> Being insured is a state of the driver, not the vehicle. To imply that "not being on a database of cars that have been named
> by somebody as their primary vehicle when purchasing insurance" is equivalent to being "subject to an offence" is just wrong.
> This technique throws up a huge number of both false positives and false negatives.
That may be true for insurance, but in the UK, every car is required to have "road tax" paid on it. The tax is paid on the car, not the driver. If the registered owner of the car has not paid roadtax and has not declared the car "off the road", then he is committing an offence - even if he has sold the car to someone else (and hasn't registered the transaction with the DVLA).
> I wonder if they will simply record the prints for checking against a db later, or if they have wireless abilities to check for a match at the scene?
The wireless check takes a few minutes and is conducted at the scene, from TFA.
> to entitlement to emergency medical care
Much as I deplore the current big-brother creep in UK society, I don't thing we're anywhere, anywhere near denying emergency medical care to anyone.
> No biggie, except that the 'reveal all passwords' button exists (and, last I checked, required no authentication to use).
Firefox, for as long as I can remember, has allowed you to set a master password, without which the password manager will not populate any password feilds and will not allow the viewing of any stored passwords.
> Congratulations. Now your vote is tied to your social security number. The whole point of a ballot box is that the votes > are uncorrelated with the voters. The total number of votes == the total number of voters, but we don't know who voted for whom.
The votes wouldn't need to be tied to the social security number, only the account would need to be. Have the server randomly generate voting pages where the options (A,B,C) each represent a candidate or party on a random basis (on my ballot A is democrat, on your ballot A is republican). Once your vote is submitted, the server enters your choice of candidate (democrat, republican, independent) in a central database but doesn't record who you are, but ALSO enters your choice of option (A,B,C) in a seperate database that you have access to which is tied to your social security number. The random page generated for you by the server is not retained anywhere. You can access the second database (at least for you own user id) and see that your option (A,B,C) has been recorded correctly, but no-one can use that info to tell who you voted for (except yourself, assuming you remember or keep a record of what A,B,C corresponds to. The actual results database is not tied to your SS number or user id. The whole thing could be done with open-source software, and done transparently.
People can also check that the totals for the database of candidate choices equals the totals for the database of option choices. Accuracy can be verified but anonymity is retained.
What would be better is carefully crafted ads that will have significance at 12x - perhaps even reveal hidden easter eggs only visible by watching them fast, by working out which frames will actually be viewable when watched at that speed. Messages and animations could be inserted that would be un-noticeable at a normal speed, assuming that 12x will skip frames predictably. A variety of steganography, almost.
It would encourage DVR users to view them, especially if the easter eggs were clever or funny, revealed a hidden context around the normal ad.
The cell phone checking does absolutly nothing to prevent (or handle) these incidents since there is no record of numbers that are about to be called.
I'm in high school and in march last year we had a huge drug bust. How? Searching through text messages on a students phone, leading to others phones and looking through call lists, etc. There isn't much you can do when a few cops come into the classroom and tell everyone to put their phones on the desk and get out.
This is an utterly terrifying thing for a young student to think. There are many, many things you can do, starting with not consenting to arbitrary police searches.
And that's not just grandstanding either, there's no way in hell I'd let a police officer look through my cell phone without a warrant, regardless of whether or not someone in a position of authority (a teacher, a professor, etc.) told me to.
What? People WORE those things? On their WRISTS? But they're massive! WHAT? HOW many gigahertz? Only four hundred? WHAT!? Megahertz? No way! No way, you're joking right? How could that even run voice recognition? WHAT?...
Oh god, I hadn't even noticed the huge, ugly, slow frame that sticks with you if you follow any article link - because just what you need when a site slow due to high traffic is extra, totally pointless stuff to load and code to process.
The page looks absolutely awful. The colour scheme is weak and amateurish, the AJAX is terribly, terribly slow, the "visit site" link (the most important button on a content portal) is, bizarrely, smaller than any other element in the article summary and hard to see against the site background, the adverts interrupt the placement of the content... overall, it's a total mess that looks like it's been thrown together with no real coherent plan. The worst type of imitation.
Has anyone installed the latest IE7 beta, gone to google.com and followed the prompts that ask if you want to use google as the integrated search?
The results are fairly pertinent to this discussion.
Google doesn't just become a search option - it becomes the default integrated search client. Meaning that everytime you restart IE7, google will be used as the integrated search client unless you manually change it to Microsoft Search each time you start IE7.
And while users are making an active choice to install google integrated search, how many users do you think will start up IE7 for the first time, visit google and follow the on-screen prompts to insall the google search integration - and then have no idea how to set another search client as the default?
A fairly insightful article, but it misses a couple of points:
It's difficult (if not impossible) for the average user to discern who an e-mail is actually from. Most people have no idea about message headers or IP addresses. It is trivial to send e-mail spoofing the address, and have 95% of people unquestioningly believe it's from the address you specify. This is one of the biggest and easiest to exploit weaknesses in e-mail.
E-mail is incredibly easy to ignore. Really, really, really easy. Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects, mostly because it's so common - it's fairly easy for an e-mailto not get to its recipient, be it an over zealous spam-filtering policy, a misconfigured mail server somewhere along the line or a lack of space on a company intranet (combined with badly configured mail servers which are relatively common).
I couldn't agree more. I use a set of Adblock expressions that I built up myself over a few months of browsing, in addition to a robust HOSTS file for ad and malware blocking. I haven't seen an advert in months, including google Adwords ads.
Slashdot Mirror
You can go about your business. Move along.
> Being insured is a state of the driver, not the vehicle. To imply that "not being on a database of cars that have been named
> by somebody as their primary vehicle when purchasing insurance" is equivalent to being "subject to an offence" is just wrong.
> This technique throws up a huge number of both false positives and false negatives.
That may be true for insurance, but in the UK, every car is required to have "road tax" paid on it. The tax is paid on the car, not the driver. If the registered owner of the car has not paid roadtax and has not declared the car "off the road", then he is committing an offence - even if he has sold the car to someone else (and hasn't registered the transaction with the DVLA).
> I wonder if they will simply record the prints for checking against a db later, or if they have wireless abilities to check for a match at the scene?
The wireless check takes a few minutes and is conducted at the scene, from TFA.
> to entitlement to emergency medical care
Much as I deplore the current big-brother creep in UK society, I don't thing we're anywhere, anywhere near denying emergency medical care to anyone.
but the summary isn't that good.
> No biggie, except that the 'reveal all passwords' button exists (and, last I checked, required no authentication to use). Firefox, for as long as I can remember, has allowed you to set a master password, without which the password manager will not populate any password feilds and will not allow the viewing of any stored passwords.
> Congratulations. Now your vote is tied to your social security number. The whole point of a ballot box is that the votes
> are uncorrelated with the voters. The total number of votes == the total number of voters, but we don't know who voted for whom.
The votes wouldn't need to be tied to the social security number, only the account would need to be. Have the server randomly generate voting pages where the options (A,B,C) each represent a candidate or party on a random basis (on my ballot A is democrat, on your ballot A is republican). Once your vote is submitted, the server enters your choice of candidate (democrat, republican, independent) in a central database but doesn't record who you are, but ALSO enters your choice of option (A,B,C) in a seperate database that you have access to which is tied to your social security number. The random page generated for you by the server is not retained anywhere. You can access the second database (at least for you own user id) and see that your option (A,B,C) has been recorded correctly, but no-one can use that info to tell who you voted for (except yourself, assuming you remember or keep a record of what A,B,C corresponds to. The actual results database is not tied to your SS number or user id. The whole thing could be done with open-source software, and done transparently.
People can also check that the totals for the database of candidate choices equals the totals for the database of option choices. Accuracy can be verified but anonymity is retained.
Where do I start queueing?! Let's hope it works with my PS3! /sarcasm
Anyone miss the days when things just "went on sale"?
"Who pays whom"?
What would be better is carefully crafted ads that will have significance at 12x - perhaps even reveal hidden easter eggs only visible by watching them fast, by working out which frames will actually be viewable when watched at that speed. Messages and animations could be inserted that would be un-noticeable at a normal speed, assuming that 12x will skip frames predictably. A variety of steganography, almost. It would encourage DVR users to view them, especially if the easter eggs were clever or funny, revealed a hidden context around the normal ad.
2000 yuan AIDS you!
No, as evidenced by _the huge number of identical posts in any discussion in involving the BPI_.
This is an utterly terrifying thing for a young student to think. There are many, many things you can do, starting with not consenting to arbitrary police searches.
And that's not just grandstanding either, there's no way in hell I'd let a police officer look through my cell phone without a warrant, regardless of whether or not someone in a position of authority (a teacher, a professor, etc.) told me to.
What? People WORE those things? On their WRISTS? But they're massive! WHAT? HOW many gigahertz? Only four hundred? WHAT!? Megahertz? No way! No way, you're joking right? How could that even run voice recognition? WHAT? ...
AMD today announced the launch of the Athlon XP 500000+. The chip has a "stock speed of around 3.0 GHz, but is named for it's IBM equivalent".
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!!!11
Nope, still nothing. No ads on my box.
Oh god, I hadn't even noticed the huge, ugly, slow frame that sticks with you if you follow any article link - because just what you need when a site slow due to high traffic is extra, totally pointless stuff to load and code to process.
The page looks absolutely awful. The colour scheme is weak and amateurish, the AJAX is terribly, terribly slow, the "visit site" link (the most important button on a content portal) is, bizarrely, smaller than any other element in the article summary and hard to see against the site background, the adverts interrupt the placement of the content... overall, it's a total mess that looks like it's been thrown together with no real coherent plan. The worst type of imitation.
What google ads?
I don't know if it's because of my HOSTS file or because of FF + Adblock, but I get nada.
http://www.odiumjunkie.com/MINIX/
Has anyone installed the latest IE7 beta, gone to google.com and followed the prompts that ask if you want to use google as the integrated search?
The results are fairly pertinent to this discussion.
Google doesn't just become a search option - it becomes the default integrated search client. Meaning that everytime you restart IE7, google will be used as the integrated search client unless you manually change it to Microsoft Search each time you start IE7.
And while users are making an active choice to install google integrated search, how many users do you think will start up IE7 for the first time, visit google and follow the on-screen prompts to insall the google search integration - and then have no idea how to set another search client as the default?
A fairly insightful article, but it misses a couple of points:
It's difficult (if not impossible) for the average user to discern who an e-mail is actually from. Most people have no idea about message headers or IP addresses. It is trivial to send e-mail spoofing the address, and have 95% of people unquestioningly believe it's from the address you specify. This is one of the biggest and easiest to exploit weaknesses in e-mail.
E-mail is incredibly easy to ignore. Really, really, really easy. Claiming you didn't receive an e-mail is a get-out to any number of problems in collaborative projects, mostly because it's so common - it's fairly easy for an e-mailto not get to its recipient, be it an over zealous spam-filtering policy, a misconfigured mail server somewhere along the line or a lack of space on a company intranet (combined with badly configured mail servers which are relatively common).
Oh, is that what they used? I was wondering why it wasn't displaying properly in lynx.
I couldn't agree more. I use a set of Adblock expressions that I built up myself over a few months of browsing, in addition to a robust HOSTS file for ad and malware blocking. I haven't seen an advert in months, including google Adwords ads.
It's wonderful.
Thank you for that excellent summary. It was more articulate and informative than TFA.