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User: itsownreward

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  1. Re:What happened to " allegedly" in the headline? on Venezuela's Government Appears To be Trying To Hack Activists With Phishing Pages (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    If, like me, you're a US person sitting in in the US making a comment on a US website over a civil matter... well, sue me. GLWT

  2. Re: Oversimplification of telemarketers on The Story of Lenny, the Internet's Favorite Telemarketing Troll (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Hey! Found the PHB!

  3. Just Dallas/Fort Worth area, not all of Texas on Fire At AT&T Facility Causes Outage For Over a Million U-Verse Fiber Customers In Texas (wfaa.com) · · Score: 1

    I've got AT&T fiber down in the Houston area and it works just fine currently. Ditto with someone I know in the Austin area.

  4. Medical devices with Windows 7? on Ask Slashdot: How Do You Handle Hardware That Never Gets Software Updates? (hpe.com) · · Score: 1

    Medical devices with Windows 7? That's a laugh. We have medical devices around here running Windows XP. How's that for a nightmare?

  5. Re:Did we ever do that? on Yelp Accused Of Hiding Positive Reviews For Non-Advertiser (cbslocal.com) · · Score: 1

    Okay, I'll grant you that. I've seen issues for all kinds of things. I have had to submit things like pronunciation changes because... well, who comes up with these pronunciations? I don't even live in an obscure area (fourth largest city in the US), but it has no clue on certain things!

    I guess it depends on what sources of information they can use. I would even think changes to the signs collected during a Streetmaps run would help, or information on a business at an address and possibly suite number found during web crawls conflicting causing them to investigate more. They have a lot of data they could integrate.

    You'd think a few people getting this data and just calling up to confirm with existing phone numbers, but Google isn't put together like that, sadly. So if you want it nicely integrated with maps we need to contribute more. (Doing work to enrich Google's data is a whole different debate, though.)

  6. Re:Did we ever do that? on Yelp Accused Of Hiding Positive Reviews For Non-Advertiser (cbslocal.com) · · Score: 2

    If you don't like the lack of data on Google Maps, submit. Be the change you want to see in the world. I've done it for places I've been that had nothing and amazingly, next thing you know other people review or submit photos. I've notified them about places being closed. I've told them about new places being open.

  7. Re:Say what... on Google's Custom Machine Learning Chips Are 15-30x Faster Than GPUs and CPUs (pcworld.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're thinking of a TPM. This is a TPU.

  8. Re: Not clever enough on AT&T Is Adding a Spam Filter For Phone Calls (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    I prefer Lenny, but there's also the Jolly Roger Telephone Company.

  9. Keep an eye on Gadgetbridge on Fitbit Won't Kill Off Pebble Services At Least Until 2018 (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    Keep an eye on Gadgetbridge if you use Android. They have already replicated a lot of what keeps your Pebble working, and if we're lucky they'll tie into using Google's voice recognition or a service of your choice. If their app would download METAR reports to give you the weather for wherever you are that would pretty much give you everything you need (that I use, anyway) that is cloud-connected.

  10. Re: The U.S. government has become weak. on The AT&T-Time Warner Merger Must Be Stopped (backchannel.com) · · Score: 1

    That wasn't my experience when I used Speakeasy DSL up to eleven or twelve years ago. The phone was flat-rate and cheap, and Covad was the CLEC and passing through to Speakeasy.

    The problem comes when something breaks. The ILEC has no incentive to fix it because you're not really their customer. My DSL was out for seven weeks while AT&T and Covad pointed the finger at each other and miss each other's appointments at the central office. The only time they actually fixed it is when AT&T started to mess with it and the voice on our phone also went out, then they realized that whatever hardware at the CO our line was plugged into had a problem and replaced the blade... and voila!

    Very disappointing.

  11. This reminds me of this story on How Vigilante Hackers Could Stop the Internet of Things Botnet (vice.com) · · Score: 1
  12. Re:Sweet vindication! on Windows UAC Bypass Permits Code Execution (threatpost.com) · · Score: 1

    Whoosh!

    Exactly. Only platforms that have UAC are affected. That's the joke.

  13. Sweet vindication! on Windows UAC Bypass Permits Code Execution (threatpost.com) · · Score: 1

    All you folks still running Windows XP and being told it's a pile of insecure horseshit are vindicated!

  14. The obvious on Google Testing AI System To Cool Data Center Energy Bills · · Score: 1

    There's surely a Nest joke in here somewhere...

  15. I'm in the US and I certainly use it. I'm not an academic or associated with an institution, but have an education in physics and computer science. I maintain a keen interest in several academic topics, and sometimes when I find a paper I want to read and can't find it on an author's website or arxiv.org then Sci-Hub is my go-to. It's ludicrous to want to charge someone $20+ to read a paper, especially when, often times, the research was government-funded. I certainly couldn't afford to do it.

    I genuinely hope if this keeps up Sci-Hub goes nuclear and just publishes a few torrents of all the papers. It'd be very Swartzian.

  16. Re: A question I keep asking that no one ever answ on US Anti-Encryption Law Is So 'Braindead' It Will Outlaw File Compression (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    Fortunately, as it stands now in the US I can use the Fifth Amendment as a defense. Regardless, if you are apt to get in much more trouble for what you have in there you can do a few months for contempt standing on your head.

  17. A question I keep asking that no one ever answers on US Anti-Encryption Law Is So 'Braindead' It Will Outlaw File Compression (theregister.co.uk) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Suppose I use some third-party encryption that is made available anonymously or from another country, so there's no company to compel to reverse it. (Think TrueCrypt, or something from Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Now suppose I plead the fifth and refuse to decrypt it. What then? We start blocking any site that hosts such a thing? Burn books on cryptography? Ban people from running compilers? Code escrow of all source with the NSA on pain of death?

    Sure, there's the obligatory XKCD wrench decryption, but otherwise... I'm not sure how this makes a lick of sense.

  18. Fusion power, artificial general intelligence and unicode at Slashdot: three things that will always happen always twenty years in the future, no matter when asked.

    (On the plus side it used to be four things, but "Duke Nukem Forever" was finally published so there is some real hope. On the downside, it was really disappointing when it finally came to be, so...)

  19. Some functionality costs, though on Microsoft Launches Bot Framework To Let Developers Build Their Own Chatbots (venturebeat.com) · · Score: 1

    I understand you have to pay if you don't want it built with the fascist module, for instance.

  20. Re:Fair's Fair on China Proposes Foreign Domain Name Censorship (thestack.com) · · Score: 1

    Not always. For instance, the server sitting in my floor at home -- looking at the vhosts logs I'll often see the same IP try the same skiddy exploit against several (or even every) domain's website hosted on the box before fail2ban drops them in the firewall rules. Since I don't have reverse DNS set up for any of these domains and some (but not all) of them are just third-level subs from domains I have hosted elsewhere it seems a bit more focused than a random scan at times.

  21. Re:Fair's Fair on China Proposes Foreign Domain Name Censorship (thestack.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was about to say, it might help fend off at least a few of the random scans I get from China...

  22. Re:What about the server distribution? on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS Officially Released · · Score: 2

    Never mind; figured it out. I just needed to run "sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-wily" to grab the kernel.

  23. What about the server distribution? on Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS Officially Released · · Score: 1

    I have several Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS using the Ubuntu Server distribution. I did an update and tried to do a dist-upgrade / upgrade on a test one and there's nothing to install. Is there a lag until the server distro is updated?

  24. Re:Not that surprising on Backblaze Dishes On Drive Reliability In their 50k+ Disk Data Center · · Score: 1

    We have a rack-mountable QNAP NAS device that our field support people back up files to when they are rebuilding a workstation. We used 3T Seagates from the compatibility list in it, and I had constant problems; we've replaced them with WD Reds, and the problems have gone away. Now in retrospect, seeing that Seagate drives report SMART events earlier, it makes sense that I had all the problems. The QNAP firmware drops and refuses to reattach any disk to an mdadm array that has SMART errors. Granted, if your data is very important you might want that warning. However, they should still have the data on an existing disk for a while, so I'd rather not be playing musical disks, so if the warnings come late it's all good.

  25. Orwell said it first on Google Exec Says Isis Must Be Locked Out of the Open Web (theguardian.com) · · Score: 2

    "IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"