I want a specific service plan from a mobile provider. There may even be one out there, but I'm not aware of it. What I want is this: - Fixed price contract. - Free calls and texts to, say, five preset numbers: mom's cellphone, mom's work, dad's work+cell, and 911. - A top-up prepaid credit line that is required for all other calls.
That way I can pay a specific flat rate and know that my kids can call me or the cops any time they need to. If they want to phone their friends, they can use their allowance/paper route money to buy credit, but when the prepaid credit runs out, they are not stranded.
Couple that with a basic (and cheap and preferably fairly rugged) line of phones and I reckon parents would be all over it.
I can assure you that innate talent exists. It is not hard to find. I have two fairly good archery students - one shoots only the one day of our course and the other shoots at home every day. If hard work and focus was the deciding factor the wrong one is getting much higer scores.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's hard to tell where background stops and talent starts. For example, perhaps your talented student simply had exposure to a range of activities as a child which meant s/he developed better hand/eye coordination - a head start, in other words, which just looks like innate ability.
I imagine "talent" to a degree depends on prediliction. I'm not at all musical, and gave up piano lessons as a child because I just didn't find it fun. Kids who/do/ enjoy it and spend hours and hours practising because it's fun, are obviously getting much more training than those who endure a weekly lesson and do a minimum of practice.
And, of course, what you like probably depends largely on your home environment. So an inclination to develop talent, perhaps, can be instilled from infancy.
None of which precludes the possibility of innate talent, of course, like you described. Some kids really do just pick up a golf club and show a frightening ability to get it right first time. Seems obvious, really: if talent="physiognomy and mental state being just right to start with", then perhaps everyone's got a statistical chance of being naturally good at any given skill.
Great piece, but it's far from a guide to survival. It's a translation into Laymanese of how you're going to be screwed by the RIAA's gaming of the legal system.
1) You're going to lose a motion and not be told how or why 2) You're going to be sent legal documents but will not be able to get a lawyer to defend you because the lawyer won't have the information he needs 3) You're going to have your information handed over to the RIAA and there's nothing you can do 4) You're going to land in a civil case and the precendents are murky enough that you may well lose, but it's certainly going to cost you a bundle anyway
What I'd like to see is a real survival guide on the back of this. For example, when you get the notice that you've lost that first motion, what should you do? What can your lawyer do to get up to speed and file a motion to dismiss in time? What can you present to the judge to show that the case, on the evidence to hand, is baseless?
Good article, and a great starting point, but it'd be so much more useful with some real advice rather than just being a well-written explanation of exactly how screwed you are.
FTFA: Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.
Although the reprimand does not amount to court action and the children do not have a criminal record, their details will be kept on file for up to five years.
Open to abuse, certainly, but it's there so that if a kid causes trouble somewhere else within that 5 year period, you have a track record. I'm not clear which part of name and photograph isn't sufficient for that, but at least the intent isn't a secret. The police, I imagine, would argue that kids' appearances change a lot in that time, and some names are fairly common. *shrug*
For a long time. While there are plenty of examples of police (at the instigation of neighbours, mind you) taking it too far, there really is a big problem in the UK with kids, both in gangs and individually, going on the rampage. Cars and property being damaged, people assaulted, shops robbed, loud noise, intimidation, drugs...it's widespread if not quite the reign of terror some of the tabloids make it out to be.
That's countered by, among other things, ASBOs - Antisocial Behaviour Orders - which enforce things like curfews and prevent the recipient from going into certain areas. Not just kids - anyone can get an ASBO. It's supposed to be a way to reduce the likelihood of offence without having to actually arrest someone or cart them off to a juvenile facility.
How well it works is another question entirely (ASBOs have been handed out in some really quite doubtful cases), but to answer your question: antisocial behaviour has been a crime for years.
A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years.
I seriously doubt it - not if you mean "in the last several years". Any unprotected box hanging directly off the net will be scanned and fingerprinted within minutes if not seconds of connecting, and exploited automatically. Botnets aren't kiddies' toys anymore: they're very professionally run and your unpatched '98 box is just grist for the mill.
About five years ago I timed scans off a dialup connection in, let's say, a hostile part of the world - average of around 20 seconds from connect to scan. It hasn't gotten any better since.
Upgrading aside (because I wonder about that too), your point about using 1% of the package is an important one, but wrong. It's wrong because although it's true, the fact is that not everyone uses the same 1%.
I'm a professional writer, and I use much less of a word processor's feature set that you'd probably expect: an even shorter list than yours. But some tools are just fundamental, like word count: the only thing that kept me away from OpenOffice and on Office for ages was simply the lack of a good word count tool. Then someone wrote a macro to do it, and that was fine, and then it became a feature of OOo 2, so that's great. And I now use OpenOffice.
The same thing will apply everywhere. That's how vendors (and OSS groups) have to target their features: aim for feature wishes shared by large groups of users, even though that will mean that the entire rest of the userbase perceives it as feature-creep. (Slow startup in OpenOffice is a big one for lots of users, for example, but I couldn't care less: I have documents open all day and it doesn't affect me.)
One way to avoid creep is through modules or extensions, like the Linux kernel and Firefox, to pick to examples at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Which is fine (apart from the burden on the user of finding the extension he needs in the first place), but I have a lot of problems with Firefox extension stability and the lack of quality control there worries me: it may put some users off the browser, when it is simply a poorly-coded extension at fault. Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.
What's the best way for a covert group to get maximum embarrassing exposure? Oh yes, try to hush it up. When justified [1], it works. When not, it can backfire spectacularly, as MI6 (the UK's sorta-equivalent to the CIA) is learning (or not), yet again through Richard Tomlinson - http://richardtomlinson.typepad.com/
[1] Cos sometimes it really is, this sort of debacle notwithstanding.
Good! That's excellent feedback! With big rollouts riding on items like this, that sort of feedback will spur the developers to build in whatever features are desired. And then the product gets more widely deployed and the rest of us get an even better suite.
Macro warnings should be a trivial fix, after all, and it/is/ a useful security flag for many users.
And how exactly am I to evaluate their customer service without buying a product first?
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but there's more to the buying process than reading blogs. So you do your research and then buy anyway and THEN find out that the customer support is abysmal, at which point the options are somewhat limited. That's the point, and that's what the OFT is for. So good for them.
I've had mixed experiences with Dell, myself. Support's always been excellent when I finally get it, but on occassion it's taken a few weeks of wrangling (read "yelling") to get them to honour the support contract in the first place.
The circumstances were obviously quite different, but samizdat and anonymous pamphlets were once the only weapons of an oppressed people.
It'd be humorously ironic, if it wasn't so sad.
Granted, I exaggerate - the US is in quite different shape from the USSR of old. But there are some intriguing similarities in the paths you're taking.
Yup, quite different. You send people to tropical islands instead of Siberia for detention without trial, for example.
That's not all. The old prosco.net page (http://web.archive.org/web/20050213064558/http:// prosco.net/) said:
"SCO is anticipating that it will use this site as the future home for all information relating to SCO's pending lawsuits and related issues. For current information about SCO's suit against IBM, please visit www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit, and about SCO's suit against Novell, please visit www.sco.com/novell."
This'll be different in what way from the massive database and set of image search tools that Interpol already maintains? It's not like every signatory agency (including those in the US) doesn't already have access to it, and it's been running for years.
I've met some of the guys running it, and while I really admire their dedication and achievements, I can honestly say there's no job on earth I'd less like to have.
It wasn't a virus, it was a trojan. Important difference, because it could not, as you suggest, somehow spread to other usb devices. The point was that they gave away free USB disks with the trojan on it, and waited to see how many people would run it. Lots, unsurprisingly.
Yes, a virus could target removable media and files on a USB drive could be infected. But that's ok, because you're keeping your own AV up to date, right? Also, depending on how you're mounting the encrypted data on that USB drive (because you are encrypting it, right?) the virus may not be able to write to it at all. If you're mounting the device as a drive/mount point, then it probably will, otherwise probably not.
SCO criticism is mostly all valid, but this is just wrong. SCOX has been holding steady at ~4.20 for months and months - it's all insiders peddling tiny volume. It was in freefall, oh, a couple of years ago, but it's stable now and it ain't going anywhere. http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5y&l=off&z= m&q=l&c=
We have sites that use WSS, and it's not the cookies I worry about, it's the massive chunk of javascript that's sitting on every page. Almost every Firefox user I know uses NoScript, so of course none of this crap is running.
Before WSS, we were at ~60%-%62% IE usage (from UA, and yes, that's way lower than you'd expect and that's because of the sort of site we run). Now, it's much higher. I suspect WSS is massively undercounting Firefox because of cookie and script blocking.
"RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a vision," said Minoru Asada, president of the RoboCup Federation.
"This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of eleven players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team."
Even granting the somewhat unlikely prospect of a robot team that can match the skill and tactical experience of a human side, I can't see them overcoming the obvious safety problems.
Call me when Minoru Asada is willing to demo what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot, and I'll reconsider.
Sixthly, what does "a lot" mean? "A lot thought the industry should be regulated", eh? Was that a majority? Did a lot more _disagree_?
Every week there's a new security survey, usually of about 50 people, showing how critical it is that I rush out and buy a product from the company that sponsored the survey. It tends to make me somewhat skeptical of surveys and polls. Very few stand up to any sort of scrutiny, though there are the occassional exceptions
What Sony management does not seem to realize is that the American middle class will pay a premium only if the product offers premium quality.
Actually that's not entirely true. There's are two well understood marketing phenomena that apply:
1) People will pay more for a recognised brand. Some people will be willing to pay more for a Sony TV than another brand they recognise (in the branding sense) less.
2) People will pay more anyway. Put two functionally identical products on the shelf, and some people will just opt for the higher priced of the two because they feel that price==quality.
Neither of these is necessarily a bad thing - just taking advantage of the market mindset. Apple clearly rides them both like mad.
Doesn't just work for high-priced goods, either - the two tie together neatly in commodity products. Given two identical products X and Y, if vendor X markets its product heavily and Y does not, the cost of advertising will obviously push X's price up above Y's. However, it may now gets increased sales thanks to both of these factors. Or not - marketing campaigns can fail.
If you don't want to be a consumer pawn, then just do your research before you buy stuff. There's no excuse not to, aside from impulse-buy convenience.
Look at phone interfaces - they're definitely more complex. Just count the number of keypresses (or screens to progress through) to accomplish basic tasks - it's increasing all the time. But that's not real complexity: if you ignore irrelevant menu items then the interfaces aren't really more complex, just more clicky.
But I don't really mind that, because most of the phone interfaces have some sort of "favorites" list to get more quickly to common tasks.
What I do mind is that phone interfaces are becoming steadily less reliable. Interface crashes, slowdowns, sudden poweroffs - they're all now daily occurences, and it drives me nuts.
The obvious answer would be to buy a phone without all the glitzy features, and when I asked for one I was offered a Nokia model for "businessmen who just want a great phone without the gizmos". Uhuh. No camera, no music player...great. But also no Bluetooth. A business phone that I can't interface my PDA and laptop with for dialup? Give me a break - they obviously didn't want anyone to buy it.
No, I'm stuck with an endless succession of phones with more features than I want, shitty interfaces and steadily degrading reliability.
This has happened in the past, with great success. Criminals are taking more care now to protect themselves, and it is becoming harder for law enforcement to infiltrate the groups - parallels with other organised crime (and law enforcement's response to it) are very clear.
I am curious as to how the person got so far through the BA website without a password or PIN. Last time I looked, you needed this. Perhaps Mr Broer hadn't registered one. Otherwise did they compromise BA's website?
It sounds like they bought a ticket in his name, supplying his frequent flyer number. Then logged in to that new passenger record, and followed the link to the associated frequent flyer record.
Sounds like BA had skipped on an authentication step, either at the point of linking, or in allowing a ticket purchase to be associated with a frequent flyer.
"Soon, all of wired South Korea seemed to be on the hunt for "Dog Poop Girl." Several misidentified women were verbally attacked, and finally the woman herself was identified on the Internet and humiliated as the topic of countless online discussions."
Honestly, I think South Korea might be moving a little too fast for its own good. People aren't getting a chance to adapt. But then again, who knows?
To be brutal (and if I was a victim I might feel otherwise!), but is this bad? I mean, some people got verbal abuse, and the person in question got humiliated online. That's a shame, but I bet she hasn't done it again. If anything, this is a good example of society taking action against an offender using the tools at its disposal.
On the other hand, that's only a short step away from a mob with pitchforks, right? Vigilante justice, even non-violent vigilante justice, is probably a very bad idea.
That's like saying that if a cryptosystem is open source, it would be trivially easy for an attacker to unencrypt anything. Have you/read/ the DReaM proposals?
If anything, an open source DRM system should be/more/ secure, since it is less likely to rely on security through obscurity. And it'd arguably be better for the end user, since it avoids vendor lock-in.
I'm not convinced either, but I'm not writing it off out of hand yet. OTOH, I do have my doubts about Sun's ability to deliver.
Slashdot Mirror
I want a specific service plan from a mobile provider. There may even be one out there, but I'm not aware of it. What I want is this:
- Fixed price contract.
- Free calls and texts to, say, five preset numbers: mom's cellphone, mom's work, dad's work+cell, and 911.
- A top-up prepaid credit line that is required for all other calls.
That way I can pay a specific flat rate and know that my kids can call me or the cops any time they need to. If they want to phone their friends, they can use their allowance/paper route money to buy credit, but when the prepaid credit runs out, they are not stranded.
Couple that with a basic (and cheap and preferably fairly rugged) line of phones and I reckon parents would be all over it.
I can assure you that innate talent exists. It is not hard to find. I have two fairly good archery students - one shoots only the one day of our course and the other shoots at home every day. If hard work and focus was the deciding factor the wrong one is getting much higer scores.
/do/ enjoy it and spend hours and hours practising because it's fun, are obviously getting much more training than those who endure a weekly lesson and do a minimum of practice.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but it's hard to tell where background stops and talent starts. For example, perhaps your talented student simply had exposure to a range of activities as a child which meant s/he developed better hand/eye coordination - a head start, in other words, which just looks like innate ability.
I imagine "talent" to a degree depends on prediliction. I'm not at all musical, and gave up piano lessons as a child because I just didn't find it fun. Kids who
And, of course, what you like probably depends largely on your home environment. So an inclination to develop talent, perhaps, can be instilled from infancy.
None of which precludes the possibility of innate talent, of course, like you described. Some kids really do just pick up a golf club and show a frightening ability to get it right first time. Seems obvious, really: if talent="physiognomy and mental state being just right to start with", then perhaps everyone's got a statistical chance of being naturally good at any given skill.
Great piece, but it's far from a guide to survival. It's a translation into Laymanese of how you're going to be screwed by the RIAA's gaming of the legal system.
1) You're going to lose a motion and not be told how or why
2) You're going to be sent legal documents but will not be able to get a lawyer to defend you because the lawyer won't have the information he needs
3) You're going to have your information handed over to the RIAA and there's nothing you can do
4) You're going to land in a civil case and the precendents are murky enough that you may well lose, but it's certainly going to cost you a bundle anyway
What I'd like to see is a real survival guide on the back of this. For example, when you get the notice that you've lost that first motion, what should you do? What can your lawyer do to get up to speed and file a motion to dismiss in time? What can you present to the judge to show that the case, on the evidence to hand, is baseless?
Good article, and a great starting point, but it'd be so much more useful with some real advice rather than just being a well-written explanation of exactly how screwed you are.
FTFA:
Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.
Although the reprimand does not amount to court action and the children do not have a criminal record, their details will be kept on file for up to five years.
Open to abuse, certainly, but it's there so that if a kid causes trouble somewhere else within that 5 year period, you have a track record. I'm not clear which part of name and photograph isn't sufficient for that, but at least the intent isn't a secret. The police, I imagine, would argue that kids' appearances change a lot in that time, and some names are fairly common. *shrug*
For a long time. While there are plenty of examples of police (at the instigation of neighbours, mind you) taking it too far, there really is a big problem in the UK with kids, both in gangs and individually, going on the rampage. Cars and property being damaged, people assaulted, shops robbed, loud noise, intimidation, drugs...it's widespread if not quite the reign of terror some of the tabloids make it out to be.
That's countered by, among other things, ASBOs - Antisocial Behaviour Orders - which enforce things like curfews and prevent the recipient from going into certain areas. Not just kids - anyone can get an ASBO. It's supposed to be a way to reduce the likelihood of offence without having to actually arrest someone or cart them off to a juvenile facility.
How well it works is another question entirely (ASBOs have been handed out in some really quite doubtful cases), but to answer your question: antisocial behaviour has been a crime for years.
A place, I once worked at, had a dozen or so entirely unpatched Win98 boxes connected directly to the net - for years.
I seriously doubt it - not if you mean "in the last several years". Any unprotected box hanging directly off the net will be scanned and fingerprinted within minutes if not seconds of connecting, and exploited automatically. Botnets aren't kiddies' toys anymore: they're very professionally run and your unpatched '98 box is just grist for the mill.
About five years ago I timed scans off a dialup connection in, let's say, a hostile part of the world - average of around 20 seconds from connect to scan. It hasn't gotten any better since.
Upgrading aside (because I wonder about that too), your point about using 1% of the package is an important one, but wrong. It's wrong because although it's true, the fact is that not everyone uses the same 1%.
I'm a professional writer, and I use much less of a word processor's feature set that you'd probably expect: an even shorter list than yours. But some tools are just fundamental, like word count: the only thing that kept me away from OpenOffice and on Office for ages was simply the lack of a good word count tool. Then someone wrote a macro to do it, and that was fine, and then it became a feature of OOo 2, so that's great. And I now use OpenOffice.
The same thing will apply everywhere. That's how vendors (and OSS groups) have to target their features: aim for feature wishes shared by large groups of users, even though that will mean that the entire rest of the userbase perceives it as feature-creep. (Slow startup in OpenOffice is a big one for lots of users, for example, but I couldn't care less: I have documents open all day and it doesn't affect me.)
One way to avoid creep is through modules or extensions, like the Linux kernel and Firefox, to pick to examples at extreme opposite ends of the spectrum. Which is fine (apart from the burden on the user of finding the extension he needs in the first place), but I have a lot of problems with Firefox extension stability and the lack of quality control there worries me: it may put some users off the browser, when it is simply a poorly-coded extension at fault. Not everything can be coded to the discipline of the kernel.
What's the best way for a covert group to get maximum embarrassing exposure? Oh yes, try to hush it up. When justified [1], it works. When not, it can backfire spectacularly, as MI6 (the UK's sorta-equivalent to the CIA) is learning (or not), yet again through Richard Tomlinson - http://richardtomlinson.typepad.com/
[1] Cos sometimes it really is, this sort of debacle notwithstanding.
Good! That's excellent feedback! With big rollouts riding on items like this, that sort of feedback will spur the developers to build in whatever features are desired. And then the product gets more widely deployed and the rest of us get an even better suite.
/is/ a useful security flag for many users.
Macro warnings should be a trivial fix, after all, and it
And how exactly am I to evaluate their customer service without buying a product first?
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but there's more to the buying process than reading blogs. So you do your research and then buy anyway and THEN find out that the customer support is abysmal, at which point the options are somewhat limited. That's the point, and that's what the OFT is for. So good for them.
I've had mixed experiences with Dell, myself. Support's always been excellent when I finally get it, but on occassion it's taken a few weeks of wrangling (read "yelling") to get them to honour the support contract in the first place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
The circumstances were obviously quite different, but samizdat and anonymous pamphlets were once the only weapons of an oppressed people.
It'd be humorously ironic, if it wasn't so sad.
Granted, I exaggerate - the US is in quite different shape from the USSR of old. But there are some intriguing similarities in the paths you're taking.
Yup, quite different. You send people to tropical islands instead of Siberia for detention without trial, for example.
That's not all. The old prosco.net page (http://web.archive.org/web/20050213064558/http:// prosco.net/) said:
"SCO is anticipating that it will use this site as the future home for all information relating to SCO's pending lawsuits and related issues. For current information about SCO's suit against IBM, please visit www.sco.com/ibmlawsuit, and about SCO's suit against Novell, please visit www.sco.com/novell."
Both the links in there are 404s now.
This'll be different in what way from the massive database and set of image search tools that Interpol already maintains? It's not like every signatory agency (including those in the US) doesn't already have access to it, and it's been running for years.
/ PR2005/PR200536.asp
http://www.interpol.int/Public/ICPO/PressReleases
I've met some of the guys running it, and while I really admire their dedication and achievements, I can honestly say there's no job on earth I'd less like to have.
It wasn't a virus, it was a trojan. Important difference, because it could not, as you suggest, somehow spread to other usb devices. The point was that they gave away free USB disks with the trojan on it, and waited to see how many people would run it. Lots, unsurprisingly.
Yes, a virus could target removable media and files on a USB drive could be infected. But that's ok, because you're keeping your own AV up to date, right? Also, depending on how you're mounting the encrypted data on that USB drive (because you are encrypting it, right?) the virus may not be able to write to it at all. If you're mounting the device as a drive/mount point, then it probably will, otherwise probably not.
SCO criticism is mostly all valid, but this is just wrong. SCOX has been holding steady at ~4.20 for months and months - it's all insiders peddling tiny volume. It was in freefall, oh, a couple of years ago, but it's stable now and it ain't going anywhere.= m&q=l&c=
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=SCOX&t=5y&l=off&z
We have sites that use WSS, and it's not the cookies I worry about, it's the massive chunk of javascript that's sitting on every page. Almost every Firefox user I know uses NoScript, so of course none of this crap is running.
Before WSS, we were at ~60%-%62% IE usage (from UA, and yes, that's way lower than you'd expect and that's because of the sort of site we run). Now, it's much higher. I suspect WSS is massively undercounting Firefox because of cookie and script blocking.
"RoboCup 2006 is the first step towards a vision," said Minoru Asada, president of the RoboCup Federation.
"This vision includes the development of a humanoid robot team of eleven players, which can win against a human soccer world champion team."
Even granting the somewhat unlikely prospect of a robot team that can match the skill and tactical experience of a human side, I can't see them overcoming the obvious safety problems.
Call me when Minoru Asada is willing to demo what it's like to be slide-tackled by a robot, and I'll reconsider.
Great points, but you missed one:
Sixthly, what does "a lot" mean? "A lot thought the industry should be regulated", eh? Was that a majority? Did a lot more _disagree_?
Every week there's a new security survey, usually of about 50 people, showing how critical it is that I rush out and buy a product from the company that sponsored the survey. It tends to make me somewhat skeptical of surveys and polls. Very few stand up to any sort of scrutiny, though there are the occassional exceptions
What Sony management does not seem to realize is that the American middle class will pay a premium only if the product offers premium quality.
Actually that's not entirely true. There's are two well understood marketing phenomena that apply:
1) People will pay more for a recognised brand. Some people will be willing to pay more for a Sony TV than another brand they recognise (in the branding sense) less.
2) People will pay more anyway. Put two functionally identical products on the shelf, and some people will just opt for the higher priced of the two because they feel that price==quality.
Neither of these is necessarily a bad thing - just taking advantage of the market mindset. Apple clearly rides them both like mad.
Doesn't just work for high-priced goods, either - the two tie together neatly in commodity products. Given two identical products X and Y, if vendor X markets its product heavily and Y does not, the cost of advertising will obviously push X's price up above Y's. However, it may now gets increased sales thanks to both of these factors. Or not - marketing campaigns can fail.
If you don't want to be a consumer pawn, then just do your research before you buy stuff. There's no excuse not to, aside from impulse-buy convenience.
Look at phone interfaces - they're definitely more complex. Just count the number of keypresses (or screens to progress through) to accomplish basic tasks - it's increasing all the time. But that's not real complexity: if you ignore irrelevant menu items then the interfaces aren't really more complex, just more clicky.
But I don't really mind that, because most of the phone interfaces have some sort of "favorites" list to get more quickly to common tasks.
What I do mind is that phone interfaces are becoming steadily less reliable. Interface crashes, slowdowns, sudden poweroffs - they're all now daily occurences, and it drives me nuts.
The obvious answer would be to buy a phone without all the glitzy features, and when I asked for one I was offered a Nokia model for "businessmen who just want a great phone without the gizmos". Uhuh. No camera, no music player...great. But also no Bluetooth. A business phone that I can't interface my PDA and laptop with for dialup? Give me a break - they obviously didn't want anyone to buy it.
No, I'm stuck with an endless succession of phones with more features than I want, shitty interfaces and steadily degrading reliability.
This has happened in the past, with great success. Criminals are taking more care now to protect themselves, and it is becoming harder for law enforcement to infiltrate the groups - parallels with other organised crime (and law enforcement's response to it) are very clear.
I am curious as to how the person got so far through the BA website without a password or PIN. Last time I looked, you needed this. Perhaps Mr Broer hadn't registered one. Otherwise did they compromise BA's website?
It sounds like they bought a ticket in his name, supplying his frequent flyer number. Then logged in to that new passenger record, and followed the link to the associated frequent flyer record.
Sounds like BA had skipped on an authentication step, either at the point of linking, or in allowing a ticket purchase to be associated with a frequent flyer.
What does "kidney-bogglingly" mean?
Sorry. Couldn't resist
Honestly, I think South Korea might be moving a little too fast for its own good. People aren't getting a chance to adapt. But then again, who knows?
To be brutal (and if I was a victim I might feel otherwise!), but is this bad? I mean, some people got verbal abuse, and the person in question got humiliated online. That's a shame, but I bet she hasn't done it again. If anything, this is a good example of society taking action against an offender using the tools at its disposal.
On the other hand, that's only a short step away from a mob with pitchforks, right? Vigilante justice, even non-violent vigilante justice, is probably a very bad idea.
That's like saying that if a cryptosystem is open source, it would be trivially easy for an attacker to unencrypt anything. Have you /read/ the DReaM proposals?
/more/ secure, since it is less likely to rely on security through obscurity. And it'd arguably be better for the end user, since it avoids vendor lock-in.
If anything, an open source DRM system should be
I'm not convinced either, but I'm not writing it off out of hand yet. OTOH, I do have my doubts about Sun's ability to deliver.