This is why I like the "make your own security question" option some sites have. Things like, "who was your favorite teacher in High School", "What was the model of the first car you drove?", etc. are a lot harder for the average person to find out and tend to be easy to remember. I never liked the "what is your favorite book?" type question since that answer is mutable over time.
So, in your example, let's say you "don't care" that your account on Discovery's MythBusters forum is compromised and don't bother to change your password. Now "you" (or rather your account) threatens Grant, stalks Kary, and requests myths about gay midgets child porn. Now, obviously you didn't do it yourself. But it could make your life uncomfortable for awhile.
I do hope that all of the folks (not just the OP - there are many in this thread) that are saying "it doesn't matter, I'll just get another account if I want to use the service again." think about this and take steps to get the password changed or the account deleted.
I'm sure I am the "statistical noise" the GP mentioned but here are some I use daily (I work in IT, I have a "different" job in that I both code and create system images):
Scroll Lock - KVM "switch machines" key - used all day
F12 - PXE boot - used a lot
F1, F2, F10, F9 - Different machines use this for BIOS access - used some
Windows Key - used to access instant search on the start menu in Windows - used a lot
For the folks who mention "just hold down shift if you need to type a lot of caps" - if you do this the machine will often ask if you want to turn on "Sticky Keys" (yes, this can be disabled).
In the real world you could do something like this. First, build an air lock at the main door of the building. Seal all the windows, roof vents, and any other areas where gases could leak out. Replace the oxygen inside with nitrogen. Go in with a breathing apparatus (or a robot). Anything that looks dangerous - shoot a spray of liquid nitrogen at it. Carry it out through the airlock with tongs. Rinse, wash, repeat - over and over. I am sure I left out steps as I am far from knowledgeable about this - but you can see how expensive and dangerous it would be to try to make the large quantities of "whatever" as close to inert as possible so that they can be carried out in small amounts.
If you have Adobe Reader or Flash installed you absolutely DO get them by surfing the web. Go to a site where their ad network has gotten either hacked or just had a bad ad get by their "review" and it is a done deal. Turning on DEP for all processes, installing EMET (video on it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ff859539.aspx) and configuring it to protect acrord32.exe and your browser, installing Adobe Reader 10, keeping Flash up to date and using something like FlashBlock to control when Flash can run, etc. can all help out in this space. But for the average user who doesn't update Flash or Adobe Reader - they absolutely get infections just browsing the web. My boss and my brother in law both got a fake AV from reputable sites recently - the ad networks had served an Acrobat Reader exploit. I'll recommend MS Security Essentials as a free as in beer, low impact AV product. But I'd look into EMET if you haven't already.
Interestingly, seeing this reminded me that I had planned to install Adobe Reader X. I just went and did that and this time it didn't offer me or attempt to foist off on me any additional crap like the McAfee scan or any toolbars. It also didn't try to install any stupid down loader application. I thought perhaps Adobe was seeing the light for once. So I went back and checked again and found that they don't foist extra stuff off on you if you are using Chrome. If you are using Firefox or IE, they try to foist crap off on you (like the McAfee scan). Perhaps this just means they haven't developed any junk down loader add-ins for Chrome yet.
No, honestly I prefer the instant search to the old search. I often get the result I want when I am only part way through typing the query I thought I had to type. For example, I may have been planning to type something like 'soccer drills for U19 site:.edu' in (yes, I coached this year). Often times with instant, the result that I want may already be there when I get to say soccer drills. It depends on the topic, but often it does indeed save me time. I've yet to see it cost me time.
At work we have several standard models from which users (or their management) can choose from. A couple years ago we offered a very nice Lenovo T61p with a 1920x1200 display. I still have one of them as a test machine. Most of the people who ordered them wanted to send them back to us because "stuff is too small to read" (yes, for a good number of apps you can scale the display up but for many line of business applications you cannot). After awhile of this type of response we stopped offering anything over 1440x900 (which we now have in the Lenovo X201 and T410 series machines). While some folks have great vision and can benefit from the higher resolution / higher ppi / dpi displays, many (most?) business folks weren't able to reap that benefit. Perhaps that's why the manufacturers are loathe to put such displays into the 12" - 14" notebooks.
I saw the above and thought, "It would be interesting to see the output of two of these bots talking to each other." OK, I am sure it has been done before, but I still think it would be interesting to see what they ended up saying to each other and how quickly the conversation went from one thing to another completely unrelated subject.
On the smaller scale (home) end of that router thing - even my recently purchased Linksys wireless access point / router doesn't do IPv6. I needed (wanted) a dual radio model so I could segregate my 802.11n devices onto 5 GHz from the 802.11g only devices (which I left on 2.4 GHz). Doing so gets better throughput for the n devices. But I was unable to find an affordable model which both had two radios AND supported IPv6. I imagine I'll have to be upgrading this device way before it is well used just to get the IPv6 support. You'd think devices you buy now would all support IPv6 out of the box - but you do still have to be careful and check into it first.
That's my solution too: I have one "real" panel (a 20" 1600x1200 4x3 panel) and one "short screen" panel (22" 1680x1050 16x9) that is rotated 90 degrees. Word processing docs and web pages work great on the short screen (wide screen) when rotated. In fact, I am typing this post on the rotated screen right now.
Interesting. I've been to a couple of these type of theaters and seen first run movies. (Both theaters were in the Houston area and I live in California so I have only gone twice). The seating typically includes a narrow "table" in front of you to put your food / drink on and often has "office chairs" (roll around chairs) instead of fixed ones (I have seen both office chairs and fixed seats), but the bottom line is that people actually aren't as close to you as they are in the Cineplex type theaters. I didn't hear any distracting food noises over the movies at all. Both times it was a very good experience. I'm not really sure how someone eating, say some chicken strips, makes all that much more noise than someone eating popcorn and candy though anyway.
Actually only some of the exploits in Acrobat Reader have been patched. According to the latest security bulletin from Adobe, reader 9.3.4 has critical vulnerabilities and they will release a patch the week of Oct. 4th. So unfortunately you can still get hit with certain Reader/PDF exploits by visiting a site.
There seems to be a polarization of views on this: some (many? here anyway) hate it, others really really like it. I'm in the middle ground. I like being able so simply type "w" and have the weather for my location show up instead of having to type in something like "weather.com" zip code enter or keeping an iGoogle page open. It is much faster for me to do movie time searches too, because it generally displays the times for the movie I want at the theater I want BEFORE I have finished typing the name of the movie (I'll often only get halfway through typing the name in). That is obviously more efficient for me than having to type the whole thing and press enter (or click search).
Other times I will agree it brings back more noise than anything - especially on the occasions where your intended search phrase starts with pretty generic terms and progresses to more specific. I think my main takeaway from that though is that I need to learn to search more efficiently using instant search - perhaps starting my query with the more specific terms. For example, with the old search I could have blithely typed in a query like "Internet Explorer issue with Kerberos using CNAME for SPN on Windows 7". With instant search it would be better to type these in a different order like "Kerberos CNAME Windows 7" and I would probably already have my answer in the top couple of results at that point. So perhaps I just need to get more used to it - modify my behavior to take advantage of the power of instant search (and the prediction engine it uses) and eventually move from the "sort of ambivalent, but it has its uses" camp into the "I really like it" camp.
While I will agree you need good chairs, there is no reason to make people sit for hours at a time. We use sit-stand desks (they have a couple of buttons - three presets you can set and a up and down button). People can freely choose to sit or stand at will during their shift. Ergonomics work a lot better when you break up static posture.
How exactly is it just as easy? With RFID the card can stay in my wallet. It can stay in my Wife's purse (she probably can't even find it in there and it still works). With bar code you have to take the card out and optically scan it. That is not even close to as easy and convenient. I'll agree it is much more secure since it is probably impossible for someone to optically scan your card while it is in you wallet whereas with RFID anyone can try to read the card as long as it is in range and isn't in a "Faraday bag".
Although the design of IPv6 discourages the use of NAT it does not actually prevent it. So if you want a NAT router to keep network wormable flaws away from the OS you can still do it. You might give up some amount of functionality doing that, but it can certainly still be done.
Note that you might need to wait for someone to ship a NAT router that does IPv6 though. I haven't researched whether they are available or not yet.
I always see that claim that a hosts file works on every OS and every browser. People always seem to forget that if you are using a proxy server (for example at work), the hosts file is ignored. The proxy server controls what the address is. So the hosts file thing works perfectly (and I use it) at home where I don't have to go through a proxy. But it is useless at work (and yes, there are things I would like to block there too - and random facebook and twitter buttons on pages are indeed some of them).
I guess the better question is, "what should we be doing with our phones that we are not?". We all have our own usage patterns. My phone is the Motorola Droid on Verizon. The last couple of months I have used 185 MB and 169 MB. What do I do on it?
Contact sync
Read news
Get movie info (Flixster and IMDB)
Use My Tracks to upload hike info
Some use of Pandora (not a lot)
Google voice (for texting; the calls use phone minutes not data, but the texting uses data)
Google Maps and Places
I'm sure there are more things, but I don't use anything else all that often. So, what do you think I should be using it for?
I seem to recall reading that the out-gassing is assumed to fade over time (after several close passes to the sun) after which the bright tail and nimbus dissipate leaving a fairly low albedo object that, while still a comet, is hard to find. If that's really true, then "burned out comets" - still in their easily perturbed, long elliptical orbits would present a lot of danger.
You know, the NYT seems to have some sort of a "sign up" wall days (free sign up). I have been using the News and Weather app that is standard on Android 2.1 to view news stories on my phone. Unfortunately, many of the stories lately seem to be NYT links. When you follow these, you get maybe a paragraph or two of article followed by a "sign up for free to see the rest of the article and all our other stuff". That's not quite as annoying as a pay wall, but it isn't something I am going to do. Creating an account and typing it into a phone is a bit too difficult to make it worth while to me. So now when I see an article that is on NYT I just look elsewhere.
Dropped calls really depend on a lot of factors. It sounds like you've been lucky and have great coverage. I live on the edge of good coverage and have lost dozens of calls along a main road right between large single family neighborhoods. I used to have ATT (I have Verizon now and their signal is better at my specific location) and while on ATT in my home office I would often lose a call just moving my head. I work from home one day a week so the cell phone is important as I get a lot of conference calls. I finally came to the conclusion that sitting the phone on the desk and not touching it and using a bluetooth headset was the way to go. Never dropped a call that way. This was almost a year ago though as I have been on Verizon since the Motorola Droid came out in November of 2009. ATT and my specific model of phone (old winmo phone - not iPhone) may not have that same problem today. Historically it certainly HAS happened to a lot of folks though. Lost calls for many of us are just part of using a mobile phone.
IBM plans to roll it out to employees on new computers and will encourage its staff of 400,000 to use it on their existing systems.
Sounds like this will be a slow adoption if they are only setting it as the default browser on new computer systems and simply "encouraging" their installed base to use it. It probably does make sense to go slow like this with it, but it doesn't make for a sensational headline to say "IBM to slowly roll out firefox as the default browser as they replace hardware; encourages existing users to use firefox too". Anyway, hopefully this does result in more robust corporate deployment tools for firefox as IBM spends more on it. Because frankly the ability to deploy and manage it in a large corporate environment now pretty much sucks compared to Internet Explorer. That corporate manageability is really the only thing that has been missing from firefox.
Or, it could show you advertisements during your trip (maybe the teleportation includes a method and a system whereby the user is detained in a cocoon-like sensory deprivation node where the only thing they can see or hear are advertisements for, by way of example, 5 minutes, after which time they are transported forthwith to their ultimate destination). The length of time of the adverts would depend upon the amount of money said user "bid" for the trip and the amount of money advertisers were willing to pay for ads uniquely targeted to the specific traveler. We'll call it Google World Traveler and it will initially be available in the US only.
actually, in the case given, he could be a friend of a friend of Sam if Sam has his posts and photo uploads set to "friends of friends". All the incriminating stuff was posted by Sam, not Brian. And anyone in that chain can (a friend of a friend of Sam) can potentially make the information more visible depending on their settings and Sam's settings.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I like the "make your own security question" option some sites have. Things like, "who was your favorite teacher in High School", "What was the model of the first car you drove?", etc. are a lot harder for the average person to find out and tend to be easy to remember. I never liked the "what is your favorite book?" type question since that answer is mutable over time.
So, in your example, let's say you "don't care" that your account on Discovery's MythBusters forum is compromised and don't bother to change your password. Now "you" (or rather your account) threatens Grant, stalks Kary, and requests myths about gay midgets child porn. Now, obviously you didn't do it yourself. But it could make your life uncomfortable for awhile.
I do hope that all of the folks (not just the OP - there are many in this thread) that are saying "it doesn't matter, I'll just get another account if I want to use the service again." think about this and take steps to get the password changed or the account deleted.
I'm sure I am the "statistical noise" the GP mentioned but here are some I use daily (I work in IT, I have a "different" job in that I both code and create system images):
Scroll Lock - KVM "switch machines" key - used all day
F12 - PXE boot - used a lot
F1, F2, F10, F9 - Different machines use this for BIOS access - used some
Windows Key - used to access instant search on the start menu in Windows - used a lot
For the folks who mention "just hold down shift if you need to type a lot of caps" - if you do this the machine will often ask if you want to turn on "Sticky Keys" (yes, this can be disabled).
In the real world you could do something like this. First, build an air lock at the main door of the building. Seal all the windows, roof vents, and any other areas where gases could leak out. Replace the oxygen inside with nitrogen. Go in with a breathing apparatus (or a robot). Anything that looks dangerous - shoot a spray of liquid nitrogen at it. Carry it out through the airlock with tongs. Rinse, wash, repeat - over and over. I am sure I left out steps as I am far from knowledgeable about this - but you can see how expensive and dangerous it would be to try to make the large quantities of "whatever" as close to inert as possible so that they can be carried out in small amounts.
If you have Adobe Reader or Flash installed you absolutely DO get them by surfing the web. Go to a site where their ad network has gotten either hacked or just had a bad ad get by their "review" and it is a done deal. Turning on DEP for all processes, installing EMET (video on it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/ff859539.aspx) and configuring it to protect acrord32.exe and your browser, installing Adobe Reader 10, keeping Flash up to date and using something like FlashBlock to control when Flash can run, etc. can all help out in this space. But for the average user who doesn't update Flash or Adobe Reader - they absolutely get infections just browsing the web. My boss and my brother in law both got a fake AV from reputable sites recently - the ad networks had served an Acrobat Reader exploit. I'll recommend MS Security Essentials as a free as in beer, low impact AV product. But I'd look into EMET if you haven't already.
Interestingly, seeing this reminded me that I had planned to install Adobe Reader X. I just went and did that and this time it didn't offer me or attempt to foist off on me any additional crap like the McAfee scan or any toolbars. It also didn't try to install any stupid down loader application. I thought perhaps Adobe was seeing the light for once. So I went back and checked again and found that they don't foist extra stuff off on you if you are using Chrome. If you are using Firefox or IE, they try to foist crap off on you (like the McAfee scan). Perhaps this just means they haven't developed any junk down loader add-ins for Chrome yet.
No, honestly I prefer the instant search to the old search. I often get the result I want when I am only part way through typing the query I thought I had to type. For example, I may have been planning to type something like 'soccer drills for U19 site:.edu' in (yes, I coached this year). Often times with instant, the result that I want may already be there when I get to say soccer drills. It depends on the topic, but often it does indeed save me time. I've yet to see it cost me time.
At work we have several standard models from which users (or their management) can choose from. A couple years ago we offered a very nice Lenovo T61p with a 1920x1200 display. I still have one of them as a test machine. Most of the people who ordered them wanted to send them back to us because "stuff is too small to read" (yes, for a good number of apps you can scale the display up but for many line of business applications you cannot). After awhile of this type of response we stopped offering anything over 1440x900 (which we now have in the Lenovo X201 and T410 series machines). While some folks have great vision and can benefit from the higher resolution / higher ppi / dpi displays, many (most?) business folks weren't able to reap that benefit. Perhaps that's why the manufacturers are loathe to put such displays into the 12" - 14" notebooks.
I saw the above and thought, "It would be interesting to see the output of two of these bots talking to each other." OK, I am sure it has been done before, but I still think it would be interesting to see what they ended up saying to each other and how quickly the conversation went from one thing to another completely unrelated subject.
On the smaller scale (home) end of that router thing - even my recently purchased Linksys wireless access point / router doesn't do IPv6. I needed (wanted) a dual radio model so I could segregate my 802.11n devices onto 5 GHz from the 802.11g only devices (which I left on 2.4 GHz). Doing so gets better throughput for the n devices. But I was unable to find an affordable model which both had two radios AND supported IPv6. I imagine I'll have to be upgrading this device way before it is well used just to get the IPv6 support. You'd think devices you buy now would all support IPv6 out of the box - but you do still have to be careful and check into it first.
That's my solution too: I have one "real" panel (a 20" 1600x1200 4x3 panel) and one "short screen" panel (22" 1680x1050 16x9) that is rotated 90 degrees. Word processing docs and web pages work great on the short screen (wide screen) when rotated. In fact, I am typing this post on the rotated screen right now.
Interesting. I've been to a couple of these type of theaters and seen first run movies. (Both theaters were in the Houston area and I live in California so I have only gone twice). The seating typically includes a narrow "table" in front of you to put your food / drink on and often has "office chairs" (roll around chairs) instead of fixed ones (I have seen both office chairs and fixed seats), but the bottom line is that people actually aren't as close to you as they are in the Cineplex type theaters. I didn't hear any distracting food noises over the movies at all. Both times it was a very good experience. I'm not really sure how someone eating, say some chicken strips, makes all that much more noise than someone eating popcorn and candy though anyway.
Actually only some of the exploits in Acrobat Reader have been patched. According to the latest security bulletin from Adobe, reader 9.3.4 has critical vulnerabilities and they will release a patch the week of Oct. 4th. So unfortunately you can still get hit with certain Reader/PDF exploits by visiting a site.
There seems to be a polarization of views on this: some (many? here anyway) hate it, others really really like it. I'm in the middle ground. I like being able so simply type "w" and have the weather for my location show up instead of having to type in something like "weather.com" zip code enter or keeping an iGoogle page open. It is much faster for me to do movie time searches too, because it generally displays the times for the movie I want at the theater I want BEFORE I have finished typing the name of the movie (I'll often only get halfway through typing the name in). That is obviously more efficient for me than having to type the whole thing and press enter (or click search).
Other times I will agree it brings back more noise than anything - especially on the occasions where your intended search phrase starts with pretty generic terms and progresses to more specific. I think my main takeaway from that though is that I need to learn to search more efficiently using instant search - perhaps starting my query with the more specific terms. For example, with the old search I could have blithely typed in a query like "Internet Explorer issue with Kerberos using CNAME for SPN on Windows 7". With instant search it would be better to type these in a different order like "Kerberos CNAME Windows 7" and I would probably already have my answer in the top couple of results at that point. So perhaps I just need to get more used to it - modify my behavior to take advantage of the power of instant search (and the prediction engine it uses) and eventually move from the "sort of ambivalent, but it has its uses" camp into the "I really like it" camp.
While I will agree you need good chairs, there is no reason to make people sit for hours at a time. We use sit-stand desks (they have a couple of buttons - three presets you can set and a up and down button). People can freely choose to sit or stand at will during their shift. Ergonomics work a lot better when you break up static posture.
How exactly is it just as easy? With RFID the card can stay in my wallet. It can stay in my Wife's purse (she probably can't even find it in there and it still works). With bar code you have to take the card out and optically scan it. That is not even close to as easy and convenient. I'll agree it is much more secure since it is probably impossible for someone to optically scan your card while it is in you wallet whereas with RFID anyone can try to read the card as long as it is in range and isn't in a "Faraday bag".
Although the design of IPv6 discourages the use of NAT it does not actually prevent it. So if you want a NAT router to keep network wormable flaws away from the OS you can still do it. You might give up some amount of functionality doing that, but it can certainly still be done.
Note that you might need to wait for someone to ship a NAT router that does IPv6 though. I haven't researched whether they are available or not yet.
I always see that claim that a hosts file works on every OS and every browser. People always seem to forget that if you are using a proxy server (for example at work), the hosts file is ignored. The proxy server controls what the address is. So the hosts file thing works perfectly (and I use it) at home where I don't have to go through a proxy. But it is useless at work (and yes, there are things I would like to block there too - and random facebook and twitter buttons on pages are indeed some of them).
I guess the better question is, "what should we be doing with our phones that we are not?". We all have our own usage patterns. My phone is the Motorola Droid on Verizon. The last couple of months I have used 185 MB and 169 MB. What do I do on it?
Contact sync
Read news
Get movie info (Flixster and IMDB)
Use My Tracks to upload hike info
Some use of Pandora (not a lot)
Google voice (for texting; the calls use phone minutes not data, but the texting uses data)
Google Maps and Places
I'm sure there are more things, but I don't use anything else all that often. So, what do you think I should be using it for?
I seem to recall reading that the out-gassing is assumed to fade over time (after several close passes to the sun) after which the bright tail and nimbus dissipate leaving a fairly low albedo object that, while still a comet, is hard to find. If that's really true, then "burned out comets" - still in their easily perturbed, long elliptical orbits would present a lot of danger.
You know, the NYT seems to have some sort of a "sign up" wall days (free sign up). I have been using the News and Weather app that is standard on Android 2.1 to view news stories on my phone. Unfortunately, many of the stories lately seem to be NYT links. When you follow these, you get maybe a paragraph or two of article followed by a "sign up for free to see the rest of the article and all our other stuff". That's not quite as annoying as a pay wall, but it isn't something I am going to do. Creating an account and typing it into a phone is a bit too difficult to make it worth while to me. So now when I see an article that is on NYT I just look elsewhere.
Dropped calls really depend on a lot of factors. It sounds like you've been lucky and have great coverage. I live on the edge of good coverage and have lost dozens of calls along a main road right between large single family neighborhoods. I used to have ATT (I have Verizon now and their signal is better at my specific location) and while on ATT in my home office I would often lose a call just moving my head. I work from home one day a week so the cell phone is important as I get a lot of conference calls. I finally came to the conclusion that sitting the phone on the desk and not touching it and using a bluetooth headset was the way to go. Never dropped a call that way. This was almost a year ago though as I have been on Verizon since the Motorola Droid came out in November of 2009. ATT and my specific model of phone (old winmo phone - not iPhone) may not have that same problem today. Historically it certainly HAS happened to a lot of folks though. Lost calls for many of us are just part of using a mobile phone.
IBM plans to roll it out to employees on new computers and will encourage its staff of 400,000 to use it on their existing systems.
Sounds like this will be a slow adoption if they are only setting it as the default browser on new computer systems and simply "encouraging" their installed base to use it. It probably does make sense to go slow like this with it, but it doesn't make for a sensational headline to say "IBM to slowly roll out firefox as the default browser as they replace hardware; encourages existing users to use firefox too".
Anyway, hopefully this does result in more robust corporate deployment tools for firefox as IBM spends more on it. Because frankly the ability to deploy and manage it in a large corporate environment now pretty much sucks compared to Internet Explorer. That corporate manageability is really the only thing that has been missing from firefox.
Or, it could show you advertisements during your trip (maybe the teleportation includes a method and a system whereby the user is detained in a cocoon-like sensory deprivation node where the only thing they can see or hear are advertisements for, by way of example, 5 minutes, after which time they are transported forthwith to their ultimate destination). The length of time of the adverts would depend upon the amount of money said user "bid" for the trip and the amount of money advertisers were willing to pay for ads uniquely targeted to the specific traveler. We'll call it Google World Traveler and it will initially be available in the US only.
actually, in the case given, he could be a friend of a friend of Sam if Sam has his posts and photo uploads set to "friends of friends". All the incriminating stuff was posted by Sam, not Brian. And anyone in that chain can (a friend of a friend of Sam) can potentially make the information more visible depending on their settings and Sam's settings.