You seem to be implying that credit cards aren't safe? One of the main benefits of a credit card is that it has no connection with your money, you are spending the bank's credit. Any fraudulent transactions are the bank's problem not yours. Using a credit card is much safer than other means of payment as at no point are you risking your own money. Because the bank are liable for fraudulent transactions they react very quickly to any issues and work pro-actively to prevent fraud.
Leaving aside the obvious contradiction in these two statements, the scenario you described isn't really how this works. If someone did steal your card, yes they would be able to buy a few cups of coffee with it, despite not having a pin or signature. The ceiling for contactless payments is normally £15 so running up a "very large sum of money" is going to be pretty difficult. Also there is very little incentive for a criminal to do this, criminals who steal credit cards use them to buy high value, easily resold items so they end up with cash. Fencing cups of coffee, sandwiches and newspapers isn't going to make anyone any money.
Plus even if someone did steal your card, and somehow manage to run up a large number of fraudulent charges, these payments are covered by the liability shift as it is a credit card. They aren't stealing your money, they are making fraudulent transaction that your credit card company is liable for. So once you notice your card is missing or fraudulent transactions on your statement all you have to do is report it and the transactions will be removed. Almost all banks have a 24/7 free to call number for reporting fraud and can remedy the situation in minutes. Remember it is in their interests to prevent fraud as it is their money they are protecting.
The banks need to be held more accountable.
In the situation you described the banks are held entirely accountable. They are liable for any losses resulting from card fraud and are responsible for detecting and dealing with the consequences of fraud. I am not sure what else you expect them to do here.
When you get a fax you're reasonably certain that the document you get wasn't scanned in and then "adjusted" before emailing.
That is a ridiculous statement. What is to stop anyone scanning the document in "adjusting" it and then printing it out and faxing it?
A fax doesn't do anything to prove that someone has access to the original copy of a document. Most faxes are also very low quality so any tampering would be very difficult to detect.
Even if only a quarter of the people act on those sentiments and actually boycott Sony, that's a lot of potential profits flushed down the drain
I'd be very surprised if anywhere near a quarter actually change their buying habits. Also the key word is potential profits, most people who rant on about boycotting companies either don't follow through, or would never have bought from them anyway.
I am sure that even if the entire readership of Slashdot never gave Sony another pound it still wouldn't make a noticable difference to their bottom line.
The general publics reaction to the Sony hack was, "oh, that sounds bad, I'm sure it won't affect me". The only real backlash was from PSN users who couldn't play online, but that soon evaporated once PSN went back up and they got their free stuff. They sure as hell aren't throwing their PS3s away and stopping buying games for them.
You can buy instrument cables with 'silent' audio plugs from various places. They have a strip down the side which earths the plug before making any other connection. Surprised to find that it hasn't been done on headphone plugs yet.
But that also means that what goes into the landfill does not biodegrade, and that we are using a non-renewable resource rather than a renewable resource for the money.
This doesn't really apply though as currency isn't a disposable product. One of the main reasons that countries switch to plastic currency is that it lasts much longer than paper currency. This reduces the cost and waste of having to collect, dispose of and replace millions of used notes every year. Because plastic currency is much more durable it won't be ending up in land fill (not that any currency would ever be landfilled, it is all incinerated or pulped).
Plastic currency is probably better for the environment for this reason.
That's why they like to list their speeds as "Up To".
Which for ADSL is pretty much the only way you can advertise it. The speed varies dramatically depending on how close to the exchange you are. Which is why most ADSL suppliers (in the UK at least) will have a way of checking before you sign up. Normally this is done by having you enter your postcode and then checking against a database of known speeds for that location. So before you sign up they can tell you roughly what speed you can actually expect in your area.
They don't sign a contract saying they'll pay an outrageous sum of money each month for "between nothing and 100 gallons of water" at the utility's discretion.
Actually that is exactly what anyone who doesn't have metered water does. They pay a flat rate each month regardless of how much they use. Up to a top limit where the water company would investigate due to excessive usage.
The bags inside cereal boxes are intentionally only part filled, the same as crisps (potato chips) and anything else that is packed in a plastic heat sealed bag. The reason for this isn't to con you by only filling it part way, it is so that when the bag is heat sealed there is a decent gap at the top. If the bags are filled too full then the contents can be close enough to interfere with the heat sealing, resulting in the bag not being air-tight and the contents going off.
Gimme a break! HOW many drivers do you think OS X ships with? Can you name a SINGLE OS that hasn't shipped with a bad driver or two? I can't. Not one.
I am sure a lot of OSs ship with a few less than perfect drivers but you do have to admit this isn't a driver for a random printer or something. The vast majority of Macs shipped in the last 10 years use either Nvidia or ATI graphics cards, both companies have combined driver packages which cover their entire range of cards so it isn't like there are thousands of distributions of drivers that have to be kept current and tested.
Also Apple only ship a very small sub-set of hardware. In this instance we are talking about Macbook Pros, laptops which only have a tiny choice of graphics hardware which is extremely unlikely to be changed after purchase. In fact a quick look at the different Macbook Pro iterations shows that to cover all of the graphics combinations since the Macbook Pro was released you would still only be looking at 7 different bits of graphics hardware*. It is hardly unreasonable to expect Apple to test a major OS update on the main hardware configurations that they ship.
* Nvidia GeForce 9400M
Nvidia GeForce 9400M with Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT
Nvidia GeForce 320M
Intel HD Graphics with GeForce GT 330M
Intel HD Graphics 3000
Intel HD Graphics 3000 with AMD Radeon HD 6490M
AMD Radeon HD 6750M
It is especially dangerous for pedestrians who cannot tell if a car is going to keep going around the round-about or if they are going to turn off.
Surely it is obvious that drivers should use their indicators to show when they are going to turn off. Just like they would do if they were changing lane or turning at a junction.
Small, light and with an SSD so one never need worry about chucking them in a bag whilst they are still running.
I have a Dell m101z which is an 11" netbook with a non-SSD hard drive. It has no problems with me closing the lid and sticking it in my bag. Been using it for months and no disk errors or any problems. Laptop hard drives are nowhere near as fragile as they used to be. Almost all of them have sensors to park the heads if any shock is detected preventing damage to the platters.
Most home insurance has phones excluded from 'our of the home' cover unless you add it specifically. If you do add it then you also get cover from fraudulent calls which is a necessity if you are on a contract.
You invariably get the best deal by just adding phone cover to your house contents insurance. Much cheaper, and you don't need a separate policy. It also has the added benefit that the claims tend to be easier as they care more about keeping you as a customer.
The lost iPhone may be $600 to replace, but at least you can be confident there is such a strict limit to your losses, if you do brick/deactivate the phone's service before the perp can abuse the phone's access to your account.
This is why phone insurance is a good idea for anyone who has a handset worth more than a couple of hundred and a contract. Insurance covers you for loss, theft or damage to the handset and also covers any fraudulent calls made on the device.
Block phone, claim on insurance, get replacement.
'Find my iPhone' is all well and good but if it has actually been stolen what are you going to do, go round their house and ask for it back? I guess you could hand the information on to the police but leaving the phone unblocked for days on the off chance you will be able to have the police recover it is a pretty big risk. As well as fraudulent calls and the data you have on the device you also expose anyone who calls your phone to whichever scumbag stole it.
Then if you are in a high load situation where you don't want the overhead of dynamic pages just cache the output. Doing a search and replace across 10,000 files sounds like a recipe for fail.
As has been referenced many times in various comments (including mine) the LAPD website has a FAQ on red light cameras that clearly states that video is taken from multiple angles and that is what is used to assess whether a ticket should be issued.
If you moved forward into an intersection to allow an Emergency Service Vehicle to pass then it would be obvious from the video and a ticket wouldn't be issued.
So you get to take a day off work to go into a court room, demand that the GPS logs of the emergency vehicles in that area be retrieved (assuming they even exist), show that your ticket was at the same time the emergency vehicle was going through, hope that the judge believes you that you really were making room and not just taking advantage of all the stopped traffic, and even if you do get out of the ticket, possibly have to pay court fees. All of which could be avoided if it were a cop on the corner instead of a camera. Sounds like a plan to me!
No, if you entered the intersection to move out of the way of an Emergency Vehicle then the video will clearly show this and you either won't be issued a ticket, or it will be quashed if you challenge it and the recordings are checked.
crimes that are detected through an algorithm and a single still photograph, is not a fair system.
As has been stated many times it isn't a single still photograph, it is multiple video feeds.
As provided by another poster:
From LA's Photo Red Light FAQs [lapdonline.org]:
How does the red light camera enforcement work?
The system uses multiple cameras placed at the intersection to record video evidence of the red light violation. The cameras capture evidence of the vehicle, the license plate and driver"s face.
What do the video cameras photograph?
The first video monitors vehicles approaching the intersection and provides a context view of the violation. The second video, recorded simultaneously, provides primary evidence of the violation. The third video captures images of the front and rear of the vehicle, including the driver"s face and the license plate.
I think this is the lesson we can all learn from Facebook. To succeed a technology doesn't have to be particularly well built or ambitious in solving problems. It just has to be easy enough to use that everyone can understand it and use it without too many problems. Facebook has so many users because it can be summed up in very simple terms, 'it's for sharing photos with your friends', 'it lets you see what people are doing'.
Google Wave may have been a technological marvel and a solution to all kinds of problems but when it launched no-one knew what it was for, so nobody bothered using it.
A household with 4 or 5 computers running vista really shouldn't have to drop $1000 to get Windows 7.
They don't. They can buy the Windows 7 Family Pack which is 3 licenses for £149.99 including VAT.
They could also pick up a copy of Office Home and Student 2010 which can be used on up to 3 computers as well for £109.99 including VAT.
While Microsoft's licensing costs may not have been great in the past they have made massive changes in recent years to make things affordable for home users.
I mean, for $25 I get legal versions of every single—ahem, questionably procured, shall we say— tracks in my gigantic iTunes library?
Not quite, you get access to it on Apple's iCloud servers and you can stream it from there. Certainly as far as I can tell you can't just download a copy of the music. You can sync it to a device but as has always been the case this is very different from actually having the files in a way that you can use them for what you want.
The key point is that the $25 is buying you access to tracks that match the ones you already have. If you stop paying your $25 then this access goes away.
If it increases the amount of time to calculate a hash from a tiny fraction of a second to a whole second then that is likely to be significant if the number of users is at all significant. The whole subject of this article is that someone trying to crack a hash can apply a lot of specialised processing power to do so and that making them more complicated isn't really a solution because of this. Getting into a processing arms race isn't really a long term solution for security.
That said if you are running a server with low load and have tons of spare processing power then yeah why not make it a bit more secure by using stronger hashes. I am just pointing out that in real world situations burning up processing power on a server for something like this isn't usually an option.
You should really use a slow hashing function that takes around 0.1 to 1 seconds to calculate one hash on the server.
require a lot of CPU time but also significant memory
Which is a great idea unless you care about performance of your server. Any increase in work for an attacker is balanced by the increase in work for your server. Most people don't want to have to run a cluster of high powered servers just to calculate hashes no matter how secure they might be.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be implying that credit cards aren't safe? One of the main benefits of a credit card is that it has no connection with your money, you are spending the bank's credit. Any fraudulent transactions are the bank's problem not yours. Using a credit card is much safer than other means of payment as at no point are you risking your own money. Because the bank are liable for fraudulent transactions they react very quickly to any issues and work pro-actively to prevent fraud.
Leaving aside the obvious contradiction in these two statements, the scenario you described isn't really how this works. If someone did steal your card, yes they would be able to buy a few cups of coffee with it, despite not having a pin or signature. The ceiling for contactless payments is normally £15 so running up a "very large sum of money" is going to be pretty difficult. Also there is very little incentive for a criminal to do this, criminals who steal credit cards use them to buy high value, easily resold items so they end up with cash. Fencing cups of coffee, sandwiches and newspapers isn't going to make anyone any money.
Plus even if someone did steal your card, and somehow manage to run up a large number of fraudulent charges, these payments are covered by the liability shift as it is a credit card. They aren't stealing your money, they are making fraudulent transaction that your credit card company is liable for. So once you notice your card is missing or fraudulent transactions on your statement all you have to do is report it and the transactions will be removed. Almost all banks have a 24/7 free to call number for reporting fraud and can remedy the situation in minutes. Remember it is in their interests to prevent fraud as it is their money they are protecting.
In the situation you described the banks are held entirely accountable. They are liable for any losses resulting from card fraud and are responsible for detecting and dealing with the consequences of fraud. I am not sure what else you expect them to do here.
That is a ridiculous statement. What is to stop anyone scanning the document in "adjusting" it and then printing it out and faxing it?
A fax doesn't do anything to prove that someone has access to the original copy of a document. Most faxes are also very low quality so any tampering would be very difficult to detect.
I'd be very surprised if anywhere near a quarter actually change their buying habits. Also the key word is potential profits, most people who rant on about boycotting companies either don't follow through, or would never have bought from them anyway.
I am sure that even if the entire readership of Slashdot never gave Sony another pound it still wouldn't make a noticable difference to their bottom line.
The general publics reaction to the Sony hack was, "oh, that sounds bad, I'm sure it won't affect me". The only real backlash was from PSN users who couldn't play online, but that soon evaporated once PSN went back up and they got their free stuff. They sure as hell aren't throwing their PS3s away and stopping buying games for them.
You can buy instrument cables with 'silent' audio plugs from various places. They have a strip down the side which earths the plug before making any other connection. Surprised to find that it hasn't been done on headphone plugs yet.
This doesn't really apply though as currency isn't a disposable product. One of the main reasons that countries switch to plastic currency is that it lasts much longer than paper currency. This reduces the cost and waste of having to collect, dispose of and replace millions of used notes every year. Because plastic currency is much more durable it won't be ending up in land fill (not that any currency would ever be landfilled, it is all incinerated or pulped).
Plastic currency is probably better for the environment for this reason.
Which for ADSL is pretty much the only way you can advertise it. The speed varies dramatically depending on how close to the exchange you are. Which is why most ADSL suppliers (in the UK at least) will have a way of checking before you sign up. Normally this is done by having you enter your postcode and then checking against a database of known speeds for that location. So before you sign up they can tell you roughly what speed you can actually expect in your area.
Actually that is exactly what anyone who doesn't have metered water does. They pay a flat rate each month regardless of how much they use. Up to a top limit where the water company would investigate due to excessive usage.
The bags inside cereal boxes are intentionally only part filled, the same as crisps (potato chips) and anything else that is packed in a plastic heat sealed bag. The reason for this isn't to con you by only filling it part way, it is so that when the bag is heat sealed there is a decent gap at the top. If the bags are filled too full then the contents can be close enough to interfere with the heat sealing, resulting in the bag not being air-tight and the contents going off.
I am sure a lot of OSs ship with a few less than perfect drivers but you do have to admit this isn't a driver for a random printer or something. The vast majority of Macs shipped in the last 10 years use either Nvidia or ATI graphics cards, both companies have combined driver packages which cover their entire range of cards so it isn't like there are thousands of distributions of drivers that have to be kept current and tested.
Also Apple only ship a very small sub-set of hardware. In this instance we are talking about Macbook Pros, laptops which only have a tiny choice of graphics hardware which is extremely unlikely to be changed after purchase. In fact a quick look at the different Macbook Pro iterations shows that to cover all of the graphics combinations since the Macbook Pro was released you would still only be looking at 7 different bits of graphics hardware*. It is hardly unreasonable to expect Apple to test a major OS update on the main hardware configurations that they ship.
* Nvidia GeForce 9400M
Nvidia GeForce 9400M with Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT
Nvidia GeForce 320M
Intel HD Graphics with GeForce GT 330M
Intel HD Graphics 3000
Intel HD Graphics 3000 with AMD Radeon HD 6490M
AMD Radeon HD 6750M
Maybe his work just frowns on his reading almost 50 pages of research on heat sinks during work time...
Surely it is obvious that drivers should use their indicators to show when they are going to turn off. Just like they would do if they were changing lane or turning at a junction.
I have a Dell m101z which is an 11" netbook with a non-SSD hard drive. It has no problems with me closing the lid and sticking it in my bag. Been using it for months and no disk errors or any problems. Laptop hard drives are nowhere near as fragile as they used to be. Almost all of them have sensors to park the heads if any shock is detected preventing damage to the platters.
Most home insurance has phones excluded from 'our of the home' cover unless you add it specifically. If you do add it then you also get cover from fraudulent calls which is a necessity if you are on a contract.
You invariably get the best deal by just adding phone cover to your house contents insurance. Much cheaper, and you don't need a separate policy. It also has the added benefit that the claims tend to be easier as they care more about keeping you as a customer.
This is why phone insurance is a good idea for anyone who has a handset worth more than a couple of hundred and a contract. Insurance covers you for loss, theft or damage to the handset and also covers any fraudulent calls made on the device.
Block phone, claim on insurance, get replacement.
'Find my iPhone' is all well and good but if it has actually been stolen what are you going to do, go round their house and ask for it back? I guess you could hand the information on to the police but leaving the phone unblocked for days on the off chance you will be able to have the police recover it is a pretty big risk. As well as fraudulent calls and the data you have on the device you also expose anyone who calls your phone to whichever scumbag stole it.
Or more to the point why not just use something like:
Then if you are in a high load situation where you don't want the overhead of dynamic pages just cache the output. Doing a search and replace across 10,000 files sounds like a recipe for fail.
As has been referenced many times in various comments (including mine) the LAPD website has a FAQ on red light cameras that clearly states that video is taken from multiple angles and that is what is used to assess whether a ticket should be issued.
If you moved forward into an intersection to allow an Emergency Service Vehicle to pass then it would be obvious from the video and a ticket wouldn't be issued.
No, if you entered the intersection to move out of the way of an Emergency Vehicle then the video will clearly show this and you either won't be issued a ticket, or it will be quashed if you challenge it and the recordings are checked.
As has been stated many times it isn't a single still photograph, it is multiple video feeds.
As provided by another poster:
From LA's Photo Red Light FAQs [lapdonline.org]:
I think this is the lesson we can all learn from Facebook. To succeed a technology doesn't have to be particularly well built or ambitious in solving problems. It just has to be easy enough to use that everyone can understand it and use it without too many problems. Facebook has so many users because it can be summed up in very simple terms, 'it's for sharing photos with your friends', 'it lets you see what people are doing'.
Google Wave may have been a technological marvel and a solution to all kinds of problems but when it launched no-one knew what it was for, so nobody bothered using it.
They don't. They can buy the Windows 7 Family Pack which is 3 licenses for £149.99 including VAT.
They could also pick up a copy of Office Home and Student 2010 which can be used on up to 3 computers as well for £109.99 including VAT.
While Microsoft's licensing costs may not have been great in the past they have made massive changes in recent years to make things affordable for home users.
If it doesn't match then you can upload your local version.
Not quite, you get access to it on Apple's iCloud servers and you can stream it from there. Certainly as far as I can tell you can't just download a copy of the music. You can sync it to a device but as has always been the case this is very different from actually having the files in a way that you can use them for what you want.
The key point is that the $25 is buying you access to tracks that match the ones you already have. If you stop paying your $25 then this access goes away.
If it increases the amount of time to calculate a hash from a tiny fraction of a second to a whole second then that is likely to be significant if the number of users is at all significant. The whole subject of this article is that someone trying to crack a hash can apply a lot of specialised processing power to do so and that making them more complicated isn't really a solution because of this. Getting into a processing arms race isn't really a long term solution for security.
That said if you are running a server with low load and have tons of spare processing power then yeah why not make it a bit more secure by using stronger hashes. I am just pointing out that in real world situations burning up processing power on a server for something like this isn't usually an option.
Which is a great idea unless you care about performance of your server. Any increase in work for an attacker is balanced by the increase in work for your server. Most people don't want to have to run a cluster of high powered servers just to calculate hashes no matter how secure they might be.