Asking somebody for a password is not far from kicking their door in and checking out their underwear drawer. The 4th amendment has been weakened, but if the founding fathers had had computers they would not have been too big on George III or anyone else demanding passwords. To be sure, current case law only applies to the government, not private entities who are not acting on behalf of the government, but the entire purpose of existing laws protecting privacy--including whole sh*tloads of questions you can't ask in a job interview--and of constitutional protections is, well, to protect privacy. For example, it is illegal to ask job applicants if they have any tattoos even though at one time people with tattoos were something like 88 times more likely to steal. Nor can you ask about marital status. And on and on and on.
The only reason employers can ask for passwords is that the law has not yet caught up with technology.
Personally, I think you ought to be willing to go on food stamps before giving some assh*le personnel dept. your passwords. But that's just me.
When women are young, slim, and unwrinkled, they can get what they want by flirting with or marrying powerful men. Why should they be feminists? When their charms fade, their ability to manipulate bosses fades until it reaches the vanishing point. When they get dumped for a younger trophy wife, their chances for another marriage are, under the best of circumstances, about 2-1 against. If they've gained weight, lost confidence, and don't know how to get asked out for dates, the odds are more like 7-2.
If you're a programmer over 40, your mental powers and ability to concentrate begin to fade. Your ability to keep up with current technology trends, relative to younger engineers, fades until it reaches the vanishing point. Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, but try not to be an anecdote and see what happens.
When you're young and female, you can bargain for the best deal at work or in your personal life. Why should you join a union? When you're young and a programmer, you can bargain for better wages and shorter hours. You've got four or five other potential employers waiting in the wings. You can bargain for yourself. Why join a union?
Moral: If you're young, don't worry. You'll never get old. You don't need collective bargaining. The web has changed everything. Why join a union?
Most criminals in the jail are really, really stupid. I wonder sometimes about the ones who don't get caught; how many of those are there?
Example:Another guy broke into our office and left his Lockheed employee badge on the floor. He stole some checks to pay for gas nearby and used his own drivers license as ID. Since the drivers license and the employee badge belonged to the same person, San Jose PD was able to crack the case.
Example: Another guy charged with armed robbery went to visit his lawyer. The case was weak enough that he might have gotten off. But he was caught for using slugs in the building's pay phone--a federal crime.
The guy they caught in NYC had a ninth-grade education, and he was LulzSec's chief-rooter-in-charge.
Since this site is for nerds, how about a nerdish description from someone of what exactly it means to "take down" a website in this way?
Politics and religion I'm pretty well up on, but I'd like to know more about the technology behind these well-publicized, probably over-publicized, attacks.
Using humans as high-tech signboards makes perfect sense to those who prize wealth above all else. But why stop there? Let's chain them to garbage cans and charge pedestrians a dime apiece to throw away their hamburger wrappers. Or, better still, have an auction for the rights to run and maintain the concrete under sidewalk.
The only reason this happens is that Facebook is a comparatively new thing, and it takes a while for issues likes these to work their way through the courts. Employers are nuts to ask for the irrelevant personal information that almost any Facebook account contains.
HOUSTON — A federal jury on Tuesday convicted R. Allen Stanford, a Texas financier, on 13 out of 14 counts of fraud in connection with a worldwide scheme that lasted more than two decades and involved more than $7 billion in investments....
The jury decision followed a six-week trial and came three years after Mr. Stanford was accused of defrauding nearly 30,000 investors in 113 countries in a Ponzi scheme involving $7 billion in fraudulent high-interest certificates of deposit at the Stanford International Bank, which was based on the Caribbean island of Antigua....
The prosecutors heavily relied on James M. Davis, Mr. Stanford’s former roommate from Baylor University, who served as his chief financial officer.
Whether his name is James M. Davis or Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the FBI informant is the key ingredient in putting people like R. Allen Stanford and John Gotti where, in my view at least, they richly deserve to be. I don't know if Lulzsec's guys belong in jail. But if they do, finding somebody to snitch them out is the FBI's job.
Now there is no excuse to avoid the gym: just one hour of exercise instantly changes your genes to boost the breakdown of fat.
Juleen Zierath and Romain Barrès at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues looked for epigenetic changes – the addition of a methyl group to genes – in muscle cells during strenuous exercise. To do so, the team collected biopsies from the thigh muscles of eight men who led relatively sedentary lives, both before and after an hour of exercise.
Several genes involved in fat metabolism that were methylated before the exercise lost their methyl group. Such demethylation allows genes to more easily make proteins, which suggests that more proteins involved in the breakdown of fat are being made after exercise, says Zierath.
The group was surprised to see these effects happen so quickly. They think calcium, produced in muscle cells during exercise, may be involved since subjecting the same biopsies to caffeine – which also increases calcium in muscles – caused the same demethylation.
Unfortunately, you would get caffeine intoxication before gaining the same effects from coffee as an hour-long workout, says Zierath.
Not exactly plain, nose-picker English, but I sorta get it: exercise is good for you.
February 11, 2012 (NYT) The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stands at less than 640 people....Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are gone. There were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing employees last summer that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t overlap.
February 24, 2012 (AP) — The Washington Post Company reported on Friday a 22 percent drop in fourth-quarter net income.
CmdrTaco helped build something worthwhile at Slashdot. He's the kind of talent the Post needs more of if they are not to circle the drain with the rest of the sorry-assed newspaper industry, which the Web is destroying without replacing it with something better.
'I am not the kind of person who can just 'not browse the internet.'
Who is? The problem that the poster may be pointing to is that it's not hard to forget which laptop is which and jumping on the Internet to check personal email or whatever. If your company has given you a Windows laptop, use a Mac or better still a Linux machine as your personal laptop. The operational differences should be enough to remind you which one you're using.
If you've accidentally stumbled onto xhamster on the company machine and anybody notices, just open your eyes wide and act dumb. Screwing around with hard disk or anything else makes it look like you've been on an Al Qaeda chatboard or something; don't be an idiot.
Of course, but the highest sequential number shows the number of ballots actually cast, which must agree with the number of signatures on the polling place sign-in sheets. This at least prevents someone from getting 310 votes in a precinct where only 292 people have voted.
Of course, it's not easy, especially in razor-thin elections like Santorum vs. Romney in Iowa where one of the other won by maybe eight votes. The bookies paid both sides because the results were, given the inherent inaccuracy in counting, basically a tie.
It's very unusual, however, that people from both parties hand-counting paper ballots can't come to a result that all the observers agree with. At some point, it makes sense to flip a (physical) coin.
"Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea." Three cheers, too, for superstitious luddites (see below). Here are my top three solutions to computer fraud and f**kups:
1. Wanted posters and long prison sentences. Rob a mail truck, do time. Why should this not work for email and other electronic fraud? Robbing an election is a more serious a threat to democracy than robbing the mails, which is bad enough.
2. Human signatures and carbon paper (or one-write NCR paper). When a live person signs a check, an invoice, a purchase order or a ballot, he or she thinks twice about the consequences. Anything can be faked, but carbon paper scores high on lie-detector tests.
3. Letterpress-imprinted sequential numbering. Paper forms, including ballots, with unique numbers and carbons copies, are a solid control for electronic databases.Ancient Letterpress lead-type numbering devices--stamp, crunch, print, and advance the counter-- are older and less screwable-with than computerized typesetting or laser-printing.
I use all of these systems in my own business because where my money is concerned, I do not entirely trust any computer system. I've seen an entire business of 100+ employees saved by one persnicketly accounting clerk who kept paper copies of all the invoices and payments. She had been ordered not to--don't be so old-fashioned, dear--but ignored the controller's blind faith in his new, shiny, $200K fail-safe automated system. No hacker except Murphy and his law was involved. She was neither thanked nor rewarded for rescuing her employer from catastrophic folly.
It's hard to say, however, what effect it may have in the general election, which will include Democrats and Independents. Among all voters, opinion about gay marriage is evenly divided.
But I don't think a majority of all voters agree with Santorum that homosexuality is the same thing as the sexual abuse of dogs. Santorum's anti-gay pronouncements go far beyond the issue of gay marriage. To the extent that Savage's site exposes Santorum's extremism, it will help Obama, but I'm not convinced that most people will make the leap from anal froth to anti-gay bigotry.
I don't begrudge Jobs or Zuckerberg their stock profits. Jobs took no salary and gambled that he could make the stock worth a bunch. He created a lot of employment and happy investors along the way.
But I do think billion-dollar estates should be taxed--a lot. The wife and kids (if any) did not create wealth. They deserve money, but so do we. Otherwise, we pay their taxes for them. The government has to get money from somewhere.
Half a billion is a nice inheritance. If it's not enough for the heirs, they could consider drastic measures, like getting a job.
Zuckerberg will still be a rich man when he dies, and the government will still need money. The place for the taxpayers to catch up with him is from his estate.
It's worth mentioning, too, that Zuckerberg has already made an eye-popping gift to New Jersey schools. Tax-deductible, no doubt, but still a praiseworthy act.
Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations. Ease of use promotes productivity among users at all skill levels. Good hardware engineers, for example, are generally interested in design of good hardware, not screwing around with command-line UNIX. Bad designers, of course, love to do everything except design.
Steve Jobs would have still been around to develop new consumer markets for another company.
Or perhaps the acquisition would have been disaster all around. We'll never know, of course, unless Apple unveils a programmable wayback machine next month.
Yes, the Libyan standard of living is better than Egypt's, but then so is Mexico's. If you've been to Mexico, you will see that a minimum wage of about $1,800/year leaves adequate room for discontent.
At least my iPad does. I use it for reading and email almost exclusively, and if a half-pound Kindle had email, I'd toss my iPad off a building. Weight and battery life are what matter to me.
Your absolutely right about cost vs. value. I like a bargain as well as the next guy, but even $49 is too much for a product you don't use. And a $1,095 is not too much if, like a laptop, you use it every day of your life for three years or so. A dollar a day--that's the price point I'm looking for.
I'm as ardent an Apple fanboy as ever drew breath, but the iPad is a boat anchor.
They have good, well-paid reporters with an army of fact-checkers and lawyers behind them. The format, and the pub's history, reminds one of "wild hogs ate my baby" journalism, but these days, they're as careful with facts as most newspapers. The headlines and photos--that's a different matter. But if the text says he was in the cancer ward, he probably was, or else someone has made an honest mistake. The company got sick of paying hundreds of millions to movie stars and no longer prints malicious stories with reckless disregard for the truth.
Why would a good professional writer work for them? Why would a good, professional programmer work for Microsoft?
The Stuxnet attack seems to have worked as well as or better than an airstrike. Call it what you will, it was something pretty damn close to a an act of war.
...still supports the original sense as the primary meaning:
hacker |hakr| noun 1 informal an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user.
a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.
And, believe it or not, there are other meanings:
1. : one that hacks 2 : a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity 3 : an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer 4 : a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
Since there is no other convenient synonym for Definition #4, it's hard to blame writers for using "hacker" as shorthand.
Slashdot Mirror
Asking somebody for a password is not far from kicking their door in and checking out their underwear drawer. The 4th amendment has been weakened, but if the founding fathers had had computers they would not have been too big on George III or anyone else demanding passwords. To be sure, current case law only applies to the government, not private entities who are not acting on behalf of the government, but the entire purpose of existing laws protecting privacy--including whole sh*tloads of questions you can't ask in a job interview--and of constitutional protections is, well, to protect privacy. For example, it is illegal to ask job applicants if they have any tattoos even though at one time people with tattoos were something like 88 times more likely to steal. Nor can you ask about marital status. And on and on and on.
The only reason employers can ask for passwords is that the law has not yet caught up with technology.
Personally, I think you ought to be willing to go on food stamps before giving some assh*le personnel dept. your passwords. But that's just me.
When women are young, slim, and unwrinkled, they can get what they want by flirting with or marrying powerful men. Why should they be feminists? When their charms fade, their ability to manipulate bosses fades until it reaches the vanishing point. When they get dumped for a younger trophy wife, their chances for another marriage are, under the best of circumstances, about 2-1 against. If they've gained weight, lost confidence, and don't know how to get asked out for dates, the odds are more like 7-2.
http://www.calculatorslive.com/Chances-Of-Getting-Married-After-40-Calculator.aspx
If you're a programmer over 40, your mental powers and ability to concentrate begin to fade. Your ability to keep up with current technology trends, relative to younger engineers, fades until it reaches the vanishing point. Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, but try not to be an anecdote and see what happens.
http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2004/05/28/ageism-in-it-over-40-forget-about-getting-a-job-39120958/
When you're young and female, you can bargain for the best deal at work or in your personal life. Why should you join a union?
When you're young and a programmer, you can bargain for better wages and shorter hours. You've got four or five other potential employers waiting in the wings. You can bargain for yourself. Why join a union?
Moral: If you're young, don't worry. You'll never get old. You don't need collective bargaining. The web has changed everything. Why join a union?
Most criminals in the jail are really, really stupid. I wonder sometimes about the ones who don't get caught; how many of those are there?
Example:Another guy broke into our office and left his Lockheed employee badge on the floor. He stole some checks to pay for gas nearby and used his own drivers license as ID. Since the drivers license and the employee badge belonged to the same person, San Jose PD was able to crack the case.
Example: Another guy charged with armed robbery went to visit his lawyer. The case was weak enough that he might have gotten off. But he was caught for using slugs in the building's pay phone--a federal crime.
The guy they caught in NYC had a ninth-grade education, and he was LulzSec's chief-rooter-in-charge.
Since this site is for nerds, how about a nerdish description from someone of what exactly it means to "take down" a website in this way?
Politics and religion I'm pretty well up on, but I'd like to know more about the technology behind these well-publicized, probably over-publicized, attacks.
Using humans as high-tech signboards makes perfect sense to those who prize wealth above all else. But why stop there? Let's chain them to garbage cans and charge pedestrians a dime apiece to throw away their hamburger wrappers. Or, better still, have an auction for the rights to run and maintain the concrete under sidewalk.
Wifi should cost the same as a library card. But Verizon pay its CEO $37.5 million a year to make sure that it doesn't.
http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/12/ceo-compensation-11_Ivan-G-Seidenberg_NBWH.html
.
The only reason this happens is that Facebook is a comparatively new thing, and it takes a while for issues likes these to work their way through the courts. Employers are nuts to ask for the irrelevant personal information that almost any Facebook account contains.
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/02/checking-out-job-applicants-on-facebook-better-ask-a-lawyer/
From today's New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/business/jury-convicts-stanford-in-7-billion-ponzi-fraud.html?scp=1&sq=james%20m%20davis&st=cse
Whether his name is James M. Davis or Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the FBI informant is the key ingredient in putting people like R. Allen Stanford and John Gotti where, in my view at least, they richly deserve to be. I don't know if Lulzsec's guys belong in jail. But if they do, finding somebody to snitch them out is the FBI's job.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21544-exercise-instantly-boosts-fatbusting-genes.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=health
Not exactly plain, nose-picker English, but I sorta get it: exercise is good for you.
They are losing relevance, not to say their ass:
February 11, 2012
(NYT) The newsroom, once with more than 1,000 employees, now stands at less than 640 people....Bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are gone. There were so many Friday afternoon cake-cutting send-offs for departing employees last summer that editors had to coordinate them so they didn’t overlap.
February 24, 2012
(AP) — The Washington Post Company reported on Friday a 22 percent drop in fourth-quarter net income.
CmdrTaco helped build something worthwhile at Slashdot. He's the kind of talent the Post needs more of if they are not to circle the drain with the rest of the sorry-assed newspaper industry, which the Web is destroying without replacing it with something better.
'I am not the kind of person who can just 'not browse the internet.'
Who is? The problem that the poster may be pointing to is that it's not hard to forget which laptop is which and jumping on the Internet to check personal email or whatever. If your company has given you a Windows laptop, use a Mac or better still a Linux machine as your personal laptop. The operational differences should be enough to remind you which one you're using.
If you've accidentally stumbled onto xhamster on the company machine and anybody notices, just open your eyes wide and act dumb. Screwing around with hard disk or anything else makes it look like you've been on an Al Qaeda chatboard or something; don't be an idiot.
Of course, but the highest sequential number shows the number of ballots actually cast, which must agree with the number of signatures on the polling place sign-in sheets. This at least prevents someone from getting 310 votes in a precinct where only 292 people have voted.
Of course, it's not easy, especially in razor-thin elections like Santorum vs. Romney in Iowa where one of the other won by maybe eight votes. The bookies paid both sides because the results were, given the inherent inaccuracy in counting, basically a tie.
It's very unusual, however, that people from both parties hand-counting paper ballots can't come to a result that all the observers agree with. At some point, it makes sense to flip a (physical) coin.
"Every single technology profession I have EVER communicated with, does not think electronic voting machines are a good idea." Three cheers, too, for superstitious luddites (see below). Here are my top three solutions to computer fraud and f**kups:
1. Wanted posters and long prison sentences. Rob a mail truck, do time. Why should this not work for email and other electronic fraud? Robbing an election is a more serious a threat to democracy than robbing the mails, which is bad enough.
2. Human signatures and carbon paper (or one-write NCR paper). When a live person signs a check, an invoice, a purchase order or a ballot, he or she thinks twice about the consequences. Anything can be faked, but carbon paper scores high on lie-detector tests.
3. Letterpress-imprinted sequential numbering. Paper forms, including ballots, with unique numbers and carbons copies, are a solid control for electronic databases.Ancient Letterpress lead-type numbering devices--stamp, crunch, print, and advance the counter-- are older and less screwable-with than computerized typesetting or laser-printing.
I use all of these systems in my own business because where my money is concerned, I do not entirely trust any computer system. I've seen an entire business of 100+ employees saved by one persnicketly accounting clerk who kept paper copies of all the invoices and payments. She had been ordered not to--don't be so old-fashioned, dear--but ignored the controller's blind faith in his new, shiny, $200K fail-safe automated system. No hacker except Murphy and his law was involved. She was neither thanked nor rewarded for rescuing her employer from catastrophic folly.
Murphy's corollary: no good deed goes unpunished.
But Anonymous did stymie those evil grade school kids who rely on the site for social studies reports. That counts for something, doesn't it?
I agree that the Savage Internet campaign may help rather than hurt Santorum win the nomination. GOP primary voters oppose gay marriage by 70%. http://www.people-press.org/2012/02/07/growing-public-support-for-same-sex-marriage/
It's hard to say, however, what effect it may have in the general election, which will include Democrats and Independents. Among all voters, opinion about gay marriage is evenly divided.
But I don't think a majority of all voters agree with Santorum that homosexuality is the same thing as the sexual abuse of dogs. Santorum's anti-gay pronouncements go far beyond the issue of gay marriage. To the extent that Savage's site exposes Santorum's extremism, it will help Obama, but I'm not convinced that most people will make the leap from anal froth to anti-gay bigotry.
I don't begrudge Jobs or Zuckerberg their stock profits. Jobs took no salary and gambled that he could make the stock worth a bunch. He created a lot of employment and happy investors along the way.
But I do think billion-dollar estates should be taxed--a lot. The wife and kids (if any) did not create wealth. They deserve money, but so do we. Otherwise, we pay their taxes for them. The government has to get money from somewhere.
Half a billion is a nice inheritance. If it's not enough for the heirs, they could consider drastic measures, like getting a job.
Zuckerberg will still be a rich man when he dies, and the government will still need money. The place for the taxpayers to catch up with him is from his estate.
It's worth mentioning, too, that Zuckerberg has already made an eye-popping gift to New Jersey schools. Tax-deductible, no doubt, but still a praiseworthy act.
Wittiest observation I've seen in a while.
Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations. Ease of use promotes productivity among users at all skill levels. Good hardware engineers, for example, are generally interested in design of good hardware, not screwing around with command-line UNIX. Bad designers, of course, love to do everything except design.
Steve Jobs would have still been around to develop new consumer markets for another company.
Or perhaps the acquisition would have been disaster all around. We'll never know, of course, unless Apple unveils a programmable wayback machine next month.
Actually, it's a new first step, pushing each of the other five down the stack:
6) Buy the book.
You need something to scan, and the publisher and writer need to make SOMETHING.
In many cases, they'll make more because of a potential step 7--some of the people to whom you lend the pdf will want to buy their own paper copy.
Yes, the Libyan standard of living is better than Egypt's, but then so is Mexico's. If you've been to Mexico, you will see that a minimum wage of about $1,800/year leaves adequate room for discontent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
At least my iPad does. I use it for reading and email almost exclusively, and if a half-pound Kindle had email, I'd toss my iPad off a building. Weight and battery life are what matter to me.
Your absolutely right about cost vs. value. I like a bargain as well as the next guy, but even $49 is too much for a product you don't use. And a $1,095 is not too much if, like a laptop, you use it every day of your life for three years or so. A dollar a day--that's the price point I'm looking for.
I'm as ardent an Apple fanboy as ever drew breath, but the iPad is a boat anchor.
They have good, well-paid reporters with an army of fact-checkers and lawyers behind them. The format, and the pub's history, reminds one of "wild hogs ate my baby" journalism, but these days, they're as careful with facts as most newspapers. The headlines and photos--that's a different matter. But if the text says he was in the cancer ward, he probably was, or else someone has made an honest mistake. The company got sick of paying hundreds of millions to movie stars and no longer prints malicious stories with reckless disregard for the truth.
Why would a good professional writer work for them? Why would a good, professional programmer work for Microsoft?
I didn't have to install a plug-in to run the check as some have said below.. Over and out on three Mac browsers in two or three minutes.
The Stuxnet attack seems to have worked as well as or better than an airstrike. Call it what you will, it was something pretty damn close to a an act of war.
...still supports the original sense as the primary meaning:
hacker |hakr|
noun
1 informal an enthusiastic and skillful computer programmer or user.
a person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data.
And, believe it or not, there are other meanings:
1.
: one that hacks
2
: a person who is inexperienced or unskilled at a particular activity
3
: an expert at programming and solving problems with a computer
4
: a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system
Since there is no other convenient synonym for Definition #4, it's hard to blame writers for using "hacker" as shorthand.
Even one share is enough to make some noise about it at the shareholder's meeting. They may not own much, but they speak for quite a crowd, methinks.