The service that you are most likely paying for in this case is military defense. You're getting a service, seeing as that we aren't under the threat of imminent invasion (for those of you who are about to bring up Iraq, don't; we all already know a ton of people disapprove). Keeping the public informed is probably a low second (or third or whatever) priority, as it should be. Afterall, is there any buring reason that Average Joe needs to know where our satellites or ships are? Curiosity is one thing, but it's not like you can act on the information (unless you're the type of person that they're trying to keep from knowing).
Come to think of it, the Command & Conquer line of games (excluding Generals) essentially can be played using only the mouse and left-clicking. As long as you can click units (depending on you're screen resolution, most are bigger than a systray icon). Like the parent said, the speed can also be adjusted if that's an issue. Other RTS might be a bit harder since each building/unit usually has its own menu and they insist on using left-clicking for half the options, and right-clicking for the other half (as a long-time C&C fan I detest this, but I guess I'm a minority).
I always had to use.ARJ,.BH,.LHA or whatever other obscure/unpopular format my compression program supported so I could e-mail executables to friends and computer science teachers. If I recall correctly, the virus scanner at my old school did remove all.exe (even renamed) files from just about any modern compression format you could think of (rar, zip, jar, cab).
Well, what scares me is that my mom got an e-mail from her sister the other day. The subject was "Pictures" and it didn't have a body. The only attachment was a 90kb executable file called something like "Picture It! Photos.exe". Turns out that it was a legitimate e-mail (after calling to confirm this) that decompressed three photos. I can see the logic behind sending self-extracting executables, but wouldn't it be simpler if there were never any common legitimate uses for sending executables through e-mail? I mean this would be trivial for a virus writer to imitate or piggy-back on. Now I can't just tell "normal people" to never open "exe" files in e-mail.
Yes, but that would be generic (installer programs have them all the time). The generic decompression part could decompress a decryption part that could decrypt the virus. The virus could reencrypt itself with a new (but supplied in the executable) encryption key and be off on its merry way. The only real way to see if an executable is a virus or not would be to run parts of its code. Even if you use a sandbox this wouldn't be the safest solution (antivirus-killing virus?). Also, like someone else said, the virus might just use some encryption scheme that took a long time to decrypt. That way it'd launch, show a couple funny pictures or whatever (what the user expects), and use the next 20 minutes of idle time to decrypt itself.
That's why my idiot cousin doesn't get my real address. That's for a few reasons really. The first is because of the reason you mentioned. The second is that my real address (myrealbox) is a novell test server that often goes down. I don't think it drops any mail, but that's why everything goes through gmail first. I also just recently added the gmail account, so I get the freedom to change my e-mail accounts and keep the same e-mail addresses. The last reason is for security. If nobody knows my real e-mail address (other than the tech-savvy people I send mail to) then they can't really impersonate me. Also, if someone did sign me up for something like that (and I haven't explained about how I give a different address to everyone) then I just give them a new one and block the old.
I just use cjb.net's subdomain forwarding to keep myself from getting spam. Anything @mysubdomain.cjb.net goes to me, so I give everybody a different e-mail address. That e-mail gets forwarded to my gmail inbox, which filters out mail sent to address that have been spammed in the past, and forwards the rest to my myrealbox.com address. A little complicated, but I never get any spam (well, maybe one message before I block the address it's sent to).
At my old high school we probably had 50 people sharing their music collections (it was a boarding school). I hardly ever needed to open Napster (this was ~5 years ago), because someone had already downloaded whatever I was interested in. Of course, some people put passwords on their shared folders, but it wasn't anything pqwak couldn't take care of.
Because this way I can create an image of the partition my user settings are on and another image of my system partition. That way, if Windows were to die then I could restore my system files without loosing too many settings. Or I could restore my settings to fix a software problem. It also helps to make my DVD-R backups managable. My system partition is 4.5 gb so it can fit on a single disc. My settings partition is 1 gb, and my programs partition is 13.5 gb (3 discs). I keep my swap file & temp directories on another 1 gb partition, documents on a 700 mb FAT-16 partition, and keep a 40 gb data drive (for downloads, media, and bigger stuff). I also have 4 other operating systems installed, so it's nice to be able to edit stuff on FAT-32 partitions (Firefox bookmarks) without loosing things like access permisions on my system drive.
Well, 'My Documents' is somewhere else entirely on my computer. (A nice 700 MB FAT-16 partition that other OSes can work with.) Also, the point of moving it was so that I could re-image *that* partition and restore my user settings/bookmarks to an earlier state. Or I could re-image my system partition to fix a problem and retain most of my settings.
Well, occasionally a stupid installion program will have said paths hard-coded into it (most don't), so I wouldn't do this to any computer that had a novice primary user/administrator. I personally prefer to be able to enter the director directly from My Computer, or by merely typing "V:" on run or command prompt. Typing 'cd "Documents and Settings"' or even 'cd doc*' gets quite annoying after a while. It also keeps path lengths managable. 'V:\Izomiac\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\' is (at least it seems) a lot shorter than 'C:\Documents and Settings\Izomiac\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\'. Shorter path lengths make displaying them and working with them much easier. It also confuses the heck out of people that insist on doing things for me on my computer.
If you do a registry search & replace (including renaming) for all variations of "C:\Documents and Settings" then you can change it to anything. You can even do this with Program Files. Of course, that messes-up the shortcuts in the start menu, but it works (there is no "Program Files" or "Documents and Settings" folders on my C: drive, I use P:\ and V:\ respectively). Now if I could only get rid of those pesky "System Volume Information" and "RECYCLER" folders on all my drives...
I wouldn't call it "unhackable" (even "unbreakable, which is what I assume they mean), but it takes skill to mess with it. My old school started using it my junior year. A restart completely removes any changes that were done (I deleted most of the windows directory to test it). Low level hard disk tools might do the trick, but it's possible that the software even catches that. Manually unloading it (from what I've heard) is rather difficult, and extremely difficult if you don't have bios access. What it does is intercept file system calls and write any changes to some other part of the drive. When the computer reboots the changes are erased (the original filesystem was never touched). One could probably unload the drivers that catch the filesystem calls, but that's well beyond most people.
And where do you think research grants come from? Which researcher would you give money to, the one that says he might be on the edge of proving a catastrophe is in the works, or the one who just did a study that suggested everything is fine?
A fact huh? And what data is this based on? The average yearly temperatures as taken by weather stations? Would this be before or after the urban heat effect adjustment? And I thought people were still debated about exactly how much they should reduce the temperature by to adjust for the weather station's proximity to urban areas...
That depends entirely on the school, homeschool, private tutor, etc. There's a pretty big range form military schools to Waldorf schools.
True, but a lot of parents can't afford to send their children to private schools, and others don't live very close to one. If the public school does this then parents may have little choice but to erode their child's privacy.
I think that parents are responsible for protecting the rights of their children, and that children can not be made/deemed responsible for that burden. For better or for worse.
I agree that they are responsible for their child's rights, but there should definitely be certain things that they can't take away. IMHO a reasonable level of privacy is one of them. If you never give kids a chance to make their own decisions (even bad ones) then they'll never learn how to think for themselves in the "real world".
They do so routinely. See also Holywood, the olimpics, etc, etc.
Hence the reason I get irritated when I see a 6 year old violinist. Too many parents want to live out their own dreams through their children.
It's true that RFID has some good used, but most can be done without using it.
1) If a student was absent from class, automatically email the student the homework assignments for the day.
The attendance system should automatically do this whether a teacher took attendance or an RFID scanner did.
2) Log times when students enter and exit bathrooms, and share that data with the smoke alarm. Identify which students are potential druggies or smokers.
Pointing a camera at the bathroom door could effectively acomplish the same thing.
3) Add RFID scanners to the broom closets, and give teachers RFID badges too, to identify which teacher/students are performing fellatio
Hopefully this isn't too much of an issue at grade school, but I hear locks work quite well. =)
4) Use RFID to keep track of room usages for marketing purposes. For example, school clubs are generally hosted in various class rooms. Identifying popular club could lead to better ideas in fundraising events that students would be interested in.
Most clubs that I went to in school required a list (or at least a number) of the people that came to each meeting (since they served food/snacks at most meetings and needed to know how much each club needed).
Such a system would also require that the schools trust the computers to keep accurate attendance. So, what are the chances that someone would notice if the number in the system and the number in class didn't match up? How secure are teacher computers that have access to that information? How many crackers are in public schools? This could be good for some slashdotters. Get credit for a class that the teacher never knew you were enrolled in. I'm not sure how often this kind of thing takes place (I assume that most crackers that do this never get caught), but it wouldn't be hard. At my old middle school I realized that nobody knew that the "sysop" needed a password (or more likely that it even existed). So for a while I had sysop powers over the network (it was some old terminal setup that probably hadn't been updated in years), but nothing to do with it (already had a 4.0 and perfect attendance).
Yes, because there is so much difference between a 17 and an 18 year old. (As for 21, I believe the logic was that if you can fight for your country in a war then you should at least be able to vote.) People gain experience and intellegence at different rates. I'd be for a citizenship test (preferably not something you could cram for) myself, but I just get irritated when I see people older than me assume that means that they are better than me. In all practicallity, the transision to being a full citizen is gradual. If minors are never given any freedom then when do they gain this "experience" that seperates them from adults? Experience can come from observation, but more often it comes from making decisions and learning from the consequences (good or bad). The think about children is that they are given the freedom to mess-up without screwing up their life for the most part. If you expect children to be mindlessly obedient, what happens when they reach the mystic age of 18? Herding children like animals is not educationally productive, and classes alone won't teach them what they need to know.
I don't buy that. This wasn't meant (I think) to be a supervisory aid - I think it was meant to be more of a failsafe.
Well, if it works then people will become reliant on it. At which point the teacher no longer needs to call out names and look at the students to take attendance? How long will it be before the teacher doesn't even bother getting to know the kids in their class?
That is a tricky one. I guess it depends on the specific details of how it was implemented, but I could certainly see where it would lead to problems.
Like a rat learning its way through a maze. No security system is perfect, and the kids will eventually figure out how to exploit it. Of course, this only applies if there is sufficient motivation to do so, but I could think of a few reasons a grade schooler would want to.
Totally disagree: this wasn't meant to protect against psycho mom, but I think it does help. If Jill student IS wearing her tag and "goes missing", her absence should be noticed immediately. Not that this is a reasonable argument for or against - nothing stops mom from picking up "her kid" in the current system or the RFID system for a "doctor's appointment" - in canada...
Well, the system isn't really designed for physical security. Going back to my first point, the teachers, right now, might notice that something is amiss if they know the child and the reason the parent is picking them up.
If kids are in public schools, that right is released by their parents.
Well, aren't all children required to go to school? Private schools are usually even more invasive when it comes to privacy, so I don't see how you can argue that. Also, it's my opinion that a person is entitled to their rights (even though privacy is a bit sketchy in the constitution) unless they themself choose to give them up. If parents could do this, they why not sell the kid to the circus or whatever?
There is no change from the current system to the RFID system in regards to this. At home they have (one hopes) parents. In school they have overseers.
That isn't necessarily a good thing though. With today's "sue anyone for anything" world, I practically felt like I was wearing one of these in school.
My guess is that it was someone who's completely against execution. (In this case it'd be kinda extreme, e.g. "Hey Bob, thanks for giving me a ride home... by the way, why are we slowing down?" "Oh, I'm just picking my kid up from school since it's on the way." "CRAP!!!") My biggest qualm about democracy is that it operates, essentially, at the average intellegence of its population. Unfortunately that isn't as high as it could (should?) be.
I think that it's meant to keep the parolee away from schools to reduce the temptation (if they wanted to spontaneously abduct a kid then they'd probably do it with one they met on the street or park or something). If they wanted to violate their parole though then they could just cut-off the GPS unit. I'm sure that would set-off an alarm, but they would already be on the run. Of course, without a GPS unit they can do that much easier, but AFAIK not many do.
Slashdot Mirror
And congratulations to Slashdot for breaking the gadgets list!
The service that you are most likely paying for in this case is military defense. You're getting a service, seeing as that we aren't under the threat of imminent invasion (for those of you who are about to bring up Iraq, don't; we all already know a ton of people disapprove). Keeping the public informed is probably a low second (or third or whatever) priority, as it should be. Afterall, is there any buring reason that Average Joe needs to know where our satellites or ships are? Curiosity is one thing, but it's not like you can act on the information (unless you're the type of person that they're trying to keep from knowing).
Come to think of it, the Command & Conquer line of games (excluding Generals) essentially can be played using only the mouse and left-clicking. As long as you can click units (depending on you're screen resolution, most are bigger than a systray icon). Like the parent said, the speed can also be adjusted if that's an issue. Other RTS might be a bit harder since each building/unit usually has its own menu and they insist on using left-clicking for half the options, and right-clicking for the other half (as a long-time C&C fan I detest this, but I guess I'm a minority).
My old school installed FilZip on all student laptops. That could open rar files (not to mention a ton of other formats).
I always had to use .ARJ, .BH, .LHA or whatever other obscure/unpopular format my compression program supported so I could e-mail executables to friends and computer science teachers. If I recall correctly, the virus scanner at my old school did remove all .exe (even renamed) files from just about any modern compression format you could think of (rar, zip, jar, cab).
Well, what scares me is that my mom got an e-mail from her sister the other day. The subject was "Pictures" and it didn't have a body. The only attachment was a 90kb executable file called something like "Picture It! Photos.exe". Turns out that it was a legitimate e-mail (after calling to confirm this) that decompressed three photos. I can see the logic behind sending self-extracting executables, but wouldn't it be simpler if there were never any common legitimate uses for sending executables through e-mail? I mean this would be trivial for a virus writer to imitate or piggy-back on. Now I can't just tell "normal people" to never open "exe" files in e-mail.
Yes, but that would be generic (installer programs have them all the time). The generic decompression part could decompress a decryption part that could decrypt the virus. The virus could reencrypt itself with a new (but supplied in the executable) encryption key and be off on its merry way. The only real way to see if an executable is a virus or not would be to run parts of its code. Even if you use a sandbox this wouldn't be the safest solution (antivirus-killing virus?). Also, like someone else said, the virus might just use some encryption scheme that took a long time to decrypt. That way it'd launch, show a couple funny pictures or whatever (what the user expects), and use the next 20 minutes of idle time to decrypt itself.
That's why my idiot cousin doesn't get my real address. That's for a few reasons really. The first is because of the reason you mentioned. The second is that my real address (myrealbox) is a novell test server that often goes down. I don't think it drops any mail, but that's why everything goes through gmail first. I also just recently added the gmail account, so I get the freedom to change my e-mail accounts and keep the same e-mail addresses. The last reason is for security. If nobody knows my real e-mail address (other than the tech-savvy people I send mail to) then they can't really impersonate me. Also, if someone did sign me up for something like that (and I haven't explained about how I give a different address to everyone) then I just give them a new one and block the old.
I just use cjb.net's subdomain forwarding to keep myself from getting spam. Anything @mysubdomain.cjb.net goes to me, so I give everybody a different e-mail address. That e-mail gets forwarded to my gmail inbox, which filters out mail sent to address that have been spammed in the past, and forwards the rest to my myrealbox.com address. A little complicated, but I never get any spam (well, maybe one message before I block the address it's sent to).
At my old high school we probably had 50 people sharing their music collections (it was a boarding school). I hardly ever needed to open Napster (this was ~5 years ago), because someone had already downloaded whatever I was interested in. Of course, some people put passwords on their shared folders, but it wasn't anything pqwak couldn't take care of.
Because this way I can create an image of the partition my user settings are on and another image of my system partition. That way, if Windows were to die then I could restore my system files without loosing too many settings. Or I could restore my settings to fix a software problem. It also helps to make my DVD-R backups managable. My system partition is 4.5 gb so it can fit on a single disc. My settings partition is 1 gb, and my programs partition is 13.5 gb (3 discs). I keep my swap file & temp directories on another 1 gb partition, documents on a 700 mb FAT-16 partition, and keep a 40 gb data drive (for downloads, media, and bigger stuff). I also have 4 other operating systems installed, so it's nice to be able to edit stuff on FAT-32 partitions (Firefox bookmarks) without loosing things like access permisions on my system drive.
Well, 'My Documents' is somewhere else entirely on my computer. (A nice 700 MB FAT-16 partition that other OSes can work with.) Also, the point of moving it was so that I could re-image *that* partition and restore my user settings/bookmarks to an earlier state. Or I could re-image my system partition to fix a problem and retain most of my settings.
Well, occasionally a stupid installion program will have said paths hard-coded into it (most don't), so I wouldn't do this to any computer that had a novice primary user/administrator. I personally prefer to be able to enter the director directly from My Computer, or by merely typing "V:" on run or command prompt. Typing 'cd "Documents and Settings"' or even 'cd doc*' gets quite annoying after a while. It also keeps path lengths managable. 'V:\Izomiac\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\' is (at least it seems) a lot shorter than 'C:\Documents and Settings\Izomiac\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\'. Shorter path lengths make displaying them and working with them much easier. It also confuses the heck out of people that insist on doing things for me on my computer.
If you do a registry search & replace (including renaming) for all variations of "C:\Documents and Settings" then you can change it to anything. You can even do this with Program Files. Of course, that messes-up the shortcuts in the start menu, but it works (there is no "Program Files" or "Documents and Settings" folders on my C: drive, I use P:\ and V:\ respectively). Now if I could only get rid of those pesky "System Volume Information" and "RECYCLER" folders on all my drives...
I wouldn't call it "unhackable" (even "unbreakable, which is what I assume they mean), but it takes skill to mess with it. My old school started using it my junior year. A restart completely removes any changes that were done (I deleted most of the windows directory to test it). Low level hard disk tools might do the trick, but it's possible that the software even catches that. Manually unloading it (from what I've heard) is rather difficult, and extremely difficult if you don't have bios access. What it does is intercept file system calls and write any changes to some other part of the drive. When the computer reboots the changes are erased (the original filesystem was never touched). One could probably unload the drivers that catch the filesystem calls, but that's well beyond most people.
Science is NOT based on popularity
And where do you think research grants come from? Which researcher would you give money to, the one that says he might be on the edge of proving a catastrophe is in the works, or the one who just did a study that suggested everything is fine?
I think mislabeled plutonium sitting on a shelf somewhere scares me a little more then an accounting error...
A fact huh? And what data is this based on? The average yearly temperatures as taken by weather stations? Would this be before or after the urban heat effect adjustment? And I thought people were still debated about exactly how much they should reduce the temperature by to adjust for the weather station's proximity to urban areas...
That depends entirely on the school, homeschool, private tutor, etc. There's a pretty big range form military schools to Waldorf schools.
True, but a lot of parents can't afford to send their children to private schools, and others don't live very close to one. If the public school does this then parents may have little choice but to erode their child's privacy.
I think that parents are responsible for protecting the rights of their children, and that children can not be made/deemed responsible for that burden. For better or for worse.
I agree that they are responsible for their child's rights, but there should definitely be certain things that they can't take away. IMHO a reasonable level of privacy is one of them. If you never give kids a chance to make their own decisions (even bad ones) then they'll never learn how to think for themselves in the "real world".
They do so routinely. See also Holywood, the olimpics, etc, etc.
Hence the reason I get irritated when I see a 6 year old violinist. Too many parents want to live out their own dreams through their children.
It's true that RFID has some good used, but most can be done without using it.
1) If a student was absent from class, automatically email the student the homework assignments for the day.
The attendance system should automatically do this whether a teacher took attendance or an RFID scanner did.
2) Log times when students enter and exit bathrooms, and share that data with the smoke alarm. Identify which students are potential druggies or smokers.
Pointing a camera at the bathroom door could effectively acomplish the same thing.
3) Add RFID scanners to the broom closets, and give teachers RFID badges too, to identify which teacher/students are performing fellatio
Hopefully this isn't too much of an issue at grade school, but I hear locks work quite well. =)
4) Use RFID to keep track of room usages for marketing purposes. For example, school clubs are generally hosted in various class rooms. Identifying popular club could lead to better ideas in fundraising events that students would be interested in.
Most clubs that I went to in school required a list (or at least a number) of the people that came to each meeting (since they served food/snacks at most meetings and needed to know how much each club needed).
Such a system would also require that the schools trust the computers to keep accurate attendance. So, what are the chances that someone would notice if the number in the system and the number in class didn't match up? How secure are teacher computers that have access to that information? How many crackers are in public schools? This could be good for some slashdotters. Get credit for a class that the teacher never knew you were enrolled in. I'm not sure how often this kind of thing takes place (I assume that most crackers that do this never get caught), but it wouldn't be hard. At my old middle school I realized that nobody knew that the "sysop" needed a password (or more likely that it even existed). So for a while I had sysop powers over the network (it was some old terminal setup that probably hadn't been updated in years), but nothing to do with it (already had a 4.0 and perfect attendance).
Yes, because there is so much difference between a 17 and an 18 year old. (As for 21, I believe the logic was that if you can fight for your country in a war then you should at least be able to vote.) People gain experience and intellegence at different rates. I'd be for a citizenship test (preferably not something you could cram for) myself, but I just get irritated when I see people older than me assume that means that they are better than me. In all practicallity, the transision to being a full citizen is gradual. If minors are never given any freedom then when do they gain this "experience" that seperates them from adults? Experience can come from observation, but more often it comes from making decisions and learning from the consequences (good or bad). The think about children is that they are given the freedom to mess-up without screwing up their life for the most part. If you expect children to be mindlessly obedient, what happens when they reach the mystic age of 18? Herding children like animals is not educationally productive, and classes alone won't teach them what they need to know.
I don't buy that. This wasn't meant (I think) to be a supervisory aid - I think it was meant to be more of a failsafe.
Well, if it works then people will become reliant on it. At which point the teacher no longer needs to call out names and look at the students to take attendance? How long will it be before the teacher doesn't even bother getting to know the kids in their class?
That is a tricky one. I guess it depends on the specific details of how it was implemented, but I could certainly see where it would lead to problems.
Like a rat learning its way through a maze. No security system is perfect, and the kids will eventually figure out how to exploit it. Of course, this only applies if there is sufficient motivation to do so, but I could think of a few reasons a grade schooler would want to.
Totally disagree: this wasn't meant to protect against psycho mom, but I think it does help. If Jill student IS wearing her tag and "goes missing", her absence should be noticed immediately. Not that this is a reasonable argument for or against - nothing stops mom from picking up "her kid" in the current system or the RFID system for a "doctor's appointment" - in canada...
Well, the system isn't really designed for physical security. Going back to my first point, the teachers, right now, might notice that something is amiss if they know the child and the reason the parent is picking them up.
If kids are in public schools, that right is released by their parents.
Well, aren't all children required to go to school? Private schools are usually even more invasive when it comes to privacy, so I don't see how you can argue that. Also, it's my opinion that a person is entitled to their rights (even though privacy is a bit sketchy in the constitution) unless they themself choose to give them up. If parents could do this, they why not sell the kid to the circus or whatever?
There is no change from the current system to the RFID system in regards to this. At home they have (one hopes) parents. In school they have overseers.
That isn't necessarily a good thing though. With today's "sue anyone for anything" world, I practically felt like I was wearing one of these in school.
My guess is that it was someone who's completely against execution. (In this case it'd be kinda extreme, e.g. "Hey Bob, thanks for giving me a ride home... by the way, why are we slowing down?" "Oh, I'm just picking my kid up from school since it's on the way." "CRAP!!!") My biggest qualm about democracy is that it operates, essentially, at the average intellegence of its population. Unfortunately that isn't as high as it could (should?) be.
I think that it's meant to keep the parolee away from schools to reduce the temptation (if they wanted to spontaneously abduct a kid then they'd probably do it with one they met on the street or park or something). If they wanted to violate their parole though then they could just cut-off the GPS unit. I'm sure that would set-off an alarm, but they would already be on the run. Of course, without a GPS unit they can do that much easier, but AFAIK not many do.