What's really scary here is that an employer with one of the worst possible jobs to offer, in possibly THE worst workplace environment there is, gets enough applicants that the are in a position to pick and choose who to hire, let alone put arbitrary qualifications on them.
Dynamic range (represented by the "24 bit" parameter) makes a lot of sense for classical music and certain other genres. No matter how much dynamic headroom is provided, most pop music will be compressed into the top four bits anyway. It won't be louder, since in the digital domain, dynamics are a matter of "attenuation from zero", and there is no envelope to push, like there was in the old days.
In a production mode, it's quite nice to have higher dynamic range, not so much for the range between extremes, but more because of the higher resolution.
Similar arguments exist for frequency, even in the face of compression of consumer audio. Want to convince yourself of how well you can hear the difference between a lossy compression codec and the original wav? There's a simple test. Take the original wav, copy it and turn it 180 degrees in phase. Mix this track agains the compressed file. Notice that when you play this result you can hear a *lot*. What you hear is the aberration of compression. If your music doesn't have a lot of stuff like clean cymbals or a solo oboe or whatever, maybe you'll find this result perfectly acceptable.
An even better, much more revealing test is to convert the track to Mid/Side stereo. (Much easier to do if you're in a studio environment, but simple and routine in any case), take the sides and compare them in a listening test and a nulling test. It will be painfully obvious what MP3 compression does to the side and to the stereo image in general.
I would be more inclined to give the login and password to my online banking account, than to my facebook account, but of these fall under the category of things that will be disclosed under torture or immediate threat of death. Then again, I won't ever be desperate enough to be applying for a job anywhere mentioned in TFA.
If they don't have any other source for your SSN, there's nothing to stop you from using some random 4 digit string. If they do have a source for your SSN, and they use it for this purpose, they might be breaking laws that could lead to fines that even Google would notice.
You are thinking on the scale of an individual, without constraining error bars. In the aggregate, say when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals and you are willing to accept a certain degree of error, the premise of "last 4 digits allows deduction of full SSN" does have a great deal of merit.
How many different institutions use your employee ID or your slashdot UID, and for what purposes? What are the risks to you from disclosure of these other data? I agree with you that genuine security has enjoyed painfully late adoption.
Exactly; they can't check. On the other hand they can certainly disqualify anyone or everyone for any reason at all. They can end the program without notice. They can quietly drop your entry on the floor. They have total indemnity.
It could even be ruled that the facebook timestamp isn't admissible as evidence, and the jury won't even hear about the status update at all. This sort of issue isn't uncommon.
People who make these claims really don't understand the economy of scale of the prison system. Hint: Getting a prisoner out of the system doesn't generate a $200K P&L bonus for anyone.
It means no such thing. All it means is that facebook timestamped the update at 7:54, Facebook server time. Unless the phone actually recorded the time that the send button was pressed, the facebook timestamp means nothing.
Not at all, without an existing, legally meaningful definition of "facebooking" that is not so broad as to make it illegal to call a tow truck or your insurer.
You would basically be trying to get a law saying who you may communicate and what means you may use to communicate with them, which is going to be a very difficult thing in the face of the First Amendment. For some people, a facebook status update happens to be the most efficient way to get a note to the maximum number of people who need that information.
In the discussion of this case there is a bias that assumes "facebooking" is necessarily some frivolous activity, but it could be essential communication, and in any event, updating facebook after the accident isn't harmful any more than calling a tow truck would be. It might even be a more efficient means of getting help than any phone call.
Failing to render aid is a crime in some states, but not everywhere.
"If someone who caused the crash sends text, updates facebook, sends twitter etc. at the same time or within 5 minutes of an accident, then that is enough reason to vote guilty."
Guilty of what? Do you seriously think you can define communication in such a way that it makes it a crime to send a text message but somehow not a crime to call your family, your employer, your insurance agent, a tow truck, or even the police? You're going to have a high hurdle.
There would be something wrong with rules of evidence if that were admitted. I've called my insurance adjuster within a minute of a crash. What legal distinction could be made between calling an insurance adjuster, calling your relatives or boss, or updating Facebook?
Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence. It is extremely rare to express any symptoms at all before the cancer metastatizes. Surgery for pancreatic cancer is, in general, palliative.
Ask an oncologist what the general prognosis is for pancreatic cancer. Go ahead and mention that the patient is a billionaire if you like.
He's pretty much as sick as a person can get. I have no doubt he is aware of this and doesn't need to be told by a slashdot headline.
That in itself would be a bigger secret than anything that would be exposed by it. Acting on any information obtained that way would expose the biggest secret in the history of secrecy, pretty much. They aren't going to tip that hand just for you.
And anyone who is serious about this either has a hard drive shredder or is getting Iron Mountain or somebody to shred them.
We get a fairly small number of drives removed from military vehicles and equipment like copy machines, that we shred. The machine is pretty brutal, it's a 20HP AMS-2000. I'm sure it was breathtakingly expensive; you need a forklift to move it.
In a forensics context, you might not need to recover data. It might be sufficient to merely prove that data was written, when, by whom. You might not need to count the grains of sand on a beach, but it might be useful to be able to say that the sand in your suspect's clothing came from a specific beach at a certain time of the year.
Slashdot Mirror
What's really scary here is that an employer with one of the worst possible jobs to offer, in possibly THE worst workplace environment there is, gets enough applicants that the are in a position to pick and choose who to hire, let alone put arbitrary qualifications on them.
They do wear it on their chest and shirt sleeve, literally.
Better to show them a site that implies your family and friends are powerful people who they fear.
Dynamic range (represented by the "24 bit" parameter) makes a lot of sense for classical music and certain other genres. No matter how much dynamic headroom is provided, most pop music will be compressed into the top four bits anyway. It won't be louder, since in the digital domain, dynamics are a matter of "attenuation from zero", and there is no envelope to push, like there was in the old days.
In a production mode, it's quite nice to have higher dynamic range, not so much for the range between extremes, but more because of the higher resolution.
Similar arguments exist for frequency, even in the face of compression of consumer audio. Want to convince yourself of how well you can hear the difference between a lossy compression codec and the original wav? There's a simple test. Take the original wav, copy it and turn it 180 degrees in phase. Mix this track agains the compressed file. Notice that when you play this result you can hear a *lot*. What you hear is the aberration of compression. If your music doesn't have a lot of stuff like clean cymbals or a solo oboe or whatever, maybe you'll find this result perfectly acceptable.
An even better, much more revealing test is to convert the track to Mid/Side stereo. (Much easier to do if you're in a studio environment, but simple and routine in any case), take the sides and compare them in a listening test and a nulling test. It will be painfully obvious what MP3 compression does to the side and to the stereo image in general.
>It was Ronald Reagan who oversaw the change in employment regulations that discarded the idea that you innocent until proven guilty of drug abuse.
You misspelled Richard Nixon.
I would be more inclined to give the login and password to my online banking account, than to my facebook account, but of these fall under the category of things that will be disclosed under torture or immediate threat of death. Then again, I won't ever be desperate enough to be applying for a job anywhere mentioned in TFA.
If they don't have any other source for your SSN, there's nothing to stop you from using some random 4 digit string.
If they do have a source for your SSN, and they use it for this purpose, they might be breaking laws that could lead to fines that even Google would notice.
>No, you can't
You are thinking on the scale of an individual, without constraining error bars. In the aggregate, say when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals and you are willing to accept a certain degree of error, the premise of "last 4 digits allows deduction of full SSN" does have a great deal of merit.
How many different institutions use your employee ID or your slashdot UID, and for what purposes? What are the risks to you from disclosure of these other data?
I agree with you that genuine security has enjoyed painfully late adoption.
>It's the last four digits that they were collecting, as a unique ID.
Unique for at most 9999+1 pigeons.
Exactly; they can't check. On the other hand they can certainly disqualify anyone or everyone for any reason at all. They can end the program without notice. They can quietly drop your entry on the floor. They have total indemnity.
>They could start by fixing a system rigged to ensure the preeminence of two parties.
I thought we already did that!
This is true even in the ruggedized military market.
>To date, I've neither purchased nor pirated any Blu-Ray media.
I've never even seen one. Is it a popular format for something?
It could even be ruled that the facebook timestamp isn't admissible as evidence, and the jury won't even hear about the status update at all.
This sort of issue isn't uncommon.
People who make these claims really don't understand the economy of scale of the prison system. Hint: Getting a prisoner out of the system doesn't generate a $200K P&L bonus for anyone.
>Meaning Beas did hit submit - at 7:54 AM.
It means no such thing. All it means is that facebook timestamped the update at 7:54, Facebook server time. Unless the phone actually recorded the time that the send button was pressed, the facebook timestamp means nothing.
>posting to facebook while driving.
That allegation isn't made by the plaintiff, so I don't see any reason why you would assume it.
Not at all, without an existing, legally meaningful definition of "facebooking" that is not so broad as to make it illegal to call a tow truck or your insurer.
You would basically be trying to get a law saying who you may communicate and what means you may use to communicate with them, which is going to be a very difficult thing in the face of the First Amendment. For some people, a facebook status update happens to be the most efficient way to get a note to the maximum number of people who need that information.
In the discussion of this case there is a bias that assumes "facebooking" is necessarily some frivolous activity, but it could be essential communication, and in any event, updating facebook after the accident isn't harmful any more than calling a tow truck would be. It might even be a more efficient means of getting help than any phone call.
Failing to render aid is a crime in some states, but not everywhere.
"If someone who caused the crash sends text, updates facebook, sends twitter etc. at the same time or within 5 minutes of an accident, then that is enough reason to vote guilty."
Guilty of what? Do you seriously think you can define communication in such a way that it makes it a crime to send a text message but somehow not a crime to call your family, your employer, your insurance agent, a tow truck, or even the police? You're going to have a high hurdle.
There would be something wrong with rules of evidence if that were admitted. I've called my insurance adjuster within a minute of a crash. What legal distinction could be made between calling an insurance adjuster, calling your relatives or boss, or updating Facebook?
Pancreatic cancer is a death sentence. It is extremely rare to express any symptoms at all before the cancer metastatizes.
Surgery for pancreatic cancer is, in general, palliative.
Ask an oncologist what the general prognosis is for pancreatic cancer. Go ahead and mention that the patient is a billionaire if you like.
He's pretty much as sick as a person can get. I have no doubt he is aware of this and doesn't need to be told by a slashdot headline.
That in itself would be a bigger secret than anything that would be exposed by it.
Acting on any information obtained that way would expose the biggest secret in the history of secrecy, pretty much.
They aren't going to tip that hand just for you.
And anyone who is serious about this either has a hard drive shredder or is getting Iron Mountain or somebody to shred them.
We get a fairly small number of drives removed from military vehicles and equipment like copy machines, that we shred. The machine is pretty brutal, it's a 20HP AMS-2000. I'm sure it was breathtakingly expensive; you need a forklift to move it.
In a forensics context, you might not need to recover data. It might be sufficient to merely prove that data was written, when, by whom. You might not need to count the grains of sand on a beach, but it might be useful to be able to say that the sand in your suspect's clothing came from a specific beach at a certain time of the year.