The dilemma: protecting developers' investments, and revenue stream, while keeping an open platform.
From (note: there's no reason to read the article I'm about to link, it's badly laid out with terrible ads and I'll quote the title) another article:
Android Skins, "Crapware" Protected by Open Source Principles, Says Schmidt
Please note, I could not find where Schmidt said these exact words but there was some sentiment of this in his interview. And there's some truth to it.
Truth be told, I'm a little wary of applications on my Android based Motorola DROID. I have seen the skins apps and am curious how one maker gets licenses for Zelda, Minnesota Vikings, Justin Beiber and all other kinds of imagery when they sell these skins. This sort of questionable content makes me wonder what other questionable things are being engaged. Likewise, I'm also a little wary of a lot of the free games I play. One in particular is the Solitaire Free Pack which, as it so turns out, I am a big fan of the ~40 variants of solitaire they offer. I also would like to use the Kindle application on my phone. There's just one problem: it wants my Amazon account login and password.
You know, it's not that I don't trust Android, Google or Amazon... it's the other apps I've unwittingly installed willy nilly on my phone while bored or drunk on the metro. You'll probably be able to assure me that there's no way another app could access the disk or memory space of the Kindle app but it just seems unsafe. I would not find iOS all that much more reassuring but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the paranoia of storing account information inside my phone -- or even repeatedly typing it in.
I don't have any proof that it's a real security issue and I hope apps somehow get very restricted memory and disk spaces but I think Google has a little further to go on security as well as offering developers a way to recoup losses. Since it'll undoubtedly be DRM like their early attempts, I hope it's stressed to be opt-in and not advised.
A book (that I even reviewed on Slashdot) has a section on just this sort of thing you can read here. It tells you how to use HTML5 microdata to mark up reviews so that search engines and sites (like metacritic) can utilize your HTML to build indexes of reviews.
Slashdot's always been a little behind the curve but considering what their review form looks like, you'd think it'd be a trivial thing to have the end product wrap the review in microdata so they too are suddenly influencing metacritic and coming back a real review site in Google.
Still, this seems like a story slot that could have been better served covering something else...
That's why I, as the submitter, tagged it as idle & humor. Because that's all it is. Something that's funny enough to read when you're idle. CmdrTaco put it under games and he, as the editor at the moment, has that choice. I mean, is it any less newsworthy than your submission on PS3 Trophies? At least your attention is being brought to potential bribery here.
As always: If you're using the new index, there is an edit button in the upper left near the 'Stories' tab that will allow you hit 'Exclusions' and add 'idle' to your exclusions.
The first of many identical to this one that will follow in these Slashdot comments.
First of all, who edited this article? This is where I viciously attack the Slashdot editor for punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. Once we clear your elementary faux pas, we can move on.
I recall some of the very basics of this in college but I just skimmed the Wikipedia article on this research and now I'm an expert ready to rip this paper to shreds.
I'm also handy with Google and just found out that their quoted researcher is viewed as a charlatan by another camp of peers in his field. Character assassination and ad hominem attacks follow.
If there was a survey, I question the sample size, method of the survey and diversity. If this is correlation and not causation, I state the obvious and take potshots at my country's shitty educational system. If this is a classification I question the recall rate. If there's any political or monetary incentive for this research to be published then I state it and have immediately won the argument. At that point I can decide who lives and who dies. My comments have leveled whole cities!
The small part of this research that I cannot disprove was already known to me. My Google Fu provides you another link to an article here where this was preliminarily discussed in 2004. And I assure you I was already on top of that this whole time. At this point, I resubtitle Slashdot in a derogatory manner for having stale news. I might even threaten to move on to a superior news aggregator but in reality will spend the rest of my life on Slashdot.
I interpreted my standoffish attitude and tone as asserting my superiority when in actuality I'm a psychologist's wet dream. Done with my post I consider the final word spoken save for one thing. I spin a wheel on my desk and it lands on an internet meme somewhere between "In Soviet Russia" and "All Your Base." I modify a noun or verb to make it potentially funny and insert it at the end.
Since I'm the expert, I might come back and read your responses -- if you're lucky. But the odds are high that I said something incredibly stupid or shortsighted (what with me being outside of my fucking element and all) so I'll probably just ignore you.
Is this the first confirmed death while operating a Segway?
It's hard to say. I think there have been reports of people dying from Segway accidents (2004 Las Vegas accident) but it's never really been clear if the Segway killed the person. I'd imagine if someone hopped on your product and rode off a cliff you wouldn't be so quick to say it was a death from riding your product. However, could you find someone that had a heart attack or went into diabetic shock and died from lack of medical attention while operating a Segway? Yeah, probably. I don't think it's right to blame the product here. You obviously have to consider the danger inherently present in the individual as well as his or her surroundings. The Las Vegas accident was a speedway incident involving a 59 year old falling into a pit area during the SKUSA SuperNats car racing event. Can you blame the product?
He was last seen at the plant arguing with one of the engineers who had assured him the latest Segway was "uncrashable." He rode off muttering something about having the last laugh. Clearly he was a business and marketing genius but a bit of a lemming in day-to-day life.
But in all seriousness, I'm very sorry for him and his family. If I didn't constantly encounter the damned things on sidewalks and in pedestrian spaces on the National Mall in DC I wouldn't be so quick to lampoon their maker's untimely demise.
The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space.
Emphasis mine. As to the 'ancient tech', it's stable and still working so what's the problem? People are bitching about rising taxes not the fact that we are stunting ourselves in exploring space. It's not 1975 anymore, people have moved on to other international penis/rocket/missile envy matches.
I'm guessing that's some regurgitated joke about MSNBC. If it is, you didn't even bother to check their front page. They seem to be running the regular AP story about it. Look, when the New York Times are the only ones willing to get off their asses and actually do some work in order to garner eyeballs, it's hard to find other sources. Even the Fox News article appears to be entirely based off the New York Times article. Even the MSNBC article (and I'm guessing AP at large) cites them:
The Times said the Obama proposal would... The Times said that some privacy and technology advocates say the regulations would create weaknesses in the technology that hackers could more easily exploit.
While they're submitting the new legislation next year, a congressional hearing recently heard arguments in favor of this and the original NYTimes article notes that it's:
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Of course, the New York Times article is way better than the Faux News article but my submission this morning turned into a paywall.
Bad, bad, very bad idea. Every academic says this is stupid, again from the original article:
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.
The government is trying to protect us by forcing us to be less secure and more vulnerable. That logic simply does not follow. I'm not against responsible internet wiretaps but this is the opposite of responsible.
"Man gets 10 years for felony commercial theft of service".
I believe the actual charges were one count of computer fraud and one count of wire fraud. Which has a pretty serious maximum punishment.
There. FTFY.
No hacking involved here; nothing to see; move along.
Well, I don't know if I'd agree there was no hacking involved. It sounds like he used someone in Washington state named Moore to run port scans on all the big routers for VoIP hardware. Moore (serving two years) would then brute force attack these routers for login information. Pena dumped Moore twenty large and then acted as a salesman. After selling the phone service, Pena would reprogram the vulnerable networks so they would accept his rogue telephone traffic. Pena didn't seem to do much hacking, Moore was apparently just a brute force hacker that preyed on stupid VoIP companies who used four number prefixes as passwords.
I think the general public considers port scanning and brute force attacks to be hacking. At least the news reports it as such.
Taking a screenshot, scaling it down, saving it as a JPEG and then converting the result to PNG results in terrible image quality. Please don't think this reflects the actual visuals of the game.
-molo
Aside from bandwidth, a low resolution image from a game used in a review can protect you if the company that made the game doesn't like your review and tries to hit you with a DMCA violation for using their copyrighted images. Whenever you submit non-free content to Wikimedia Commons, there are many guidelines designed to keep you and wikimedia inside fair use and safe harbor suggested boundaries.
For example, when I uploaded a fair use clip of Life on Mars by David Bowie, I had to set the sound quality at the absolute lowest possible value and add this rationale to the very long list of requirements to turn a snippet of a copyrighted song into non-free fair use:
It is of a lower quality than the original recording.
I believe that a low res distorted image may protect you from being a target by a game publisher if you wish to reserve your right to pan a game, give it a score zero and still present screen shots to add in your criticism. While it's a good idea to mention these are not game quality resolution screen shots, there may be another purpose to their degradation. The 'this is kinda what it looks like' is exactly what protects you from someone claiming ownership of that imagery accusing you of unlicensed distribution of that imagery.
Just a thought from the world of jacked up copyright insanity. I submitted a story a short while ago that demonstrated how out of hand this exact topic can get.
I mean, nothing seems to point to me that this is shill garbage coming from facebook, but the conceptual idea of Diaspora is sound and the code was released for the precise reason of improving it, as it has done...
Okay well, sometimes I look at code and I think "good start" and then sometimes I feel like Simon Cowell... and ask them to start over. So to determine where I stand with the Diaspora code, allow me to quote the article:
This basic pattern was repeated several times in Diaspora’s code base: security-sensitive actions on the server used the params hash to identify pieces of data they were to operate on, without checking that the logged in user was actually authorized to view or operate on that data. For example, if you were logged in to a Diaspora seed and knew the ID of any photo on the server, changing the URL of any destroy action from the ID of a photo you own to an ID of any other photo would let you delete that second photo. Rails makes exploits like this child’s play, since URLs to actions are trivially easy to guess and object IDs “leak” all over the place. Do not assume than an object ID is private.
Okay, I taught myself how to use the rails framework and code Ruby. And one of the things I was amazed at was the Rails magic. Because of how powerful it can be (both good and bad). Yes, it helps you prototype but it's errors like these that make me pause and reconsider if the person coding Ruby on Rails really understands how the framework is attempting to assist them. Obviously if you allow any user to enter any ID of a record in their URL for any CRUD action... you aren't really understanding what those routes are trying to do for you. And you're a danger to your users.
While I could quickly remedy the above problem for the Diaspora team by improving the authentication and authorization code checks, it might be better to just start over. Now, I've devoted none of my time to the concept of liberating social network users and for that I thank the Diaspora team. This blog posting -- if true -- sure is a vote of no confidence for their capabilities of developing a realistic system. Can they improve? Certainly. But if you're making errors like that, you might be better off letting someone else take a stab at this. It's a harsh thing to say but you don't understand the tool you're using to prototype if you're even starting at this point.
I wish them the best of luck and I hope the community reaches out to them. But I'm not interested in recoding everything. I'd sooner simply start my own project.
Talk to Dr. William E. Morrow of Layton, Utah who signed for thousands of prescriptions that two of Kyle Rootsaert's pharmacies filled. From that article:
CNN's Special Investigations Unit first examined Rootsaert and Roots Pharmacy, the company he owns in American Fork, in 2008. CNN Correspondent Drew Griffin ordered the antidepressant Prozac over the internet without a doctor's prescription, and the pills were delivered by overnight express the following day.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and FBI are very very interested in all of this and as the article notes, Google is quick to show they're on the government's side regarding these pharmacies. Google faces very low risk (alleging breach of AdWords contracts allowing others to back out of contracts) while reducing its liability exposure by way of this lawsuit if any of the 49 "John Doe" owned sites face criminal investigation.
Did they ask if it could be blocked because they wanted to, or because they think it could mean backslash for using ACTA as a censor tool instead of enforcing copyrights?
I'd imagine the MPAA and government have similar interests in forcing ISPs to block certain websites. The MPAA is probably making a calculated move to suggest they would be the watchdog going after Wikileaks if such a censorship method could also be used to protect their copyrights.
Frankly, it looks like they're trying to show to the government that they have aligned interests. As the TechDirt article notes, the MPAA could merge The Pirate Bay with Wikileaks in the eyes of the government and then from there it's guilt by association. Personally I think this is the MPAA fishing for how extensive they can make ACTA by appealing to the United States government's emotions. Think back to the DMCA and Patriot Acts and how following their passage into law we all sat around scratching our heads wondering WTF was going on with some of the prosecution that was falling under those acts. Wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA ran a campaign saying that passing ACTA into law worldwide will stop terrorists, child porn, small arms traders, drugs, wildfires, Satan, etc.
I'm guessing the MPAA would love to prosecute cases of copyright infringement under the same law (and maybe even penalties) as cases of threats to national security.
After watching King of Kong I'm extremely happy to hear Wiebe is back on top. Something about Billy Mitchell has never sat right with me.
Perhaps how the 'documentary' demonized him? Is he egotistical and full of himself? Probably. But it seems the documentary was either not entirely truthful or misrepresented time lines. I met Walter Day at the Mall of America in college and will say that in the few minutes I chatted with him he was the kindest and most honest person I have met. If Walter Day doesn't think Billy Mitchell is pure evil than neither do I. If Billy had tried to do anything truly sinister I think Day would have short circuited it and I'm not clear on whether or not the mailed in tape that beat Wiebe in the documentary was actually accepted.
I'd be careful to accept something as truth when it could have made for gripping cinema. Mitchell is such a villain in the documentary that it's almost too good to be true when juxtaposing him to Wiebe.
I would caution your "doesn't sit right with me" assessment from a film and point out it's probably as reliable as anything meant to entertain someone can be. Yeah there's probably some truth to it. But Mitchell is no more purely evil than Wiebe is purely good. Selective footage can make it seem that way though. Before you jump all over Mitchell I would suggest you read the this and meet him first. You've selected one single source that is a highly entertaining movie and it has a very high chance of being unfairly biased to represent an epic battle between good and evil. They may be foils of each other in several ways but I would imagine some of it is manufactured to put you on Wiebe's side. Mitchell's devoted a lot of his life to video games and has held other records. The documentary really doesn't seem to investigate the positives of Mitchell as much as it does Wiebe.
She has twopatents that appear to show both what is wrong with America's diet mentality and the patent system all at once.
She's basically pimping out arginine as a panacea (from increased sexual performance to weight-loss). Just read about her wondrous achievements on Skinny Science Corporation: A Leading Biomedical Research Company. Never have I seen the word "science" so abused and raped by words around it. And it doesn't stop there. Google her name or "skinny science" and you're left with a plethora of bullshit sites with her vapid stare hawking complete medical farces designed to prey on the obese. Surprise surprise, she wants it to be illegal for you to talk about her and these sites.
Does anybody know how she got the prefix of "Dr."?
I recently went on vacation to Grand Cayman and didn't have any phone service. What happens then? I had to correctly identify friends from random Facebook pictures in order to log into Facebook the first time (at which point the place I was staying was apparently white listed for me to log into for the rest of the trip).
Sure, it's probably a small annoyance to pay for better security unless you travel often or have really randomly spotty cell phone service. A trip out to my parent's farm would probably be more than an annoyance as I await the text msg okaying me to log into GMail through my parent's 56k modem. I guess everything comes with a price but I'd probably just turn this off and leave it off instead of regretting it on vacation if I forget to disable it before traveling.
Also, a few of my company's clients have server rooms in the depths of basements with little to no cell phone reception. Would hate to work there if you try to log into GMail and get asked for this. You'd have to go for a walk to get your authentication code.
When I open up the FTP link, the latest modified listing I see is:
GtkRadiant-GPL.zip Feb 17 2006
Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?
I don't really know, perhaps someone can explain better, but I just get this bad feeling the way they are going about this.
For better or for worse, this is going to seriously shake any confidence a person or country is going to have when offering sensitive information to the United States. The United States conducts a lot of operations both good and bad throughout the entire world. If you think that overall the United States' actions in other countries is good then you would probably have a bad feeling about this. Let's say I know where a warlord is hiding out in Sudan but if I tell US forces about it and anyone finds out that it was me, I'll lose my life. After being able to peruse their entire set of documents from Afghanistan and Iraq, how much confidence can I have in them?
Hopefully bringing in Bureau of Investigative Journalism is a way to protect those people but at the same time relaying the important information to the public in a way it doesn't further jeopardize lives.
Here's another complete rewrite reducing the whole article to:
- Iraq War, eh??? - All your oil are belong to U.S. - Stup up stoopid Americans
But you know what's really interesting? When Bridle compiled this used their lexer to transform the XML, he kept the IP address in the upper right of each edit. So the above edit's IP address is forever in print: 68.162.123.240 Of course if you had used a username to make an edit, that was put in place of the IP address.
100 people surveyed? Students? Sounds like there might be some sampling concerns there. How many people out of 100 are narcissists? Also, anyone know the reputability of the journal it was published in?
Mehdizadeh went on to say "that's why so many people get paranoid if their boss sees them on Facebook. They're worried that they don't project the same image there that they project in their workplace."
Yeah or you know the reason the rest of us get nervous is the fact that you're not doing work if you're on Facebook. Unless he means 'on Facebook' outside of work and then it's probably closer to the fact that you can't always control what goes on on Facebook unless you don't allow anything on your page. It's for socializing, not working so therein lies the paranoia regardless of whether or not you're a narcissist.
"From incorrectly using seawater instead of drilling fluid"
I can't even imagine how dumb one must be to substitute one fluid for the other. That would be like a mechanic using gasoline instead of wiper fluid, something that you just don't do or think about, period.
Even if heads roll, are oil companies going to change?
I'm no drilling expert. I read the articles (but not the whole report) and, as the submitter, I guess I failed to explain that the articles seem to imply that at some point it's okay to switch from drilling fluid to seawater when the rig is recognized as very stable. You take readings and measurements to determine when this is safe. Apparently there were a lot of misjudgments from both Transocean and BP. You would think they would be a lot better at this by now. Sure you can outline all the pressures both companies had to make this thing that was behind schedule run flawlessly but personally I'm happy that six or seven things had to go wrong to lead to this... I'm unhappy that it seems to be companies just pushing the process further by ignoring/misreading warning signs. Do they switch to seawater to save money?
According to the article, if they had stuck with drilling fluid instead of switching to the lighter seawater, a blowout would have been prevented. Instead they made history. Perhaps next time their gamble will be in favor of their worker's lives and the environment?
Is there a good reason why these new Google toys don't work in Opera by default? Neither the background image option or that swirling ball trick from the other day worked in Opera until you set it in the options for Opera to mask itself as IE or Firefox - and now the same thing is true for this latest gimmick.
I don't know for sure (not a Google insider) but I would guess that they are using a wrapper script or something that has a hard coded list of support browser by browser. Whatever version of Opera you are using is probably incorrectly identified as not having these HTML5 feature(s) supported. Or perhaps it only gives you some of the functionality so they make the executive decision to just disable it entirely. I just finished reading HTML5 Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim of Google and he pushes heavily for the use of modernizr to check browser capabilities. I've never known Modernizr to be wrong though. Whatever the case, it appears Google is simply not promising their doodle will work in Opera... could be that they made a checking script for the Pac-Man doodle and just kept carrying it over. Did Opera work for that?
Now that I think about it, this is a high traffic page so they probably wrote their own browser checking wrapper for graceful fallback instead of pushing all of a javascript library down to each client. They are probably using a broad brush to balance bandwidth with audience and you're one of the unfortunate victims.
Slashdot Mirror
The dilemma: protecting developers' investments, and revenue stream, while keeping an open platform.
From (note: there's no reason to read the article I'm about to link, it's badly laid out with terrible ads and I'll quote the title) another article:
Android Skins, "Crapware" Protected by Open Source Principles, Says Schmidt
Please note, I could not find where Schmidt said these exact words but there was some sentiment of this in his interview. And there's some truth to it.
... it's the other apps I've unwittingly installed willy nilly on my phone while bored or drunk on the metro. You'll probably be able to assure me that there's no way another app could access the disk or memory space of the Kindle app but it just seems unsafe. I would not find iOS all that much more reassuring but I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the paranoia of storing account information inside my phone -- or even repeatedly typing it in.
Truth be told, I'm a little wary of applications on my Android based Motorola DROID. I have seen the skins apps and am curious how one maker gets licenses for Zelda, Minnesota Vikings, Justin Beiber and all other kinds of imagery when they sell these skins. This sort of questionable content makes me wonder what other questionable things are being engaged. Likewise, I'm also a little wary of a lot of the free games I play. One in particular is the Solitaire Free Pack which, as it so turns out, I am a big fan of the ~40 variants of solitaire they offer. I also would like to use the Kindle application on my phone. There's just one problem: it wants my Amazon account login and password.
You know, it's not that I don't trust Android, Google or Amazon
I don't have any proof that it's a real security issue and I hope apps somehow get very restricted memory and disk spaces but I think Google has a little further to go on security as well as offering developers a way to recoup losses. Since it'll undoubtedly be DRM like their early attempts, I hope it's stressed to be opt-in and not advised.
A book (that I even reviewed on Slashdot) has a section on just this sort of thing you can read here. It tells you how to use HTML5 microdata to mark up reviews so that search engines and sites (like metacritic) can utilize your HTML to build indexes of reviews.
Slashdot's always been a little behind the curve but considering what their review form looks like, you'd think it'd be a trivial thing to have the end product wrap the review in microdata so they too are suddenly influencing metacritic and coming back a real review site in Google.
Still, this seems like a story slot that could have been better served covering something else...
That's why I, as the submitter, tagged it as idle & humor. Because that's all it is. Something that's funny enough to read when you're idle. CmdrTaco put it under games and he, as the editor at the moment, has that choice. I mean, is it any less newsworthy than your submission on PS3 Trophies? At least your attention is being brought to potential bribery here.
As always: If you're using the new index, there is an edit button in the upper left near the 'Stories' tab that will allow you hit 'Exclusions' and add 'idle' to your exclusions.
The first of many identical to this one that will follow in these Slashdot comments.
First of all, who edited this article? This is where I viciously attack the Slashdot editor for punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc. Once we clear your elementary faux pas, we can move on.
I recall some of the very basics of this in college but I just skimmed the Wikipedia article on this research and now I'm an expert ready to rip this paper to shreds.
I'm also handy with Google and just found out that their quoted researcher is viewed as a charlatan by another camp of peers in his field. Character assassination and ad hominem attacks follow.
If there was a survey, I question the sample size, method of the survey and diversity. If this is correlation and not causation, I state the obvious and take potshots at my country's shitty educational system. If this is a classification I question the recall rate. If there's any political or monetary incentive for this research to be published then I state it and have immediately won the argument. At that point I can decide who lives and who dies. My comments have leveled whole cities!
The small part of this research that I cannot disprove was already known to me. My Google Fu provides you another link to an article here where this was preliminarily discussed in 2004. And I assure you I was already on top of that this whole time. At this point, I resubtitle Slashdot in a derogatory manner for having stale news. I might even threaten to move on to a superior news aggregator but in reality will spend the rest of my life on Slashdot.
I interpreted my standoffish attitude and tone as asserting my superiority when in actuality I'm a psychologist's wet dream. Done with my post I consider the final word spoken save for one thing. I spin a wheel on my desk and it lands on an internet meme somewhere between "In Soviet Russia" and "All Your Base." I modify a noun or verb to make it potentially funny and insert it at the end.
Since I'm the expert, I might come back and read your responses -- if you're lucky. But the odds are high that I said something incredibly stupid or shortsighted (what with me being outside of my fucking element and all) so I'll probably just ignore you.
Is this the first confirmed death while operating a Segway?
It's hard to say. I think there have been reports of people dying from Segway accidents (2004 Las Vegas accident) but it's never really been clear if the Segway killed the person. I'd imagine if someone hopped on your product and rode off a cliff you wouldn't be so quick to say it was a death from riding your product. However, could you find someone that had a heart attack or went into diabetic shock and died from lack of medical attention while operating a Segway? Yeah, probably. I don't think it's right to blame the product here. You obviously have to consider the danger inherently present in the individual as well as his or her surroundings. The Las Vegas accident was a speedway incident involving a 59 year old falling into a pit area during the SKUSA SuperNats car racing event. Can you blame the product?
He was last seen at the plant arguing with one of the engineers who had assured him the latest Segway was "uncrashable." He rode off muttering something about having the last laugh. Clearly he was a business and marketing genius but a bit of a lemming in day-to-day life.
But in all seriousness, I'm very sorry for him and his family. If I didn't constantly encounter the damned things on sidewalks and in pedestrian spaces on the National Mall in DC I wouldn't be so quick to lampoon their maker's untimely demise.
Yes, a lot of NASA's computer systems are antiquated ...
Furthermore, I thought the United States was still a bit stymied at how the Russians managed to compete with us in space while severely lacking in the VLSI chips department? There may still be some technologies, improvements and lessons to be learned from The Space Race -- especially from the side that fell apart first.
The Ancient Computers Powering the Space Race
From general agreement on the definition of the Space Race:
The Space Race was a mid-to-late twentieth century competition between the Soviet Union (USSR) and the United States (USA) for supremacy in outer space exploration. The term refers to a specific period in human history, 1957-1975, and does not include subsequent efforts by these or other nations to explore space.
Emphasis mine. As to the 'ancient tech', it's stable and still working so what's the problem? People are bitching about rising taxes not the fact that we are stunting ourselves in exploring space. It's not 1975 anymore, people have moved on to other international penis/rocket/missile envy matches.
In related news, the house fails to agree on a meager NASA funding bill while space tourism continues to progress.
What does the DNC-NBC say about it?
Nothing.
I'm guessing that's some regurgitated joke about MSNBC. If it is, you didn't even bother to check their front page. They seem to be running the regular AP story about it. Look, when the New York Times are the only ones willing to get off their asses and actually do some work in order to garner eyeballs, it's hard to find other sources. Even the Fox News article appears to be entirely based off the New York Times article. Even the MSNBC article (and I'm guessing AP at large) cites them:
The Times said the Obama proposal would ... The Times said that some privacy and technology advocates say the regulations would create weaknesses in the technology that hackers could more easily exploit.
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Of course, the New York Times article is way better than the Faux News article but my submission this morning turned into a paywall.
Bad, bad, very bad idea. Every academic says this is stupid, again from the original article:
Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.
The government is trying to protect us by forcing us to be less secure and more vulnerable. That logic simply does not follow. I'm not against responsible internet wiretaps but this is the opposite of responsible.
"Man gets 10 years for felony commercial theft of service".
I believe the actual charges were one count of computer fraud and one count of wire fraud. Which has a pretty serious maximum punishment.
There. FTFY.
No hacking involved here; nothing to see; move along.
Well, I don't know if I'd agree there was no hacking involved. It sounds like he used someone in Washington state named Moore to run port scans on all the big routers for VoIP hardware. Moore (serving two years) would then brute force attack these routers for login information. Pena dumped Moore twenty large and then acted as a salesman. After selling the phone service, Pena would reprogram the vulnerable networks so they would accept his rogue telephone traffic. Pena didn't seem to do much hacking, Moore was apparently just a brute force hacker that preyed on stupid VoIP companies who used four number prefixes as passwords.
I think the general public considers port scanning and brute force attacks to be hacking. At least the news reports it as such.
Taking a screenshot, scaling it down, saving it as a JPEG and then converting the result to PNG results in terrible image quality. Please don't think this reflects the actual visuals of the game.
-molo
Aside from bandwidth, a low resolution image from a game used in a review can protect you if the company that made the game doesn't like your review and tries to hit you with a DMCA violation for using their copyrighted images. Whenever you submit non-free content to Wikimedia Commons, there are many guidelines designed to keep you and wikimedia inside fair use and safe harbor suggested boundaries.
For example, when I uploaded a fair use clip of Life on Mars by David Bowie, I had to set the sound quality at the absolute lowest possible value and add this rationale to the very long list of requirements to turn a snippet of a copyrighted song into non-free fair use:
It is of a lower quality than the original recording.
I believe that a low res distorted image may protect you from being a target by a game publisher if you wish to reserve your right to pan a game, give it a score zero and still present screen shots to add in your criticism. While it's a good idea to mention these are not game quality resolution screen shots, there may be another purpose to their degradation. The 'this is kinda what it looks like' is exactly what protects you from someone claiming ownership of that imagery accusing you of unlicensed distribution of that imagery.
Just a thought from the world of jacked up copyright insanity. I submitted a story a short while ago that demonstrated how out of hand this exact topic can get.
I mean, nothing seems to point to me that this is shill garbage coming from facebook, but the conceptual idea of Diaspora is sound and the code was released for the precise reason of improving it, as it has done ...
Okay well, sometimes I look at code and I think "good start" and then sometimes I feel like Simon Cowell ... and ask them to start over. So to determine where I stand with the Diaspora code, allow me to quote the article:
This basic pattern was repeated several times in Diaspora’s code base: security-sensitive actions on the server used the params hash to identify pieces of data they were to operate on, without checking that the logged in user was actually authorized to view or operate on that data. For example, if you were logged in to a Diaspora seed and knew the ID of any photo on the server, changing the URL of any destroy action from the ID of a photo you own to an ID of any other photo would let you delete that second photo. Rails makes exploits like this child’s play, since URLs to actions are trivially easy to guess and object IDs “leak” all over the place. Do not assume than an object ID is private.
Okay, I taught myself how to use the rails framework and code Ruby. And one of the things I was amazed at was the Rails magic. Because of how powerful it can be (both good and bad). Yes, it helps you prototype but it's errors like these that make me pause and reconsider if the person coding Ruby on Rails really understands how the framework is attempting to assist them. Obviously if you allow any user to enter any ID of a record in their URL for any CRUD action ... you aren't really understanding what those routes are trying to do for you. And you're a danger to your users.
While I could quickly remedy the above problem for the Diaspora team by improving the authentication and authorization code checks, it might be better to just start over. Now, I've devoted none of my time to the concept of liberating social network users and for that I thank the Diaspora team. This blog posting -- if true -- sure is a vote of no confidence for their capabilities of developing a realistic system. Can they improve? Certainly. But if you're making errors like that, you might be better off letting someone else take a stab at this. It's a harsh thing to say but you don't understand the tool you're using to prototype if you're even starting at this point.
I wish them the best of luck and I hope the community reaches out to them. But I'm not interested in recoding everything. I'd sooner simply start my own project.
How do I order?
Talk to Dr. William E. Morrow of Layton, Utah who signed for thousands of prescriptions that two of Kyle Rootsaert's pharmacies filled. From that article:
CNN's Special Investigations Unit first examined Rootsaert and Roots Pharmacy, the company he owns in American Fork, in 2008. CNN Correspondent Drew Griffin ordered the antidepressant Prozac over the internet without a doctor's prescription, and the pills were delivered by overnight express the following day.
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and FBI are very very interested in all of this and as the article notes, Google is quick to show they're on the government's side regarding these pharmacies. Google faces very low risk (alleging breach of AdWords contracts allowing others to back out of contracts) while reducing its liability exposure by way of this lawsuit if any of the 49 "John Doe" owned sites face criminal investigation.
Did they ask if it could be blocked because they wanted to, or because they think it could mean backslash for using ACTA as a censor tool instead of enforcing copyrights?
I'd imagine the MPAA and government have similar interests in forcing ISPs to block certain websites. The MPAA is probably making a calculated move to suggest they would be the watchdog going after Wikileaks if such a censorship method could also be used to protect their copyrights.
Frankly, it looks like they're trying to show to the government that they have aligned interests. As the TechDirt article notes, the MPAA could merge The Pirate Bay with Wikileaks in the eyes of the government and then from there it's guilt by association. Personally I think this is the MPAA fishing for how extensive they can make ACTA by appealing to the United States government's emotions. Think back to the DMCA and Patriot Acts and how following their passage into law we all sat around scratching our heads wondering WTF was going on with some of the prosecution that was falling under those acts. Wouldn't be surprised if the MPAA ran a campaign saying that passing ACTA into law worldwide will stop terrorists, child porn, small arms traders, drugs, wildfires, Satan, etc.
I'm guessing the MPAA would love to prosecute cases of copyright infringement under the same law (and maybe even penalties) as cases of threats to national security.
After watching King of Kong I'm extremely happy to hear Wiebe is back on top. Something about Billy Mitchell has never sat right with me.
Perhaps how the 'documentary' demonized him? Is he egotistical and full of himself? Probably. But it seems the documentary was either not entirely truthful or misrepresented time lines. I met Walter Day at the Mall of America in college and will say that in the few minutes I chatted with him he was the kindest and most honest person I have met. If Walter Day doesn't think Billy Mitchell is pure evil than neither do I. If Billy had tried to do anything truly sinister I think Day would have short circuited it and I'm not clear on whether or not the mailed in tape that beat Wiebe in the documentary was actually accepted.
I'd be careful to accept something as truth when it could have made for gripping cinema. Mitchell is such a villain in the documentary that it's almost too good to be true when juxtaposing him to Wiebe.
I would caution your "doesn't sit right with me" assessment from a film and point out it's probably as reliable as anything meant to entertain someone can be. Yeah there's probably some truth to it. But Mitchell is no more purely evil than Wiebe is purely good. Selective footage can make it seem that way though. Before you jump all over Mitchell I would suggest you read the this and meet him first. You've selected one single source that is a highly entertaining movie and it has a very high chance of being unfairly biased to represent an epic battle between good and evil. They may be foils of each other in several ways but I would imagine some of it is manufactured to put you on Wiebe's side. Mitchell's devoted a lot of his life to video games and has held other records. The documentary really doesn't seem to investigate the positives of Mitchell as much as it does Wiebe.
Just something to consider when judging others.
It's dolomite, baby! The mineral that won't cop out when the heat is all about.
- Professor Farnsworth
She has two patents that appear to show both what is wrong with America's diet mentality and the patent system all at once.
She's basically pimping out arginine as a panacea (from increased sexual performance to weight-loss). Just read about her wondrous achievements on Skinny Science Corporation: A Leading Biomedical Research Company. Never have I seen the word "science" so abused and raped by words around it. And it doesn't stop there. Google her name or "skinny science" and you're left with a plethora of bullshit sites with her vapid stare hawking complete medical farces designed to prey on the obese. Surprise surprise, she wants it to be illegal for you to talk about her and these sites.
Does anybody know how she got the prefix of "Dr."?
Learn to keep track of your damn phone...
And what do I do when I don't have phone service?
I recently went on vacation to Grand Cayman and didn't have any phone service. What happens then? I had to correctly identify friends from random Facebook pictures in order to log into Facebook the first time (at which point the place I was staying was apparently white listed for me to log into for the rest of the trip).
Sure, it's probably a small annoyance to pay for better security unless you travel often or have really randomly spotty cell phone service. A trip out to my parent's farm would probably be more than an annoyance as I await the text msg okaying me to log into GMail through my parent's 56k modem. I guess everything comes with a price but I'd probably just turn this off and leave it off instead of regretting it on vacation if I forget to disable it before traveling.
Also, a few of my company's clients have server rooms in the depths of basements with little to no cell phone reception. Would hate to work there if you try to log into GMail and get asked for this. You'd have to go for a walk to get your authentication code.
Which seems a bit old. As I look through each of these files, none seem to be related to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein – Enemy Territory, Return to Castle Wolfenstein single-player or Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer. A few directories up I see Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone but all I'm seeing are older games that have been open sourced with notes from John Carmack. There are a lot of Doom and Quake utilities and Wolfenstein 3D but ... I cannot find these other engines. Am I missing something? Is the Quake code the same engine?
Gamasutra ran a similar story back in August but there's no press release on id's site about such a commitment to the GPL. One would think that if this did happen at QuakeCon it would be on QuakeCon's news site. Did someone make an announcement and confuse Wolfenstein 3D with the later games or is there a legit place you can get the source with a GPL license alongside it?
I don't really know, perhaps someone can explain better, but I just get this bad feeling the way they are going about this.
For better or for worse, this is going to seriously shake any confidence a person or country is going to have when offering sensitive information to the United States. The United States conducts a lot of operations both good and bad throughout the entire world. If you think that overall the United States' actions in other countries is good then you would probably have a bad feeling about this. Let's say I know where a warlord is hiding out in Sudan but if I tell US forces about it and anyone finds out that it was me, I'll lose my life. After being able to peruse their entire set of documents from Afghanistan and Iraq, how much confidence can I have in them?
Hopefully bringing in Bureau of Investigative Journalism is a way to protect those people but at the same time relaying the important information to the public in a way it doesn't further jeopardize lives.
Time Magazine reports ...
It was BookTwo that originated this story because that's written by the guy who put the book together (which was picked up by a blog which was picked up by The Awl which was picked up by Time's NewsFeed). Of course, we are talking about Time here. I found the images of what's actually inside very interesting but I would bet that the guy who used some simple code to create the Creative Commons work is probably the only person to tender cash for a physical copy.
Here's another complete rewrite reducing the whole article to:
But you know what's really interesting? When Bridle compiled this used their lexer to transform the XML, he kept the IP address in the upper right of each edit. So the above edit's IP address is forever in print: 68.162.123.240 Of course if you had used a username to make an edit, that was put in place of the IP address.
This whole thing reminds me of the time lapse video done of the Virginia Tech shootings. Creative stuff you can do with Wikipedia.
Mehdizadeh went on to say "that's why so many people get paranoid if their boss sees them on Facebook. They're worried that they don't project the same image there that they project in their workplace."
Yeah or you know the reason the rest of us get nervous is the fact that you're not doing work if you're on Facebook. Unless he means 'on Facebook' outside of work and then it's probably closer to the fact that you can't always control what goes on on Facebook unless you don't allow anything on your page. It's for socializing, not working so therein lies the paranoia regardless of whether or not you're a narcissist.
"From incorrectly using seawater instead of drilling fluid" I can't even imagine how dumb one must be to substitute one fluid for the other. That would be like a mechanic using gasoline instead of wiper fluid, something that you just don't do or think about, period. Even if heads roll, are oil companies going to change?
I'm no drilling expert. I read the articles (but not the whole report) and, as the submitter, I guess I failed to explain that the articles seem to imply that at some point it's okay to switch from drilling fluid to seawater when the rig is recognized as very stable. You take readings and measurements to determine when this is safe. Apparently there were a lot of misjudgments from both Transocean and BP. You would think they would be a lot better at this by now. Sure you can outline all the pressures both companies had to make this thing that was behind schedule run flawlessly but personally I'm happy that six or seven things had to go wrong to lead to this ... I'm unhappy that it seems to be companies just pushing the process further by ignoring/misreading warning signs. Do they switch to seawater to save money?
According to the article, if they had stuck with drilling fluid instead of switching to the lighter seawater, a blowout would have been prevented. Instead they made history. Perhaps next time their gamble will be in favor of their worker's lives and the environment?
Is there a good reason why these new Google toys don't work in Opera by default? Neither the background image option or that swirling ball trick from the other day worked in Opera until you set it in the options for Opera to mask itself as IE or Firefox - and now the same thing is true for this latest gimmick.
I don't know for sure (not a Google insider) but I would guess that they are using a wrapper script or something that has a hard coded list of support browser by browser. Whatever version of Opera you are using is probably incorrectly identified as not having these HTML5 feature(s) supported. Or perhaps it only gives you some of the functionality so they make the executive decision to just disable it entirely. I just finished reading HTML5 Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim of Google and he pushes heavily for the use of modernizr to check browser capabilities. I've never known Modernizr to be wrong though. Whatever the case, it appears Google is simply not promising their doodle will work in Opera ... could be that they made a checking script for the Pac-Man doodle and just kept carrying it over. Did Opera work for that?
Now that I think about it, this is a high traffic page so they probably wrote their own browser checking wrapper for graceful fallback instead of pushing all of a javascript library down to each client. They are probably using a broad brush to balance bandwidth with audience and you're one of the unfortunate victims.