Aw, heck, I remember having one of these as a kid in the early 80's. Once we went "cordless", we could rearrange the furniture a bit to give us a bit more distance from the TV.
And you're assuming that the passwords are valuable enough to spend sufficient CPU cycles to attempt to crack. If they can find some important users, maybe their passwords are valuable enough to try. I would guess that most users are likely not valuable enough to attempt.
Whose cell phone are we tracking? The kidnapper or the kidnappee? If the latter, there's no legal problem as the kidnapper has no expectation of privacy from someone else's cell phone, only his own. Kidnapper? Yes, you need a warrant. I'm wondering if there would be an "exigent circumstances" workaround for crimes-in-progress (like hearing someone yell "help" from behind a locked door).
I didn't say I'd have to give up my day job - a friend of mine is a local county councillor while holding on to two other jobs (including teaching post-secondary, if I remember correctly). Another acquaintance is both a councillor and a real estate agent. I know this. (Another two friends are working and school board trustees.) The question is whether I would have the flexibility to be both a councillor and still fulfill my obligations at work, given the schedules for both.
Also, without giving up on my number one priority: my wife and kids.
I'd at least like to have someone in government that understood the difference between statistics, studies, and facts. That won't get enraged over Dihydrogen Monoxide. Or will ask questions when presented with "studies" about EMF emitted by power lines, and compare them to all other sources of EMF. Or will stop second-guessing actual experts in a field when it comes to cost analysis. (Looking to trim 5-10% is one thing, but decrying it by an order of magnitude?)
Yes, I'm currently very frustrated with the local councillors for spending my tax dollars in fighting something that isn't even their jurisdiction, and basing their fight on non-science. I've been tempted to run, but trying to figure out how that would interfere with a much-higher-paying job... but not so high paying that I have the independence to leave.
I'm not sure it would be very far off if we changes "politicians" in your statement with "law enforcement officers." (I actually had a retired cop try to justify to me why marked cars should be able to speed down public roads with neither lights nor sirens going despite admitting it wasn't legal. If I were in an interrogation room, I doubt I'd get even that much honesty.)
There's an extent to which the bill of rights can't properly be applied in the modern world, and we've addressed that by allowing certain variations of things to be allowed(e.g. High yield explosives, and chemical weapons don't count as arms for the second amendment). We should rewrite the thing and actually put into the constitution the things we think are protected and the ones we don't.
It sounds like what you're saying is that if judges were given less lattitude to interpret things (you know, actually judging based on the constitution and laws as written), we'd find reason to fix those things. So, if judges were to claim that high yield explosives and chemical weapons were "arms" since they are used as such, overturning all sorts of laws in the process, the actual constitution would be open for update on a regular basis again?
Sounds bloody. And sounds like a great idea. Except that we're just as prone to end up with a constitution that does not protect citizens' attempts to protect themselves both from each other and from the government.
If the US were capable of prosecuting large companies for financial fraud, there'd be a jail full of executives from every major financial firm.
No. If the US were capable of prosecuting large companies for financial fraud, you'd find every major financial firm finding ways to comply with the new law. They would still manage to avoid paying 35% tax on actual profits, but it would also be far higher than TFA is reporting Google paid in Australia. Companies, especially financial firms, generally find ways to comply with the laws as they currently are. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule, they follow the rules. Change the rules, they'll complain, but follow them.
The challenge is to change the rules in a way that doesn't drive jobs out of the country while not getting derailed by lobbyists. Both of these are hard to do. You can guarantee that while the talk about rule changes is going on, these businesses will assume it's a least-cost process to lobby against the change. But should said rule change go in to law, they will follow it. Which, of course, could mean moving actual jobs to Ireland and other low-cost jurisdictions.
I'm not sure why, but the first thought popping into my head was: did the real estate agent pay appropriate license fees for the distribution of that music?
If you haven't restarted your session, you haven't fixed the vulnerability.
True. You will be fixed when you restart, though. I do the updates, and then, periodically, when it is safe to do so, restart daemons that have been updated. That is the point where I'm running with the fix, not merely updating the code. It's not instantly, but it does allow me to update the code even under load and defer the outage to a less sensitive time.
Reloading the desktop? That's more work as then I have to close down everything except the daemons. More of a headache. But still no reboot.
Your false sense of security is probably exactly why MS & Apple force a reboot.
No. MS forces a reboot for historical (hysterical?) reasons: they could not update files that are "in-use" because FAT, FAT32, and early versions of NTFS couldn't handle hardlinks the way that unix filesystems do. (NTFS probably could, but NT didn't use it.) Files that were "in-use" could only be updated during the reboot before they were first loaded. There was no way to get the updated code without the reboot.
Apple probably forces a reboot because their users used to use Windows where it was expected, and because it's far easier to document "reboot" than how to figure out which processes need restarting and how to restart them (safely).
Because when you have dozens of smaller players, none of them have the warchest available to defend your rights and will, instead, capitulate to the smallest demand. When you have mammoth agencies who are interested in protecting the internet (more Google, less Facebook), you will also have the mammoth warchest to fund it.
If you had a dozen smaller players competing for video bandwidth in Germany, you'd get some paying the licensing fee, others pulling out, with a net effect that Gema gets money while there is no outcry from German citizens. WIth Google/Youtube, you first got an actual court case, and pulling out of Germany becomes a real, viable response that will likely result in a lot of complaining by German citizens, which is much more likely to get the government of Germany to look at legislative options to tone down Gema and entice Youtube to return.
And, if he then fights the charges in court, he can use a Free Speech defense. This is relatively (but not entirely) clear that the nudity was a form of protest and thus speech protected by the First Amendment.
Bought a hybrid Saturn VUE in Dec, 2006. And, when we needed a second vehicle, didn't even consider a second hybrid. Got a used minivan in Jan, 2011. Uses 30-50% more gas, but trying to get a vehicle to fit all those car seats with hybrid? Far too expensive. I'll save more by spending on gas than buying new w/hybrid.
As is every other option. Every other solution vastly oversimplifies the problem (thus I thought I could, too), and can never, by themselves, eliminate spam. Ever. They all look good in theory, but they always lose in reality. That doesn't make the attempt any less useful.
And then the filters will get lax, someone will start up again, a spurt of spam will arrive, the filters adjust, and again dead.
You have imagined a situation that will never, ever, happen. Filters will never stop spam. They will always be reactionary to spam, and spam will always be outsmarting the filters.
Yup. I've imagined a situation that will never, ever happen. As have the proponents of every other solution. So? That was my point! But, I will maintain that filtering is more or less as effective at slowing spam, on average, as law enforcement. And that is largely because law enforcement does nothing most of the time, but sometimes stops an entire operation, having a huge effect at that time. Unfortunately, the system is too complex to really prove one way or the other - we're not about to stop everyone from using spam filters for a while to see how spam grows without filtering to compare it against with filtering. Law enforcement really can simply compare before-and-after snap shots of spam and take most of the credit for that difference, so it makes better news.
If no one receives your spam because their filters are effective, there will be no profitability left
No filter is 100% effective. It costs effectively nothing to spam a 10 million addresses, but for sake of argument say it costs $100. If 1% of those get through the defenses, and 1% of the non-filtered recipients falls for your scam, you've got your hooks into 1,000 suckers. Even if you only take each sucker for $1 your ROI is 1000%.
You really need to read the rest of my comment. Perhaps my snarkiness was too subtle. The point is that ignoring filters as a useful tool in our arsenal is costly. Especially when said filtering can be done by your web-email host (e.g., hotmail, gmail, etc.) in such a way that does not require any set up from a user. (Getting spamassassin on my own account took far more work and is still not terribly hard.)
The other point, where the snarkiness really came in, is that there is no solution that will be 100% effective. If there was, we'd be using it to stop murders, which is much higher on the priority list of far more people. So, if you can reduce the amount of spam seen by naive victims by 50% (awfully high, I expect) by shutting down botnets, capturing and convicting those who initiate it, etc., and you can eliminate 99% (your number, I think we can do better) through filtering, we've just eliminated 149% of all spam. Sorry, snarkiness crept in. 99.5%. That's still much better than either method by itself.
Further, the groups of people with the skills/authority to do either one don't have much, if any, overlap. You practically need to be a law enforcement officer with jurisdiction over some aspect of the case to shut down the botnet and/or charge those responsible. There are many others, again, Google, Microsoft, Spamassassin, etc., who are working on the filtering side.
Theoretically, if you convict all the spammers, spamming ceases. In practice, others fill in the gap, more or less. Theoretically, if you filter 100% of the spam, spamming ceases to be profitable, and spamming ceases. In practice, you can't get to 100%. Neither is a reason to stop the attempt, as they both are somewhat effective at stemming the tide of vicitimisation, which, let's face it, is far more important than stemming the tide of spam itself. And, stemming the tide of victimisation will stem the tide of spam itself - without the profit available, those who expect large sums of money will find something else to do, and that will only leave those whose needs are more meager, and thus may be less educated, and thus less effective.
In short, filtering will never, ever, solve the spam problem. The summary of the article mentions techniques that are effective at stopping spam, and there is a reason why filters are not on that list.
Not necessarily. If no one receives your spam because their filters are effective, there will be no profitability left. And, with that, the industry will die. And then the filters will get lax, someone will start up again, a spurt of spam will arrive, the filters adjust, and again dead.
I don't see this any less effective than current methods. Convicting someone just opens up room for someone else to take his place. Take down a botnet, and those same people who allowed their computers to be infected once will get infected again with the next botnet.
All methods are chasing the impossible. But just because we can't eliminate murder doesn't mean we legalise it. Filtering is an important tool. It is not and, for all practical purposes, can not be the only tool. But omitting that tool is just as fatal of a mistake as ignoring the law as a tool.
Spoken as one who doesn't have kids and therefore has never faced down the "I want that"s at the end of an exhaustingly long day and just can't put up with it anymore. Advertising doesn't target the parents.
My wife is not a "girly girl" (she plays D&D). Yet the amount of pink/princess stuff in the house... (first child: girl)
And, while space is "neat", it's not fascinating. We just held a space-themed birthday party (second child: boy). Got more than a couple space-themed toys laying around.
(Third child: boy, but he only just turned one, so hasn't started to display his own preferences. Yet.)
switching between many different servers quickly, easily, and without jumping to root each time.
penetrating firewalls (ssh port may be allowed, but nfs port usually isn't)
I'm sure there are other uses, too, where NFS might perform better but sshfs provides a level of convenience as a fully user-mode filesystem that outweighs it.
I have a unit test wrapper that takes the name of a machine to test against, automatically penetrates firewalls (using https and DBus + KWallet for passwords) when the machine is behind a firewall, mounts the remote filesystem via sshfs, copies tests to run, runs them via ssh, and reports everything back on my desktop. And I can switch from machine to machine trivially. Without aggravating IT. They've already approved my access to the machine (user account, firewall access), and approved ssh access. They don't like NFS, especially for VPN-based clients (roving IP address). I'm happy, they're happy, I get my job done.
I only wish I had found sshfs years ago. This would have made earlier jobs so much easier.
To be fair, you may be talking about some of the people who best know the world of investment finance, but they also have a vested interest in opposing deregulation: it removes some of their power. They no longer have oversight over something, and that is generally a scary proposition for people in power.
This doesn't mean they're wrong, merely that you have to evaluate their statements in the context of their positions. As you should do for investment bankers who might be in favour of the change.
Slashdot Mirror
Aw, heck, I remember having one of these as a kid in the early 80's. Once we went "cordless", we could rearrange the furniture a bit to give us a bit more distance from the TV.
And you're assuming that the passwords are valuable enough to spend sufficient CPU cycles to attempt to crack. If they can find some important users, maybe their passwords are valuable enough to try. I would guess that most users are likely not valuable enough to attempt.
Just a wild guess, but I'm thinking you're not their target market.
Whose cell phone are we tracking? The kidnapper or the kidnappee? If the latter, there's no legal problem as the kidnapper has no expectation of privacy from someone else's cell phone, only his own. Kidnapper? Yes, you need a warrant. I'm wondering if there would be an "exigent circumstances" workaround for crimes-in-progress (like hearing someone yell "help" from behind a locked door).
I dunno, have you met many slashdotters? I'd say that most of them are square and quite round.
I didn't say I'd have to give up my day job - a friend of mine is a local county councillor while holding on to two other jobs (including teaching post-secondary, if I remember correctly). Another acquaintance is both a councillor and a real estate agent. I know this. (Another two friends are working and school board trustees.) The question is whether I would have the flexibility to be both a councillor and still fulfill my obligations at work, given the schedules for both.
Also, without giving up on my number one priority: my wife and kids.
I'd at least like to have someone in government that understood the difference between statistics, studies, and facts. That won't get enraged over Dihydrogen Monoxide. Or will ask questions when presented with "studies" about EMF emitted by power lines, and compare them to all other sources of EMF. Or will stop second-guessing actual experts in a field when it comes to cost analysis. (Looking to trim 5-10% is one thing, but decrying it by an order of magnitude?)
Yes, I'm currently very frustrated with the local councillors for spending my tax dollars in fighting something that isn't even their jurisdiction, and basing their fight on non-science. I've been tempted to run, but trying to figure out how that would interfere with a much-higher-paying job ... but not so high paying that I have the independence to leave.
I'm not sure it would be very far off if we changes "politicians" in your statement with "law enforcement officers." (I actually had a retired cop try to justify to me why marked cars should be able to speed down public roads with neither lights nor sirens going despite admitting it wasn't legal. If I were in an interrogation room, I doubt I'd get even that much honesty.)
stack overflow
Sorry, that's a different site.
There's an extent to which the bill of rights can't properly be applied in the modern world, and we've addressed that by allowing certain variations of things to be allowed(e.g. High yield explosives, and chemical weapons don't count as arms for the second amendment). We should rewrite the thing and actually put into the constitution the things we think are protected and the ones we don't.
It sounds like what you're saying is that if judges were given less lattitude to interpret things (you know, actually judging based on the constitution and laws as written), we'd find reason to fix those things. So, if judges were to claim that high yield explosives and chemical weapons were "arms" since they are used as such, overturning all sorts of laws in the process, the actual constitution would be open for update on a regular basis again?
Sounds bloody. And sounds like a great idea. Except that we're just as prone to end up with a constitution that does not protect citizens' attempts to protect themselves both from each other and from the government.
If the US were capable of prosecuting large companies for financial fraud, there'd be a jail full of executives from every major financial firm.
No. If the US were capable of prosecuting large companies for financial fraud, you'd find every major financial firm finding ways to comply with the new law. They would still manage to avoid paying 35% tax on actual profits, but it would also be far higher than TFA is reporting Google paid in Australia. Companies, especially financial firms, generally find ways to comply with the laws as they currently are. There are always exceptions, but as a general rule, they follow the rules. Change the rules, they'll complain, but follow them.
The challenge is to change the rules in a way that doesn't drive jobs out of the country while not getting derailed by lobbyists. Both of these are hard to do. You can guarantee that while the talk about rule changes is going on, these businesses will assume it's a least-cost process to lobby against the change. But should said rule change go in to law, they will follow it. Which, of course, could mean moving actual jobs to Ireland and other low-cost jurisdictions.
Here's a neighbor's house that's on the market, for reference of habitability.
I'm not sure why, but the first thought popping into my head was: did the real estate agent pay appropriate license fees for the distribution of that music?
/me considers getting a skydrive account to help distribute linux ISO's, and wonders what kind of advertising he'd be subjected to for that.
If you haven't restarted your session, you haven't fixed the vulnerability.
True. You will be fixed when you restart, though. I do the updates, and then, periodically, when it is safe to do so, restart daemons that have been updated. That is the point where I'm running with the fix, not merely updating the code. It's not instantly, but it does allow me to update the code even under load and defer the outage to a less sensitive time.
Reloading the desktop? That's more work as then I have to close down everything except the daemons. More of a headache. But still no reboot.
Your false sense of security is probably exactly why MS & Apple force a reboot.
No. MS forces a reboot for historical (hysterical?) reasons: they could not update files that are "in-use" because FAT, FAT32, and early versions of NTFS couldn't handle hardlinks the way that unix filesystems do. (NTFS probably could, but NT didn't use it.) Files that were "in-use" could only be updated during the reboot before they were first loaded. There was no way to get the updated code without the reboot.
Apple probably forces a reboot because their users used to use Windows where it was expected, and because it's far easier to document "reboot" than how to figure out which processes need restarting and how to restart them (safely).
Because when you have dozens of smaller players, none of them have the warchest available to defend your rights and will, instead, capitulate to the smallest demand. When you have mammoth agencies who are interested in protecting the internet (more Google, less Facebook), you will also have the mammoth warchest to fund it.
If you had a dozen smaller players competing for video bandwidth in Germany, you'd get some paying the licensing fee, others pulling out, with a net effect that Gema gets money while there is no outcry from German citizens. WIth Google/Youtube, you first got an actual court case, and pulling out of Germany becomes a real, viable response that will likely result in a lot of complaining by German citizens, which is much more likely to get the government of Germany to look at legislative options to tone down Gema and entice Youtube to return.
And, if he then fights the charges in court, he can use a Free Speech defense. This is relatively (but not entirely) clear that the nudity was a form of protest and thus speech protected by the First Amendment.
Windows 3.1, 95, 98, ME, 2000, 2003, XP, Vista, 7, 8...
Um, say what?
(For the pedants, I'm sure I missed some, but I don't think that any I've missed will actually make that list "[keep] going up")
Bought a hybrid Saturn VUE in Dec, 2006. And, when we needed a second vehicle, didn't even consider a second hybrid. Got a used minivan in Jan, 2011. Uses 30-50% more gas, but trying to get a vehicle to fit all those car seats with hybrid? Far too expensive. I'll save more by spending on gas than buying new w/hybrid.
Not necessarily. If no one receives your spam because their filters are effective, there will be no profitability left.
You vastly oversimplified the problem with that statement.
Yes. That was on purpose. (See my other comment in this thread.)
Filters are an always-losing strategy.
As is every other option. Every other solution vastly oversimplifies the problem (thus I thought I could, too), and can never, by themselves, eliminate spam. Ever. They all look good in theory, but they always lose in reality. That doesn't make the attempt any less useful.
And then the filters will get lax, someone will start up again, a spurt of spam will arrive, the filters adjust, and again dead.
You have imagined a situation that will never, ever, happen. Filters will never stop spam. They will always be reactionary to spam, and spam will always be outsmarting the filters.
Yup. I've imagined a situation that will never, ever happen. As have the proponents of every other solution. So? That was my point! But, I will maintain that filtering is more or less as effective at slowing spam, on average, as law enforcement. And that is largely because law enforcement does nothing most of the time, but sometimes stops an entire operation, having a huge effect at that time. Unfortunately, the system is too complex to really prove one way or the other - we're not about to stop everyone from using spam filters for a while to see how spam grows without filtering to compare it against with filtering. Law enforcement really can simply compare before-and-after snap shots of spam and take most of the credit for that difference, so it makes better news.
If no one receives your spam because their filters are effective, there will be no profitability left
No filter is 100% effective. It costs effectively nothing to spam a 10 million addresses, but for sake of argument say it costs $100. If 1% of those get through the defenses, and 1% of the non-filtered recipients falls for your scam, you've got your hooks into 1,000 suckers. Even if you only take each sucker for $1 your ROI is 1000%.
You really need to read the rest of my comment. Perhaps my snarkiness was too subtle. The point is that ignoring filters as a useful tool in our arsenal is costly. Especially when said filtering can be done by your web-email host (e.g., hotmail, gmail, etc.) in such a way that does not require any set up from a user. (Getting spamassassin on my own account took far more work and is still not terribly hard.)
The other point, where the snarkiness really came in, is that there is no solution that will be 100% effective. If there was, we'd be using it to stop murders, which is much higher on the priority list of far more people. So, if you can reduce the amount of spam seen by naive victims by 50% (awfully high, I expect) by shutting down botnets, capturing and convicting those who initiate it, etc., and you can eliminate 99% (your number, I think we can do better) through filtering, we've just eliminated 149% of all spam. Sorry, snarkiness crept in. 99.5%. That's still much better than either method by itself.
Further, the groups of people with the skills/authority to do either one don't have much, if any, overlap. You practically need to be a law enforcement officer with jurisdiction over some aspect of the case to shut down the botnet and/or charge those responsible. There are many others, again, Google, Microsoft, Spamassassin, etc., who are working on the filtering side.
Theoretically, if you convict all the spammers, spamming ceases. In practice, others fill in the gap, more or less. Theoretically, if you filter 100% of the spam, spamming ceases to be profitable, and spamming ceases. In practice, you can't get to 100%. Neither is a reason to stop the attempt, as they both are somewhat effective at stemming the tide of vicitimisation, which, let's face it, is far more important than stemming the tide of spam itself. And, stemming the tide of victimisation will stem the tide of spam itself - without the profit available, those who expect large sums of money will find something else to do, and that will only leave those whose needs are more meager, and thus may be less educated, and thus less effective.
In short, filtering will never, ever, solve the spam problem. The summary of the article mentions techniques that are effective at stopping spam, and there is a reason why filters are not on that list.
Not necessarily. If no one receives your spam because their filters are effective, there will be no profitability left. And, with that, the industry will die. And then the filters will get lax, someone will start up again, a spurt of spam will arrive, the filters adjust, and again dead.
I don't see this any less effective than current methods. Convicting someone just opens up room for someone else to take his place. Take down a botnet, and those same people who allowed their computers to be infected once will get infected again with the next botnet.
All methods are chasing the impossible. But just because we can't eliminate murder doesn't mean we legalise it. Filtering is an important tool. It is not and, for all practical purposes, can not be the only tool. But omitting that tool is just as fatal of a mistake as ignoring the law as a tool.
TL;DR: You're saying that the smoldering pile of flour on my kitchen bench is exactly like a dust explosion. I beg to differ.
With sufficient psychedelics, watching grass grow is exactly like an explosion.
Spoken as one who doesn't have kids and therefore has never faced down the "I want that"s at the end of an exhaustingly long day and just can't put up with it anymore. Advertising doesn't target the parents.
My wife is not a "girly girl" (she plays D&D). Yet the amount of pink/princess stuff in the house... (first child: girl)
And, while space is "neat", it's not fascinating. We just held a space-themed birthday party (second child: boy). Got more than a couple space-themed toys laying around.
(Third child: boy, but he only just turned one, so hasn't started to display his own preferences. Yet.)
sshfs is better than NFS. For
I'm sure there are other uses, too, where NFS might perform better but sshfs provides a level of convenience as a fully user-mode filesystem that outweighs it.
I have a unit test wrapper that takes the name of a machine to test against, automatically penetrates firewalls (using https and DBus + KWallet for passwords) when the machine is behind a firewall, mounts the remote filesystem via sshfs, copies tests to run, runs them via ssh, and reports everything back on my desktop. And I can switch from machine to machine trivially. Without aggravating IT. They've already approved my access to the machine (user account, firewall access), and approved ssh access. They don't like NFS, especially for VPN-based clients (roving IP address). I'm happy, they're happy, I get my job done.
I only wish I had found sshfs years ago. This would have made earlier jobs so much easier.
To be fair, you may be talking about some of the people who best know the world of investment finance, but they also have a vested interest in opposing deregulation: it removes some of their power. They no longer have oversight over something, and that is generally a scary proposition for people in power.
This doesn't mean they're wrong, merely that you have to evaluate their statements in the context of their positions. As you should do for investment bankers who might be in favour of the change.