If everybody posting on YouTube is to be considered a candidate for going crazy with guns, and suspended, then schools are going to become a lot emptier.
The "hack" proved that databases with huge amounts of sensitive data (not just users, passwords, and personal private information by the way) were easily accessible via an SQL injection attack. In theory, they could have downloaded the lot, but it would have taken a huge amount of time and resources to do so using remote SQL injection. Their objectives were not criminal use of the data, but to embarrass Sony, and probably massage their own egos. They did not need everything to do that. Be thankful that this group launched the attack, and hope they did so before a criminal enterprise grabbed all the data. The damage from exposing this small sample, especially with the content available to assist in mitigation, will probably be pretty limited. That would not be true if the mafia silently acquired the data, and used it before the data breach came to light.
I really like the idea of an open source, community content, translation system. Maybe, at some point in the future, Apertium might develop to the point it can be compared with Google Translate. Right now, it is no near.
Google supports nearly 60 languages, including all the most important languages worldwide. It can usually automatically identify the input language and provide understandable translations in any of the 58 supported languages. Apertium supports a handful of European languages, and cannot even support translation of some permutations of the languages it does include.
Apertium needs a huge group of contributors, similar to that enjoyed by Wikipedia, as well as linguists and engineers from around the world. Given that, maybe the need for proprietary translators can be assigned to history. Today, they are essential.
"Verizon will be eliminating its unlimited smartphone data plan this summer. No longer will one be able to pay $30 a month to have unlimited data. This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to pay more for mobile data.'"
This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to find a better phone vendor'.
First, I accept that use of nuclear power will need to continue. That said, to believe the Fukishima nuclear accident is anything short of disastrous shows a high level of ignorance. This is an area with quite high population densities where
expert opinion is already saying that a 10km radius around the plants will be uninhabitable for a generation or more;
dangerous levels of radiation, necessitating evacuations, have already been detected over 40km from the plants;
several people have already been hospitalized for treatment of very high radiation exposure;
three huge explosions, causing destruction of the concrete containment buildings, cooling systems and monitoring equipment (as well, in at least one case, damage to the steel containment vessel) have already occurred;
major releases of highly radioactive water into the seas near the plants have already occurred;
the safety of food supplies in the area has already been jeopardized.
Meanwhile, attempts to stabilize the situation and end the emergency continue. There remains the possibility that the worst is not yet over.
I think it is too early to draw full conclusions, but I think we should already demand
no new boiling water reactors should be built near major population centres;
nuclear fuels allowed in nuclear reactors should be limited to those with short half lives (ie no plutonium as in Fukishima 3) until there is unanimous agreement among nuclear engineers that containment is guaranteed under even the most extreme circumstances.
... an explanation that I am willing to accept for why I appear to be overweight. Obviously, I am just living in an area where the gravitational pull is unusually strong. The same reason explains my low level of activity. More effort is needed to move, so I am justified in moving less.
40 year old badly designed reactors survived the worst earthquake and tsunami in living memory... not much of a story there
This may or may not turn out to be substantially correct. Frankly, I doubt we shall be able to state this with any confidence for quite a while. Further, I do think that there are much safer (but less economic) designs than boiling water reactors, but I have yet to be convinced that modern boiling water designs are a big advance on the older designs. The problem still seems to be that accidents are potentially very difficult to contain. Remember that the initial events in Japan were not worst case. Three of the six reactors were in shut down mode in advance of the earthquake and the other three shut down correctly before the tsunami. The situation would have been quickly critical if the reactors could not be shut down before major damage occurred (surely feasible if unlikely).
Well, technically, I think it could be done. I created a Windows image at one point without IE and added IE7 back as a VMware ThinApp package. Even if IE invoked higher priority programs, these were also sandboxed (assuming no bugs in ThinApp).
I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons.
SCO had a really weak case from the beginning. However, in fairness, I must point out that their legal representation over the last couple of years has been mostly excellent. Stuart Singer is a highly skilled lawyer in the prime of his career. In the jury trial, Judge Stewart commented that the lawyering was some of the best he had ever seen. If you look back at the 10th circuit hearing of the appeal of Judge Kimball's original decisions, you will see that (against the odds) Singer outargued Novell's lawyers to win most of the critical points. I have no idea why BSF is fighting this so hard. (Perhaps, a major firm in Redmond is making it worth their while?) Whatever the reason, they are playing a weak hand for all it is worth.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you tried to read any of those old floppies? Any of mine with data I care about were transferred to harddisk (and my regular backups) long ago. It really does not take long except for the ones with read errors (couple of minutes a floppy). I can remember, years ago, many occasions when data could not be read from old floppies. I also have a customer who ended up with real problems recently. They have an old accounting program that will not run some operations without a readable copy protected floppy. Yes, the floppy became unreadable.
Well, the United Nations charter was signed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, but not in the Golden Gate Park (no idea of the exact time it was signed). I guess this is the 65th anniversary of a significant event. Good excuse for a celebration. What are the laws surrounding drinking alcohol in the Golden Gate Park?
First, it is a fact that installing Linux on some ancient and not so ancient PCs is tough. That said, the problems are often with the specific distribution rather than being endemic. I always keep a recent Knoppix live CD on hand. If I cannot boot Knoppix on the PC (having tried the various useful boot switches available) then I assume making things work on that PC will be too hard. If I can boot Knoppix, making it work with other recent distributions is only a matter or working out what was wrong and resolving the problem.
When asking for help, you need to develop the combination of a thick skin and a grovelling disposition. In my experience, those who are most knowledgeable are helpful, but very very busy. Most of the time, you need to rely on arseholes who have time on their hands to help, but find it more fun to make you suffer first.
Say, you have an idea for improving the efficiency of solar panels. Commercializing it will cost many millions of dollars, but there is a healthy expanding market. Why not? Well, if there are several patents held by other organizations on inferior solar panels, but including necessary aspects of your better design, this severely restricts future profits from sale of the improved panels, and the viability of development.
Unfortunately, this is not just theoretical. It is the what happens time and time again. Often, the obvious aspects of some technology get patented early which makes it uneconomic to do the necessary optimization of the process for a decade or more.
there's got to be some way we can put the fault on Micro$oft?
Most people on/. are too young to properly comprehend the situation. Blaming Microsoft for everything that goes wrong in IT only became standard operating procedure in the 1990s. Since the system is supposedly based on a 1980s era Data General mini, we need to resurrect our blame processes from that era. This failure was clearly engineered by IBM. Not only that, but they are using their huge muscle to block third party maintenance of the hardware.
Hey, many visitors to Congress go there because they want to know how their government works. The experience you relate shows that they are doing their best to demonstrate. Why else do you think legislation can take so long and so much legislation fall by the wayside because it cannot be completed. The rules for our Congress critters and Senators are as time consuming and nonsensical as those for visitors.
I agree with all your points, with a few caveats that I shall mostly not bother with.
For your own information
There is no problem sending ZIP (or other compressed format) files through Gmail, depending on the names of the embedded files. It is trying to block executable files within the zip archive.
To overcome the problem sending executable files through Gmail. just change the filetype. For instance, change "myprog.exe" to "myprog.exe.rename", "myscript.vbs" to "myscript.vbs.rename" and "myarchive.zip" with embedded executables to "myarchive.zip.rename". Everything is then fine.
Your post made be laugh. Thanks for that. But, seriously, Fastmail.FM is not a free email service. The "Guest" account is severely crippled (as you correctly point out) but is really only intended to allow people to get a feel for the service before paying to use the service for real.
As for your point that serious FM users know all the names and positions of the key folks at FM, that is because of the open communication on the EmailDiscussions forums. It is a compact, transparent organization with good people.
Teh Google is reading my mail, but then it's ignoring most of it. Since the government is already reading my mail, who cares about google?
If you are using Fastmail.FM with secure login, the government most likely is not reading your mail. I suspect NSA can break SSL, but I am confident it is expensive and they only do so on an extremely selective basis.
Okay, so could someone who is familiar with who these guys are explain what they have to offer? From a quick look, my impression is that as a consumer who doesn't necessarily need 5 9's of reliability, there isn't much reason for me to use them over Gmail.
For most casual email users (and even some not so casual) Gmail is quite sufficient. I happen to use Gmail extensively (but not exclusively) myself. However, I have several customers who are small business users and, for them, Fastmail.FM is usually a much superior alternative. It's not just a question of reliability (though FM, today, is more reliable then Gmail) but also because of features. Gmail has better search and a cleaner UI than FM, but otherwise all the feature advantages lie with FM. For instance
an executive being able to share some of his emails with his PA but not others;
support for multiple personalities so that an entrepreneur can easily wear multiple hats switching intuitively between them;
the ability to select which emails get forwarded to your smart phone based on almost any criteria;
very easy realtime backup of both received and sent emails to a backup server (for which I invariably use Gmail)
These are the kinds of things that really matter to many users.
it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
I guess "cheap" is a subjective term. The additional cost to upgrade from "Full" to "Enhanced" membership (6GB email space plus 2GB file space) is US$20 per year. Casual email users might balk at that, but is is surely an acceptable cost for people who use email as a critical tool.
Self-encrypting viruses that choose to infect non-common running process images (i.e. avoid Windows system files) might have different signatures everywhere and still require manual analysis.
Hmmm... This is somewhat similar to an issue mentioned in the article: polymorphic viruses. It raises an interesting question. Do existing AV products try to detect such behavior in newly executed code? I am really not sure how tricky the algorithms would be to detect code that is trying to encrypt itself or modify its own executable code. However, most regular software (funnily enough excepting security software trying to avoid detection by malware!) does not need to do this, so such code should probably be blocked and reported by default.
It is worth noting that the disk drives at the museum are not first generation. An original IBM 350 weighed over a ton! It had a capacity of about 4.4 MB and a peak transfer rate a little over 8KB per sec. It is amazing to realize that a modern consumer 2TB drive has the capacity of about 400,000 IBM 350 drives and a transfer rate over 10,000 times faster.
... I have yet to see any application based on any large "cloud" based service have response times as bad as their site right now. A 20x slowdown would under load would be orders of magnitude better than they are achieving. Hmmm... could one of the reasons some companies prefer to outsource applications be that there is extra capacity to handle peak load conditions?
Slashdot Mirror
Dilbert's take on Internet logic
The "hack" proved that databases with huge amounts of sensitive data (not just users, passwords, and personal private information by the way) were easily accessible via an SQL injection attack. In theory, they could have downloaded the lot, but it would have taken a huge amount of time and resources to do so using remote SQL injection. Their objectives were not criminal use of the data, but to embarrass Sony, and probably massage their own egos. They did not need everything to do that. Be thankful that this group launched the attack, and hope they did so before a criminal enterprise grabbed all the data. The damage from exposing this small sample, especially with the content available to assist in mitigation, will probably be pretty limited. That would not be true if the mafia silently acquired the data, and used it before the data breach came to light.
Google supports nearly 60 languages, including all the most important languages worldwide. It can usually automatically identify the input language and provide understandable translations in any of the 58 supported languages. Apertium supports a handful of European languages, and cannot even support translation of some permutations of the languages it does include.
Apertium needs a huge group of contributors, similar to that enjoyed by Wikipedia, as well as linguists and engineers from around the world. Given that, maybe the need for proprietary translators can be assigned to history. Today, they are essential.
This move is designed to 'force heavy data users to find a better phone vendor'.
Meanwhile, attempts to stabilize the situation and end the emergency continue. There remains the possibility that the worst is not yet over.
I think it is too early to draw full conclusions, but I think we should already demand
I love science!
This may or may not turn out to be substantially correct. Frankly, I doubt we shall be able to state this with any confidence for quite a while. Further, I do think that there are much safer (but less economic) designs than boiling water reactors, but I have yet to be convinced that modern boiling water designs are a big advance on the older designs. The problem still seems to be that accidents are potentially very difficult to contain. Remember that the initial events in Japan were not worst case. Three of the six reactors were in shut down mode in advance of the earthquake and the other three shut down correctly before the tsunami. The situation would have been quickly critical if the reactors could not be shut down before major damage occurred (surely feasible if unlikely).
Well, technically, I think it could be done. I created a Windows image at one point without IE and added IE7 back as a VMware ThinApp package. Even if IE invoked higher priority programs, these were also sandboxed (assuming no bugs in ThinApp).
I find it curious that Linux on the desktop should be so well accepted in some markets (especially Latin America) and resisted so vigorously in others. Anyway, this is sad news, whatever the reasons.
Read this and then post it prominently on a popular Australian website.
SCO had a really weak case from the beginning. However, in fairness, I must point out that their legal representation over the last couple of years has been mostly excellent. Stuart Singer is a highly skilled lawyer in the prime of his career. In the jury trial, Judge Stewart commented that the lawyering was some of the best he had ever seen. If you look back at the 10th circuit hearing of the appeal of Judge Kimball's original decisions, you will see that (against the odds) Singer outargued Novell's lawyers to win most of the critical points. I have no idea why BSF is fighting this so hard. (Perhaps, a major firm in Redmond is making it worth their while?) Whatever the reason, they are playing a weak hand for all it is worth.
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you tried to read any of those old floppies? Any of mine with data I care about were transferred to harddisk (and my regular backups) long ago. It really does not take long except for the ones with read errors (couple of minutes a floppy). I can remember, years ago, many occasions when data could not be read from old floppies. I also have a customer who ended up with real problems recently. They have an old accounting program that will not run some operations without a readable copy protected floppy. Yes, the floppy became unreadable.
Well, the United Nations charter was signed on June 26, 1945 in San Francisco, but not in the Golden Gate Park (no idea of the exact time it was signed). I guess this is the 65th anniversary of a significant event. Good excuse for a celebration. What are the laws surrounding drinking alcohol in the Golden Gate Park?
When asking for help, you need to develop the combination of a thick skin and a grovelling disposition. In my experience, those who are most knowledgeable are helpful, but very very busy. Most of the time, you need to rely on arseholes who have time on their hands to help, but find it more fun to make you suffer first.
Unfortunately, this is not just theoretical. It is the what happens time and time again. Often, the obvious aspects of some technology get patented early which makes it uneconomic to do the necessary optimization of the process for a decade or more.
Most people on /. are too young to properly comprehend the situation. Blaming Microsoft for everything that goes wrong in IT only became standard operating procedure in the 1990s. Since the system is supposedly based on a 1980s era Data General mini, we need to resurrect our blame processes from that era. This failure was clearly engineered by IBM. Not only that, but they are using their huge muscle to block third party maintenance of the hardware.
Hey, many visitors to Congress go there because they want to know how their government works. The experience you relate shows that they are doing their best to demonstrate. Why else do you think legislation can take so long and so much legislation fall by the wayside because it cannot be completed. The rules for our Congress critters and Senators are as time consuming and nonsensical as those for visitors.
For your own information
As for your point that serious FM users know all the names and positions of the key folks at FM, that is because of the open communication on the EmailDiscussions forums. It is a compact, transparent organization with good people.
If you are using Fastmail.FM with secure login, the government most likely is not reading your mail. I suspect NSA can break SSL, but I am confident it is expensive and they only do so on an extremely selective basis.
For most casual email users (and even some not so casual) Gmail is quite sufficient. I happen to use Gmail extensively (but not exclusively) myself. However, I have several customers who are small business users and, for them, Fastmail.FM is usually a much superior alternative. It's not just a question of reliability (though FM, today, is more reliable then Gmail) but also because of features. Gmail has better search and a cleaner UI than FM, but otherwise all the feature advantages lie with FM. For instance
These are the kinds of things that really matter to many users.
I guess "cheap" is a subjective term. The additional cost to upgrade from "Full" to "Enhanced" membership (6GB email space plus 2GB file space) is US$20 per year. Casual email users might balk at that, but is is surely an acceptable cost for people who use email as a critical tool.
Hmmm... This is somewhat similar to an issue mentioned in the article: polymorphic viruses. It raises an interesting question. Do existing AV products try to detect such behavior in newly executed code? I am really not sure how tricky the algorithms would be to detect code that is trying to encrypt itself or modify its own executable code. However, most regular software (funnily enough excepting security software trying to avoid detection by malware!) does not need to do this, so such code should probably be blocked and reported by default.
It is worth noting that the disk drives at the museum are not first generation. An original IBM 350 weighed over a ton! It had a capacity of about 4.4 MB and a peak transfer rate a little over 8KB per sec. It is amazing to realize that a modern consumer 2TB drive has the capacity of about 400,000 IBM 350 drives and a transfer rate over 10,000 times faster.
... I have yet to see any application based on any large "cloud" based service have response times as bad as their site right now. A 20x slowdown would under load would be orders of magnitude better than they are achieving. Hmmm ... could one of the reasons some companies prefer to outsource applications be that there is extra capacity to handle peak load conditions?