Webmin will load all the right packages and set up Apache, mail, DNS etc. for you on a variety of Linux distributions.You can use it like a control panel afterwards or just ignore it and use the usual text config files and the command line from then on if you want. It's free and quick to run. I find it saves a lot of time (and mistakes). I made a tutorial if that's any use.
A password is only safe for about 8 seconds (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4423733.stm). A responsible company really should be asking you to change passwords more often than that. Forcing you, really.
Archiving old media is a time-consuming process, unfortunately. How many is "several" in your case? If it's more than a dozen or so you will probably run out of time and patience and will want to consider only doing the most precious ones or else paying someone else to do it. Also it may take a bit of experimentation to get the quality right. I asked around my friends and this is a common experience - so much so that I was considering making a business out of it.
If you're considering outsourcing, there are quite a few companies that will do this for you for around $10 per tape. Obviously this can get expensive if you have hundreds of tapes - it's up to you to decide how much your time and the tapes are worth to you. Unless you're willing to trust the post (or a courier) with your tapes, you'll need to find a local company.
A reputable commercial company is likely to get a better result than you would yourself, unless you're the obsessive compulsive type (not unlikely on Slashdot, I guess.)
No-one seems to have mentioned what seems to me an obvious solution: Make it very clear that communication with anyone else during an exam will result in disqualification, then verify this often enough that the risk of discovery is real, for example using RF sniffers or cameras. Specifically prohibiting certain devices seems to be missing the point.
I'm not a teacher, so I guess this "obvious" solution must have been found impractical for some reason - privacy concerns or too much manpower required?
I currently use two IP4 static addresses - one at the webhosting company I use in the US, essential for the SSL certificate (shared between several domains, yech!) and one at my home address in the UK, not essential but losing it and using dyndns wouldn't really free up another address. Last year I asked both suppliers what plans they had for IPv6 adoption, and both replied "none". It seems to me they're leaving it a bit late, especially at the hosting end. If I think of all the places where I currently have an opportunity to input an IPv4 port number (even though it's usually just left at the default) it comes to quite a large number.
I've got a Curta calculator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta) that's about the same vintage (1964, but earlier models date from 1948) that still works. Does that count?
Life's about deciding what's important (to you), and doing it. If what you want to do is also important to mankind, then you should want to persuade lots of other people to go in the same direction. It seems to me that Megacorp is offering you a great way to do that. They might also help you avoid the common mistakes in the process.
You should check the small print carefully, though. If their direction turns out to be different to yours, you need some way to escape.
Don't worry too much about losing your freedom - if you want lots of people to help you, you inevitably have to put some time and effort into convincing them. You will still achieve much more than by working in isolation. And you can delegate the boring bits if you have money.
If it's all available anyway...
on
Linked In Or Out?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Basic information such as name, address, phone number, spouse's name, employer and so on are (usually) publicly available and trivial to find, e.g. from the electoral roll. I can't see any point in hiding them and personally I make no attempt - they're right there on my web page.
Having used online employment agencies, my CV is also pretty much public information and I have put that on my web page as well. I've found at least one permanent job and a contract as a result.
It may still be prudent not to broadcast your birthdate and mother's maiden name because they're unfortunately sometimes used as security questions, but it's barely worth it because they're pretty easy to discover as well. Maybe it just gives a false sense of security, in fact.
It's possibly still worth making some effort to conceal email addresses from spambots, but that battle is pretty much lost as well.
Bank account details are on every cheque you write (and every electronic payment) so any security based on criminals not knowing them is shaky at best. They're not really secret. Credit card numbers (and even the CVV) are pretty easily read by any waiter or shopkeeper.
My point is, a lot of personal information people think is private or obscure isn't really hard to find at all. It's safest to assume it's all known and concentrate on other security measures (encryption, effective passwords...) for the important stuff.
...but how long will any mobile phone technology last? Will you find yourself having to re-do it all every 5 years as phone/carrier makers obsolete what you developed for?
Symbian for one has a compatibility promise that explicitly addresses that problem. The introduction of Platform Security in version 9.0 caused such an (unavoidable) compatibility break that they effectively had to say "never again". As long as you follow the rules (use only the published APIs and rely only on documented behaviour) you should be OK. [Disclaimer: I work for Symbian]
I've read the FA (briefly) and I'm not impressed. The graphs of the difference in size distribution show little difference. The Cornaglia Iveco tests apparently showed an improvement of "5.5%...with an error bar of 2%" which is far less than the 20% they claim and likely to be experimental error. The Mercedes-Benz test "was repeated for 3 h and had an error within 5%...power output increased to 0.443 hp" which has too many digits, indicating a lack of awareness of accuracy. (Also, why imperial units, and did they mean "continued" rather than "repeated"?). The "continuous road tests" show no data or controls and are worthless, as others have pointed out. The very fact that they are mentioned is suspicious. In the discussion they talk about "our technology, developed on the new physics principle" without explaining what new physics is involved (and it's incorrect grammar). If this was peer reviewed, I would say they did a pretty sloppy job. If it's not peer-reviewed, it's worthless.
<quote>ISDN access will become a common standard for small office and home office access, allowing lots of new applications from conferencing to software distribution...</quote>
I like it because ISDN development paid my salary for a few years! <URL:http://mckerracher.net/highway> But it never really took off except in Germany, and BT are now withdrawing <URL:http://tinyurl.com/y6ml9p> Home Highway here in the UK, so basic rate ISDN for SoHo use is essentially dead here. RIP [snif!]<br/><br/>
It would have been more accurate to say that <em>DSL</em> access will become a common standard, since ADSL is now common and ISDN was essentially the first DSL technology. How long will digital subscriber loops last though, I wonder?
There's a "better CAPTCHA" mod for phpBB that solved the problem 100% for me(http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3828 90&highlight=captcha). It's beta but I've found no bugs.
I experimented with "oddball" questions myself (also hidden fields etc), but found that I had to change them all periodically, otherwise spam eventually reappeared a few weeks later. This is interesting in itself, because it implies that a human spammer has looked to see why the submissions have started failing and devised an (automated) workaround.
This was for questions that required no brainpower, though. ("Leave this blank" or "copy this word".) More complicated questions, even trivial ones (1+1=?) reduced the spam to zero - but also reduced legitimate responses to zero. People just can't be bothered, it seems.
By the way, SpamAssassin (even using the Bayesian sa-learn feature) was no help for filtering email generated from my other web forms, presumably because the spam originated from the same server that SpamAssassin was running on and so bypassed the spam check. A CAPTCHA (from www.neoprogrammers.com) solved this as well, although I think even that reduced my legitimate response rate.
The problem is visually impaired users may not be able to use them. I don't have a good solution for that.
"not all censorship or eavesdropping is inherently bad..."
Granted, and of course fomenting dissent that might bring down a government and destabilise a country may not be a good thing, even if the government is evil.
However, Amnesty are quite specifically targetting censorship that almost everyone except the perpetrators would agree is 'bad' - censorship that protects a few powerful individuals against the interests of the majority. You have to start somewhere. I think this could be an effective way of raising awareness and I've added the box to my own homepage.
Agreed, there are some things that need to be kept secret despite being perfectly legal and moral, a fact that governments seem incapable of realising. But you shouldn't be leaving sensitive stuff unprotected on a personal computer either - the chances of someone breaking into your house and taking your PC are probably comparable to the chances of a "serious" data centre being hacked.
I'm amazed people don't use GnuPG and other encryption technologies more - they would never dream of sending the sensitive information they do electronically, in the physical world (no envelopes for anything??). I guess if it's made easy enough (like Skype) they will.
Personally I get enough strife from "stable" apps and despite being an "early adopter" I don't really have time to debug other people's stuff for them. But, hey, someone's got to do it and I'm very grateful for their efforts.
I don't think connection speed and patch size are really the issue. Even if Microsoft snail-mailed an automatic patch CD to every user on the planet (and they all had CD drives) I'm guessing most would not install it. They would be afraid of it breaking something (who can blame them?!) and they wouldn't know what to do if it did.
Most people simply use things until they break, then they ask "someone technical" to fix it and if that fails they give up in disgust or buy a later model. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - people genuinely have better things to do with their time. We software developers are sometimes slow to realise this.
Slashdot Mirror
My Galaxy S4 says it was last updated in November 2016. Must be pretty vulnerable by now :-(
Webmin will load all the right packages and set up Apache, mail, DNS etc. for you on a variety of Linux distributions.You can use it like a control panel afterwards or just ignore it and use the usual text config files and the command line from then on if you want. It's free and quick to run. I find it saves a lot of time (and mistakes). I made a tutorial if that's any use.
A password is only safe for about 8 seconds (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/4423733.stm). A responsible company really should be asking you to change passwords more often than that. Forcing you, really.
Archiving old media is a time-consuming process, unfortunately. How many is "several" in your case? If it's more than a dozen or so you will probably run out of time and patience and will want to consider only doing the most precious ones or else paying someone else to do it. Also it may take a bit of experimentation to get the quality right. I asked around my friends and this is a common experience - so much so that I was considering making a business out of it.
If you're considering outsourcing, there are quite a few companies that will do this for you for around $10 per tape. Obviously this can get expensive if you have hundreds of tapes - it's up to you to decide how much your time and the tapes are worth to you. Unless you're willing to trust the post (or a courier) with your tapes, you'll need to find a local company.
A reputable commercial company is likely to get a better result than you would yourself, unless you're the obsessive compulsive type (not unlikely on Slashdot, I guess.)
There's an interesting blog post from Tomi Ahonen about this - he agrees it probably won't happen. http://communities-dominate.bl...
No-one seems to have mentioned what seems to me an obvious solution: Make it very clear that communication with anyone else during an exam will result in disqualification, then verify this often enough that the risk of discovery is real, for example using RF sniffers or cameras. Specifically prohibiting certain devices seems to be missing the point.
I'm not a teacher, so I guess this "obvious" solution must have been found impractical for some reason - privacy concerns or too much manpower required?
I currently use two IP4 static addresses - one at the webhosting company I use in the US, essential for the SSL certificate (shared between several domains, yech!) and one at my home address in the UK, not essential but losing it and using dyndns wouldn't really free up another address. Last year I asked both suppliers what plans they had for IPv6 adoption, and both replied "none". It seems to me they're leaving it a bit late, especially at the hosting end. If I think of all the places where I currently have an opportunity to input an IPv4 port number (even though it's usually just left at the default) it comes to quite a large number.
I too was with them in the beginning but they lost the plot (the founder even got a suspended jail sentence).
Agreed about the other ISPs as well - I've found bethere to be pretty good though.
I've got a Curta calculator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta) that's about the same vintage (1964, but earlier models date from 1948) that still works. Does that count?
Life's about deciding what's important (to you), and doing it. If what you want to do is also important to mankind, then you should want to persuade lots of other people to go in the same direction. It seems to me that Megacorp is offering you a great way to do that. They might also help you avoid the common mistakes in the process.
You should check the small print carefully, though. If their direction turns out to be different to yours, you need some way to escape.
Don't worry too much about losing your freedom - if you want lots of people to help you, you inevitably have to put some time and effort into convincing them. You will still achieve much more than by working in isolation. And you can delegate the boring bits if you have money.
Basic information such as name, address, phone number, spouse's name, employer and so on are (usually) publicly available and trivial to find, e.g. from the electoral roll. I can't see any point in hiding them and personally I make no attempt - they're right there on my web page.
Having used online employment agencies, my CV is also pretty much public information and I have put that on my web page as well. I've found at least one permanent job and a contract as a result.
It may still be prudent not to broadcast your birthdate and mother's maiden name because they're unfortunately sometimes used as security questions, but it's barely worth it because they're pretty easy to discover as well. Maybe it just gives a false sense of security, in fact.
It's possibly still worth making some effort to conceal email addresses from spambots, but that battle is pretty much lost as well.
Bank account details are on every cheque you write (and every electronic payment) so any security based on criminals not knowing them is shaky at best. They're not really secret. Credit card numbers (and even the CVV) are pretty easily read by any waiter or shopkeeper.
My point is, a lot of personal information people think is private or obscure isn't really hard to find at all. It's safest to assume it's all known and concentrate on other security measures (encryption, effective passwords...) for the important stuff.
...but how long will any mobile phone technology last? Will you find yourself having to re-do it all every 5 years as phone/carrier makers obsolete what you developed for?
Symbian for one has a compatibility promise that explicitly addresses that problem. The introduction of Platform Security in version 9.0 caused such an (unavoidable) compatibility break that they effectively had to say "never again". As long as you follow the rules (use only the published APIs and rely only on documented behaviour) you should be OK. [Disclaimer: I work for Symbian]
Do people here feel comfortable buying books by crooks?
I've read the FA (briefly) and I'm not impressed. The graphs of the difference in size distribution show little difference. The Cornaglia Iveco tests apparently showed an improvement of "5.5%...with an error bar of 2%" which is far less than the 20% they claim and likely to be experimental error. The Mercedes-Benz test "was repeated for 3 h and had an error within 5% ...power output increased to 0.443 hp" which has too many digits, indicating a lack of awareness of accuracy. (Also, why imperial units, and did they mean "continued" rather than "repeated"?). The "continuous road tests" show no data or controls and are worthless, as others have pointed out. The very fact that they are mentioned is suspicious. In the discussion they talk about "our technology, developed on the new physics principle" without explaining what new physics is involved (and it's incorrect grammar). If this was peer reviewed, I would say they did a pretty sloppy job. If it's not peer-reviewed, it's worthless.
Fascinating. The prediction I like best is
/><br />
<quote>ISDN access will become a common standard for small office and home office access, allowing lots of new applications from conferencing to software distribution...</quote>
I like it because ISDN development paid my salary for a few years! <URL:http://mckerracher.net/highway> But it never really took off except in Germany, and BT are now withdrawing <URL:http://tinyurl.com/y6ml9p> Home Highway here in the UK, so basic rate ISDN for SoHo use is essentially dead here. RIP [snif!]<br
It would have been more accurate to say that <em>DSL</em> access will become a common standard, since ADSL is now common and ISDN was essentially the first DSL technology. How long will digital subscriber loops last though, I wonder?
There's a "better CAPTCHA" mod for phpBB that solved the problem 100% for me(http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3828 90&highlight=captcha). It's beta but I've found no bugs.
I experimented with "oddball" questions myself (also hidden fields etc), but found that I had to change them all periodically, otherwise spam eventually reappeared a few weeks later. This is interesting in itself, because it implies that a human spammer has looked to see why the submissions have started failing and devised an (automated) workaround.
This was for questions that required no brainpower, though. ("Leave this blank" or "copy this word".) More complicated questions, even trivial ones (1+1=?) reduced the spam to zero - but also reduced legitimate responses to zero. People just can't be bothered, it seems.
By the way, SpamAssassin (even using the Bayesian sa-learn feature) was no help for filtering email generated from my other web forms, presumably because the spam originated from the same server that SpamAssassin was running on and so bypassed the spam check. A CAPTCHA (from www.neoprogrammers.com) solved this as well, although I think even that reduced my legitimate response rate.
The problem is visually impaired users may not be able to use them. I don't have a good solution for that.
"not all censorship or eavesdropping is inherently bad..."
Granted, and of course fomenting dissent that might bring down a government and destabilise a country may not be a good thing, even if the government is evil.
However, Amnesty are quite specifically targetting censorship that almost everyone except the perpetrators would agree is 'bad' - censorship that protects a few powerful individuals against the interests of the majority. You have to start somewhere. I think this could be an effective way of raising awareness and I've added the box to my own homepage.
Agreed, there are some things that need to be kept secret despite being perfectly legal and moral, a fact that governments seem incapable of realising. But you shouldn't be leaving sensitive stuff unprotected on a personal computer either - the chances of someone breaking into your house and taking your PC are probably comparable to the chances of a "serious" data centre being hacked. I'm amazed people don't use GnuPG and other encryption technologies more - they would never dream of sending the sensitive information they do electronically, in the physical world (no envelopes for anything??). I guess if it's made easy enough (like Skype) they will.
Personally I get enough strife from "stable" apps and despite being an "early adopter" I don't really have time to debug other people's stuff for them. But, hey, someone's got to do it and I'm very grateful for their efforts.
I don't think connection speed and patch size are really the issue. Even if Microsoft snail-mailed an automatic patch CD to every user on the planet (and they all had CD drives) I'm guessing most would not install it. They would be afraid of it breaking something (who can blame them?!) and they wouldn't know what to do if it did. Most people simply use things until they break, then they ask "someone technical" to fix it and if that fails they give up in disgust or buy a later model. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - people genuinely have better things to do with their time. We software developers are sometimes slow to realise this.