Really, though, I'm not too sure how relevant the article is to Slashdot - how many countries have an Internal Security Act that allows the government to detain anyone, without trial, for as long as it wants? And among countries that do - both Malaysia's and Singapore's governments reaffirmed their intention to retain the acts this year, so it's not going to go away soon (the opposition in M'sia is a coalition that includes the radical Islamic right. Not exactly a civil rights champion, there. The opposition in Singapore is virtually nonexistent).
If you see anything later than RC29 then you already have the fix.
Because Android is open source, the problem was quickly tracked down by users to a couple lines in the system file init.rc. My guess is that this was accidentally left in during device debugging.
Nonetheless, this does raise the interesting question of what happens if Google - or some future similar big company - decides to screw around with its free services. Not what Slashdot's armchair libertarians think should happen, mind you, but what might actually happen.
We have companies that are "too big to fail". Is it possible that there can be services too influential to leave without intervention?
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions insisted that the security software and passwords on the memory stick had been protected so that a stranger would not be able to access the Government Gateway easily.
She said: 'Passwords are hidden using an industry standard technique which is difficult to break. We believe the risk of someone accessing personal data in this way is extremely low.'
Assuming she's not lying through her teeth, my impression is that what was on the USB stick was more akin to a malicious attacker stealing your/etc/shadow file. A breach, to be sure, but a long step from compromising your entire system.
An expert who examined it for The Mail on Sunday said it contained confidential passwords, security software and the technical blueprint to the system known as the 'source code'. The memory stick is now in the hands of the police.
I love the little quote marks around "source code". Oh my god, it's the Source Code! Anyway... from that, I daresay that the USB stick wasn't meant to provide access to the database. Probably more as a copy of the gateway system software.
This kind of careless attitude towards security wouldn't fly in the corporate world. It's only because it's the government doing it that security is so lax.
More from TFA:
The memory stick was lost by Daniel Harrington, 29, an IT analyst at computer management firm Atos Origin.
The multinational company, which boasts an annual turnover of £4billion, won the five-year £46.7million contract to manage the Government Gateway in 2006.
Everyone who is remotely interested in the topic can find everything elsewhere with Google, so arguing about global warming (never mind anthropogenic global warming) here is not likely to produce anything useful. Duly note, however, that most mainstream publications are now assuming AGW when talking about other issues: at a purely social-awareness level, AGW has won.
In the meanwhile, Wikipedia on frogs croaking. Note that TFA is similar, despite what TFS suggests: mostly discussion about pollutants and diseases, with a nod to the obvious factor of climate change as one possible cause of habitat destruction.
Amphibians require both land and water. They can't live in the middle of freshwater lakes and they can't live further inland where it's dry. This limits their choice of environments.
Never mind the bizarre comment about amphibian evolution, anyway.
Schneier, responding to 'shadowfirebird's comment on his blog:
"Sooner or later some dumb ass is going to ask why Skein is based on Threefish, which was (apparently, according to the intertubes) broken."
Threefish can't possibly be broken yet; we only just announced it yesterday. No one knew of its existence before then.
I think your intertubes are clogged.
Gah! I read it again and what they actually did was run a T-Mobile Samsung Omnia against the T-Mobile G1 on silicon.com and barackobama.com. The G1 wins...
And then they run the (O2-locked) iPhone against the T-Mobile G1 on eHam.net, and the G1 wins.
Great for the G1 and all... but seriously? CNET, you fail at comparisons. Different sites? For the love of the experimental method, why?
And there's absolutely no way to conclude that the G1's processor or browser beats the iPhone's on this test alone... maybe O2 just really, really sucks? Who knows?
If you really want to do a comparison... just unlock the damned thing and put in SIM cards from the same network!
Taking into account that we tested it against another 3G phone with a T-Mobile SIM in it, we believe that it's not a network factor, it's the G1's browser and processor being able to render pages much faster. So if you're looking for a fast Web experience on the go, we strongly recommend checking out the T-Mobile G1.
Note to the oblivious: OpenID doesn't eliminate anonymity. Far from it.
Wikipedia:
Since OpenID is decentralized, any website can use OpenID as a way for users to sign in; OpenID does not require a centralized authority to confirm a user's digital identity.
For those wondering if 'redbana' is a portmaneau of 'red' and 'banana'... you're right. In fact the Chinese name of the company, literally translated, is "Red Banana(s)".... yeah, I've got no idea either. I mean 'redbana' works just as well as 'google' does perhaps, but Red Bananas...? I give up.
You may laugh, but Slashdot comments can and have been cited as sources. A trivial example is the article about/. itself (note 28). Interestingly, the comment cited itself is modded Flamebait: 0; the citation is about the comment rather than its content.
NPOV says that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each. Now an important qualification: Articles that compare views should not give minority views as much or as detailed a description as more popular views, and will generally not include tiny-minority views at all. For example, the article on the Earth does not mention modern support for the Flat Earth concept, a view of a distinct minority.
...From Jimbo Wales, paraphrased from this post from September 2003 on the WikiEN-l mailing list:
* If a viewpoint is in the majority, then it should be easy to substantiate it with reference to commonly accepted reference texts;
* If a viewpoint is held by a significant minority, then it should be easy to name prominent adherents;
* If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia regardless of whether it is true or not and regardless of whether you can prove it or not, except perhaps in some ancillary article.
So, despite TFA, verifiability is not the only criterion. I daresay NPOV comes into play more often: WP policy is only ever important when an issue is fought over by differing editors, after all; and it is trivial to find sources for all sorts of contradictory viewpoints.
Note that even the UNDUEWEIGHT policy is not strictly followed in Wikipedia - e.g., creationism has a lot of adherents at a popular level. It's also trivial to find cited sources and endless lines of arguments and counter-arguments. Despite this, Wikipedia is usually sceptical of creationism - statements on evolution are usually phrased "it is the case that x" whereas creationist statements are carefully bracketed as "many people believe that x".
...but who seriously thinks that this is a bad thing? WP:IAR is probably the best guideline here. Common sense, indeed...
The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britainâ(TM)s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.
The pay-as-you-go phones are popular with criminals and terrorists because their anonymity shields their activities from the authorities. But they are also used by thousands of law-abiding citizens who wish to communicate in private.
Because the infamous "kill switch" statement is part of the Android Market Business and Program Policies (see Product Removals). If you don't use Android Market, you're not subject to the kill switch.
And you can get your Android apps elsewhere without jailbreaking, unlike the iPhone.
To put it bluntly, Android has a multitude of possible channels for the distribution of apps. The iPhone does not. This functionality is built right into Android and isnâ(TM)t the weekend project of some particularly clever hacker. Furthermore, keep in mind that this kill switch will only affect apps distributed through the Market, not those installed from the Web.
But what if JPMorgan could create a device that would protect it if those loans defaulted, and free up that capital?
What the bankers hit on [in the 1990s] was a sort of insurance policy: a third party would assume the risk of the debt going sour, and in exchange would receive regular payments from the bank, similar to insurance premiums. JPMorgan would then get to remove the risk from its books and free up the reserves. The scheme was called a "credit default swap," and it was a twist on something bankers had been doing for a while to hedge against fluctuations in interest rates and commodity prices... [JPMorgan] built up a "swaps" desk in the mid-'90s and hired young math and science grads from schools like MIT and Cambridge to create a market for the complex instruments. Within a few years, the credit default swap (CDS) became the hot financial instrument, the safest way to parse out risk while maintaining a steady return.
...
Before long, credit default swaps were being used to encourage investors to buy into risky emerging markets such as Latin America and Russia by insuring the debt of developing countries. Later, after corporate blowouts like Enron and WorldCom, it became clear there was a big need for protection against company implosions, and credit default swaps proved just the tool.
...
AIG's fatal flaw appears to have been applying traditional insurance methods to the CDS market. There is no correlation between traditional insurance events; if your neighbor gets into a car wreck, it doesn't necessarily increase your risk of getting into one. But with bonds, it's a different story: when one defaults, it starts a chain reaction that increases the risk of others going bust. Investors get skittish, worrying that the issues plaguing one big player will affect another. So they start to bail, the markets freak out and lenders pull back credit.
The problem was exacerbated by the fact that so many institutions were tethered to one another through these deals. For example, Lehman Brothers had itself made more than $700 billion worth of swaps, and many of them were backed by AIG.
Slashdot Mirror
Raja Petra's blog. Less "blog" and more "discussion site", I guess.
Really, though, I'm not too sure how relevant the article is to Slashdot - how many countries have an Internal Security Act that allows the government to detain anyone, without trial, for as long as it wants? And among countries that do - both Malaysia's and Singapore's governments reaffirmed their intention to retain the acts this year, so it's not going to go away soon (the opposition in M'sia is a coalition that includes the radical Islamic right. Not exactly a civil rights champion, there. The opposition in Singapore is virtually nonexistent).
Preventing people like acting like pricks? Someone has to design the crowd control system, you know.
Apparently, Ed Felten is interested, while Lessig isn't.
Nonetheless, this does raise the interesting question of what happens if Google - or some future similar big company - decides to screw around with its free services. Not what Slashdot's armchair libertarians think should happen, mind you, but what might actually happen.
We have companies that are "too big to fail". Is it possible that there can be services too influential to leave without intervention?
Assuming she's not lying through her teeth, my impression is that what was on the USB stick was more akin to a malicious attacker stealing your /etc/shadow file. A breach, to be sure, but a long step from compromising your entire system.
I love the little quote marks around "source code". Oh my god, it's the Source Code! Anyway... from that, I daresay that the USB stick wasn't meant to provide access to the database. Probably more as a copy of the gateway system software.
This kind of careless attitude towards security wouldn't fly in the corporate world. It's only because it's the government doing it that security is so lax.
More from TFA:
Hmmm.
Everyone who is remotely interested in the topic can find everything elsewhere with Google, so arguing about global warming (never mind anthropogenic global warming) here is not likely to produce anything useful. Duly note, however, that most mainstream publications are now assuming AGW when talking about other issues: at a purely social-awareness level, AGW has won.
In the meanwhile, Wikipedia on frogs croaking. Note that TFA is similar, despite what TFS suggests: mostly discussion about pollutants and diseases, with a nod to the obvious factor of climate change as one possible cause of habitat destruction.
Amphibians require both land and water. They can't live in the middle of freshwater lakes and they can't live further inland where it's dry. This limits their choice of environments.
Never mind the bizarre comment about amphibian evolution, anyway.
Gah! I read it again and what they actually did was run a T-Mobile Samsung Omnia against the T-Mobile G1 on silicon.com and barackobama.com. The G1 wins... And then they run the (O2-locked) iPhone against the T-Mobile G1 on eHam.net, and the G1 wins.
Great for the G1 and all... but seriously? CNET, you fail at comparisons. Different sites? For the love of the experimental method, why?
And there's absolutely no way to conclude that the G1's processor or browser beats the iPhone's on this test alone... maybe O2 just really, really sucks? Who knows?
If you really want to do a comparison... just unlock the damned thing and put in SIM cards from the same network!
Wikipedia:
For those wondering if 'redbana' is a portmaneau of 'red' and 'banana'... you're right. In fact the Chinese name of the company, literally translated, is "Red Banana(s)". ... yeah, I've got no idea either. I mean 'redbana' works just as well as 'google' does perhaps, but Red Bananas...? I give up.
You know, the stoptaggingeverythingstory and !story tags are getting more annoying than the story tags to begin with.
Anyone else feel the same way?
(1050/40) (mph / second) = 1.19661658 g. Neat. Accelerating just above the rate one falls. No excessive gee forces to worry about, at least.
You may laugh, but Slashdot comments can and have been cited as sources. A trivial example is the article about /. itself (note 28). Interestingly, the comment cited itself is modded Flamebait: 0; the citation is about the comment rather than its content.
So, despite TFA, verifiability is not the only criterion. I daresay NPOV comes into play more often: WP policy is only ever important when an issue is fought over by differing editors, after all; and it is trivial to find sources for all sorts of contradictory viewpoints.
...but who seriously thinks that this is a bad thing? WP:IAR is probably the best guideline here. Common sense, indeed...
Note that even the UNDUEWEIGHT policy is not strictly followed in Wikipedia - e.g., creationism has a lot of adherents at a popular level. It's also trivial to find cited sources and endless lines of arguments and counter-arguments. Despite this, Wikipedia is usually sceptical of creationism - statements on evolution are usually phrased "it is the case that x" whereas creationist statements are carefully bracketed as "many people believe that x".
Why would it be irrelevant?
Because the infamous "kill switch" statement is part of the Android Market Business and Program Policies (see Product Removals). If you don't use Android Market, you're not subject to the kill switch.
And you can get your Android apps elsewhere without jailbreaking, unlike the iPhone.
A fairly crucial difference, I think.
... what sort of mutant frogs have you seen that can jump to the defined altitude of 150 feet?
... okay, I'm an idiot.
Minister of Defence.
;)
"Secretary of State for Defence" doesn't really make sense anyway