No - not true. The merchant bears most of the risk. It's entirely wrong, and I'm amazed it's even legal, but that's how it is.
If you set up an online shop, you'll find that you are asked to take on the risk of fraud, yet you don't get the card number or card address from the purchaser. That means you have no reasonable way to verify if the purchaser is fraudulent - even if you had a list of all the stolen cards or whatever, you still couldn't make that judgement. Instead, the card company does that fraud check for you, and tell you the card is good to go. You'll then ship product, after which they come back to you to say "sorry, that card was stolen". They then take their money back off you, and you're left without product and without money.
I wonder if this sort of thing is even legal in the UK any more. Financial companies now have to treat customers fairly (under FSA/FCA rules), and I'm left wondering if this would hold up as "fair" if it was challenged. However, until such a time, the merchant is almost entirely liable for any card fraud.
I use Tor for shopping, banking whatever. The reasons I do this are many and varied, but I don't see why the retailer needs to know my IP address and therefore current location for me to order something. Sure, they know where to send it, and they know where I live, but they have no business knowing that I'm at the dog track, or visiting my mistress or goofing off at work, or out of town for a few days on vacation or anything else.
And so, yes, there are very good reasons to hide your IP address, even if you're subsequently giving away personal details.
Here in the UK, BT (nee the GPO) had the monopoly. The regulator now forces them to rent their cables, telegraph poles and cabinets to their competitors. It's a long way from a perfect system, but it's how I, who live in the South of the England can use Plusnet, a Yorkshire based company in the North of England's services. Plusnet are able to put equipment in my local (BT) telephone exchange, and if BT ever get off their arse and dig some fibre, Plusnet will be able to use that too.
Use one of the country specific googles - eg. google.co.uk - it seems the torbots don't hassle the countries as much as they do.com, so their IPs don't get blacklisted quite so easily.
One thing I find really funky is logging onto the like of Yahoo and co via Tor - they (incorrectly) assume you're in Germany and so show you the page in German. They're not at al unique at this either - it seems the world of webdev has a long way to go before it understands Tor.
...and think about the utter crap they'll put on a CD for you.
Like many people, I've bought HP printers because they were always really solid and just did what you wanted. These days though, the sort of stuff you can buy in shops comes with an enormous behemoth of utter crapware you have to install on your windows machine. On my wife's PC I deleted as much of the "Buy HP Supplies" software that no one with an IQ over 100 would ever want to use, and then turned off all of the "fast start helper" and "discovery service" crap too. Time to install it all: about 10 minutes. Time to clean up the mess: 1 hour+. Happily her PC runs more or less as it should now, not much slower as HP would have it.
Contrast this to my Linux machine: I installed no software at all, and can print just fine. I was hoping for the same on Windows, but sadly, that's not possible any more. I've yet to find a way to scan via Linux, but I do it so infrequently that I'll just use the Windows crapware to do it.
I'll never buy an HP printer/MFP again. Shame - they used to be good.
The great irony is of course that by keeping his file secret, they had a problem. Had they had less secrets, he might have been found out and stopped. Of course, had they had less secrets, he wouldn't have been a problem in the first place, and wouldn't have needed stopping.
TractorBarry is a raging homo/lesbian/paedo/other, who likes nothing more than to take advantage of vulnerable young people. he's predatory, merciless and ruthless.
TractorBarry lives at 123 Fake Street, Springfield, 90210. If you happen to be in the area, pop over and tell him how you feel about his homo/lesbian/paedo tendencies.
TractorBarry is an abomination, and will hopefully contract cancer and die really soon. He's the product of a mother who was hooked on crack and gave blowjobs to just about anyone so she could get her next fix. His dad was a $country hating fascist/socialist/marxist/communist/capitalist who would think nothing of screwing over his fellow man just to steal a quick buck.
Now, tell me again how any of this is a worthy addition to the actual subject at hand, or how it adds anything useful to the discussion? It could equally have been written as "but you may find people use the most base, degenerate and inappropriate insults when proper prose would be more useful". One form is acceptable, the other is not. In slashdot world, one form gets modded +1, the other "troll". The latter gets hidden for the majority of readers, thus avoids polluting the conversation needlessly.
I understand this ruling probably has unintended consequences, but there's no need for newspapers to leave the truly inappropriate on their sites. Heck, if I can remove them from my little blog which makes no money whatsoever, newspapers who make money from their sites can sure remove them. The judgement makes this activity a cost of doing business if your business is soliciting comments from the public. Seems fair enough to me (on the surface, at least).
Since he is/was a big swinging dick in the NSA - why wasn't he on a constant road show to said Fortune 100 companies to talk to them about how they can improve their security? After all, the NSA must be the national authority on the subject, no?
Oh yeah... it was because he was far to busy fucking the people over to worry about maybe helping anyone out.
I believe the 'you' in "you voted for them" is the plural. That is, you and your neighbours and friends voted for them.
I don't like it either, but like you, I can't be arsed to go out and canvass my neighbourhood on the merits of the Pirate Party (or even just to vote for someone other than the incumbent). Hence, like you, I have got exactly the government that I voted for.
As an aside, lots of people here in the UK have been voting for UKIP. As far as I can tell, the majority of UKIPs manifesto is that they want to 'rebalance' immigration so that we have less immigrants. Once UKIP started getting voted into small seats, the 2.5 major parties all started talking about their new plans to tackle immigration, whereas before that they'd just shrugged it all off as nonsense (hell, Labour actively encouraged immigration so that there would be a whole new generation of Labour votets, and even they are now talking about curbs on immigration). The point here is of course that you don't necessarily need to replace the incumbents, but actually just make them alter course a little. It all still means getting off your arse, and that's where my whole argument falls down because none of us can be bothered.
If you're going to go down for something, make sure it's big. In the case of theft, make sure you're stealing several wasted lifetimes worth of money so that you can afford the legal defence, and eventual breaking out of jail. And you can afford to do the same for everyone involved.
There's no point getting banged up and a criminal record for petty theft.
I'm with you on this - it might be criminal, and it might be taking money from the banks customers, but it sure is a slick manoeuvre.
This post might as well have been called "Kids cho0sing to live in trendy SF instead of cultural vacuum of Silicon Valley"
The valley is dull - really dull. You need a car to get from one store to the next, let alone to get anywhere interesting. That means you have to be sober the whole time, which is dull. SF on the other hand, has decent public transport, has some cool places to go, and because you're on public transport you can have a drink whenever you want.
If anything's getting worse, it's the lack of public transport between SF and the Valley.
So how do you deal with sites that use a CDN domain? As I understand performance 'best practice', you should deliberately host your static assets on a secondary domain so that it doesn't ever get sent cookies. You mention vimeo.com and vimeocdn.com, but many CDN domains aren't quite so obviously named - even here on/. we seem to have slashdot.org and a.fsdn.com and www.gstatic.com (not sure if gstatic is serving any JS, but you get the idea).
FWIW, I use Adblock + Ghostery to avoid most of the cross-domain crap that you really don't want. However, the whitelists for noscript are proving more challenging.
I don't disagree entirely, but I'd like to add that it's not quite as simple as you make out. As an Ultimaker owner, I've found that very small details make a huge difference to print quality. I've also found that as the machine's design evolves, so does the 'ease' of getting quality out of it.You can get some really astounding quality out of an Ultimaker, but it takes hours and hours to print, and simply printing again doesn't always yield the same quality as it did the first time. I seriously doubt people will want to wait hours for their $2 curtain rings, and they certainly won't want to tinker with the machine and software for an hour before printing, or indeed put up with failed prints.
Lastly, the quality of the model has as much to do with the outcome as the printer itself. I've tried some truly horrible models that I've downloaded, and I've also used some really good ones. Garbage in, garbage out.
Ultimately though, you will be right. It'll just take a few years until the cheap printers really can do what the more expensive ones can do. In the 2 years I've owned an Ultimaker, I'd say the cost of the quality I bought 2 years ago is down by about 30%. Paying the same as I did 2 years ago probably gets you better quality/reliability/repeatability than back then too though. And even though the Ultimaker has been copied by the Chinese, and there already are various Chinese printers available, I'm not aware of any that are credible enough to eat any of Ultimaker's lunch just yet.
Suffice to say though, you'd need to be some sort of shower-curtain weirdo to need to print enough curtain rings and whatnot to make it worth owning a printer. Popping down to your local Tescos and having them print it for you sounds a lot more likely (and is something they've talked about on their blog).
Perhaps you have more money than me, but I don't want my fridge re-ordering stuff for me at all.
We use an online supermarket to buy our groceries. The app/website has a "you've ordered this before" sort of feature, and also "you might also like", "start with your last basket" etc etc. The trouble is, if I'm ordering (say) deodorant, I'll buy either of the two major brands that my supermarket stocks. I'll buy the one that's on special offer, and if they're both on special, then I'll pick the one that gives me the greatest volume for money spent. If neither is on special, then maybe, just maybe I'll consider the supermarket own-brand, but then I'll buy the minimum quantity possible, just in case it doesn't work very well or something, otherwise I'll probably pick the cheaper of the two major brands, or else the one I didn't buy last time.
I know in theory I could absolutely have an app on my fridge that works all this shit out and orders what I want. However, reality suggests it's never going to happen. In fact, reality suggests the supermarkets will p0wn the fridge apps so completely that the fridge will never be able to order a special offer, and will just happen to think I want to eat steak in the one week that steak prices are unseasonally high, or in the week that the supermarket has a bit too much of it going off in the freezers.
Oh, and yes, I realise that you don't keep deodorant in the fridge, but the same goes for packs of ham, or organic eggs or whatever.
Time to routinely use RedPhone and TextSecure. I've been using the latter, and it's actually very nice. I've yet to find a friend doing the same though:-(
> They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago.
In which case, our Trans-Atlantic Bullshit Filter seems to be broken these days:-(
In the UK we only really used to get the fairly-reasonable-might-just-work-out sort of films at the cinema, presumably because it wasn't worth shipping the crap ones over to us. Nowadays, the cinemas are putting films out at about the same time as they appear in the US, and so the TABF doesn't get a chance to take effect. They do their best to have some big premiere, and then the film tanks because it's rubbish. In the past, we might have had to wait, but it meant we stood a chance of getting reasonable films.
I suspect the only reasonable solution is to cut the cost of production. That way, they can afford to release dozens of crap films and see which ones work out, and then produce endless sequels and prequals in an attempt to squeeze out every last tiny bit of revenue. Oh wait... they're doing most of that right now:-(
A quick run around those million servers shows the most used app is the System Idle Process. Microsoft's marketing department is already looking at how it can rebrand and promote this awesome app. Research suggests Linux doesn't even have a System Idle Process, so Microsoft is hoping to capitalise on this in the constant battle of Windows vs. Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
No - not true. The merchant bears most of the risk. It's entirely wrong, and I'm amazed it's even legal, but that's how it is.
If you set up an online shop, you'll find that you are asked to take on the risk of fraud, yet you don't get the card number or card address from the purchaser. That means you have no reasonable way to verify if the purchaser is fraudulent - even if you had a list of all the stolen cards or whatever, you still couldn't make that judgement. Instead, the card company does that fraud check for you, and tell you the card is good to go. You'll then ship product, after which they come back to you to say "sorry, that card was stolen". They then take their money back off you, and you're left without product and without money.
I wonder if this sort of thing is even legal in the UK any more. Financial companies now have to treat customers fairly (under FSA/FCA rules), and I'm left wondering if this would hold up as "fair" if it was challenged. However, until such a time, the merchant is almost entirely liable for any card fraud.
I'm sorry, I have to pick you up on this.
I use Tor for shopping, banking whatever. The reasons I do this are many and varied, but I don't see why the retailer needs to know my IP address and therefore current location for me to order something. Sure, they know where to send it, and they know where I live, but they have no business knowing that I'm at the dog track, or visiting my mistress or goofing off at work, or out of town for a few days on vacation or anything else.
And so, yes, there are very good reasons to hide your IP address, even if you're subsequently giving away personal details.
Good to know - I'll look into it...
Did you?
Here in the UK, BT (nee the GPO) had the monopoly. The regulator now forces them to rent their cables, telegraph poles and cabinets to their competitors. It's a long way from a perfect system, but it's how I, who live in the South of the England can use Plusnet, a Yorkshire based company in the North of England's services. Plusnet are able to put equipment in my local (BT) telephone exchange, and if BT ever get off their arse and dig some fibre, Plusnet will be able to use that too.
Use one of the country specific googles - eg. google.co.uk - it seems the torbots don't hassle the countries as much as they do .com, so their IPs don't get blacklisted quite so easily.
One thing I find really funky is logging onto the like of Yahoo and co via Tor - they (incorrectly) assume you're in Germany and so show you the page in German. They're not at al unique at this either - it seems the world of webdev has a long way to go before it understands Tor.
As a not-American, I'm always impressed with NASA for stuff like this. I just wish the ESA would do more like it :-)
...and think about the utter crap they'll put on a CD for you.
Like many people, I've bought HP printers because they were always really solid and just did what you wanted. These days though, the sort of stuff you can buy in shops comes with an enormous behemoth of utter crapware you have to install on your windows machine. On my wife's PC I deleted as much of the "Buy HP Supplies" software that no one with an IQ over 100 would ever want to use, and then turned off all of the "fast start helper" and "discovery service" crap too. Time to install it all: about 10 minutes. Time to clean up the mess: 1 hour+. Happily her PC runs more or less as it should now, not much slower as HP would have it.
Contrast this to my Linux machine: I installed no software at all, and can print just fine. I was hoping for the same on Windows, but sadly, that's not possible any more. I've yet to find a way to scan via Linux, but I do it so infrequently that I'll just use the Windows crapware to do it.
I'll never buy an HP printer/MFP again. Shame - they used to be good.
A little too much efficiency leads to a police state, or a surveillance state, or a security state.
The great irony is of course that by keeping his file secret, they had a problem. Had they had less secrets, he might have been found out and stopped. Of course, had they had less secrets, he wouldn't have been a problem in the first place, and wouldn't have needed stopping.
TractorBarry is a raging homo/lesbian/paedo/other, who likes nothing more than to take advantage of vulnerable young people. he's predatory, merciless and ruthless.
TractorBarry lives at 123 Fake Street, Springfield, 90210. If you happen to be in the area, pop over and tell him how you feel about his homo/lesbian/paedo tendencies.
TractorBarry is an abomination, and will hopefully contract cancer and die really soon. He's the product of a mother who was hooked on crack and gave blowjobs to just about anyone so she could get her next fix. His dad was a $country hating fascist/socialist/marxist/communist/capitalist who would think nothing of screwing over his fellow man just to steal a quick buck.
Now, tell me again how any of this is a worthy addition to the actual subject at hand, or how it adds anything useful to the discussion? It could equally have been written as "but you may find people use the most base, degenerate and inappropriate insults when proper prose would be more useful". One form is acceptable, the other is not. In slashdot world, one form gets modded +1, the other "troll". The latter gets hidden for the majority of readers, thus avoids polluting the conversation needlessly.
I understand this ruling probably has unintended consequences, but there's no need for newspapers to leave the truly inappropriate on their sites. Heck, if I can remove them from my little blog which makes no money whatsoever, newspapers who make money from their sites can sure remove them. The judgement makes this activity a cost of doing business if your business is soliciting comments from the public. Seems fair enough to me (on the surface, at least).
To get those higher speeds outside the lab, you'll need some wifi spray
Since he is/was a big swinging dick in the NSA - why wasn't he on a constant road show to said Fortune 100 companies to talk to them about how they can improve their security? After all, the NSA must be the national authority on the subject, no?
Oh yeah... it was because he was far to busy fucking the people over to worry about maybe helping anyone out.
I believe the 'you' in "you voted for them" is the plural. That is, you and your neighbours and friends voted for them.
I don't like it either, but like you, I can't be arsed to go out and canvass my neighbourhood on the merits of the Pirate Party (or even just to vote for someone other than the incumbent). Hence, like you, I have got exactly the government that I voted for.
As an aside, lots of people here in the UK have been voting for UKIP. As far as I can tell, the majority of UKIPs manifesto is that they want to 'rebalance' immigration so that we have less immigrants. Once UKIP started getting voted into small seats, the 2.5 major parties all started talking about their new plans to tackle immigration, whereas before that they'd just shrugged it all off as nonsense (hell, Labour actively encouraged immigration so that there would be a whole new generation of Labour votets, and even they are now talking about curbs on immigration). The point here is of course that you don't necessarily need to replace the incumbents, but actually just make them alter course a little. It all still means getting off your arse, and that's where my whole argument falls down because none of us can be bothered.
Already being done, although sadly that island appears to be Britain :-(
Since it's a thought experiment, and it's slashdot... I think all this, running on a Raspberry Pi. ;-)
Someone's got to pay for the billions worth of IT and manpower used to run this stuff. Why not rent it out to anyone with a suitcase full of cash?
If you're going to go down for something, make sure it's big. In the case of theft, make sure you're stealing several wasted lifetimes worth of money so that you can afford the legal defence, and eventual breaking out of jail. And you can afford to do the same for everyone involved.
There's no point getting banged up and a criminal record for petty theft.
I'm with you on this - it might be criminal, and it might be taking money from the banks customers, but it sure is a slick manoeuvre.
This post might as well have been called "Kids cho0sing to live in trendy SF instead of cultural vacuum of Silicon Valley"
The valley is dull - really dull. You need a car to get from one store to the next, let alone to get anywhere interesting. That means you have to be sober the whole time, which is dull. SF on the other hand, has decent public transport, has some cool places to go, and because you're on public transport you can have a drink whenever you want.
If anything's getting worse, it's the lack of public transport between SF and the Valley.
So how do you deal with sites that use a CDN domain? As I understand performance 'best practice', you should deliberately host your static assets on a secondary domain so that it doesn't ever get sent cookies. You mention vimeo.com and vimeocdn.com, but many CDN domains aren't quite so obviously named - even here on /. we seem to have slashdot.org and a.fsdn.com and www.gstatic.com (not sure if gstatic is serving any JS, but you get the idea).
FWIW, I use Adblock + Ghostery to avoid most of the cross-domain crap that you really don't want. However, the whitelists for noscript are proving more challenging.
I don't disagree entirely, but I'd like to add that it's not quite as simple as you make out. As an Ultimaker owner, I've found that very small details make a huge difference to print quality. I've also found that as the machine's design evolves, so does the 'ease' of getting quality out of it.You can get some really astounding quality out of an Ultimaker, but it takes hours and hours to print, and simply printing again doesn't always yield the same quality as it did the first time. I seriously doubt people will want to wait hours for their $2 curtain rings, and they certainly won't want to tinker with the machine and software for an hour before printing, or indeed put up with failed prints.
Lastly, the quality of the model has as much to do with the outcome as the printer itself. I've tried some truly horrible models that I've downloaded, and I've also used some really good ones. Garbage in, garbage out.
Ultimately though, you will be right. It'll just take a few years until the cheap printers really can do what the more expensive ones can do. In the 2 years I've owned an Ultimaker, I'd say the cost of the quality I bought 2 years ago is down by about 30%. Paying the same as I did 2 years ago probably gets you better quality/reliability/repeatability than back then too though. And even though the Ultimaker has been copied by the Chinese, and there already are various Chinese printers available, I'm not aware of any that are credible enough to eat any of Ultimaker's lunch just yet.
Suffice to say though, you'd need to be some sort of shower-curtain weirdo to need to print enough curtain rings and whatnot to make it worth owning a printer. Popping down to your local Tescos and having them print it for you sounds a lot more likely (and is something they've talked about on their blog).
Perhaps you have more money than me, but I don't want my fridge re-ordering stuff for me at all.
We use an online supermarket to buy our groceries. The app/website has a "you've ordered this before" sort of feature, and also "you might also like", "start with your last basket" etc etc. The trouble is, if I'm ordering (say) deodorant, I'll buy either of the two major brands that my supermarket stocks. I'll buy the one that's on special offer, and if they're both on special, then I'll pick the one that gives me the greatest volume for money spent. If neither is on special, then maybe, just maybe I'll consider the supermarket own-brand, but then I'll buy the minimum quantity possible, just in case it doesn't work very well or something, otherwise I'll probably pick the cheaper of the two major brands, or else the one I didn't buy last time.
I know in theory I could absolutely have an app on my fridge that works all this shit out and orders what I want. However, reality suggests it's never going to happen. In fact, reality suggests the supermarkets will p0wn the fridge apps so completely that the fridge will never be able to order a special offer, and will just happen to think I want to eat steak in the one week that steak prices are unseasonally high, or in the week that the supermarket has a bit too much of it going off in the freezers.
Oh, and yes, I realise that you don't keep deodorant in the fridge, but the same goes for packs of ham, or organic eggs or whatever.
Time to routinely use RedPhone and TextSecure. I've been using the latter, and it's actually very nice. I've yet to find a friend doing the same though :-(
> They're about at the same level of quality as they were 25 years ago.
In which case, our Trans-Atlantic Bullshit Filter seems to be broken these days :-(
In the UK we only really used to get the fairly-reasonable-might-just-work-out sort of films at the cinema, presumably because it wasn't worth shipping the crap ones over to us. Nowadays, the cinemas are putting films out at about the same time as they appear in the US, and so the TABF doesn't get a chance to take effect. They do their best to have some big premiere, and then the film tanks because it's rubbish. In the past, we might have had to wait, but it meant we stood a chance of getting reasonable films.
I suspect the only reasonable solution is to cut the cost of production. That way, they can afford to release dozens of crap films and see which ones work out, and then produce endless sequels and prequals in an attempt to squeeze out every last tiny bit of revenue. Oh wait... they're doing most of that right now :-(
A quick run around those million servers shows the most used app is the System Idle Process. Microsoft's marketing department is already looking at how it can rebrand and promote this awesome app. Research suggests Linux doesn't even have a System Idle Process, so Microsoft is hoping to capitalise on this in the constant battle of Windows vs. Linux.