Did you lose billions of dollars in the stock market? Don't have enough cash to cover your debts? Call the Federal Reserve hotline! You could have $85bn in your checking account by tomorrow, no collateral or responsibility required! 1-800-FED Call now and we'll start a commission to get investors off your back for free!*
*offer applies with enrollment in triple advantage and is subject to a vote for John McCain
Wow, if the source is credible that's pretty damning. For those who don't like to RTFA:
One message includes bin Laden's denial of having anything to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
"Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it. The United States has always accused me of these incidents which have been caused by its enemies. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it, and the perpetrators have carried this out because of their own interest," said bin Laden on September 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks.
To me the timing of that message seems far more relevant to 9/11 than a vague message 4 months prior that he could "make life miserable for the United States", "If the Taleban allowed". It seems that in as much as we've had to deal with manufactured evidence to serve the cause of the Bush administration regarding the Iraq war now it's clear that the CIA has also withheld critical counter-evidence that the American people and its allies should have been aware of. Could this message have been too sensitive to release? Well, they seemed to release other messages and video around the time of the event that helped make the case and build support for war..
Me thinks most of the people who can't playback the file are using Windows, where "MPEG-4" means whatever Microsoft says, and not what the specification says. MPEG-4 support in FOSS land is actually quite robust these days.
That's BS. Most people on Windows can't play the file because prior to QuickTime 7 (IIRC).mov files were not containing H.264 and AAC, and H.264 and AAC decoders do not come free with Windows. Even if they did, there are very few file splitters that can handle all varieties of the.mov container and their contents correctly - I know because I have to deal with this problem frequently. Windows users do not like installing QuickTime because it is bloated, it's been bundled with iTunes and other crap in the past, and it doesn't even talk to the Windows DirectShow media system (at least older versions that I've used) so many file types won't play with it. It's UI does not conform to the conventions expected by Windows users and last time I used it Apple were charging you just to be able to watch full screen.
Don't put this problem on Windows or Windows users. If you want to publish video for the web try publishing to a format that isn't a total PITA to work with outside of Apple's platform and applications. MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX, Xvid, are all good candidates that will work on any OS.
I'd like to know if they also commit to anonymizing the client ID that is associated with every Chrome installation and the associated history tied to your account. After all, what's the point of anonymizing the IP data if your Chrome installation is tracking everything anyway? The same company would hold all the same information.
That is the cheapest publicity they would ever receive... and what publicity they would receive!
Yes, what publicity they would receive?:) I've never heard of 16systems.com before, their site is barebones with almost no articles. I dare say they caught a lucky break with this Slashdot article. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that there is no obvious publicity to be had (before now). And should recovery firms respond to everyone with a small website who issues a challenge?
Although the drive has to be in a living system and not on the shelf, it's worth noting the cold boot attack
Not in this context because we're talking about how intentionally wipe the data from a drive, e.g. when you want to erase the data and dispose of the disk. The cold boot attack, although interesting, has nothing to do with recovering data from a drive after someone has attempted to destroy it, unless your implication is that someone would try to overwrite the header a split second before someone like the FBI breaks the door down. Even then, simply unmounting the volume will wipe the key from memory. If you have time to attempt an erasure you have time to unmount the disk. If you are in a situation where you have enough time to write zeros all over the drive, as in this challenge, you are certainly not at risk from the cold boot attack.
Based on nothing more than personal suspicion, I think many professional recovery firms may be in the business of simply running expensive tools that scan through the partition and file table area and perhaps even the entire disk to locate data that has either been marked erased or had references removed (for a full disk scan) and then restoring it. Perhaps they'll also move the spindle from a dead drive into a new case to complete the operation, but I doubt there are many companies that will actually do electron force microscopy for you and even fewer that will do it at anything other than an astronomical fee. Powerful recovery tools can be purchased for a few hundred dollars now anyway. My opinion is that the recovery business is a focus around confidence that a professional will be doing the recovery and that you or your employees won't worsen the situation. In the event that a drive with critical data fails and you don't have a backup, who wants to be the person responsible for damaging the disk during recovery?
Anyway, IMHO this whole debate should be moot by now. If you want to secure your drive use full disk encryption (now freely available in TrueCrypt) and when it comes to destroying the data just overwrite the header area a thousand times with random garbage. It will take only a second or two, and the whole drive will be useless to anyone.
Of course it would also be nice if more manufacturers were producing encrypted disks as standard with verified schemes (there have been some lemons purporting to be secure that really aren't) so that we wouldn't have to do encryption in software.
Matroska is the best generic container format (replacing the flawed avi) as well as open standard and open source based.
Matroska is nice, but AVI is not "flawed". Lots of people dislike AVI and can't explain why, only that they have heard others also saying that it is "flawed". AVI has supported a wide range of compressors including DivX and Xvid for many years successfully. AVI is certainly not best suited to H.264 but given that AVI, introduced in 1992, stems from IFF, first introduced by Electronic Arts in 1985, you can hardly call that a flaw. The main technical challenge that AVI writers have to deal with is correctly writing VBR audio streams - an issue that has already been addressed for many, many years.
Maybe you can explain why you think AVI is "flawed"?
Besides (AFAIK) SD DivX content cannot be progressive
Quite the opposite! Most of it is progressive. Both progressive and interlace (top or bottom field first) is supported. However, progressive is recommended because it requires a much lower data rate for the same quality.
interlaced is not good for desktops (and deinterlacers suck). Therefore if you want HD or desktops then H.264 can be a better choice.
Interlace indeed is not great for desktops, but the DivX Decoder for DirectShow can ask the renderer to de-interlace. On most modern graphics cards you'll get nice 50/60fps bob, which looks really fluid. H.264 is troublesome, especially for 1080HD, because decode requirements for 1080HD H.264 are much, much higher than for 1080ASP, upon which DivX is based. This is because the format itself is more complex (smaller blocks, longer references, CABAC) and due to mandatory in-loop deblock, whereas post-processing in ASP can be adapted based on real-time playback performance.
Not to mention that there is huge amount of devices capable of H.264 (iPod, etc.)
What is "etc."?;) AFAIK there is iPod, PSP (with some quirks), and there is Blu-Ray, and that's it. Additionally, there are multiple H.264 levels and multiple H.264 profiles and you can't just move content between devices without targeting them appropriate. iPod, for example only supports Baseline profile. High profile decoders (i.e. Blu-Ray) are not required to support all of the features present in baseline profiles.
However, DivX is already working on an H.264 solution designed for interoperability. Check it out;)
DivX is not just a codec. DivX 4 through 6 do use the MPEG 4 Part II video spec (ASP) but what's important is that DivX defines additional constraints such as limiting the use of different bitstream features and data rates for CE device classes with varying capabilities to ensure a high quality playback experience on a very wide range of hardware. DivX Profiles (e.g. Mobile, Home Theater, 1080 HD) also constrain file format features and valid audio formats for the same reason.
This is why you can buy $50 devices that are certified to play all your DivX files smoothly so long as you've encoded them to the correct profile. Can you walk into a store and easily identify something on the shelf that you're absolutely certain will play any other combination of formats? I bet most people can't.
But why would you use such an outdated and non-free codec in the first place, when there are enough alternatives.
DivX Codec was just updated last month.
There are x264, XviD, Theora as video encoders, Matroska and Ogg as containers, Vorbis, MP3 and too many other formats and encoders to count for audio.
x264 is a good codec, but good luck finding a low-cost DVD player that supports it. Xvid is a comparable video codec to DivX and provides compatible output options - i.e. leveraging the support DivX has built in low-cost CE devices. Theora has no CE support that I am aware of, and I don't think CE support of Ogg is either extensive or thoroughly tested by anyone. Vorbis as an audio format is only recently being supported even in PMP devices (sure, you can find a handful here and there).
If the only thing that's important to you is playback on your desktop then sure, do whatever you like. I like creating my media so that I can pass it to friends without worry, watch it on my TV with my $50 TV player or connected device, transfer it to my phone, etc.
Every other information is only deliberate disinformation by DivX Inc. to sell you their trash.
One of the greatest values of DivX is that an interoperable and largely open platform that has been created to bridge the gap from your desktop to the world of consumer electronics. Name any other high efficiency video format openly accessible to the general consumer that almost any software can export to that works on thousands of low cost devices from hundreds of manufacturers. Infact, name some other companies dedicated to making platforms that are so open and accessible who have actually been fairly successful in doing so?
I am so sick of these whiney posts.... wah wah wah, I might be capped soon. I've been capped since around 2002. I live in Australia, I'm capped to 80gb, I download around that each month (which is a lot), and I have 4.5mbit down and 1mbit up. I also pay $109 for this privilege (although that's on top of $15 per month line fees). Don't worry about your usage, 250gb is heaps, you will normalize once you're capped, I guarantee it!
Wait, so just because you happen to live in a country notorious for extreme bandwidth caps the rest of us shouldn't complain when faced with the same problem and we should be happy to adjust our habits to suit the desires of our ISPs even though they're perfectly capable of providing the bandwidth if they want to (we know because they're doing it now) and even though they've taken taxpayer money to upgrade their capacity and service but haven't done so?
You've still got it way better than us and a lot of the rest of the world.
Why bother to overcome it? I bet you can find applications dating back way before the patent was filed to cover almost every use case you could ever want in your app. This ought to be prior-art'd to death.
You know what those "secure" phones are called? Blackberries. Go buy one today!
Hah! RIM doesn't even support it's own device security properly. Want to get your encrypted photos back off the device? Good luck! You have to downgrade your desktop software installation to a special old version just to do it because the later revisions that feature a Roxio application in place of the media manager don't seem to support decrypting photos.
Just Google ".jpg.rem" to see the extent of the problem.
Whoever offers the largest cap with the lowest overage rates (or even better no cap at all) at the highest speeds gets my $50/month. Oh, and if you're a provider also offering cable TV you'll get that money too.
In my area TWC and ATT are fighting for customers as an ISP and cable provider. First to impose caps loses on both counts.
Assuming that it takes less energy to transport the matter and energy through the portal than the wheel generates, and that gravity is never exhausted, which sounds like an obvious assumption but if the gravity is being converted to energy doesn't that mean that whatever is causing gravity must be changed so that it looses energy/mass?
If your junk mail shows your date of birth and password I'd be worried. It's also a little harder for an observer to collect millions of records from junk mail than it is to sniff at a router and log all the traffic automatically.
BTW what has happened to/. tonight? If Google switched their login page to http would nobody care?
That level of privacy is not considered important by anybody.
It is by me (obviously);)
You don't think a name, address, DOB, and password all going plaintext is troublesome? How many people use the same password for half a dozen websites? How many password recovery systems use address or DOB?
With specific regard to "trust", here you have a website asking for a bunch of personal information without taking the most basic precautions to protect it in transit and without an SSL certificate that identifies the owners to inform you where the data might really be going to.
We all know that's a very difficult attack when Windows is involved! Amazing cleverness here.
No, this incident brought to you by Best Western.
Listen, you have a massive international corporation with terminals everywhere. It's reasonable to assume that no matter what security measures you put in place a dedicated attacker (maybe even working with an insider) could compromise a terminal somewhere. What really raises questions is how one login can be given access to a system covering all of Europe and pull down 8 million customer records before raising a red flag.
"We continue to investigate the root cause of the issue, including, but not limited to, the third-party website that has allegedly facilitated this illegal exchange of information."
Don't point fingers, the root cause seems clear to me. At some point in time some officer of the company should have said, "Hey guys, we have 8 million customer records with card and address information. Let's reduce the risk of a data theft by limiting the queries on a single login to 1000 per day. That's way more than anyone should need and it would really help to prevent against massive theft and liability for the company.". That's just my opinion of course based on limited information.
Is there any reason that all of our default protocols are unencrypted variants? Okay, it's easier to develop applications when you don't have to deal with encrypted transport, but I think with all of the blatant warrantless wiretapping going on as well as repressive goverment interferance like we see in China as well as new profile platforms such as Phorm it's simply time to switch everything we use to secure by default, otherwise nothing will change.
I'd like to at least see options in Firefox and IE to prioritize https over http.
The big problem with idle so far for me is that there is no scope for comments. What are we supposed to say about this story, for example?
"Thanks for your funny anecdote and warning us not to read this book none of us would ever have seen anyway!"/. is famed for the quality of the discussion, and so far the promoted idle stories aren't really providing any possibility for that. Heck, the summary/story does not even go so far as to pose a question, and defines the book in question as the bottom of the barrel, so what remains?
Slashdot Mirror
Did you lose billions of dollars in the stock market? Don't have enough cash to cover your debts? Call the Federal Reserve hotline! You could have $85bn in your checking account by tomorrow, no collateral or responsibility required! 1-800-FED Call now and we'll start a commission to get investors off your back for free!*
*offer applies with enrollment in triple advantage and is subject to a vote for John McCain
No it's not. If you leave your dog's poop on a public place, it's free game for any DNA analysis or whatever.
You might argue that owning a dog is a matter of privacy and should not require a permit or anything
The greater privacy question is whether the permit should require DNA swabbing.
Wow, if the source is credible that's pretty damning. For those who don't like to RTFA:
One message includes bin Laden's denial of having anything to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania.
"Following the latest explosions in the United States, some Americans are pointing the finger at me, but I deny that because I have not done it. The United States has always accused me of these incidents which have been caused by its enemies. Reiterating once again, I say that I have not done it, and the perpetrators have carried this out because of their own interest," said bin Laden on September 16, 2001, just five days after the attacks.
To me the timing of that message seems far more relevant to 9/11 than a vague message 4 months prior that he could "make life miserable for the United States", "If the Taleban allowed". It seems that in as much as we've had to deal with manufactured evidence to serve the cause of the Bush administration regarding the Iraq war now it's clear that the CIA has also withheld critical counter-evidence that the American people and its allies should have been aware of. Could this message have been too sensitive to release? Well, they seemed to release other messages and video around the time of the event that helped make the case and build support for war..
VLC is a package with dozens of unlicensed codecs/IP. Tell me some legit software, other than QuickTime, that will play a QuickTime 7 file for free.
Me thinks most of the people who can't playback the file are using Windows, where "MPEG-4" means whatever Microsoft says, and not what the specification says. MPEG-4 support in FOSS land is actually quite robust these days.
That's BS. Most people on Windows can't play the file because prior to QuickTime 7 (IIRC) .mov files were not containing H.264 and AAC, and H.264 and AAC decoders do not come free with Windows. Even if they did, there are very few file splitters that can handle all varieties of the .mov container and their contents correctly - I know because I have to deal with this problem frequently. Windows users do not like installing QuickTime because it is bloated, it's been bundled with iTunes and other crap in the past, and it doesn't even talk to the Windows DirectShow media system (at least older versions that I've used) so many file types won't play with it. It's UI does not conform to the conventions expected by Windows users and last time I used it Apple were charging you just to be able to watch full screen.
Don't put this problem on Windows or Windows users. If you want to publish video for the web try publishing to a format that isn't a total PITA to work with outside of Apple's platform and applications. MPEG1, MPEG2, DivX, Xvid, are all good candidates that will work on any OS.
I'd like to know if they also commit to anonymizing the client ID that is associated with every Chrome installation and the associated history tied to your account. After all, what's the point of anonymizing the IP data if your Chrome installation is tracking everything anyway? The same company would hold all the same information.
That is the cheapest publicity they would ever receive... and what publicity they would receive!
Yes, what publicity they would receive? :) I've never heard of 16systems.com before, their site is barebones with almost no articles. I dare say they caught a lucky break with this Slashdot article. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that there is no obvious publicity to be had (before now). And should recovery firms respond to everyone with a small website who issues a challenge?
Although the drive has to be in a living system and not on the shelf, it's worth noting the cold boot attack
Not in this context because we're talking about how intentionally wipe the data from a drive, e.g. when you want to erase the data and dispose of the disk. The cold boot attack, although interesting, has nothing to do with recovering data from a drive after someone has attempted to destroy it, unless your implication is that someone would try to overwrite the header a split second before someone like the FBI breaks the door down. Even then, simply unmounting the volume will wipe the key from memory. If you have time to attempt an erasure you have time to unmount the disk. If you are in a situation where you have enough time to write zeros all over the drive, as in this challenge, you are certainly not at risk from the cold boot attack.
Based on nothing more than personal suspicion, I think many professional recovery firms may be in the business of simply running expensive tools that scan through the partition and file table area and perhaps even the entire disk to locate data that has either been marked erased or had references removed (for a full disk scan) and then restoring it. Perhaps they'll also move the spindle from a dead drive into a new case to complete the operation, but I doubt there are many companies that will actually do electron force microscopy for you and even fewer that will do it at anything other than an astronomical fee. Powerful recovery tools can be purchased for a few hundred dollars now anyway. My opinion is that the recovery business is a focus around confidence that a professional will be doing the recovery and that you or your employees won't worsen the situation. In the event that a drive with critical data fails and you don't have a backup, who wants to be the person responsible for damaging the disk during recovery?
Anyway, IMHO this whole debate should be moot by now. If you want to secure your drive use full disk encryption (now freely available in TrueCrypt) and when it comes to destroying the data just overwrite the header area a thousand times with random garbage. It will take only a second or two, and the whole drive will be useless to anyone.
Of course it would also be nice if more manufacturers were producing encrypted disks as standard with verified schemes (there have been some lemons purporting to be secure that really aren't) so that we wouldn't have to do encryption in software.
No hand held I know is DivX certified.
Check out these phones and if you aren't lucky enough to own one download the mobile player for Windows Mobile or Symbian devices (scroll down the page a bit).
there are no DivX-HD players either
There are now :)
The DVB-T2 (HD version of DVB) will use H.264
The next beta of the DivX H.264 Decoder should have preliminary support for DVB apps.
Matroska is the best generic container format (replacing the flawed avi) as well as open standard and open source based.
Matroska is nice, but AVI is not "flawed". Lots of people dislike AVI and can't explain why, only that they have heard others also saying that it is "flawed". AVI has supported a wide range of compressors including DivX and Xvid for many years successfully. AVI is certainly not best suited to H.264 but given that AVI, introduced in 1992, stems from IFF, first introduced by Electronic Arts in 1985, you can hardly call that a flaw. The main technical challenge that AVI writers have to deal with is correctly writing VBR audio streams - an issue that has already been addressed for many, many years.
Maybe you can explain why you think AVI is "flawed"?
Besides (AFAIK) SD DivX content cannot be progressive
Quite the opposite! Most of it is progressive. Both progressive and interlace (top or bottom field first) is supported. However, progressive is recommended because it requires a much lower data rate for the same quality.
interlaced is not good for desktops (and deinterlacers suck). Therefore if you want HD or desktops then H.264 can be a better choice.
Interlace indeed is not great for desktops, but the DivX Decoder for DirectShow can ask the renderer to de-interlace. On most modern graphics cards you'll get nice 50/60fps bob, which looks really fluid. H.264 is troublesome, especially for 1080HD, because decode requirements for 1080HD H.264 are much, much higher than for 1080ASP, upon which DivX is based. This is because the format itself is more complex (smaller blocks, longer references, CABAC) and due to mandatory in-loop deblock, whereas post-processing in ASP can be adapted based on real-time playback performance.
Not to mention that there is huge amount of devices capable of H.264 (iPod, etc.)
What is "etc."? ;) AFAIK there is iPod, PSP (with some quirks), and there is Blu-Ray, and that's it. Additionally, there are multiple H.264 levels and multiple H.264 profiles and you can't just move content between devices without targeting them appropriate. iPod, for example only supports Baseline profile. High profile decoders (i.e. Blu-Ray) are not required to support all of the features present in baseline profiles.
However, DivX is already working on an H.264 solution designed for interoperability. Check it out ;)
DivX is not just a codec. DivX 4 through 6 do use the MPEG 4 Part II video spec (ASP) but what's important is that DivX defines additional constraints such as limiting the use of different bitstream features and data rates for CE device classes with varying capabilities to ensure a high quality playback experience on a very wide range of hardware. DivX Profiles (e.g. Mobile, Home Theater, 1080 HD) also constrain file format features and valid audio formats for the same reason.
This is why you can buy $50 devices that are certified to play all your DivX files smoothly so long as you've encoded them to the correct profile. Can you walk into a store and easily identify something on the shelf that you're absolutely certain will play any other combination of formats? I bet most people can't.
But why would you use such an outdated and non-free codec in the first place, when there are enough alternatives.
DivX Codec was just updated last month.
There are x264, XviD, Theora as video encoders,
Matroska and Ogg as containers,
Vorbis, MP3 and too many other formats and encoders to count for audio.
x264 is a good codec, but good luck finding a low-cost DVD player that supports it. Xvid is a comparable video codec to DivX and provides compatible output options - i.e. leveraging the support DivX has built in low-cost CE devices. Theora has no CE support that I am aware of, and I don't think CE support of Ogg is either extensive or thoroughly tested by anyone. Vorbis as an audio format is only recently being supported even in PMP devices (sure, you can find a handful here and there).
If the only thing that's important to you is playback on your desktop then sure, do whatever you like. I like creating my media so that I can pass it to friends without worry, watch it on my TV with my $50 TV player or connected device, transfer it to my phone, etc.
Every other information is only deliberate disinformation by DivX Inc. to sell you their trash.
One of the greatest values of DivX is that an interoperable and largely open platform that has been created to bridge the gap from your desktop to the world of consumer electronics. Name any other high efficiency video format openly accessible to the general consumer that almost any software can export to that works on thousands of low cost devices from hundreds of manufacturers. Infact, name some other companies dedicated to making platforms that are so open and accessible who have actually been fairly successful in doing so?
Where is the love? :)
I am so sick of these whiney posts.... wah wah wah, I might be capped soon. I've been capped since around 2002. I live in Australia, I'm capped to 80gb, I download around that each month (which is a lot), and I have 4.5mbit down and 1mbit up. I also pay $109 for this privilege (although that's on top of $15 per month line fees). Don't worry about your usage, 250gb is heaps, you will normalize once you're capped, I guarantee it!
Wait, so just because you happen to live in a country notorious for extreme bandwidth caps the rest of us shouldn't complain when faced with the same problem and we should be happy to adjust our habits to suit the desires of our ISPs even though they're perfectly capable of providing the bandwidth if they want to (we know because they're doing it now) and even though they've taken taxpayer money to upgrade their capacity and service but haven't done so?
You've still got it way better than us and a lot of the rest of the world.
And that is still no justification.
Why bother to overcome it? I bet you can find applications dating back way before the patent was filed to cover almost every use case you could ever want in your app. This ought to be prior-art'd to death.
You know what those "secure" phones are called? Blackberries. Go buy one today!
Hah! RIM doesn't even support it's own device security properly. Want to get your encrypted photos back off the device? Good luck! You have to downgrade your desktop software installation to a special old version just to do it because the later revisions that feature a Roxio application in place of the media manager don't seem to support decrypting photos.
Just Google ".jpg.rem" to see the extent of the problem.
Note to ISPs:
Whoever offers the largest cap with the lowest overage rates (or even better no cap at all) at the highest speeds gets my $50/month. Oh, and if you're a provider also offering cable TV you'll get that money too.
In my area TWC and ATT are fighting for customers as an ISP and cable provider. First to impose caps loses on both counts.
Assuming that it takes less energy to transport the matter and energy through the portal than the wheel generates, and that gravity is never exhausted, which sounds like an obvious assumption but if the gravity is being converted to energy doesn't that mean that whatever is causing gravity must be changed so that it looses energy/mass?
If your junk mail shows your date of birth and password I'd be worried. It's also a little harder for an observer to collect millions of records from junk mail than it is to sniff at a router and log all the traffic automatically.
BTW what has happened to /. tonight? If Google switched their login page to http would nobody care?
That level of privacy is not considered important by anybody.
It is by me (obviously) ;)
You don't think a name, address, DOB, and password all going plaintext is troublesome? How many people use the same password for half a dozen websites? How many password recovery systems use address or DOB?
With specific regard to "trust", here you have a website asking for a bunch of personal information without taking the most basic precautions to protect it in transit and without an SSL certificate that identifies the owners to inform you where the data might really be going to.
It was enough to make me cancel out.
We all know that's a very difficult attack when Windows is involved! Amazing cleverness here.
No, this incident brought to you by Best Western.
Listen, you have a massive international corporation with terminals everywhere. It's reasonable to assume that no matter what security measures you put in place a dedicated attacker (maybe even working with an insider) could compromise a terminal somewhere. What really raises questions is how one login can be given access to a system covering all of Europe and pull down 8 million customer records before raising a red flag.
"We continue to investigate the root cause of the issue, including, but not limited to, the third-party website that has allegedly facilitated this illegal exchange of information."
Don't point fingers, the root cause seems clear to me. At some point in time some officer of the company should have said, "Hey guys, we have 8 million customer records with card and address information. Let's reduce the risk of a data theft by limiting the queries on a single login to 1000 per day. That's way more than anyone should need and it would really help to prevent against massive theft and liability for the company.". That's just my opinion of course based on limited information.
Isn't that pretty much exactly what I said?
I'm currently writing a solver for questions from Slashdot using the Debian package dependency resolver. I'll let you know in a few days...
Is there any reason that all of our default protocols are unencrypted variants? Okay, it's easier to develop applications when you don't have to deal with encrypted transport, but I think with all of the blatant warrantless wiretapping going on as well as repressive goverment interferance like we see in China as well as new profile platforms such as Phorm it's simply time to switch everything we use to secure by default, otherwise nothing will change.
I'd like to at least see options in Firefox and IE to prioritize https over http.
Maybe if all the comments were not simply "idle should go away" the stories would actually be interesting.
The big problem with idle so far for me is that there is no scope for comments. What are we supposed to say about this story, for example?
"Thanks for your funny anecdote and warning us not to read this book none of us would ever have seen anyway!" /. is famed for the quality of the discussion, and so far the promoted idle stories aren't really providing any possibility for that. Heck, the summary/story does not even go so far as to pose a question, and defines the book in question as the bottom of the barrel, so what remains?