Agreed. IME the places where you're most likely to be asked to email credit card numbers are smaller organisations and organisations which still do a lot of business face to face - places where the person you're dealing with can't say "Do it through our website".
My g/f booked a small hotel recently and they asked her to email a credit card number across. Thankfully she refused, but apparently the hotel was rather surprised at this.
If it's a public computer, it would be quite possible for an enterprising cybercafe owner to set up a proxy server which sets up the SSL connection itself, decrypts everything, then presents a self-signed certificate to the client PC. The upshot is that data is nicely encrypted to the proxy, whereupon it's decrypted, logged for later use, then re-encrypted to do the actual banking.
If properly set up, you wouldn't see any error messages on the client PC as it would have the root CA for the self-signed cert installed.
That's because the definition of the word "murder" is unclear.
It's not considered murder to kill a man who's fighting for the opposition when you're at war (unless he's surrendered and should be taken as a PoW).
It's not necessarily murder to kill a man who's coming at you with a weapon. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder.
It's not murder if you're not mentally fit to judge what is and isn't acceptable (well actually it is, but you won't receive the same kind of punishment in most civilised countries).
Purely out of morbid curiosity, why on Earth do you not already have a good backup system in place? What would have happened had your bosses' new laptop been lost, stolen or otherwise damaged?
Not tried, but I recall the earlier ones were essentially a pad on which you placed your finger.
The newer ones are about 5mm long and you swipe your finger across it. So it won't be susceptible to the "blow on it to warm up the impression the last person left" attack, but I've no idea about others.
As regards field users who are away from the office, this works under XP. No idea about Win2K.
While connected to the network, right-click on a directory which is part of a drive mounted from the network. Select "Make available offline".
Bingo. You now have a directory which is always available on the laptop regardless of whether it's hooked to the network or not, will get automatically resync'd with the server next time it's connected and all you need to backup is the server. Best bit is you don't need any further software and it will work whether you're using a Windows server as the fileserver or Samba.
If the staff are so seldom connected to the network that this won't work, neither will any other form of network-based backup. Give them a CD or DVD writer, a cakebox of blank media and a swift grounding in "This is how you backup your data. Do it, or you'll get no sympathy when (not if) your laptop is lost or damaged".
As I understand it this system checks your fingerprint against a "banned" list,
Is that so? My understanding is that even human "experts" cannot always agree on whether or not two fingerprints taken in optimal circumstances match, and that it is commonplace for police computers to produce several possible matches when presented with a fingerprint taken from the scene of a crime - the idea being that once the computer's narrowed it down, an expert can then identify the correct match.
Now, replace the computing power and software sophistication available to the police with that available to your local pub landlord. Replace the optimal circumstances with a beer-soaked bar staffed by untrained students who just want to get on with serving the next customer. Replace the fingerprint experts with a couple of knuckle-dragging bouncers.
Once that thing's got enough fingerprints on there for there to be a reasonably sized database to search against, it's going to make the pub a lot quieter.
Well, seeing as almost nobody writes in assembler for a specific processor any more, perhaps it would be more accurate to phrase that as "it is possible to do substantially more optimisation at the compiler stage".
This may be the case, and I'm quite happy to concede it, but would still point out that for most real world applications the CPU is not the bottleneck. And for those where it is, it is unlikely you really need a flash player on there;)
I'd go a step further and ask what benefit a 64-bit OS has unless you have over 4GB RAM.
AFAICT, you use up more disk space, individual apps require more memory and the biggest benefit - that you can access >4GB without hacks like PAE - is irrelevant.
The connection logs are often all you need to paint a strong picture of who's in contact with who.
Let's say, for instance, that the logs for my telephone show a number of calls to a satellite phone in Afghanistan. Suddenly, I'm a suspect the next time a bomb goes off within about 150 miles of me. What am I saying to this person in Afghanistan? Well, actually, it's my sister who went over there as part of a red cross relief effort, but the local police don't know that and while they're holding me to confirm it, my employer is asking questions.
Questions like "What sort of a person is this who was arrested last week and hasn't been heard from since? Best replace him."
After that happens, it's rather hard to get another job. A common interview question is "Why did you leave your last job?" and the honest answer ("I was arrested and held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act owing to poor evidence") tends to put off prospective employers - chances are they stopped listening after the word "arrested" and now just want me off the premises as quickly as possible.
Not really. IBM, Sun, Oracle and the like have been making much more money out of support contracts rather than software licensing for years now.
In case you didn't already know, a large chunk of genuinely active opensource projects have at least one regular contributor who's being paid to contribute by their employer - check the changelog of the Linux kernel and you'll see scores of people with @ibm.com, @redhat.com email addresses.
Rubbish. It may impact price, but it will have almost no impact on quality which is already uniformly low in the average supermarket.
You know how in IT, we say "good, fast, cheap: choose any two"? Much the same applies to meat. In this case, it's a trade off between lean meat, tasty, tender, length of time needed to prepare and cost.
There are a number of things which affect what comes out when the cow is shot, skinned, cut up and put onto little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. Sure, one of them is the breed, but two very big factors are how the animal lived and how long the meat was hung after slaughter. Neither of which is affected in the slightest by whether your cow was made by a boy and a girl cow who loved each other very much, by a man with a syringe full of bull sperm or by a farmer wearing a flat cap and an old tweed jacket working in a lab.
Most Americans believe very deeply that "it can't happen here."
Y'know, what with all this "War on Terror" and "Post 9/11" stuff going on, I'd have thought the American people out of all would have figured out that it can happen there.
Lots of parents have heard the question "Mummy, how do you get babies?" and felt rather awkward.
In light of the news that Republicans consider sex immoral, I'd like to ask "How do you get republicans? Are they cloned in a lab somewhere or something?".
I don't pretend to understand the prevailing winds of the region or how radiation tends to fall out.
Not to worry, this makes me eminently qualified to comment on slashdot.
To me it looks extremely dangerous for North Korea to drop a nuclear bomb on its closest neighbours. There's a real risk that a significant amount of fallout could wind up back over North Korea.
If your CIO tells you you -must- use windows servers, explain to him that you would, but they require a "token ring" and all of them fell into the "ethernet" and they must be found first. Much like telling an idiot to sit in the corner of a round room, it will distract him for the better part of the next quarter.
Your CIO doesn't need to demand Windows servers.
Certainly IME, what actually happens is the powers that be demand something on their desktop which happens to depend on a Windows server - something like Outlook complete with all the shared calendaring features (yes I know plugins for alternative server solutions exist, show me one which doesn't suck and is cheaper than Exchange), or some financial or reporting software package which demands SQL server.
Depends how large the company was and how big a role the CEO has in running it.
In larger companies, the CEO generally plays golf most of the time.
In smaller companies, it's quite common for the CEO to be designing the products in great detail, and many a promising open source project has withered for lack of a leader - though I can't see that happening in the case of ReiserFS because it's too big and important.
In these cases, spouses and ex-spouses are always the first suspects.
Regardless of whether or not Hans has done anything wrong (and the public have no evidence either way), it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that unless convincing evidence to the contrary turned up, he'd be arrested.
Expect somthing similar to what happened with CDs when the recording industry kept messing with copy protection there. They had to stop putting the CD logo on them. Just only buy things that have the DVD logo and return them if they don't work.
Have you looked closely at an album which was released in about the last 10 years? Copy protection or not, the CD logo simply hasn't been bothered with 90% of the time.
Then, when the next blockbuster movie sell a grand total of four DVDs, maybe the movie and television studios will finally realize how much money this is costing them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's obviously run by cretins
Actually it's run by France Telecom, but it amounts to much the same thing.
Agreed. IME the places where you're most likely to be asked to email credit card numbers are smaller organisations and organisations which still do a lot of business face to face - places where the person you're dealing with can't say "Do it through our website".
My g/f booked a small hotel recently and they asked her to email a credit card number across. Thankfully she refused, but apparently the hotel was rather surprised at this.
If it's a public computer, it would be quite possible for an enterprising cybercafe owner to set up a proxy server which sets up the SSL connection itself, decrypts everything, then presents a self-signed certificate to the client PC. The upshot is that data is nicely encrypted to the proxy, whereupon it's decrypted, logged for later use, then re-encrypted to do the actual banking.
If properly set up, you wouldn't see any error messages on the client PC as it would have the root CA for the self-signed cert installed.
That's because the definition of the word "murder" is unclear.
It's not considered murder to kill a man who's fighting for the opposition when you're at war (unless he's surrendered and should be taken as a PoW).
It's not necessarily murder to kill a man who's coming at you with a weapon. Manslaughter, maybe, but not murder.
It's not murder if you're not mentally fit to judge what is and isn't acceptable (well actually it is, but you won't receive the same kind of punishment in most civilised countries).
Purely out of morbid curiosity, why on Earth do you not already have a good backup system in place? What would have happened had your bosses' new laptop been lost, stolen or otherwise damaged?
Not tried, but I recall the earlier ones were essentially a pad on which you placed your finger.
The newer ones are about 5mm long and you swipe your finger across it. So it won't be susceptible to the "blow on it to warm up the impression the last person left" attack, but I've no idea about others.
I don't backup user PCs. It's just not practical.
As regards field users who are away from the office, this works under XP. No idea about Win2K.
While connected to the network, right-click on a directory which is part of a drive mounted from the network. Select "Make available offline".
Bingo. You now have a directory which is always available on the laptop regardless of whether it's hooked to the network or not, will get automatically resync'd with the server next time it's connected and all you need to backup is the server. Best bit is you don't need any further software and it will work whether you're using a Windows server as the fileserver or Samba.
If the staff are so seldom connected to the network that this won't work, neither will any other form of network-based backup. Give them a CD or DVD writer, a cakebox of blank media and a swift grounding in "This is how you backup your data. Do it, or you'll get no sympathy when (not if) your laptop is lost or damaged".
As I understand it this system checks your fingerprint against a "banned" list,
Is that so? My understanding is that even human "experts" cannot always agree on whether or not two fingerprints taken in optimal circumstances match, and that it is commonplace for police computers to produce several possible matches when presented with a fingerprint taken from the scene of a crime - the idea being that once the computer's narrowed it down, an expert can then identify the correct match.
Now, replace the computing power and software sophistication available to the police with that available to your local pub landlord. Replace the optimal circumstances with a beer-soaked bar staffed by untrained students who just want to get on with serving the next customer. Replace the fingerprint experts with a couple of knuckle-dragging bouncers.
Once that thing's got enough fingerprints on there for there to be a reasonably sized database to search against, it's going to make the pub a lot quieter.
Well, seeing as almost nobody writes in assembler for a specific processor any more, perhaps it would be more accurate to phrase that as "it is possible to do substantially more optimisation at the compiler stage".
;)
This may be the case, and I'm quite happy to concede it, but would still point out that for most real world applications the CPU is not the bottleneck. And for those where it is, it is unlikely you really need a flash player on there
I'd go a step further and ask what benefit a 64-bit OS has unless you have over 4GB RAM.
AFAICT, you use up more disk space, individual apps require more memory and the biggest benefit - that you can access >4GB without hacks like PAE - is irrelevant.
Why are you bothering to install drivers for a keyboard?
The connection logs are often all you need to paint a strong picture of who's in contact with who.
Let's say, for instance, that the logs for my telephone show a number of calls to a satellite phone in Afghanistan. Suddenly, I'm a suspect the next time a bomb goes off within about 150 miles of me. What am I saying to this person in Afghanistan? Well, actually, it's my sister who went over there as part of a red cross relief effort, but the local police don't know that and while they're holding me to confirm it, my employer is asking questions.
Questions like "What sort of a person is this who was arrested last week and hasn't been heard from since? Best replace him."
After that happens, it's rather hard to get another job. A common interview question is "Why did you leave your last job?" and the honest answer ("I was arrested and held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act owing to poor evidence") tends to put off prospective employers - chances are they stopped listening after the word "arrested" and now just want me off the premises as quickly as possible.
Not really. IBM, Sun, Oracle and the like have been making much more money out of support contracts rather than software licensing for years now.
In case you didn't already know, a large chunk of genuinely active opensource projects have at least one regular contributor who's being paid to contribute by their employer - check the changelog of the Linux kernel and you'll see scores of people with @ibm.com, @redhat.com email addresses.
Rubbish. It may impact price, but it will have almost no impact on quality which is already uniformly low in the average supermarket.
You know how in IT, we say "good, fast, cheap: choose any two"? Much the same applies to meat. In this case, it's a trade off between lean meat, tasty, tender, length of time needed to prepare and cost.
There are a number of things which affect what comes out when the cow is shot, skinned, cut up and put onto little shrink-wrapped polystyrene trays. Sure, one of them is the breed, but two very big factors are how the animal lived and how long the meat was hung after slaughter. Neither of which is affected in the slightest by whether your cow was made by a boy and a girl cow who loved each other very much, by a man with a syringe full of bull sperm or by a farmer wearing a flat cap and an old tweed jacket working in a lab.
I have a solution to that one: Buy a really uncomfortable bed. (Ikea have a good range)
You'll still have to sleep on the couch, but now it's more a reward than a punishment.
Most Americans believe very deeply that "it can't happen here."
Y'know, what with all this "War on Terror" and "Post 9/11" stuff going on, I'd have thought the American people out of all would have figured out that it can happen there.
Lots of parents have heard the question "Mummy, how do you get babies?" and felt rather awkward.
In light of the news that Republicans consider sex immoral, I'd like to ask "How do you get republicans? Are they cloned in a lab somewhere or something?".
I don't pretend to understand the prevailing winds of the region or how radiation tends to fall out.
Not to worry, this makes me eminently qualified to comment on slashdot.
To me it looks extremely dangerous for North Korea to drop a nuclear bomb on its closest neighbours. There's a real risk that a significant amount of fallout could wind up back over North Korea.
If your CIO tells you you -must- use windows servers, explain to him that you would, but they require a "token ring" and all of them fell into the "ethernet" and they must be found first. Much like telling an idiot to sit in the corner of a round room, it will distract him for the better part of the next quarter.
Your CIO doesn't need to demand Windows servers.
Certainly IME, what actually happens is the powers that be demand something on their desktop which happens to depend on a Windows server - something like Outlook complete with all the shared calendaring features (yes I know plugins for alternative server solutions exist, show me one which doesn't suck and is cheaper than Exchange), or some financial or reporting software package which demands SQL server.
If you happen to be a Nobel-prize winning physicist who is driven by that kind of thing, fine.
But for 99.9% of us that's not the case - and I challenge you to find anyone who said on their deathbed "I wish I'd spent more time at work".
they'd rather eat cat feces, which smells the same but tastes slightly better.
How do you know?
Depends how large the company was and how big a role the CEO has in running it.
In larger companies, the CEO generally plays golf most of the time.
In smaller companies, it's quite common for the CEO to be designing the products in great detail, and many a promising open source project has withered for lack of a leader - though I can't see that happening in the case of ReiserFS because it's too big and important.
Hans' wife has been missing for some time.
In these cases, spouses and ex-spouses are always the first suspects.
Regardless of whether or not Hans has done anything wrong (and the public have no evidence either way), it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that unless convincing evidence to the contrary turned up, he'd be arrested.
Expect somthing similar to what happened with CDs when the recording industry kept messing with copy protection there. They had to stop putting the CD logo on them. Just only buy things that have the DVD logo and return them if they don't work.
Have you looked closely at an album which was released in about the last 10 years? Copy protection or not, the CD logo simply hasn't been bothered with 90% of the time.
Then, when the next blockbuster movie sell a grand total of four DVDs, maybe the movie and television studios will finally realize how much money this is costing them.
More likely they'll blame piracy.