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User: emilv

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Comments · 91

  1. Abuse is slow too on German Court: Google Must Stop Ignoring Customer E-mails · · Score: 1

    I once e-mailed their abuse address when I worked at a web hosting provider. They had a bug in Gmail that made them send the exact same message hundreds of times per second, for days. We know this was a bug because the sender was one of our customers who had sent the e-mail to his own address with us, and now he got thousands of copies of it per minute. Something had apparently ended up in an infinite loop on Google's end.

    I obviously contacted the abuse address listed in WHOIS with this rather important message but when I didn't get a response within an hour we had to ban Gmail. Not everybody can say that they made that decision! (Eventually we unlocked everything but his sender address).

    Two WEEKS later I got a template reply with totally irrelevant links to their FAQ. I lost all respect for Google then and there. I thought that they would at least know how to be good netizens on the tech level but no.

  2. Re:Too complex on Autonomous Car Ethics: If a Crash Is Unavoidable, What Does It Hit? · · Score: 1

    With a good emergency broadcast channel you could get everyone around you involved in milliseconds. We should try to get the algorithms to work with local data only (and whatever info is in the emergency broadcast packet), and low-runtime algorithms. We might not be able to find the optimal soution but maybe we can find a solution that indeed minimizes accidents, inside that fraction of a second. Maybe just braking and steering away from the accident works in many scenarios? Because everyone steers away at the same time they leave room for each other without need for further coordination.

    The fun thing about automated cars is that even the worst-case scenarios should be at most as dangerous as if only humans were involved. So we can only make it better. Everything is more ethical than letting humans decide in realtime imo.

  3. One human and a computer on Grading Software Fooled By Nonsense Essay Generator · · Score: 1

    The solution might be to have a human sanity filter checking semantics and throwing out gibberish, and a computer grader doing the fair grading.

  4. Anonymous exams on Grading Software Fooled By Nonsense Essay Generator · · Score: 2

    Racism, sexism and other discrimination is quite effectively countered with anonymous grading. My university gave you a unique number before each exam and you put only that number on the sheets. Only afterwards did the administrators (not anyone involved in the course) look up and file the exam under your name. I found this helpful as a TA too because we really wanted to be fair both in grades and comments.

    You can still be biased by the handwriting but we tried to counter that ourselves. If someone in my TA group recognized the handwriting of someone they knew we made sure to let someone else in the group grade that exam.

  5. Re: wrong on New Attack Hijacks DNS Traffic From 300,000 Routers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The system used by most Swedish banks:

    * The bank website gives you a random number as a challenge
    * You input the number to a device together with your PIN (some banks also require you to insert your card into the device)
    * You get a new number from the device that you input on a web page

    The web pages are obviously encrypted with HTTPS using an EV-SSL certificate.

    It used to be that the challenge was an account number or an amount but that is no longer the case due to the possibility of a replay attack.

  6. Re:Laws server their purpose on Blogger Fined €3,000 for 'Publicizing' Files Found Through Google Search · · Score: 1

    This situation is nothing like that.

    Yes, it is. He found out that the resource required authorization and that he found a bug in that authorization. Before he downloaded the documents. He was well aware that he was not allowed to download those documents.

  7. Re:Hacker??!! on Blogger Fined €3,000 for 'Publicizing' Files Found Through Google Search · · Score: 2

    But does it apply to government employees?

    This is a relevant question regarding the damage done. Are government documents copyrightable in France? In Sweden where I live these kinds of documents are explicitly exempt from copyright and put into the public domain. Swedes can also request a copy of any government document not explicitly covered by confidentiality laws.

    But it is not entirely relevant if they argue that the crime is hacking into a computer system, which is usually covered by different laws altogether. So getting the documents in this way may be illegal regardless of copyright and confidentiality. Under Swedish law the act of getting access to computer resources you shouldn't have access to is the crime in this instance. My understanding of TFA is that the French law is similar in this regard, and that was the crime he was convicted for. Not copyright, but computer intrusion.

  8. Re:Proxy ? on Epic: A Privacy-Focused Web Browser · · Score: 3, Informative

    Indeed. And accessing using HTTPS isn't even guaranteeing anything in this browser since the proxy service and the browser is provided by the same party, so they can trivially add their own CA and sign certificates for whatever sites they want.

  9. Could have answered themselves on CipherCloud Invokes DMCA To Block Discussions of Its Crypto System · · Score: 1

    If they were doing secure encryption they could have just answered the question themselves. Since they instead went for silencing the critique, I guess the security of CipherCloud most be pretty bad.

  10. Not a fair use problem on Canadian Newspaper Charging $150 License Fee To Publish Excerpts · · Score: 1

    I do not believe this is a fair use problem. You can still quote the articles by just reading the text and typing it in yourself. Quotations are not meant to be large chunks anyway.

  11. Re:Ob "correct horse battery staple" on New 25-GPU Monster Devours Strong Passwords In Minutes · · Score: 1

    Why not? I think that is the responsibility of the user. You can indicate the password strength but please let me as a user use whatever password I want.

  12. Re:my password on New 25-GPU Monster Devours Strong Passwords In Minutes · · Score: 2

    This sounds vulnerable to a DoS attack, though. If I walk up to your house and enter a random pin a couple of times you are effectively locked out from your own home for up to an hour.

  13. Re:Cookieculler on Research To "Reveal the Unseen World of Cookies" · · Score: 2

    How is cookieculler different from setting a default policy in Firefox and then using the built-in whitelist in Firefox to give permissions for certain sites?

  14. Re:Debian packages still fubar'd on XBMC V11 Eden Has Been Released · · Score: 1

    The Debian packages are really strange for XBMC. First off the Linux instructions are aimed primarily at Ubuntu. Then the other problem is that there is some kind of a fork between the "official packages" for Ubuntu and the Debian packages provided on debian-multimedia.org, the latter not being up to date (only rc2 is available).

    ...

    Short of adding a Ubuntu PPA to my sources.list, I am not sure how I can get this thing installed on Debian, which is a bit annoying.

    I've compiled it myself for Debian, using the instructions from Compile XBMC for Linux. I've spent some hours figuring out which packages to install prior to compilation, but most of them is listed in the README.linux file (which you get when you checkout with git as part of the installation procedure).

    When you're done compiling, instead of doing a make install, use checkinstall to get a .deb package.

    The best thing about this is that you can run the latest code without waiting for a release. The code in the repository have always been very stable for me, and I've had access to most of the features in 11.0 since February. Once you've managed to do your own compile it's just a matter of git pull to get the latest changes downloaded and then doing a recompile and build a new package.

  15. Re:Trakt.com support on XBMC V11 Eden Has Been Released · · Score: 1

    I think it's like Last.fm for movies and TV shows. You install i plugin for your media player which tells Trakt.tv what you are watching and it suggests similar movies for you. At least that's what I figured out by reading the about page.

  16. Re:Blasphemy! on Scientists Work Towards Naturally Caffeine-Free Coffee · · Score: 1

    We sell sugar-free energy drinks in the cafeteria at my university, alongside a sugar-filled variant of the same brand. The sugar-free one is pretty popular. One guy even bought some candy at the same time as the sugar-free energy drink!

  17. Re:What a load of drivel on New Cable Designed To Deter Copper Thieves · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Maybe because "we" north European countries are part of the European union which makes it easy for people to travel between poor and rich countries.

    Note that I don't think it's the poor peoples fault. There's obviously some sort of organised crime utilising poor people for their own gains and this is made easier just because of the ease of travel, but that same ease of travel is a big win for other parts of society, and it's also fair to not bind people to the geographic region they happend to be born in. I'm sure americans have similar problems.

  18. Re:45% of revenues is particularly weird on Copyright License Fees Drive Pandora Out of Canada · · Score: 1

    I think it's fair for artists to get a big part of the revenue. What I don't think is fair is that the producers, who are themselves just middlemen, will take a large bit of the revenue. Artists taking 2/3 of your profit is therefore fair, IMO, because you are just a middleman as well.

  19. Re:Government accountability on Watching the IPRED Watchers In Sweden · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, but this is Sweden. The motto of our police force are something along the lines of "Raidin' The Pirate Bay and keepin' their servers forever". Thus, your comment are not at all inappropriate to describe Sweden.

  20. Re:April Fools on Slashdot Launches User Achievements · · Score: 1

    This is probably the worst comment ever.

  21. Re:What does this mean for their WinXP models? on OLPC Set To Dump x86 For Arm Chips In XO 2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    On the contrary, I know a few non-techie people that use The Gimp on Windows with a Wacom tablet. They are happy with The Gimp, both because it's free and because it's a good tool to work with.

  22. Re:I forget the movie or documentary on Inventor Builds Robot Wife · · Score: 1

    And in the middle you find us autistic persons that still gets laid.

  23. Re:In Soviet Sweden... on McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance · · Score: 1

    ... which, of course, includes e-mail between almost every Swedish person because most of us use Hotmail or Gmail.

  24. In Soviet Sweden... on McCain Supports Warrantless Domestic Surveillance · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In less than two weeks the Swedish government are going to vote for just this type of survelliance. If the propsed new law is implemented, they will connect new cables that will search through all data going over the border.

    They can, in theory, read every e-mail going over the border.

  25. Re:Lemme get this straight... on Promise of OOXML Oversight By ISO Falls Through · · Score: 1

    ... China?