No...no, I would call a crappy ancient ad campaign that successfully implanted itself into the internal consciousness of a weak-minded Slashdot poster.
That's how I feel about practically every pop-culture reference that is ever posted to Slashdot. The less relevant to the discussion the reference is, the more this is so.
Wouldn't one think that someone going to Harvard with a high GPA and SAT score be smart enough to weigh the risks?
Smart enough? Possibly, but remember that this guy went to both Yale (BA) and Harvard (MBA). Don't know about his GPA or SAT scores though... or whether that says more/less about him or the schools.
It takes some brains to convince everyone that you're stupid, to make them underestimate you, so that behind the scenes you can do whatever you like with little or no scrutiny. It takes brains and a ruthless determination to get your way no matter what it takes, even at the expense of widespread ridicule. It also takes some brains to exploit a climate of fear and use time-tested tactics (such as calling your opponents "unpatriotic") to virtually guarantee that the Congress will pass whatever legistlation you recommend with little or no concern for the Constitution.
It takes brains to do all of this. It also takes a profound lack of wisdom to have the desire to do this. An amount of inhumanity helps, too, for disregarding all the damage (sorry, "collateral damage") such policies have caused. No, G.W. Bush was not stupid, in the same way that serial killers are not stupid. Pathological, lustful for power, indifferent to suffering, and indifferent to our nation's traditions, sure, but not stupid.
Maybe they can work with Wikipedia, by asking for a list of article stubs or proposed articles Wiki would like to see researched and written. It could be something that benefits both parties.
Excellent. Then the students will know what to write, and the Wikipedia admins will know what to expect so they can delete it. Everyone wins!
(Normal shaking, like from typing, is more important.)
Just wait until someone releases a paper on how to detect exactly what someone is typing by examining the accelerometer. That would be a very interesting research project and have possible consequences for anyone just randomly giving out data like this (not that I have anything against this project, I would use it on my play laptops but not my work laptops).
Is not the accelerometer a component of the laptop? In that case, if an adversary can obtain the readings from the accelerometer, they should have enough access to the machine to just install a keylogger. Therefore this technique, while technically interesting, seems rather pointless as a realistic attack vector.
But Windows isn't a "good deal"; it's actually quite expensive and overpriced, given that the same functionality is available even in free operating systems.
How do I get a free OS to run DirectX-apps?
I currently use WINE to play Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 (which was released recently on Jan. 26, 2010) and have played several other games successfully. For ME2, I had to patch WINE to fix a stability issue and a mouse issue, but this was no big deal and is unusual; most games WINE can run don't require this. The "Winetricks" script makes it very easy to download (from Microsoft.com) and install the DirectX runtimes with a single command, facilitating the process.
It's quite rare that I encounter a game that simply will not work with WINE, though for some games I have had to take steps that would quickly frustrate someone who is not technically inclined and therefore not interested in how it works. For folks who don't want to deal with the effort, there are commercial versions of WINE that play more games out-of-the-box. Considering its complexity and the magnitude of the project, I am most impressed with what WINE can do.
Many of us believe that a Linux distribution with a decent default configuration is inherently more secure and less exploitable than the average Windows system that ships with new PCs.
That's where "many of you" have a serious misunderstanding of what security is.
"Security" is not a simple grayscale. Things aren't "more" or "less" secure. Security is a very complex concept that is based largely upon the skill and knowledge of the attackers.
A simple cardboard box is "secure" against a great many threats, such as mosquitos. But not secure against others, such as a human attacker. Despite this lack of security, we deem simple cardboard boxes "good enough" to secure billions of packages every year as thy move through various mail systems.
Many kinds of attacks that are common today, were thought to be "theoretical" and "impossible" 10 years ago. Systems that are vulnerable today, would not have been vulnerable 10 years ago. Conversely, that means systems that are "secure" today may well be insecure tomorrow, with nothing more than a bit of knowledge changing that status.
The point is, all it takes is knowledge to defeat security. If that's the case, was it ever really secure to begin with?
I have a different take on this than you. I absolutely agree that there is no such thing as absolute security. But it's for precisely that reason that I use relative terms like "more secure" or "less secure". For your point about cardboard boxes and their ability to protect against mosquitoes but not humans, I view that as a need to define your threat model.
Perhaps I should have spelled it out, but the threat model I intended to imply involved insecure system system services, browser exploits, and e-mail client exploits. Currently, these are your standard "remotely exploitable vulnerabilities". These have facilitated botnets, and with those come spam, phishing, and all sorts of other forms of fraud. This class of vulnerabilities is currently causing the real problems. Therefore, I'm not advocating extreme security against a highly determined and highly skilled attacker who is targeting something personally, though that'd be nice. Instead, I'm advocating a basic level of security that is achievable and would remove much of the low-hanging fruit that currently makes large botnets possible.
I believe that can be done with both Linux and Windows, but is easier to accomplish on Linux. Further, the inherent diversity among various Linux systems mean that a single exploit is unlikely to work on all or even most of them, which further raises the effort it would take to build a botnet. It would be a welcome change from the situation now, where a single vulnerability in Windows and/or IE instantly means that millions of machines are exploitable.
Do you expect the average person to know that Europe mandated the ballot? If they blame anyone, I'd expect Windows to get the most heat for it (mistakenly, but still). It does say "Windows Internet Explorer" in the titlebar...
A big part of Microsoft's marketshare is not due to customers who evaluate all possible options and consciously choose Windows. It's from people who have Windows because "that's what it came with." So Microsoft has no qualms about benefitting from passive ignorance. Now when people who could use Google to inform themselves instead assume that Windows is to be "blamed"* for the ballot, Microsoft will potentially experience a little of the disadvantages of passive ignorance. I don't see anything wrong with this.
* Usually "blamed" means something wrong has happened. I don't personally view a browser ballot as morally wrong or otherwise worth getting excited over. To each their own.
That seems like an overly simple solution. Wouldn't whatever OS that takes its place present the same issues after people decide to try exploiting it? I know windows is far from being the perfect OS, but what would happen if say Ubuntu got 80% market share?
Many of us believe that a Linux distribution with a decent default configuration is inherently more secure and less exploitable than the average Windows system that ships with new PCs. There are several reasons for this. Access to source makes it easier to build binaries with protections against buffer overflows and other exploits. The wide variety of distributions combined with the extreme configurability of each, down to the ability to replace most core system components with alternative implementations, means that Linux tends to avoid the problems that come with a monoculture.
Centralized package managers make it much easier to keep all of your software up-to-date. Compare that to Windows where Windows Update can only service Microsoft software and all of your other programs are on their own. Also, Linux distributions are not known for abusing their update mechanisms by pushing WGA and other non-customer-friendly components. They have no "piracy" fears that would tempt them to do so.
I used to look at widespread Windows worms and wonder at the fact that so many of them exploit already-patched vulnerabilities. It amazed me that people weren't updating, and I think the lack of trust towards Microsoft has much to do with that. If those people did trust Microsoft to provide updates that are high-quality and only in the customers' interests, then there'd be no reason not to allow automatic Windows Updates. For these reasons, it's both easier to keep all software updated in Linux and more likely that users will do so.
Or are you advocating that nobody gets a majority share (which i suppose is the ideal way do to things)? But then you run into issues of compatibility between systems yadda yadda.
It'd be nice if no single OS had an overwhelming majority of marketshare. I don't think there'd be compatibility issues. Bear in mind that you're posting to a Web site using ASCII and HTML and JavaScript, all of which are open standards usable on Windows, Macs, and *nix. Incompatibility is really just a synonym for "vendor lock-in". Right now, vendors like Microsoft can get away with that if they have enough marketshare. More diversity in OSs would just compel them to use open standards, otherwise their customers would find themselves on a network where everyone else can communicate and they cannot.
You suppose wrong. It's about muggers and other small fry. A mugger won't risk a possession charge because a mugging carries a much lower penalty and being the one mugger with a gun will make the police interested.
What you describe there is robbery, where violence or the threat of violence is used to take someone's possessions. That's considered a violent crime, even if the mugger does not actually injure anyone. If the police are not already interested in this, they need to be fired and replaced by police who are. Further, let's say that a mugger uses a knife instead of a gun. Both are deadly weapons. A person killed by a knife is just as dead as a person killed by a gun. The crime is the same either way: the criminal threatened someone with a deadly weapon in order to take their property by force.
I doubt that the unauthorized possession (with no distribution) of a type of contraband carries a more severe penalty than a violent crime, but if true, that is not how it should be, but then I digress. If the gun-control advocated are correct, then those places where firearms are completely forbidden (like Washington D.C.) should have rates of muggings and other violent crimes lower than the rest of the nation, but they don't, so clearly their theories do not describe the real world.
Speaking of muggers, one reason conceal-carry permits lower violent crime is that the predatory criminals cannot distinguish between helpless victims and those who are ready to fight back. With a gun anyone, no matter what their physical condition, can quickly and reliably present deadly force. Criminals who prey on others want helpless victims; they don't want to risk their lives in a shootout.
Also the compulsory weapons in Switzerland are battle rifles, those aren't exactly ideal for concealed carrying or even crime on the streets.
I see what you are trying to do there, and I wonder if you also see what you're trying to do. I made two distinct points. One point was about universal gun ownership. The other point was about US states where plenty of people choose not to own firearms, but those who do are able to obtain conceal-carry permits. Those two points were listed in the same post, but are otherwise independent. You are conflating the two points. The inability to conceal a large battle rifle has absolutely nothing to do with whether conceal-carry permits lower violent crime rates. Sorry but when people try to confuse issues like this, either accidentally or deliberately, it's a sign that they have a weak argument.
Lest there be further needless confusion, I'll explain a bit more. The position of gun-control advocates is that fewer firearms means there will be less violent crime. This is why they urge the government to restrict and/or forbid the private ownership of firearms. When you have a militia that requires every able-bodied male in every household to own a battle rifle, every household has access to firearms. When you have states that allow gun ownership and conceal-carry permits, every household that wants guns can obtain and carry them. Both situations involve more guns and more people owning guns than anything the gun-control advocates would want. Yet both situations realize the gun-control advocates' stated goal of reducing violent crime.
Upon honest appraisal, the dispassionate, intellectually honest inquirer would be forced to conclude that gun-control is a religious position that has little or no connection with reality. That movement neither addresses the evidence against it, nor feels a need to address said evidence. Its followers do not see this as a problem, as a reason to rethink their position. It's purely emotional and it's purely based on blaming human problems on inanimate objects. It's amazing to me that anyone grants it equal footing with positions based on evidence and experience.
I just described the people who support this political position, t
There's a difference between paranoia and preparedness. I think the long prevailing position of the Swiss is that they don't especially care for violence, but simultaneously, they know it has its place.
(Paraphrased) "If you want peace, prepare for war." - Flavius Vegetius Renatus
Because it's comparing apples (people who wanted a gun and so bought one) vs oranges (people who may or may not have wanted one but are legally required to have one anyway).
You haven't explained the significance of that difference. To listen to gun-control advocates, more guns equals more crime. That's why they think they will reduce violent crime by disarming people who obey weapons regulations (that is, law-abiding citizens). I suppose some of them might seriously believe that a criminal willing to commit murder is worried about getting caught with an illegal weapons possession charge, but that's absurd. So when we talk of people who can realistically be disarmed, we are talking about law-abiding citizens.
In other countries, the only people who have guns are the ones who wanted them and bought them (let's call them Group A). In Switzerland, those people have guns and everyone else does, too (let's call those Group B). If the case for gun-control reducing crime were correct, Switzerland should have crime from Group A and crime from Group B. If they have less gun crime per capita than other industrialized nations, it seriously discredits the justifications given by gun-control advocates. And the use of the police power of government to remove a freedom like gun ownership does need justification.
So if anything, the relatively unique situation in Switzerland (a militia) strengthens the comparison, because anyone in Switzerland who wanted to shoot someone has ready access to firearms. In a way, this is like the reduction in violent crime that has been enjoyed by every US state which has enabled conceal-carry permits for firearms. Both situations incline me to believe that gun-control is a religious issue, because those who advocate it never seem to think very hard about the evidence against them. It does not surprise me that the desire to blame society's problems on inanimate objects would be based on rhetoric, emotional appeals, and religious fervor, and not on actual evidence.
That would be a niggardly response, don't you think? Why should posts that offend some be deleted? Selfish in the extreme IMO.
Well done; you nailed it. It masquerades as a noble cause that, coincidentally enough, is difficult to oppose just like the "for the children" or "to stop terrorists" excuses. Really it's an incredibly selfish desire to "cleanse" the world of everything the person finds distasteful. With good old ends-justify-the-means consequentialism, this type of selfishness will make people advocate censorship and other cures that are worse than the disease.
It's like that saying: most people have two reasons why they do anything -- a good reason, and the real reason. I call it a corrupting influence because the person is usually not aware that the real reason exists, which makes their agenda little more than software they are mindlessly executing.
Is it just me or is the entire world going into a period of reduced freedom and increased state control? Every developed nation appears to be banning violent games, porn and free speech in general and they're doing it for no logical reasons. Modern Warfare 2 sold 6.4million copies in the first week in the US and UK alone and yet there weren't 6.4million new mass murders on the streets. This is more than sufficient evidence to prove that violent games don't turn people into killers and yet are moronic, moralist rulers still press on with their attacks on our freedom.
I've been wondering for several years now how long this must go on before the average person realizes that it's a concerted effort. Two or three sovereign nations adopting similar restrictions in similar timeframes is a coincidence. Most of the Western world doing so within the same timespan of a few years indicates a common agenda. It has to be at least significant enough to overcome nationalistic pride, "not invented here", and other factors that would tend to make any given nation not want to follow the lead of all the others.
Only the public education system could produce such large numbers of people who fail to realize or fail to appreciate that a frighteningly small number of people strongly influence, control, and own the major governments and multinational corporations of the world. Historically, small aristocratic elites have never cared about what was in the interests of the average person. Why does anyone suppose they would start caring about that now with video games and the freedom to play the ones of your choice?
What has already happened among the various states of the US is now happening with nations. US states once had significant differences in terms of social norms and state laws. If one state's restrictions really bothered you, you could move to another state that had different laws. Now they all have the same drinking age, the same smoking age, similar speed limits, the same list of prohibited substances, etc. The same thing is happening to nations.
The tendency now is to gradually erode the diversity that exists among nations and turn them into uniform carbon copies of each other so you cannot "vote with your feet" for greater freedoms. This is necessary for two reasons. One, a highly visible counterexample might cause people to decide they won't accept arbitrary restrictions ("country X didn't ban Y, and they haven't had problems with it, so why do we ban Y?"). Two, a few nations that remain free countries would have significant economic (and other) advantages when competing with the ones that jump on the state-control bandwagon. This is in fact one reason why the USA became a superpower in the first place.
Both of those points would serve to undermine the notion that central management of daily life is a necessary function of modern states. That's why so many nations are doing this at once. It's quite obvious to me that it's more than coincidence.
Absolutely nothing. That's an integral part of the philosophy behind the design of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. I believe it to be a very sound idea, which is why I use a Unix-like OS. Additionally, I think the KISS principle is especially important in a Web browser, as browsers are one of the main attack vectors for compromised computers.
A lot of "social networking" websites ask for your password to your email so they can import your contacts. If the browser could (semi-)automagically give it that info, you'd close a huge security gap...
I'm assuming you refer to Web-based e-mail services like Gmail. I have no e-mail accounts like this, but I otherwise don't know what you mean. For example, the password to my POP3 e-mail account would not contain any of my contacts. Those are stored in my local e-mail client. I'm not so sure about IMAP, but POP3 remains much more common in either case.
I also don't use any social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace, so I am wondering if it is common for them to function as HTTP-to-SMTP gateways. If that's not commonplace, then what is their legitimate reason for storing your list of contacts? If you use a social networking site and want to readily access the pages of other users on that service, wouldn't standard browser bookmarks be better suited for this task?
As evidenced by Facebook, Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about privacy.
I think that's only because Joe Sixpack has never taken a hard look at datamining techniques, the relative ease with which they can be implemented, and how this information can be misused. "I don't care about privacy at all" is like many other positions; it does not typically fare well among educated users who are equipped to make a factual cost-benefit analysis.
First of all, when I'm filling out a web form I'm *never* putting somebody else's information into it -- it's always my own. Second of all..
gee, when i fill out a web form, it's hardly ever anyone's actual information unless it's a legit site that really needs it (e.g. amazon) and i want them to have it. all those free-registration-required sites should never get your real information, never. virtually all of them do NOT need it
Agreed. Personally, I like to use Mailinator and other free, temporary/disposable e-mail services to deal with those Web sites that want to send a confirmation e-mail before you can gain access. A few of them seem to have gotten wise to this, and will consider e-mail addresses from certain domains invalid information on their forms. Fortunately, there are enough such services that it's really not hard to find one that they don't recognize as such. I think this is the best way to deal with the likelihood that such sites will spam you and generally have not impressed me with their trustworthiness or concern for privacy.
More powerful = lower battery life. Yes, tablets are niche devices, but if you think about it there are a LOT of niches a tablet with some flexibility and a good amount of battery life can fill. Book reader, obviously. Notepad replacement, somewhat. Inventory control, yup. It's all been a matter of expense, durability, communications and operating life.
The problem I see is that, in principle, these devices are produced by marketing processes the way much legislation is produced by our political process. By that I mean, it doesn't come from a genuine need or from overwhelming customer demand. It's a solution in search of a problem. They are producing these devices and then trying to find uses/markets for them instead of finding a use/market and producing a device to fit that need. To me this is backwards. Because this is being done in a backwards fashion, I am not remotely surprised that the technology is not taking off. To me, this is rather predictable and it would be a lot more strange if anything else happened.
The question now is whether Apple's marketing can create a perceived demand and let these devices catch on bandwagon-style. I don't like it one bit, but talented marketing is able to "convince people to buy products for needs they didn't even know they had." It's mindless and it relies on sheep-like behavior that would properly be replaced with intelligent assessment of needs and wants. In that sense, it highlights a difference between the consumer mindset and the customer mindset. But it does sell products and it does create trends. It'll be interesting to see what Apple does with this.
Has anyone contacted the police and get IP records and get this bozo charged with hate crimes? We do live in the 21st century; language, culture and humanity has moved waaaaaaay past this, and there are laws that are being broken here. Although I think this behavior shouldn't have been allowed to happen then and definitely not now.
I am definitely not a lawyer. Having said that, if this individual is in the USA, then no crime has been committed as far as I know. We don't really need to use the police power of government to censor such people anyway. Not only would it be quite difficult to catch many of them, but we simply deal with this differently here. Here, being called "racist" is one of the worst things that could happen to your social life. If you identify yourself as having beliefs like this, it's a tremendous stigma. Thus there is little or no open racism here, at least from white people, and no one has to go to jail to arrange that. If anything, the police would have to protect an open racist from others, and not the other way around. This is quite effective.
I really think that's how you deal with this. The problem with "hate crime" laws is that they are actually thought crimes. For example, if a criminal mugs someone in order to get his money, he receives X punishment. But if that criminal specifically mugged that victim because of race, he might receive X+Y punishment, depending on the state. The difference amounts to what the criminal was thinking. If I get mugged because of what I look like, I'm just as mugged as someone who was targeted randomly. My suffering isn't any more important than theirs; the contents of the attacker's brain does not change this. If muggers are not punished enough, then increase the penalties for all of them. I just don't want the government in the thoughtcrime business, not even when the stated reason is noble. To me that's just as dangerous as all of the "protect the children" and "stop terrorism" reasons that are so often given.
With text posted to a Web site, no one was physically harmed. People are going to say things on the Internet all the time that you and I would find absolutely despicable. Even if we released all the violent criminals and drug offenders today, I doubt there would be enough prison space to hold even a fraction of them. Additionally, you have a choice about whether you react emotionally or not to things you can't control.
When I read the post to which you replied, I just shook my head. I didn't get upset about it, I didn't get offended, and I didn't let it ruin my day.
I already knew there were assholes in the world, so I'm not shocked or surprised by an example of one. With over 6.5 billion people in the world, I can guarantee that someone, somewhere is saying or doing something right now that I really wouldn't like. Should I be miserable 24/7 because of that? Should I be miserable only when I am reminded by an example of this? Should I allow some rather immature people to control my emotional well-being by taking them seriously? Like Richard S. Bach wrote, if your happiness depends on what other people are doing, then yes you do have a problem. This pathological tendency is exactly what trolls are counting on, what they exploit. It's so widespread that it's very rarely recognized as pathological.
I am getting upset that I keep seeing this and have to waste time and points burying it, and have seen people posting that to just "ignore it and it will go away", but it hasn't gone away.
I think they do this just because they want an emotional impact. As I mentioned above, you have 100% control over whether you give them what they want. You're really not ignoring it, and I very rarely see instances of these troll posts that are totally disregarded by everyone (I browse at -1). So I think we have yet to really try that. If that's true, we can't make too many statements about its effectiveness. Meanwh
Just because you run Firefox, you can't relax about malware attacks. Not on Windows anyway. Imagine how quickly an exploit of this type could be integrated into a malware kit, already running on countless compromised sites? No one can relax about buffer/stack smashing, dangling pointers, etc..., until there's a bulletproof safeguard against them built into the OS/processor architecture.
Agreed. Personally I use Gentoo Hardened with PaX and Grsecurity in the kernel plus a hardened toolchain and userspace measures against buffer overflows. That includes things like address randomization, non-executable pages, mprotect() restrictions, etc. Further measures are also available, like capability systems. It's good, though I would not call it "bulletproof", not even if I thought it was.
Really none of this is any substitute for patching known vulnerabilities. What it does provide is a second line of defense against vulnerabilities you don't yet know about or cannot yet patch. Because I am building Firefox (really all my programs) from source with these features enabled, I benefit from some protection against flaws like this.
I think some of these measures are becoming increasingly common on more mainstream Linux distributions. That's a very good thing as well, since I realize that many users don't want to compile source code. For example, one of my friends is set up with OpenSUSE and it has AppArmor and other protections available by default. I can't remember whether they were enabled by default, but it's still a step in the right direction. You can arrange your systems so merely discovering that you run a vulnerable version is not good enough for the attacker. At least with Linux this is readily achievable, though still not commonplace.
I'd be interested in knowing what options are available for similarly hardening Windows. What I'd really like to see is for the average system to become difficult enough to compromise that there is no longer fertile ground for automated attacks and the botnets that follow. I think that's achievable too, if we really wanted to do it.
but it is difficult to believe a corporate legal counsel would post something like that if he could not prove it six ways to Sunday. Indeed, while I am not a lawyer, I would think that Google has grounds to counter sue.
As a PR person I am embarrassed for my profession.
Don't worry. In all likelihood, Viacom's PR staff will find a way to spin this and make them look like the good guys, whether they deserve that image or not, whether extremely one-sided presentation of facts, selective omission of facts, and heavy usage of weasel words is required or not. Then you can once again be proud of your profession.
and you're painfully retarded. seriously, it hurts even to think about how retarded you are.
like, you're making Trig Palin look very, very smart by comparison.
This is the sort of shit that people who read xkcd find amusing.
Eh, there's a difference between reading it and finding it amusing... and feeling a need to bring it up in every possible discussion and work it into every conversation, like some kind of obsession. I think what you're talking about applies to the latter and not the former.
Xkcd is pretty good, and for the most part I can appreciate its humor. However, it's not so good that I want to see it in every single Slashdot story. If anything, that's a great way to make me not want to read it. Turning something into another mindless meme is not a great way to promote it. This thread indicates I'm not the only one who feels that way.
Yeah, because an airplane in a few miles with only thermal vision on has the same accuracy than when a sniper is stalking and on a good opportunity targeting and shooting a target.
That's... strange. I remember during our first invasion of Iraq in the 1980s there was a then-famous video demonstrating the use of "smart bombs". The video showed an airplane at a high altitude dropping a bomb that went with pinpoint accuracy down the chimney of a large building, blowing it up from the inside. That was about 20 years ago. There have been no improvements in aerial accuracy since then?
However, the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights.
Would someone please mod this "+1...World's Dumbest Criminal's Apologist"
Heh, betterunixthanunix, did you know that if you buy a car with $20K in small, unmarked bills, the police will consider you a person of interest and start an investigation on you?
Did you know that if you are in a gang, there might be policeman around you that look like normal people? They call themselves "undercover agents".
Did you know that the "young lady" that is asking you if you "want to party" could actually be an undercover policeman? Yeah, he could actually be in drag, but it might also be a policewoman.
The things that you do in public are not private. You have no right to privacy in public places. If you don't want to tell people that you're dealing drugs at the Grateful Dead Look-a-like concert, don't publicize on FACEBOOK that you're dealing drugs at the Grateful Dead Look-a-like concert.
Had the GP said "the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to catch criminals" your comment would make some sense. Since he did not say that, I must regard your comment as a knee-jerk emotional reaction. I saw nothing which indicated that the GP was an apologist for criminals.
In other words, it is possible to catch criminals without undermining civil rights. It is also possible to undermine civil rights without catching criminals. The desire that the police not violate or undermine civil rights is not nearly the same thing as the desire that the police stop trying to catch criminals. Your exasperated statements of the obvious won't change this. In fact, when you feel upset and along with that you feel a need to state the obvious in a debasing tone, that's a good time to stop and see if you might have misinterpreted something.
Slashdot Mirror
That's how I feel about practically every pop-culture reference that is ever posted to Slashdot. The less relevant to the discussion the reference is, the more this is so.
Smart enough? Possibly, but remember that this guy went to both Yale (BA) and Harvard (MBA). Don't know about his GPA or SAT scores though... or whether that says more/less about him or the schools.
It takes some brains to convince everyone that you're stupid, to make them underestimate you, so that behind the scenes you can do whatever you like with little or no scrutiny. It takes brains and a ruthless determination to get your way no matter what it takes, even at the expense of widespread ridicule. It also takes some brains to exploit a climate of fear and use time-tested tactics (such as calling your opponents "unpatriotic") to virtually guarantee that the Congress will pass whatever legistlation you recommend with little or no concern for the Constitution.
It takes brains to do all of this. It also takes a profound lack of wisdom to have the desire to do this. An amount of inhumanity helps, too, for disregarding all the damage (sorry, "collateral damage") such policies have caused. No, G.W. Bush was not stupid, in the same way that serial killers are not stupid. Pathological, lustful for power, indifferent to suffering, and indifferent to our nation's traditions, sure, but not stupid.
Maybe they can work with Wikipedia, by asking for a list of article stubs or proposed articles Wiki would like to see researched and written. It could be something that benefits both parties.
Excellent. Then the students will know what to write, and the Wikipedia admins will know what to expect so they can delete it. Everyone wins!
(Normal shaking, like from typing, is more important.)
Just wait until someone releases a paper on how to detect exactly what someone is typing by examining the accelerometer. That would be a very interesting research project and have possible consequences for anyone just randomly giving out data like this (not that I have anything against this project, I would use it on my play laptops but not my work laptops).
Is not the accelerometer a component of the laptop? In that case, if an adversary can obtain the readings from the accelerometer, they should have enough access to the machine to just install a keylogger. Therefore this technique, while technically interesting, seems rather pointless as a realistic attack vector.
But Windows isn't a "good deal"; it's actually quite expensive and overpriced, given that the same functionality is available even in free operating systems.
How do I get a free OS to run DirectX-apps?
I currently use WINE to play Fallout 3 and Mass Effect 2 (which was released recently on Jan. 26, 2010) and have played several other games successfully. For ME2, I had to patch WINE to fix a stability issue and a mouse issue, but this was no big deal and is unusual; most games WINE can run don't require this. The "Winetricks" script makes it very easy to download (from Microsoft.com) and install the DirectX runtimes with a single command, facilitating the process.
It's quite rare that I encounter a game that simply will not work with WINE, though for some games I have had to take steps that would quickly frustrate someone who is not technically inclined and therefore not interested in how it works. For folks who don't want to deal with the effort, there are commercial versions of WINE that play more games out-of-the-box. Considering its complexity and the magnitude of the project, I am most impressed with what WINE can do.
Many of us believe that a Linux distribution with a decent default configuration is inherently more secure and less exploitable than the average Windows system that ships with new PCs.
That's where "many of you" have a serious misunderstanding of what security is.
"Security" is not a simple grayscale. Things aren't "more" or "less" secure. Security is a very complex concept that is based largely upon the skill and knowledge of the attackers.
A simple cardboard box is "secure" against a great many threats, such as mosquitos. But not secure against others, such as a human attacker. Despite this lack of security, we deem simple cardboard boxes "good enough" to secure billions of packages every year as thy move through various mail systems.
Many kinds of attacks that are common today, were thought to be "theoretical" and "impossible" 10 years ago. Systems that are vulnerable today, would not have been vulnerable 10 years ago. Conversely, that means systems that are "secure" today may well be insecure tomorrow, with nothing more than a bit of knowledge changing that status.
The point is, all it takes is knowledge to defeat security. If that's the case, was it ever really secure to begin with?
I have a different take on this than you. I absolutely agree that there is no such thing as absolute security. But it's for precisely that reason that I use relative terms like "more secure" or "less secure". For your point about cardboard boxes and their ability to protect against mosquitoes but not humans, I view that as a need to define your threat model.
Perhaps I should have spelled it out, but the threat model I intended to imply involved insecure system system services, browser exploits, and e-mail client exploits. Currently, these are your standard "remotely exploitable vulnerabilities". These have facilitated botnets, and with those come spam, phishing, and all sorts of other forms of fraud. This class of vulnerabilities is currently causing the real problems. Therefore, I'm not advocating extreme security against a highly determined and highly skilled attacker who is targeting something personally, though that'd be nice. Instead, I'm advocating a basic level of security that is achievable and would remove much of the low-hanging fruit that currently makes large botnets possible.
I believe that can be done with both Linux and Windows, but is easier to accomplish on Linux. Further, the inherent diversity among various Linux systems mean that a single exploit is unlikely to work on all or even most of them, which further raises the effort it would take to build a botnet. It would be a welcome change from the situation now, where a single vulnerability in Windows and/or IE instantly means that millions of machines are exploitable.
Do you expect the average person to know that Europe mandated the ballot? If they blame anyone, I'd expect Windows to get the most heat for it (mistakenly, but still). It does say "Windows Internet Explorer" in the titlebar...
A big part of Microsoft's marketshare is not due to customers who evaluate all possible options and consciously choose Windows. It's from people who have Windows because "that's what it came with." So Microsoft has no qualms about benefitting from passive ignorance. Now when people who could use Google to inform themselves instead assume that Windows is to be "blamed"* for the ballot, Microsoft will potentially experience a little of the disadvantages of passive ignorance. I don't see anything wrong with this.
* Usually "blamed" means something wrong has happened. I don't personally view a browser ballot as morally wrong or otherwise worth getting excited over. To each their own.
Many of us believe that a Linux distribution with a decent default configuration is inherently more secure and less exploitable than the average Windows system that ships with new PCs. There are several reasons for this. Access to source makes it easier to build binaries with protections against buffer overflows and other exploits. The wide variety of distributions combined with the extreme configurability of each, down to the ability to replace most core system components with alternative implementations, means that Linux tends to avoid the problems that come with a monoculture.
Centralized package managers make it much easier to keep all of your software up-to-date. Compare that to Windows where Windows Update can only service Microsoft software and all of your other programs are on their own. Also, Linux distributions are not known for abusing their update mechanisms by pushing WGA and other non-customer-friendly components. They have no "piracy" fears that would tempt them to do so.
I used to look at widespread Windows worms and wonder at the fact that so many of them exploit already-patched vulnerabilities. It amazed me that people weren't updating, and I think the lack of trust towards Microsoft has much to do with that. If those people did trust Microsoft to provide updates that are high-quality and only in the customers' interests, then there'd be no reason not to allow automatic Windows Updates. For these reasons, it's both easier to keep all software updated in Linux and more likely that users will do so.
It'd be nice if no single OS had an overwhelming majority of marketshare. I don't think there'd be compatibility issues. Bear in mind that you're posting to a Web site using ASCII and HTML and JavaScript, all of which are open standards usable on Windows, Macs, and *nix. Incompatibility is really just a synonym for "vendor lock-in". Right now, vendors like Microsoft can get away with that if they have enough marketshare. More diversity in OSs would just compel them to use open standards, otherwise their customers would find themselves on a network where everyone else can communicate and they cannot.
What you describe there is robbery, where violence or the threat of violence is used to take someone's possessions. That's considered a violent crime, even if the mugger does not actually injure anyone. If the police are not already interested in this, they need to be fired and replaced by police who are. Further, let's say that a mugger uses a knife instead of a gun. Both are deadly weapons. A person killed by a knife is just as dead as a person killed by a gun. The crime is the same either way: the criminal threatened someone with a deadly weapon in order to take their property by force.
I doubt that the unauthorized possession (with no distribution) of a type of contraband carries a more severe penalty than a violent crime, but if true, that is not how it should be, but then I digress. If the gun-control advocated are correct, then those places where firearms are completely forbidden (like Washington D.C.) should have rates of muggings and other violent crimes lower than the rest of the nation, but they don't, so clearly their theories do not describe the real world.
Speaking of muggers, one reason conceal-carry permits lower violent crime is that the predatory criminals cannot distinguish between helpless victims and those who are ready to fight back. With a gun anyone, no matter what their physical condition, can quickly and reliably present deadly force. Criminals who prey on others want helpless victims; they don't want to risk their lives in a shootout.
I see what you are trying to do there, and I wonder if you also see what you're trying to do. I made two distinct points. One point was about universal gun ownership. The other point was about US states where plenty of people choose not to own firearms, but those who do are able to obtain conceal-carry permits. Those two points were listed in the same post, but are otherwise independent. You are conflating the two points. The inability to conceal a large battle rifle has absolutely nothing to do with whether conceal-carry permits lower violent crime rates. Sorry but when people try to confuse issues like this, either accidentally or deliberately, it's a sign that they have a weak argument.
Lest there be further needless confusion, I'll explain a bit more. The position of gun-control advocates is that fewer firearms means there will be less violent crime. This is why they urge the government to restrict and/or forbid the private ownership of firearms. When you have a militia that requires every able-bodied male in every household to own a battle rifle, every household has access to firearms. When you have states that allow gun ownership and conceal-carry permits, every household that wants guns can obtain and carry them. Both situations involve more guns and more people owning guns than anything the gun-control advocates would want. Yet both situations realize the gun-control advocates' stated goal of reducing violent crime.
Upon honest appraisal, the dispassionate, intellectually honest inquirer would be forced to conclude that gun-control is a religious position that has little or no connection with reality. That movement neither addresses the evidence against it, nor feels a need to address said evidence. Its followers do not see this as a problem, as a reason to rethink their position. It's purely emotional and it's purely based on blaming human problems on inanimate objects. It's amazing to me that anyone grants it equal footing with positions based on evidence and experience.
I just described the people who support this political position, t
There's a difference between paranoia and preparedness. I think the long prevailing position of the Swiss is that they don't especially care for violence, but simultaneously, they know it has its place.
(Paraphrased) "If you want peace, prepare for war." - Flavius Vegetius Renatus
Because it's comparing apples (people who wanted a gun and so bought one) vs oranges (people who may or may not have wanted one but are legally required to have one anyway).
You haven't explained the significance of that difference. To listen to gun-control advocates, more guns equals more crime. That's why they think they will reduce violent crime by disarming people who obey weapons regulations (that is, law-abiding citizens). I suppose some of them might seriously believe that a criminal willing to commit murder is worried about getting caught with an illegal weapons possession charge, but that's absurd. So when we talk of people who can realistically be disarmed, we are talking about law-abiding citizens.
In other countries, the only people who have guns are the ones who wanted them and bought them (let's call them Group A). In Switzerland, those people have guns and everyone else does, too (let's call those Group B). If the case for gun-control reducing crime were correct, Switzerland should have crime from Group A and crime from Group B. If they have less gun crime per capita than other industrialized nations, it seriously discredits the justifications given by gun-control advocates. And the use of the police power of government to remove a freedom like gun ownership does need justification.
So if anything, the relatively unique situation in Switzerland (a militia) strengthens the comparison, because anyone in Switzerland who wanted to shoot someone has ready access to firearms. In a way, this is like the reduction in violent crime that has been enjoyed by every US state which has enabled conceal-carry permits for firearms. Both situations incline me to believe that gun-control is a religious issue, because those who advocate it never seem to think very hard about the evidence against them. It does not surprise me that the desire to blame society's problems on inanimate objects would be based on rhetoric, emotional appeals, and religious fervor, and not on actual evidence.
That would be a niggardly response, don't you think? Why should posts that offend some be deleted? Selfish in the extreme IMO.
Well done; you nailed it. It masquerades as a noble cause that, coincidentally enough, is difficult to oppose just like the "for the children" or "to stop terrorists" excuses. Really it's an incredibly selfish desire to "cleanse" the world of everything the person finds distasteful. With good old ends-justify-the-means consequentialism, this type of selfishness will make people advocate censorship and other cures that are worse than the disease.
It's like that saying: most people have two reasons why they do anything -- a good reason, and the real reason. I call it a corrupting influence because the person is usually not aware that the real reason exists, which makes their agenda little more than software they are mindlessly executing.
I've been wondering for several years now how long this must go on before the average person realizes that it's a concerted effort. Two or three sovereign nations adopting similar restrictions in similar timeframes is a coincidence. Most of the Western world doing so within the same timespan of a few years indicates a common agenda. It has to be at least significant enough to overcome nationalistic pride, "not invented here", and other factors that would tend to make any given nation not want to follow the lead of all the others.
Only the public education system could produce such large numbers of people who fail to realize or fail to appreciate that a frighteningly small number of people strongly influence, control, and own the major governments and multinational corporations of the world. Historically, small aristocratic elites have never cared about what was in the interests of the average person. Why does anyone suppose they would start caring about that now with video games and the freedom to play the ones of your choice?
What has already happened among the various states of the US is now happening with nations. US states once had significant differences in terms of social norms and state laws. If one state's restrictions really bothered you, you could move to another state that had different laws. Now they all have the same drinking age, the same smoking age, similar speed limits, the same list of prohibited substances, etc. The same thing is happening to nations.
The tendency now is to gradually erode the diversity that exists among nations and turn them into uniform carbon copies of each other so you cannot "vote with your feet" for greater freedoms. This is necessary for two reasons. One, a highly visible counterexample might cause people to decide they won't accept arbitrary restrictions ("country X didn't ban Y, and they haven't had problems with it, so why do we ban Y?"). Two, a few nations that remain free countries would have significant economic (and other) advantages when competing with the ones that jump on the state-control bandwagon. This is in fact one reason why the USA became a superpower in the first place.
Both of those points would serve to undermine the notion that central management of daily life is a necessary function of modern states. That's why so many nations are doing this at once. It's quite obvious to me that it's more than coincidence.
Absolutely nothing. That's an integral part of the philosophy behind the design of Unix and Unix-like operating systems. I believe it to be a very sound idea, which is why I use a Unix-like OS. Additionally, I think the KISS principle is especially important in a Web browser, as browsers are one of the main attack vectors for compromised computers.
A lot of "social networking" websites ask for your password to your email so they can import your contacts. If the browser could (semi-)automagically give it that info, you'd close a huge security gap...
I'm assuming you refer to Web-based e-mail services like Gmail. I have no e-mail accounts like this, but I otherwise don't know what you mean. For example, the password to my POP3 e-mail account would not contain any of my contacts. Those are stored in my local e-mail client. I'm not so sure about IMAP, but POP3 remains much more common in either case.
I also don't use any social networking sites like Facebook or Myspace, so I am wondering if it is common for them to function as HTTP-to-SMTP gateways. If that's not commonplace, then what is their legitimate reason for storing your list of contacts? If you use a social networking site and want to readily access the pages of other users on that service, wouldn't standard browser bookmarks be better suited for this task?
I take it you are not a government employee.
As evidenced by Facebook, Joe Sixpack doesn't give a damn about privacy.
I think that's only because Joe Sixpack has never taken a hard look at datamining techniques, the relative ease with which they can be implemented, and how this information can be misused. "I don't care about privacy at all" is like many other positions; it does not typically fare well among educated users who are equipped to make a factual cost-benefit analysis.
gee, when i fill out a web form, it's hardly ever anyone's actual information unless it's a legit site that really needs it (e.g. amazon) and i want them to have it. all those free-registration-required sites should never get your real information, never. virtually all of them do NOT need it
Agreed. Personally, I like to use Mailinator and other free, temporary/disposable e-mail services to deal with those Web sites that want to send a confirmation e-mail before you can gain access. A few of them seem to have gotten wise to this, and will consider e-mail addresses from certain domains invalid information on their forms. Fortunately, there are enough such services that it's really not hard to find one that they don't recognize as such. I think this is the best way to deal with the likelihood that such sites will spam you and generally have not impressed me with their trustworthiness or concern for privacy.
More powerful = lower battery life. Yes, tablets are niche devices, but if you think about it there are a LOT of niches a tablet with some flexibility and a good amount of battery life can fill. Book reader, obviously. Notepad replacement, somewhat. Inventory control, yup. It's all been a matter of expense, durability, communications and operating life.
The problem I see is that, in principle, these devices are produced by marketing processes the way much legislation is produced by our political process. By that I mean, it doesn't come from a genuine need or from overwhelming customer demand. It's a solution in search of a problem. They are producing these devices and then trying to find uses/markets for them instead of finding a use/market and producing a device to fit that need. To me this is backwards. Because this is being done in a backwards fashion, I am not remotely surprised that the technology is not taking off. To me, this is rather predictable and it would be a lot more strange if anything else happened.
The question now is whether Apple's marketing can create a perceived demand and let these devices catch on bandwagon-style. I don't like it one bit, but talented marketing is able to "convince people to buy products for needs they didn't even know they had." It's mindless and it relies on sheep-like behavior that would properly be replaced with intelligent assessment of needs and wants. In that sense, it highlights a difference between the consumer mindset and the customer mindset. But it does sell products and it does create trends. It'll be interesting to see what Apple does with this.
I am definitely not a lawyer. Having said that, if this individual is in the USA, then no crime has been committed as far as I know. We don't really need to use the police power of government to censor such people anyway. Not only would it be quite difficult to catch many of them, but we simply deal with this differently here. Here, being called "racist" is one of the worst things that could happen to your social life. If you identify yourself as having beliefs like this, it's a tremendous stigma. Thus there is little or no open racism here, at least from white people, and no one has to go to jail to arrange that. If anything, the police would have to protect an open racist from others, and not the other way around. This is quite effective.
I really think that's how you deal with this. The problem with "hate crime" laws is that they are actually thought crimes. For example, if a criminal mugs someone in order to get his money, he receives X punishment. But if that criminal specifically mugged that victim because of race, he might receive X+Y punishment, depending on the state. The difference amounts to what the criminal was thinking. If I get mugged because of what I look like, I'm just as mugged as someone who was targeted randomly. My suffering isn't any more important than theirs; the contents of the attacker's brain does not change this. If muggers are not punished enough, then increase the penalties for all of them. I just don't want the government in the thoughtcrime business, not even when the stated reason is noble. To me that's just as dangerous as all of the "protect the children" and "stop terrorism" reasons that are so often given.
With text posted to a Web site, no one was physically harmed. People are going to say things on the Internet all the time that you and I would find absolutely despicable. Even if we released all the violent criminals and drug offenders today, I doubt there would be enough prison space to hold even a fraction of them. Additionally, you have a choice about whether you react emotionally or not to things you can't control.
When I read the post to which you replied, I just shook my head. I didn't get upset about it, I didn't get offended, and I didn't let it ruin my day. I already knew there were assholes in the world, so I'm not shocked or surprised by an example of one. With over 6.5 billion people in the world, I can guarantee that someone, somewhere is saying or doing something right now that I really wouldn't like. Should I be miserable 24/7 because of that? Should I be miserable only when I am reminded by an example of this? Should I allow some rather immature people to control my emotional well-being by taking them seriously? Like Richard S. Bach wrote, if your happiness depends on what other people are doing, then yes you do have a problem. This pathological tendency is exactly what trolls are counting on, what they exploit. It's so widespread that it's very rarely recognized as pathological.
I think they do this just because they want an emotional impact. As I mentioned above, you have 100% control over whether you give them what they want. You're really not ignoring it, and I very rarely see instances of these troll posts that are totally disregarded by everyone (I browse at -1). So I think we have yet to really try that. If that's true, we can't make too many statements about its effectiveness. Meanwh
Just because you run Firefox, you can't relax about malware attacks. Not on Windows anyway. Imagine how quickly an exploit of this type could be integrated into a malware kit, already running on countless compromised sites? No one can relax about buffer/stack smashing, dangling pointers, etc..., until there's a bulletproof safeguard against them built into the OS/processor architecture.
Agreed. Personally I use Gentoo Hardened with PaX and Grsecurity in the kernel plus a hardened toolchain and userspace measures against buffer overflows. That includes things like address randomization, non-executable pages, mprotect() restrictions, etc. Further measures are also available, like capability systems. It's good, though I would not call it "bulletproof", not even if I thought it was.
Really none of this is any substitute for patching known vulnerabilities. What it does provide is a second line of defense against vulnerabilities you don't yet know about or cannot yet patch. Because I am building Firefox (really all my programs) from source with these features enabled, I benefit from some protection against flaws like this.
I think some of these measures are becoming increasingly common on more mainstream Linux distributions. That's a very good thing as well, since I realize that many users don't want to compile source code. For example, one of my friends is set up with OpenSUSE and it has AppArmor and other protections available by default. I can't remember whether they were enabled by default, but it's still a step in the right direction. You can arrange your systems so merely discovering that you run a vulnerable version is not good enough for the attacker. At least with Linux this is readily achievable, though still not commonplace.
I'd be interested in knowing what options are available for similarly hardening Windows. What I'd really like to see is for the average system to become difficult enough to compromise that there is no longer fertile ground for automated attacks and the botnets that follow. I think that's achievable too, if we really wanted to do it.
but it is difficult to believe a corporate legal counsel would post something like that if he could not prove it six ways to Sunday. Indeed, while I am not a lawyer, I would think that Google has grounds to counter sue. As a PR person I am embarrassed for my profession.
Don't worry. In all likelihood, Viacom's PR staff will find a way to spin this and make them look like the good guys, whether they deserve that image or not, whether extremely one-sided presentation of facts, selective omission of facts, and heavy usage of weasel words is required or not. Then you can once again be proud of your profession.
xkcd is painfully unfunny.
and you're painfully retarded. seriously, it hurts even to think about how retarded you are.
like, you're making Trig Palin look very, very smart by comparison.
This is the sort of shit that people who read xkcd find amusing.
Eh, there's a difference between reading it and finding it amusing ... and feeling a need to bring it up in every possible discussion and work it into every conversation, like some kind of obsession. I think what you're talking about applies to the latter and not the former.
Xkcd is pretty good, and for the most part I can appreciate its humor. However, it's not so good that I want to see it in every single Slashdot story. If anything, that's a great way to make me not want to read it. Turning something into another mindless meme is not a great way to promote it. This thread indicates I'm not the only one who feels that way.
Yeah, because an airplane in a few miles with only thermal vision on has the same accuracy than when a sniper is stalking and on a good opportunity targeting and shooting a target.
That's ... strange. I remember during our first invasion of Iraq in the 1980s there was a then-famous video demonstrating the use of "smart bombs". The video showed an airplane at a high altitude dropping a bomb that went with pinpoint accuracy down the chimney of a large building, blowing it up from the inside. That was about 20 years ago. There have been no improvements in aerial accuracy since then?
However, the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to undermine our rights.
Would someone please mod this "+1...World's Dumbest Criminal's Apologist"
Heh, betterunixthanunix, did you know that if you buy a car with $20K in small, unmarked bills, the police will consider you a person of interest and start an investigation on you?
Did you know that if you are in a gang, there might be policeman around you that look like normal people? They call themselves "undercover agents".
Did you know that the "young lady" that is asking you if you "want to party" could actually be an undercover policeman? Yeah, he could actually be in drag, but it might also be a policewoman.
The things that you do in public are not private. You have no right to privacy in public places. If you don't want to tell people that you're dealing drugs at the Grateful Dead Look-a-like concert, don't publicize on FACEBOOK that you're dealing drugs at the Grateful Dead Look-a-like concert.
Had the GP said "the government should not be taking advantage of stupidity to catch criminals" your comment would make some sense. Since he did not say that, I must regard your comment as a knee-jerk emotional reaction. I saw nothing which indicated that the GP was an apologist for criminals.
In other words, it is possible to catch criminals without undermining civil rights. It is also possible to undermine civil rights without catching criminals. The desire that the police not violate or undermine civil rights is not nearly the same thing as the desire that the police stop trying to catch criminals. Your exasperated statements of the obvious won't change this. In fact, when you feel upset and along with that you feel a need to state the obvious in a debasing tone, that's a good time to stop and see if you might have misinterpreted something.