Security technologies these days are pretty well defined, but getting policies right (and making people follow them) is an ongoing battle.
Our company setup a "transparent" proxy server on the border router which requires proxy-auth to access any external web sites and then logs the crap out of you. Since I object to such monitoring I refuse to use it. Whenever a new server gets setup for us to use, like CVS or SVN for example, I find myself getting prompted for access because the server builders put it on a public IP.
I take great delight in telling my manager that I can't do any work until they've followed their own security policies and put an internal system on our internal networks. You'd think they'd learn after the first few times.:)
One time for security's sake my office ethernet port was turned off by IT... because my machine had refused to accept recent XP updates.
I'm curious how you were able to apply the updates while your ethernet port was still off. Did IT come around with a CD for you to install the latest spyware from their CD burning server?
(a) What if you're working for a company like Playboy or Penthouse, or others more risque? Porn is expected to be on your screen since it's a function of the workplace.
(b) Not everybody's working on company-owned hardware. When our company got the bright idea of upgrading everyone to LCD screens they wanted to take away my two 19-inch CRT's and give me a single budget-priced 17" LCD. This was idiotic, but I was told that if I wanted anything better I'd have to buy it myself, so now I have two 20" LCD's on my desk that I bought myself and claim on tax as a work-related expense.
How exactly does one render a 2D barcode in a text message? Surely the article heading was meant to be "Admission Tickets as MMS" or "Admission Tickets as SMS".
You have an excellent point, except that "50ms" finds nothing (as opposed to "50 milliseconds") and "judge" returns more than a few legal articles.
Finding appropriate keywords to search on is not a straightforward task, especially in the presence of typos.
Or it could be that the poor editors who are wading through so many submissions lose track of what's been approved to go online recently. There is more than one editor, you know, so it would be easy to miss something that another editor has already done.
In all seriousness, maybe Google's next big solution should be a way of finding commonality in Slashdot submissions so that editors can easily sort through them all and easily determine if anything similar has been accepted recently.
Yes, and Gibson is well known for *not* being an open source advocate, quite the opposite. So for him to start swinging towards open source is really a big thing.
Ethernet, Bluetooth and 802.11, hey? Bzzt, no. None of those were "supported" by a stock Newton actually, only PCMCIA memory cards.
I've tried various third-party addons to get 802.11 capability on my Newton 2100 and they generally suck. Literally. Battery life on a wireless-enabled Newton suddenly becomes 1 hour or less, regardless of which of about six 802.11 cards I use. You need to start using an AC adaptor, which defeats the purpose of installing the wireless card in the first place.
I'd definitely like to see Newton re-released, though. With today's processor and battery technology (think LiPo's instead of 4 AA's) you could get a Newt with the same handheld foot print (to keep the large writing/drawing area) but much lighter and thinner, better power management software for the built-in Bluetooth and 802.11. An MMC/SD memory card slot to leave the PCMCIA slot free would be nice, too.
The Rosetta system used on Newt is still the best handwriting recognition software ever. Period.
I'll see your 2 cents and raise you half a cent...
No wonder that for mission critical systems in space ships, NASA still uses previous generation computers.
There's other reasons for that, including: proven technology, easier to shield against radiation, and money-poor budgets requiring re-use of hardware.
There will be of course, major privacy concerns about this (imagine someone waving a small device around you and obtaining full personal info and medical records).
These devices won't contain medical records, but I'd hate some script kiddie to start playing Wheel of Fortune with my wireless pacemaker.
Again, why the heck is this called a "new" concept? OSX had it before 2006, office (and other apps) had it for years, but most importantly, Internet had it for ages and is already sick of it and deprecated it.
Yes, metadata is an old concept. It was built into BeFS and other operating systems before it.
Hehe, wait until we have the "600 000 medical records lost (or stolen) from hospital X" news, following similar trends for other important electronic data we see nowadays.
How about blackmail of EMR's dating back to 2003? Not really a hot topic for 2006.
The consequences for not meeting the law's provisions are severe: those holding licenses from States that fail to meet the requirements by 2008 will not be permitted to fly on airplanes or enter federal buildings.
I saw that too, but I have a different spin: What if you can't get a drivers licence because say you suffer from epilepsy or are blind? Does this mean you are barred access to all federal buildings, even to do something about your Social Security payments or organize a passport for overseas travel?
"The cadmium atom that has lost an electron becomes a negatively charged ion, which can then be controlled with an electrical field," said Daniel Stick, a doctoral student in the University of Michigan's physics department who participated in the work.
It's been twenty years since I've done chemistry but last time I checked losing an electron causes an atom to become positively charged - it would have to gain an extra electron to become negatively charged. So is this a typo, or has Quantum Physics turned everything on its head, including Electronic Principles?
Less spam? Or just seeing less of it?
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Choice quotes from TFA:
First, there are multiple spam filters between me and the outside world: some at the companies that forward my email (Google Mail does a very good job), some on my machine, some in the email programs I use.
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
Yet the amount of spam seems to be declining. Postini (www.postini.com) keeps real-time data on the amount of spam it stops. A few years ago, it said spam made up around 80% of all the email circulating. When I looked last week the figure was about 60%.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
More than books
Books are just the beginning for the Sony Reader. It also displays Adobe PDFs, personal documents, blogs, newsfeeds, and JPEGs with the same amazing readability, so you can take your favorite blogs and online newspapers with you. It even plays audio files.
Obviously they've learned a few lessons from their DRM-up-the-wazoo on the Librie, but I am curious how they take the "blockies" out of JPEG's when zooming in to 200%.
Most of the new development staff we've hired in recent years have come from internal applicants in our Technical Support departments who've been through our systems software training programs.
When I went back to uni to do IT in mid-90's (I was an Elec. Eng. originally) I was unpleasantly surprised to find that a large number of incoming students had to be shown where to find the power switches on the lab computers. It seems that not much has changed, with a lot of the graduates we've interviewed having the piece of paper but no real idea of what the hell they're talking about.
I'd say the graduates with any nouse have their jobs and are as happy as Larry - it's the nouse-less ones left behind which are making the noise.
Since everyone around here seems to have affirmed their sexuality by "getting stuck on Superman's penis," did anyone actually notice the plot outline of Superman Returns?
After a long visit to the planet Krypton, the Man Of Steel returns to earth to become the people's saviour once again and reclaim the love of Lois Lane.
When did Krypton get around to putting itself back together, or was the whole I'm-an-alien-from-an-exploded-planet thing just get swept under the rug?
Aside from the point that the laws aren't asking to log content (just logging date/time and each end of the connection) your suggestion is going to do one of two things:
kill the internet as we run out of IPv4 address space - https doesn't work with Host-Header (Shared-IP) web sites because there's no way for a source server to determine which certificate it should be presenting to the connecting client until it sees the http headers (*after* the certificate exchange has occurred) so each web site would need a dedicated IP, or
force IPv6 on everybody at great expense so as to avoid (1).
Even still, though, MS won't want to make consumers buy new PC's or accept something they don't like in order to buy the new Windows for fear of losing business.
OO works almost like MS Office - but be prepared for lots of complaining from users who will say "But Microsoft Office didn't work this way"
Well, just remember that you said "almost like" because some of those complaints are actually valid. I switched to OO.o at home and work recently (because I'm sick to death of the constant upgrades with their ever-increasing prices) and am still trying to break some of my MSO habits.
Try this simple task in Microsoft Word:
(1) In a new document create a 4x4 table and fill it with random junk.
(2) Now pick a row and hover just to the left of the leftmost column (so you get the select row cursor) and click to highlight the row.
(3) Press [Shift-Delete] to cut (and remove) the row.
(4) Click somewhere in the left-most column of one of the other rows and press [Shift-Insert]. The row you cut should be inserted before the current row.
OO.o's Write has several behavioural differences here:
(a) Pressing [Shift-Delete] will cut the row to the clipboard but leave the current row empty in the document (it doesn't remove the row).
(b) Pressing [Shift-Insert] will overwrite the data in the current row. You need to actually Insert a blank row (which inserts after the current one duplicating its style attributes, not before the current one duplicating its style attributes) and then [Shift-Insert] your cut row into that. This is especially painful if you want to insert the cut row just under a Headings row.
For transitional users who've been used to the Microsoft Word way of doing things for years on end, these differences can be confusing and sometimes annoying.
Yes, they're going to Skype but from TFA you must have missed this:
The chairman and chief executive of the world's largest online auction site said the transition to completely free voice communications will not happen in the next year or two, but that could happen in the next three to six years.
I expect that revenue will be raised by advertising, not through the audio channel, but through banner (or pop-up) ads in the Skype client.
Slashdot Mirror
Security technologies these days are pretty well defined, but getting policies right (and making people follow them) is an ongoing battle.
:)
Our company setup a "transparent" proxy server on the border router which requires proxy-auth to access any external web sites and then logs the crap out of you. Since I object to such monitoring I refuse to use it. Whenever a new server gets setup for us to use, like CVS or SVN for example, I find myself getting prompted for access because the server builders put it on a public IP.
I take great delight in telling my manager that I can't do any work until they've followed their own security policies and put an internal system on our internal networks. You'd think they'd learn after the first few times.
Ordinarily I'd agree with you, except for:
(a) What if you're working for a company like Playboy or Penthouse, or others more risque? Porn is expected to be on your screen since it's a function of the workplace.
(b) Not everybody's working on company-owned hardware. When our company got the bright idea of upgrading everyone to LCD screens they wanted to take away my two 19-inch CRT's and give me a single budget-priced 17" LCD. This was idiotic, but I was told that if I wanted anything better I'd have to buy it myself, so now I have two 20" LCD's on my desk that I bought myself and claim on tax as a work-related expense.
How exactly does one render a 2D barcode in a text message? Surely the article heading was meant to be "Admission Tickets as MMS" or "Admission Tickets as SMS".
You have an excellent point, except that "50ms" finds nothing (as opposed to "50 milliseconds") and "judge" returns more than a few legal articles. Finding appropriate keywords to search on is not a straightforward task, especially in the presence of typos.
Or it could be that the poor editors who are wading through so many submissions lose track of what's been approved to go online recently. There is more than one editor, you know, so it would be easy to miss something that another editor has already done.
In all seriousness, maybe Google's next big solution should be a way of finding commonality in Slashdot submissions so that editors can easily sort through them all and easily determine if anything similar has been accepted recently.
Yes, and Gibson is well known for *not* being an open source advocate, quite the opposite. So for him to start swinging towards open source is really a big thing.
Ethernet, Bluetooth and 802.11, hey? Bzzt, no. None of those were "supported" by a stock Newton actually, only PCMCIA memory cards.
I've tried various third-party addons to get 802.11 capability on my Newton 2100 and they generally suck. Literally. Battery life on a wireless-enabled Newton suddenly becomes 1 hour or less, regardless of which of about six 802.11 cards I use. You need to start using an AC adaptor, which defeats the purpose of installing the wireless card in the first place.
I'd definitely like to see Newton re-released, though. With today's processor and battery technology (think LiPo's instead of 4 AA's) you could get a Newt with the same handheld foot print (to keep the large writing/drawing area) but much lighter and thinner, better power management software for the built-in Bluetooth and 802.11. An MMC/SD memory card slot to leave the PCMCIA slot free would be nice, too.
The Rosetta system used on Newt is still the best handwriting recognition software ever. Period.
So he's not really getting any less spam at all, it's just getting hit on the head before it gets to his inbox.
I wonder if by "amount" he means "proportion"? With many more users getting on the internet now than "a few years ago" it's not surprising that the proportion of spam may have dropped a little (overall), but I'd be very surprised if there's actually less spam being generated.
In the last three years I think I've received one spam and two eBay phishing e-mails. I run my own mail domain, so when I register an e-mail address for anywhere I use nospam-[their domain]@[my domain]. This makes things very easy to trace and would seem to have some discouraging effect on places selling their address lists. The phishing e-mails were due to a hardware supplier whose customer database had been comprimised, for example.
Mod parent up!! Deadwood is certainly the case!
Most of the new development staff we've hired in recent years have come from internal applicants in our Technical Support departments who've been through our systems software training programs.
When I went back to uni to do IT in mid-90's (I was an Elec. Eng. originally) I was unpleasantly surprised to find that a large number of incoming students had to be shown where to find the power switches on the lab computers. It seems that not much has changed, with a lot of the graduates we've interviewed having the piece of paper but no real idea of what the hell they're talking about.
I'd say the graduates with any nouse have their jobs and are as happy as Larry - it's the nouse-less ones left behind which are making the noise.
Since everyone around here seems to have affirmed their sexuality by "getting stuck on Superman's penis," did anyone actually notice the plot outline of Superman Returns?
When did Krypton get around to putting itself back together, or was the whole I'm-an-alien-from-an-exploded-planet thing just get swept under the rug?
Aside from the point that the laws aren't asking to log content (just logging date/time and each end of the connection) your suggestion is going to do one of two things:
Well, just remember that you said "almost like" because some of those complaints are actually valid. I switched to OO.o at home and work recently (because I'm sick to death of the constant upgrades with their ever-increasing prices) and am still trying to break some of my MSO habits.
Try this simple task in Microsoft Word:
(1) In a new document create a 4x4 table and fill it with random junk.
(2) Now pick a row and hover just to the left of the leftmost column (so you get the select row cursor) and click to highlight the row.
(3) Press [Shift-Delete] to cut (and remove) the row.
(4) Click somewhere in the left-most column of one of the other rows and press [Shift-Insert]. The row you cut should be inserted before the current row.
OO.o's Write has several behavioural differences here:
(a) Pressing [Shift-Delete] will cut the row to the clipboard but leave the current row empty in the document (it doesn't remove the row).
(b) Pressing [Shift-Insert] will overwrite the data in the current row. You need to actually Insert a blank row (which inserts after the current one duplicating its style attributes, not before the current one duplicating its style attributes) and then [Shift-Insert] your cut row into that. This is especially painful if you want to insert the cut row just under a Headings row.
For transitional users who've been used to the Microsoft Word way of doing things for years on end, these differences can be confusing and sometimes annoying.
I'm sticking with OO.o, though.
Isn't this the day before the day before the day before yesterday's news?
... so to speak. No soul-eating registration required:
Harnessing flea power to create near-perfect rubber