I'm not sure they actually learned anything. If you look at the language
"We want to make sure that security experts can get a hold of us when they discover new ways to abuse our service ".
It seems clear that they keep the public position that it is the researchers' fault for finding the holes and making Snapchat look like amateurs.
Wow. Somebody needs a hug, although not from anybody in AA.
Some people find the acceptance and awareness of groups to be of comfort, without having to adopt the theism found in the 12 step books. There's all kinds of different ways to treat an addiction, and although some ways are more public that others (Like AA). There are atheist AA groups, Sober Recovery, SOS, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy. There's antipsychotics and antidepressants. There's antabuse - which does exactly the same thing as the "vaccine" - only it only lasts up to 5 days, not 30. There used to be subcutaneous antabuse implants which lasted 30 days too. People still drank on them. People will still take drugs while on methadone. It's in an addict's nature to take something.
Anything that helps somebody away from their addiction is a good thing. To dismiss the value of any particular approach because of a few zealous wingnuts is simply wrongheaded and harmful. Addictions - be it alcohol, crack, heroin, gambling, food - they all kill.
Attitudes that all you need is self control and more willpower display out of a complete lack of knowledge the biology of addiction, and show a disturbing lack of empathy for what an addict goes through.
If the "vaccine" works for a few people, it has value as a treatment strategy. If SSRI medication works for some, it has value. If talk therapy, be it in a professional or informal group setting like AA, work, that also has value. Some people will need none of these aids, some will will need more that what can be found.
Just like calling something a cure does not make something a cure, cursing at something and calling it awful does not make it an awful thing.
Having worked in law enforcement, and then in software design where one of the projects was risk analysis for fraud detection, all I can do is wobble my head in disbelief.
The model will catch those people whose parameters match the model - initially because the model is a reasonable guess, but over time and the players and methods change, the model will appear more successful since those people are being targeted more often. Profile all dark, left handed persons from Denmark or Scotland, and sure enough, you will more than likely find more dark, lefthanded bad persons from those areas. Even if the models are adaptive, they will always be adaptive post hoc.
Once again, it's theater, and some are going to make a lot money by promising things that can't be delivered.
Looking at the above replies, I may be reiterating previous comments So be it - it just means that more than one person had the same enlightened thoughts.
If your client wants to monitor all the traffic coming into and out of his LAN, then good luck to him. Honestly, what kind of paranoid person wants that much control over their family members? Moreover, what kind of person wants to suck you into their paranoid, evil, misshapen worldview? There is likely, in my opinion, something seriously flawed with their thought processes. That and/or he is probably lying to you about his real reasons. Saving the family from the evils of the internet? You can't protect a person from all of the evils of the internet through blacklists. The internet comes at you from all sides. Monitoring software will not do anything except bolt the doors after the horses have fled. Proper education about social engineering and decent values imbued by proper parenting will do far more than packet filtering. The only thing that "client" is suggesting doing is teaching the people on his LAN to be afraid. Of him.
Maybe his wife is chatting up an ex high school flame. Maybe his kids are hanging out with ne'er do wells, doing drugs or just reading books not on his approved list. His family problems should never require your technological solutions. Getting involved in something like this is akin to walking into the monkey cage at the zoo. The only thing that is going to happen is that you are going to be clawed, abused, shrieked at and covered with monkey byproducts.
You have to draw an ethical line somewhere.
The nightmare of maintaining someone else's code is often the fact the original they don't comment, don't explain their reasons, and are frequently hard to communicate with, or in one of my current projects, dead.
Having a map of the code is great, but it doesn't really explain how or why it does what it does. In this case, unfortunately, you have to do the heavy lifting. Understand how it starts, how it's controlled, and what the points of input and output are. I'm guessing that you have at least the source code.
You've got a lot of work, it's not easy, but it can be done. You're smart enough for them to have hired you.
And while you're in there tinkering, do the next guy a favor and comment the gorram thing.
It's terrific and way beyond cool. As a former frequent flier, I'm thrilled that somebody has actually gotten something useful for their frequent flier miles besides more travel. Let's be real here. After the first couple of flights, the glamour of frequent travel wears off.
The last thing you want after spending 50 weeks a year out of town is to be more out of town. No matter how cool the place that you are going to is. Midnight flights, the disruption of your home life, the fact you don't actually get paid for having your butt on a plane, only for being there...
Richard Branson has scored a marketing coup with the translation of air flight miles to a space flight chance of a lifetime. Bravo to him, and to the people who step up and take it.
It's possible she's a shill. Film studios use their employees to talk up films on web sites - publishing houses are probably no different. There's an interesting article on it on the Hollywoodbitchslap web site.
We had a similar problem back in 1998 at a client site. Basically, we had to strip out all of the word macros embedded in a document. And there were tons of them! What we ended up doing is creating a Visual Basic program that :
Opens a directory
Gets a list of files
Instantiates Word within VB and opens one of the documents.
Runs a macro, to reformat
Uses a save as
Closes the Word Document with a
Goes to the next file
Almost any command (may be all, I never checked;)) that you can perform in Word can be performed through a VB program remotely. Don't present dialog boxes...They'll want keystroke input. And hide the Word Window...it will require O/S overhead that really doesn't help you.
Note: After running the conversion, take a sample set of documents and validate the conversion. I can't remember where we got the math, but it was like sqrt(n + 1), where n was the number of documents.
We converted thousands of documents automatically between Word 95 and Word 97 this way.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure they actually learned anything. If you look at the language "We want to make sure that security experts can get a hold of us when they discover new ways to abuse our service ". It seems clear that they keep the public position that it is the researchers' fault for finding the holes and making Snapchat look like amateurs.
Wow. Somebody needs a hug, although not from anybody in AA. Some people find the acceptance and awareness of groups to be of comfort, without having to adopt the theism found in the 12 step books. There's all kinds of different ways to treat an addiction, and although some ways are more public that others (Like AA). There are atheist AA groups, Sober Recovery, SOS, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy. There's antipsychotics and antidepressants. There's antabuse - which does exactly the same thing as the "vaccine" - only it only lasts up to 5 days, not 30. There used to be subcutaneous antabuse implants which lasted 30 days too. People still drank on them. People will still take drugs while on methadone. It's in an addict's nature to take something. Anything that helps somebody away from their addiction is a good thing. To dismiss the value of any particular approach because of a few zealous wingnuts is simply wrongheaded and harmful. Addictions - be it alcohol, crack, heroin, gambling, food - they all kill. Attitudes that all you need is self control and more willpower display out of a complete lack of knowledge the biology of addiction, and show a disturbing lack of empathy for what an addict goes through. If the "vaccine" works for a few people, it has value as a treatment strategy. If SSRI medication works for some, it has value. If talk therapy, be it in a professional or informal group setting like AA, work, that also has value. Some people will need none of these aids, some will will need more that what can be found. Just like calling something a cure does not make something a cure, cursing at something and calling it awful does not make it an awful thing.
Having worked in law enforcement, and then in software design where one of the projects was risk analysis for fraud detection, all I can do is wobble my head in disbelief. The model will catch those people whose parameters match the model - initially because the model is a reasonable guess, but over time and the players and methods change, the model will appear more successful since those people are being targeted more often. Profile all dark, left handed persons from Denmark or Scotland, and sure enough, you will more than likely find more dark, lefthanded bad persons from those areas. Even if the models are adaptive, they will always be adaptive post hoc. Once again, it's theater, and some are going to make a lot money by promising things that can't be delivered.
Looking at the above replies, I may be reiterating previous comments So be it - it just means that more than one person had the same enlightened thoughts. If your client wants to monitor all the traffic coming into and out of his LAN, then good luck to him. Honestly, what kind of paranoid person wants that much control over their family members? Moreover, what kind of person wants to suck you into their paranoid, evil, misshapen worldview? There is likely, in my opinion, something seriously flawed with their thought processes. That and/or he is probably lying to you about his real reasons. Saving the family from the evils of the internet? You can't protect a person from all of the evils of the internet through blacklists. The internet comes at you from all sides. Monitoring software will not do anything except bolt the doors after the horses have fled. Proper education about social engineering and decent values imbued by proper parenting will do far more than packet filtering. The only thing that "client" is suggesting doing is teaching the people on his LAN to be afraid. Of him. Maybe his wife is chatting up an ex high school flame. Maybe his kids are hanging out with ne'er do wells, doing drugs or just reading books not on his approved list. His family problems should never require your technological solutions. Getting involved in something like this is akin to walking into the monkey cage at the zoo. The only thing that is going to happen is that you are going to be clawed, abused, shrieked at and covered with monkey byproducts. You have to draw an ethical line somewhere.
The nightmare of maintaining someone else's code is often the fact the original they don't comment, don't explain their reasons, and are frequently hard to communicate with, or in one of my current projects, dead. Having a map of the code is great, but it doesn't really explain how or why it does what it does. In this case, unfortunately, you have to do the heavy lifting. Understand how it starts, how it's controlled, and what the points of input and output are. I'm guessing that you have at least the source code. You've got a lot of work, it's not easy, but it can be done. You're smart enough for them to have hired you. And while you're in there tinkering, do the next guy a favor and comment the gorram thing.
It's terrific and way beyond cool. As a former frequent flier, I'm thrilled that somebody has actually gotten something useful for their frequent flier miles besides more travel. Let's be real here. After the first couple of flights, the glamour of frequent travel wears off.
The last thing you want after spending 50 weeks a year out of town is to be more out of town. No matter how cool the place that you are going to is. Midnight flights, the disruption of your home life, the fact you don't actually get paid for having your butt on a plane, only for being there...
Richard Branson has scored a marketing coup with the translation of air flight miles to a space flight chance of a lifetime. Bravo to him, and to the people who step up and take it.
http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/hbs.cgi?feature= 621
We had a similar problem back in 1998 at a client site. Basically, we had to strip out all of the word macros embedded in a document. And there were tons of them! What we ended up doing is creating a Visual Basic program that : Opens a directory Gets a list of files Instantiates Word within VB and opens one of the documents. Runs a macro, to reformat Uses a save as Closes the Word Document with a Goes to the next file Almost any command (may be all, I never checked ;)) that you can perform in Word can be performed through a VB program remotely. Don't present dialog boxes...They'll want keystroke input. And hide the Word Window...it will require O/S overhead that really doesn't help you.
Note: After running the conversion, take a sample set of documents and validate the conversion. I can't remember where we got the math, but it was like sqrt(n + 1), where n was the number of documents.
We converted thousands of documents automatically between Word 95 and Word 97 this way.