I find it laughable that people think the reason that China can compete on price with American suppliers is because the former might be using pirated MS software. Don't you think that the fact that per-capita GDP in the People's Republic is a seventh of the figure for the US might play a bigger role? Even manipulation of the value of the yuan is probably more significant than this.
This is a stupid law. I saw in PJ's article that a similar bill is working its way through the Massachusetts legislature. If so, I'm going to be writing some letters to my state rep and senator.
Be very careful about your assumptions. "whereas in the US, the majority of the country supports gay marriage" is likely very false
It's almost certainly false. In 2009, the Pew Center found that 54% of the Americans they polled opposed same-sex marriage. This figure has fluctuated over the years, but in only one 2008 poll did the figure slip below 50%, and then only by a mere percentage point. Explicit support for same-sex marriage never breaks 40% in any year that article reports.
The good news for the future is that younger cohorts are more likely to accept same-sex marriage, though even among 18-29 year-olds, there's about an equal number of opponents and supporters.
I would have liked to see comparable data on Verizon and Sprint defections after AT&T released the iPhone. I don't find this argument at all convincing. It sounds more like either a post-hoc rationalization for dumping an unprofitable investment, or a way to convince Telekom investors that their US problems were all Apple/AT&T's fault.
As an AT&T customer who was recently considering switching to T-Mobile, I'm not very happy about the proposed merger. Now we'll have only one GSM provider in the US.
One key point in the ruling not yet mentioned is that Righthaven did not employ the take-down procedures set in place by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They failed to notify the blogger or the blogger's ISP, presumably because they knew that doing so would result in the piece being removed from the blogger's site and eliminating Righthaven's chance to profit.
Like others, I'm a bit troubled by how sweeping a ruling this seems to be. On its face it seems to give nonprofit groups a "fair-use bonus" just because of their nonprofit status. I can understand the finding of limited "harm" to the copyright holder and perhaps even accept the non-competing markets part of the ruling. I would still argue nonprofits should have to defend their use of copyrighted materials with the standard list of defenses in the Copyright Act. I also have problems with the portion of the judge's ruling that claims a long investigative story doesn't qualify as a "creative work" because it's purely "factual" in nature.
Those qualms aside, I don't have any problems with the judge ruling that plaintiffs must first use the procedures Congress put in place to handle disputes of this kind before bringing them to the courts. One of the commentators to the linked article reported that Righthaven had earlier rejected sending take-down notices because of the costs involved. I'll just observe in passing that little Funimation, an American distributor of Japanese anime, had no problem finding the funds to send 1,337 (yep, that's the figure) take-down notices to file sharers. I'd bet Stephens Media has a lot more resources available to devote to take-down notices than a company whose annual revenues are well under $100 million.
While everyone here always focuses on what this means for Linux, Novell sells a number of products that have nothing per se to do with *nix like GroupWise and ZenWorks. Hell, there still may be existing patents that relate to NetWare.
Enabling the "Add-On Bar" in the View > Toolbars menu restores the traditional status bar it appears. At least I now have the icons for ForecastFox and NoScript at the bottom of the browser window again.
Mass General agreed to pay a $1 million fine this past week for a HIPAA violation. One of its staff members left the records for 192 patients on a subway train. They were never recovered.
These are the kinds of practices HIPAA was designed to prevent. I, for one, am glad to see HHS enforcing these rules. Just the fact that someone could be carrying the records for 192 patients around with them while commuting shows how cavalierly some medical staff handle their patients' personal data.
Massachusetts has been studying this approach to cost-management for a couple of years now, and the Governor introduced a bill last week to switch all patients paid for by the Commonwealth to capitation. See:
Me: "Could you copy them to my flash drive then?" Them: "Sorry, that would be a HIPAA violation."
That's not a HIPAA violation, that's a obvious security issue. Nobody in their right mind would let you plug some random flash drive into the hospital network.
Funny you should say that. Recently I was talking to someone who works in a clinic. They have centralized virus scanning, and he was notified when one of the machines in the patient intake area reported finding some item of malware. Turned out a patient had brought her medical records on a USB stick, and the person behind the desk plugged it into her computer to copy the materials from it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the malware was installed on the device when the records were copied there in the first place.
Let me hasten to add that this is an institution that takes HIPAA seriously, but still has these little vulnerabilities. They're looking into disabling USB storage via Group Policies. I suggested filling the USB ports with epoxy as well.
Just curious, but how many of those HIPAA-fearing doctors use plain-text email to correspond with patients? How many of them have their email addresses on their business cards? I routinely ask providers if they realize that sending patient health information via e-mail is a HIPAA violation. Most haven't ever given the question a moment's thought.
Thanks for asking this. I was left scratching my head after reading the blurb, too. Other than simple malicious behavior like draining batteries and running up account charges, is there some deeper purpose to this piece of crap?
8% of the 749 people polled answered "no" or "not sure" to the question about Hawaii. The standard error for that value is
sqrt(0.08*0.92/749) ~ 0.01
So the actual error is +1%. The normal "two-sigma" confidence interval is thus +/- 2%. So it's likely that somewhere between six and ten percent of NC voters would have answered the same way if we could have polled them all.
The standard errors reported in polls represent the worst-case scenario which occurs at 50%. As you go towards zero or one hundred the standard error shrinks which only makes sense.
Then why did you run the story knowing that it's "incomplete" instead of waiting for more details to become available? It's not like this is a story that needs to be rushed out before deadline. The lead sentence says this story covers events that happened last year.
If you are going to run a story like this, you need some significantly better editorial controls that what it seems were employed. How about starting off with a specific time-line of events so we can have some idea which systems were involved, when the attacks took place, etc., rather than the jumbled mess your publication released?
You really shouldn't be surprised that a story like this might be seen as FUD. From my reading of the story you released, I don't see any evidence that Linux was involved in these attacks whatsoever. Instead you chose, as another poster here suggests, to run a headline with the words "Linux" and "cyberattack" in it with literally no justification for suggesting Linux was involved at all.
It's certainly possible that the transition to the new trading system provided opportunities for hackers the way bomb threats in the Czech Republic facilitated the thefts from carbon traders accounts recently. You could have written an article with the headline "London Stock Exchange under 'major cyber-attack' during software switch." Instead you chose to include Linux along the way. Somehow I suspect your headline editors know that suggesting there might be security issues with "that geeky Linux stuff" draws attention among your readership of CIOs afraid of that "stuff."
I, for one, do not look forward to a future where games will be developed to run on both the PS3 and the PSP. I didn't buy a PS3 and connect it to my 1080p TV to play games that are designed to look good on a 5" screen.
I have a friend who still has AOL for mail and a FiOS connection. He reads his mail with a browser and pays nothing for the mail service. No exporting for him. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of AOL mail users read their messages over the web nowadays.
Why companies waste their time putting yet another attack vector into their products and on our PCs, laptops, netbooks and smart phones (no root access ~ dumb device...it just ain't smart) is beyond me.
You don't see any value to having a corporate logo like Yahoo's or Norton's continuously in front of people's faces whenever they use their web browsers? Hmm, maybe you should sign up for Marketing 101.
Most people don't care about second- and higher-order ramifications of installing something like a toolbar. In many cases they didn't install it themselves anyway. It came that way from the OEM. In the case of something like Norton, they probably feel reassured that Symantec is looking over their shoulders while they surf.
They may have sold the credits already. The WSJ piece I submitted about this story has more details:
"It started when an anonymous caller on Tuesday morning told Czech State Police that explosives had been placed at the offices of OTE AS, a private company that manages the Czech Republic's national registry. The police evacuated the registry for five hours.
During that time, the computer network wasn't monitored, OTE officials said. Hackers stole 475,000 allowances, worth 7 million, from a company called Blackstone Global Ventures, an environmental consultancy that trades carbon credits for industrial companies.
The thieves changed account-ownership information and executed illegal trades, said Nikos Tornikidis, a portfolio manager at Blackstone Global Ventures."
My guess is that they executed the trades and siphoned the proceeds off to a bank account somewhere.
It looks like they're only considering options that install into a browsing computer. That leaves some highly-rated solutions like Dan's Guardian off the list.
The way to solve this problem is not to deliver infected emails in the first place. After all these years of development of systems for scanning email, no one should be getting infected attachments. I don't blame the endusers, but the IT staffs that fail to protect their users, and their organizations, from obvious threats.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it laughable that people think the reason that China can compete on price with American suppliers is because the former might be using pirated MS software. Don't you think that the fact that per-capita GDP in the People's Republic is a seventh of the figure for the US might play a bigger role? Even manipulation of the value of the yuan is probably more significant than this.
This is a stupid law. I saw in PJ's article that a similar bill is working its way through the Massachusetts legislature. If so, I'm going to be writing some letters to my state rep and senator.
Be very careful about your assumptions. "whereas in the US, the majority of the country supports gay marriage" is likely very false
It's almost certainly false. In 2009, the Pew Center found that 54% of the Americans they polled opposed same-sex marriage. This figure has fluctuated over the years, but in only one 2008 poll did the figure slip below 50%, and then only by a mere percentage point. Explicit support for same-sex marriage never breaks 40% in any year that article reports.
The good news for the future is that younger cohorts are more likely to accept same-sex marriage, though even among 18-29 year-olds, there's about an equal number of opponents and supporters.
I would have liked to see comparable data on Verizon and Sprint defections after AT&T released the iPhone. I don't find this argument at all convincing. It sounds more like either a post-hoc rationalization for dumping an unprofitable investment, or a way to convince Telekom investors that their US problems were all Apple/AT&T's fault.
As an AT&T customer who was recently considering switching to T-Mobile, I'm not very happy about the proposed merger. Now we'll have only one GSM provider in the US.
One key point in the ruling not yet mentioned is that Righthaven did not employ the take-down procedures set in place by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. They failed to notify the blogger or the blogger's ISP, presumably because they knew that doing so would result in the piece being removed from the blogger's site and eliminating Righthaven's chance to profit.
Like others, I'm a bit troubled by how sweeping a ruling this seems to be. On its face it seems to give nonprofit groups a "fair-use bonus" just because of their nonprofit status. I can understand the finding of limited "harm" to the copyright holder and perhaps even accept the non-competing markets part of the ruling. I would still argue nonprofits should have to defend their use of copyrighted materials with the standard list of defenses in the Copyright Act. I also have problems with the portion of the judge's ruling that claims a long investigative story doesn't qualify as a "creative work" because it's purely "factual" in nature.
Those qualms aside, I don't have any problems with the judge ruling that plaintiffs must first use the procedures Congress put in place to handle disputes of this kind before bringing them to the courts. One of the commentators to the linked article reported that Righthaven had earlier rejected sending take-down notices because of the costs involved. I'll just observe in passing that little Funimation, an American distributor of Japanese anime, had no problem finding the funds to send 1,337 (yep, that's the figure) take-down notices to file sharers. I'd bet Stephens Media has a lot more resources available to devote to take-down notices than a company whose annual revenues are well under $100 million.
While everyone here always focuses on what this means for Linux, Novell sells a number of products that have nothing per se to do with *nix like GroupWise and ZenWorks. Hell, there still may be existing patents that relate to NetWare.
Well, maybe to start with, how about having a computer for this purpose that's not on the network?
Enabling the "Add-On Bar" in the View > Toolbars menu restores the traditional status bar it appears. At least I now have the icons for ForecastFox and NoScript at the bottom of the browser window again.
Mass General agreed to pay a $1 million fine this past week for a HIPAA violation. One of its staff members left the records for 192 patients on a subway train. They were never recovered.
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2011pres/02/20110224b.html
These are the kinds of practices HIPAA was designed to prevent. I, for one, am glad to see HHS enforcing these rules. Just the fact that someone could be carrying the records for 192 patients around with them while commuting shows how cavalierly some medical staff handle their patients' personal data.
Massachusetts has been studying this approach to cost-management for a couple of years now, and the Governor introduced a bill last week to switch all patients paid for by the Commonwealth to capitation. See:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/02/18/patrick_unveils_plan_to_curb_health_care_costs/
Funny you should say that. Recently I was talking to someone who works in a clinic. They have centralized virus scanning, and he was notified when one of the machines in the patient intake area reported finding some item of malware. Turned out a patient had brought her medical records on a USB stick, and the person behind the desk plugged it into her computer to copy the materials from it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the malware was installed on the device when the records were copied there in the first place.
Let me hasten to add that this is an institution that takes HIPAA seriously, but still has these little vulnerabilities. They're looking into disabling USB storage via Group Policies. I suggested filling the USB ports with epoxy as well.
Funny this should come up today. I just started watching Moonlight Mile the other night.
Just curious, but how many of those HIPAA-fearing doctors use plain-text email to correspond with patients? How many of them have their email addresses on their business cards? I routinely ask providers if they realize that sending patient health information via e-mail is a HIPAA violation. Most haven't ever given the question a moment's thought.
Thanks for asking this. I was left scratching my head after reading the blurb, too. Other than simple malicious behavior like draining batteries and running up account charges, is there some deeper purpose to this piece of crap?
I wonder how much attention Nokia will pay to Maemo if it makes Win7 its default mobile platform:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/technology/04nokia.html
I guess you didn't take a statistics class.
8% of the 749 people polled answered "no" or "not sure" to the question about Hawaii. The standard error for that value is
sqrt(0.08*0.92/749) ~ 0.01
So the actual error is +1%. The normal "two-sigma" confidence interval is thus +/- 2%. So it's likely that somewhere between six and ten percent of NC voters would have answered the same way if we could have polled them all.
The standard errors reported in polls represent the worst-case scenario which occurs at 50%. As you go towards zero or one hundred the standard error shrinks which only makes sense.
Then why did you run the story knowing that it's "incomplete" instead of waiting for more details to become available? It's not like this is a story that needs to be rushed out before deadline. The lead sentence says this story covers events that happened last year.
If you are going to run a story like this, you need some significantly better editorial controls that what it seems were employed. How about starting off with a specific time-line of events so we can have some idea which systems were involved, when the attacks took place, etc., rather than the jumbled mess your publication released?
You really shouldn't be surprised that a story like this might be seen as FUD. From my reading of the story you released, I don't see any evidence that Linux was involved in these attacks whatsoever. Instead you chose, as another poster here suggests, to run a headline with the words "Linux" and "cyberattack" in it with literally no justification for suggesting Linux was involved at all.
It's certainly possible that the transition to the new trading system provided opportunities for hackers the way bomb threats in the Czech Republic facilitated the thefts from carbon traders accounts recently. You could have written an article with the headline "London Stock Exchange under 'major cyber-attack' during software switch." Instead you chose to include Linux along the way. Somehow I suspect your headline editors know that suggesting there might be security issues with "that geeky Linux stuff" draws attention among your readership of CIOs afraid of that "stuff."
No leetency either, I suspect.
I, for one, do not look forward to a future where games will be developed to run on both the PS3 and the PSP. I didn't buy a PS3 and connect it to my 1080p TV to play games that are designed to look good on a 5" screen.
What about the Chinese-language channels?
I have a friend who still has AOL for mail and a FiOS connection. He reads his mail with a browser and pays nothing for the mail service. No exporting for him. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of AOL mail users read their messages over the web nowadays.
Why companies waste their time putting yet another attack vector into their products and on our PCs, laptops, netbooks and smart phones (no root access ~ dumb device...it just ain't smart) is beyond me.
You don't see any value to having a corporate logo like Yahoo's or Norton's continuously in front of people's faces whenever they use their web browsers? Hmm, maybe you should sign up for Marketing 101.
Most people don't care about second- and higher-order ramifications of installing something like a toolbar. In many cases they didn't install it themselves anyway. It came that way from the OEM. In the case of something like Norton, they probably feel reassured that Symantec is looking over their shoulders while they surf.
They may have sold the credits already. The WSJ piece I submitted about this story has more details:
"It started when an anonymous caller on Tuesday morning told Czech State Police that explosives had been placed at the offices of OTE AS, a private company that manages the Czech Republic's national registry. The police evacuated the registry for five hours.
During that time, the computer network wasn't monitored, OTE officials said. Hackers stole 475,000 allowances, worth 7 million, from a company called Blackstone Global Ventures, an environmental consultancy that trades carbon credits for industrial companies.
The thieves changed account-ownership information and executed illegal trades, said Nikos Tornikidis, a portfolio manager at Blackstone Global Ventures."
My guess is that they executed the trades and siphoned the proceeds off to a bank account somewhere.
Maybe it's because I'm using MailScanner and ClamAV.
It looks like they're only considering options that install into a browsing computer. That leaves some highly-rated solutions like Dan's Guardian off the list.
The way to solve this problem is not to deliver infected emails in the first place. After all these years of development of systems for scanning email, no one should be getting infected attachments. I don't blame the endusers, but the IT staffs that fail to protect their users, and their organizations, from obvious threats.