Burger King are basically nothing more than Black Hat hackers showing us the devices are insecure. Anyone stupid enough to have bought into this generation of voice activated devices deserves all the accidental or malicious triggering they get because the devices just have no attempt at security at all. I mean, I hope the gen 2 devices make some attempt to authenticate that its their owner issuing commands.
Right now these devices are as secure as running routers or other iot devices with the default passwords.
"Empty seats" in the sense of the article are already profitable for the Airline, as someone has payed for the seat but didn't show. They don't "cost the airline money" except in the sense that they are a revenue opportunity to sell the seats of no-shows a second time.
Perhaps airlines should be forced to refund tickets if they manage to resell the seat - which given the way their pricing works they invariable do at a higher price anyway.
Whats the deal with nulls? While I can attest to the accuracy of the other 8/9 issues causing extended bouts of hair-pulling stress, I've never found nulls be problematic.
I mean, sure they have been a source of errors while developing, but dealing with them is just as aspect of dealing with function boundry conditions, and whether you do it via bools, nulls, exceptions or whatever, it has to be done.
A password hasher takes a password that you can remember, the domain you need the password for and cryptographically hashes them together to generate a secure, site specific, password.
There are browser plugins that can intercept your weak-used-a-lot password on webforms and replace them on the fly with the strong, per site, password.
Nothing is ever stored, all you do is remember a few easy to recall passwords.
Game developers used to ask players what they wanted, and players asked for more, harder, content. Then the internet was invented, and consoles got online games. And developers got to measure the gap between what players said they did, and what they actually did. And game developers found that the more, harder, content was mostly ignored, and actually the majority of players gave up on content longer than a few hours, and stuck to easy mode. Because thats where the fun is.
Multiplayer has never been about me and some strangers. Multiplayer is a social experience. Multiplayer is LAN gaming. Multiplayer is why the PS/2 supported 4 controllers.
There is a real dearth of PROPER Multiplayer game titles for the Wii, PS/2 and PC this last decade. Diablo II - I played with my friends on a LAN, not on Battle.NET. The same for Starcraft II. Games like counterstrike were big LAN titles. Champions of Norrath and Baldurs Gate were the last proper multiplayer titles on the console and I think theyre 10 years old now. The modern focus seems to have become PvP focused games played over the internet. Not co-operative titles played with friends, on a couch.
Reading patents with an eye to identifying "Technologies" to use is an exercise in futility: Most are stupidly obvious. The others written in leagalease.
Reading patents with an eye to identifying "technologies" to avoid is also an excercise in futility. Again, you need the mind of a lawyer, combined with the approach of a security researcher, to "see" the ways a patent could be exploited to somehow map to your own problem domain. That you were happily solving without resorting to the giant database of solutions to micro problems no one is interested in.
Next, theres just too damned many of them. If anyone took the time out to exhaustively read and analyse each patent enough to determine if the possibility for collision existed, well they wouldn't have a problem with patents as they'd never write any code.
Lastly, it takes courts a long time to determine if a particular product does conflict with a patent. This means theres a lot of grey area around the edges of a patent to determine if a particular approach is covered or not. Which means, of necessity, that, like Chinese ISPs, developers who read a patent would have to defensively eliminate huge swathes of potential solution space from their investigations, to avoid getting "too damned close".
* Try and discuss the issue rationally, be ignored (and follow up with the remaining two options):- * Ignore the directive and continue listening to music, collect three written warnings and be fired. * Quit now.
The sad truth is, people who think like this exist. And you CANNOT change their mind. Sometimes. But not every time. They end up in positions of management. They believe that rules, and strict control, is how to achieve productivity in their underlings and every descision they ever make will be coloured by that.
They will install firewall software to monitor and block employees web access, despite the fact that a lot of useful research material code-wise tends to occour on blogs, wiki's and other sites that fall into blacklist categories like "peer to peer", "social networking" or "network backup". Your life degenerates into a living hell of finding every topic of research ends up being a google results page full of blocked results.
The will disallow any form of gaming on company hardware (during non work hours) because they are oblivious to the team building aspects of LAN games, as well as the inspiration many programmers (especially games developers those lucky bastards) find in the work of others.
They try to measure productivity in meaningless and easy to game metrics like "number of bugs per test cycle" or "lines of code written".
Unless (and only if) you manage to make a successful stand against them, they will use the failures engenderd by their own bad policies as evidence that more draconian measures need to be introduced. Every time a critical bug reaches the world, they will react by adding more developer 'checks' and testing procedures, ensuring that the next bug is yet more expensive (and time consuming) to fix. Each time, YOU the developer will be blamed for the ever more massive costs incurred by their futile attempt to stamp out the one constant of computer science - if youre not making bugs, youre not developing features.
This will over time, sap the reason you became a programmer. your zest and zeal will die. Programming will become a 9 to 5 hellish drudge that you can only hope to escape from at the end of the day. You will feel self doubt and actually come to believe that it IS you, not them, responsible for the hellish state of affairs - where it takes over 6 months to develop and ship a single feature or upgrade.
These people read dilbert, and find it funny not sad - because theyre empathising with the PHB.
You cannot frankly discuss things with them because, while you are both speaking english, your core understandings of basic concepts is fundamentally different. As such, when you present what you belive to be a compelling argument to them, they will draw a totally different conclusion from the same data. they are not idiots. Or classically stupid.
they do however think differntly. And they live amongst us. and become our managers.
if and when non invasive blood sugar / insulin monitors monitors were going to become possible. Being vaguely interested in the rammifactions of the Atkins diet, as a geek i'm bloody interested to know (not suffering from any metabolic problems (yet)) just exactly what happens to blood sugar and hormone levels as I consume various products. One see's so much stuff labled "Low GI" now, but how do you really know?
Basically, each new title that comes out invalidates all the previous songs. I now own GH III. GH Aerosmith, GH World Tour and GH Metallica. There is *some* sharing of DLC amongst the latest titles, but for every disk I put in my console - that acts to eliminate the majority of my collected songs from my available playlist.
Until/Unless the next version of Guitar Hero allows me to copy ALL the songs from ALL my Guitar Hero's onto my disk and play them all from a single playlist, well, i'm losing interest.
While it is possible to design a game from first principals to be playable from an electric Guitar - and I eagerly await the release of GuitarRising in that regard, unfortunately, the buttons pressed on GH and RB controllers are not directly mapped to the equivalent concepts on a real guitar.
Basically, at its core, at various times in various songs, the red button can imply a fret that in a different song is played by holding (for e.g.) green.
There is thus no way for the guitar software, even after its done all the finger sensing magic of figuring out which string is being held where exactly when plucked, to map that to a a combination of 5 buttons.
The implication of the article, and site, is that this Guitar can be used to play the existing Guitar Hero games. That will never be possible. New versions of the game with explicit support for the guitar as a controller? sure.
First off, I don't think that blocking access is going to work. You need to porovide the impression to the children that their activities are being watched. My home network runs with a Netgear router that has various firewall settings, in conjunctoion with the ability to log locally or to a syslog server.
The simplest thing to do then, is the best: make sure that all household traffic gooes through a router that the kids DO NOT have the passwords to. Log remote sitenames. And manually check the resulting lists for objectional material.
Relying on tools that must be installed on the PCs to be monitored is not going to work.
Real, hardcore, scientific guys know that the word 'evolve' does not imply objective betterment of the organism/population in question. The idea of evolution as a process of constant improvement is a common misconception among laymen. Organisms just evolve, ie. they become different from their ancestors. Whether this change makes them more or less fit (depends on the conditions) doesn't change the concept of evolving.
Actually it does. "evolution" describes the process by which successive generations of an organism become for fit for their envirnment. The process bywhich this occours involves the simple fact that "fitter" individuals will breed more thereby increasing the ratio of fit to unfit individuals in each generation. Mutation is a process by which an offspring may be more or less fit than its parents and hence succeed or fail to influeence further evolution of the organism in the future.
I must admit, everytime I see wild claims of "Vista breaks gaming", deeper reading usually reveals "Vista breaks our stupid copy protection that needed admin access". I see this as a good thing. Ive had enough computers fucked over by SecuROM, StarForce and friends.
Where I live, a disturbing number of ATM machines now bear the Diebold logo. They used to say IBM. Now, I dont belive that IBM are some godlike power of flowing goodness, but damnit, IBM have some semblance of professional attitude.
What im trying to say is, I don't bloody trust the ATM system at all right now. Especially with muppets like Diebold in the mix.
Slashdot Mirror
How did this SJW propaganda get elevated to the front page? That article is sensationalist bullshit.
Burger King are basically nothing more than Black Hat hackers showing us the devices are insecure. Anyone stupid enough to have bought into this generation of voice activated devices deserves all the accidental or malicious triggering they get because the devices just have no attempt at security at all. I mean, I hope the gen 2 devices make some attempt to authenticate that its their owner issuing commands.
Right now these devices are as secure as running routers or other iot devices with the default passwords.
"Empty seats" in the sense of the article are already profitable for the Airline, as someone has payed for the seat but didn't show. They don't "cost the airline money" except in the sense that they are a revenue opportunity to sell the seats of no-shows a second time.
Perhaps airlines should be forced to refund tickets if they manage to resell the seat - which given the way their pricing works they invariable do at a higher price anyway.
Whats the deal with nulls?
While I can attest to the accuracy of the other 8/9 issues causing extended bouts of hair-pulling stress, I've never found nulls be problematic.
I mean, sure they have been a source of errors while developing, but dealing with them is just as aspect of dealing with function boundry conditions, and whether you do it via bools, nulls, exceptions or whatever, it has to be done.
"Switches off parts of Brain" is just a very dramatic way of saying "You won't remember the route".
"Oooo, I better read the article, lest I become permanently retarded next time I use a GPS!"
Maybe they should ask low performance employees what they need!
High performance employees clearly already have what they need.
A password hasher takes a password that you can remember, the domain you need the password for and cryptographically hashes them together to generate a secure, site specific, password.
There are browser plugins that can intercept your weak-used-a-lot password on webforms and replace them on the fly with the strong, per site, password.
Nothing is ever stored, all you do is remember a few easy to recall passwords.
Ok. Some empirical science.
Suggest to your GF that, this weekend, you stay home, go no where, and have sex.
Game developers used to ask players what they wanted, and players asked for more, harder, content. Then the internet was invented, and consoles got online games. And developers got to measure the gap between what players said they did, and what they actually did. And game developers found that the more, harder, content was mostly ignored, and actually the majority of players gave up on content longer than a few hours, and stuck to easy mode. Because thats where the fun is.
i meant Starcraft I of course.
Multiplayer has never been about me and some strangers. Multiplayer is a social experience. Multiplayer is LAN gaming. Multiplayer is why the PS/2 supported 4 controllers.
There is a real dearth of PROPER Multiplayer game titles for the Wii, PS/2 and PC this last decade.
Diablo II - I played with my friends on a LAN, not on Battle.NET. The same for Starcraft II.
Games like counterstrike were big LAN titles. Champions of Norrath and Baldurs Gate were the last proper multiplayer titles on the console and I think theyre 10 years old now.
The modern focus seems to have become PvP focused games played over the internet. Not co-operative titles played with friends, on a couch.
I want multiplayer.
Reading patents with an eye to identifying "Technologies" to use is an exercise in futility:
Most are stupidly obvious. The others written in leagalease.
Reading patents with an eye to identifying "technologies" to avoid is also an excercise in futility. Again, you need the mind of a lawyer, combined with the approach of a security researcher, to "see" the ways a patent could be exploited to somehow map to your own problem domain. That you were happily solving without resorting to the giant database of solutions to micro problems no one is interested in.
Next, theres just too damned many of them. If anyone took the time out to exhaustively read and analyse each patent enough to determine if the possibility for collision existed, well they wouldn't have a problem with patents as they'd never write any code.
Lastly, it takes courts a long time to determine if a particular product does conflict with a patent. This means theres a lot of grey area around the edges of a patent to determine if a particular approach is covered or not. Which means, of necessity, that, like Chinese ISPs, developers who read a patent would have to defensively eliminate huge swathes of potential solution space from their investigations, to avoid getting "too damned close".
* Try and discuss the issue rationally, be ignored (and follow up with the remaining two options) :-
* Ignore the directive and continue listening to music, collect three written warnings and be fired.
* Quit now.
The sad truth is, people who think like this exist. And you CANNOT change their mind. Sometimes. But not every time. They end up in positions of management. They believe that rules, and strict control, is how to achieve productivity in their underlings and every descision they ever make will be coloured by that.
They will install firewall software to monitor and block employees web access, despite the fact that a lot of useful research material code-wise tends to occour on blogs, wiki's and other sites that fall into blacklist categories like "peer to peer", "social networking" or "network backup". Your life degenerates into a living hell of finding every topic of research ends up being a google results page full of blocked results.
The will disallow any form of gaming on company hardware (during non work hours) because they are oblivious to the team building aspects of LAN games, as well as the inspiration many programmers (especially games developers those lucky bastards) find in the work of others.
They try to measure productivity in meaningless and easy to game metrics like "number of bugs per test cycle" or "lines of code written".
Unless (and only if) you manage to make a successful stand against them, they will use the failures engenderd by their own bad policies as evidence that more draconian measures need to be introduced. Every time a critical bug reaches the world, they will react by adding more developer 'checks' and testing procedures, ensuring that the next bug is yet more expensive (and time consuming) to fix. Each time, YOU the developer will be blamed for the ever more massive costs incurred by their futile attempt to stamp out the one constant of computer science - if youre not making bugs, youre not developing features.
This will over time, sap the reason you became a programmer. your zest and zeal will die. Programming will become a 9 to 5 hellish drudge that you can only hope to escape from at the end of the day. You will feel self doubt and actually come to believe that it IS you, not them, responsible for the hellish state of affairs - where it takes over 6 months to develop and ship a single feature or upgrade.
These people read dilbert, and find it funny not sad - because theyre empathising with the PHB.
You cannot frankly discuss things with them because, while you are both speaking english, your core understandings of basic concepts is fundamentally different. As such, when you present what you belive to be a compelling argument to them, they will draw a totally different conclusion from the same data. they are not idiots. Or classically stupid.
they do however think differntly. And they live amongst us. and become our managers.
if and when non invasive blood sugar / insulin monitors monitors were going to become possible. Being vaguely interested in the rammifactions of the Atkins diet, as a geek i'm bloody interested to know (not suffering from any metabolic problems (yet)) just exactly what happens to blood sugar and hormone levels as I consume various products. One see's so much stuff labled "Low GI" now, but how do you really know?
Basically, each new title that comes out invalidates all the previous songs. I now own GH III. GH Aerosmith, GH World Tour and GH Metallica. There is *some* sharing of DLC amongst the latest titles, but for every disk I put in my console - that acts to eliminate the majority of my collected songs from my available playlist. Until/Unless the next version of Guitar Hero allows me to copy ALL the songs from ALL my Guitar Hero's onto my disk and play them all from a single playlist, well, i'm losing interest.
Basically, at its core, at various times in various songs, the red button can imply a fret that in a different song is played by holding (for e.g.) green.
There is thus no way for the guitar software, even after its done all the finger sensing magic of figuring out which string is being held where exactly when plucked, to map that to a a combination of 5 buttons.
The implication of the article, and site, is that this Guitar can be used to play the existing Guitar Hero games. That will never be possible. New versions of the game with explicit support for the guitar as a controller? sure.
4 is perhaps a little young, but kids seem quite adept at figuring the things out given some access and opportunity :-
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/india/thestory.html
First off, I don't think that blocking access is going to work. You need to porovide the impression to the children that their activities are being watched. My home network runs with a Netgear router that has various firewall settings, in conjunctoion with the ability to log locally or to a syslog server.
The simplest thing to do then, is the best: make sure that all household traffic gooes through a router that the kids DO NOT have the passwords to. Log remote sitenames. And manually check the resulting lists for objectional material.
Relying on tools that must be installed on the PCs to be monitored is not going to work.
Like all else, morality is the after-the-fact justification we use to feel good about the thing we just did.
Both games I tried. Both were ultimately shit.
I believe that we are not doing children any favors by building in the idea that taking work home is a good thing.
Actually it does. "evolution" describes the process by which successive generations of an organism become for fit for their envirnment. The process bywhich this occours involves the simple fact that "fitter" individuals will breed more thereby increasing the ratio of fit to unfit individuals in each generation. Mutation is a process by which an offspring may be more or less fit than its parents and hence succeed or fail to influeence further evolution of the organism in the future.
I must admit, everytime I see wild claims of "Vista breaks gaming", deeper reading usually reveals "Vista breaks our stupid copy protection that needed admin access". I see this as a good thing. Ive had enough computers fucked over by SecuROM, StarForce and friends.
Where I live, a disturbing number of ATM machines now bear the Diebold logo. They used to say IBM. Now, I dont belive that IBM are some godlike power of flowing goodness, but damnit, IBM have some semblance of professional attitude. What im trying to say is, I don't bloody trust the ATM system at all right now. Especially with muppets like Diebold in the mix.
> These are the guys making ATMs, for goodness sake.
Yes. Horrifying thought isn't it.
I personally avoid ATMs that carry the Diebold badge.