In my entire life, I have never received any service from a book seller other than selling books and directions to the shelf where the book I wanted was at. Amazon does both of things with an efficiency that asymptotically approaches perfection. Yeah yeah, rah rah little guy and all that, but for a new book for pleasure reading I go straight to Amazon first. The only time I go to the bookstore is when I'm in the mood to get out of the house for a bit -- our local mall has a bookstore which is located right next to obscenely overpriced but quite tasty iced cocoa.
Yeah, I can understand the nostalgia for a bookseller who "knows what I want" and "understands the community". But, reality check, Amazon recommendations churned out from a little AI magic and some freakishly large database just utterly destroy anything a minimum-wage retail staffer with no knowledge of my tastes can hope to accomplish. "Well what do you like?" "Hmm, I don't know, a bit of everything. I read a lot of fantasy or Tom Clancy.". "Well, in that case, can I recommend you go to our fantasy or Tom Clancy shelves?" (Gee thanks, why didn't I think of that.) Amazon *knows* that there is a British alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars fought with dragons that is right up my alley (incidentally: it starts with His Majesty's Dragon, and I'm *loving* it).
Community involvement... well... I'm all for teaching kids to read and exposing them to the classics. And I support libraries, churches, and schools that do. But bookstores are, well, poorly suited to the task. I also, how do I put this gently, sort of fail to be a member of the community the bookstore is representing on a regular basis? I live in Japan at the moment -- the most community-oriented mom&pop bookstore around here can't possibly be community-oriented and still be Patio11-oriented. If I got a job in San Fransisco, I'd be pretty bloody out of place as the Catholic Republican and some of my reading selections might not make a San Fransisco bookseller abundantly happy. Then there's just the practical limits of bookseller expertise and shelf-space: excuse me, Mr. Mom&Pop Bookseller, can you recommend me a good book for a twenty-something set in modern China written in English which is *nothing like* Shanghai Baby? Thats what I was looking for the last time I bought a birthday gift from Amazon, and you can browse yourself a dozen choices in less time than it takes to get to the head of the line to speak to the clerk.
Its not images or bandwidth that typically drive Slashdotted sites under. It ill-considered CGI or database calls which throw up a bottleneck and cause the server to burst into flames. Otherwise a slashdotting is pretty much the optimal use case for a well-configured web server: a lot of people hitting a small set of content which is guaranteed to be cached. Additionally, nowadays normal images just aren't heavy enough to cause much of a bandwidth problem (oh know, a 50 kb page load! Add a random peak of 2000 users to that and its... OK, so I could serve that off of my residential connection*.)
* N.B. I live in Japan, land of $5 cokes, $100 melons, and $40-a-month 50 mbps Internet connections. Don't try this with an American residential connection:)
Why does Slashdot always accuse Martians of looting but when Earthlings do it its merely "copyright infringement"? Discrimination, that's why. Why the prejudice against the Martians? If you prick them, do they not ooze?
Its the classic Alienware strategy: getting geeks to pay absurd amounts of money for case mods, style, and geek street cred. Nothing inside the box is all that special, nor does it need to be. They're not selling whats in the box any more than Lexus sells whats in the engine housing.
... on reading that article, decide to head straight back to a society in which having a magazine column was a mark of having something worthwhile to say.
Granted, this particular artifact was undecoded until recently, but the Confederates' crypto scheme was busted into little itty bits during the war. The reason was, drumroll please, user error. Just like the Germans in WWII, they had a decently-secure cryptographic method combined with keys which were repeated on a regular basis. I highly recommend the book The Ultra Secret for an in-depth discussion of how far the Allies got on breaking Ultra (the Engima code) even before they captured the hardware -- there were several German signal operators who were sloppy and one particular favorite of the Brits and Poles working on the problem used his girlfriend's initals to encrypt every message for years.
Cryptanalysis is, informally, the study of turning other peoples' "harmless mistakes" into "catastrophic errors". (Incidentally, this Confederate document got broken because they stored the cyphertext with plaintext which contained a sliver of the plaintext that was encoded, allowing the analyst to do a known-plaintext attack on the cypher. Thats also a boo-boo.)
There is probably a way to do this is secure even when the stego algorithm is known.
I'm rather skeptical. Suppose a security company says that they've got a program which will guard your source code. The security company says "Mangle it however much you want, we can still extract our watermark!". This means that two functionally equivalent pieces of code always have the same watermark, no matter how you define "functionally equivalent".
Horsepuckey. Lets define functionally equivalent in a braindead stupid way: two programs are functionally equivalent if they both halt when given the same input. "No problem", says the security company representative, "we've got the watermarking algorithm that meets your needs". If this were true, then I can take one program which is known to halt (for example, int main() {return 0;}) and watermark it with "foo". Yay, I've now got some quirky looking code which also halts all of the time. Now, I can take any piece of code and test it for equivalence to my original code by running it through the watermark reader. If arbitrary code contains the watermark "foo", then this code halts when given no input. Phew, I've solved the halting problem. Oh wait, nobody can solve the halting problem, which means our security company is selling magic and moonshine.
Now hold on one minute, says the security company representative. OK, so you might be right. So we can't prove that its impossible to rewrite watermarked code such that it functions the same without the watermark. But its sure infeasible. Even if you have the complete description of how we embed the watermark and the watermarked source code. Horsepuckey again, security company! Now you're just selling me security through obscurity ("We bet you won't find the transformation between functional marked code to functional unmarked code") without the obscurity bit!
Do you know why this bit of rhetoric is "stirring stuff"? Well, aside from its later day use as the Central Intelligence Agency's motto, its also taken from John 8:32. Its the bit where Jesus charges his disciples to go into the world and preach the gospel despite the world's resistance to the message: "If you hold to my teaching, you are my disciples. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." I absolutely love the irony of using this to castigate religious conservatives vis-a-vis the Schiavo thing: trust me, your honor, they know the whole passage. It doesn't quite lend itself to the reading "Don't worry, Science will light the way".
Your skin/saliva/sweat are falling off you all the times in all sorts of places. For example, suppose that you were brought in for a quick chat at the police station. They're not trying to arrest you (yet), mind you, they just want to clarify some things about your statement. And they offer you a cup of coffee. It has been done to death over the years that if its their cup you've got no expectation to privacy after you move your hands off of it or otherwise discard it, so the police can lift fingerprints from it without any of that pesky 4th Amendment business getting in the way. If you ever touched your lips to the cup, you left saliva on it to, and probably had some skin cells incidentally fall off around the handle. They don't need a heck of a lot of tissue from you to get a sample, and the amount that they do need is falling every year as biotech gets more advanced.
(Sure, I suppose if they had fumbled carrying the cup over from wherever they had autoclaved it to you they could have contaminated it somehow. Realistically, though, the police are probably going to win with "We took every possible precaution to avoid contamination, and believe this DNA (which matches what we found at the murder scene) to be the suspect's. If he disagrees, well, let him submit to a blood test and we'll know in twenty-four hours. Heck, we'll just go ahead and ask for you to compel that blood test now, since this is good enough for a search warrant as it is.")
I'm not actually worried too much by that, to be honest.
That way they get all the keywords on one page for Google's benefit but an actual user has to go through ad city. Funny, that sounds like it should be penalized...
Three months on the job != three months work. Think of the opportunity cost if you're not expecting the contract to last that long: these people could have, e.g, bought houses, moved cities, made long term plans (bump up your marriage date with your sweetheart, etc) with the expectation they were being employed for the long term. My last job required me to relocate to another continent, and I sold literally everything I could not fit in a suitcase to do so. I would not have been so pleased to hear after three months "Oops, sorry about that -- we'll be generous and pay you double for your time here, though".
I'm rated at 40 Mb/s but rarely managed over 2 MB/s (note change in units). Bastards. 2 MB/s is so sloooooooooooooooooow. It takes like three whole minutes to download a 24 episode from iTunes at this rate. "Open a new socket" or something and fix this, please.
Only problem with that strategy is that after he gives out the private key to one person... well, it isn't so private anymore (and presumably "extorting one person" is not the entirety of the business model). You need to include a step where the virus phones home for a *unique* public key, then encrypt with that, and have it tied to a *unique* private key.
You've got a moral (and in some jurisdictions, a legal) obligation to get in touch with the original owner.
The drive might have been stolen. If after purchasing property you have reason to suspect that it is owned by someone who didn't sell it to you, you not performing due diligence will get you into a bit of hot water (ask your favorite pawn shop, although they're specially regulated to avoid this).
The data might already have been compromised. For example, someone could have read it (or copied the entire thing) and then sold the original to make an extra $20 on top of what selling their credit card number and whatnot will get them online (not much). Altering the owners that their data may have been compromised allows them to take steps to avoid nasty losses.
We once had a situation at my place of employment where we ended up with a 100 page legal document with (at a glance) a heck of a lot of "this is private" come in on our "incoming orders" fax line. I immediately alerted my manager, shredded pages 2 - 100, and got the task of calling the sender and telling him what happened. I got the phone slammed on me twice because he thought it was a sales call (I was speaking from the mandatory script: "This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation and..."). Third time I got his attention by "We are not the law office of Duey, Cheatum, and Howe but we somehow got a copy of your _______ filing. This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation. We have destroyed the fax and suggest that you check the number you are sending it to very carefully." I didn't even get an apology for it. Ahh well, the joys of telephone customer service.
After you've wiped a computer with DBAN, take out the disk and snap it in half. The next time you need to DBAN something, just download a new copy. No matter WHAT you write on it, someone will put it in a computer just to see what it does. Either that, or lock it up as tight as you would a loaded firearm.
An unscrupulous 18 year old, or thereabouts, who was trusted by a 30-something manager stole something of value, and lied about it. End of story. Saying Best Buy is responsible here is like holding Linus responsible for monetary loss that happened because someone with legitimate access to root decided he would start embezzling.
You can get a Dell and a half, likely made in the same factory nowadays, except Dell comes without the patented "gam3r xTreme" case and ability to brag to your friends about your conspicuous consumption.
If you're just sharing files, there is no reason to go with the hassle and expense of setting up a VPN, with its associated security risks. There are any number of options which will work just as well, from using AIM, a traditional file-transfer application, or any number of web services (available free or cheap at your option). Sure, "drag and drop directly in the Windows interface" is an awfully nice feature when you're talking about Mom's digital camera stuff, but there are a few services that even replicate this feature (I once used one which did it via ActiveX control, but don't remember the name -- there are probably a gazillion though).
Granted, its a niche of a niche, but seriously. I read another Discworld book (man he cranks them out) yesterday, was transported into the realm of nostalgia, and nearly tracked down a mud client so that I could play the Discworld MUD... this is during a scheduled WoW raid, mind you. I saw my friends playing with a Discworld adventure game once and it seemed to have the hilarity down right... if they could make an RPG or something I'd buy it in a second.
That page, for some unaccountable reason, will get META-refreshed into an ad after about 5 seconds, and will NOT take you back to the page afterwards.
This site has quite possibly committed the worst sins of "maximizing advertising revenue at the expense of usability" of any site I would ever admit to browsing of (admit, mind you).
You've got a variety of options for banning bitorrent (that is your problem, right? You have done traffic analysis before coming to Slashdot, right?). This is in an escalating hierarchy of how invasive you'll have to be.
1) Tell your employees that bandwidth costs have gone up, that you know BT to be the source of the problem, and that you trust them to do what is necessary.
1.5) Ban BT by policy, threaten severe sanctions up to and including dismissal for skirting the ban.
2) Block the standard BT ports.
3) Filter out BT packets.
4) Install computer forensics software and look for evidence of BT use (pretty much has to be combined with 1.5).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I can understand the nostalgia for a bookseller who "knows what I want" and "understands the community". But, reality check, Amazon recommendations churned out from a little AI magic and some freakishly large database just utterly destroy anything a minimum-wage retail staffer with no knowledge of my tastes can hope to accomplish. "Well what do you like?" "Hmm, I don't know, a bit of everything. I read a lot of fantasy or Tom Clancy.". "Well, in that case, can I recommend you go to our fantasy or Tom Clancy shelves?" (Gee thanks, why didn't I think of that.) Amazon *knows* that there is a British alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars fought with dragons that is right up my alley (incidentally: it starts with His Majesty's Dragon, and I'm *loving* it).
Community involvement... well... I'm all for teaching kids to read and exposing them to the classics. And I support libraries, churches, and schools that do. But bookstores are, well, poorly suited to the task. I also, how do I put this gently, sort of fail to be a member of the community the bookstore is representing on a regular basis? I live in Japan at the moment -- the most community-oriented mom&pop bookstore around here can't possibly be community-oriented and still be Patio11-oriented. If I got a job in San Fransisco, I'd be pretty bloody out of place as the Catholic Republican and some of my reading selections might not make a San Fransisco bookseller abundantly happy. Then there's just the practical limits of bookseller expertise and shelf-space: excuse me, Mr. Mom&Pop Bookseller, can you recommend me a good book for a twenty-something set in modern China written in English which is *nothing like* Shanghai Baby? Thats what I was looking for the last time I bought a birthday gift from Amazon, and you can browse yourself a dozen choices in less time than it takes to get to the head of the line to speak to the clerk.
Its not images or bandwidth that typically drive Slashdotted sites under. It ill-considered CGI or database calls which throw up a bottleneck and cause the server to burst into flames. Otherwise a slashdotting is pretty much the optimal use case for a well-configured web server: a lot of people hitting a small set of content which is guaranteed to be cached. Additionally, nowadays normal images just aren't heavy enough to cause much of a bandwidth problem (oh know, a 50 kb page load! Add a random peak of 2000 users to that and its... OK, so I could serve that off of my residential connection*.)
:)
* N.B. I live in Japan, land of $5 cokes, $100 melons, and $40-a-month 50 mbps Internet connections. Don't try this with an American residential connection
Why does Slashdot always accuse Martians of looting but when Earthlings do it its merely "copyright infringement"? Discrimination, that's why. Why the prejudice against the Martians? If you prick them, do they not ooze?
Its the classic Alienware strategy: getting geeks to pay absurd amounts of money for case mods, style, and geek street cred. Nothing inside the box is all that special, nor does it need to be. They're not selling whats in the box any more than Lexus sells whats in the engine housing.
... on reading that article, decide to head straight back to a society in which having a magazine column was a mark of having something worthwhile to say.
Cryptanalysis is, informally, the study of turning other peoples' "harmless mistakes" into "catastrophic errors". (Incidentally, this Confederate document got broken because they stored the cyphertext with plaintext which contained a sliver of the plaintext that was encoded, allowing the analyst to do a known-plaintext attack on the cypher. Thats also a boo-boo.)
I'm rather skeptical. Suppose a security company says that they've got a program which will guard your source code. The security company says "Mangle it however much you want, we can still extract our watermark!". This means that two functionally equivalent pieces of code always have the same watermark, no matter how you define "functionally equivalent".
Horsepuckey. Lets define functionally equivalent in a braindead stupid way: two programs are functionally equivalent if they both halt when given the same input. "No problem", says the security company representative, "we've got the watermarking algorithm that meets your needs". If this were true, then I can take one program which is known to halt (for example, int main() {return 0;}) and watermark it with "foo". Yay, I've now got some quirky looking code which also halts all of the time. Now, I can take any piece of code and test it for equivalence to my original code by running it through the watermark reader. If arbitrary code contains the watermark "foo", then this code halts when given no input. Phew, I've solved the halting problem. Oh wait, nobody can solve the halting problem, which means our security company is selling magic and moonshine.
Now hold on one minute, says the security company representative. OK, so you might be right. So we can't prove that its impossible to rewrite watermarked code such that it functions the same without the watermark. But its sure infeasible. Even if you have the complete description of how we embed the watermark and the watermarked source code. Horsepuckey again, security company! Now you're just selling me security through obscurity ("We bet you won't find the transformation between functional marked code to functional unmarked code") without the obscurity bit!
Or, to put it another way, "I'm a videogamer hitman, you insensitive clod!"
Do you know why this bit of rhetoric is "stirring stuff"? Well, aside from its later day use as the Central Intelligence Agency's motto, its also taken from John 8:32. Its the bit where Jesus charges his disciples to go into the world and preach the gospel despite the world's resistance to the message: "If you hold to my teaching, you are my disciples. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." I absolutely love the irony of using this to castigate religious conservatives vis-a-vis the Schiavo thing: trust me, your honor, they know the whole passage. It doesn't quite lend itself to the reading "Don't worry, Science will light the way".
1560464-40437870136830!
Yeah, who ever heard of a rusty old anachronism like that typewriter manufacturer International Business Machines competing in the new economy.
Your skin/saliva/sweat are falling off you all the times in all sorts of places. For example, suppose that you were brought in for a quick chat at the police station. They're not trying to arrest you (yet), mind you, they just want to clarify some things about your statement. And they offer you a cup of coffee. It has been done to death over the years that if its their cup you've got no expectation to privacy after you move your hands off of it or otherwise discard it, so the police can lift fingerprints from it without any of that pesky 4th Amendment business getting in the way. If you ever touched your lips to the cup, you left saliva on it to, and probably had some skin cells incidentally fall off around the handle. They don't need a heck of a lot of tissue from you to get a sample, and the amount that they do need is falling every year as biotech gets more advanced.
(Sure, I suppose if they had fumbled carrying the cup over from wherever they had autoclaved it to you they could have contaminated it somehow. Realistically, though, the police are probably going to win with "We took every possible precaution to avoid contamination, and believe this DNA (which matches what we found at the murder scene) to be the suspect's. If he disagrees, well, let him submit to a blood test and we'll know in twenty-four hours. Heck, we'll just go ahead and ask for you to compel that blood test now, since this is good enough for a search warrant as it is.")
I'm not actually worried too much by that, to be honest.
That way they get all the keywords on one page for Google's benefit but an actual user has to go through ad city. Funny, that sounds like it should be penalized...
Three months on the job != three months work. Think of the opportunity cost if you're not expecting the contract to last that long: these people could have, e.g, bought houses, moved cities, made long term plans (bump up your marriage date with your sweetheart, etc) with the expectation they were being employed for the long term. My last job required me to relocate to another continent, and I sold literally everything I could not fit in a suitcase to do so. I would not have been so pleased to hear after three months "Oops, sorry about that -- we'll be generous and pay you double for your time here, though".
I'm rated at 40 Mb/s but rarely managed over 2 MB/s (note change in units). Bastards. 2 MB/s is so sloooooooooooooooooow. It takes like three whole minutes to download a 24 episode from iTunes at this rate. "Open a new socket" or something and fix this, please.
Only problem with that strategy is that after he gives out the private key to one person... well, it isn't so private anymore (and presumably "extorting one person" is not the entirety of the business model). You need to include a step where the virus phones home for a *unique* public key, then encrypt with that, and have it tied to a *unique* private key.
You've got a moral (and in some jurisdictions, a legal) obligation to get in touch with the original owner. The drive might have been stolen. If after purchasing property you have reason to suspect that it is owned by someone who didn't sell it to you, you not performing due diligence will get you into a bit of hot water (ask your favorite pawn shop, although they're specially regulated to avoid this). The data might already have been compromised. For example, someone could have read it (or copied the entire thing) and then sold the original to make an extra $20 on top of what selling their credit card number and whatnot will get them online (not much). Altering the owners that their data may have been compromised allows them to take steps to avoid nasty losses. We once had a situation at my place of employment where we ended up with a 100 page legal document with (at a glance) a heck of a lot of "this is private" come in on our "incoming orders" fax line. I immediately alerted my manager, shredded pages 2 - 100, and got the task of calling the sender and telling him what happened. I got the phone slammed on me twice because he thought it was a sales call (I was speaking from the mandatory script: "This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation and..."). Third time I got his attention by "We are not the law office of Duey, Cheatum, and Howe but we somehow got a copy of your _______ filing. This is Patio11 calling on behalf of X Corporation. We have destroyed the fax and suggest that you check the number you are sending it to very carefully." I didn't even get an apology for it. Ahh well, the joys of telephone customer service.
After you've wiped a computer with DBAN, take out the disk and snap it in half. The next time you need to DBAN something, just download a new copy. No matter WHAT you write on it, someone will put it in a computer just to see what it does. Either that, or lock it up as tight as you would a loaded firearm.
An unscrupulous 18 year old, or thereabouts, who was trusted by a 30-something manager stole something of value, and lied about it. End of story. Saying Best Buy is responsible here is like holding Linus responsible for monetary loss that happened because someone with legitimate access to root decided he would start embezzling.
You can get a Dell and a half, likely made in the same factory nowadays, except Dell comes without the patented "gam3r xTreme" case and ability to brag to your friends about your conspicuous consumption.
80 people dying 80 years ago after waves of molasses 15 feet tall drench central Boston is a comedy.
If you're just sharing files, there is no reason to go with the hassle and expense of setting up a VPN, with its associated security risks. There are any number of options which will work just as well, from using AIM, a traditional file-transfer application, or any number of web services (available free or cheap at your option). Sure, "drag and drop directly in the Windows interface" is an awfully nice feature when you're talking about Mom's digital camera stuff, but there are a few services that even replicate this feature (I once used one which did it via ActiveX control, but don't remember the name -- there are probably a gazillion though).
Granted, its a niche of a niche, but seriously. I read another Discworld book (man he cranks them out) yesterday, was transported into the realm of nostalgia, and nearly tracked down a mud client so that I could play the Discworld MUD... this is during a scheduled WoW raid, mind you. I saw my friends playing with a Discworld adventure game once and it seemed to have the hilarity down right... if they could make an RPG or something I'd buy it in a second.
This site has quite possibly committed the worst sins of "maximizing advertising revenue at the expense of usability" of any site I would ever admit to browsing of (admit, mind you).
You've got a variety of options for banning bitorrent (that is your problem, right? You have done traffic analysis before coming to Slashdot, right?). This is in an escalating hierarchy of how invasive you'll have to be. 1) Tell your employees that bandwidth costs have gone up, that you know BT to be the source of the problem, and that you trust them to do what is necessary. 1.5) Ban BT by policy, threaten severe sanctions up to and including dismissal for skirting the ban. 2) Block the standard BT ports. 3) Filter out BT packets. 4) Install computer forensics software and look for evidence of BT use (pretty much has to be combined with 1.5).