The parent is right. Having held a TS security clearance in Australia for more than a decade (with all the letters on the card, some red, some black, plus a few others), it's pretty safe to say that the truly delusional are also a fairly loud minority. A handful of these people latch on to a few scraps here and there, the result being huge chunks of the population now have these oddball theories bubbling up.
While there might be a conspiracy or two from time to time, there are no secrets for long. Humans are woefully bad at keeping anything secret. The most classified of secrets I ever had access to were passed around either purely verbally, or 'pass by hand' Australian eyes only - and you know what, not even these stayed secret for long. Politicians leak. Executives within the intelligence community leak. Newspapers have their paid up sources who leak. Plenty of people with security clearances will tell their families what they do, families leak to friends. All of this results in a few snippets landing at the feet of some imaginative souls who then fill in the blanks with their own theories.
An example. A very large (in its day) satellite dish being transported from one particular country to Australia on a military transport aircraft - this aircraft lands in a large city, a few curtains are erected to prevent onlookers from getting too detailed a view as the parts are removed and loaded on to trucks. The conspiracy nuts went mad and figured we were shipping UFO's to some underground base in the area. If we had nothing to hide then why erect the shrouds? Well, we did have something to hide, that being exactly where the dish came from which would have been obvious if people were able to see it.
The primary reason is to provide a seamless experience for the customer.
If I go to some slick looking website to buy whatever, and then get redirected to pay-pal or some other off domain payment system, then I'm probably going to shop elsewhere. For me it's a little like trying to run a government department where all public email is handled through @yahoo.com email addresses. (If you think this doesn't happen, take a trip to the Philippines)
Merchant accounts are not exactly cheap, but they can bring in customers you might otherwise not get. The whole PCI-DSS thing is a scam, but at the lower levels you can fill in the form yourself and mail it off. It's not difficult.
I hope you're right mjwx, but your vote doesn't look like it ever mattered much to me. I left the Defence Signals Directorate, and subsequently Australia a decade ago because I saw from the inside just how simplistic it is for this particular agency to have new laws made, old laws modified, and more worryingly, just how much latitude they give themselves for interpretation of existing laws. I lived through a couple of royal commissions focused on the very departments I worked in, those investigations never ventured beyond the walls of the "Director DSD's" office. Farcical to say the least.
If you weren't already aware of this, the government has long been doing whatever it pleases regardless of which sock puppet is in power. No doubt the driving force behind half of these initiatives are a handful of drones from ASIO and the NCA. Politicians don't know squat about real life.
I lost the faith a long time ago, I ain't ever coming back.
Perhaps the most basic solution is to simply store a unique key on the card - nothing more - then have your card readers link in to some giant back end database to retrieve the details for that particular number as necessary.
Don't banks do this very successfully already with digipass and so on?
I'm a foreigner in the Philippines with, more or less, exactly the same kind of biometric card, my assumption is that it is no more secure either. (Alien Certificate of Registration - ACR)
Aside from your shameless plug good sir, as proficient as you are at music, might I humbly suggest that instead of 'finding information about your music at every single social networking fad' on the planet, you rewrite your primary links such that all your stuff is hosted from and on your own domain. Too many bands are doing what you do, too many middle level marketers are pushing for assimilation of trend curves, and everyone seems to think this is a fantastic idea. Maybe I'm just old school, but this approach feels unprofessional, it's disjointed, it interrupts my chain of thought, and one might even go so far as to reflect that it is indicative of the quality of effort put in to the music you're trying to showcase.
All pertinent information, one domain. That'd be my suggestion.
I would suggest you walk up to any random person you see with an Apple product and ask if they've ever heard of one Mr Steve Jobs, even better, try this in any country that is not the USA. Nobody cares who created the 'look', just that it exists and is in limited quantity with high demand so they can look cool in starbucks or wherever, the same as everyone else:-)
I think you'll find that in the end, the customer will actually have the last say on this. We hand over money, the music industry hands over a chunk of data, that data is our property. Like it or not, jump up and down, sigh, click your tongue, and so on and so forth, but this is the human condition in the present capitalistic world that a good many of us find ourselves living within.
A 'license' to listen to music we paid for is just some bullshit word that lawyers throw around. Try to change this concept of ownership too much and a few people will find themselves suddenly out of work.
Or, forgetting about mind rays for a minute, I'd actually want to make a transparent engine block - combine it with those laser spark plugs and some pretty colours - that'd be some interesting bling.
I've run up against more than a few USB ports that don't appear to provide enough power to spin up 2.5" drives properly. It could also be crappy USB enclosures causing the problem. Annoying really.
The phone wasn't free at all, you are simply deceiving yourself.
The cost of the phone is real, it is tangible, and will be somewhere between 10 to 20 out of your 40.
This 'free $40 credit' is entirely mythical. It's just a number in a database. The actual financial burden to the telco will vary depending upon how you use their services, but it wont go above 50 cents to support the infrastructure. (It doesn't need to, there are millions of other subscribers too) The remaining amount is, essentially, used to pay wages and fill out those golden parachutes.
What if the 'corporate spy' is the mail server admin? Plucking crap out of the bcc_always queue or so on and so forth.
Having had a TS security clearance for a whole bunch of years myself, I frequently handled pass by hand (codeword) eyes only stuff. This entire 'unique copy to each person' thing only happens when someone is 'already' suspected of working for the other side, or in the movies.
Once you have a TS clearance you are trusted until there are signs present that indicate a review thereof might be necessary - at least this is how it worked in my part of the world anyway. The security branches responsible for investigating leaks were never quick to react - after all, it is a big old chess game, those leaks might also be put to good use before they hit the jail cell.
Understood. Good points. Some of these things probably should have a review period from time to time, but in contrast, say there are laws governing freedoms - things like freedom of or from religion, should we allow those to be reviewed from time to time too?
I'm not sure it is the law that is 'stupid' here good sir.
An entire country decided this was a good thing to make permanent. It's their playpen, their choice.
Anyone already in office, attempting to change this permanent legislation, gets the boot for 10 years. Simple right? (At least one would think this is simple enough language) So no, this law does NOT mean that any average jane or joe thinking about becoming president would be unable to hold office. If they gain office and then try to make those changes, obviously the law is clear. They get their arse kicked to the curb for 10 years.
Pretty fair if you ask me - keep the bastards as honest as you can by handing out eviction notices every 4 years, an enforced fresh outlook if you will.
Industry typically already does get charged more for consumption, though raise that price too much and people either go out of business or start sticking in their own generators, be they diesel, gas turbine or whatever.
Back when VHS and Betamax were popular household items, I presume this is how they duplicated porn videos for that format too:-) They always looked like they were copies of copies of copies with really crappy sound tracks.
So all your belongings are in boxes, including this GPS with SMS bridge business you speak of, all of which is buried under clothes or whatever, sitting deep inside a moving truck which just happens to be built out of sheet metal, strengthened by a steel or alloy frame of sorts (Last time I checked, all of them were built this way) A nice little Faraday cage yes?
Your solution would not work, this guy lucked out in that the system was using cell towers to triangulate the phones location, if it was true GPS it would not have worked.
I thought you only learned sorting algorithms and methods purely so you could impress the dick doing the interview? For all other times you use google, just like everyone else:-)
Those billion cameras are primarily a reactive system, not proactive. While they were initially sold on the public as a crime prevention and safety thing, they don't exist that way any longer. I guess in many ways it is a good thing that there are just too many to be monitored in real time. This makes your simple trip to the store utterly irrelevant and not of interest to anyone - but if your trip happens to coincide with some idiot crashing his car in to the aforementioned store, knocking you down in the process, then someone, be it insurance, police, ambulance, or whatever, might dredge it up for review. All in all you and I are just lost in the noise while the only valuable signal makes the nightly news.
RFID is a pretty good filter if your aim is to create a choke point (i.e. immigration counters) - you can file people past a scanner, snap off their picture without them knowing, have a drone somewhere do a comparison with the databased image, or run it through your super computer in the basement to do it for you.
So long as your action does not violate any term of service, and if those terms of service mean you end up having to right click on every single image, so be it - but your stinky 3rd party friend over there, he ain't welcome. Facebook TOS. Understand? It don't matter a damn how much you trust this other entity, facebook do not want their site scraped - and frankly, they have a right to be pissed, it is, after all, their website, and you accepted the rules when you signed on. End of story.
BASIC, I utterly failed my first year of high school computer science because I couldn't wrap my brain around any programming language that didn't use line numbers. Seems kind of pathetic looking back, but all I had to work with prior to that was an Aquarius computer from Mattel and the good old Commodore Vic 20
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The parent is right. Having held a TS security clearance in Australia for more than a decade (with all the letters on the card, some red, some black, plus a few others), it's pretty safe to say that the truly delusional are also a fairly loud minority. A handful of these people latch on to a few scraps here and there, the result being huge chunks of the population now have these oddball theories bubbling up.
While there might be a conspiracy or two from time to time, there are no secrets for long. Humans are woefully bad at keeping anything secret. The most classified of secrets I ever had access to were passed around either purely verbally, or 'pass by hand' Australian eyes only - and you know what, not even these stayed secret for long. Politicians leak. Executives within the intelligence community leak. Newspapers have their paid up sources who leak. Plenty of people with security clearances will tell their families what they do, families leak to friends. All of this results in a few snippets landing at the feet of some imaginative souls who then fill in the blanks with their own theories.
An example. A very large (in its day) satellite dish being transported from one particular country to Australia on a military transport aircraft - this aircraft lands in a large city, a few curtains are erected to prevent onlookers from getting too detailed a view as the parts are removed and loaded on to trucks. The conspiracy nuts went mad and figured we were shipping UFO's to some underground base in the area. If we had nothing to hide then why erect the shrouds? Well, we did have something to hide, that being exactly where the dish came from which would have been obvious if people were able to see it.
The primary reason is to provide a seamless experience for the customer.
If I go to some slick looking website to buy whatever, and then get redirected to pay-pal or some other off domain payment system, then I'm probably going to shop elsewhere. For me it's a little like trying to run a government department where all public email is handled through @yahoo.com email addresses. (If you think this doesn't happen, take a trip to the Philippines)
Merchant accounts are not exactly cheap, but they can bring in customers you might otherwise not get. The whole PCI-DSS thing is a scam, but at the lower levels you can fill in the form yourself and mail it off. It's not difficult.
The simple reason: Because everyone else is doing it.
I hope you're right mjwx, but your vote doesn't look like it ever mattered much to me. I left the Defence Signals Directorate, and subsequently Australia a decade ago because I saw from the inside just how simplistic it is for this particular agency to have new laws made, old laws modified, and more worryingly, just how much latitude they give themselves for interpretation of existing laws. I lived through a couple of royal commissions focused on the very departments I worked in, those investigations never ventured beyond the walls of the "Director DSD's" office. Farcical to say the least.
If you weren't already aware of this, the government has long been doing whatever it pleases regardless of which sock puppet is in power. No doubt the driving force behind half of these initiatives are a handful of drones from ASIO and the NCA. Politicians don't know squat about real life.
I lost the faith a long time ago, I ain't ever coming back.
Perhaps the most basic solution is to simply store a unique key on the card - nothing more - then have your card readers link in to some giant back end database to retrieve the details for that particular number as necessary.
Don't banks do this very successfully already with digipass and so on?
I'm a foreigner in the Philippines with, more or less, exactly the same kind of biometric card, my assumption is that it is no more secure either. (Alien Certificate of Registration - ACR)
Replace every passage in all the marriage books you've read where it says "Sports" - with "gaming/Linux geek" and you'll have exactly the same result.
However, don't believe everything you read! :-)
Probably this is a little off topic...
Aside from your shameless plug good sir, as proficient as you are at music, might I humbly suggest that instead of 'finding information about your music at every single social networking fad' on the planet, you rewrite your primary links such that all your stuff is hosted from and on your own domain. Too many bands are doing what you do, too many middle level marketers are pushing for assimilation of trend curves, and everyone seems to think this is a fantastic idea. Maybe I'm just old school, but this approach feels unprofessional, it's disjointed, it interrupts my chain of thought, and one might even go so far as to reflect that it is indicative of the quality of effort put in to the music you're trying to showcase.
All pertinent information, one domain. That'd be my suggestion.
I would suggest you walk up to any random person you see with an Apple product and ask if they've ever heard of one Mr Steve Jobs, even better, try this in any country that is not the USA. Nobody cares who created the 'look', just that it exists and is in limited quantity with high demand so they can look cool in starbucks or wherever, the same as everyone else :-)
I think you'll find that in the end, the customer will actually have the last say on this. We hand over money, the music industry hands over a chunk of data, that data is our property. Like it or not, jump up and down, sigh, click your tongue, and so on and so forth, but this is the human condition in the present capitalistic world that a good many of us find ourselves living within.
A 'license' to listen to music we paid for is just some bullshit word that lawyers throw around. Try to change this concept of ownership too much and a few people will find themselves suddenly out of work.
Or, forgetting about mind rays for a minute, I'd actually want to make a transparent engine block - combine it with those laser spark plugs and some pretty colours - that'd be some interesting bling.
I've run up against more than a few USB ports that don't appear to provide enough power to spin up 2.5" drives properly. It could also be crappy USB enclosures causing the problem. Annoying really.
The phone wasn't free at all, you are simply deceiving yourself.
The cost of the phone is real, it is tangible, and will be somewhere between 10 to 20 out of your 40.
This 'free $40 credit' is entirely mythical. It's just a number in a database. The actual financial burden to the telco will vary depending upon how you use their services, but it wont go above 50 cents to support the infrastructure. (It doesn't need to, there are millions of other subscribers too) The remaining amount is, essentially, used to pay wages and fill out those golden parachutes.
What if the 'corporate spy' is the mail server admin? Plucking crap out of the bcc_always queue or so on and so forth.
Having had a TS security clearance for a whole bunch of years myself, I frequently handled pass by hand (codeword) eyes only stuff. This entire 'unique copy to each person' thing only happens when someone is 'already' suspected of working for the other side, or in the movies.
Once you have a TS clearance you are trusted until there are signs present that indicate a review thereof might be necessary - at least this is how it worked in my part of the world anyway. The security branches responsible for investigating leaks were never quick to react - after all, it is a big old chess game, those leaks might also be put to good use before they hit the jail cell.
Understood. Good points. Some of these things probably should have a review period from time to time, but in contrast, say there are laws governing freedoms - things like freedom of or from religion, should we allow those to be reviewed from time to time too?
Times most certainly do change.
According to Wikipedia? (giggle, you're amusing)
I'm not sure it is the law that is 'stupid' here good sir.
An entire country decided this was a good thing to make permanent. It's their playpen, their choice.
Anyone already in office, attempting to change this permanent legislation, gets the boot for 10 years. Simple right? (At least one would think this is simple enough language) So no, this law does NOT mean that any average jane or joe thinking about becoming president would be unable to hold office. If they gain office and then try to make those changes, obviously the law is clear. They get their arse kicked to the curb for 10 years.
Pretty fair if you ask me - keep the bastards as honest as you can by handing out eviction notices every 4 years, an enforced fresh outlook if you will.
Industry typically already does get charged more for consumption, though raise that price too much and people either go out of business or start sticking in their own generators, be they diesel, gas turbine or whatever.
Back when VHS and Betamax were popular household items, I presume this is how they duplicated porn videos for that format too :-) They always looked like they were copies of copies of copies with really crappy sound tracks.
Not much seems to have changed though...
So all your belongings are in boxes, including this GPS with SMS bridge business you speak of, all of which is buried under clothes or whatever, sitting deep inside a moving truck which just happens to be built out of sheet metal, strengthened by a steel or alloy frame of sorts (Last time I checked, all of them were built this way) A nice little Faraday cage yes?
Your solution would not work, this guy lucked out in that the system was using cell towers to triangulate the phones location, if it was true GPS it would not have worked.
I thought you only learned sorting algorithms and methods purely so you could impress the dick doing the interview? For all other times you use google, just like everyone else :-)
Those billion cameras are primarily a reactive system, not proactive. While they were initially sold on the public as a crime prevention and safety thing, they don't exist that way any longer. I guess in many ways it is a good thing that there are just too many to be monitored in real time. This makes your simple trip to the store utterly irrelevant and not of interest to anyone - but if your trip happens to coincide with some idiot crashing his car in to the aforementioned store, knocking you down in the process, then someone, be it insurance, police, ambulance, or whatever, might dredge it up for review. All in all you and I are just lost in the noise while the only valuable signal makes the nightly news.
RFID is a pretty good filter if your aim is to create a choke point (i.e. immigration counters) - you can file people past a scanner, snap off their picture without them knowing, have a drone somewhere do a comparison with the databased image, or run it through your super computer in the basement to do it for you.
They leak photons if you bend them just right :-)
So long as your action does not violate any term of service, and if those terms of service mean you end up having to right click on every single image, so be it - but your stinky 3rd party friend over there, he ain't welcome. Facebook TOS. Understand? It don't matter a damn how much you trust this other entity, facebook do not want their site scraped - and frankly, they have a right to be pissed, it is, after all, their website, and you accepted the rules when you signed on. End of story.
Or, you know, maybe he had a heart attack, stroke, whatever, and was already deceased prior to ground impact. We will never know.
BASIC, I utterly failed my first year of high school computer science because I couldn't wrap my brain around any programming language that didn't use line numbers. Seems kind of pathetic looking back, but all I had to work with prior to that was an Aquarius computer from Mattel and the good old Commodore Vic 20