[May 3rd 16:43 GMT] PharmaMaster Strikes Again, Takes Down Tucows
PharmaMaster starts another attack and takes down Tucows's DNS servers which were serving thousands of sites, including Blue Security's. Tucows terminates Blue Security's account in an attempt to stop the attack.
And it was't all that long ago that DNS vulnerabilities were under discussion. Attacking a DNS server not only takes out the site intended, it has the bonus of collateral damage. Imagine the chagrin of all the other sites served by Tucows when they all go down en masse and imagine the PR campaign that Blue Security is going to have to wage to get any credibility back.
The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff. Everything is so complicated. People tell you to turn off cookies because they are dangerous, but you can't talk to anything on the Web without using them. People build this horribly complicated software, put up all these mysterious pop-up boxes and then blame the users when things don't go right. I keep hearing people say, like with distributed denial of service, that there are all these grandmothers out there who don't know how to maintain their systems. Don't blame the grandmothers; blame the vendors. Liability is one of those things I don't understand. Somebody makes a toy and some kid manages to stick a piece up his nose and dies from it, that company has to pay millions of dollars because everyone is so sympathetic. But in the software industry, when you install something there is this 9,000-page legalese that basically says: "We have no idea what this thing does, we're not claiming it does anything, if it remotely does anything useful you should be grateful to us, but you shouldn't blame us if it doesn't do what you expect." And they get away with it!
Which is why I don't like it when lawyers get involved in technology for good or bad. We have EULAs and DRM precisely because they make the lawyers rich, not because they are necessary to the function of the technology. When you need them, they are there, but only because they have a hand out, awaiting their payday.
As to the software problems, well, that's a byproduct of the whole system. The fact is, as long as you slap a horribly complicated EULA on your software that ultimately says "if it works, great; if not, don't blame us," you can cover up all sorts of sins of programming. Why do you think Microsoft gets away with so much? By the time you've successfully sued them over something theydid, they're two generations ahead in development and you're out time and money.
Good programming and a recognition that users have the right to workable, funtional, easy-to-use software, would go a long way to solving some problems. It would also help if the courts stopped pandering to the lawyers and started bearing down on the software makers.
From the press release on Yahoo: This reorganization is planned with no disruption to day-to-day customer and partner activities as the Company positions itself to recapture mindshare and market share. Over the last 100 days, the Company under the leadership of its new management team has had several significant achievements. During this time it has:
Assembled a new management team including a new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, as well as the appointment of other experienced executives;
Closed on some significant sales orders reflecting continued customer confidence in SGI;
Completed a program that has resulted in $100 million in annualized cost savings with an additional $50 million in savings underway;
Identified additional paths to streamline operating and administrative costs;
Improved efficiencies in its manufacturing operations;
Strengthened and expanded its product roadmap; and
Implemented a plan to reposition its product and market focus to take advantage of the Company's significant technology and market potential.
Their relevance has descreased over the years as newer, faster workstations based on more standard components have become available and the rise of Linux has brought the cost of operating those workstations down. It's clear to say that their upper manaement didn't recognize the forest for the trees as their marketshare eroded, with the ultimate result that they became irrelevant. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Industrial Light and Magic, which was one of their greatest supporters for a long time, shifted away from SGI workstations in the last few years. Those are the kinds of blows it's hard to recover from.
Listen, when you go to your snail-mailbox and get the mail, you can pretty much tell which mail is good and which is junk, right? I mean, it's easy to tell letters and cards from family members and friends from bills and unsolicited junk. It's easy because there's a physical form of recognition taking place.
Email is tougher, because in most cases all you have to go by is a sender's email address/identifier and the subject line. Now I don't knwo if you've looked at those two things closely, but it's usually easy to tell when the email is spam (how many freinds do have named Lemon T. Viceroy?). Now, as reported, phishers are getting more sophisticated and they are making much more convincing emails that are tricking people into believing the email is from their bank. They's be able to save themselves some time and frustration by checking the email address vs. a legit email they've received from the bank.
I think blocking has to start at the user end. You have to put up a wall and say that only these addresses are legit and anything else is suspect. You dump suspect emails into a separate folder and peruse it for emails that are actually legitimate, and add a pass-through for them to your wall. It requires maintenance and vigilance, and cooperation from banks, credit card companies, etc., who have to make sure you know what legitimate addresses they will send emails to you with. Any left over emails you fire back to the senders and alert your ISP
Putting the responsibility for screening mail on the user is problematic, but it's certainly a lot more efficient than having to listen to complaints about legitimate mail getting blocked constantly. I do this very thing constantly with my personal account and by using my ISP's spam filter, I'm doing a pretty good job of screening out the crap. By alerting my ISP of definite frauds, I'm hopefully making things easier for others. Of course, you have to make this system easy to use, or users will get frustrated and it won't work properly.
"Defendant is willing to accede to the demands of the Chinese autocrats to block the search term 'democracy,'" the complaint states, "but when it comes to the protection and well-being of our nation's innocent children, Defendant refuses to spend a dime's worth of resources to block child pornography from reaching children."
The difference being that China is a Communist state, while the United States is a Republic. In China, the government makes and breaks the rules at will, so when they tell Google "ban searches for 'X' or else," Google complies. In the US, legislation is required to ban something and it has to meet the "rigorous" standards of law. See below.
A Google representative said Friday that the company prohibits child pornography in its products and removes all such content whenever the company finds or is made aware of it. "We also report it to the appropriate law enforcement officials and fully cooperate with the law enforcement community to combat child pornography," spokesman Steve Langdon said in an e-mail interview.
Langdon pointed to the content policy for Google's AdWords sponsored links service, which broadly prohibits "promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material." Langdon also noted that Google offers a filtering tool called SafeSearch that aims to block offensive content in search results.
The availability of such tools could mean that the suit may not go far. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act protects providers and users of an "interactive computer service" from liability if it can be shown that they took good faith to restrict access to obscene material. It also provides that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
So, in the end, while their cause is just and I think all of us can agree that child pornography is an abomination, the fact is that laws have been passed stating the circumstances required for a company to avoid being charged with a crime for promoting child pornography, and Google is complying. Whether you agree with how the law is worded is a separate issue. This is a lot of wasted time and effort. Hopefully this lawsuit will be struck down and the anti-child-porn people can get back to helping children who are victims of this and hunting down the assholes who make it available and do these despicable things.
"Oracle promised them on May 1. Now they are saying some will come on May 10 and others will come on May 15. It's clear they are having big problems," Cerrudo said.
He said Oracle's explanation that patch testing is not yet done points to serious shortcomings and an absence of a good patch development process.
"For such a big organization with a lot of financial resources, they should be ready to handle this without problems. But they are amateurs on everything security related," Cerrudo said.
"They spend a lot of time creating these patches. Then, patch day comes around and the patches aren't available. Then, when the patches are finally released, it's normal to find that they are incomplete and fail to address the actual vulnerability," he added.
Oracle has been falling down on the job for years, making it virtually impossible for DBAs to keep up with patches and keep their systems tuned. They hem and haw, obfuscate and prevaricate, and still manage to retain their commanding market share. Sound like anyone else we know?
Again, Oracle should have gotten into the Linux biz 5 years ago -- now it's too late. At this point they should think about cleaning their own house and stay out of the OS business until they have a firm grip on their DB. This constant inability to stay on top of critical problems points a wider, systemic problem that would infect any Linux development program they acquired. Time for Larry Ellison to retire to a tiny island in the Pacific somehwere and let some new blood fix Oracle before it implodes under its own weight and become an IT black hole.
Assuming you have a good idea of what input to your program is supposed to be, and you have an adequate method of checking to make sure the data is not some sort of goo (love those regexs!), then you should be able to test the software as you go. I'm of the school that tends to build each part, test it, and move on. It cuts down on the holes if I know where a piece of data comes from, where it's going, and what manipulations may happen to it along the way.
Three things can establish trust:
1) what you are - biometric
2) something you carry - card ( ref id?)
3) something you know - password or pin
Getting back to the laziness aspect, this is exactly what most people would prefer to avoid. While they carry fingerprints or retinas everywhere, carrying a card means the potential for losing it and having a PIN/password means having to remember it. Most people want a one-shot identification to take place, preferably without them having to lift a finger (I know... I know...)
Anybody with mod points might want to throw the parent an "Insightful."
Mind you... if all they need is a fingerprint and/or data from your RFID implant, a crook wouldn't even need you alive. The RFID chip would supposedly keep working for a while and fingerprints don't depend on you being alive. Retinas would be a different story, since they require a constant blood flow, though I'm not sure what the decay rate is for retinal tissue when you die.
"He's trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam," Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef said of the spammer he believes launched the attack.
LiveJournal and TypePad found themselves suffering the brunt of the attack when Blue, which says it has been targeted by a "top four" Russian spammer, redirected the front page of its website to a blog hosted at TypePad's data center.
Reshef said Blue replaced the front page of its site with the TypePad blog to keep its users up to date with events, and disagreed with commentary that said Blue acted irresponsibly by passing the DDoS burden to Six Apart.
"We didn't offload any DDoS," he said. "That's like blaming the victim of a crime."
Since they were apparently in contact with this dirtbag, didn't they see this coming? Perhaps they were just being well-intentioned by shifting their front page to a blog with information for their users, but since they don't host the blog, that seems like dirty pool. Spammers are not known for being the most easy-going people in the world and sure he made threats about a DDoS. Seems a bit iffy. It could all be above board but without more info, who knows?
I find it interesting that they supply spammers with the addresses of their clients, so the spammers can avoid emailing them. Wouldn't a spammer get that info when they get bombarded by unsubscribe requests? Seems like handing the fox the keys to the henhouse while you slip off for a brewski.
At least with a cross shredder, you increase the number of elements by a significant multiple. If your shredder produces anything larger than confetti, then it's too cutting too big. I personally incinerate all important documents.
I shred then incinerate important stuff; shredded paper can make very good firestarting fuel on those cold winter nights. A but tough in the summer, but that's where the barbecue comes in.
FTFA: So, to Microsoft: never mind. You don't need to lift a finger.
Prior to that quote: Some people might wonder why the Foundation would be interested in "extending" the life and vested value of these Win32 bound desktops?
Our reply is that this isn't about "Windows" or MS Office. It's about people, business units, existing workflows and business processes, and vested legacy information systems begging to be connected, coordinated, and re engineered to reach new levels of productivity and service. It's also about the extraordinary value of ODF and it's importance to the next generation of collaborative computing. And it's about ODF rising to meet the needs of key information domains as they are represented by desktop productivity environments; publishing, content and archive management systems; SOA efforts; and the Open Internet.
Microsoft doesn't "win" anything. ODF realizes that even if people switch to an open document format, they are going to have legacy files (Word, Excel, etc.) that are going to have to work with the new open system. People are going to want to be able to edit and revise those documents, or even just be able to read them, without having to go through some lengthy and costly conversion process.
From the artice: Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able - within 15 minutes - to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)
Laurie was anything but smug.
"This is terrible," he said. "It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn't enhance our security; it undermines it.
Anything that has even one piece of critical information on it (name, address, account numer of any sort, etc.) is vulnerable. That's why my shredder works overtime. I don't throw boarding passes away; I have quite a collection of them from my trips to Europe and the ones I don't want get consigned to the shredder. You can't take for granted that once you toss away a piece of paper, it will be on its way to the landfill soon enough. Trash may sit unattended for hours, even at a busy airport, and is a ripe picking ground. Mind you, I think airport security might look at you funny if you were poking around in all the trash cans, but you never know.
FTA: 8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.
But will Google stay a non-competitor? Didn't we hear rumors of a Google OS earlier in the year and doesn't it make sense that eventually Google might take Microsoft on head on? Google can certainly handle any competition it has on the Internet right now, but if their idea of a global data sharing network is to be believed (thought I doubt it would ever become sentient), it would gain a big assist if there were Google OS-powered computers world wide. So perhaps MS is engaging Google pre-emptively, to forestall the day they do become a competitor directly.
When something threatening the future of the Internet as we know it is before the Congress, we need all the lawyers we can gather, especially when they are professors at Columbia.
No, you need to lobby your Congressmen and make your voice heard, voting the bums out if they won't listen to you. The lawyers only come into play after the law has hit the fan and when that happens, there will be plenty of lawyers from both sides, the upshot being they will make oodles of money in fees and book deals.
Now please excuse me... I have a bridge to hide under to threaten unwary travellers...
Google should go out and make it's own browser, then put it's search engine as default if they don't want to pay money for that right..
Don't think it hasn't already been developed and its "beta" version is waiting on a disregarded server in a dimly lit room somewhere. Google's a big enough player that they wouldn't have gone into this without a contingency plan. Win or lose, you'll see the Google browser as soon its impact would have the greatest effect on the market.
This is the basic case for network neutrality--to prevent centralized control over the future of the Internet. But there's a long-standing rebuttal that goes like this: A broadband company already has incentives to make the network neutral, because it's a better network that way. If AT&T makes money on an exclusive deal, they'll lose it somewhere else. Whatever money AT&T earns by prioritizing Google rather than Yahoo!, it will lose by making its product--broadband service--less attractive to consumers. By this logic, regulating the Bells is a waste of time. AT&T and Verizon also say that they must be free to discriminate to justify their investments in building networks. If you don't let us discriminate, they say, we won't build.
That would assume that "consumers" actually had a choice, but as we all know, competition is a misnomer. With acquisitions and mergers, the number of carriers continues to shrink. And while you might think you can get whatever phone company you want wherever you are, think again. My folks in North Carolina have one carrier available: Sprint. They can't switch phone companies. They use calling cards for long distance, so they don't have to pay Sprint's outrageous fees or deal with their crappy customer service.
Think cable's a good alternative? Bah! I have to use Optimuj Online through Cablevision, because I can't get Comcast (not that I really want to). There's no competition -- in my area its Cablevision or satellite, take your pick.
If you think the Bells and or cable giants stand to lose by restricting service or charging more to some comapnies than others, think again. The customer doesn't have much of a choice in most cases.
Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?"
It seems like there are suddenly a lot of lawyers writing about the future of the Internet. So we've gone from ambulance chasing to Internet chasing? I can see the commercial now: Have you been the victim of an Internet crime? Spamming? Identity Theft? Bad romance from Match.com? The law office of Swindle, Swipe, and Obfuscate are here to help!
Two wild cards remain: Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who has historically shunned large acquisitions, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, whose support would be key to bringing the necessary Yahoo shareholders on board for a deal. Mr. Yang and others in Yahoo would be hard-pressed to sell to Microsoft, people close to the company say.
I can't see this happening, precisely for this reason. Ballmer's ego wouldn't let him co-exist with Yahoo and Yang wouldn't be caught dead letting Ballmer in the building. Eventually it comes down to which one would flinch in a staring contest, but I suspect they'd both go blind before agreeing to work with the other.
I love the features and I want them to keep coming, but I'd like to see the audio quality improve too!
I'm more interested in the security aspect. Cell phones used to be atrociously noisy but the technology rapidly evolved to where, when your call isn't being inconveniently dropped, you can hold a conversation that's pretty clear. It will take VoIP a while, but in the end the audio quality will match what the phone company offers now. I just hope the prices don't start to balloon shortly thereafter.
Blah bla blah the world revolves around me and it should therefore conform to my every wish.
Far be it from me to rain on anyone's parade, but it's a valid point. It's nice to be able to auto-update software, but that process should remain as unobtrusive as possible. Let Firefox download the fix, keep it ready, and do an install next time I run the browser from scratch. Where's the harm in it?
Now, please remind me, why on earth would Yahoo leave the opportunity to search for keywords that have.com or.whatever in their name? Why not filter these searches out?
For the simple reason that they are a business, they need to make money to satisfy shareholders, and it's easy to do. And best of all, it's not strictly illegal, only the practice of double-dipping the customer is illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
[May 3rd 16:43 GMT]
PharmaMaster Strikes Again, Takes Down Tucows
PharmaMaster starts another attack and takes down Tucows's DNS servers which were serving thousands of sites, including Blue Security's. Tucows terminates Blue Security's account in an attempt to stop the attack.
And it was't all that long ago that DNS vulnerabilities were under discussion. Attacking a DNS server not only takes out the site intended, it has the bonus of collateral damage. Imagine the chagrin of all the other sites served by Tucows when they all go down en masse and imagine the PR campaign that Blue Security is going to have to wage to get any credibility back.
Where should the funding go?
The things that seem absolutely unsolvable but that we have to solve is the user interface stuff. Everything is so complicated. People tell you to turn off cookies because they are dangerous, but you can't talk to anything on the Web without using them. People build this horribly complicated software, put up all these mysterious pop-up boxes and then blame the users when things don't go right. I keep hearing people say, like with distributed denial of service, that there are all these grandmothers out there who don't know how to maintain their systems. Don't blame the grandmothers; blame the vendors. Liability is one of those things I don't understand. Somebody makes a toy and some kid manages to stick a piece up his nose and dies from it, that company has to pay millions of dollars because everyone is so sympathetic. But in the software industry, when you install something there is this 9,000-page legalese that basically says: "We have no idea what this thing does, we're not claiming it does anything, if it remotely does anything useful you should be grateful to us, but you shouldn't blame us if it doesn't do what you expect." And they get away with it!
Which is why I don't like it when lawyers get involved in technology for good or bad. We have EULAs and DRM precisely because they make the lawyers rich, not because they are necessary to the function of the technology. When you need them, they are there, but only because they have a hand out, awaiting their payday.
As to the software problems, well, that's a byproduct of the whole system. The fact is, as long as you slap a horribly complicated EULA on your software that ultimately says "if it works, great; if not, don't blame us," you can cover up all sorts of sins of programming. Why do you think Microsoft gets away with so much? By the time you've successfully sued them over something theydid, they're two generations ahead in development and you're out time and money.
Good programming and a recognition that users have the right to workable, funtional, easy-to-use software, would go a long way to solving some problems. It would also help if the courts stopped pandering to the lawyers and started bearing down on the software makers.
From the press release on Yahoo: This reorganization is planned with no disruption to day-to-day customer and partner activities as the Company positions itself to recapture mindshare and market share. Over the last 100 days, the Company under the leadership of its new management team has had several significant achievements. During this time it has:
Their relevance has descreased over the years as newer, faster workstations based on more standard components have become available and the rise of Linux has brought the cost of operating those workstations down. It's clear to say that their upper manaement didn't recognize the forest for the trees as their marketshare eroded, with the ultimate result that they became irrelevant. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Industrial Light and Magic, which was one of their greatest supporters for a long time, shifted away from SGI workstations in the last few years. Those are the kinds of blows it's hard to recover from.
Listen, when you go to your snail-mailbox and get the mail, you can pretty much tell which mail is good and which is junk, right? I mean, it's easy to tell letters and cards from family members and friends from bills and unsolicited junk. It's easy because there's a physical form of recognition taking place.
Email is tougher, because in most cases all you have to go by is a sender's email address/identifier and the subject line. Now I don't knwo if you've looked at those two things closely, but it's usually easy to tell when the email is spam (how many freinds do have named Lemon T. Viceroy?). Now, as reported, phishers are getting more sophisticated and they are making much more convincing emails that are tricking people into believing the email is from their bank. They's be able to save themselves some time and frustration by checking the email address vs. a legit email they've received from the bank.
I think blocking has to start at the user end. You have to put up a wall and say that only these addresses are legit and anything else is suspect. You dump suspect emails into a separate folder and peruse it for emails that are actually legitimate, and add a pass-through for them to your wall. It requires maintenance and vigilance, and cooperation from banks, credit card companies, etc., who have to make sure you know what legitimate addresses they will send emails to you with. Any left over emails you fire back to the senders and alert your ISP
Putting the responsibility for screening mail on the user is problematic, but it's certainly a lot more efficient than having to listen to complaints about legitimate mail getting blocked constantly. I do this very thing constantly with my personal account and by using my ISP's spam filter, I'm doing a pretty good job of screening out the crap. By alerting my ISP of definite frauds, I'm hopefully making things easier for others. Of course, you have to make this system easy to use, or users will get frustrated and it won't work properly.
Maybe snail mail isn't dead yet for a reason.
'Cyclic universe' can explain cosmological constant
"Defendant is willing to accede to the demands of the Chinese autocrats to block the search term 'democracy,'" the complaint states, "but when it comes to the protection and well-being of our nation's innocent children, Defendant refuses to spend a dime's worth of resources to block child pornography from reaching children."
The difference being that China is a Communist state, while the United States is a Republic. In China, the government makes and breaks the rules at will, so when they tell Google "ban searches for 'X' or else," Google complies. In the US, legislation is required to ban something and it has to meet the "rigorous" standards of law. See below.
A Google representative said Friday that the company prohibits child pornography in its products and removes all such content whenever the company finds or is made aware of it. "We also report it to the appropriate law enforcement officials and fully cooperate with the law enforcement community to combat child pornography," spokesman Steve Langdon said in an e-mail interview.
Langdon pointed to the content policy for Google's AdWords sponsored links service, which broadly prohibits "promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material." Langdon also noted that Google offers a filtering tool called SafeSearch that aims to block offensive content in search results.
The availability of such tools could mean that the suit may not go far. Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act protects providers and users of an "interactive computer service" from liability if it can be shown that they took good faith to restrict access to obscene material. It also provides that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
So, in the end, while their cause is just and I think all of us can agree that child pornography is an abomination, the fact is that laws have been passed stating the circumstances required for a company to avoid being charged with a crime for promoting child pornography, and Google is complying. Whether you agree with how the law is worded is a separate issue. This is a lot of wasted time and effort. Hopefully this lawsuit will be struck down and the anti-child-porn people can get back to helping children who are victims of this and hunting down the assholes who make it available and do these despicable things.
"Oracle promised them on May 1. Now they are saying some will come on May 10 and others will come on May 15. It's clear they are having big problems," Cerrudo said.
He said Oracle's explanation that patch testing is not yet done points to serious shortcomings and an absence of a good patch development process.
"For such a big organization with a lot of financial resources, they should be ready to handle this without problems. But they are amateurs on everything security related," Cerrudo said.
"They spend a lot of time creating these patches. Then, patch day comes around and the patches aren't available. Then, when the patches are finally released, it's normal to find that they are incomplete and fail to address the actual vulnerability," he added.
Oracle has been falling down on the job for years, making it virtually impossible for DBAs to keep up with patches and keep their systems tuned. They hem and haw, obfuscate and prevaricate, and still manage to retain their commanding market share. Sound like anyone else we know?
Again, Oracle should have gotten into the Linux biz 5 years ago -- now it's too late. At this point they should think about cleaning their own house and stay out of the OS business until they have a firm grip on their DB. This constant inability to stay on top of critical problems points a wider, systemic problem that would infect any Linux development program they acquired. Time for Larry Ellison to retire to a tiny island in the Pacific somehwere and let some new blood fix Oracle before it implodes under its own weight and become an IT black hole.
Assuming you have a good idea of what input to your program is supposed to be, and you have an adequate method of checking to make sure the data is not some sort of goo (love those regexs!), then you should be able to test the software as you go. I'm of the school that tends to build each part, test it, and move on. It cuts down on the holes if I know where a piece of data comes from, where it's going, and what manipulations may happen to it along the way.
Three things can establish trust:
1) what you are - biometric
2) something you carry - card ( ref id?)
3) something you know - password or pin
Getting back to the laziness aspect, this is exactly what most people would prefer to avoid. While they carry fingerprints or retinas everywhere, carrying a card means the potential for losing it and having a PIN/password means having to remember it. Most people want a one-shot identification to take place, preferably without them having to lift a finger (I know... I know...)
Anybody with mod points might want to throw the parent an "Insightful."
Mind you... if all they need is a fingerprint and/or data from your RFID implant, a crook wouldn't even need you alive. The RFID chip would supposedly keep working for a while and fingerprints don't depend on you being alive. Retinas would be a different story, since they require a constant blood flow, though I'm not sure what the decay rate is for retinal tissue when you die.
Food for thought.
"He's trying to rip apart the internet just to make our community stop fighting back against spam," Blue Security's chief executive Eran Reshef said of the spammer he believes launched the attack.
LiveJournal and TypePad found themselves suffering the brunt of the attack when Blue, which says it has been targeted by a "top four" Russian spammer, redirected the front page of its website to a blog hosted at TypePad's data center.
Reshef said Blue replaced the front page of its site with the TypePad blog to keep its users up to date with events, and disagreed with commentary that said Blue acted irresponsibly by passing the DDoS burden to Six Apart.
"We didn't offload any DDoS," he said. "That's like blaming the victim of a crime."
Since they were apparently in contact with this dirtbag, didn't they see this coming? Perhaps they were just being well-intentioned by shifting their front page to a blog with information for their users, but since they don't host the blog, that seems like dirty pool. Spammers are not known for being the most easy-going people in the world and sure he made threats about a DDoS. Seems a bit iffy. It could all be above board but without more info, who knows?
I find it interesting that they supply spammers with the addresses of their clients, so the spammers can avoid emailing them. Wouldn't a spammer get that info when they get bombarded by unsubscribe requests? Seems like handing the fox the keys to the henhouse while you slip off for a brewski.
I shred then incinerate important stuff; shredded paper can make very good firestarting fuel on those cold winter nights. A but tough in the summer, but that's where the barbecue comes in.
Prior to that quote: Some people might wonder why the Foundation would be interested in "extending" the life and vested value of these Win32 bound desktops?
Our reply is that this isn't about "Windows" or MS Office. It's about people, business units, existing workflows and business processes, and vested legacy information systems begging to be connected, coordinated, and re engineered to reach new levels of productivity and service. It's also about the extraordinary value of ODF and it's importance to the next generation of collaborative computing. And it's about ODF rising to meet the needs of key information domains as they are represented by desktop productivity environments; publishing, content and archive management systems; SOA efforts; and the Open Internet.
Microsoft doesn't "win" anything. ODF realizes that even if people switch to an open document format, they are going to have legacy files (Word, Excel, etc.) that are going to have to work with the new open system. People are going to want to be able to edit and revise those documents, or even just be able to read them, without having to go through some lengthy and costly conversion process.
...to consult the new Star Wars boxed set for practical ideas. Turbo-lasers anyone?
From the artice: Using this information and surfing publicly available databases, we were able - within 15 minutes - to find out where Broer lived, who lived there with him, where he worked, which universities he had attended and even how much his house was worth when he bought it two years ago. (This was particularly easy given his unusual name, but it would have been possible even if his name had been John Smith. We now had his date of birth and passport number, so we would have known exactly which John Smith.)
Laurie was anything but smug.
"This is terrible," he said. "It just shows what happens when governments begin demanding more and more of our personal information and then entrust it to companies simply not geared up for collecting or securing it as it gets shared around more and more people. It doesn't enhance our security; it undermines it.
Anything that has even one piece of critical information on it (name, address, account numer of any sort, etc.) is vulnerable. That's why my shredder works overtime. I don't throw boarding passes away; I have quite a collection of them from my trips to Europe and the ones I don't want get consigned to the shredder. You can't take for granted that once you toss away a piece of paper, it will be on its way to the landfill soon enough. Trash may sit unattended for hours, even at a busy airport, and is a ripe picking ground. Mind you, I think airport security might look at you funny if you were poking around in all the trash cans, but you never know.
...favorite Knight Rider joke here: "Michael, someone's trying to connect to me via Wi-Fi and and override my locking mechanism!"
FTA: 8. Preoccupation with Google. Microsoft is too easily distracted by successful companies who are not competitors. There is a deep-rooted belief that if a company like Google is successful, then they are an enemy per se. So the company obsesses on what Google is doing rather than concentrating on important Microsoft projects. Now Microsoft is about to do a deal with Yahoo to flank Google. This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size.
But will Google stay a non-competitor? Didn't we hear rumors of a Google OS earlier in the year and doesn't it make sense that eventually Google might take Microsoft on head on? Google can certainly handle any competition it has on the Internet right now, but if their idea of a global data sharing network is to be believed (thought I doubt it would ever become sentient), it would gain a big assist if there were Google OS-powered computers world wide. So perhaps MS is engaging Google pre-emptively, to forestall the day they do become a competitor directly.
No, you need to lobby your Congressmen and make your voice heard, voting the bums out if they won't listen to you. The lawyers only come into play after the law has hit the fan and when that happens, there will be plenty of lawyers from both sides, the upshot being they will make oodles of money in fees and book deals.
Now please excuse me... I have a bridge to hide under to threaten unwary travellers...
Don't think it hasn't already been developed and its "beta" version is waiting on a disregarded server in a dimly lit room somewhere. Google's a big enough player that they wouldn't have gone into this without a contingency plan. Win or lose, you'll see the Google browser as soon its impact would have the greatest effect on the market.
That would assume that "consumers" actually had a choice, but as we all know, competition is a misnomer. With acquisitions and mergers, the number of carriers continues to shrink. And while you might think you can get whatever phone company you want wherever you are, think again. My folks in North Carolina have one carrier available: Sprint. They can't switch phone companies. They use calling cards for long distance, so they don't have to pay Sprint's outrageous fees or deal with their crappy customer service.
Think cable's a good alternative? Bah! I have to use Optimuj Online through Cablevision, because I can't get Comcast (not that I really want to). There's no competition -- in my area its Cablevision or satellite, take your pick.
If you think the Bells and or cable giants stand to lose by restricting service or charging more to some comapnies than others, think again. The customer doesn't have much of a choice in most cases.
It seems like there are suddenly a lot of lawyers writing about the future of the Internet. So we've gone from ambulance chasing to Internet chasing? I can see the commercial now: Have you been the victim of an Internet crime? Spamming? Identity Theft? Bad romance from Match.com? The law office of Swindle, Swipe, and Obfuscate are here to help!
I can't see this happening, precisely for this reason. Ballmer's ego wouldn't let him co-exist with Yahoo and Yang wouldn't be caught dead letting Ballmer in the building. Eventually it comes down to which one would flinch in a staring contest, but I suspect they'd both go blind before agreeing to work with the other.
I'm more interested in the security aspect. Cell phones used to be atrociously noisy but the technology rapidly evolved to where, when your call isn't being inconveniently dropped, you can hold a conversation that's pretty clear. It will take VoIP a while, but in the end the audio quality will match what the phone company offers now. I just hope the prices don't start to balloon shortly thereafter.
Far be it from me to rain on anyone's parade, but it's a valid point. It's nice to be able to auto-update software, but that process should remain as unobtrusive as possible. Let Firefox download the fix, keep it ready, and do an install next time I run the browser from scratch. Where's the harm in it?
For the simple reason that they are a business, they need to make money to satisfy shareholders, and it's easy to do. And best of all, it's not strictly illegal, only the practice of double-dipping the customer is illegal.