I've been looking into (just a bit) the most annoying of the ones that gets to me -- the fake "CARD SERVICES" calls. These are the ones that robocall numbers, ignoring the donotcall lists, play the recording calling themselves "card services" and offer a lower rate. Pressing to be removed does no good. If you do hold or press to talk to an operator, if you try to ask for a supervisor, a company name, a call back number, or to be removed from the list, they hang up (often cursing at you first).
If you do play along, they will pre-screen you and eventually pass you on to some kind of debt consolidation company. I don't yet know if it's one company or a group of them, but I do know that the telemarketers are not employees of that company. I believe they get paid either based on the number of successful transfers, or more standard "lead generation" once they capture your information.
The problem with playing along to find out who is ultimately making the money from the scam, is that to get to that group of people requires you to turn over too much private information to be worth the risk.
I don't know if the Tata is the right way to go, but I do think there is a market for commuter car that's small and safe enough for surface roads, may be prohibited on highways (like a moped) but is enclosed and heated. I think there are plenty of in-town commuters who would opt for such a high mileage vehicle if it were done well enough and still stay cheap.
It's far too much detail on the surface. TheSteve wouldn't like it. They should simple do a wax image of a black turtleneck folded, on a pair of folded jeans, with a pair of thin glasses neatly folded on top.
It's great for the very small number of home consumers able to make real use of the programming oriented amazon api. More likely you (or your less tech neighbor) will be looking at a few bucks a month to a middle man company that builds a nice UI front end to Amazon's glacier tools.
I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide long term archival tools for end users. This firm would spend its energy focused on front end tools for the end user and make use of Amazon's back end long term storage for the actual infrastructure.
There are many amateur and even professional photographers, for example, with almost no alternatives for very long term storage. Home writable media is nearly all flawed in terms of true long term storage. I'm sure there are many use cases in this space.
In terms of mid-size and larger companies, I think a critical feature will need to be a simple interface that encrypts at the client side prior to sending the data using a private key only available on the client side. I cannot think a responsible I.T. professional would store company critical or customer data on a third party site like that without such protections in place.
This seems like the kind of problem made by one of those "super-bright" children that got hired for way too much money in the late 90's and were given offices with dog beds and room for their skateboards while they ignored all the great original standards that made the internet possible, and built insanely over-engineered new ones in the hope of making a fortune.
I'm mildly fascinated (by mildly, I mean if someone here has a good answer, I'll read it, but that's as far as I'm going) -- I have a few linux servers and they are apparently either too old or updated enough to have not had the problem, because they didn't crash.
My first question was, "How the hell would my servers even KNOW that someone had inserted a "Leap Second" into the time unless they happened to do their ntp updates at exactly that time?" That of course would be followed by "why would they care?"
As far as I knew, NTP just says "Hey, server, what time is it" and gets back "It's f*****ing 3 o'clock, exactly 1 hour since the last time you asked. Now go away and quit bothering me!" (only it says it really fast using a single big number) At which point the software makes sure my server knows it's 3 o'clock.
The IBM engineers will be a sort of "Traffic Ring" in which the major roads are used IN TURN, so that all of the lanes go the same direction. Each building will await it's turn, then all the traffic from that building will go out at once for a specific period of time. During that period of time, traffic from that building will have complete use of the roads until the turn passes and it becomes the next building's turn.
To enable this, there will be a Token passed from building to building. Whichever building has the token will control all traffic on the ring.:-)
...for cars, and move further toward electric motors (powered by fuel cell, battery, supercapacitor, or f'ing rubber bands and string) we won't need the huge amounts of platinum used in catalytic converters.
Along with water, isn't there quite a bit of heat produced as part of the fuel cell process? It would seem to me that this may take away some of the stealth benefits, no?
You think there won't be after market programming for these cars? They can't stop you from rooting your iPhone or Android. New root kits are available within hours of a new "fix" to prevent them.
On the other hand, self driving cars would help in interesting ways. It could drop you off in front of your destination in a big city while you tell it "go park somewhere". Parking would be assigned based on availability and expected duration -- it sure would make airports easier to deal with.
You could take public transportation most days, and if you needed your car for an alternative destination after work or had to leave early, you could have it meet you at the office, or some half way point train station.
Long drive cross-country? Why stop? Just go to sleep and let the car take over for a while.
Advertising on web pages went from small, single banner ads to obnoxious fly-across animations and other practices that went past what I was willing to allow -- so I block virtually all of it.
Advertising on television has gotten nearly as bad. It's very poorly targeted, frequently either offensive or incredibly banal. It's disingenuous or outright misleading, and aggressive.
Programming is no longer a good enough trade for me to sit through the advertising.
Well managed sites do not store your password. They store an encryption HASH of your password. When you type in your password, they use the same routine to HASH what you type in and compare the hashes. You cannot go backward from a hash to a password (well, not a modern hash, and not with a password that isn't a simple common word). There is no excuse for a web site to actually have a stored copy of your actual password anywhere in their systems.
So far, none of the Philips "Ambient LED" bulbs I've purchased has failed. I have several, in 40 and 60 watt equiv. The 60's (around 850 lumins) are not the latest prize winners, but are still quite efficient.
I --HATE-- the CFL bulbs. I have found them to be unreliable as well as uncomfortable to use for reading or working. These new LED bulbs, however, have a very nice color to them, a fairly wide spectrum, virtually no flicker at all, and as I said -- so far, I have yet to have one fail.
I actually prefer these new ones to incandescent bulbs for reading and lighting a room -- I would never have said that for any form of CFL or long tube fluorescent.
Fantastic post. I agree with most of what you say - although I think the vulnerability of many of the least mainstream religions has a lot to do with the fact that they're running websites put up on the cheap, built and managed by amateurs. These sites are just more vulnerable than sites built and run by professional web site designers and administrators.
I was thinking exactly the same thing as I read Kupfernigk response. The sites which are least professionally built and maintained are most vulnerable to outsiders planting malware. Many of the less mainstream religious sites fall into this category of low technical management and are thus vulnerable.
Porn, being a huge industry, seems to get the attention of more skilled developers and administrators (if not actors and camera people). While surely some are not, and those will be vulnerable, I think most of the porn sites that are malware laden fall into the category of 'honeypots' with either fake or real porn placed with the deliberate goal of being a malware vector.
How many Apple "Genii" (Genuses?) will bother to do a drive wipe? What about Geek Squad types? The red shirt guys (now there's a good name) in Staples? Even the ones who know -- will they wait the hour+ while the drive wipe happens?
If I still did stuff like that for a living (thank FSM I don't and haven't in 20 years) I'd b pulling the drives as untouched as possible until I new the data transfer worked as well as possible. Then I'm done -- would I have the discipline to then waste and hour more wiping a drive? Probably not when I was that age.
no, you're thinking plant fats with one hydrogen atom vs. animal fats with two. the "hydrogenate" plant fats to make them taste and have the texture of animal fats but as a result, they're just as bad for you.
This is more about the fatty acids and oils that are why fish are healthier to eat than beef (in that we eat too much beef and not enough fish, generally).
I don't get this. They don't have as a good a network, and where they do have coverage it is spotty and calls drop. They seems to be hostile to their own customers, and people don't seem to get what they pay for.
I run a web service for firefighters that sounds like thousands and thousands of text messages each month -- and does using using the US providers' preferred method of sending them via SMTP. AT&T is the slowest at receiving the messages and getting them out to phones in most places by a long way. Verizon is usually a matter of a second or two, where I've seen AT&T regularly take 5 minutes or more and occasionally much longer.
Why do people put up with this crap?
I'm going to sound like a commercial for Verizon here -- but I swear, I'm not in any way tied to them other than as a customer.
I've been a Verizon customer for years and years. While it is true that recently they changed from an "unlimited" service to some reasonable (IMHO) caps based on price, the plan isn't bad at all and it's spelled out pretty clearly. I pay 50 bucks for up to 5gb in a month, and if I go over that it costs me about $10/gb -- which is in line with my service pricing. Most months, I'm way under. Once or twice in a year if I'm travelling a lot and using slingbox over LTE I may go over -- but it's no big deal. My calling plan has a contract length, but I can reduce the monthly minutes and cost or increase it pretty much at will with no penalty so if I care to I could manage the bill to save a bunch of money. My kids phones use my minutes so they don't cost much to add to my plan, and because I'm a volunteer firefighter, they give me 20% off everything plus free unlimited text messaging.
I'm not 100% happy all the time with them, sure. Their international data plan is unusable these days (where it used to be a good deal) but overall -- I don't have the kinds of problems I see people with AT&T complaining about.
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I've been looking into (just a bit) the most annoying of the ones that gets to me -- the fake "CARD SERVICES" calls. These are the ones that robocall numbers, ignoring the donotcall lists, play the recording calling themselves "card services" and offer a lower rate. Pressing to be removed does no good. If you do hold or press to talk to an operator, if you try to ask for a supervisor, a company name, a call back number, or to be removed from the list, they hang up (often cursing at you first).
If you do play along, they will pre-screen you and eventually pass you on to some kind of debt consolidation company. I don't yet know if it's one company or a group of them, but I do know that the telemarketers are not employees of that company. I believe they get paid either based on the number of successful transfers, or more standard "lead generation" once they capture your information.
The problem with playing along to find out who is ultimately making the money from the scam, is that to get to that group of people requires you to turn over too much private information to be worth the risk.
The company which profits from this kind of activity should, IMCO, but subject to RICO forfeitures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
You have to go after whoever profits from the calls, and do it aggressively.
I don't know if the Tata is the right way to go, but I do think there is a market for commuter car that's small and safe enough for surface roads, may be prohibited on highways (like a moped) but is enclosed and heated. I think there are plenty of in-town commuters who would opt for such a high mileage vehicle if it were done well enough and still stay cheap.
You nailed it. I wish I had mod points today to mod you up.
It's far too much detail on the surface. TheSteve wouldn't like it. They should simple do a wax image of a black turtleneck folded, on a pair of folded jeans, with a pair of thin glasses neatly folded on top.
It's great for the very small number of home consumers able to make real use of the programming oriented amazon api. More likely you (or your less tech neighbor) will be looking at a few bucks a month to a middle man company that builds a nice UI front end to Amazon's glacier tools.
I think this opens the possibility for a middle-man company to provide long term archival tools for end users. This firm would spend its energy focused on front end tools for the end user and make use of Amazon's back end long term storage for the actual infrastructure.
There are many amateur and even professional photographers, for example, with almost no alternatives for very long term storage. Home writable media is nearly all flawed in terms of true long term storage. I'm sure there are many use cases in this space.
In terms of mid-size and larger companies, I think a critical feature will need to be a simple interface that encrypts at the client side prior to sending the data using a private key only available on the client side. I cannot think a responsible I.T. professional would store company critical or customer data on a third party site like that without such protections in place.
This seems like the kind of problem made by one of those "super-bright" children that got hired for way too much money in the late 90's and were given offices with dog beds and room for their skateboards while they ignored all the great original standards that made the internet possible, and built insanely over-engineered new ones in the hope of making a fortune.
I'm mildly fascinated (by mildly, I mean if someone here has a good answer, I'll read it, but that's as far as I'm going) -- I have a few linux servers and they are apparently either too old or updated enough to have not had the problem, because they didn't crash.
My first question was, "How the hell would my servers even KNOW that someone had inserted a "Leap Second" into the time unless they happened to do their ntp updates at exactly that time?" That of course would be followed by "why would they care?"
As far as I knew, NTP just says "Hey, server, what time is it" and gets back "It's f*****ing 3 o'clock, exactly 1 hour since the last time you asked. Now go away and quit bothering me!" (only it says it really fast using a single big number) At which point the software makes sure my server knows it's 3 o'clock.
The IBM engineers will be a sort of "Traffic Ring" in which the major roads are used IN TURN, so that all of the lanes go the same direction. Each building will await it's turn, then all the traffic from that building will go out at once for a specific period of time. During that period of time, traffic from that building will have complete use of the roads until the turn passes and it becomes the next building's turn.
To enable this, there will be a Token passed from building to building. Whichever building has the token will control all traffic on the ring. :-)
...for cars, and move further toward electric motors (powered by fuel cell, battery, supercapacitor, or f'ing rubber bands and string) we won't need the huge amounts of platinum used in catalytic converters.
Along with water, isn't there quite a bit of heat produced as part of the fuel cell process? It would seem to me that this may take away some of the stealth benefits, no?
They're not using Pentium III based parallel processing machines.... :-)
It's good advice (your golden rule). There are only two levels of paranoia, to a computer security person. Absolute, and insufficient.
Agree completely. I've installed it and found it unworkable.
You think there won't be after market programming for these cars? They can't stop you from rooting your iPhone or Android. New root kits are available within hours of a new "fix" to prevent them.
On the other hand, self driving cars would help in interesting ways. It could drop you off in front of your destination in a big city while you tell it "go park somewhere". Parking would be assigned based on availability and expected duration -- it sure would make airports easier to deal with.
You could take public transportation most days, and if you needed your car for an alternative destination after work or had to leave early, you could have it meet you at the office, or some half way point train station.
Long drive cross-country? Why stop? Just go to sleep and let the car take over for a while.
These are just a few that come time mind.
Advertising on web pages went from small, single banner ads to obnoxious fly-across animations and other practices that went past what I was willing to allow -- so I block virtually all of it.
Advertising on television has gotten nearly as bad. It's very poorly targeted, frequently either offensive or incredibly banal. It's disingenuous or outright misleading, and aggressive.
Programming is no longer a good enough trade for me to sit through the advertising.
Well managed sites do not store your password. They store an encryption HASH of your password. When you type in your password, they use the same routine to HASH what you type in and compare the hashes. You cannot go backward from a hash to a password (well, not a modern hash, and not with a password that isn't a simple common word). There is no excuse for a web site to actually have a stored copy of your actual password anywhere in their systems.
So far, none of the Philips "Ambient LED" bulbs I've purchased has failed. I have several, in 40 and 60 watt equiv. The 60's (around 850 lumins) are not the latest prize winners, but are still quite efficient.
I --HATE-- the CFL bulbs. I have found them to be unreliable as well as uncomfortable to use for reading or working. These new LED bulbs, however, have a very nice color to them, a fairly wide spectrum, virtually no flicker at all, and as I said -- so far, I have yet to have one fail.
I actually prefer these new ones to incandescent bulbs for reading and lighting a room -- I would never have said that for any form of CFL or long tube fluorescent.
Fantastic post. I agree with most of what you say - although I think the vulnerability of many of the least mainstream religions has a lot to do with the fact that they're running websites put up on the cheap, built and managed by amateurs. These sites are just more vulnerable than sites built and run by professional web site designers and administrators.
I was thinking exactly the same thing as I read Kupfernigk response. The sites which are least professionally built and maintained are most vulnerable to outsiders planting malware. Many of the less mainstream religious sites fall into this category of low technical management and are thus vulnerable.
Porn, being a huge industry, seems to get the attention of more skilled developers and administrators (if not actors and camera people). While surely some are not, and those will be vulnerable, I think most of the porn sites that are malware laden fall into the category of 'honeypots' with either fake or real porn placed with the deliberate goal of being a malware vector.
I'd have guessed 9/10 would have data on them. Higher than that if you could real serious forensics and not just dripping the used drive in a reader.
How many Apple "Genii" (Genuses?) will bother to do a drive wipe? What about Geek Squad types? The red shirt guys (now there's a good name) in Staples? Even the ones who know -- will they wait the hour+ while the drive wipe happens?
If I still did stuff like that for a living (thank FSM I don't and haven't in 20 years) I'd b pulling the drives as untouched as possible until I new the data transfer worked as well as possible. Then I'm done -- would I have the discipline to then waste and hour more wiping a drive? Probably not when I was that age.
More than that, it will likely interact with the brain differently. You could conceivably be creating sheep with very different brain function.
no, you're thinking plant fats with one hydrogen atom vs. animal fats with two. the "hydrogenate" plant fats to make them taste and have the texture of animal fats but as a result, they're just as bad for you.
This is more about the fatty acids and oils that are why fish are healthier to eat than beef (in that we eat too much beef and not enough fish, generally).
The real question is ...how will it taste.
I don't get this. They don't have as a good a network, and where they do have coverage it is spotty and calls drop. They seems to be hostile to their own customers, and people don't seem to get what they pay for.
I run a web service for firefighters that sounds like thousands and thousands of text messages each month -- and does using using the US providers' preferred method of sending them via SMTP. AT&T is the slowest at receiving the messages and getting them out to phones in most places by a long way. Verizon is usually a matter of a second or two, where I've seen AT&T regularly take 5 minutes or more and occasionally much longer.
Why do people put up with this crap?
I'm going to sound like a commercial for Verizon here -- but I swear, I'm not in any way tied to them other than as a customer.
I've been a Verizon customer for years and years. While it is true that recently they changed from an "unlimited" service to some reasonable (IMHO) caps based on price, the plan isn't bad at all and it's spelled out pretty clearly. I pay 50 bucks for up to 5gb in a month, and if I go over that it costs me about $10/gb -- which is in line with my service pricing. Most months, I'm way under. Once or twice in a year if I'm travelling a lot and using slingbox over LTE I may go over -- but it's no big deal. My calling plan has a contract length, but I can reduce the monthly minutes and cost or increase it pretty much at will with no penalty so if I care to I could manage the bill to save a bunch of money. My kids phones use my minutes so they don't cost much to add to my plan, and because I'm a volunteer firefighter, they give me 20% off everything plus free unlimited text messaging.
I'm not 100% happy all the time with them, sure. Their international data plan is unusable these days (where it used to be a good deal) but overall -- I don't have the kinds of problems I see people with AT&T complaining about.