And I have a question to ask: what kind of data exactly was left vulnerable by this hacking? Is it credit card information, names and addresses, phone numbers, credit ratings, all of the above?
"The suspect, now in police custody, was an employee with legitimate access to the information. It amazes me that a such a company would have such lax security as to allow an insider to browse supposedly private data at will."
This is, unfortunately, the real world. Lax security such as this is the norm. "Need-to-know" is a term which doesn't seem to exist in the security policies of these companies. Insider information will always be leaked by someone out of curiosity or some malicious impulse. They're lucky they were able to find out who it was! At least maybe now they're more likely to improve their security and get it up to scratch. (But probably not.)
...anonymity is the key. My crystal ball (i.e. an application of Murphy's Law) states that if you try to formally inform the universities of the flaw, you'll get hushed up, blamed and generally blusted. Just write anonymous letters to the companies who develop the software and the universities about the problems. If they don't take action, then feel guiltfree about giving yourself arbitrary scores. Remember: if you don't get caught, it's not illegal.
I notice that like a lot of assembler OSes it doesn't seem too modular. (That's fine, though, considering that it's just 70K!) All the utilities which are needed are builtin. Which brings me to the question I wish to ask for any who are more informed than I?
Is there a simple way of interfacing with the GUI to produce dialog boxes and the like from a simple shell? I'm thinking of something like xdialog or gdialog in UNIX/Linux systems with X/GNOME installed.
Unfortunately, I feel that in most cases such a small sample size would render virtually any impersonal/algorithmic trust metric unhelpful or at best unreliable. I think it would be best to implement something simple and human-powered; maybe like an extension of the Slashdot zoo system? This works very effectively as is for shutting out regular trolls (or even just ACs, if that floats your boat) and would probably be just fine without the moderation systems. Set friends and foes, allow comment scores and let a few simple rules do the rest!
I live in England and a popular BBC science TV programme, "Tomorrow's World" was doing reports on this phenomenon as far back as 1998/1999. If I recall correctly, they even asked viewers to do an informal study whereby they looked at the night sky through a toilet roll tube and counted the number of visible stars, then to send in that number and geographical location in so that they could figure out where light pollution was worst. As far as I can tell, the south of the country was a lot more afflicted than the north, with major cities (particularly London) often having no stars visible at all at some times.
Racing likely to become more interesting?
on
Scientists Clone Horse
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't think that cloning will make much difference to current methods of selective breeding; after all, selective breeding works just fine as it is, and I don't think that horses can really be "improved" any further without some large anomalistic genetic change in a large proportion of the species.
RIM said in a statement that it was gratified that the judge did not make the injunction take effect immediately....
"It doesn't do NTP any good to shut RIM down, because its business is based on licensing...we believe that RIM will settle at some nominal licensing rate and while we view this as a short-term negative...the long-term effects will be minimal."
In its earnings reports, RIM has been stating two sets of results, depending on the outcome of the infringement case. A negative ruling would bite into RIM's financial results."
It really does seem to me that the article is stating the obvious quite a bit here. Of course a ruling against a company's practice is going to reduce its financial results. Of course reasonable licensing will keep a company in business, and of course slight fluctuations in it will only have short-term effects. The only way this article would give you new information is if you were completely unfamiliar with the case. Is it just me or are the articles on "news.com.com" becoming more and more like fluff?
1. Set up a SSH server on your UNIX/Linux system. 2. Make 50 user accounts. 3. Give out the passwords for the accounts to as many geek friends of yours as you can. 4. Pick 6 of the user accounts at random and put them in the 'wheel' group. 5. Install telnet, FTP and sendmail daemons. 6. Have fun keeping up with everything! (An iron bar with a rubber handle for gripping might come in handy.)
This article reads like an advert to me, is packed with buzzwords and doesn't really give any details beyond that it'll be demonstrated at LinxuWorld, booth 647 today and tomorrow. Could those more informed than I enlighten me as to what advantages does this have over current portable Linux system? Or have insufficient details been released?
...then I'm all for it. Anything which makes teaching information to children easier can only be a good thing. If a child learns best through an immersive video game, then that's a very useful tool and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's not used excessively. Video games have had a bad rap recently but that's purely because of infamously violent video games stealing the attention from the innumerable other nonviolent and nonsexual computer games which are simply a lot less noticed by either the pro or anti video game camps.
Some things to point out.
on
Perl 1.0?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Before I continue, I'd just like to point out that on the offchance that something goes wrong with regard to dev.perl.org, I uploaded a copy before the article was posted in case of Slashdotting or if you just want to use a mirror.
With that out of the way, there's a few limitations of the language which I found quite interesting:
There's no switch statement
There are no hash table variables (i.e. those beginning with a '%')
No support for recursive subroutines
And yes, Larry does say that Perl "actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that." Oh. Oops.
Oh, and when you download the package and untar it all into a directory, it won't work out of the box. Here's some instructions on how to make it work on Red Hat Linux system. First, untar it all into one big folder. Then, run./Configure and just press Enter. When 'make depend' has run, you need to edit the Makefile. Open the Makefile up in your text editor and get rid of all the lines containing either '<built-in>' or '<command line>'. Then you should be able to just do 'make' and you now have a copy of Perl 1.0 as./perl in the current directory.
Is there going to be a Mars probe launched on this date of closest approach, or will we be able to exploit it for sending a person to Mars? Or is this just, unfortunately, an astronomical curiosity which NASA doesn't have the budget to take advantage of at the moment?
Laws that people don't understand are disliked by them? Surely some mistake!
What does the government expect? Copyright laws have not been properly developed and then updated independently of the interests of those with influence (read: money) but have instead been accumulated over time by gradual accretion. Is it really any surprise then that they parallel other equally confusing works such as James Joyce's Ulysses, developed in an identical way. Copyright law started out as making some sense for the purpose of protecting an artist's rights while allowing public domain material to say public domain. Now they continuously tinker with it. Rich organisations constantly press for nonsensical and exact new stipulations, and because people try to exploit every loophole at every opportunity because of this they have to introduce even more arbitrary limits:
"For example, bars and restaurants that measure no more than 3,750 square feet (not including the parking lot, as long as the parking lot is used exclusively for parking purposes) can contain no more than four TVs (of no more than 55 inches diagonally) for their patrons to watch, as long as there is only one TV per room."
What bullshit! The thing that makes this even worse is that this isn't unusual: it's just a microcosm of law these days: a series of idiotic and numerically precise restrictions with no justification suffering from excessive detail with every little fucking detail having to be dictated due to the foolhardy allowance given for defence lawyers in exploiting any undefined part of each law.
I don't want to sound like a killjoy, but what do you think will be the odds that Xerox lets the average person get their hands on this technology? More likely that they'll take out about half a dozen patents on every known way of implementing it and then enforce ridiculously high licensing fees on any product or organisation which tries to use it.
"In fact, if use of the paste becomes commonplace, it may even give the semiconductor industry a little speed boost."
Not if it doesn't dry as quickly as solder, not if it's more brittle than solder, and not if it's stronger than solder. That's the thing with solder - it's a "good enough" solution so it'll probably last quite a while yet.
If users will install random spyware and games on work machines, why wouldn't they do the same for an entire operating system? The only difference is that they have to insert a CD-ROM! And that seems to be what people are doing with their Linux installs as well as their Windows workstations too, according to the article.
The PRISMIQ Media Player is "a new Linux embedded product", and yet it says this on the information page it says:
"MediaManager Windows-compliant software, which runs on the networked PC to detect suitable PC and Internet files anywhere on the home network..."
Isn't it a bit insecure for it to scan the entire hard disk drive of an old Windows machine for media files? How secure is the communication if one decides to use it in its wireless incarnation? Though this product certainly sounds great, the practicality of it for users of alternative operating systems and its security sounds doubtful, especially given the dearth of information on the company website.
"Pacific Bell Internet Services jumped into the contentious music-downloading fray late Wednesday, filing a lawsuit against the recording industry and questioning the constitutionality of the industry's effort to track down online music sharers." (emphasis mine)
Joyce's Law: As a US lawsuit goes on longer, the probability of its constitutionality being challenged approaches one.:-)
It's really very simple, people; if you leave personal information about me lying around on a network which a mere script kiddie can break into, then you deserve to get sued. If you take no measures to remedy the situation, even after being repeatedly warned, and then my details get stolen and sold on, you WILL get sued. Why? To send a message. I hope this happens to more companies so that they get serious about data protection. Heck, even schools have crappy information security. I should tell you about the kind of thing I could get off the school network and the lax treatment of passwords...
"ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
It doesn't matter if the RIAA can see your "Kazaa files". All the RIAA has to do is see your username on a P2P network and trace the IP address behind it. They don't need to search your hard disk drive - all they need is evidence of a particular kind of modem activity and they can bust you anyway, hard disk or no!
"For MAX3, the ABIT Engineers listened to users who were asking for information security. SecureIDE connects to your IDE hard disk...without a special key, your hard disk cannot be opened by anyone. Thus hackers and would be information thieves cannot access your hard disk, even if they remove it from your PC. Protect your privacy and keep anyone from snooping into your information. Lock down your hard disk..."
It's not encryption! It's a physical lock on the hard disk!
Slashdot Mirror
And I have a question to ask: what kind of data exactly was left vulnerable by this hacking? Is it credit card information, names and addresses, phone numbers, credit ratings, all of the above?
This is, unfortunately, the real world. Lax security such as this is the norm. "Need-to-know" is a term which doesn't seem to exist in the security policies of these companies. Insider information will always be leaked by someone out of curiosity or some malicious impulse. They're lucky they were able to find out who it was! At least maybe now they're more likely to improve their security and get it up to scratch. (But probably not.)
...anonymity is the key. My crystal ball (i.e. an application of Murphy's Law) states that if you try to formally inform the universities of the flaw, you'll get hushed up, blamed and generally blusted. Just write anonymous letters to the companies who develop the software and the universities about the problems. If they don't take action, then feel guiltfree about giving yourself arbitrary scores. Remember: if you don't get caught, it's not illegal.
I notice that like a lot of assembler OSes it doesn't seem too modular. (That's fine, though, considering that it's just 70K!) All the utilities which are needed are builtin. Which brings me to the question I wish to ask for any who are more informed than I?
Is there a simple way of interfacing with the GUI to produce dialog boxes and the like from a simple shell? I'm thinking of something like xdialog or gdialog in UNIX/Linux systems with X/GNOME installed.
Unfortunately, I feel that in most cases such a small sample size would render virtually any impersonal/algorithmic trust metric unhelpful or at best unreliable. I think it would be best to implement something simple and human-powered; maybe like an extension of the Slashdot zoo system? This works very effectively as is for shutting out regular trolls (or even just ACs, if that floats your boat) and would probably be just fine without the moderation systems. Set friends and foes, allow comment scores and let a few simple rules do the rest!
I live in England and a popular BBC science TV programme, "Tomorrow's World" was doing reports on this phenomenon as far back as 1998/1999. If I recall correctly, they even asked viewers to do an informal study whereby they looked at the night sky through a toilet roll tube and counted the number of visible stars, then to send in that number and geographical location in so that they could figure out where light pollution was worst. As far as I can tell, the south of the country was a lot more afflicted than the north, with major cities (particularly London) often having no stars visible at all at some times.
I don't think that cloning will make much difference to current methods of selective breeding; after all, selective breeding works just fine as it is, and I don't think that horses can really be "improved" any further without some large anomalistic genetic change in a large proportion of the species.
It really does seem to me that the article is stating the obvious quite a bit here. Of course a ruling against a company's practice is going to reduce its financial results. Of course reasonable licensing will keep a company in business, and of course slight fluctuations in it will only have short-term effects. The only way this article would give you new information is if you were completely unfamiliar with the case. Is it just me or are the articles on "news.com.com" becoming more and more like fluff?
Changelog, hot off the press!
(Now I wonder how long it will be before someone posts the "Gentoo Linux Zealot Translator"?)
1. Set up a SSH server on your UNIX/Linux system.
2. Make 50 user accounts.
3. Give out the passwords for the accounts to as many geek friends of yours as you can.
4. Pick 6 of the user accounts at random and put them in the 'wheel' group.
5. Install telnet, FTP and sendmail daemons.
6. Have fun keeping up with everything! (An iron bar with a rubber handle for gripping might come in handy.)
This article reads like an advert to me, is packed with buzzwords and doesn't really give any details beyond that it'll be demonstrated at LinxuWorld, booth 647 today and tomorrow. Could those more informed than I enlighten me as to what advantages does this have over current portable Linux system? Or have insufficient details been released?
...then I'm all for it. Anything which makes teaching information to children easier can only be a good thing. If a child learns best through an immersive video game, then that's a very useful tool and there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's not used excessively. Video games have had a bad rap recently but that's purely because of infamously violent video games stealing the attention from the innumerable other nonviolent and nonsexual computer games which are simply a lot less noticed by either the pro or anti video game camps.
Now fixed.
Before I continue, I'd just like to point out that on the offchance that something goes wrong with regard to dev.perl.org, I uploaded a copy before the article was posted in case of Slashdotting or if you just want to use a mirror.
With that out of the way, there's a few limitations of the language which I found quite interesting:
Oh, and when you download the package and untar it all into a directory, it won't work out of the box. Here's some instructions on how to make it work on Red Hat Linux system. First, untar it all into one big folder. Then, run ./Configure and just press Enter. When 'make depend' has run, you need to edit the Makefile. Open the Makefile up in your text editor and get rid of all the lines containing either '<built-in>' or '<command line>'. Then you should be able to just do 'make' and you now have a copy of Perl 1.0 as ./perl in the current directory.
The be-all and end-all word: FUD.
Need I say more?
Is there going to be a Mars probe launched on this date of closest approach, or will we be able to exploit it for sending a person to Mars? Or is this just, unfortunately, an astronomical curiosity which NASA doesn't have the budget to take advantage of at the moment?
What does the government expect? Copyright laws have not been properly developed and then updated independently of the interests of those with influence (read: money) but have instead been accumulated over time by gradual accretion. Is it really any surprise then that they parallel other equally confusing works such as James Joyce's Ulysses, developed in an identical way. Copyright law started out as making some sense for the purpose of protecting an artist's rights while allowing public domain material to say public domain. Now they continuously tinker with it. Rich organisations constantly press for nonsensical and exact new stipulations, and because people try to exploit every loophole at every opportunity because of this they have to introduce even more arbitrary limits:
What bullshit! The thing that makes this even worse is that this isn't unusual: it's just a microcosm of law these days: a series of idiotic and numerically precise restrictions with no justification suffering from excessive detail with every little fucking detail having to be dictated due to the foolhardy allowance given for defence lawyers in exploiting any undefined part of each law.
I don't want to sound like a killjoy, but what do you think will be the odds that Xerox lets the average person get their hands on this technology? More likely that they'll take out about half a dozen patents on every known way of implementing it and then enforce ridiculously high licensing fees on any product or organisation which tries to use it.
"In fact, if use of the paste becomes commonplace, it may even give the semiconductor industry a little speed boost."
Not if it doesn't dry as quickly as solder, not if it's more brittle than solder, and not if it's stronger than solder. That's the thing with solder - it's a "good enough" solution so it'll probably last quite a while yet.
If users will install random spyware and games on work machines, why wouldn't they do the same for an entire operating system? The only difference is that they have to insert a CD-ROM! And that seems to be what people are doing with their Linux installs as well as their Windows workstations too, according to the article.
Isn't it a bit insecure for it to scan the entire hard disk drive of an old Windows machine for media files? How secure is the communication if one decides to use it in its wireless incarnation? Though this product certainly sounds great, the practicality of it for users of alternative operating systems and its security sounds doubtful, especially given the dearth of information on the company website.
"Pacific Bell Internet Services jumped into the contentious music-downloading fray late Wednesday, filing a lawsuit against the recording industry and questioning the constitutionality of the industry's effort to track down online music sharers." (emphasis mine)
:-)
Joyce's Law: As a US lawsuit goes on longer, the probability of its constitutionality being challenged approaches one.
It's really very simple, people; if you leave personal information about me lying around on a network which a mere script kiddie can break into, then you deserve to get sued. If you take no measures to remedy the situation, even after being repeatedly warned, and then my details get stolen and sold on, you WILL get sued. Why? To send a message. I hope this happens to more companies so that they get serious about data protection. Heck, even schools have crappy information security. I should tell you about the kind of thing I could get off the school network and the lax treatment of passwords...
"ABIT's SecureIDE will keep government supercomputers busy for weeks and will keep the RIAA away from your Kazaa files."
It doesn't matter if the RIAA can see your "Kazaa files". All the RIAA has to do is see your username on a P2P network and trace the IP address behind it. They don't need to search your hard disk drive - all they need is evidence of a particular kind of modem activity and they can bust you anyway, hard disk or no!
It's not encryption! It's a physical lock on the hard disk!