It's one thing to fool fingerprint scanners. The ones described in the article use a photo system that takes a picture of the full print and detects similarities with prints on file. It does sound pretty easy to fool. However, what about swipe-based scanners? Or retinal scanners? Surely Play-Doh isn't durable enough to drag over a fingerprint swipe-scanner and it's probably difficult to make a good replica of an eye with the stuff.
But the real security comes with a Marine standing guard. If you can get passed that guy, the biggest problem is already solved.
The problem with search engines is that sometimes when you are looking for something specific, you end up using the wrong terms and get results that are not what you are looking for. Take this article, for example. As a technically-inclined website, you'd expect that "Search Engine Optimization" would refer to techniques and algorithms used by search engines to index pages faster and search through the indices faster.
Instead, it's about some company using link farms to boost website rankings. While this might be interesting to someone who was actually affected by page rankings, I doubt that anyone really cares about their page rank for anything other than vanity. In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results, so despite the efforts of companies such as this, their efforts simply can't overcome the value provided by serving real content.
When you think about it, all these investment banks do is take nothing, divide it up, sell it, and make a huge amount of profit on the hard work of entrepreneurs. Mizuho will no doubt be forced to pay back the difference to J-Com, but that's too late, really. Some lucky souls bought in at that low price and made up to 500,000% profit on the error.
So much capital floating around based on the creation of nothing. Is there a more apt description of the modern world?
Why should it be more difficult than plugging in one wire from the wall to the television?
If a box is required to descramble the signal, why should it require more than one wire from the wall to the box and one more wire to the television?
These things should be simple that anyone can do it. Blaming confusing technology on the user is useless. The confusing technology is that way because the designers didn't find a way to make it any easier. That is the designers' fault.
This is one of those areas where OEMs and service providers are incredibly stupid.
The high definition should be enabled by default. The broadcasts should be in high definition by default.
It's not the customers' fault that they don't use these features, it's the technology and content providers' fault for not making those features seamless.
I've always felt the goal of technology was to become as unintrusive as possible. Making things that "just work" without fiddling or even minimal setup is one way to make technology invisible.
Virus writer is a Free Software fanatic
on
Sober Code Cracked
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Why else would he choose a date that coincides with the 21st anniversary of Richard Stallman's starting the GNU project?
Somewhere in Tokyo there was a brand new apartment building put up with state of the art everything. Video screen doorbells, plush elevators, garbage disposals, efficient kitchens, the works.
But when it was found out that someone had already broken in using the non-reprogrammable security password, the price floor fell right out from under the developer. Now there is a relatively vacant apartment building in Tokyo with all the trimmings for bargain basement prices because there is no safety available if you live there.
When calling overseas, it would be nice to forego the international rates in favor of much lower data packet rates on my cellphone. If there was a service that ran on my cellular phone that used VoIP data packets at a reasonable cost, that would be a huge step forward.
Sitting in front of my PC with a headset is not convenient.
Unless the laws in Australia are significantly different than in the U.S., it is illegal for minors to possess or view pornography. By creating a system in which a parent can control the content available to the household by means of an upstream valve (at the ISP), the government is helping parents exercise greater control over the content that is allowed into the household.
Does that mean that little Johnny can't find some way around it? No, kids have been sneaking adult magazines into their rooms for decades. What it does mean is that it helps reduce the exposure of kids to porn online and gives parents a mechanism to throttle as much as technically possible that sort of content coming into the home.
What is the cost? An extra checkbox on the application sheet? That seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Is this any different from hotels or cable companies blocking adult channels by default? By requiring this step, it blocks children from adult sites on the Internet (to the extent that the filters work).
This gives much more power to parents to control what their children have access to at home. Whereas there are numerous ways to circumvent PC-based web filters, there really isn't much a child can do to bypass ISP filters.
Lots of people with the same name in that database.
Kind of like the Nobel prize a couple years ago where there were a bunch of people with the same name in the research department of the winner in Japan.
For those that didn't read the article, USPTO is bad and grants too many broad patents to obvious and common things.
NASA has outlived its usefulness as an astronaut ferry operator. It's shown in the past few years that it is unable to reliably send astronauts into orbit or to even provide aid to the international space station.
This is good.
There are several large problems with having NASA in charge of space flight, and one of those is that it's the government tightly controlling who flies and who doesn't. If you aren't selected as an astronaut, you aren't going. Period. That means that it's just not feasible for the private sector to come up with NEO vehicles because NASA just won't allow it. No NEOVs, no rapid intercontinental travel, no business case.
So government here ought to do what only it can do, finance good ideas. Get out of the business of trying to do this space travel stuff on their own and turn over that money to the private sector who will find ways of doing the same more cheaply and more economically and more safely than any government boondoggle could hope to imagine.
It would be very interesting to see the effects of this gene across different populations. If it does not adversely affect Caucasian females, perhaps other populations are also immune to its effects (or are particularly susceptible to it).
No, staying technologically superior makes a lot of sense. Even if it is to fight an enemy that does not exist yet.
What doesn't make a lot of sense is to plow head first into a foreign policy that undermines your credibility around the world and makes the act of building a missile defense system seem like a means to wage an offensive war against enemies who suddenly find themselves unable to fight back. Under a missile defense shield, an aggressing nation would have no fear of reprisal.
Now take away the international trust that such a nation would never wage an offensive war (in both senses of the word "offensive"), and you will find those other nations scrambling to ally against it in an effort to move the balance of power away from that one nation. All of a sudden, enemies abound for that nation.
Remember, Russia agreed to cancelling the non-proliferation treaties. That was back when America wasn't seen as an aggressive nation.
So the fatal flaw was to expose the internal network to the external Internet? With the resources available to the government, would an alternative "G-Internet" have been infeasible?
Who cares if the power company's website is defaced or their web server brought down? That won't lead to the lights going out.
The question is not whether the threat from cyberterrorism (what a stupid term) is credible, but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
If you want to take out half the internet, you don't need hackers. A backhoe works just fine. So why in the world would anyone put such important things on a network that is easily disabled?
It's easier to relate an idea to people when they have a frame of reference to start from. Many people have seen Fight Club. I'm not sure how many people here are old enough to have taken a college course.
It's unfortunate that unions have gotten such a bad rap, especially among engineers in the computer-related fields. For all the Randian talk of rugged individualism, most people really are just sycophants and sheep. That's not bashing, it's just the way it is. For every engineer demanding better pay and working conditions, there are one thousand who are just happy to collect a paycheck every two weeks. If the industry was made up of solely the former type of engineer, there really wouldn't be any need for unions, each person acting in his own self-interest would be a union unto himself.
However, when you look around and see people working 40+ hours a week, working on the weekends, working through the night, showering at work because they don't have time to go home, and being pushed through project cycles that are causing undo stress, something is wrong. The balance of power is not maintained and the employers are exploiting the engineers. That "great" paycheck you're raking in every two weeks suddenly comes out to barely double minimum wage when you break it down hourly. The cost to your family is also incredibly high as they don't have you around. It's a terrible situation.
So what's the solution? Well, the favored solution among the computer cognoscenti is to "go find yourself a new line of work". Why should someone who is good at their job be forced to take a different job just because the industry is unwilling to offer a fair wage as well as reasonable working conditions? It should not be a requirement that anyone who wants to work in the computer industry should also be forced to give up their personal lives. Unionizing is one very good way of forcing employers to bend to the needs of the employed.
It's unfortunate that so many people are against the idea. We ought to be working to live, not living to work.
Slashdot Mirror
You just get to a point where it's not even necessary to block these things. Your brain just glosses over it and it's totally invisible.
And besides, what are we complaining about? A few seconds of program time? Be glad it's not less!
It's one thing to fool fingerprint scanners. The ones described in the article use a photo system that takes a picture of the full print and detects similarities with prints on file. It does sound pretty easy to fool. However, what about swipe-based scanners? Or retinal scanners? Surely Play-Doh isn't durable enough to drag over a fingerprint swipe-scanner and it's probably difficult to make a good replica of an eye with the stuff.
But the real security comes with a Marine standing guard. If you can get passed that guy, the biggest problem is already solved.
The problem with search engines is that sometimes when you are looking for something specific, you end up using the wrong terms and get results that are not what you are looking for. Take this article, for example. As a technically-inclined website, you'd expect that "Search Engine Optimization" would refer to techniques and algorithms used by search engines to index pages faster and search through the indices faster.
Instead, it's about some company using link farms to boost website rankings. While this might be interesting to someone who was actually affected by page rankings, I doubt that anyone really cares about their page rank for anything other than vanity. In general, the websites you are looking for, given the right search terms, come up in the first few search results, so despite the efforts of companies such as this, their efforts simply can't overcome the value provided by serving real content.
When you think about it, all these investment banks do is take nothing, divide it up, sell it, and make a huge amount of profit on the hard work of entrepreneurs. Mizuho will no doubt be forced to pay back the difference to J-Com, but that's too late, really. Some lucky souls bought in at that low price and made up to 500,000% profit on the error.
So much capital floating around based on the creation of nothing. Is there a more apt description of the modern world?
So you could be hit once by the original flaw. Then you could be hit one more time by the flaw in the patch?
Someone should write a song about that.
Why should it be more difficult than plugging in one wire from the wall to the television?
If a box is required to descramble the signal, why should it require more than one wire from the wall to the box and one more wire to the television?
These things should be simple that anyone can do it. Blaming confusing technology on the user is useless. The confusing technology is that way because the designers didn't find a way to make it any easier. That is the designers' fault.
This is one of those areas where OEMs and service providers are incredibly stupid.
The high definition should be enabled by default. The broadcasts should be in high definition by default.
It's not the customers' fault that they don't use these features, it's the technology and content providers' fault for not making those features seamless.
I've always felt the goal of technology was to become as unintrusive as possible. Making things that "just work" without fiddling or even minimal setup is one way to make technology invisible.
Why else would he choose a date that coincides with the 21st anniversary of Richard Stallman's starting the GNU project?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_5
Spelling mistake.
Somewhere in Tokyo there was a brand new apartment building put up with state of the art everything. Video screen doorbells, plush elevators, garbage disposals, efficient kitchens, the works.
But when it was found out that someone had already broken in using the non-reprogrammable security password, the price floor fell right out from under the developer. Now there is a relatively vacant apartment building in Tokyo with all the trimmings for bargain basement prices because there is no safety available if you live there.
When calling overseas, it would be nice to forego the international rates in favor of much lower data packet rates on my cellphone. If there was a service that ran on my cellular phone that used VoIP data packets at a reasonable cost, that would be a huge step forward.
Sitting in front of my PC with a headset is not convenient.
Unless the laws in Australia are significantly different than in the U.S., it is illegal for minors to possess or view pornography. By creating a system in which a parent can control the content available to the household by means of an upstream valve (at the ISP), the government is helping parents exercise greater control over the content that is allowed into the household.
Does that mean that little Johnny can't find some way around it? No, kids have been sneaking adult magazines into their rooms for decades. What it does mean is that it helps reduce the exposure of kids to porn online and gives parents a mechanism to throttle as much as technically possible that sort of content coming into the home.
What is the cost? An extra checkbox on the application sheet? That seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
Is this any different from hotels or cable companies blocking adult channels by default? By requiring this step, it blocks children from adult sites on the Internet (to the extent that the filters work).
This gives much more power to parents to control what their children have access to at home. Whereas there are numerous ways to circumvent PC-based web filters, there really isn't much a child can do to bypass ISP filters.
It's a good idea.
Not to bring everyone down, but this article, and most of the rest of the Slashdot homepage just gives bad news.
Is there any tech *good* news out there?
Lots of people with the same name in that database.
Kind of like the Nobel prize a couple years ago where there were a bunch of people with the same name in the research department of the winner in Japan.
For those that didn't read the article, USPTO is bad and grants too many broad patents to obvious and common things.
NASA has outlived its usefulness as an astronaut ferry operator. It's shown in the past few years that it is unable to reliably send astronauts into orbit or to even provide aid to the international space station.
This is good.
There are several large problems with having NASA in charge of space flight, and one of those is that it's the government tightly controlling who flies and who doesn't. If you aren't selected as an astronaut, you aren't going. Period. That means that it's just not feasible for the private sector to come up with NEO vehicles because NASA just won't allow it. No NEOVs, no rapid intercontinental travel, no business case.
So government here ought to do what only it can do, finance good ideas. Get out of the business of trying to do this space travel stuff on their own and turn over that money to the private sector who will find ways of doing the same more cheaply and more economically and more safely than any government boondoggle could hope to imagine.
It would be very interesting to see the effects of this gene across different populations. If it does not adversely affect Caucasian females, perhaps other populations are also immune to its effects (or are particularly susceptible to it).
I can bring my own pens. Does that help?
No, staying technologically superior makes a lot of sense. Even if it is to fight an enemy that does not exist yet.
What doesn't make a lot of sense is to plow head first into a foreign policy that undermines your credibility around the world and makes the act of building a missile defense system seem like a means to wage an offensive war against enemies who suddenly find themselves unable to fight back. Under a missile defense shield, an aggressing nation would have no fear of reprisal.
Now take away the international trust that such a nation would never wage an offensive war (in both senses of the word "offensive"), and you will find those other nations scrambling to ally against it in an effort to move the balance of power away from that one nation. All of a sudden, enemies abound for that nation.
Remember, Russia agreed to cancelling the non-proliferation treaties. That was back when America wasn't seen as an aggressive nation.
So the fatal flaw was to expose the internal network to the external Internet? With the resources available to the government, would an alternative "G-Internet" have been infeasible?
What kind of security clearance do you need to do that?
Who cares if the power company's website is defaced or their web server brought down? That won't lead to the lights going out.
The question is not whether the threat from cyberterrorism (what a stupid term) is credible, but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
If you want to take out half the internet, you don't need hackers. A backhoe works just fine. So why in the world would anyone put such important things on a network that is easily disabled?
Why shouldn't those who use a public facility more be also forced to pay more?
It seems pretty straightforward to me.
It's easier to relate an idea to people when they have a frame of reference to start from. Many people have seen Fight Club. I'm not sure how many people here are old enough to have taken a college course.
It's unfortunate that unions have gotten such a bad rap, especially among engineers in the computer-related fields. For all the Randian talk of rugged individualism, most people really are just sycophants and sheep. That's not bashing, it's just the way it is. For every engineer demanding better pay and working conditions, there are one thousand who are just happy to collect a paycheck every two weeks. If the industry was made up of solely the former type of engineer, there really wouldn't be any need for unions, each person acting in his own self-interest would be a union unto himself.
However, when you look around and see people working 40+ hours a week, working on the weekends, working through the night, showering at work because they don't have time to go home, and being pushed through project cycles that are causing undo stress, something is wrong. The balance of power is not maintained and the employers are exploiting the engineers. That "great" paycheck you're raking in every two weeks suddenly comes out to barely double minimum wage when you break it down hourly. The cost to your family is also incredibly high as they don't have you around. It's a terrible situation.
So what's the solution? Well, the favored solution among the computer cognoscenti is to "go find yourself a new line of work". Why should someone who is good at their job be forced to take a different job just because the industry is unwilling to offer a fair wage as well as reasonable working conditions? It should not be a requirement that anyone who wants to work in the computer industry should also be forced to give up their personal lives. Unionizing is one very good way of forcing employers to bend to the needs of the employed.
It's unfortunate that so many people are against the idea. We ought to be working to live, not living to work.