FWIW, all but Turkey Shoot and Sleeping Dogs are available DRM-free for unlimited viewing on usenet without anyone tracking your viewing habits. Minimum quality DVD5, many in 1080p that is head-and-shoulds above the bit-starved "hd" streams from the likes of netflix and amazon instant.
Thanks for reminding me about Silent Running, I am going to watch that in a couple of minutes here.
Therefore it would be wise to arrange sites into tiers of importance.
That seems overly complicated - trying to accurately assign risk levels to different websites is beyond most people, and can potentially change out from under them if a website decides to increase its scope.
Here's what I do -- create a "base" password that is uber-secure, random line-noise sort of thing. Then I use a really simple algorithm where I take something from each website's name and prepend it to the base password (prepending is important since some websites silently truncate passwords).
So, for example:
base password: ^%9*&yhui_YhJGA algorithm: first two letters of the website name
password for yahoo.com: ya^%9*&yhui_YhJGA password for google.com: go^%9*&yhui_YhJGA password for slasdot.org: sl^%9*&yhui_YhJGA
That means I only have to memorize one crazy-hard password but I still get 99% of the security of using unique crazy-hard passwords for each website.
Many years ago, I visited the NRA office in Washington DC. They quoted a lot of statistics about other countries that had high gun ownership rates and low murder rates.
Did they say anything about correlations with other crimes? I've got a pet theory that most gun homicides are drug related and that if we took those out of the totals, the stats for the USA wouldn't be all that different from those in other countries.
But, so far, I haven't been able to find anywhere on the web that breaks down the number of gun homicides in a way that would lend itself to that sort of analysis. I've got a pet theory about that too - that the stereotypical NRA crowd is also big-time pro-war-on-drugs and the anti-war-on-drugs people are stereotypically anti-gun. So the two biggest groups on both sides aren't interested in seeing their pet causes in contradiction.
Here's an example of how legal protections for privacy only get enacted when someone powerful gets screwed.
The timing sure makes this look like a reaction to the Petreaus scandal. From the news reports it sounds like the only reason Petreaus got caught is because of what had been basically carte blanche for the FBI to dig through any webmail system. Under normal circumstances the FBI should not have been investigating random threatening emails to a civilian - it was only because the civilian knew an FBI agent that wanted to bone her that the FBI even got involved. It seems implausible that a judge would have issued a warrant under those circumstances, but the FBI didn't need one under current law.
It's been 25 years, long enough that most people don't remember Robert Bork's supreme court nomination casuing his video rental records to become embarrasingly public and ultimately resulting in the passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act. So its not much of a surprise that the VPPA is getting dismantled - despite the actual threat being worse today since everything is in massive centralized databases now instead of paper records in a local store.
You don't seem to realize that all those bits of identifying information are a lot less useful when some of them are deliberately polluted.
So, carrier-grade NAT to mix traffic between multiple different users plus minor variations in fingerprinting information makes it exceptionally difficult to correlate different website accesses with a unique user. The problem has now gone from one that can be reasonably automated to one that is going to require human judgment, so the risk has gone from being caught up in mass-profiling systems to being specificaly targetted. At that point, you are probably a person of interest to an organization with enough resources to just send in someone to install a network sniffer on your local lan.
The best I can understand you have now defined two different scenarios:
1) Open a new firefox instance when there is no running instance with that specific profile 2) Open a new firefox window when there is already a running instance with that specific profile
These works for me on mint, I don't see why it wouldn't work on Ubuntu or any other platform:
I forgot to mention that using different themes for each profile really helps me to keep from accidentally using the wrong window. I also use the customize_titlebar_v2 add-on to change the titlebar to something unique to each profile, that helps when looking at iconified windows where you can't see the theme.
Yep, I really did mean "a little bit harder" when I wrote it.
Security is never 100% - on both the attacking and the defending sides. It is always a trade-off between effort and results. I figure the majority of trackers will not go to those extremes to track people because not enough people even go so far as to diddle the user-agent string. It just isn''t worth their time to do it and do it reliably when pay-out is such a small fraction of the total.
Firefox has supported multiple simultaneous sessions since at least the 3.x days.
Use these command-line options:
-ProfileManager -new-instance
Then create as many different profiles as you want. They will all have their own history, bookmarks, add-ons, cookies, etc. The only place you have to worry about cross-profile pollution is with plugins like flash that keep state (like flash-cookies) in their own directory rather than under the firefox profile directory.
I have about 8 different profiles - one for gmail, one for my bank, one for slashdot, one for IMDB, etc and I keep a special "anonymous" profile that is basically a private-mode session, it wipes everything on exit, cookies, disk cache, history, etc. I even use the "User Agent Switcher" add-on so that each profile pretends to be a slightly different version of Firefox to make browser fingerprinting a little bit harder.
We *so* need to get out of this egg before we run out of resources.
.. and into the giant pit of vacuum in which there are even less resources? Good plan.
WTF man? Of course he was talking about going some where else with sufficient resources and habitable conditions. You might as well have assumed he meant we should set up a colony on the surface of the sun for all the idiocy you've attributed to him.
Ah, utilitarian-nerd rage. None of those things mean anything without a vibrant and creative culture to both create them and make use of them. Studying ourselves is basically the only way to learn what sociological principles encourage and discourage the kind of creative processes that lead to the development of all of those sorts of toys you think are so great. If we don't actively learn from these experiences we, as a species, end up constantly repeating the past and therefore wasting enormous amounts of potential.
is it possible that the injury rate, or at least number of serous injuries or fatalities, has decreased?
I'm as anti-traffic-camera as they come, but I have to agree that this is prime territory for "lies, damned lies and statistics." How do we know that the increase in accidents wasn't due to some other factor and the cameras actually mitigated it? What happened in the bordering towns that didn't deploy cameras? Where there any other changes, like increased number of drivers on the road, etc?
Having either DNT+ or AdBlock (with privacy filters) will stop the commenting system altogether.
Which is soooo ironic. If you are blocking their ads, the only way you can help them is to contribute to the community so that more people without ad-blockers will spend time loading pages with ads. Plus, it is reasonable to assume that people blocking ads are smarter than your average dog on the internet so their comments might be higher calibre than the hoi polloi.
Why would GM phone my data home? They aren't interested in the data. What would they do with it?
You are surprisingly naive. They will be collecting it looking for any way they can to monetize it. Have you not been paying attention for the last 10 years? Monetizing personal information is the biggest business model of the decade, anyone who can conceivably do it, is doing it.
I said I don't think GM is calling IN to my car to get data.
That's a distinction without a difference. Especially since the original article was all about providing an API and authentication mechanism to access the information that GM is already collecting. Did you even read the article, let me quote it: '130,000 times a day. That's how often OnStar hardware in GM cars "phones home"'
Why do you bring up the cops with ANPR data?
Because you didn't spell it out one way or the other. Since I am not a mind reader, I decided to cover all of the bases.
I do not expect license plate hiding to be common.
For a guy who gets so pissy about someone not being a mind-reader, you do a hellavu job of ignoring what I wrote - I did not say "common," I said "more common" and then I elaborated as to exactly what small subset of the population would use it.
Places like Target will require you have your license plate uncovered, the excuse can be because they allow the police to enforce laws in their parking lot (which they do)
Ok, if you want to make up laws in order to win an argument on slashdot, be my guest because its kinda funny how transparent it is. There is no law requiring the display of a license plate on private property, full-stop. Hell, no traffic laws even apply on private property - speeding, driving without a license, not even yielding right-of-way.
I don't think GM is calling my car to get data from it
If it can phone home, it is. It is naive to assume otherwise for the simple fact that GM would not have put that ability in there if that wasn't their intention.
As for ANPR, a few things: 1) Regulation of what police departments can do with ANPR data is already in process in some jurisidictions and the more ubiquituous the collection the sooner more legislation will be passed. 2) A thousand privately-owned ANPR systems aren't that bad as long as the data isn't collected into a database that can cross-reference readings from different cameras. 3) Expect to see license plate hiding systems becoming more common, probably electro-chromic. There is no law requiring display of a license plate on private property, only publically owned roadways. So all those ANPR systems that Target and others have deployed in their parking lots can be easily foiled by someone who cares to foil them. The same kind of person who would disable their car phoning home and ratting them out.
This is a 3rd party service and they cannot access your data without you authenticating to GM. So don't go to the site, don't log in and they don't get any data.
You are missing the forest for the trees. GM still gets all of your data and who knows what they will do with it. It's all well and good that GM has some sort of authentication requirement to access the data off their servers, but there is one basic rule - information wants to be free. If you give it to someone else, sooner or later it will escape. The only way to guarantee that does not happen is to never give the information to anyone in the first place.
What we need to know is how well does the car work if I pull the sim card out so it can't ever give your information to GM in the first place.
I know the Israelian lobby is very powerful in the states and there goes a lot of money round, but it baffles me that there are not that many critical voices within the US.
For the most part, the only people who care about foreign affairs are those with a vested interest. There just aren't enough people with enough money who give a shit about the other side of that conflict to make any real noise about it. Occasionally an american girl gets run over with a bulldozer or something like that and then we get a ltitle more coverage, because she's american not because of the injustices she was protesting. But that's about it.
The thing that's stopping it is the users: or do you really want to make a decision every time you click something whether it's worth paying for? Even if it's just a cent a page, browsing a news paper site becomes different. Are you really interested in that article? Read the headline and discard it together with your hard-earned money?
(1) You are right, it is the users. The merchant-side users, they decided advertising was easier and went with that.
(2) You presume exactly one model - prepayment. Micro-payments are no more specific to any financial model than any other form of payment.
Building a micropayment system can't be that hard. ... And the actual payment may be an issue of course, there is no cost-effective way to charge small amounts of money.
Ok, now you are just throwing anything you can think of at the wall hoping it will stick, even if you contradict yourself. Why is it so common for people to look for narrow excuses for failure and assume they are insurmountable instead of looking for a way to find success?
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, all but Turkey Shoot and Sleeping Dogs are available DRM-free for unlimited viewing on usenet without anyone tracking your viewing habits. Minimum quality DVD5, many in 1080p that is head-and-shoulds above the bit-starved "hd" streams from the likes of netflix and amazon instant.
Thanks for reminding me about Silent Running, I am going to watch that in a couple of minutes here.
Therefore it would be wise to arrange sites into tiers of importance.
That seems overly complicated - trying to accurately assign risk levels to different websites is beyond most people, and can potentially change out from under them if a website decides to increase its scope.
Here's what I do -- create a "base" password that is uber-secure, random line-noise sort of thing. Then I use a really simple algorithm where I take something from each website's name and prepend it to the base password (prepending is important since some websites silently truncate passwords).
So, for example:
base password: ^%9*&yhui_YhJGA
algorithm: first two letters of the website name
password for yahoo.com: ya^%9*&yhui_YhJGA
password for google.com: go^%9*&yhui_YhJGA
password for slasdot.org: sl^%9*&yhui_YhJGA
That means I only have to memorize one crazy-hard password but I still get 99% of the security of using unique crazy-hard passwords for each website.
Many years ago, I visited the NRA office in Washington DC. They quoted a lot of statistics about other countries that had high gun ownership rates and low murder rates.
Did they say anything about correlations with other crimes? I've got a pet theory that most gun homicides are drug related and that if we took those out of the totals, the stats for the USA wouldn't be all that different from those in other countries.
But, so far, I haven't been able to find anywhere on the web that breaks down the number of gun homicides in a way that would lend itself to that sort of analysis. I've got a pet theory about that too - that the stereotypical NRA crowd is also big-time pro-war-on-drugs and the anti-war-on-drugs people are stereotypically anti-gun. So the two biggest groups on both sides aren't interested in seeing their pet causes in contradiction.
Ah come on, it was a J-O-K-E and you linked to a place called "Serious Eats"?!
Clearly they aren't going to be having any fun with it.
What's the big deal here?
McDonalds has figured out how to make an entire hamburger, including the bun, last for 20 years without molding.
Here's an example of how legal protections for privacy only get enacted when someone powerful gets screwed.
The timing sure makes this look like a reaction to the Petreaus scandal. From the news reports it sounds like the only reason Petreaus got caught is because of what had been basically carte blanche for the FBI to dig through any webmail system. Under normal circumstances the FBI should not have been investigating random threatening emails to a civilian - it was only because the civilian knew an FBI agent that wanted to bone her that the FBI even got involved. It seems implausible that a judge would have issued a warrant under those circumstances, but the FBI didn't need one under current law.
It's been 25 years, long enough that most people don't remember Robert Bork's supreme court nomination casuing his video rental records to become embarrasingly public and ultimately resulting in the passage of the Video Privacy Protection Act. So its not much of a surprise that the VPPA is getting dismantled - despite the actual threat being worse today since everything is in massive centralized databases now instead of paper records in a local store.
You don't seem to realize that all those bits of identifying information are a lot less useful when some of them are deliberately polluted.
So, carrier-grade NAT to mix traffic between multiple different users plus minor variations in fingerprinting information makes it exceptionally difficult to correlate different website accesses with a unique user. The problem has now gone from one that can be reasonably automated to one that is going to require human judgment, so the risk has gone from being caught up in mass-profiling systems to being specificaly targetted. At that point, you are probably a person of interest to an organization with enough resources to just send in someone to install a network sniffer on your local lan.
The best I can understand you have now defined two different scenarios:
1) Open a new firefox instance when there is no running instance with that specific profile
2) Open a new firefox window when there is already a running instance with that specific profile
These works for me on mint, I don't see why it wouldn't work on Ubuntu or any other platform:
1) firefox -P foo -new-instance
2) firefox -P foo -remote 'OpenUrl(about:blank,new-window)'
Why aren't you using the -new-instance argument? It worked for me under ubuntu before I switched to Mint where it continues to work.
I forgot to mention that using different themes for each profile really helps me to keep from accidentally using the wrong window. I also use the customize_titlebar_v2 add-on to change the titlebar to something unique to each profile, that helps when looking at iconified windows where you can't see the theme.
Yep, I really did mean "a little bit harder" when I wrote it.
Security is never 100% - on both the attacking and the defending sides. It is always a trade-off between effort and results. I figure the majority of trackers will not go to those extremes to track people because not enough people even go so far as to diddle the user-agent string. It just isn''t worth their time to do it and do it reliably when pay-out is such a small fraction of the total.
Firefox has supported multiple simultaneous sessions since at least the 3.x days.
Use these command-line options:
-ProfileManager -new-instance
Then create as many different profiles as you want. They will all have their own history, bookmarks, add-ons, cookies, etc. The only place you have to worry about cross-profile pollution is with plugins like flash that keep state (like flash-cookies) in their own directory rather than under the firefox profile directory.
I have about 8 different profiles - one for gmail, one for my bank, one for slashdot, one for IMDB, etc and I keep a special "anonymous" profile that is basically a private-mode session, it wipes everything on exit, cookies, disk cache, history, etc. I even use the "User Agent Switcher" add-on so that each profile pretends to be a slightly different version of Firefox to make browser fingerprinting a little bit harder.
We *so* need to get out of this egg before we run out of resources.
.. and into the giant pit of vacuum in which there are even less resources? Good plan.
WTF man? Of course he was talking about going some where else with sufficient resources and habitable conditions. You might as well have assumed he meant we should set up a colony on the surface of the sun for all the idiocy you've attributed to him.
Ah, utilitarian-nerd rage. None of those things mean anything without a vibrant and creative culture to both create them and make use of them. Studying ourselves is basically the only way to learn what sociological principles encourage and discourage the kind of creative processes that lead to the development of all of those sorts of toys you think are so great. If we don't actively learn from these experiences we, as a species, end up constantly repeating the past and therefore wasting enormous amounts of potential.
Why is this news?
In South Korea anyone can get 350Gbps fibre to their home for less than $50/month!
is it possible that the injury rate, or at least number of serous injuries or fatalities, has decreased?
I'm as anti-traffic-camera as they come, but I have to agree that this is prime territory for "lies, damned lies and statistics." How do we know that the increase in accidents wasn't due to some other factor and the cameras actually mitigated it? What happened in the bordering towns that didn't deploy cameras? Where there any other changes, like increased number of drivers on the road, etc?
Having either DNT+ or AdBlock (with privacy filters) will stop the commenting system altogether.
Which is soooo ironic. If you are blocking their ads, the only way you can help them is to contribute to the community so that more people without ad-blockers will spend time loading pages with ads. Plus, it is reasonable to assume that people blocking ads are smarter than your average dog on the internet so their comments might be higher calibre than the hoi polloi.
Why would GM phone my data home? They aren't interested in the data. What would they do with it?
You are surprisingly naive. They will be collecting it looking for any way they can to monetize it. Have you not been paying attention for the last 10 years? Monetizing personal information is the biggest business model of the decade, anyone who can conceivably do it, is doing it.
I said I don't think GM is calling IN to my car to get data.
That's a distinction without a difference. Especially since the original article was all about providing an API and authentication mechanism to access the information that GM is already collecting. Did you even read the article, let me quote it: '130,000 times a day. That's how often OnStar hardware in GM cars "phones home"'
Why do you bring up the cops with ANPR data?
Because you didn't spell it out one way or the other. Since I am not a mind reader, I decided to cover all of the bases.
I do not expect license plate hiding to be common.
For a guy who gets so pissy about someone not being a mind-reader, you do a hellavu job of ignoring what I wrote - I did not say "common," I said "more common" and then I elaborated as to exactly what small subset of the population would use it.
Places like Target will require you have your license plate uncovered, the excuse can be because they allow the police to enforce laws in their parking lot (which they do)
Ok, if you want to make up laws in order to win an argument on slashdot, be my guest because its kinda funny how transparent it is. There is no law requiring the display of a license plate on private property, full-stop. Hell, no traffic laws even apply on private property - speeding, driving without a license, not even yielding right-of-way.
I don't think GM is calling my car to get data from it
If it can phone home, it is. It is naive to assume otherwise for the simple fact that GM would not have put that ability in there if that wasn't their intention.
As for ANPR, a few things:
1) Regulation of what police departments can do with ANPR data is already in process in some jurisidictions and the more ubiquituous the collection the sooner more legislation will be passed.
2) A thousand privately-owned ANPR systems aren't that bad as long as the data isn't collected into a database that can cross-reference readings from different cameras.
3) Expect to see license plate hiding systems becoming more common, probably electro-chromic. There is no law requiring display of a license plate on private property, only publically owned roadways. So all those ANPR systems that Target and others have deployed in their parking lots can be easily foiled by someone who cares to foil them. The same kind of person who would disable their car phoning home and ratting them out.
This is a 3rd party service and they cannot access your data without you authenticating to GM. So don't go to the site, don't log in and they don't get any data.
You are missing the forest for the trees. GM still gets all of your data and who knows what they will do with it. It's all well and good that GM has some sort of authentication requirement to access the data off their servers, but there is one basic rule - information wants to be free. If you give it to someone else, sooner or later it will escape. The only way to guarantee that does not happen is to never give the information to anyone in the first place.
What we need to know is how well does the car work if I pull the sim card out so it can't ever give your information to GM in the first place.
I know the Israelian lobby is very powerful in the states and there goes a lot of money round, but it baffles me that there are not that many critical voices within the US.
For the most part, the only people who care about foreign affairs are those with a vested interest. There just aren't enough people with enough money who give a shit about the other side of that conflict to make any real noise about it. Occasionally an american girl gets run over with a bulldozer or something like that and then we get a ltitle more coverage, because she's american not because of the injustices she was protesting. But that's about it.
Replace "had" with "had had." There was no tivo 30 years ago when ads on catv got their foothold.
Ads would have cropped up anyways, just like they did with cable TV (originally sold under the "pay-and-don't see ads" theory).
Seems to me that if we had an effective ad-blocker for CATV, then those ads would have never had a chance to take a foot-hold.
Key reuse is one way to weaken the encoding without forking over the key itself, though this needs multiple messages encoded with the same key.
At that point it is no longer a one-time pad it is a multiple-times pad.
The thing that's stopping it is the users: or do you really want to make a decision every time you click something whether it's worth paying for? Even if it's just a cent a page, browsing a news paper site becomes different. Are you really interested in that article? Read the headline and discard it together with your hard-earned money?
(1) You are right, it is the users. The merchant-side users, they decided advertising was easier and went with that.
(2) You presume exactly one model - prepayment. Micro-payments are no more specific to any financial model than any other form of payment.
Building a micropayment system can't be that hard.
...
And the actual payment may be an issue of course, there is no cost-effective way to charge small amounts of money.
Ok, now you are just throwing anything you can think of at the wall hoping it will stick, even if you contradict yourself. Why is it so common for people to look for narrow excuses for failure and assume they are insurmountable instead of looking for a way to find success?