.
Why should we care what an anonymous coward thinks?
Chelsea received an undergraduate degree at Stanford University and later earned master's degrees from Oxford University and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in May 2014.
Nor perhaps the pursuits one might expect from a financially secure young woman married, pregnant and living in a $10.5 million dollar condo in Manhattan.
The Clinton family is widely respected and feared politically. It is easy to visualize her mother winning the Democratic nomination, perhaps even taking the White House herself.
It's not like the guy sitting in the seat is the actual "driver" of an autonomous car.
He is the one programming the destination. The one who ultimately decides whether the run is within the car's operational parameters. I don't want to see a young child or an impaired adult making those decisions.
The geek tends to assume that the autonomous car will have complete and accurate situational awareness. That it can plan ahead.
I have my doubts.
I learned to drive on country back roads ---- learning to sweep my eyes right and left watching out for traffic approaching a blind crossroads long before they posed any immediate threat. Learning which roads would be flooded in a heavy rain.
Why this steep narrow cut with an S-curve halfway down had earned its reputation as a suicide hill.
Rodger's e-mails and posts to the Internet would be admissible as evidence of premeditated murder.
Once again, a self-made video, uploaded to the world via YouTube, is at the heart of a horrific news event.
Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who authorities say killed six people in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area before fatally shooting himself late Friday, posted at least two self-pitying videos to the video-sharing site shortly before he went on his rampage.
The videos --- in which Rodger calmly and chillingly discusses his sexual frustrations and intent to ''slaughter'' those he claims harmed him --- were removed by YouTube after viewers flagged them. But they were repeatedly re-posted on the site as copies spread across the Internet.
Videos are routinely flagged by YouTube's users; the company reviews videos that have raised concerns and removes them if they violate its community guidelines.
Among other things, the guidelines prohibit videos displaying ''predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment [and] intimidation... and inciting others to commit violent acts.... Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.''
Law enforcement authorities in Santa Barbara said they are analyzing Rodger's videos, which he apparently has posted online since 2012.
Finally, when exactly did the angry rants of a mass murderer become rightfully characterized as a manifesto? Although Rodger's document is a manifestation of emotional disturbance, it hardly qualifies to be called a manifesto. A true manifesto reflects the political ideology of a formidable leader of men, a political force to be reckoned with. Nowhere in his 141 pages does Rodger describe his manuscript in such a way.
He has more room to run away from the mobs of angry geeks. Unless he actually go into the subterranean lairs, aka their mothers' basements, he can avoid most beatdowns.
The geek's talk of revenge and revolution always seem to be in inverse proportion to his actions --- though now and again you are left to wonder if you are looking at someone like the Isla Vista shooter.
Wordnik's recent collection of commonly confused words reminded me that it's been a while since I wrote a post of this sort. Time for another.
Discreet and discrete are often mixed up. It's easily done: not only are they homophones with near-identical spelling, they're also doublets, meaning they diverged from the same original word. In modern English, their spellings and meanings are distinct.
Discreet is probably the more familiar word, and is usually used to refer to people, especially their speech, appearance, or behavior. It means unobtrusive, circumspect and prudent, careful not to attract attention or cause embarrassment, able to keep a secret. Discretion is the noun form.
Discrete generally means separate, non-continuous, individually distinct; it also has technical usages relating to possible parts or values. Discreteness is the related noun.
As code is a form of speech, denying someone a freedom of it is against a democratic constitution.
You won't find unlimited freedom of speech embodied anywhere in American law.
Free speech in American law began with the right to hold to hold unpopular ideas and defend them in open and unconstrained political debate.It has been extended to protect freedom of expression in the arts from governmental interference.
It has never been defined as an unfettered right to lie, cheat and steal.
Code can be used to express an idea.
But most often it is simply a means to achieve some more mundane purpose. To turn on the lights. To flush the toilet.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't comprehend the conspiracy theories flying around about this.
[TrueCyrpt] is a barely-maintained Open Source project (no updates in the past two years), with an outdated, messy code-base, serious build dependency problems, and lacking in full support for the newest Windows release. It likely only has a small development team - perhaps only one or two people.
The developers are absurdly secretive, and when they do come out of hiding to make a statement, they are confrontational (take, for example, their response to Fedora's queries over the clause in their license that reserves the right to sue for copyright infringement).
If this was any other project, we'd all just assume the developers had decided to call it a day. However, because of the nature of the software, everyone assumes security agencies or reptilians are involved.
Maybe the developer was a security researcher who has decided to retire to a tropical island. Or maybe there were two developers, and they have had a dispute. Maybe the primary developer took a job offer at a security firm, with a clause prohibiting him from working on external projects. There are an almost infinite range of possibilities... assuming that the cause was the devious acts of state-sponsored actors is leaping to a pretty big conclusion.
If I developed a piece of security software, and wanted to cease development, I'd make a similar statement.
"Don't use this anymore. It's not maintained, and should therefore be considered insecure".
Otherwise, if a vulnerability is discovered, everyone will scream: "Fix it now! Nobody told us to stop using it!"
''TrueCrypt is not secure,'' official SourceForge page abruptly warns
[Ars stats for Marlor: 1279 posts > registered Oct 3, 2003 > 0.01% of all posts > 0.33 posts per day]
The only other "Pandora" that comes to mind is a music streaming service and I doubt that anyone is going to confuse those.
If only life were that simple.
The WiFi Internet radio ships with Pandora.
The Pandora app is available for almost all mobile platforms including the Kindle.
During a presentation last week at RAIN Summit West in Las Vegas...Arbitron SVP Bill Rose and Edison Research President Larry Rosin offered some stats on Pandora, which has an impressive brand awareness recognition rate of 69% among adults 12+ in the US
Pandora's Audience, Awareness Up [April 2013]
Which in my case, i do. I pay Comcast a monthly 'delivery fee'. what is delivered is of no business to them, just like the post office.
The post office may not care what is in the box but its charges are based on size and weight.
It figures it'd be the LAPD. What other police force on the west coast would hunger for this kind of invasiveness?
There is nothing on the west coast like the LAPD.
With 10,023 officers and 2,879 civilian staff, it is the third-largest local law enforcement agency in the United States, after the New York City Police Department and the Chicago Police Department. The department serves an area of 498 square miles (1,290 km2) and a population of 3,792,621 people as of the 2010 Census.
Los Angeles Police Department
LAPD acquires two drones, to consider employing them for 'narrow' use
The X6 is a spy drone with wireless video and still cameras (in hi-def, infra-red and 0 lux flavors) that can fly autonomously, or as a remote-controlled bot. It has 11 sensors (including gyros, accelerometers, barometers, magnetometers and GPS) and is so easy to pilot, a Wii gamer could do it. Now it will be used by the Ontario Provincial Police and the Saskatoon Police to patrol crime scenes and help gather evidence.
The Draganflyer X6 UAV Police Edition
[March 2009]
I want to send a letter to someone in a different country, say, the USA, or England, I pay Canada Post to deliver it. I do not have to pay the United States Postal Service or Royal Mail to deliver my letter sent from Canada.
Postal settlements for delivery abroad are made peer-to-peer.
The Universal Postal Union (UPU, French: Union postale universelle) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that coordinates postal policies among member nations.
In 1969, the UPU introduced a new system of payment where fees were payable between countries according to the difference in the total weight of mail between them. These fees were called terminal dues. Ultimately, this new system was fairer when traffic was heavier in one direction than the other. As a matter of example, in 2012, terminal dues for transit from China to the USA was 0.635 SDR/kg, or about 1 USD/kg.
As this affected the cost of the delivery of periodicals, the UPU devised a new ''threshold'' system, which it later implemented in 1991. The system sets separate letter and periodical rates for countries which receive at least 150 tonnes of mail annually. For countries with less mail, the original flat rate is still maintained. The United States has negotiated a separate terminal dues formula with thirteen European countries that includes a rate per piece plus a rate per kilogram; it has a similar arrangement with Canada.
Universal Postal Union
One thing is to have financial information about individuals and their families scattered across multiple entities with defined boundaries and different search mechanisms -- it's another thing entirely to have the same financial info in one nice, convenient, easy-to-search, easy-to-abuse place.
How many private - corporate - entities have the resources needed to cross those boundaries and build a comprehensive, centralized, financial database of their own? How many of these databases already exist? How difficult are they to access?
This is BS. If you compare the amount of females in the IT pool to begin with its hardly surprising to find a similar ratio in the actually hired staff of any company.
Google isn't just any company.
It is a company with the wealth, presence and power needed to draw more women into the IT pool.
Imagine if instead of remaking a movie half a dozen times, we contented ourselves with the original and cultivated an appreciation for film as not just a disposable commodity but an art.
Then we would be forever restricted to watching the silent version of many a story as it was first produced between 1903 and 1929. There is no place in your world for July Garland and "Over The Rainbow" in a Technicolor re-make of "The Wizard of Oz."
No chance for Basil Rathbone. Jeremy Brett, Robert Downey, Jr., Jonny Lee Miller. or Benedict Cumberbatch to try their hand at playing Sherlock Holmes.
Who watches TV anymore, let alone with friends, that is just some cruel torture
Sherlock, and his American cousin in Elementary, Game of Thrones....
The geek is being damn well served by both broadcast and cable television. His loss, our gain, if he ignores what is out there.
A statistically significant higher percentage of victims of violent crime are male, consistently, across that survey's data.
How many of the offenders and their victims are single young men? Adolescents? How many of these crimes are alcohol, drug or gang related?
Now, on the other hand, can we address the reality that men are FAR more likely than women to be victims of violence, physical intimidation, violent crime, and other physical threats such as military hazards and other job-related physical danger?
My first response to up-modded but unsupported assertions like this is to look at the numbers.
Victims
Victimization rates for both males and females have been relatively stable since 2000.
Males were more likely to be murder victims (76.8%).
Females were most likely to be victims of domestic homicides (63.7%) and sex-related homicides (81.7%)
Males were most likely to be victims of drug- (90.5%) and gang-related homicides (94.6%).
Offenders
Males committed the vast majority of homicides in the United States at that time, representing 90% of the total number of offenders.
Young adult black males had the highest homicide offending rate compared to offenders in other racial and sex categories.
White females of all ages had the lowest offending rates of any racial or age groups.
The overall offending rates for both males and females have declined since 1990.
Of children under age 5 killed by a parent, the rate for biological fathers was slightly higher than for biological mothers.
However, of children under 5 killed by someone other than their parent, 80% were killed by males.
Sex differences in crime
[1980-2008 Stats sourced from a 2011 USDOJ report]
''Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.'' ----Neal Stephenson
about 90% of all landings done daily by large civil aircraft (737 upward) is done by the autoland system
but an autodrive system with no manual override must be 100% fail-safe.
If you take the set of people who might be willing to buy a self-driving car (a set underrepresented on /.)
Much more likely to be over-represented on Slashdot, I would think.
in the meantime, what better way to protect your users from liability than to make it impossible for them to have had any control of the vehicle?
In any activity that is inherently dangerous, the owner of a fully automated system of any kind would be held legally responsible for whatever injuries that are likely to follow.
Wait, this search engine located at youtube.com - is that not primarly used for pirating music and videos?
Disney's Frozen ''Let It Go'' Sequence Performed by Idina Menzel
Licensed by Disney for distribution through YouTube.
239.7 million views.
Searching YouTube for all things Frozen will return 23 million hits, a quarter million hits for the music and lyrics alone, again, all licensed content or "fair use."
But will it be able to tell you the difference between a heart attack and a panic attack?
In either case the sensible response would be to call 911.
Sorry, but, there comes a point where I think having your phone have more and more of this information is going to become more of a problem than a benefit.
If you have diabetes, respiratory problems, heart disease or anxiety disorders severe enough to warrant routine monitoring, chances are quite good your employers, insurance carriers, pharmacies, etc., already know about the problem.
If the Samsung smartphone could read blood sugar levels non-invasively, a diabetic and his insurance company could say goodbye forever to glucometers, lancets and test strips --- saving more than enough money to cover the cost of the phone.
she was 7 in '87, she would of been playing with dolls and kindergarten
You do know Chelsea holds two masters degrees and a newly minted doctorate from Oxford?
She attended Forest Park Elementary School, Booker Arts and Science Magnet Elementary School and Horace Mann Junior High School, which are public schools in Little Rock. She skipped the third grade.
At age four, Clinton had begun taking dance classes in Arkansas, and she continued her dance training at the Washington School of Ballet for several years.
Chelsea Clinton
Why do we care what she thinks?
Why should we care what an anonymous coward thinks?
Chelsea received an undergraduate degree at Stanford University and later earned master's degrees from Oxford University and Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford in May 2014.
Chelsea Clinton
These are not trivial achievements.
Nor perhaps the pursuits one might expect from a financially secure young woman married, pregnant and living in a $10.5 million dollar condo in Manhattan.
The Clinton family is widely respected and feared politically. It is easy to visualize her mother winning the Democratic nomination, perhaps even taking the White House herself.
An autonomous car should not allow human input. It should come to a stop if the controls fail and remain stopped until help arrives
IF it is safe to stop here.
IF help arrives in time AND IF the kids remain in the car until it does.
It's not like the guy sitting in the seat is the actual "driver" of an autonomous car.
He is the one programming the destination. The one who ultimately decides whether the run is within the car's operational parameters. I don't want to see a young child or an impaired adult making those decisions.
The geek tends to assume that the autonomous car will have complete and accurate situational awareness. That it can plan ahead.
I have my doubts.
I learned to drive on country back roads ---- learning to sweep my eyes right and left watching out for traffic approaching a blind crossroads long before they posed any immediate threat. Learning which roads would be flooded in a heavy rain.
Why this steep narrow cut with an S-curve halfway down had earned its reputation as a suicide hill.
the internet is not a "crime scene"(for this) any more than the postal system and newspaper opinion pieces were 30 years ago..
A crime scene is a location where a crime took place or another location where evidence of the crime may be found.
Crime scene
Rodger's e-mails and posts to the Internet would be admissible as evidence of premeditated murder.
Once again, a self-made video, uploaded to the world via YouTube, is at the heart of a horrific news event.
Elliot Rodger, the 22-year-old man who authorities say killed six people in the Santa Barbara, Calif., area before fatally shooting himself late Friday, posted at least two self-pitying videos to the video-sharing site shortly before he went on his rampage.
The videos --- in which Rodger calmly and chillingly discusses his sexual frustrations and intent to ''slaughter'' those he claims harmed him --- were removed by YouTube after viewers flagged them. But they were repeatedly re-posted on the site as copies spread across the Internet.
Videos are routinely flagged by YouTube's users; the company reviews videos that have raised concerns and removes them if they violate its community guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines prohibit videos displaying ''predatory behavior, stalking, threats, harassment [and] intimidation ... and inciting others to commit violent acts. ... Anyone caught doing these things may be permanently banned from YouTube.''
Law enforcement authorities in Santa Barbara said they are analyzing Rodger's videos, which he apparently has posted online since 2012.
Elliot Rodger video removed by YouTube
Finally, when exactly did the angry rants of a mass murderer become rightfully characterized as a manifesto? Although Rodger's document is a manifestation of emotional disturbance, it hardly qualifies to be called a manifesto. A true manifesto reflects the political ideology of a formidable leader of men, a political force to be reckoned with. Nowhere in his 141 pages does Rodger describe his manuscript in such a way.
So why should we?
Why mass killers need to explain their plan
He has more room to run away from the mobs of angry geeks. Unless he actually go into the subterranean lairs, aka their mothers' basements, he can avoid most beatdowns.
The geek's talk of revenge and revolution always seem to be in inverse proportion to his actions --- though now and again you are left to wonder if you are looking at someone like the Isla Vista shooter.
Wordnik's recent collection of commonly confused words reminded me that it's been a while since I wrote a post of this sort. Time for another.
Discreet and discrete are often mixed up. It's easily done: not only are they homophones with near-identical spelling, they're also doublets, meaning they diverged from the same original word. In modern English, their spellings and meanings are distinct.
Discreet is probably the more familiar word, and is usually used to refer to people, especially their speech, appearance, or behavior. It means unobtrusive, circumspect and prudent, careful not to attract attention or cause embarrassment, able to keep a secret. Discretion is the noun form.
Discrete generally means separate, non-continuous, individually distinct; it also has technical usages relating to possible parts or values. Discreteness is the related noun.
Keeping 'discreet' and 'discrete' discreetly discrete
Incorrect. Present nothing. Say nothing. Do not open your mouth. Stare into space. Daydream.
Good advice. Changes nothing.
When the geek has a run in with the law no power on earth can persuade him to shut up.
As code is a form of speech, denying someone a freedom of it is against a democratic constitution.
You won't find unlimited freedom of speech embodied anywhere in American law.
Free speech in American law began with the right to hold to hold unpopular ideas and defend them in open and unconstrained political debate .It has been extended to protect freedom of expression in the arts from governmental interference.
It has never been defined as an unfettered right to lie, cheat and steal.
Code can be used to express an idea.
But most often it is simply a means to achieve some more mundane purpose. To turn on the lights. To flush the toilet.