Opaque walls in private homes enable the residents of those home to commit crimes. The detection and prosecution of those crimes is a difficult task due to the use of opaque walls. All building contractors need to take responsibility, and join together to reduce and eliminate those crimes. I propose that it should not be permitted to build any new private homes whose walls are made from opaque materials.
Have you noticed the difference between my proposal and the BBC's proposal? That's right - the crimes enabled by opaque walls do not threaten to reduce the profits of large media corporations like the BBC. Ah well, I guess my proposal doesn't have much chance of adoption, then.
From the point of view of academics, the response of Suresh Venkatasubramanian to Cerf's letter has been getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and is worth a read.
They didn't say it's 3000K. They said it's not 3000K, because otherwise they would have detected it directly. It's cooler than 3000K, perhaps much cooler.
Warning: ACTUAL PHYSICS, not typical Slashdot half-assed speculation...
Calling this a diamond is simply wrong. Perhaps at some point in the distant future one of these will cool and part of it will become a form of crystal carbon, but considering that the cooling time without mantle carbon crystallization is on the order of 10 Gigayears, it is not likely this has happened yet considering that the universe is around 13.6 gigayears old...
OP here. Not claiming to know much about this; I just pointed out the NRAO announcement. But I assume that NRAO does have people that know something about the physics here.
They are not saying that the white dwarf is 3000 K - they would have detected it directly then. They are saying that it must be cooler than that, perhaps much cooler. Thus, they are speculating that this is an extremely old object, and that it may indeed have cooled enough to reach temperatures at which there would be carbon crystallization.
As far as I can see, the main innovation here seems to be that Google is throwing their corporate weight at the patents that have been keeping the home automation market in a choke-hold for almost two decades.
Re:"Undead" doesn't mean vibrant, though.
on
Perl Is Undead
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· Score: 1
Python, Ruby... You're right, it's not the 1990's anymore. it's the 2000's.
Oh, wait - it's already past 2010 now? So - how about Haskell?
Seriously, what idiot thought this would be a good idea? Punish your customers and give moochers, criminals and cheapskates free and anonymous internet.
Only people who provide the service from their own wifi will be able to use it from others. It's actually an attractive idea. The OP is framing it as a problem only because Comcast is doing it as "opt-out", enabling it remotely without people explicitly giving their permission. I suppose that's true. But in practice, it's not much different than "opt-in". Our local provider is doing it as "opt-in", but almost everyone signs up for it. You get sent to the opt-in screen automatically as part of the installation procedure whenever you put in a new modem. And why not? It costs you essentially nothing, and it's really convenient.
Landline telephone providers are doing this all over world, and pushing it very aggressively. Here's why: landline providers are quickly losing their market share. Mobile providers are eating their lunch. Many young people are not ever signing up for a landline phone anymore, and some people who already have a landline are getting rid of it to save money. Share-alike free wifi service not only gives you convenient wifi access almost wherever you are; it also ties you to your landline. And makes it less attractive to shell out as much money for mobile data plans.
The paper itself mentions only the ion hypothesis; the article linked by OP attributes the other hypothesis to "Keith Forward, a chemical engineer at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona". The point is that the study makes no claim about the validity of any hypothesis. It only rejects the previously widely accepted one. So the title of the article is quite fair; it's not "clickbait".
The title is unfortunate (it's clickbait)... At the end of the paper, they point out that small amounts of water adsorbed on the surfaces of these oxides should create H+ and OH- ions in a density that does explain the static generation effect.
No, that's just one of two alternative hypotheses mentioned at the end of the article. The second is transfer of the zirconium itself between the particles. There could be other ideas. The point of this study is only to eliminate the widely assumed electron-transfer hypothesis, not to establish any alternative. So the title is quite accurate.
This same thing happened in the US. I forget the new station, but they released stats on the election days before it happened. whatever, no one would ever believe it happens here though...
Here's the story. It was KPHO in Phoenix, Arizona. They displayed a banner at the bottom of the screen announcing the exact percentages by which Obama defeated Romney with 99% of results in - more than two weeks before the election.
The station claims it was a mistaken display of a test graphic. Could be that's what happened in Azerbaijan, too, if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Do we?
Only a handful of mathematicians would trust that.
Paper ballots with independents actually conducting the election taking ballots and counting them, etc, with overseers from all political parties welcome to watch the entire proceedings, from start to finish.
Simple and transparent.
No, even the mathematicians wouldn't trust it. See Bruce Schneier's 2006 essay that explains why.
Use paper ballots. Period.
However, crypto can still add value - it can go a long way towards preventing fraud and errors even in a paper ballot election. Scantegrity is an open-source system, invented by Rivest (the "R" in RSA), Chaum, and other researchers, that helps secure a paper ballot election by supplying each voter with a simple verification code that can be written down. The codes in no way compromise the anonymity of the voters, and cannot be used to determine what vote was cast. But they can be used by individual voters to verify that their votes have been counted correctly, and by election officials to verify that ballots have not been tampered with and that the results have been tallied correctly. The overhead cost of the system is low.
Scantegrity has been used successfully in two real elections - municipal elections in the Takoma Park, Maryland in the U.S. But so far it doesn't seem to be catching on very much. I guess it doesn't quite suit the needs of the big money electronic voting industry.
When I was a graduate student at University of Chicago, the University's private police force was the third largest police force in Illinois, after the cities of Chicago and Springfield. That may still be the case. The University police patrolled the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago in which the University is situated. Hyde Park is surrounded on three sides by high-crime neighborhoods, and on the east by a park along the shore of Lake Michigan, but it was safe to walk the streets of Hyde Park at all hours of the day or night. University police patrol cars could constantly be seen cruising slowly up and down every street. In those days before cell phones were popular, you could walk up any street almost without ever taking your hand off an emergency call box. When I first visited Hyde Park for my interview, I remember being told the exact boundaries of where it was safe to walk. That included things like "make sure to walk only along the south side of 47th Street, never along the north side of the street."
Their TOS explicitly states they can and will decrypt emails if asked to by law.
They can only do that if they have your key. If you use their web interface to generate your key, or to send and read email, then they can be forced to decrypt your email. But if you generate your key yourself and use it to encrypt and decrypt locally, your are fine.
They are not worth looking at
I think that's a little harsh. They're doing the best they can, and they are being very honest about the inherent limitations.
My understanding of Hetzner's report is that it works like this: there is a backdoor on a Nagios server (not clear whether that means a backdoor in Nagios itself, or some other kind of backdoor on a server whose purpose is Nagios monitoring). The attackers are able to use this backdoor to gain root on other servers within Hetzner, which they use to modify key daemons on those servers. The daemons are modified in memory as they run, and I'm sure the attackers are careful not to generate any logging events. So nothing at all is touched on disk for the servers being attacked. Nothing.
The backdoor on the Nagios server probably does persist across reboots. However, that also may be something that is remote in origin. For example, perhaps the backdoor is hidden in the Perl code of some Nagios module which is regularly updated by Hetzner (and probably plenty of other data centers) from some remote repository which the attackers have compomised. There doesn't even need to be any trace of the backdoor on the Nagios server most of the time. It only needs to be present for a few seconds every once in a while, say, once every few weeks, because the daemons it attacks are long-running processes.
Now Logitech can produce a commercial in which a short Facebook employee gets four or five Microsoft mice out of the machine, then stands on them in order to reach the higher-up button to get a Logitech mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
Opaque walls in private homes enable the residents of those home to commit crimes. The detection and prosecution of those crimes is a difficult task due to the use of opaque walls. All building contractors need to take responsibility, and join together to reduce and eliminate those crimes. I propose that it should not be permitted to build any new private homes whose walls are made from opaque materials.
Have you noticed the difference between my proposal and the BBC's proposal? That's right - the crimes enabled by opaque walls do not threaten to reduce the profits of large media corporations like the BBC. Ah well, I guess my proposal doesn't have much chance of adoption, then.
Wasn't it already shut down a couple of years ago, with mandatory migration to Skype?
TFA implies that MSN is still active in China, and that is what is now being shut down.
Besides Skype, MS also owns Yammer, which is more similar to MSN than Skype, at least superficially, but targeted at the corporate market.
All in all - there's not much reason for MS to keep MSN around.
From the point of view of academics, the response of Suresh Venkatasubramanian to Cerf's letter has been getting a lot of well-deserved attention, and is worth a read.
They didn't say it's 3000K. They said it's not 3000K, because otherwise they would have detected it directly. It's cooler than 3000K, perhaps much cooler.
Warning: ACTUAL PHYSICS, not typical Slashdot half-assed speculation...
Calling this a diamond is simply wrong. Perhaps at some point in the distant future one of these will cool and part of it will become a form of crystal carbon, but considering that the cooling time without mantle carbon crystallization is on the order of 10 Gigayears, it is not likely this has happened yet considering that the universe is around 13.6 gigayears old...
OP here. Not claiming to know much about this; I just pointed out the NRAO announcement. But I assume that NRAO does have people that know something about the physics here.
They are not saying that the white dwarf is 3000 K - they would have detected it directly then. They are saying that it must be cooler than that, perhaps much cooler. Thus, they are speculating that this is an extremely old object, and that it may indeed have cooled enough to reach temperatures at which there would be carbon crystallization.
As far as I can see, the main innovation here seems to be that Google is throwing their corporate weight at the patents that have been keeping the home automation market in a choke-hold for almost two decades.
Python, Ruby... You're right, it's not the 1990's anymore. it's the 2000's.
Oh, wait - it's already past 2010 now? So - how about Haskell?
Seriously, what idiot thought this would be a good idea? Punish your customers and give moochers, criminals and cheapskates free and anonymous internet.
Only people who provide the service from their own wifi will be able to use it from others. It's actually an attractive idea. The OP is framing it as a problem only because Comcast is doing it as "opt-out", enabling it remotely without people explicitly giving their permission. I suppose that's true. But in practice, it's not much different than "opt-in". Our local provider is doing it as "opt-in", but almost everyone signs up for it. You get sent to the opt-in screen automatically as part of the installation procedure whenever you put in a new modem. And why not? It costs you essentially nothing, and it's really convenient.
Landline telephone providers are doing this all over world, and pushing it very aggressively. Here's why: landline providers are quickly losing their market share. Mobile providers are eating their lunch. Many young people are not ever signing up for a landline phone anymore, and some people who already have a landline are getting rid of it to save money. Share-alike free wifi service not only gives you convenient wifi access almost wherever you are; it also ties you to your landline. And makes it less attractive to shell out as much money for mobile data plans.
The paper itself mentions only the ion hypothesis; the article linked by OP attributes the other hypothesis to "Keith Forward, a chemical engineer at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona". The point is that the study makes no claim about the validity of any hypothesis. It only rejects the previously widely accepted one. So the title of the article is quite fair; it's not "clickbait".
The title is unfortunate (it's clickbait)... At the end of the paper, they point out that small amounts of water adsorbed on the surfaces of these oxides should create H+ and OH- ions in a density that does explain the static generation effect.
No, that's just one of two alternative hypotheses mentioned at the end of the article. The second is transfer of the zirconium itself between the particles. There could be other ideas. The point of this study is only to eliminate the widely assumed electron-transfer hypothesis, not to establish any alternative. So the title is quite accurate.
This same thing happened in the US. I forget the new station, but they released stats on the election days before it happened. whatever, no one would ever believe it happens here though...
Here's the story. It was KPHO in Phoenix, Arizona. They displayed a banner at the bottom of the screen announcing the exact percentages by which Obama defeated Romney with 99% of results in - more than two weeks before the election.
The station claims it was a mistaken display of a test graphic. Could be that's what happened in Azerbaijan, too, if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Do we?
Not all encryption is broken. As Bruce Schneier says - trust the math(s).
As Bruce Shneier says - Don't trust electronic voting. Use paper.
Only a handful of mathematicians would trust that.
Paper ballots with independents actually conducting the election taking ballots and counting them, etc, with overseers from all political parties welcome to watch the entire proceedings, from start to finish.
Simple and transparent.
No, even the mathematicians wouldn't trust it. See Bruce Schneier's 2006 essay that explains why.
Use paper ballots. Period.
However, crypto can still add value - it can go a long way towards preventing fraud and errors even in a paper ballot election. Scantegrity is an open-source system, invented by Rivest (the "R" in RSA), Chaum, and other researchers, that helps secure a paper ballot election by supplying each voter with a simple verification code that can be written down. The codes in no way compromise the anonymity of the voters, and cannot be used to determine what vote was cast. But they can be used by individual voters to verify that their votes have been counted correctly, and by election officials to verify that ballots have not been tampered with and that the results have been tallied correctly. The overhead cost of the system is low.
Scantegrity has been used successfully in two real elections - municipal elections in the Takoma Park, Maryland in the U.S. But so far it doesn't seem to be catching on very much. I guess it doesn't quite suit the needs of the big money electronic voting industry.
When I was a graduate student at University of Chicago, the University's private police force was the third largest police force in Illinois, after the cities of Chicago and Springfield. That may still be the case. The University police patrolled the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago in which the University is situated. Hyde Park is surrounded on three sides by high-crime neighborhoods, and on the east by a park along the shore of Lake Michigan, but it was safe to walk the streets of Hyde Park at all hours of the day or night. University police patrol cars could constantly be seen cruising slowly up and down every street. In those days before cell phones were popular, you could walk up any street almost without ever taking your hand off an emergency call box. When I first visited Hyde Park for my interview, I remember being told the exact boundaries of where it was safe to walk. That included things like "make sure to walk only along the south side of 47th Street, never along the north side of the street."
Shhh.... I still use the goold ol' command line FTP.
Maybe it's finally time to graduate to lftp?
Their TOS explicitly states they can and will decrypt emails if asked to by law.
They can only do that if they have your key. If you use their web interface to generate your key, or to send and read email, then they can be forced to decrypt your email. But if you generate your key yourself and use it to encrypt and decrypt locally, your are fine.
They are not worth looking at
I think that's a little harsh. They're doing the best they can, and they are being very honest about the inherent limitations.
Except HushMail won't hesitate to deliver a unique java client-side applet embedded with a keylogger to intercept the target recipient's passphrase.
If you don't use their web interface at all - neither to generate your key nor to send and read mail - then that's not a problem.
My understanding of Hetzner's report is that it works like this: there is a backdoor on a Nagios server (not clear whether that means a backdoor in Nagios itself, or some other kind of backdoor on a server whose purpose is Nagios monitoring). The attackers are able to use this backdoor to gain root on other servers within Hetzner, which they use to modify key daemons on those servers. The daemons are modified in memory as they run, and I'm sure the attackers are careful not to generate any logging events. So nothing at all is touched on disk for the servers being attacked. Nothing.
The backdoor on the Nagios server probably does persist across reboots. However, that also may be something that is remote in origin. For example, perhaps the backdoor is hidden in the Perl code of some Nagios module which is regularly updated by Hetzner (and probably plenty of other data centers) from some remote repository which the attackers have compomised. There doesn't even need to be any trace of the backdoor on the Nagios server most of the time. It only needs to be present for a few seconds every once in a while, say, once every few weeks, because the daemons it attacks are long-running processes.
Where's all the posts proclaiming the infallibility and universal superiority of PorsgreSQL?
Oh, you're right. There you go then.
(Seriously, is there a stipulation in the licences that obligates you guys to reply to threads about mysql?)
Actually, no. It's in the design, the features, and the source code.
Will you be the first one to try flying one of these things? Oh no, don't look at me. No way.
Now Logitech can produce a commercial in which a short Facebook employee gets four or five Microsoft mice out of the machine, then stands on them in order to reach the higher-up button to get a Logitech mouse.
Dotcom's claims were only "baseless" in the sense that they were not base and evil, unlike the DOJ's behavior in this case.
...but what does it increase the chances of? Well, besides drug (caffeine) addiction?
I'll bet the rate of cancer morbidity among heroin users is extremely low.
Based on past experience, I think it will probably be indeed very interesting, but not "earth-shaking" for most people.
Everyone could always use another paperweight.