Re:is it possible to have no backdoors?
on
No Backdoor in Vista
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· Score: 2, Informative
Well, according to Webopedia (not a resource I normally use but it's the only one I could really get a nice succinct definition for, Wikipedia being too long), a backdoor is:
...written by the programmer who creates the code for the program.
Exactly. I have some vague notion that the people who came up with this idea were trying to stimulate interest amongst the curious, and perhaps draw up future recruits, but all I can see this doing is exposing them to the more brusque qualities of the coding community. Not a watertight idea, I think.
Neutrons are two down quarks and one up quark, and protons are two up quarks and one down quark, down quarks carrying a relative negative 1/3 charge and up quarks carrying a relative positive 2/3 charge. It's pretty simple to figure it out from there.
I'll admit I heard something along those lines a while ago, but I wasn't given proof then, and I haven't been given proof now. I'd probably be convinced if I saw a website with some statistics, though I do agree that parents obviously have more opportunity to commit these crimes (probably have the least motive of anyone to do it, however).
You don't see/hear/read about many parents that are sex offenders; similarly unless there are previous convictions, you don't hear about the next-door neighbor being a sex offender. Such cases are (sadly) common and rarely considered newsworthy.
I'm thinking of getting a Nokia 7710, but only because it has a decent sized screen and has Flash capabilites (and me, being the showoff I am, want to brag about my stuff).
Of the course, it might be 186g, but the thing looks like Nokia's answer to the XBox - it's a clunky, square piece of crap. The obvious solution? An earpiece. Is there a major difficulty getting one where you are?
A bit of a controversial issue, that. Most people (the government included) will see only the fact that an FBI agent's been snooped on, and that something important's gone awry. Of course, people won't often ascribe the same situation to themselves. The thing I think's a bit poor is that people don't really care if they're being swindled or not, unless somebody says "This is happening to you, and it's bad". A bit like terrorism in America - it's been going on around the world for years, but it's only when it comes to the hearth and home and the government starts telling people it's bad that people start to have any feelings about it.
I'm not trying to call names here, but that's sort of how a salesman works - he gives you a problem you don't usually think about, then says "This thing will solve your problem". Never thought of it like that before.
Of course, you should never forget that old tenet of - well, not just quantum physics, but any experiment at all: observing the experiment will possibly (and with something as delicate as quantum physics, very likely) change a critical aspect of the experiment in a way that will alter the outcome.
I'm sure these people have been extremely careful not to do that, though. With a field of science as well-observed and criticised as that of quantum physics, any slip-up will definitely be noticed by another scientist.
Myself, I subscribe to Scott Adams 'OA5' company philosophy. Basically, nothing can make work more fun than its alternative, not working - that's why they have to pay you for it. So basically, the aim is to get the employee working as efficiently as possible by getting managers to remove obstructions to their productivity, and Out At 5 (hence the acronym). Managers don't waste their time with thinking up stupid morale-boosting techniques (just read any Adams book for excellent examples) and spend more time 'managing', also known as 'something useful'.
Frankly, the only companies that can and should be trying to improve the morale of their employees (I mean the grunts, not the management) with techniques other than money or free time, are the ones with proper mechanisms are in place where smart people get to decision-making positions. Come to think of it, there probably isn't much to be done on the morale front there anyway.
I wouldn't blame it on the education system. I'm still halfway through it, in fact, and I was never in any doubt - even before I entered it - that there was no way of 'turning on' gravity, just like that. You actually learn quite early on how mass 'causes' a gravitational field, perhaps not very much more than that.
I don't think you'd like it if I took, say, a sample of Americans from a Darwin Awards website and said it 'says a lot about the education system'.
This might be a hit, but it'll have problems with longevity. The difference between this and, say, Big Brother, is that this isn't going to have 5 more maddening, accursed series (more or less by definition), one after another, with which my otherwise normal friends and colleagues will regale me with in extensive and frankly disgusting detail on Monday morning.
Every decade, the corporate powers grow stronger, more integrated with the government and the courts. The ability to enforce antitrust laws is decreasing hyperbolically with each era.
Frankly, I haven't been thinking about the issue for long enough to come to a proper decision. Perhaps it's because Something Awful is big and popular enough to get away with it, but weren't they doing it when they were small and vulnerable? I can remember a particularly controversial case when they insulted the mothers of stillborn children (don't worry, no pictures anymore).
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down AT&T, and pay t'CEO for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
And you try and tell the young people of today that..... they won't believe you.
You make a really good point. It's A shame it's ruined BY FULLY capitalising random WORDS, as well as the total lack of a point, and any actual information or arguments that hasn't already been disproved in the discussion or that makes the slightest bit of sense anyway:
Now, as far as securing your CODE? You do and CAN build it into your code, removing business logic as much as possible from client-side forms/code & storing it as much as possible on the ServerSide for one example, & watching out for buffer overflow type exploitable code as another..
By the way, Oracle on Linux doesn't do too well against a similar database on Windows because Oracle is terrible (and that isn't the only one, for anyone who's been reading the securityfocus.com vuln lists). I don't know what databases you're talking about when you say 'other', so I'll just have to assume made that up.
...if somebody wants to kill somebody else, or go on a spree, they will go and try it, video game or no video game. The real problem here is the (in some states in the US, and numerous other places around the world) easy availability of firearms to the general public, which makes it all the easier to murder other people.
Over here in England, there's relatively little gun crime. Due to the 1997 ban on handguns, guns any more lethal than hunting rifles or shotguns (which need licenses to possess) are very expensive (if you can find someone to vend one to you) and will get you detained at her Majesty's pleasure for a good long time if they catch you with one. Ball Bearing guns are treated in a manner similar to switchblades - they aren't allowed out in public, and threatening somebody with them is likely to get you in serious trouble.
Less than 10% of the police force is armed, and these particular officers are only deployed in emergencies like bank heists, terrorist alerts and the like. As a result, firearms aren't leaked into society through the police force (check the firearm saturation here. Homicide levels in the USA were 5 times what they were in the UK (admittedly, the survey was carried out about a decade ago and the number has been falling, and both countries use slightly different methods for deciding what's a homicide and what isn't, but 5 times?).
In my opinion, all this stuff about video games causing murderous feelings to arise is down to a fewisolatedincidents, where it's the gun that causes the deaths, but games are cited as the reason. It's not as if this type of media hasn't been blasted in our faces since the first action movie. The argument that 'games make you the killer' is nonsense - they're people on the screen, and all the gamer is doing is moving control sticks.
I remember reading about this in a magazine with a bunch of other computer-y type articles on an airplane about 6 months ago. I think it was in Time. I also distinctly remember the magazine saying "The '1' in his name gives him extra 'street cred' in cyber space". Yes, they said that.
What really irks me is that everyone is getting very worked up over Mr Thompson. I've heard him say that "if I really am crazy, then you'd just ignore me".
Which is the strange thing. We are getting very worked up over him. What happens when somebody posts something inflammatory, trollish or vulgar here on Slashdot? We just ignore it and get on with our lives. However, it seems to me that this usually stable mindset goes right out of the window when it comes to Mr Thompson, and he's been feeding the furnace of publicity with all the hate emails, comments, and other statements made by the people who can't just see this guy for the common (albeit rich and infamous) troll he is.
I've even seen this behaviour normally level-headed people like Tim Buckley (who made a quite threatening message in comic form here, I'm sure that if Thompson had heard of it he'd be splattering it everywhere). He says (in essence) that he's got his right to do it if he wants (and yes he does), just like Jack Thompson can argue against video games, but I really don't know how this is going to shift him from the screen at all.
In any case, I don't suppose he'll be here any longer than New Year's, unless something spectacular happens (maybe something like the Whitehouse being invaded by people dressed up like Unreal Tournament bots - it's Real Tournament now, mofo!).
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia agrees, apparently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor
Exactly. I have some vague notion that the people who came up with this idea were trying to stimulate interest amongst the curious, and perhaps draw up future recruits, but all I can see this doing is exposing them to the more brusque qualities of the coding community. Not a watertight idea, I think.
Neutrons are two down quarks and one up quark, and protons are two up quarks and one down quark, down quarks carrying a relative negative 1/3 charge and up quarks carrying a relative positive 2/3 charge. It's pretty simple to figure it out from there.
Love in action right there, folks. You will spend hours laughing.
I'll admit I heard something along those lines a while ago, but I wasn't given proof then, and I haven't been given proof now. I'd probably be convinced if I saw a website with some statistics, though I do agree that parents obviously have more opportunity to commit these crimes (probably have the least motive of anyone to do it, however).
I don't believe you. Prove it.
Of the course, it might be 186g, but the thing looks like Nokia's answer to the XBox - it's a clunky, square piece of crap. The obvious solution? An earpiece. Is there a major difficulty getting one where you are?
I'm not trying to call names here, but that's sort of how a salesman works - he gives you a problem you don't usually think about, then says "This thing will solve your problem". Never thought of it like that before.
http://tinyurl.com/d4fnc
Are there other such things for MSN, Gaim, mIRC (and other IRC applications)?
At the risk of losing karma, and because I have no mod points to give you, I'll just reply here just to say how much that brightened my day.
(Warning - post contains sarcasm)
I'm sure these people have been extremely careful not to do that, though. With a field of science as well-observed and criticised as that of quantum physics, any slip-up will definitely be noticed by another scientist.
Frankly, the only companies that can and should be trying to improve the morale of their employees (I mean the grunts, not the management) with techniques other than money or free time, are the ones with proper mechanisms are in place where smart people get to decision-making positions. Come to think of it, there probably isn't much to be done on the morale front there anyway.
I don't think you'd like it if I took, say, a sample of Americans from a Darwin Awards website and said it 'says a lot about the education system'.
But hey, you know, there are some pretty stupid people in the world. Most of which are already, thankfully, dead.
This is a Hyperbolic curve: http://glx.sourceforge.net/examples/2dplots/hyperb ola.png. So unless you mean that around the beginning of time the ability to enforce antitrust laws was somewhere in the realms of infinity, I'm guessing you mean exponentially: http://ghs.gresham.k12.or.us/science/ps/sci/ibbio/ ecology/pics/exponential.gif .
Ideas and opinions, whether true of[sic] false, cannot constitutionally be subject to libel claims.
Frankly, I haven't been thinking about the issue for long enough to come to a proper decision. Perhaps it's because Something Awful is big and popular enough to get away with it, but weren't they doing it when they were small and vulnerable? I can remember a particularly controversial case when they insulted the mothers of stillborn children (don't worry, no pictures anymore).
Why is the first thing I thought of when reading that "lol no its not a virus"?
Further apologies to Scott.
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
Sure. The mac-10 is a pristine example.
Now, as far as securing your CODE? You do and CAN build it into your code, removing business logic as much as possible from client-side forms/code & storing it as much as possible on the ServerSide for one example, & watching out for buffer overflow type exploitable code as another..
By the way, Oracle on Linux doesn't do too well against a similar database on Windows because Oracle is terrible (and that isn't the only one, for anyone who's been reading the securityfocus.com vuln lists). I don't know what databases you're talking about when you say 'other', so I'll just have to assume made that up.
Over here in England, there's relatively little gun crime. Due to the 1997 ban on handguns, guns any more lethal than hunting rifles or shotguns (which need licenses to possess) are very expensive (if you can find someone to vend one to you) and will get you detained at her Majesty's pleasure for a good long time if they catch you with one. Ball Bearing guns are treated in a manner similar to switchblades - they aren't allowed out in public, and threatening somebody with them is likely to get you in serious trouble.
Less than 10% of the police force is armed, and these particular officers are only deployed in emergencies like bank heists, terrorist alerts and the like. As a result, firearms aren't leaked into society through the police force (check the firearm saturation here. Homicide levels in the USA were 5 times what they were in the UK (admittedly, the survey was carried out about a decade ago and the number has been falling, and both countries use slightly different methods for deciding what's a homicide and what isn't, but 5 times?).
In my opinion, all this stuff about video games causing murderous feelings to arise is down to a few isolated incidents, where it's the gun that causes the deaths, but games are cited as the reason. It's not as if this type of media hasn't been blasted in our faces since the first action movie. The argument that 'games make you the killer' is nonsense - they're people on the screen, and all the gamer is doing is moving control sticks.
I remember reading about this in a magazine with a bunch of other computer-y type articles on an airplane about 6 months ago. I think it was in Time. I also distinctly remember the magazine saying "The '1' in his name gives him extra 'street cred' in cyber space". Yes, they said that.
Which is the strange thing. We are getting very worked up over him. What happens when somebody posts something inflammatory, trollish or vulgar here on Slashdot? We just ignore it and get on with our lives. However, it seems to me that this usually stable mindset goes right out of the window when it comes to Mr Thompson, and he's been feeding the furnace of publicity with all the hate emails, comments, and other statements made by the people who can't just see this guy for the common (albeit rich and infamous) troll he is.
I've even seen this behaviour normally level-headed people like Tim Buckley (who made a quite threatening message in comic form here, I'm sure that if Thompson had heard of it he'd be splattering it everywhere). He says (in essence) that he's got his right to do it if he wants (and yes he does), just like Jack Thompson can argue against video games, but I really don't know how this is going to shift him from the screen at all.
In any case, I don't suppose he'll be here any longer than New Year's, unless something spectacular happens (maybe something like the Whitehouse being invaded by people dressed up like Unreal Tournament bots - it's Real Tournament now, mofo!).