>>> There is *nothing* preventing you from creating your own X tomorrow and trying to lure people into subscribing to it.
Just like with a Standard Oil, you are free to start your own oil company? I hope you understand how ridiculous such suggestion when we are talking about monopoly.
We, or a lot of us, are reasonably weary of the government overreach into our personal lives. There are checks and balances in place that over long run designed to keep government from intruding too much into our lives. We could never reduce it to zero, it is necessary evil, but we can and should pragmatically minimize it.
There is no such measures for private corporations, like Facebook, that if happen to monopolize social interaction can become worse dictators than any government. Just imagine how 'freedom of speech' would work, if speaking was not natural but instead enabled by Speech Inc that could stop selling it you on a whim? This is why Internet Neutrality is so important, but we dropped the ball on Social Neutrality and will have to fight an uphill battle.
I think way forward is to deem some services 'essential'. Yes, I shudder at the idea of declaring Facebook essential (I chose not to use it) but for many people it is.
There are different sensor technologies, only obsolete optical sensors are vulnerable to this attack. Modern sensors are subdermal, that is it doesn't matter what is on surface of your skin, it is internal ridge structure that gets scanned. Obviously, you are welcome to trust mythbusters to provide comprehensive technology overview.
Dead finger is harder to detect - capillary pulse detection can be faked, but it is hard.
Most FP sensors in use since 90s can detect if it is actual finger that is pressed against the sensor. Cutting off fingers still work, but anything else, including burning off fingertips does not.
At the same time you are correct, fingerprints are not passwords - it is something you have, not something you know. Additional consideration is that unless secure channel is established between the sensor and processing hardware, it is trivially easy to 'skim' this data and forever compromise any non-secure channel implementation of FP.
Or you could not buy a product with extra features you don't want. My big screen does not spy on me, it simply does not have an input capability (well, technically it has IR remote and power on/off button).
I connect my "TV" to a media PC and stream VLC/netflix content to big screen in my living room. Many people also have consoles connected to their screens. Cable TV might be dying, and I will be first one to dance on its overpriced commercial-filled grave, but big screen living room entertainment is not.
Yes, but this site is read by "average security persons" and I am tailoring my language to something that can be understood. Saying "this cost more to fix than insure", or "we are covered by contracts from this liability", or any other response that does not include "lets fix it all, right now" is usually not well-received.:)
Security = Liability. There is no other way to look at this from the bean-counter point of view. This is why all organizations need CIO, someone who is capable of translating "if we don't do X, we going to get pwned" into "if we don't spend X$ and Y man-hours, we are exposing our business to $Z,000,000 -sized liability".
This problem boils down to techies and suits not speaking the same language. So someone has to translate.
The difference that surveillance and airport sexual assault checkpoints is not something you have to purchase. Here is US we have enough cars to last next 50 years. It will be just like Cuba.
Good example is Windows 8, sure someone will end up buying it, but when consumers in large numbers say DO NOT WANT you have panicked lobby groups reverting obnoxious laws in a hurry.
Cars getting better mileage, safer and so on can be regulated, because drivers actually want these things. Electronic nanny that is not 100% right all the time? Good luck with that.
There is UN, why is it up to US to police (and pay for) intervention? How does Syrians using chemical weapons against other Syrians is a US national security concern?
When a government institution prevents you as an individual that happen to work for the government from putting 'menorah in late December' in your workplace, then you know atheism went too far. We allow individuals to celebrate personal non-religious occasions (e.g. birthdays, retirement) in such environment, making a big deal out of preventing religious celebrations is out of line. Obviously, don't spend public money on it, but then don't prevent individuals from partaking in it. This is how it mostly works right now, but QC proposed secular charter aims to push it out of balance.
Pastafarianism is useful as a litmus test for such stupid laws. If at any point "well, then we will have to allow Pastafarians to do this, and that would be plain stupid" enters conversation, then the entire law is stupid.
At the same time we have to be careful to not go too far in trying to be rational, because humanity as a whole, religious or not, is not perfectly rational all the time, and expecting everyone to act rational is in itself is irrational.
For example, there is a talk about banning all religious symbols in official institutions in Quebec. This goes too far, as in it infringes on people's ability to act irrationally.
There has to be a limit for both religion and atheism, both in extremes can be oppressive. Secularism definition should be updated to also include separation of atheism and state.
>>>about controlling a bunch of sheep into doing stupid shit like giving you money in exchange for lies.
Not only "stupid shit", and not only "exchange for lies". Religions, like any other set of arbitrary values and believes, can impose benevolent or harmful world view. You have to evaluate its effects as a whole, and by only focusing on negatives you are not being objective.
For example, "Do not kill" part of Christianity can be credited with sufficiently stabilizing society that scientific progress became possible, directly leading to establishing Western Civilization as a successor to Roman Civilization. You can correctly point out that morality/ethics does not require religion, but this only holds true in already civilized society. Now try to stop Viking raiding party from pillaging, raping, and burning crops with appeals to morality. You need something stronger, like a set of superstitions that designed to scare you into normality (or else you eternally burn in hell, and who wants to chance that?).
This is not what I meant, and you know it. You are more likely to get accepted into a specific journal if you heavily cite papers from this specific journal outside of the merits of said paper.
>>>Do you have any evidence to back this claim up whatsoever?
I am not about to start naming&shaming people over this. Careers got destroyed over lesser slights, and seeing how you posted AC you are all too aware of this.
>>>no reviewer or editor ever asked whether the measurements were done on a homegrown 30k or commercial 300k machine
This does not match my experiences whatsoever. If you do anything outside of defacto approved methods you will be asked to validate your methods before publishing, and nobody would be interested in publishing your validation paper on your "homegrown" machine. It is Catch 22 as far as measurements go. Unless you are inventing something new, you are not likely to get accepted anywhere with your homegrown measurement equipment, even if it is vastly cheaper and better than the alternative.
Back when I worked in science in my field it took about 2mil to conduct a study, with another 10 mil in infrastructure costs. I am sure it costs even more now. This is very much outside third-world budget range. Does all this tech gadgetry help design better studies? Absolutely, but you don't have to have latest and greatest to do interesting work. Unfortunately Tier 1 journals don't see it this way, if you don't have X $toy$ in your lab, you might as well not submit manuscripts. Also if you are the first to get new expensive tech you can publish low hanging fruit (validation plus comparison to old tech) and all but guarantee no-effort papers. So arm race to spend on new gadgetry is always there.
Tier 1 journals do the same. It is open secret that you are more likely to get published if you heavily citing papers from the journal.
Impact factors, publish or perish, and pay walled articles means that a lot of shoddy "science" is going on out of public's eye. In a small field you are not going to rock the boat when your college is pushing out questionable papers. Sure, if you get selected to review the paper you can push back, but then you get to known by editors as "difficult one" and excluded in the future. Back when I worked in science more than half papers were unreproducible, meaning they collected data until significance then wrote paper around it.
More = Better mentality has to go. We do not push boundary of our knowledge by verbiage and fishing expeditions.
You can't generalize this much and you are not lacking better data points - what bank lends money out without knowing credit history?
Irresponsible is in the eye of the beholder. It might be irresponsible to speed, it might be irresponsible to not regularly mow your lawn, it might be irresponsible to not call your mother regularly, but these "irresponsibilities" have nothing to do with your ability to repay a loan.
Slashdot Mirror
Enough with this "lets rewrite the dictionary because it may offend someone" newspeak. You have no right to not get offended.
This article made me twitch... twitch... twitch...
>>> There is *nothing* preventing you from creating your own X tomorrow and trying to lure people into subscribing to it.
Just like with a Standard Oil, you are free to start your own oil company? I hope you understand how ridiculous such suggestion when we are talking about monopoly.
We, or a lot of us, are reasonably weary of the government overreach into our personal lives. There are checks and balances in place that over long run designed to keep government from intruding too much into our lives. We could never reduce it to zero, it is necessary evil, but we can and should pragmatically minimize it.
There is no such measures for private corporations, like Facebook, that if happen to monopolize social interaction can become worse dictators than any government. Just imagine how 'freedom of speech' would work, if speaking was not natural but instead enabled by Speech Inc that could stop selling it you on a whim? This is why Internet Neutrality is so important, but we dropped the ball on Social Neutrality and will have to fight an uphill battle.
I think way forward is to deem some services 'essential'. Yes, I shudder at the idea of declaring Facebook essential (I chose not to use it) but for many people it is.
There are different sensor technologies, only obsolete optical sensors are vulnerable to this attack. Modern sensors are subdermal, that is it doesn't matter what is on surface of your skin, it is internal ridge structure that gets scanned. Obviously, you are welcome to trust mythbusters to provide comprehensive technology overview.
Dead finger is harder to detect - capillary pulse detection can be faked, but it is hard.
Most FP sensors in use since 90s can detect if it is actual finger that is pressed against the sensor. Cutting off fingers still work, but anything else, including burning off fingertips does not.
At the same time you are correct, fingerprints are not passwords - it is something you have, not something you know. Additional consideration is that unless secure channel is established between the sensor and processing hardware, it is trivially easy to 'skim' this data and forever compromise any non-secure channel implementation of FP.
Or you could not buy a product with extra features you don't want. My big screen does not spy on me, it simply does not have an input capability (well, technically it has IR remote and power on/off button).
I connect my "TV" to a media PC and stream VLC/netflix content to big screen in my living room. Many people also have consoles connected to their screens. Cable TV might be dying, and I will be first one to dance on its overpriced commercial-filled grave, but big screen living room entertainment is not.
Yes, but this site is read by "average security persons" and I am tailoring my language to something that can be understood. Saying "this cost more to fix than insure", or "we are covered by contracts from this liability", or any other response that does not include "lets fix it all, right now" is usually not well-received. :)
Security = Liability. There is no other way to look at this from the bean-counter point of view. This is why all organizations need CIO, someone who is capable of translating "if we don't do X, we going to get pwned" into "if we don't spend X$ and Y man-hours, we are exposing our business to $Z,000,000 -sized liability".
This problem boils down to techies and suits not speaking the same language. So someone has to translate.
Still limited to 60Hz? Disappointing and annoying.
The difference that surveillance and airport sexual assault checkpoints is not something you have to purchase. Here is US we have enough cars to last next 50 years. It will be just like Cuba.
Good example is Windows 8, sure someone will end up buying it, but when consumers in large numbers say DO NOT WANT you have panicked lobby groups reverting obnoxious laws in a hurry.
Cars getting better mileage, safer and so on can be regulated, because drivers actually want these things. Electronic nanny that is not 100% right all the time? Good luck with that.
There is UN, why is it up to US to police (and pay for) intervention? How does Syrians using chemical weapons against other Syrians is a US national security concern?
>>>Which in many cases is backhauled VOIP
Correct. >>>to the point of being as bad as Skype
This does not match my experiences. My traditional land line that I use for business communications never has any voice quality issues.
When a government institution prevents you as an individual that happen to work for the government from putting 'menorah in late December' in your workplace, then you know atheism went too far. We allow individuals to celebrate personal non-religious occasions (e.g. birthdays, retirement) in such environment, making a big deal out of preventing religious celebrations is out of line. Obviously, don't spend public money on it, but then don't prevent individuals from partaking in it. This is how it mostly works right now, but QC proposed secular charter aims to push it out of balance.
>>>Really? What do you use then?
Traditional PSTN.
Skype can barely handle regular voice calls, why do you think it is up to the task for anything else?
Pastafarianism is useful as a litmus test for such stupid laws. If at any point "well, then we will have to allow Pastafarians to do this, and that would be plain stupid" enters conversation, then the entire law is stupid.
At the same time we have to be careful to not go too far in trying to be rational, because humanity as a whole, religious or not, is not perfectly rational all the time, and expecting everyone to act rational is in itself is irrational.
For example, there is a talk about banning all religious symbols in official institutions in Quebec. This goes too far, as in it infringes on people's ability to act irrationally.
There has to be a limit for both religion and atheism, both in extremes can be oppressive. Secularism definition should be updated to also include separation of atheism and state.
>>>about controlling a bunch of sheep into doing stupid shit like giving you money in exchange for lies.
Not only "stupid shit", and not only "exchange for lies". Religions, like any other set of arbitrary values and believes, can impose benevolent or harmful world view. You have to evaluate its effects as a whole, and by only focusing on negatives you are not being objective.
For example, "Do not kill" part of Christianity can be credited with sufficiently stabilizing society that scientific progress became possible, directly leading to establishing Western Civilization as a successor to Roman Civilization. You can correctly point out that morality/ethics does not require religion, but this only holds true in already civilized society. Now try to stop Viking raiding party from pillaging, raping, and burning crops with appeals to morality. You need something stronger, like a set of superstitions that designed to scare you into normality (or else you eternally burn in hell, and who wants to chance that?).
This is not what I meant, and you know it. You are more likely to get accepted into a specific journal if you heavily cite papers from this specific journal outside of the merits of said paper.
>>>Do you have any evidence to back this claim up whatsoever?
I am not about to start naming&shaming people over this. Careers got destroyed over lesser slights, and seeing how you posted AC you are all too aware of this.
>>>no reviewer or editor ever asked whether the measurements were done on a homegrown 30k or commercial 300k machine
This does not match my experiences whatsoever. If you do anything outside of defacto approved methods you will be asked to validate your methods before publishing, and nobody would be interested in publishing your validation paper on your "homegrown" machine. It is Catch 22 as far as measurements go. Unless you are inventing something new, you are not likely to get accepted anywhere with your homegrown measurement equipment, even if it is vastly cheaper and better than the alternative.
Back when I worked in science in my field it took about 2mil to conduct a study, with another 10 mil in infrastructure costs. I am sure it costs even more now. This is very much outside third-world budget range. Does all this tech gadgetry help design better studies? Absolutely, but you don't have to have latest and greatest to do interesting work. Unfortunately Tier 1 journals don't see it this way, if you don't have X $toy$ in your lab, you might as well not submit manuscripts. Also if you are the first to get new expensive tech you can publish low hanging fruit (validation plus comparison to old tech) and all but guarantee no-effort papers. So arm race to spend on new gadgetry is always there.
Tier 1 journals do the same. It is open secret that you are more likely to get published if you heavily citing papers from the journal.
Impact factors, publish or perish, and pay walled articles means that a lot of shoddy "science" is going on out of public's eye. In a small field you are not going to rock the boat when your college is pushing out questionable papers. Sure, if you get selected to review the paper you can push back, but then you get to known by editors as "difficult one" and excluded in the future. Back when I worked in science more than half papers were unreproducible, meaning they collected data until significance then wrote paper around it.
More = Better mentality has to go. We do not push boundary of our knowledge by verbiage and fishing expeditions.
You can't generalize this much and you are not lacking better data points - what bank lends money out without knowing credit history?
Irresponsible is in the eye of the beholder. It might be irresponsible to speed, it might be irresponsible to not regularly mow your lawn, it might be irresponsible to not call your mother regularly, but these "irresponsibilities" have nothing to do with your ability to repay a loan.