I am sick of the term "hacker" being used as a perjorative. But I've beat that dead horse before...
What peeves me about this story, and a similar one, is that in both cases there was a lamatable lack of security-mindness among the school staff. Leaving passwords taped to the back of computers is the same as not using passwords at all. I consider this the failure of the staff members to exercise simple-minded commonsense security procedures.
In the other case that I have in mind, the teacher left her desk without password protecting her computer, which would've taken her 2 keystrokes to do. A student went to her desk and altered grades. Everybody nailed the student, but *no* attention was given to the very plan fact that the teacher left everything wide open.
And another criticism. Most school staff are clueless about computers anyway; the students can very easily run rings around them. If a technology is going to be used, then that technology should be fully understood by the adminstrators and staff. After all, a teacher *is supposed* to be smarter than the students he or she is teaching, right?
I recalled being so bored in school all those many years ago because I was light-years ahead of the techers in the areas of math and science -- even in their so-called "advanced placement" courses. It was all largely a joke as I recall.
Wherther the Chinese government is behind it or not, obviously there are problems with the security of the US governemnt sites. If they would only address those concerns, the problem would go away.
I'd hate to see what a sophisticated enemy could do to this country if it wanted to. The lame security on the US gov servers is lamantable. We hear the same old story over and over again and no one learns. The Germans during WWII had better security -- it actually took brains to crack the Enigma codes. Nowadays, any old script kiddle can bring down a US Goverment server!
GEICO should go after the individal insurance companies using their trademarks, not Google, which is simply a conduit for commerce.
There is a potential for a chilling effect on online ads. Perhaps GEICO has stiffed a few of its clients, for instance, and I might want to do a web site on that. Would I be prohibited from using text like "GEICO Stiffed Clients" in the text of the ad?
Space-based weapons? What are we comming to? No, they are not necessary, as they will only be used to terrorize the world into compliance with the US wishes.
With the way the British gov has been acting lately, squashing privacy everywhere in that country, it is about bloody time they get into operation something akin to EFF.
I myself will simply ignore the email and focus on what I must accomplish. Then when I'm at a breaking point, I'll look at the email.
Simple old-fashioned prioritization.
All thing fall under:
Urgent or Not Urgent
Important or not Important
That forms a 2x2 matrix, and all problems should be ranked accordingly. Then, it becomes clear what the most efficient way to deal with the issues are.
The last thing we want is for governments to take an even greater role in regulating us.
Let's find better technological solutions to spam control, and less government-based solutions.
After all, government never get it quite right. Moreover, there is the enforcement issue. It's just not workable. Anyone can purchase a web server in any other country other than the one they live in, so enforcement becomes a joke at best, or worse becomes so draconian that it will hurt hammers as well as spammers (or may not hurt spammers at all, since they can skate the loopholes in the system).
I dunno, my time is too valuable to bother doing the upgrade myself. Better just to buy the high-end at 10x the price and save 100x in the cost of my time.
What would be easier to do than Morse Code would be to arrange the alphabet in descending order of frequency -- e, t, a, o, n, r, i, s, h, etc, and assign binary enumeration to them, 'e' would be 1, 't' would be '10', a would be '11', etc.
Then the code would be easy to memorize and recreate in case one forgot it.
Over a decade ago, Transputers were supposed to revolutionize how we compute, but they unfortunately went nowhere. I had actually wanted to get involved with them, porting over a ray-tracing platform I was developing at the time.
I am so tired of our good name being smeared this way, and everyone here should know better!
Let's set the record straight: "Hackers" refer to those of us who do wonderful things with the hardware and software. "Crackers" are those who seek unwarranted entry into other people's systems, usually for malicious intent.
I am a born bonafide *hacker*, and have been so for the past 27 years. I, on the other hand, am NOT a *cracker*, and I would like to see them on the business-end of a (insert your favorite weapon here). Recovering from the damage crackers have caused me and others is no fun, eats valuable time, and forces me to focus on things that are not productive, but necessary to keep them out.
I've had the Firefly DVD set forever. While it is nice they picked up such a distinguished series, I am personally not all that impressed, considering that The Sci Fi Channel has been on a steady decline in quality since their inception.
They hit an all-time bottom with "Scare Tactics" and "Crossing Over with John Edward", neither of which has anything to do with SF or even "Sci Fi".
And if you have to ask about the difference between SF and "Sci Fi", it says a lot about you.
I am bashing Microsoft. Besides, it's fun to do.
Yes, they will screw it up, but their overwhelming ability to market just might carry it anyway.
Of course, if we scramble, we can take the market away from them -- at least for a while.
Not even music is safe from Microsoft. What a sad state of affairs. On the other hand, music these days is pretty sad in its own right, so perhaps we ought to let them have their fun...
Indeed,the very pressure of "publish or perish" is also the problem. Quality goes down when issues other than the quality of the work and its publication comes into play.
Then again, "90% of everything is crud." That being the case, it follows that 90% of research will be utter BS by definition.
Or to put it more scientifically, research, along with many other things both in nature and man-made will follow the 1/f power scaling law. So it is rather ironic -- and gratifing -- to note that research itself does not escape the deep laws of nature it hopes to uncover!!!!
Oh, come on. Your government has only your best interests at heart. With these RFID tags that they also want to embed in our clothing, our food products, and just about everything else, the'll know where all of us are at any given moment.
Why, it'll become impossible to cheat on your spouse, as she'll only need to go to an online tracking system with her mouse, type in your National ID number, and see who you are boinking.
If your political views differs from the Status Quo, yes, your government will be interested in that too! Wonderful.
Orwell had no idea. At least in 1984 there were places you could go to avoid the cameras. Now, there's nowhere we can go.
Couple that with closed-circuit cameras being everywhere in public, face recognition tecnology getting better and better, and Bush slipping his henchmen in place over the years, and you have...? All non-republicans take note!!!!
What strange bedfellows.
The single-signon technology quite frankly scares me. There is much potential for abuse. If someone steals your account, they'll have total access to *all* of your online services accessible through that account.
Besides, browsers such as Mozilla already have the capability of storing your login info -- LOCALLY, UNDER YOUR CONTROL, not at some distant and super major coropration.
Well, the choice is yours, folks. Centralized login, and all that implies, or decentralized and less vunerable to comprimise.
The concept of actually getting lower prices for fewer features on the board does not work the way one would think. Mass production makes it "really cheap" to just slap on functionality like graphics card (chip, really), ethernet, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Pardon me for this rather puerile exclamation, but...
LINUX RULES!!!!!
Now that I got that out of my system, I return you to our regularly metered out diet of sanity.
What peeves me about this story, and a similar one, is that in both cases there was a lamatable lack of security-mindness among the school staff. Leaving passwords taped to the back of computers is the same as not using passwords at all. I consider this the failure of the staff members to exercise simple-minded commonsense security procedures.
In the other case that I have in mind, the teacher left her desk without password protecting her computer, which would've taken her 2 keystrokes to do. A student went to her desk and altered grades. Everybody nailed the student, but *no* attention was given to the very plan fact that the teacher left everything wide open.
And another criticism. Most school staff are clueless about computers anyway; the students can very easily run rings around them. If a technology is going to be used, then that technology should be fully understood by the adminstrators and staff. After all, a teacher *is supposed* to be smarter than the students he or she is teaching, right?
I recalled being so bored in school all those many years ago because I was light-years ahead of the techers in the areas of math and science -- even in their so-called "advanced placement" courses. It was all largely a joke as I recall.
I can't imagine how something like this got into the production image unless there were a lot with their thumbs up their anal orficies that day...
I'd hate to see what a sophisticated enemy could do to this country if it wanted to. The lame security on the US gov servers is lamantable. We hear the same old story over and over again and no one learns. The Germans during WWII had better security -- it actually took brains to crack the Enigma codes. Nowadays, any old script kiddle can bring down a US Goverment server!
There is a potential for a chilling effect on online ads. Perhaps GEICO has stiffed a few of its clients, for instance, and I might want to do a web site on that. Would I be prohibited from using text like "GEICO Stiffed Clients" in the text of the ad?
Good bye free speech...
Space-based weapons? What are we comming to? No, they are not necessary, as they will only be used to terrorize the world into compliance with the US wishes.
With the way the British gov has been acting lately, squashing privacy everywhere in that country, it is about bloody time they get into operation something akin to EFF.
I myself will simply ignore the email and focus on what I must accomplish. Then when I'm at a breaking point, I'll look at the email.
Simple old-fashioned prioritization.
All thing fall under:
- Urgent or Not Urgent
- Important or not Important
That forms a 2x2 matrix, and all problems should be ranked accordingly. Then, it becomes clear what the most efficient way to deal with the issues are.No wonder the Sci Fi Channel sucks lately.
Let's find better technological solutions to spam control, and less government-based solutions.
After all, government never get it quite right. Moreover, there is the enforcement issue. It's just not workable. Anyone can purchase a web server in any other country other than the one they live in, so enforcement becomes a joke at best, or worse becomes so draconian that it will hurt hammers as well as spammers (or may not hurt spammers at all, since they can skate the loopholes in the system).
I dunno, my time is too valuable to bother doing the upgrade myself. Better just to buy the high-end at 10x the price and save 100x in the cost of my time.
Anyone need that many digits for a precise calculation? :-)
Then the code would be easy to memorize and recreate in case one forgot it.
Oh well, dream on...
Let's set the record straight: "Hackers" refer to those of us who do wonderful things with the hardware and software. "Crackers" are those who seek unwarranted entry into other people's systems, usually for malicious intent.
I am a born bonafide *hacker*, and have been so for the past 27 years. I, on the other hand, am NOT a *cracker*, and I would like to see them on the business-end of a (insert your favorite weapon here). Recovering from the damage crackers have caused me and others is no fun, eats valuable time, and forces me to focus on things that are not productive, but necessary to keep them out.
They hit an all-time bottom with "Scare Tactics" and "Crossing Over with John Edward", neither of which has anything to do with SF or even "Sci Fi".
And if you have to ask about the difference between SF and "Sci Fi", it says a lot about you.
Of course, if we scramble, we can take the market away from them -- at least for a while.
Not even music is safe from Microsoft. What a sad state of affairs. On the other hand, music these days is pretty sad in its own right, so perhaps we ought to let them have their fun...
Never say on the Internet what you wouldn't mind shouted from mountaintops?
A slight modification for today's times:
Never say on the Internet what you wouldn't mind shouted from mountaintops for ever and ever!
Then again, "90% of everything is crud." That being the case, it follows that 90% of research will be utter BS by definition.
Or to put it more scientifically, research, along with many other things both in nature and man-made will follow the 1/f power scaling law. So it is rather ironic -- and gratifing -- to note that research itself does not escape the deep laws of nature it hopes to uncover!!!!
Chew on that one over the holiday...
Why, it'll become impossible to cheat on your spouse, as she'll only need to go to an online tracking system with her mouse, type in your National ID number, and see who you are boinking.
If your political views differs from the Status Quo, yes, your government will be interested in that too! Wonderful. Orwell had no idea. At least in 1984 there were places you could go to avoid the cameras. Now, there's nowhere we can go.
Couple that with closed-circuit cameras being everywhere in public, face recognition tecnology getting better and better, and Bush slipping his henchmen in place over the years, and you have...? All non-republicans take note!!!!
I could grow a diamond around my girl's finger and she would never be able to take it off!!!
Besides, browsers such as Mozilla already have the capability of storing your login info -- LOCALLY, UNDER YOUR CONTROL, not at some distant and super major coropration.
Well, the choice is yours, folks. Centralized login, and all that implies, or decentralized and less vunerable to comprimise.
The concept of actually getting lower prices for fewer features on the board does not work the way one would think. Mass production makes it "really cheap" to just slap on functionality like graphics card (chip, really), ethernet, etc.
Finally us matheticians will be taken seriously!
But it sounds sexy, nontheless.