I've had my identity stolen twice. Once for UC Berkeley's "snatched laptop" that made the news a while back, and more recently a desktop from Georgia Tech. I applied to both schools (UC in 2003, GT in 1999) but attended neither. But they still held on to my personal information for their own convenience. Furthermore, I wasn't informed of the theft by either school until weeks after it had taken place (so in the mean time while I was unaware, my credit could have been destroyed). A few weeks ago, someone hacked into the UT Austin business school computers and snatched information from current and former faculty, staff, and students. A professor I am currently taking an intellectual property course with was talking about it and how he has all his info on fraud alert right now. The school negotiated with an identity protection service to offer him a major (66%) discount, but he's still paying something like $20 or $70 a year for this (I forget what amount he said exactly).
Anyway to answer your question: IMO (and IANAL), the court would not force the 3rd party who's information was stolen to compensate your ID theft protection service, should you take it to a small claims court. However, if your credit record was destroyed as a result, I think you would have a better chance at winning some financial compensation for your case. So the best short-term answer I guess would be: put ID fraud alert on ASAP and unless you have spare time and a thirst for absolute justice, don't take it to court (although you could ask them nicely to compensate you, at least partially if not fully).
The long-term solution here people, is to get a god damn law passed. This is absolutely ridiuclous how much this occurs, and its usually because of poor/inadequate/incompetent security on the fault of the 3rd party containing the info. I am actually very interested in proposing such a bill to our legislative branch, but I'm an engineer and a grad student, and I have little time to spare right now. If someone is interested in moving this forward, let me know about it because I would like to do what I can to be involved. I believe such a bill should cover:
1. The circumstances under which a company/school/whatever may contain your personal information
2. The length of time under which they may retain that information (with mandatory and permanent removal after a given period of time)
3. A definition of the minimum necessary security measures a party must take when retaining another's personal information
4. Explicitly stating to the person when they will retain their information, for how long, and what security measures they will take to protect it
5. In the case of theft, if parts 1-4 are not satisfied, the party owes full monetary compensation for providing ID theft protection, and also granting the person the right to choose what ID protection service and what level of protection they want
6. In the case of theft, if parts 1-4 are satisfied, the party owes a minimal monetary compensation for ID theft protection that meets certain stated requirements.
Wow, that's an awesome site. Thanks for the link.:)
A couple months ago at my workplace, I proposed using a wiki in my group because we were having a lot of problems organizing our information and keeping it updated in a timely manner. My proposal was well received by the group and we went with Twiki , because it had already been setup by the IT department. Personally, I would not recommend twiki to anyone, because the syntax is horrible and the interface is very unintuitive (among a host of other downsides). The only thing I like about Twiki is that it has a little calender pop-up so that you can easily select dates, and it allows for scriptable tables so you can specify what types of data should be entered in which columns.
For my open-source project, we choose to use MediaWiki and started using it extensively in January. It has been a great help in organizing our information so that developers/artists/composers can easily find information that they need to know, rather than doing a deep search through the forums. The only major problem with MediaWiki that we have had is that by default, it doesn't support restricted access to certain pages/groups like twiki does natively, but with a quick patch we were able to get that feature.
Between Twiki and MediaWiki, I would recommend MediaWiki for just about anyone in any situation over the cumbersome and poorly managed Twiki.
Exactly what I was thinking. While I think ninja's are totally awesome like every other mammal on the planet, I think we all agree that not all nerds are also mammals.....
Oh, god damn it. I just had a terrible vision of RMS in skin-tight ninja gear carrying out an assasination mission in Redmond. I think my only option is to commit seppuku at this point.
It contains no technical information or interactivity whatsoever. No status bar information, no ability to view page source, just screen grabs of random web sites.
This is a completely invalid, unsound test, as there is no technical way to determine the presence of malicious software simply by looking at a page as it initially loads in the absence of any ability to interact with it or at the very freaking least scroll up or down or hover a mouse... sheesh...
Your criticism is completely valid, and for the large part I agree with you. However, how many users out there browsing the web would actually perform all of those safe checks (or even just one) if they had the ability to? The answer: probably not very many. Since we geeks typically maintain contacts/friendships with other geeks, we sometimes forget about the "normal" people out there whose technical apex in computer savyness is that they can check their own e-mail. I would venture a guess that a vast majority of web users out there would only use a web site's appearance to evaluate its credibility and level of malicious intent.
But I digress, I usually base my own evaluation of unknown sites based off of only their appearance as well. Since I run Linux + Firefox, I have become rather complacent about spyware/adware installing themselves on my system unbeknowest to me.;)
Actually an old friend of mine who went to a community college in Phoenix once told my friends and I something interesting. If you're on the campus computers ther and it determines that you are looking at porn, it will play the following (loud) message on the computer's speakers:
Woohoo! I'm looking at PORN! Yeah, alright! This is great!
Or something like that anyway. I'm still not sure if I really believe that though. It seems highly unprofessional for a college to do.
Google Voice: Please state what it is that you would like to search for.
MAN (whispering):.....porn
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (whispering):...porn
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (whispering): porn
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (shouting): PORN! I want to search for PORN you stupid ass computer! (stares from every person in the vicinity)
GV:...Search item confirmed. Commencing search for "porn".
Just think of all the entertaining stories that wide-spread voice recognition will bring us ^_~
I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean? I have the notion that it means something different to everyone. I've been exclusively running Linux on my desktop for over 3 years, and exclusively on my laptop for over one year. I have a Linux system at my workplace, and so does almost everyone else on my floor. Are there occasionally problems with running Linux on my desktop (including problems related to the fact that I'm not running Windows)? Yes, of course there are. The amount of problems may decrease, but will never be fully eliminated (IMHO). I can usually find a detour or alternative to the problems that I face now though, so its not a huge deal. And I can state for a fact that the amount of time I spend fixing problems with my Linux desktop is much less than the amount of time I used to spend solving similar problems on my former Windows machine.
So I consider Linux is already "desktop ready" for me. I think that for the most part, regular people can do just fine if Ubuntu or another user-friendly distro is completely setup for them and they are given maybe a 30-minute tutorial on how to access the web, e-mail, etc. So who are we talking about here? Who does Linux have to be "ready" for to be called desktop ready? Those idiots that call in to tech support asking which key is the any key? The elderly who don't even know what a mouse is? Or just your normal, average computer user? And if so, who is a normal, aveage computer user anyway?
Sorry for the early morning rant, but this term has been bothering me for quite some time.:p
Assuming they do find water, I can't help but wonder what the quality of it would be. Would it be drinkable? Would it need to go through a 24 stage modern filtration system? What about the posibility of consumers of the water getting moon cooties? You gotta be careful about moon cooties...>_>
What if you have the audio muted or really silent, or the thief plugs in headphones? What if the laptop goes into sleep mode? What if the battery runs out, or, if the laptop is plugged in, they unplug it and wait for the battery to die?
There are too many ways around this so called "security" mechanism to be anything more than a gimmick. Although I will credit it because a theif that has no idea about or previous experience with this software is going to get caught red handed.:)
You can sign it here: http://www.dearaol.com/. MoveOn.org (political action group) is renouncing this absurb proposal by AOL as well. So it's not just strictly tech companies that are opposed to this.
What I would like to know is why all this super-sensitive information is riding around in everyone's laptops. Now, I'm sure it's a great convenience for Mr. HR rep who for some reason needs to be able to look up any employee's SS# on the fly, but I think the privacy rights of the thousands of customers/employees on that laptop are much more important than the convenience of one employee. I have had my identity stolen twice in the past 12 months. One from UC Berkely's laptop theft, and another from Georgia Tech (both universities I applied to at some point, and I didn't attend either one).
Why don't people store this kind of information on encrypted, hard-to-walk-away-with data servers? If an HR rep or some other employee needs access to the information, they should have to remotely login to the server and access the data, and not just keep the entire data sitting unencrytped on their personal machines at home. Seriously. I'm to the point where I think that there should be laws established in the US government that mandate how companies/institutions need to handle and protect this kind of data.
I read something related to this in a neurobiology article back in October. See this link.
For the lazy, some scientists in Singapore and Asia activated a flourescent green protein in rat males and bred them with normal rat females. After giving birth, the mother rats had neuronal cells with the protein expressed in their brains, making it clear that those cells formerly belonged to their fetuses. And check out this quote:
"Moreover, after the scientists chemically injured the mouse brains, nearly six times as many fetal cells made their way to damaged areas than elsewhere, suggesting the cells could be responding to molecular distress signals released by the brain."
Seems like it makes for a pretty damn good argument for this theory to me.
I've already seen these things in action in Command and Conquer Generals. Can't they come up with some original designs for tools of war anymore instead of just copying them from video games? Sheesh.
Pshhh, big deal. This has already done before by Alan Greenspan, my hero. The only difference is he didn't have some big PR campaign. He's old school, and just slapped those bitches up the side of the head without any warning at all.
What, you don't believe me? See this historical proof and prove it to yourself. Alan Greenspan is a l33t h4xor, that fact is undeniable!
I tried to watch that 60 minutes video before with Firefox + mplayer plugin, but all it lets me watch is the damn commercial before the actual content. (It stops after the commericial and then when I hit play again, it just brings me back to the commercial). Does anyone know how to get around this? I'm really interested to watch this video as well.:(
Yet interestingly enough, all of those who have known to lay their eyes on the code have a 99.6% chance of one of the following scenarios occuring in the proceeding 10 days:
I agree. It's probably some cutesy thing that the web designer/admin had in mind since Valentine's day is coming up I guess. What a freaking moron. Everyone knows that all nerds are alone on Valentine's day, even the ones that are married. (-_-)
I don't know if darkness is deadly, but it can cause an imbalance in your hormone levels which can lead to depression. If you live way up north or way down south where there is much less sunlight during certain seasons, you are more likely to become depressed. It has to do with the way the brain regulates hormones during the circadian rhythm (24hr day/night cycle). So while darkness probably didn't end this man's life (my bet is it was the instant noodles...) it likely pushed him into a more depressed state.
Shit, what the hell am I doing posting on Slashdot. I have a final in less than two hours
Anyone bother to take a look at the date of the article? November 2004. I thought something was fishy and I was right; I already read this last year. In fact, I might have been linked to the page from slashdot (I can't recall) so this could be a dupe story too.
To the editors: please check the dates of the articles you submit. It's not "News for Nerds" if it happened over 12 months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had my identity stolen twice. Once for UC Berkeley's "snatched laptop" that made the news a while back, and more recently a desktop from Georgia Tech. I applied to both schools (UC in 2003, GT in 1999) but attended neither. But they still held on to my personal information for their own convenience. Furthermore, I wasn't informed of the theft by either school until weeks after it had taken place (so in the mean time while I was unaware, my credit could have been destroyed). A few weeks ago, someone hacked into the UT Austin business school computers and snatched information from current and former faculty, staff, and students. A professor I am currently taking an intellectual property course with was talking about it and how he has all his info on fraud alert right now. The school negotiated with an identity protection service to offer him a major (66%) discount, but he's still paying something like $20 or $70 a year for this (I forget what amount he said exactly).
Anyway to answer your question: IMO (and IANAL), the court would not force the 3rd party who's information was stolen to compensate your ID theft protection service, should you take it to a small claims court. However, if your credit record was destroyed as a result, I think you would have a better chance at winning some financial compensation for your case. So the best short-term answer I guess would be: put ID fraud alert on ASAP and unless you have spare time and a thirst for absolute justice, don't take it to court (although you could ask them nicely to compensate you, at least partially if not fully).
The long-term solution here people, is to get a god damn law passed. This is absolutely ridiuclous how much this occurs, and its usually because of poor/inadequate/incompetent security on the fault of the 3rd party containing the info. I am actually very interested in proposing such a bill to our legislative branch, but I'm an engineer and a grad student, and I have little time to spare right now. If someone is interested in moving this forward, let me know about it because I would like to do what I can to be involved. I believe such a bill should cover:
1. The circumstances under which a company/school/whatever may contain your personal information
2. The length of time under which they may retain that information (with mandatory and permanent removal after a given period of time)
3. A definition of the minimum necessary security measures a party must take when retaining another's personal information
4. Explicitly stating to the person when they will retain their information, for how long, and what security measures they will take to protect it
5. In the case of theft, if parts 1-4 are not satisfied, the party owes full monetary compensation for providing ID theft protection, and also granting the person the right to choose what ID protection service and what level of protection they want
6. In the case of theft, if parts 1-4 are satisfied, the party owes a minimal monetary compensation for ID theft protection that meets certain stated requirements.
How's that for a start?
Wow, that's an awesome site. Thanks for the link. :)
A couple months ago at my workplace, I proposed using a wiki in my group because we were having a lot of problems organizing our information and keeping it updated in a timely manner. My proposal was well received by the group and we went with Twiki , because it had already been setup by the IT department. Personally, I would not recommend twiki to anyone, because the syntax is horrible and the interface is very unintuitive (among a host of other downsides). The only thing I like about Twiki is that it has a little calender pop-up so that you can easily select dates, and it allows for scriptable tables so you can specify what types of data should be entered in which columns.
For my open-source project, we choose to use MediaWiki and started using it extensively in January. It has been a great help in organizing our information so that developers/artists/composers can easily find information that they need to know, rather than doing a deep search through the forums. The only major problem with MediaWiki that we have had is that by default, it doesn't support restricted access to certain pages/groups like twiki does natively, but with a quick patch we were able to get that feature.
Between Twiki and MediaWiki, I would recommend MediaWiki for just about anyone in any situation over the cumbersome and poorly managed Twiki.
Exactly what I was thinking. While I think ninja's are totally awesome like every other mammal on the planet, I think we all agree that not all nerds are also mammals.....
Oh, god damn it. I just had a terrible vision of RMS in skin-tight ninja gear carrying out an assasination mission in Redmond. I think my only option is to commit seppuku at this point.
It contains no technical information or interactivity whatsoever. No status bar information, no ability to view page source, just screen grabs of random web sites.
;)
This is a completely invalid, unsound test, as there is no technical way to determine the presence of malicious software simply by looking at a page as it initially loads in the absence of any ability to interact with it or at the very freaking least scroll up or down or hover a mouse... sheesh...
Your criticism is completely valid, and for the large part I agree with you. However, how many users out there browsing the web would actually perform all of those safe checks (or even just one) if they had the ability to? The answer: probably not very many. Since we geeks typically maintain contacts/friendships with other geeks, we sometimes forget about the "normal" people out there whose technical apex in computer savyness is that they can check their own e-mail. I would venture a guess that a vast majority of web users out there would only use a web site's appearance to evaluate its credibility and level of malicious intent.
But I digress, I usually base my own evaluation of unknown sites based off of only their appearance as well. Since I run Linux + Firefox, I have become rather complacent about spyware/adware installing themselves on my system unbeknowest to me.
Actually an old friend of mine who went to a community college in Phoenix once told my friends and I something interesting. If you're on the campus computers ther and it determines that you are looking at porn, it will play the following (loud) message on the computer's speakers:
Woohoo! I'm looking at PORN! Yeah, alright! This is great!
Or something like that anyway. I'm still not sure if I really believe that though. It seems highly unprofessional for a college to do.
In the library...
.....porn ...porn ...Search item confirmed. Commencing search for "porn".
Google Voice: Please state what it is that you would like to search for.
MAN (whispering):
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (whispering):
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (whispering): porn
GV: I'm sorry, I did not understand you. Please state your search item again.
MAN (shouting): PORN! I want to search for PORN you stupid ass computer!
(stares from every person in the vicinity)
GV:
Just think of all the entertaining stories that wide-spread voice recognition will bring us ^_~
I find it quite ambiguous when people debate whether Linux is "desktop ready" or not. What does that mean? I have the notion that it means something different to everyone. I've been exclusively running Linux on my desktop for over 3 years, and exclusively on my laptop for over one year. I have a Linux system at my workplace, and so does almost everyone else on my floor. Are there occasionally problems with running Linux on my desktop (including problems related to the fact that I'm not running Windows)? Yes, of course there are. The amount of problems may decrease, but will never be fully eliminated (IMHO). I can usually find a detour or alternative to the problems that I face now though, so its not a huge deal. And I can state for a fact that the amount of time I spend fixing problems with my Linux desktop is much less than the amount of time I used to spend solving similar problems on my former Windows machine.
:p
So I consider Linux is already "desktop ready" for me. I think that for the most part, regular people can do just fine if Ubuntu or another user-friendly distro is completely setup for them and they are given maybe a 30-minute tutorial on how to access the web, e-mail, etc. So who are we talking about here? Who does Linux have to be "ready" for to be called desktop ready? Those idiots that call in to tech support asking which key is the any key? The elderly who don't even know what a mouse is? Or just your normal, average computer user? And if so, who is a normal, aveage computer user anyway?
Sorry for the early morning rant, but this term has been bothering me for quite some time.
Assuming they do find water, I can't help but wonder what the quality of it would be. Would it be drinkable? Would it need to go through a 24 stage modern filtration system? What about the posibility of consumers of the water getting moon cooties? You gotta be careful about moon cooties...>_>
What if you have the audio muted or really silent, or the thief plugs in headphones? What if the laptop goes into sleep mode? What if the battery runs out, or, if the laptop is plugged in, they unplug it and wait for the battery to die?
:)
There are too many ways around this so called "security" mechanism to be anything more than a gimmick. Although I will credit it because a theif that has no idea about or previous experience with this software is going to get caught red handed.
Unfortunately for the scientists responsible for the discovery, they still can't seem to get a hot date on Friday nights. :(
You can sign it here: http://www.dearaol.com/. MoveOn.org (political action group) is renouncing this absurb proposal by AOL as well. So it's not just strictly tech companies that are opposed to this.
What I would like to know is why all this super-sensitive information is riding around in everyone's laptops. Now, I'm sure it's a great convenience for Mr. HR rep who for some reason needs to be able to look up any employee's SS# on the fly, but I think the privacy rights of the thousands of customers/employees on that laptop are much more important than the convenience of one employee. I have had my identity stolen twice in the past 12 months. One from UC Berkely's laptop theft, and another from Georgia Tech (both universities I applied to at some point, and I didn't attend either one).
Why don't people store this kind of information on encrypted, hard-to-walk-away-with data servers? If an HR rep or some other employee needs access to the information, they should have to remotely login to the server and access the data, and not just keep the entire data sitting unencrytped on their personal machines at home. Seriously. I'm to the point where I think that there should be laws established in the US government that mandate how companies/institutions need to handle and protect this kind of data.
"Keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer."
What, no Linux version?
I read something related to this in a neurobiology article back in October. See this link.
For the lazy, some scientists in Singapore and Asia activated a flourescent green protein in rat males and bred them with normal rat females. After giving birth, the mother rats had neuronal cells with the protein expressed in their brains, making it clear that those cells formerly belonged to their fetuses. And check out this quote:
"Moreover, after the scientists chemically injured the mouse brains, nearly six times as many fetal cells made their way to damaged areas than elsewhere, suggesting the cells could be responding to molecular distress signals released by the brain."
Seems like it makes for a pretty damn good argument for this theory to me.
I've already seen these things in action in Command and Conquer Generals. Can't they come up with some original designs for tools of war anymore instead of just copying them from video games? Sheesh.
(Yes, I'm being sarcastic)
Pshhh, big deal. This has already done before by Alan Greenspan, my hero. The only difference is he didn't have some big PR campaign. He's old school, and just slapped those bitches up the side of the head without any warning at all.
What, you don't believe me? See this historical proof and prove it to yourself. Alan Greenspan is a l33t h4xor, that fact is undeniable!
I tried to watch that 60 minutes video before with Firefox + mplayer plugin, but all it lets me watch is the damn commercial before the actual content. (It stops after the commericial and then when I hit play again, it just brings me back to the commercial). Does anyone know how to get around this? I'm really interested to watch this video as well. :(
Yet interestingly enough, all of those who have known to lay their eyes on the code have a 99.6% chance of one of the following scenarios occuring in the proceeding 10 days:
1) Unforeseen spontaneous combustion
2) Alien abduction
3) ?????
Yeah, it's really nothing to be impressed about. I have well over 22TB of porn sitting on my computer.
I agree. It's probably some cutesy thing that the web designer/admin had in mind since Valentine's day is coming up I guess. What a freaking moron. Everyone knows that all nerds are alone on Valentine's day, even the ones that are married. (-_-)
...is because no heart is required for this job, as real lawyers have shown us.
Okay then, I officially declare: mankind not dead yet . Can I be hired as a magazine journalist now?
I don't know if darkness is deadly, but it can cause an imbalance in your hormone levels which can lead to depression. If you live way up north or way down south where there is much less sunlight during certain seasons, you are more likely to become depressed. It has to do with the way the brain regulates hormones during the circadian rhythm (24hr day/night cycle). So while darkness probably didn't end this man's life (my bet is it was the instant noodles...) it likely pushed him into a more depressed state.
Shit, what the hell am I doing posting on Slashdot. I have a final in less than two hours
Anyone bother to take a look at the date of the article? November 2004. I thought something was fishy and I was right; I already read this last year. In fact, I might have been linked to the page from slashdot (I can't recall) so this could be a dupe story too.
To the editors: please check the dates of the articles you submit. It's not "News for Nerds" if it happened over 12 months ago.