You could have said the same thing about mass production, and predicted that the world would still be full of serfs and slaves 200 years in the future, but you would have been wrong.
I think you are living in a different world than I am. It isn't monotonic, but the trend over time is to higher stress and a greater part of life spent working. One of the regressions was early medieval europe where the desire to "be roman" eliminated the use of the plow share in favor of serf labor using pointed sticks. Reading what I wrote looks funny, I only wish I were kidding. But despite the occasional regression the overall, long term trend is definitely more work versus leisure.
Its kinda funny, though not in a ha-ha way, that we have made astounding advances in recreation (audio and video recordings, for one) and yet we have less time to take advantage of them. Three thousand years ago required relatively little work with lots of time left to... do what? Its no wonder that alcohol, story telling and dancing were historically so important.
Now we can select from hundreds (if not thousands) of movies to watch, or select from play lists of thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of songs to listen to. Or play games on a console or computer (even if a particular individual chooses not to, in the USA these options are widely available). But how much of our time can we spend on recreational activity? If you eliminate the ruling class, not that much. Even aggressive use of non-work time for leisure (an option not available to many, such as parents) is hard pressed to match working hours, much less exceed them.
Certain aspects of quality of life have certainly improved. Overall, medical care is slightly better (though not as wonderful as the health industry would like you to believe*) and average life expectency has improved (though not as much as most people are led to believe**). For most in the USA quality food is available, as is shelter and these certainly improve the quality of life. But there has definitely been a cost, and part of that cost is a decrease in available leisure time.
* too large of a topic for a post like this, but once you consider the meaningfulness of FDA testing and the general methodology of prescription ("we'll try this and evaluate the results", "take antibiotics, it *might* be a bacterial infection"), that the majority of medical research involves doing a study then looking for any correlation rather than following the scientific method -- it starts coming clear that while treatment of wound/injury based medical emergencies has greatly improved, the rest is much more incremental.
** also too large, but a variety of statistics are invented from whole cloth. For example, the official statistics for infant mortality rate have projections for frontier america that are vastly exaggerated (presumably in an attempt to convince people that home birth is dangerous) so as to claim much higher rates than are documented during plagues in medieval europe. And the use of IMR for historical purposes is for a much greater age span which already inflates it making the exaggeration even more ridiculous. And infant mortality rate is just one example of where different criteria result in apples/oranges comparisons that exaggerate the improvements.
in Missouri the state supreme court ruled against Springfield, MO for the installation and operation of red light cameras. Unfortunately, this fact is not well known and there are other operations in the state. If you get a red light camera based ticket in Missouri, don't pay it.
a good post, but a point that seems to be missed here: the design patents are intended to allow broad coverage of appearance in a bid to create a revenue stream from the filings.
In a distinctly related topic is the established companies use of patents (supposedly FRAND, but refused to Apple) to try and prevent APple from ever releasing the iPhone. Apple figured they had the law on their side and proceded and the lawsuit proceded and... we end up with stupid, obvious patents being used on both sides. I say "stupid and obvious" because in most cases that is exactly what patents are. (Large) companies encourage employees to file patents (assigned to the company of course). Microsoft was asleep for a long time on this subject, but finally woke up.
Ridiculous patents is not an Apple, or Microsoft, or IBM or Intel or AMD or Samsung or Motorola thing -- it is all of them. Patents are used to suppress competition by raising a barrier for entry into a market. Intel and AMD cross license patents -- great, and bully for them. A significant reason *why* is because no one else can get into the game of making desktop CPUs -- you literally can't afford their patents.
When the EU decided to make money by creating "design patents" companies like Apple and Samsung are faced with a choice: file a patent on your product (and pay the fee to do so) or be sued for infringement if there is a turf war. Apple chose to file design patents in the EU, Samsung did not. In the end, Apple lost that IIRC but it might be interesting to see if Samsung now pays the EU protection money by filing design patents there.
While Apple's "rounded corners" design patent was obnoxious they are far from the only company to file for design patents in the EU, and they are certainly not the only company to use "stupid and obvious" patents when fighting against another company. In the topic at hand, Morotorola's patent was ruled as "obvious".
In sum: patents serve two purposes:
1) a revenue stream for the government issuing them
2) reduce competition by raising a barrier to entry in a market
But people are distracted by the claimed purpose "to promote invention/protect inventor's rights" and argue about merit rather than realizing they have been duped.
two factor authentication requires two factors to authenticate. From the MS piece this reads like Apple's recent enhancement and it is *not* adding two factor authentication to your MS (or Apple) account. Rather it revises the account recovery process to, in principle, better protect an account from being "stolen" via social engineering. Great, that has some utility. But two factor authentication it is not.
To be clear: two factor authentication for the account would be if two separate factors were required to authenticate. In the case of an Apple account that would mean to authenticate for email would require presenting two separate factors (e.g., something I know, something I have). But with both Apple and Microsoft this is not the case: authentication is still only password "protected". Only some limited areas are covered by two-factor (or something dressed up to look like it). So if you re-use your password and one place you use it at is compromised this does absolutely nothing to prevent a bad guy from running amok through your account and personal life. (Particularly given the general propensity for logins to take the form of email/password.)
The reality is that passwords as protection have been dead for at least a decade, but very few are cognizant of it. Instead, there is talk about "strong" passwords, or "passphrase" or whatever is intended to shore up a model that is dead and broken lying by the side of the road, but still used because it is familiar and convenient.
its fairly similar to Apple's new option which isn't two factor (and apple doesn't call it that), but is widely *reported* as being "two factor". In the case of Apple, you can secure your account against normal password recovery attacks (e.g., a social engineering call to Apple support with a bit of personal information gleaned from facebook). And while that may have some utility for some people it is definitely/not/ two factor authentication.
What is it with logic failures and lack of reading comprehension? You could try again, and this time pay attention to what is being said. Such as the point about skill and time constraints. Perhaps you can't grasp the difference between a write-at-your-own-pace essay and a timed exam, but the information is all there.
""Brevity is a strong indicator of lack of quality" means the same thing as "length correlates to quality", so this is self-contradictory."
Only for the logic impaired. And the rest of your post is even worse. Grade: 1/10 points -- kinda topical but attempting to hide lack of comprehension behind large words that are poorly understood.
I use essay questions for tests and I teach in a technical field. My instructions note that a good answer is complete and succinct. Many students don't know the word "succinct" and end up thinking it means "short" or "brief". Most college students lack the language skills to be complete and succinct on a timed exam. Heck, most probably can't do it even if it were not timed. Consequently, good answers tend to also be long.
It isn't that length correlates to quality (you always get someone who thinks they can bury their ignorance in a pile of words), its that brevity is a strong indicator for a lack of quality. Significant sections of most answers could be deleted without detracting from the answer (it isn't succinct), but it takes skill and/or time to pare down the verbage. As noted, they lack the time and unless they have good skill to compensate succinctness just doesn't happen.
OTOH it/is/ a pain to grade. Much more time consuming than using traditional multiple choice exams.
With respect to your statement, it isn't that "smart people" write concisely, it is that skilled people with time and motivation to do so write concisely. The brevity of your post betrays the lack of quality in your contribution.
Ah yes, becuase your "psychologist friend" has a working definition of intelligence and there is "professional" literature with studies on it. Interesting.
I used to have a cat that played fetch. I had a soft rubber dart. Toss it, she'd chase it and bring it back. IIRC, she suggested the game. Not all cats are the same (in fact, I've never met any two that were) -- that one also liked to play with water (bat at water coming from a faucet). Her sister had no interest.
But I was really amused by her playing fetch. I've never had another cat do that.
heh. Take ECON 200? Their too busy pontificating on a subject about which they are ignorant and their CPU is too busy mining bitcoins to even consider working on something else.:)
The life cycle of a bitcoin proponent:
- this is great, I can make money quick!
- this is great, but I need other people to believe in it so that my hoard will grow in value and I can cash out
- crap, where's my exit plan:)
In all seriousness, people who fall for scams often fight very hard against anyone trying to educate them. I don't personally know anyone who has taken the bitcoin plunge and needs an intervention, but I *do* know people who have fallen for the iraqi dinar scam. They will wax eloquent about how its just a matter of time before it pays off. To prove their point, they will give even more of their life savings to the scammers. Some will even take on debt to keep the fantasy going. They can't bring themselves to admit that they've blown thousands of dollars -- it would be too embarrasing.
Bitcoin has a manifesto that is all fluff without substance. I thought it was a good joke until I realized people were taking it seriously. It is designed to appeal to the naive, in particular the naive geek. For all the talk about how deflationary money is good, its amazing how many miners are trying to increase supply at considerable expense.
Your point about how it *must* be spent to be considered money is, unfortunately, lost on people who are willfully ignorant. In medieval Europe there was a serious problem with the economy: there was no effective way to effect large transfers of wealth due to lack of coinage. Europe was poor in silver, but that was what was available for use as coin. Consequently it was heavily debased causing significant inflation/crash cycles for currency. Charlemagne tried to fix things by establishing a standard coin of good silver. It helped, but in the end succombed to debasement.
All of this while there was ample supply of gold. There were few gold coins in circulation, all foreign currency. Why? Because the gold was tied up in hordes. Either some petty lord clung to his pile of gold or it was held by the Church. And as time went on more and more was held by the Church.
What allowed the economy and trade to (eventually) flourish was an arrangement of ficitious currency. Merchants established a non-existent coinage (theoretically gold-based) and tracked and traded in that.
Money doesn't have to be physical. It does have to be an agreed upon standard and it *must* be used, otherwise it isn't money any more than the gold hordes of medieval Europe were.
a good post. Too bad you couldn't resist an unrelated jab at Apple at the end. Bitter that new versions of OS X don't run on PPC? Now, compare the last date of manufacture for an Apple PPC system to that for the handsets. Then look at how long Apple provided new OS versions for PPC models. There are significant discrepencies, both in Apple's "favor"
If you don't like Apple, great. But your insinuation against Apple just makes you look bad. The assertion that Apple stopped supporting PPC as a means for forcing users to upgrade falls flat when you notice that support lasted about as long as typical life cycle on hardware. If Apple were actually doing what you were alleging, they would've killed PPC support as soon as their market line up was all intel. But they didn't, not even close.
The closest to that was the result of a judgement against Apple resulting from a lawsuit where the complaint revolved around OS X's builtin firewire drivers did not mean an Apple computer made before firewire would have working firewire when OS X was installed. It sounds convoluted, but some idiotic things require that much mental back tracking. After Apple lost OS X could no longer (directly) be installed on pre-firewire Macintosh systems. But that wasn't Apple's plan, it was the consequence of a lawsuit. At least in the OS X era, Apple has never dropped hardware support as a way to force users to buy new hardware.
but the claim was that somehow all the over-the-air upgrades that anyone who cares knows are not happening were happening and that there were all of these mysterious iOS devices that have never been connected to itunes and aren't being updated either. Its two lies twisted together to give some vague semblence of truth.
As you say, iOS does not have to have a computer any more. *And* it gets patches over the air.
Moreover, it isn't a *theoretical* problem that Android devices are woefully behind on updates, it is actual fact. It doesn't require somehow spying on updates, all it takes is knowing the carriers and handset manufacturers do not provide updates. There's a nice table (sorry, no citation, but google is your friend) that shows the supported OS versions for various handsets for a variety of major Android sets as well as all iOS devices.
The truth is, Android devices -- as a group -- are more vulnerable than iOS devices simply due to the lack of provision for updates. Any given phone is another matter. Someone can deliberately not upgrade their iOS device -- even with the current over-the-air updating -- and keep it vulnerable. And it is possible to root (at least most, if not all) Android sets and install an updated OS. But that is not the general situation. It isn't that Android *has* to be more vulnerable, its just that in *practice* more devices are on (much) older and vulnerable versions.
you might want to look at the provisions of the DMCA and what Safe Harbor is and means and how it does not apply to proxying connections for other copyright infringers to contribute to your own copyright infringing activity.
Just to be clear: supernodes outside of microsoft still exist. I know, because we see them on our network.
OTOH, it would be foolish to think that Microsoft doesn't, at a minimum, have the capability to force a call to route through a system under their control. The ability to do so is basic CALEA compliance and a significant question about Skype before Microsoft bought them.
You seem to be curiously uninformed as to how and why unions came into existence in the US. Hint, it wasn't to stop 8-year olds from mining coal. Second hint, Pinkerton (the famous detective agency) got its start as a union busting company.
Your lack of knowledge on the subject is hardly surprising as the US government has been anti-union from the beginning seeing it as socialist and thus antithetical to the fascist regime. But despite various official efforts to undermine the legitimacy of unions it still isn't hard to learn this stuff.
(Not that unions are all glory and light. Funny how things aren't black and white and -- especially when talking in generalizations -- there is no single shade of grey that applies).
He was not asked to do a vulnerability test, and, like he was warned, there are stiff penalties for attacks. I'm more familiar with US laws on the subject, but would not be surprised for Canada's to be similar.
However, he is apparently not being charged, but being expelled. That is something else entirely. Yes, expulsion may be less severe than the pressing criminal charges, but in light of the circumstances it would have been much more appropriate to involve student affairs and have them explain very clearly what was wrong with his actions and what the future consequences will be. To go from praise to expulsion by one event... something should be very extraordinary about that one event.
Sometimes people forget that students are at a university to learn, not to be hammered into obedience or served up as an example. What was the actual harm of running acutenix against the application? The "it could have crashed" cannard is so lame -- anyone can download a vulnerability scanner. If your service or device is so lame that it breaks from a simple scan then you need to know. And not only that, you *will* find out if it is a public facing service or device. No, him running the scanner was not doing them a service, but the line "it could have crashed" is lame at best and more likely FUD.
We've had students do more actual harm (still fairly tenuous) through unethical and probably illegal actions -- referring them to student affairs always helps. Even for the DMCA (where there is some legislated obligation to act) there is a "three strikes" rule -- and expulsion isn't even the end result.
My point is that he was a student and he needed to learn. For example, not to run vulnerability scanners against targets you do not have authorization to do so. But this lesson could have been taught without resorting to expulsion.
by all of these clearly misleading statements I trust you mean the FUD against mega?
It was embarrasing to read the "security evaluations" where using javascript random number generation is blasted, while tacitly admitting that using it (versus none) improves the security. An *actual* security evaluation would have measured the entropy and reported on that, and *specifically* how much it improved (versus none). An example of the proper way to do this was an evaluation of Apple's file vault 2. Which does not have as much entropy as it "should" (in an ideal world) due to real world constraints. In Apple's case the reduction isn't particularly significant for home market, but you wouldn't want to trust it for storing important state secrets.
In real world encryption implementations there are always limitations to actual entropy. It isn't easy to accomplish and it is easy to lose. And side channel attacks can remove some you thought you had.
I sure wouldn't trust anything I considered private to megas servers -- but considering their security posture seems to be at least as good as (if not better than) dropbox* I wonder why all the outrage. If you want to put private files in the cloud don't use Mega, or dropbox, or pretty much any of these providers. Maybe spideroak (though where is the review of their still-private code to demonstrate proper implementation) or similar. Possibly tarsnap -- except that isn't really storing files in the cloud, but rather a remote archival solution.
I've been surprised at the apparent level of astro-turfing by the MAFIAA here. More likely its just a more general dislike for mega and its owner than I'd anticipate
* Dropbox who, via a "simple" mistake during a routine site update eliminated password verification so all files were effectively public. But trust them, no one's data was actually exposed...
You seem to be under the misapprehension that these bugs are in underlying C code, not java itself. I'm not sure why you think C code is somehow less secure than Java bytecode, but a common claim is C having pointers. Ooo, scary.
The problem is, these vulnerabilities are not due to buffer over runs or problems with pointers. They are caused by run-of-the-mill bugs in the java design or implementation. In other words, the jvm is executing the bytecode without any problem -- the *intention* of the security is being subverted, but the JVM is doing exactly what the source code is telling it to do.
Java was designed with the intention of providing a secure sandbox. The reality is instructive about the consequences of using a complex and many-featured product. Simple is no guarantee of security, but complexity is definitely an enemy of security.
Hmm... "credit is the lifeblood of modern economies" is true, according to historical economists, back to at least the middle ages (the earliest economic analysis I've read is for that period). In medieval europe there was plenty of gold but little silver. In fact, there wasn't enough silver to cover currency needs which led to constant debasement of the currency which led to easily predictable consequences for trade and commerce.
But if there was so much gold, why wasn't there a gold currency? Because it was there, but not available. At first, it existed in hordes maintained by lords. By the medieval church set great stock in gold and sucked it up -- and while a lord might use up some gold the church was a one-way street. Simply put, the only gold that existed as currency came from other regions, either east or south. Not much, and not of good quality.
What permitted trade and commerce to grow was the practice of credit.
You can throw around words like "velocity" and write a fairly comprehensible reply, but anyone espousing bitcoin as more than a boutique currency (whether it is an appeal to philosophy as you attempt, or some other method) is either attempting to fool others or has been fooled. I use one (a boutique currency) myself -- it has very low circulation (but used by others than myself), the supply is limited to the tokens I arbitrarily add to it, and it is a fiat currency. Still, it technically *is* a currency. Just like bitcoin. The fact that bitcoin has different features and greater adoption doesn't change anything -- it isn't like there is some bar that you cross that makes a currency "real" it simply is what it is.
What seems to offend most bitcoin fans is when the extremely limited circulation of their favorite currency (a simple fact) is pointed out, or the futility in investing in it. Get rich quick schemes are always popular and the people who buy into them do not take kindly to having this pointed out. It doesn't matter if its a life insurance/investment pyramid scheme, Iraqi dinars, or whatever else. There are cons and there are marks.
If someone derives satisfaction from "sticking it to the man" by using bitcoin, feels empowered by "mining", manages to launder a relatively small sum of money with it, manages a minor transaction that would not have otherwise been feasible for them due to external constraints --- great, they are deriving value from their use of bitcoin.
Maybe, some day, bitcoin will actually achieve a level of circulation associated with "real" currencies. But it doesn't seem likely, no matter what spin, hype and hyperbole the fans pitch. In that respect it is rather reminiscent of the Amiga and "the Amiga is coming back" and the fleecing of the faithful. But don't try telling that to one of the few faithful remaining who still uses (or at least dreams about using) an Amiga.
of course, anyone taking your advice has their head screwed on wrong. Maybe your going about your advice wrong. First, try to learn something about the topic on which you want to give advice. Second, don't insult the people you are talking to at every turn. You really like the phrase "grow a pair", for example. Grow up.
Of course, the same criticism could be leveled at this post. Except I'm not trying to give you advice, just pointing out why your "sage advice" is falling on deaf ears.
you may have worked in corporate IT but you have no clue. What is your source for wild ass claims like "9 out of 10 CPU cycles are work around exploits"? Oh, right, you pulled that out of your ass -- an invented statistic to try and make XP look bad. The problem with that claim is that it is patently false as is obvious not only to anyone with a clue about CPUs, application execution, or anything related -- but even to anyone who gives it a passing thought (for one, your assertion implies 1/10 the performance of an unpatched XP box). Someone who runs XP and installs Vista, Win7 or Win8 is (very likely*) going to experience a slow down, not a speed up. In general, people are aware that XP is "faster" than its successors and when you use lies to bolster your case you actually weaken it.
The claim that "security in XP is from the last century where all you needed is a good password" also shows your utter and complete ignorance of XP and security architectures. Of course, you don't offer a single item to backup your claim. It would be hard to, unless you made it up on the spot like your statistic from above, as it simply isn't true.
That isn't to say that people shouldn't be moving off of XP. But they should do it for real reasons, not some made up crap, and posting obvious lies only weakens that case.
Its amazing that such a stupid post got modded insightful. Then again, this *is* slashdot...
* except for blind fans of Microsoft, it is apparent that the successors of XP require more resources. This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but one consequence is that a system spec'd for XP is going to be under spec for Vista/Win7/Win8 and run slower. Potentially a lot slower (particularly dependent on how much RAM they have). Of course, MS has managed to shave a little off of boot time and there are other minor improvements such as the infinitesimal gain from disabling recording of access times (on a local file system of decent design -- which NTFS has -- there is no perceptible improvement).
measured by what benchmark? My non-SSD system will bury yours in the benchmarks I care about due to its 32GB RAM (still not enough, though) and fast CPU. Hint, your SSD isn't fast enough to keep system performance up when buried in swap. While 4GB is sufficient for some users, many it is not. A windows gamer friend of mine finally had to bite the bullet and go 64-bit to be able to use 8GB RAM so it isn't just non-gamer uses that benefit from RAM.
In short, it all depends on what your use case is. If yours involves totally loaded memory of 3GB your 4GB is going to be okay. I have hit swap even with 32GB of RAM. Some operations that simply weren't possible on a limited system (32-bit OS) are now do-able. The worst case example I tracked required 13GB just for the file load -- given other overhead it required 16GB just to load and do minimal operations.
When I put an SSD in my last computer I discovered the bottleneck for my operations was *not* the disk (which really surprised me as I expected file load/saves that were taking several minutes to become much faster instead of no discernable difference) but rather the CPU. It all depends on how the file is constructed on disk -- the new system has a much better CPU (and far more RAM) which *did* improve file load/save operations.
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You could have said the same thing about mass production, and predicted that the world would still be full of serfs and slaves 200 years in the future, but you would have been wrong.
I think you are living in a different world than I am. It isn't monotonic, but the trend over time is to higher stress and a greater part of life spent working. One of the regressions was early medieval europe where the desire to "be roman" eliminated the use of the plow share in favor of serf labor using pointed sticks. Reading what I wrote looks funny, I only wish I were kidding. But despite the occasional regression the overall, long term trend is definitely more work versus leisure.
Its kinda funny, though not in a ha-ha way, that we have made astounding advances in recreation (audio and video recordings, for one) and yet we have less time to take advantage of them. Three thousand years ago required relatively little work with lots of time left to... do what? Its no wonder that alcohol, story telling and dancing were historically so important.
Now we can select from hundreds (if not thousands) of movies to watch, or select from play lists of thousands (if not tens or hundreds of thousands) of songs to listen to. Or play games on a console or computer (even if a particular individual chooses not to, in the USA these options are widely available). But how much of our time can we spend on recreational activity? If you eliminate the ruling class, not that much. Even aggressive use of non-work time for leisure (an option not available to many, such as parents) is hard pressed to match working hours, much less exceed them.
Certain aspects of quality of life have certainly improved. Overall, medical care is slightly better (though not as wonderful as the health industry would like you to believe*) and average life expectency has improved (though not as much as most people are led to believe**). For most in the USA quality food is available, as is shelter and these certainly improve the quality of life. But there has definitely been a cost, and part of that cost is a decrease in available leisure time.
* too large of a topic for a post like this, but once you consider the meaningfulness of FDA testing and the general methodology of prescription ("we'll try this and evaluate the results", "take antibiotics, it *might* be a bacterial infection"), that the majority of medical research involves doing a study then looking for any correlation rather than following the scientific method -- it starts coming clear that while treatment of wound/injury based medical emergencies has greatly improved, the rest is much more incremental.
** also too large, but a variety of statistics are invented from whole cloth. For example, the official statistics for infant mortality rate have projections for frontier america that are vastly exaggerated (presumably in an attempt to convince people that home birth is dangerous) so as to claim much higher rates than are documented during plagues in medieval europe. And the use of IMR for historical purposes is for a much greater age span which already inflates it making the exaggeration even more ridiculous. And infant mortality rate is just one example of where different criteria result in apples/oranges comparisons that exaggerate the improvements.
in Missouri the state supreme court ruled against Springfield, MO for the installation and operation of red light cameras. Unfortunately, this fact is not well known and there are other operations in the state. If you get a red light camera based ticket in Missouri, don't pay it.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/30/3067.asp
Best post ever
a good post, but a point that seems to be missed here: the design patents are intended to allow broad coverage of appearance in a bid to create a revenue stream from the filings.
In a distinctly related topic is the established companies use of patents (supposedly FRAND, but refused to Apple) to try and prevent APple from ever releasing the iPhone. Apple figured they had the law on their side and proceded and the lawsuit proceded and... we end up with stupid, obvious patents being used on both sides. I say "stupid and obvious" because in most cases that is exactly what patents are. (Large) companies encourage employees to file patents (assigned to the company of course). Microsoft was asleep for a long time on this subject, but finally woke up.
Ridiculous patents is not an Apple, or Microsoft, or IBM or Intel or AMD or Samsung or Motorola thing -- it is all of them. Patents are used to suppress competition by raising a barrier for entry into a market. Intel and AMD cross license patents -- great, and bully for them. A significant reason *why* is because no one else can get into the game of making desktop CPUs -- you literally can't afford their patents.
When the EU decided to make money by creating "design patents" companies like Apple and Samsung are faced with a choice: file a patent on your product (and pay the fee to do so) or be sued for infringement if there is a turf war. Apple chose to file design patents in the EU, Samsung did not. In the end, Apple lost that IIRC but it might be interesting to see if Samsung now pays the EU protection money by filing design patents there.
While Apple's "rounded corners" design patent was obnoxious they are far from the only company to file for design patents in the EU, and they are certainly not the only company to use "stupid and obvious" patents when fighting against another company. In the topic at hand, Morotorola's patent was ruled as "obvious".
In sum: patents serve two purposes:
1) a revenue stream for the government issuing them
2) reduce competition by raising a barrier to entry in a market
But people are distracted by the claimed purpose "to promote invention/protect inventor's rights" and argue about merit rather than realizing they have been duped.
two factor authentication requires two factors to authenticate. From the MS piece this reads like Apple's recent enhancement and it is *not* adding two factor authentication to your MS (or Apple) account. Rather it revises the account recovery process to, in principle, better protect an account from being "stolen" via social engineering. Great, that has some utility. But two factor authentication it is not.
To be clear: two factor authentication for the account would be if two separate factors were required to authenticate. In the case of an Apple account that would mean to authenticate for email would require presenting two separate factors (e.g., something I know, something I have). But with both Apple and Microsoft this is not the case: authentication is still only password "protected". Only some limited areas are covered by two-factor (or something dressed up to look like it). So if you re-use your password and one place you use it at is compromised this does absolutely nothing to prevent a bad guy from running amok through your account and personal life. (Particularly given the general propensity for logins to take the form of email/password.)
The reality is that passwords as protection have been dead for at least a decade, but very few are cognizant of it. Instead, there is talk about "strong" passwords, or "passphrase" or whatever is intended to shore up a model that is dead and broken lying by the side of the road, but still used because it is familiar and convenient.
its fairly similar to Apple's new option which isn't two factor (and apple doesn't call it that), but is widely *reported* as being "two factor". In the case of Apple, you can secure your account against normal password recovery attacks (e.g., a social engineering call to Apple support with a bit of personal information gleaned from facebook). And while that may have some utility for some people it is definitely /not/ two factor authentication.
What is it with logic failures and lack of reading comprehension? You could try again, and this time pay attention to what is being said. Such as the point about skill and time constraints. Perhaps you can't grasp the difference between a write-at-your-own-pace essay and a timed exam, but the information is all there.
Your lack of reading comprehension is amazing.
""Brevity is a strong indicator of lack of quality" means the same thing as "length correlates to quality", so this is self-contradictory."
Only for the logic impaired. And the rest of your post is even worse. Grade: 1/10 points -- kinda topical but attempting to hide lack of comprehension behind large words that are poorly understood.
I use essay questions for tests and I teach in a technical field. My instructions note that a good answer is complete and succinct. Many students don't know the word "succinct" and end up thinking it means "short" or "brief". Most college students lack the language skills to be complete and succinct on a timed exam. Heck, most probably can't do it even if it were not timed. Consequently, good answers tend to also be long.
It isn't that length correlates to quality (you always get someone who thinks they can bury their ignorance in a pile of words), its that brevity is a strong indicator for a lack of quality. Significant sections of most answers could be deleted without detracting from the answer (it isn't succinct), but it takes skill and/or time to pare down the verbage. As noted, they lack the time and unless they have good skill to compensate succinctness just doesn't happen.
OTOH it /is/ a pain to grade. Much more time consuming than using traditional multiple choice exams.
With respect to your statement, it isn't that "smart people" write concisely, it is that skilled people with time and motivation to do so write concisely. The brevity of your post betrays the lack of quality in your contribution.
Ah yes, becuase your "psychologist friend" has a working definition of intelligence and there is "professional" literature with studies on it. Interesting.
Then again, I'm responding to an AC...
I used to have a cat that played fetch. I had a soft rubber dart. Toss it, she'd chase it and bring it back. IIRC, she suggested the game. Not all cats are the same (in fact, I've never met any two that were) -- that one also liked to play with water (bat at water coming from a faucet). Her sister had no interest.
But I was really amused by her playing fetch. I've never had another cat do that.
heh. Take ECON 200? Their too busy pontificating on a subject about which they are ignorant and their CPU is too busy mining bitcoins to even consider working on something else. :)
The life cycle of a bitcoin proponent:
- this is great, I can make money quick! :)
- this is great, but I need other people to believe in it so that my hoard will grow in value and I can cash out
- crap, where's my exit plan
In all seriousness, people who fall for scams often fight very hard against anyone trying to educate them. I don't personally know anyone who has taken the bitcoin plunge and needs an intervention, but I *do* know people who have fallen for the iraqi dinar scam. They will wax eloquent about how its just a matter of time before it pays off. To prove their point, they will give even more of their life savings to the scammers. Some will even take on debt to keep the fantasy going. They can't bring themselves to admit that they've blown thousands of dollars -- it would be too embarrasing.
Bitcoin has a manifesto that is all fluff without substance. I thought it was a good joke until I realized people were taking it seriously. It is designed to appeal to the naive, in particular the naive geek. For all the talk about how deflationary money is good, its amazing how many miners are trying to increase supply at considerable expense.
Your point about how it *must* be spent to be considered money is, unfortunately, lost on people who are willfully ignorant. In medieval Europe there was a serious problem with the economy: there was no effective way to effect large transfers of wealth due to lack of coinage. Europe was poor in silver, but that was what was available for use as coin. Consequently it was heavily debased causing significant inflation/crash cycles for currency. Charlemagne tried to fix things by establishing a standard coin of good silver. It helped, but in the end succombed to debasement.
All of this while there was ample supply of gold. There were few gold coins in circulation, all foreign currency. Why? Because the gold was tied up in hordes. Either some petty lord clung to his pile of gold or it was held by the Church. And as time went on more and more was held by the Church.
What allowed the economy and trade to (eventually) flourish was an arrangement of ficitious currency. Merchants established a non-existent coinage (theoretically gold-based) and tracked and traded in that.
Money doesn't have to be physical. It does have to be an agreed upon standard and it *must* be used, otherwise it isn't money any more than the gold hordes of medieval Europe were.
a good post. Too bad you couldn't resist an unrelated jab at Apple at the end. Bitter that new versions of OS X don't run on PPC? Now, compare the last date of manufacture for an Apple PPC system to that for the handsets. Then look at how long Apple provided new OS versions for PPC models. There are significant discrepencies, both in Apple's "favor"
If you don't like Apple, great. But your insinuation against Apple just makes you look bad. The assertion that Apple stopped supporting PPC as a means for forcing users to upgrade falls flat when you notice that support lasted about as long as typical life cycle on hardware. If Apple were actually doing what you were alleging, they would've killed PPC support as soon as their market line up was all intel. But they didn't, not even close.
The closest to that was the result of a judgement against Apple resulting from a lawsuit where the complaint revolved around OS X's builtin firewire drivers did not mean an Apple computer made before firewire would have working firewire when OS X was installed. It sounds convoluted, but some idiotic things require that much mental back tracking. After Apple lost OS X could no longer (directly) be installed on pre-firewire Macintosh systems. But that wasn't Apple's plan, it was the consequence of a lawsuit. At least in the OS X era, Apple has never dropped hardware support as a way to force users to buy new hardware.
but the claim was that somehow all the over-the-air upgrades that anyone who cares knows are not happening were happening and that there were all of these mysterious iOS devices that have never been connected to itunes and aren't being updated either. Its two lies twisted together to give some vague semblence of truth.
As you say, iOS does not have to have a computer any more. *And* it gets patches over the air.
Moreover, it isn't a *theoretical* problem that Android devices are woefully behind on updates, it is actual fact. It doesn't require somehow spying on updates, all it takes is knowing the carriers and handset manufacturers do not provide updates. There's a nice table (sorry, no citation, but google is your friend) that shows the supported OS versions for various handsets for a variety of major Android sets as well as all iOS devices.
The truth is, Android devices -- as a group -- are more vulnerable than iOS devices simply due to the lack of provision for updates. Any given phone is another matter. Someone can deliberately not upgrade their iOS device -- even with the current over-the-air updating -- and keep it vulnerable. And it is possible to root (at least most, if not all) Android sets and install an updated OS. But that is not the general situation. It isn't that Android *has* to be more vulnerable, its just that in *practice* more devices are on (much) older and vulnerable versions.
an online service provider is allowed "Safe Harbor" but for that you must:
1) respond to all DMCA complaints in a timely fashion
2) prevent distribution of material on receipt of the complaint
and you can lose safe harbor status e.g., for continuing to provide service to a repeat offender, failing to take action on complaints, etc.
being a provider is no perfect shield, especially when you don't have the money for on-staff legal counsel
you might want to look at the provisions of the DMCA and what Safe Harbor is and means and how it does not apply to proxying connections for other copyright infringers to contribute to your own copyright infringing activity.
Just to be clear: supernodes outside of microsoft still exist. I know, because we see them on our network.
OTOH, it would be foolish to think that Microsoft doesn't, at a minimum, have the capability to force a call to route through a system under their control. The ability to do so is basic CALEA compliance and a significant question about Skype before Microsoft bought them.
You seem to be curiously uninformed as to how and why unions came into existence in the US. Hint, it wasn't to stop 8-year olds from mining coal. Second hint, Pinkerton (the famous detective agency) got its start as a union busting company.
Your lack of knowledge on the subject is hardly surprising as the US government has been anti-union from the beginning seeing it as socialist and thus antithetical to the fascist regime. But despite various official efforts to undermine the legitimacy of unions it still isn't hard to learn this stuff.
(Not that unions are all glory and light. Funny how things aren't black and white and -- especially when talking in generalizations -- there is no single shade of grey that applies).
He was not asked to do a vulnerability test, and, like he was warned, there are stiff penalties for attacks. I'm more familiar with US laws on the subject, but would not be surprised for Canada's to be similar.
However, he is apparently not being charged, but being expelled. That is something else entirely. Yes, expulsion may be less severe than the pressing criminal charges, but in light of the circumstances it would have been much more appropriate to involve student affairs and have them explain very clearly what was wrong with his actions and what the future consequences will be. To go from praise to expulsion by one event... something should be very extraordinary about that one event.
Sometimes people forget that students are at a university to learn, not to be hammered into obedience or served up as an example. What was the actual harm of running acutenix against the application? The "it could have crashed" cannard is so lame -- anyone can download a vulnerability scanner. If your service or device is so lame that it breaks from a simple scan then you need to know. And not only that, you *will* find out if it is a public facing service or device. No, him running the scanner was not doing them a service, but the line "it could have crashed" is lame at best and more likely FUD.
We've had students do more actual harm (still fairly tenuous) through unethical and probably illegal actions -- referring them to student affairs always helps. Even for the DMCA (where there is some legislated obligation to act) there is a "three strikes" rule -- and expulsion isn't even the end result.
My point is that he was a student and he needed to learn. For example, not to run vulnerability scanners against targets you do not have authorization to do so. But this lesson could have been taught without resorting to expulsion.
by all of these clearly misleading statements I trust you mean the FUD against mega?
It was embarrasing to read the "security evaluations" where using javascript random number generation is blasted, while tacitly admitting that using it (versus none) improves the security. An *actual* security evaluation would have measured the entropy and reported on that, and *specifically* how much it improved (versus none). An example of the proper way to do this was an evaluation of Apple's file vault 2. Which does not have as much entropy as it "should" (in an ideal world) due to real world constraints. In Apple's case the reduction isn't particularly significant for home market, but you wouldn't want to trust it for storing important state secrets.
In real world encryption implementations there are always limitations to actual entropy. It isn't easy to accomplish and it is easy to lose. And side channel attacks can remove some you thought you had.
I sure wouldn't trust anything I considered private to megas servers -- but considering their security posture seems to be at least as good as (if not better than) dropbox* I wonder why all the outrage. If you want to put private files in the cloud don't use Mega, or dropbox, or pretty much any of these providers. Maybe spideroak (though where is the review of their still-private code to demonstrate proper implementation) or similar. Possibly tarsnap -- except that isn't really storing files in the cloud, but rather a remote archival solution.
I've been surprised at the apparent level of astro-turfing by the MAFIAA here. More likely its just a more general dislike for mega and its owner than I'd anticipate
* Dropbox who, via a "simple" mistake during a routine site update eliminated password verification so all files were effectively public. But trust them, no one's data was actually exposed...
You seem to be under the misapprehension that these bugs are in underlying C code, not java itself. I'm not sure why you think C code is somehow less secure than Java bytecode, but a common claim is C having pointers. Ooo, scary.
The problem is, these vulnerabilities are not due to buffer over runs or problems with pointers. They are caused by run-of-the-mill bugs in the java design or implementation. In other words, the jvm is executing the bytecode without any problem -- the *intention* of the security is being subverted, but the JVM is doing exactly what the source code is telling it to do.
Java was designed with the intention of providing a secure sandbox. The reality is instructive about the consequences of using a complex and many-featured product. Simple is no guarantee of security, but complexity is definitely an enemy of security.
Hmm... "credit is the lifeblood of modern economies" is true, according to historical economists, back to at least the middle ages (the earliest economic analysis I've read is for that period). In medieval europe there was plenty of gold but little silver. In fact, there wasn't enough silver to cover currency needs which led to constant debasement of the currency which led to easily predictable consequences for trade and commerce.
But if there was so much gold, why wasn't there a gold currency? Because it was there, but not available. At first, it existed in hordes maintained by lords. By the medieval church set great stock in gold and sucked it up -- and while a lord might use up some gold the church was a one-way street. Simply put, the only gold that existed as currency came from other regions, either east or south. Not much, and not of good quality.
What permitted trade and commerce to grow was the practice of credit.
You can throw around words like "velocity" and write a fairly comprehensible reply, but anyone espousing bitcoin as more than a boutique currency (whether it is an appeal to philosophy as you attempt, or some other method) is either attempting to fool others or has been fooled. I use one (a boutique currency) myself -- it has very low circulation (but used by others than myself), the supply is limited to the tokens I arbitrarily add to it, and it is a fiat currency. Still, it technically *is* a currency. Just like bitcoin. The fact that bitcoin has different features and greater adoption doesn't change anything -- it isn't like there is some bar that you cross that makes a currency "real" it simply is what it is.
What seems to offend most bitcoin fans is when the extremely limited circulation of their favorite currency (a simple fact) is pointed out, or the futility in investing in it. Get rich quick schemes are always popular and the people who buy into them do not take kindly to having this pointed out. It doesn't matter if its a life insurance/investment pyramid scheme, Iraqi dinars, or whatever else. There are cons and there are marks.
If someone derives satisfaction from "sticking it to the man" by using bitcoin, feels empowered by "mining", manages to launder a relatively small sum of money with it, manages a minor transaction that would not have otherwise been feasible for them due to external constraints --- great, they are deriving value from their use of bitcoin.
Maybe, some day, bitcoin will actually achieve a level of circulation associated with "real" currencies. But it doesn't seem likely, no matter what spin, hype and hyperbole the fans pitch. In that respect it is rather reminiscent of the Amiga and "the Amiga is coming back" and the fleecing of the faithful. But don't try telling that to one of the few faithful remaining who still uses (or at least dreams about using) an Amiga.
of course, anyone taking your advice has their head screwed on wrong. Maybe your going about your advice wrong. First, try to learn something about the topic on which you want to give advice. Second, don't insult the people you are talking to at every turn. You really like the phrase "grow a pair", for example. Grow up.
Of course, the same criticism could be leveled at this post. Except I'm not trying to give you advice, just pointing out why your "sage advice" is falling on deaf ears.
you may have worked in corporate IT but you have no clue. What is your source for wild ass claims like "9 out of 10 CPU cycles are work around exploits"? Oh, right, you pulled that out of your ass -- an invented statistic to try and make XP look bad. The problem with that claim is that it is patently false as is obvious not only to anyone with a clue about CPUs, application execution, or anything related -- but even to anyone who gives it a passing thought (for one, your assertion implies 1/10 the performance of an unpatched XP box). Someone who runs XP and installs Vista, Win7 or Win8 is (very likely*) going to experience a slow down, not a speed up. In general, people are aware that XP is "faster" than its successors and when you use lies to bolster your case you actually weaken it.
The claim that "security in XP is from the last century where all you needed is a good password" also shows your utter and complete ignorance of XP and security architectures. Of course, you don't offer a single item to backup your claim. It would be hard to, unless you made it up on the spot like your statistic from above, as it simply isn't true.
That isn't to say that people shouldn't be moving off of XP. But they should do it for real reasons, not some made up crap, and posting obvious lies only weakens that case.
Its amazing that such a stupid post got modded insightful. Then again, this *is* slashdot...
* except for blind fans of Microsoft, it is apparent that the successors of XP require more resources. This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but one consequence is that a system spec'd for XP is going to be under spec for Vista/Win7/Win8 and run slower. Potentially a lot slower (particularly dependent on how much RAM they have). Of course, MS has managed to shave a little off of boot time and there are other minor improvements such as the infinitesimal gain from disabling recording of access times (on a local file system of decent design -- which NTFS has -- there is no perceptible improvement).
measured by what benchmark? My non-SSD system will bury yours in the benchmarks I care about due to its 32GB RAM (still not enough, though) and fast CPU. Hint, your SSD isn't fast enough to keep system performance up when buried in swap. While 4GB is sufficient for some users, many it is not. A windows gamer friend of mine finally had to bite the bullet and go 64-bit to be able to use 8GB RAM so it isn't just non-gamer uses that benefit from RAM.
In short, it all depends on what your use case is. If yours involves totally loaded memory of 3GB your 4GB is going to be okay. I have hit swap even with 32GB of RAM. Some operations that simply weren't possible on a limited system (32-bit OS) are now do-able. The worst case example I tracked required 13GB just for the file load -- given other overhead it required 16GB just to load and do minimal operations.
When I put an SSD in my last computer I discovered the bottleneck for my operations was *not* the disk (which really surprised me as I expected file load/saves that were taking several minutes to become much faster instead of no discernable difference) but rather the CPU. It all depends on how the file is constructed on disk -- the new system has a much better CPU (and far more RAM) which *did* improve file load/save operations.