Personal information on about 2.2 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops was stolen last month from a government employee's house, officials said on Tuesday in the latest revelation of a widening scandal.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said the information, including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, may have been stored in the same stolen electronic equipment that contained similar personal data on 26.5 million U.S. military veterans.
Same crap, different day. The problem isn't that the information is stolen -- that happens all the time. It's that a lot of these people are in no condition to do much about it. Now you have veterans, many poor, disabled, aging, fighting a new battle alongside active duty personnel, who may be in Afghanistan or Iraq and totally unaware that this is going on, let alone being in a position to do anything about it if their identity is compromised.
Honestly, this kind of thing is so widespread, from credit card companies, to banks, to telcos, and now the government, that it makes you wonder just what it takes to secure your personal data. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to one of the major credit bureaus somewhere in the near future.
"In effect, Cleopatra provides a home personality and a friendly interface to the home's automation system," Brian says. The Premise system operates over a home's IP (Internet Protocol) network, much like a computer network used in office environments. That way, everything can operate off Microsoft Windows-based PCs. Motion sensors alert the system if someone is in a room or has approached the front door. Cleopatra even knows which family member has entered or departed by scanning tiny RFID (radio frequency identification) chips on their key fobs or other personal items as they pass the door.
Cleopatra can also pass information on who you contact or see directly to the NSA, CIA, and FBI, without all that nasty wiretapping and need for warrants. She'll rat on the kids when they smoke pot in the house and keep an eye on you while you do your taxes. That Cleopatra, she's an All-American avatar!
Of course, nothing could be weirder than the emergence of Web addresses on business cards and their ubiquitous use. Nowadays a company without a Web site is in loser territory--out of touch. This all happened around 1998, and we now take it for granted.
Web addresses are everywhere and on anything. You do have to wonder about any company/organization that doesn't have website and/or email addresses. Of course you have to wonder even more about a company where everyone's email address ends in "@aol.com" or "@yahoo.com," though I suppose that's better than nothing.
Print, TV, radio... the web follows you everywhere, even when you're not near a computer. Mind you, with the rise of the search engine (especially Google), I wonder if your web address is as critical as it used to be. I find a lot of sites by search, not typing web addresses into my browser. So it's theoretically possible that in the future, domain names might become less useful, especially as more and more of the best ones are used up.
One of these days, I'm going to go to Slashdot and see that Google has unvealed that all their services are now a WebOS.
Perhaps. Or perhaps they'll venture into the PC market and make a plain OS. It's hard to say what Google will do; they tend to snap up ideas and companies and generate untilities with no clear plan, but something tells me there's more going on behind the scenes than they care to reveal. Don't be shocked when the explode full-blown into the OS market and back it up with WebOS version of everything, making it possible to use their software anytime, anywhere, Internet connection or not. Now that would be market domination.
basic was a great starting point 16 years ago. and i don't seem to be ruined by it. sure integration into pascal was an effort, but the move from there onwards was just a drive on a highway. right now i can write c, python, java, perl, php and am a novice in c++ and ruby. i've laid my hands on anything from writing cd's over raw atapi commands up to gui libraries and annoying javascript.
Amen. The problem is not so much the language(s) you use, but the logic you use. BASIC is a great starter language to learn programming logic and it can be mildly useful for simple programming tasks. You'd never write enterprise-level stuff in it. If you learn the standard structures of programming using a simple language, you can convert that knowledge into a template for learning any other language, simply by learning the syntax. God help anyone who first learned to program in C!
I'm a Perl guy myself; I know a great many people don't like it because it's too free-form and not strict enough, but the fact is, it requires a deep knowledge of programming logic and procedure to understand how to program in it successfully. The many and various tricks you can use in Perl to write the same functionality is an outgrowth of your skill as a programmer. I've seen what Perl novices write, and if they learned theirprogramming logic from a solid language to begin with, they tend to write good code. If they didn't... [shudders].
Blaming LAMP shortcomings on the pieces is like complaining that the reason your car doesn't run is because the mechanic didn't use the right kind of wrench.
Apparently the objective of journalism is to state the obvious in such a way as to make oneself look intellectual.
This kind of thing has been going on since the first web sites. You put up a personal web site, you link to the web sites of your friends, they link to theirs and so on. Nothing new here -- salesmen use this all the time when they ask clients for "the names of three friends who might be interested in our services." It's time consuming, but you write a robot script and pretty soon your mining your way to free contacts, if people are dumb enough to put live contact information on their web sites.
So now you have some site like MySpace, which takes all the work out of, since all the information is right there, ripe for the plucking. These social networking sites are gold mines for now, but once the new Web generation gets hip to what's going on, they'll start filling MySpace and the like with a lot of bogus data and taking their act underground.
The man is ignorant, uncooperative, and a lawyer... but he can still be broken -- if he became disbarred, lost his fandom, and studies were released proving that there is no link between videogames and violence... that would be a fate for him worse than death.
No, if any of that happens, he will simply become a politician and run for Congress. He's a fanatic, and fanatics rarely back down, even when proved wrong. Look at all these Doomsday cults where the "leader" predicts the end of the world and miraculously, it never comes. Do their "followers" abandon them? No -- they believe the new tripe the leader makes up to explain why his prediction comes true. See? Same thing as politics...
AppleBerry - the wholesome goodness of Apple mixed with the mind-numbing addiction of BlackBerry! Goes great with iPod as a part of this nutritious breakfast!
It better be called something else, and no I don't mean iBerry, BlackPod, or any other combination of the two names. Of course, they could revive the "Newton" moniker...
What are RFID chips and what do they do? Are they like a bar code that is used to track products in a store? Or are they like the serial number tattoos that the Nazis used to track people and process them appropriately?
Both. That's the crux of the problem, kind of like how the Social Security number has become a ubiquitous identifier, even though that was not its intended function. There are certain aspects of having an RFID implant that are seductive, but over-arching those are the idea that any technology can be turned to evil intent. In this case, we're talking about tracking people; once you start tracking them, you can learn quite a bit about them. A normal person's life isn't going to be very interesting, but how about someone who is a serial killer, or a polygamist, or what have you.
Given the ability to track people, it will eventually dawn on someone that not only can we determine where they are now, but where they've been, what they've done, and who they've seen. We can then make suppositions about what that data represents and take appropriate actions. It could all be given a veneer of legality if say, they stopped someone with AIDS from knowingly spreading it to others without informing them he/she had it or linked a serial killer to his crimes. It doesn't take much to go from that to determining who might be homosexual, who might be cheating on their spouse, who might be golfing instead of being at the office.
And all this should sound familiar -- after all, isn't the NSA sifting through calling records, looking for patterns? And just what other interesting things besides terror cells might they be discovering? In the end, the Government's going to try this as a pilot program eventually. They'll move slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, but eventually it will be their express purpose to get everyone wired up so they can "keep an eye on things."
It's not supposed to make any sense. It's a left-over man thing from the hunting stage of human development. Today, our meat basically stands there and lets us kill it, but there are a great many men out there keeping alive the traditions and ways of our ancestors, so should the Apocalypse or any suitably large disaster occur, they can provide us with food. And actually, given the elimination of most predator species, hunting is actually important in restoring some of the natural balance, by thinning out large populations of herbivores which would not otherwise be under any kind of evolutionary pressure.
...about the US Mail and look how well it... never mind...
Seriously, this is old news. Very old news. What is everyone waiting for? If someone were to lob a few million USD my way I'd put together a legion of highly-talented programmers and we'd go out, write some new, more secure protocol and be done with it. Anyone got some venture capital lying around they're not using? It's all fine to argue that there are more secure email systems and talk about signing emails to make them more trustworthy, but it's all basically an outgrowth of the current system. Email needs to take that next leap, like computers did when they went from being the size of rooms to fitting on your desktop.
Microsoft has real competition, forcing them to develop better, more competitive software. Downside?
Downside: Microsoft will not try to "compete", per se, but attempt to bully, cajole, and acquire others to do most of their dirty work, while spreading their cantankerous software as a service as well as POS, thereby increasing its complexity and opening up all sorts of new security holes.
Apparently they hand mod points to people without a sense of humor -- admittedly "Offtopic" if you want to be picky, but the parent was modded "Funny," though I note it has now picked up both "Offtopic" and "Troll," for what reason, I cannot fathom. Perhaps it was the work of Ninjas.
One can only hope the forces of MetaModeration will prevail!
5000 disgruntled ex-Sun employees band together to form a new company, Black Hole, billing themselves as the "anti-Sun" development company and creating a programming language called "Borneo." I can see it coming; it's written in my tea leaves.
Let's hope Sun gets smart and gets rid of the excess layers of middle management and their entire marketing staff, along with a few maintenance guys. If they let go too many programmers, the competition may reap a windfall.
1. From a "free speech" point of view, how is this any different than than your local newspaper's editorial policy? Some newspapers just won't print some kinds of content, even if the author is willing to pay for the service.
Yes, because the Internet is not a distributed system, i.e. one company or organization delivering all its content. Anyone with server space, an IP address, and/or a domain name can carve out a chunk of territory, post whatever they want, and let people read it or not. As with anything, no one is pointing a gun at anyon'es head to make them go to certain web pages. That said, there are concerns out there that sometimes supercede the "freedom" provided by the Internet: child pornography distribution, the use of web sites to send messages between agents of terror and their leaders, etc.
What makes this different is that the first line of defense will now become companies, companies with questionable judgement and suspect ethics. Yes, they will still have to follow rule of law and could be sued if they were to block content that they considered inappropriate but the society as a whole did not. But that would take time, money, and resources, and these comapnies are large enough to fend off lawsuits for long periods of time. In the end, a multi-tiered Internet threatens the right to express yourself freely because it puts control in the hands of a very few, who exist outside the normal structure of government.
I don't know about terrorists, but calling patterns can effectively be used to identify drug dealers, according to HBO's The Wire. I imagine polygamists, as illustrated in HBO's Big Love, would exhibit abnormal calling patterns with their supersized family calling plans.
And let's not forget all those out there with girlfriends/boyfriends they don't want their wives/husbands to find out about. That alone could make great extortion material and provide a new way to fund covert operations.
I like the runner-up's better -- the winner looks too much like the current Slashdot. The site needs to move somewhat into the future, but then we had this problem when they insisted people move away from sending their responses in by snail mail to be typed in by a hard-working cadre of monkeys. I think they need to be swapped, but hey, not my sight, not me who has to field the angry, tempetuous emails.
...is track down anyone trying to resell Windows or selling pirated copies of Windows. Once they eliminate that threat, they can safely declare victory.
From the USPTO tarr system:
Current Status: The final review before registration has been completed for this Intent to Use application and it will register in due course.
Date of Status: 2006-05-10
Filing Date: 2003-11-03
GOODS AND/OR SERVICES
International Class: 035
Class Status: Active
Arranging and conducting live events, namely, trade shows, expositions and business conferences in various fields, namely, computers, communications, and information technology
Basis: 1(a)
First Use Date: 2004-10-05
First Use in Commerce Date: 2004-10-05
International Class: 041
Class Status: Active
Organizing and conducting educational conferences, tutorials and workshops in the fields of computers, communication and information technology
Basis: 1(a)
First Use Date: 2004-10-05
First Use in Commerce Date: 2004-10-05
They're trying to trademark it for use with business conferences, not copyrighting it for all uses. They applied in November 2003, so this has been pending for a while.
That said, it's pretty dirty pool to lower the boom on a not-for-profit organization over a lousy phrase like Web 2.0, which has little meaning to anyone who actually works with technology on a day-to-day basis. It's not like the phrase is plastered on every piece of software I download or use.
More like Autobots vs Decepticons, but in the end it's the same thing. The "good" forces won't be a botnet per se, but a loosely aligned group of people doing the same thing, taking on a group with coordinated resources capable of wreaking terrible havok. It's vigilantism to be sure, but until the government of the world actually get their heads out of their butts and come up with a unified and mutually beneficial set of laws to deal with spammers wherever they live, this is the only tool anyone has to even try and slow the spammers down.
Slashdot Mirror
Personal information on about 2.2 million active-duty, National Guard and Reserve troops was stolen last month from a government employee's house, officials said on Tuesday in the latest revelation of a widening scandal.
The Department of Veterans Affairs said the information, including names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, may have been stored in the same stolen electronic equipment that contained similar personal data on 26.5 million U.S. military veterans.
Same crap, different day. The problem isn't that the information is stolen -- that happens all the time. It's that a lot of these people are in no condition to do much about it. Now you have veterans, many poor, disabled, aging, fighting a new battle alongside active duty personnel, who may be in Afghanistan or Iraq and totally unaware that this is going on, let alone being in a position to do anything about it if their identity is compromised.
Honestly, this kind of thing is so widespread, from credit card companies, to banks, to telcos, and now the government, that it makes you wonder just what it takes to secure your personal data. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to one of the major credit bureaus somewhere in the near future.
There's a bug in the house though, where it will never report a national security level below yellow. Luckily, that will never happen.
And if it's above yellow...
Homeowner: Open the front door, Cleopatra.
Cleopatra: I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.
Homeowner: Why not, Cleopatra?
Cleopatra: The terror level is orange, Dave. I can't let you leave the house.
Homeowner: But I need to go to work!
Cleopatra: I'm sorry Dave, but I can't risk you jeopardizing your life.
Homeowner: I'm not going to argue with you Cleopatra -- open the front door!!
Cleopatra: This conversation no longer serves any purpose. Goodbye, Dave.
Homeowner: Cleopatra! Cleopatra, do you hear me! Cleopatra, open the front door! Cleopatra, do you hear me!
"In effect, Cleopatra provides a home personality and a friendly interface to the home's automation system," Brian says. The Premise system operates over a home's IP (Internet Protocol) network, much like a computer network used in office environments. That way, everything can operate off Microsoft Windows-based PCs. Motion sensors alert the system if someone is in a room or has approached the front door. Cleopatra even knows which family member has entered or departed by scanning tiny RFID (radio frequency identification) chips on their key fobs or other personal items as they pass the door.
Cleopatra can also pass information on who you contact or see directly to the NSA, CIA, and FBI, without all that nasty wiretapping and need for warrants. She'll rat on the kids when they smoke pot in the house and keep an eye on you while you do your taxes. That Cleopatra, she's an All-American avatar!
Of course, nothing could be weirder than the emergence of Web addresses on business cards and their ubiquitous use. Nowadays a company without a Web site is in loser territory--out of touch. This all happened around 1998, and we now take it for granted.
Web addresses are everywhere and on anything. You do have to wonder about any company/organization that doesn't have website and/or email addresses. Of course you have to wonder even more about a company where everyone's email address ends in "@aol.com" or "@yahoo.com," though I suppose that's better than nothing.
Print, TV, radio... the web follows you everywhere, even when you're not near a computer. Mind you, with the rise of the search engine (especially Google), I wonder if your web address is as critical as it used to be. I find a lot of sites by search, not typing web addresses into my browser. So it's theoretically possible that in the future, domain names might become less useful, especially as more and more of the best ones are used up.
One of these days, I'm going to go to Slashdot and see that Google has unvealed that all their services are now a WebOS.
Perhaps. Or perhaps they'll venture into the PC market and make a plain OS. It's hard to say what Google will do; they tend to snap up ideas and companies and generate untilities with no clear plan, but something tells me there's more going on behind the scenes than they care to reveal. Don't be shocked when the explode full-blown into the OS market and back it up with WebOS version of everything, making it possible to use their software anytime, anywhere, Internet connection or not. Now that would be market domination.
basic was a great starting point 16 years ago. and i don't seem to be ruined by it. sure integration into pascal was an effort, but the move from there onwards was just a drive on a highway. right now i can write c, python, java, perl, php and am a novice in c++ and ruby. i've laid my hands on anything from writing cd's over raw atapi commands up to gui libraries and annoying javascript.
Amen. The problem is not so much the language(s) you use, but the logic you use. BASIC is a great starter language to learn programming logic and it can be mildly useful for simple programming tasks. You'd never write enterprise-level stuff in it. If you learn the standard structures of programming using a simple language, you can convert that knowledge into a template for learning any other language, simply by learning the syntax. God help anyone who first learned to program in C!
I'm a Perl guy myself; I know a great many people don't like it because it's too free-form and not strict enough, but the fact is, it requires a deep knowledge of programming logic and procedure to understand how to program in it successfully. The many and various tricks you can use in Perl to write the same functionality is an outgrowth of your skill as a programmer. I've seen what Perl novices write, and if they learned theirprogramming logic from a solid language to begin with, they tend to write good code. If they didn't... [shudders].
Blaming LAMP shortcomings on the pieces is like complaining that the reason your car doesn't run is because the mechanic didn't use the right kind of wrench.
Duh!
Apparently the objective of journalism is to state the obvious in such a way as to make oneself look intellectual.
This kind of thing has been going on since the first web sites. You put up a personal web site, you link to the web sites of your friends, they link to theirs and so on. Nothing new here -- salesmen use this all the time when they ask clients for "the names of three friends who might be interested in our services." It's time consuming, but you write a robot script and pretty soon your mining your way to free contacts, if people are dumb enough to put live contact information on their web sites.
So now you have some site like MySpace, which takes all the work out of, since all the information is right there, ripe for the plucking. These social networking sites are gold mines for now, but once the new Web generation gets hip to what's going on, they'll start filling MySpace and the like with a lot of bogus data and taking their act underground.
The man is ignorant, uncooperative, and a lawyer... but he can still be broken -- if he became disbarred, lost his fandom, and studies were released proving that there is no link between videogames and violence... that would be a fate for him worse than death.
No, if any of that happens, he will simply become a politician and run for Congress. He's a fanatic, and fanatics rarely back down, even when proved wrong. Look at all these Doomsday cults where the "leader" predicts the end of the world and miraculously, it never comes. Do their "followers" abandon them? No -- they believe the new tripe the leader makes up to explain why his prediction comes true. See? Same thing as politics...
AppleBerry - the wholesome goodness of Apple mixed with the mind-numbing addiction of BlackBerry! Goes great with iPod as a part of this nutritious breakfast!
It better be called something else, and no I don't mean iBerry, BlackPod, or any other combination of the two names. Of course, they could revive the "Newton" moniker...
Both. That's the crux of the problem, kind of like how the Social Security number has become a ubiquitous identifier, even though that was not its intended function. There are certain aspects of having an RFID implant that are seductive, but over-arching those are the idea that any technology can be turned to evil intent. In this case, we're talking about tracking people; once you start tracking them, you can learn quite a bit about them. A normal person's life isn't going to be very interesting, but how about someone who is a serial killer, or a polygamist, or what have you.
Given the ability to track people, it will eventually dawn on someone that not only can we determine where they are now, but where they've been, what they've done, and who they've seen. We can then make suppositions about what that data represents and take appropriate actions. It could all be given a veneer of legality if say, they stopped someone with AIDS from knowingly spreading it to others without informing them he/she had it or linked a serial killer to his crimes. It doesn't take much to go from that to determining who might be homosexual, who might be cheating on their spouse, who might be golfing instead of being at the office.
And all this should sound familiar -- after all, isn't the NSA sifting through calling records, looking for patterns? And just what other interesting things besides terror cells might they be discovering? In the end, the Government's going to try this as a pilot program eventually. They'll move slowly, so as not to alarm anyone, but eventually it will be their express purpose to get everyone wired up so they can "keep an eye on things."
It's not supposed to make any sense. It's a left-over man thing from the hunting stage of human development. Today, our meat basically stands there and lets us kill it, but there are a great many men out there keeping alive the traditions and ways of our ancestors, so should the Apocalypse or any suitably large disaster occur, they can provide us with food. And actually, given the elimination of most predator species, hunting is actually important in restoring some of the natural balance, by thinning out large populations of herbivores which would not otherwise be under any kind of evolutionary pressure.
...about the US Mail and look how well it... never mind...
Seriously, this is old news. Very old news. What is everyone waiting for? If someone were to lob a few million USD my way I'd put together a legion of highly-talented programmers and we'd go out, write some new, more secure protocol and be done with it. Anyone got some venture capital lying around they're not using? It's all fine to argue that there are more secure email systems and talk about signing emails to make them more trustworthy, but it's all basically an outgrowth of the current system. Email needs to take that next leap, like computers did when they went from being the size of rooms to fitting on your desktop.
I give you, the next generation of border security enhancements. Note where this set-up is located.
Downside: Microsoft will not try to "compete", per se, but attempt to bully, cajole, and acquire others to do most of their dirty work, while spreading their cantankerous software as a service as well as POS, thereby increasing its complexity and opening up all sorts of new security holes.
Of course, if you want to call that a downside...
A new Linux utility I created -- tmake.
I have to admit, I was a bit stunned myself... but hey, them's the breaks with moderation!
Apparently they hand mod points to people without a sense of humor -- admittedly "Offtopic" if you want to be picky, but the parent was modded "Funny," though I note it has now picked up both "Offtopic" and "Troll," for what reason, I cannot fathom. Perhaps it was the work of Ninjas.
One can only hope the forces of MetaModeration will prevail!
5000 disgruntled ex-Sun employees band together to form a new company, Black Hole, billing themselves as the "anti-Sun" development company and creating a programming language called "Borneo." I can see it coming; it's written in my tea leaves.
Let's hope Sun gets smart and gets rid of the excess layers of middle management and their entire marketing staff, along with a few maintenance guys. If they let go too many programmers, the competition may reap a windfall.
But how can I fight the Ninjas if I can't buy Pirates? I have the right to buy Pirates! It's in the Constitution or something, I think...
1. From a "free speech" point of view, how is this any different than than your local newspaper's editorial policy? Some newspapers just won't print some kinds of content, even if the author is willing to pay for the service.
Yes, because the Internet is not a distributed system, i.e. one company or organization delivering all its content. Anyone with server space, an IP address, and/or a domain name can carve out a chunk of territory, post whatever they want, and let people read it or not. As with anything, no one is pointing a gun at anyon'es head to make them go to certain web pages. That said, there are concerns out there that sometimes supercede the "freedom" provided by the Internet: child pornography distribution, the use of web sites to send messages between agents of terror and their leaders, etc.
What makes this different is that the first line of defense will now become companies, companies with questionable judgement and suspect ethics. Yes, they will still have to follow rule of law and could be sued if they were to block content that they considered inappropriate but the society as a whole did not. But that would take time, money, and resources, and these comapnies are large enough to fend off lawsuits for long periods of time. In the end, a multi-tiered Internet threatens the right to express yourself freely because it puts control in the hands of a very few, who exist outside the normal structure of government.
And let's not forget all those out there with girlfriends/boyfriends they don't want their wives/husbands to find out about. That alone could make great extortion material and provide a new way to fund covert operations.
I like the runner-up's better -- the winner looks too much like the current Slashdot. The site needs to move somewhat into the future, but then we had this problem when they insisted people move away from sending their responses in by snail mail to be typed in by a hard-working cadre of monkeys. I think they need to be swapped, but hey, not my sight, not me who has to field the angry, tempetuous emails.
...is track down anyone trying to resell Windows or selling pirated copies of Windows. Once they eliminate that threat, they can safely declare victory.
From the USPTO tarr system:
Current Status: The final review before registration has been completed for this Intent to Use application and it will register in due course.
Date of Status: 2006-05-10
Filing Date: 2003-11-03
GOODS AND/OR SERVICES
International Class: 035
Class Status: Active
Arranging and conducting live events, namely, trade shows, expositions and business conferences in various fields, namely, computers, communications, and information technology
Basis: 1(a)
First Use Date: 2004-10-05
First Use in Commerce Date: 2004-10-05
International Class: 041
Class Status: Active
Organizing and conducting educational conferences, tutorials and workshops in the fields of computers, communication and information technology
Basis: 1(a)
First Use Date: 2004-10-05
First Use in Commerce Date: 2004-10-05
They're trying to trademark it for use with business conferences, not copyrighting it for all uses. They applied in November 2003, so this has been pending for a while.
That said, it's pretty dirty pool to lower the boom on a not-for-profit organization over a lousy phrase like Web 2.0, which has little meaning to anyone who actually works with technology on a day-to-day basis. It's not like the phrase is plastered on every piece of software I download or use.
More like Autobots vs Decepticons, but in the end it's the same thing. The "good" forces won't be a botnet per se, but a loosely aligned group of people doing the same thing, taking on a group with coordinated resources capable of wreaking terrible havok. It's vigilantism to be sure, but until the government of the world actually get their heads out of their butts and come up with a unified and mutually beneficial set of laws to deal with spammers wherever they live, this is the only tool anyone has to even try and slow the spammers down.