I was just thinking, it would be nice if Slashdot had some anti-malicious link tech blocking their advertisers. Swear to god, last drive-by spyware attempt I intercepted was from clicking on some dumb ad (some curiosity, but more to give/. a little click-through love).
If you can prove how you voted then you can be pressured to prove it by a third party. Since you can prove how you voted it would be possible to sell your vote to the highest bidder.
Hmmm... I see your point. But, then again, the GOP has been buying votes by bribing people with their own money (lower taxes) for years now.
Rev Al Gore who neglects to tell you the "inconvenient truth" that he has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire
It's called commitment, or putting your money where your mouth is. You know, like Dick Cheney being heavily invested in oil and pushing an agenda to help his bottom line, except that Al Gore isn't denying or hiding his support of green energy. But, hey... If you loathe Al Gore, go ahead and twist his integrity into some tin foil hat conspiracy.
The fundamental difference between voting and those other transactions is that voting is a secret transaction where you can't be able to connect a particular vote to a particular voter. Those other things don't require that level of secrecy.
Identity and encryption really don't need to be related. TOR doesn't know who you are, but the packets get there nonetheless. Give a voter an encoded receipt and they can punch/scan in a code from any web browser to see what votes were made for the unique, randomized code they received. Anonymous and verifiable.
For those of us who don't like sport and don't like subsidizing those who do, this is a win. For a sport fan, it's a good way to part him from his money.
It's a great start. For a follow-up, how about we stop committing my tax dollars to fund the rebuilding of privately-owned sports stadiums?
Exactly. Somehow we can make ATMs, electronic slot machines, and all kinds of online transactions secure, but can't secure a vote? Sounds like a lack of will at best, a nefarious plan to make U.S. democracy more of a farce that it already is at worst.
Here are a couple of videos from MS Office Labs with their vision of what MS products might look like in 2019. Check out the second vid at about 2:05 to see a modular phone system in action.
Hmm. kju, who is absolutely right, was modded "troll" and the thread is being swarmed by MSFT defenders. I have to wonder whether they are paid shills, or merely lacking in any historical perspective.
Please try to be fair here. Like ge7 said, when M$ botches/ignores security we bash them, when they implement good security we bash them.
Personally, since I have to use Windows, I'd really prefer to not have a creeping feeling that something might have rooted the machine. It's not like I have a lot of time at work or home to constantly keep up with the latest exploits and anti-virus/security products will never be perfect. I would love to have more peace of mind on Windows boxes.
If UEFI tied to Win8 is not for you, buy different hardware or buy from a manufacturer that lets you do it your way. Or don't... So you can keep complaining about how everything M$ does is wrong.
Oh, *technically* it does get copy and pasted. Only everything gets pasted into one single cell in Excel. Both in SQL Server 2000 and 2005, with Excel 2000 and 2005.
It works on an US setup, but it doesn't work under German language settings. Since the data in the clipboard seems to be text/csv, and the German Excel can't handle the text/csv correctly since the "," is the decimal separator.
Ah... Apologies. I was operating under the same ethnocentric assumptions as Microsoft apparently. I seem to get tab-delimited data copied to the clipboard from the Query Analyzer grid under US-EN culture settings.
Galileo was never politically motivated --powerful people threatened by his findings made it political. Unlike modern climate iconoclasts, he wasn't being bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil to contradict mountains of evidence.
Nope I sure don't, but I also do not like having to include 500 megs of code to be able to do anything.
Look... If you're writing high-performance device drivers, cutting edge physics simulation engines, or the like, my hat's off to you --that's serious code where every cycle counts. For the other 99.9% of us, ruthless efficiency isn't our highest priority anymore; we are being paid to be productive and not screw up. If a complex app takes one hour to debug rather than one month, I have more time and money. Smart people use productivity tools to their advantage.
Is there no fucking end to this "nanny state and let's put rubber baby buggy bumpers and fucking everything" just so some god damn fucking moron can play at being a programmer?
Admittedly things like M$ VB have lowered the bar and many employers don't know good developers from bad, but saying that easier to use technologies are bad is Luddite thinking along the lines of saying that people being able to place their own phone calls or take their own photos is somehow a bad thing. Besides, if you don't like the safeguards on newer systems, nobody is preventing you from continuing to write everything in assembly, COBOL, or binary if you like.
The world has sharp corners how about having an attention span great then that of gnat and pay attention to what you are doing?
"attention span great then that of gnat"?
Wow, look at that. If this were code, you'd have three errors in under six words --and there's more nitpicking material where that came from. I'm guessing that without a spell checker (another one of those damned, meddling, nanny state things!) you might have made even more errors. Back in the good old days when I wrote code in scripting languages, simple mistakes often wouldn't be caught until a user hit a particular piece of code. I much prefer finding obvious problems at compilation --or not even making those mistakes thanks to things like code auto-completion (or training wheels, as you might say). My tools aren't dumbed-down, they're smart enough that I can worry about the big ideas instead of investing mental energy in double-checking my data types and other distractions.
You'll see idiots and geniuses get slapped by typos and inadvertent mistakes
And you think this bit of crap will prevent that? Sheeeesh are you really that naive?
Clearly you're right. There is no amount of idiot-proofing that can't be overcome by a determined idiot, so having tools/languages/methodologies that help prevent errors is just a horrible idea. Type-safety, enumerations, compiled code, etc. are really bad ideas that add nothing to the quality of our code. We should all be using scripting languages programmed on punch cards so our code will be the bestest evar. Avoidable run-time errors like type mismatches that crash production systems are a good thing --don't you love surprises?
This appears to be more of the 'nanny state' mentality that Microsoft is shoving down our throats.
Sheesh... I was going to moderate a few items in this thread, but I just have to reply to your ignorant excuse to bash M$ --like they invented type-safety.
This is the old case of narrowing the band of opportunity so that the lowest performers can't make the obvious mistakes. When will they realise that they are also stifling the highest performers? Give us some credit folks. We're not all first year out of college.
Really? Technologies that help minimize errors through convention are a bad thing? So if you're in a shop that saves countless hours of time and debugging using a modern ORM like Hibernate, that makes you some sort of slack-jawed moron because "real" programmers do everything in assembly and don't need no stinkin' oversight, static code analysis, testing, or code review, right? Sheesh... Remind me not to hire you to code any systems where human safety is on the line. Most employers --even for inconsequential crap-- would rather have working apps than theoretically pure code; they can buy another rack of servers for what a good developer earns, so in most cases they really don't give a damn about efficient code.
Besides, even if you think type-safety = training wheels, if you've been coding long enough, you'll see idiots and geniuses get slapped by typos and inadvertent mistakes. Only an amateur thinks they're immune to error and that things like type-safety just cramp your style. And real programmers can go around these things off when they need to, but take advantage of lower bug counts the rest of the time.
Sure. Obviously there's a tidy matrix of 1s (dark pixels) and 0s (no ink) behind the mess, but the paper on both ends is an analog device.:)
And considering all the gnarly mangling of the modem, modulating and demodulating the mess over noisy POTS, and the rough translation in the original scan and final lo-fi output spewed out, I just can't think of the end-to-end system as being digital --even if several parts of it are.
Sigh... Yeah, you're right. Until the legal system finds the any key, we're stuck with the anachronistic thing. And I have to keep doing the face-palm maneuver every time some dope e-mails me a document, then insists that a scanned.PDF with my signature isn't acceptable, but a crappy analog copy (at great inconvenience to me) is golden. I hope all those office drones are replaced by real robots soon.
The problem with communism is that it doesn't scale well. Works fantastically well for a nuclear family --maybe even a whole village or commune. But once a group gets large enough that accountability is obscured, there are too many that shamelessly take (or don't give much) and it all falls apart in a downward spiral of cynicism and demoralization.
Here's my plan:
We have manufacturers quietly replace every fax machine's innards with a scanner that sends 256-bit encrypted e-mails to other "fax machines" while letting techno-Luddites continue struggling to punch in the right numbers and standing around like idiots waiting for a wasted piece of paper that says something was sent. So nobody gets wise, we can degrade the image quality when their "fax machine" prints out the message at the other end. We could even keep the things plugged into POTS if the idiot users think that's an important part of the magic.
Seeing all these comments on the superiority of the fax is making my head hurt.
Everyone who works in a medical office is required to be educated about and sign a HIPAA compliance form. Every employee is liable.
I'm sure most places try to keep faxes secure, but how do you figure a big, unguarded pile of paper is more secure than e-mails that require a login? I can't even count all the places I've worked where faxes with SSNs and other dangerous information are just left scattered about until someone threw them away.
If someone is willing to go through enough trouble to intercept a company's email, they'll happily do the same for their fax line.
Phone lines are more difficult to break into than a protocol that is passed over the public internet. At least for now.
Hmmm... I agree with the previous poster. I knew people in high school that did their own wire taps. Intercepting e-mail might be easier and more anonymous, but in either case, if someone thinks the fax or e-mail is valuable enough, interception isn't that hard. Now tell me how one encrypts a fax... Maybe you could encode your ugly analog message in scrambled hex or binary? Use a really big font to compensate for the extremely degraded image on the other end.
Well... It all depends on your frame of reference I suppose. If you consider the blink of the cosmic eye we're been here, it's a supernova-like population explosion.
But, if you only consider modern times (and believe in projections), it looks like we're slowing down.
The fascinating part is how our closed system had a much lower point of equilibrium for the human population for millennia --and then we changed the system.
I say "wallpaper". Really, how awesome would that be!
Exactly. How about an update to the somewhat cheesy 1970s panorama scenes that took up a whole wall, but this time it's reincarnated as a super high-def. video feed in 360 degrees?
I'll be brief, although it's hard to not attack the ridiculous notion that Democrats are somehow to blame for poverty with mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The game here in "The Land of Opportunity" is getting increasingly rigged, like some ugly game of king of the hill, where the middle class is increasingly being squeezed into (relative) poverty --and it ain't because of people excited to get on welfare. Payments have been dropping and the percentage of Americans dependent on welfare has also dropped. It's convenient to think that a bunch of lazy poor folk are stealing your money through a program the constitutes the tiniest sliver of our GPD, but that's nothing more than a conservative fairy tale to rationalize their lack of compassion.
Take a look at this graph of changes in the Gini coefficient over the last 60 years in various countries. The conservative, anti-government contingent are absolutely right about people suffering a heinous redistribution of wealth, they just have the mechanics completely reversed.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just thinking, it would be nice if Slashdot had some anti-malicious link tech blocking their advertisers. Swear to god, last drive-by spyware attempt I intercepted was from clicking on some dumb ad (some curiosity, but more to give /. a little click-through love).
If you can prove how you voted then you can be pressured to prove it by a third party. Since you can prove how you voted it would be possible to sell your vote to the highest bidder.
Hmmm... I see your point. But, then again, the GOP has been buying votes by bribing people with their own money (lower taxes) for years now.
Rev Al Gore who neglects to tell you the "inconvenient truth" that he has set himself up to be a carbon billionaire
It's called commitment, or putting your money where your mouth is. You know, like Dick Cheney being heavily invested in oil and pushing an agenda to help his bottom line, except that Al Gore isn't denying or hiding his support of green energy. But, hey... If you loathe Al Gore, go ahead and twist his integrity into some tin foil hat conspiracy.
The fundamental difference between voting and those other transactions is that voting is a secret transaction where you can't be able to connect a particular vote to a particular voter. Those other things don't require that level of secrecy.
Identity and encryption really don't need to be related. TOR doesn't know who you are, but the packets get there nonetheless. Give a voter an encoded receipt and they can punch/scan in a code from any web browser to see what votes were made for the unique, randomized code they received. Anonymous and verifiable.
For those of us who don't like sport and don't like subsidizing those who do, this is a win. For a sport fan, it's a good way to part him from his money.
It's a great start. For a follow-up, how about we stop committing my tax dollars to fund the rebuilding of privately-owned sports stadiums?
Exactly. Somehow we can make ATMs, electronic slot machines, and all kinds of online transactions secure, but can't secure a vote? Sounds like a lack of will at best, a nefarious plan to make U.S. democracy more of a farce that it already is at worst.
Hmmm... Have we ruled out Blipverts?
Here are a couple of videos from MS Office Labs with their vision of what MS products might look like in 2019. Check out the second vid at about 2:05 to see a modular phone system in action.
Hmm. kju, who is absolutely right, was modded "troll" and the thread is being swarmed by MSFT defenders. I have to wonder whether they are paid shills, or merely lacking in any historical perspective.
Please try to be fair here. Like ge7 said, when M$ botches/ignores security we bash them, when they implement good security we bash them.
Personally, since I have to use Windows, I'd really prefer to not have a creeping feeling that something might have rooted the machine. It's not like I have a lot of time at work or home to constantly keep up with the latest exploits and anti-virus/security products will never be perfect. I would love to have more peace of mind on Windows boxes.
If UEFI tied to Win8 is not for you, buy different hardware or buy from a manufacturer that lets you do it your way. Or don't... So you can keep complaining about how everything M$ does is wrong.
Showing my age, but The Last Starfighter also came to mind. Can anyone think of an earlier instance of video game talent scouting in sci-fi?
Oh, *technically* it does get copy and pasted. Only everything gets pasted into one single cell in Excel. Both in SQL Server 2000 and 2005, with Excel 2000 and 2005.
It works on an US setup, but it doesn't work under German language settings. Since the data in the clipboard seems to be text/csv, and the German Excel can't handle the text/csv correctly since the "," is the decimal separator.
Ah... Apologies. I was operating under the same ethnocentric assumptions as Microsoft apparently. I seem to get tab-delimited data copied to the clipboard from the Query Analyzer grid under US-EN culture settings.
Unless you try do do something "exotic" like copy/paste some results from SQL Server Query Analzer (MS) to Excel (MS).
Which seems to be pretty much impossible.
Huh? I think you're doing it wrong. I've never had any issues, going back at least as far as SQL 2000 and Excel 95, if memory serves.
Make selection, ctrl-c, ctrl-v, done.
Galileo was never politically motivated --powerful people threatened by his findings made it political. Unlike modern climate iconoclasts, he wasn't being bankrolled by Exxon-Mobil to contradict mountains of evidence.
Nope I sure don't, but I also do not like having to include 500 megs of code to be able to do anything.
Look... If you're writing high-performance device drivers, cutting edge physics simulation engines, or the like, my hat's off to you --that's serious code where every cycle counts. For the other 99.9% of us, ruthless efficiency isn't our highest priority anymore; we are being paid to be productive and not screw up. If a complex app takes one hour to debug rather than one month, I have more time and money. Smart people use productivity tools to their advantage.
Is there no fucking end to this "nanny state and let's put rubber baby buggy bumpers and fucking everything" just so some god damn fucking moron can play at being a programmer?
Admittedly things like M$ VB have lowered the bar and many employers don't know good developers from bad, but saying that easier to use technologies are bad is Luddite thinking along the lines of saying that people being able to place their own phone calls or take their own photos is somehow a bad thing. Besides, if you don't like the safeguards on newer systems, nobody is preventing you from continuing to write everything in assembly, COBOL, or binary if you like.
The world has sharp corners how about having an attention span great then that of gnat and pay attention to what you are doing?
"attention span great then that of gnat"?
Wow, look at that. If this were code, you'd have three errors in under six words --and there's more nitpicking material where that came from. I'm guessing that without a spell checker (another one of those damned, meddling, nanny state things!) you might have made even more errors. Back in the good old days when I wrote code in scripting languages, simple mistakes often wouldn't be caught until a user hit a particular piece of code. I much prefer finding obvious problems at compilation --or not even making those mistakes thanks to things like code auto-completion (or training wheels, as you might say). My tools aren't dumbed-down, they're smart enough that I can worry about the big ideas instead of investing mental energy in double-checking my data types and other distractions.
You'll see idiots and geniuses get slapped by typos and inadvertent mistakes
And you think this bit of crap will prevent that? Sheeeesh are you really that naive?
Clearly you're right. There is no amount of idiot-proofing that can't be overcome by a determined idiot, so having tools/languages/methodologies that help prevent errors is just a horrible idea. Type-safety, enumerations, compiled code, etc. are really bad ideas that add nothing to the quality of our code. We should all be using scripting languages programmed on punch cards so our code will be the bestest evar. Avoidable run-time errors like type mismatches that crash production systems are a good thing --don't you love surprises?
This appears to be more of the 'nanny state' mentality that Microsoft is shoving down our throats.
Sheesh... I was going to moderate a few items in this thread, but I just have to reply to your ignorant excuse to bash M$ --like they invented type-safety.
This is the old case of narrowing the band of opportunity so that the lowest performers can't make the obvious mistakes. When will they realise that they are also stifling the highest performers? Give us some credit folks. We're not all first year out of college.
Really? Technologies that help minimize errors through convention are a bad thing? So if you're in a shop that saves countless hours of time and debugging using a modern ORM like Hibernate, that makes you some sort of slack-jawed moron because "real" programmers do everything in assembly and don't need no stinkin' oversight, static code analysis, testing, or code review, right? Sheesh... Remind me not to hire you to code any systems where human safety is on the line. Most employers --even for inconsequential crap-- would rather have working apps than theoretically pure code; they can buy another rack of servers for what a good developer earns, so in most cases they really don't give a damn about efficient code.
Besides, even if you think type-safety = training wheels, if you've been coding long enough, you'll see idiots and geniuses get slapped by typos and inadvertent mistakes. Only an amateur thinks they're immune to error and that things like type-safety just cramp your style. And real programmers can go around these things off when they need to, but take advantage of lower bug counts the rest of the time.
Sure. Obviously there's a tidy matrix of 1s (dark pixels) and 0s (no ink) behind the mess, but the paper on both ends is an analog device. :)
And considering all the gnarly mangling of the modem, modulating and demodulating the mess over noisy POTS, and the rough translation in the original scan and final lo-fi output spewed out, I just can't think of the end-to-end system as being digital --even if several parts of it are.
Sigh... Yeah, you're right. Until the legal system finds the any key, we're stuck with the anachronistic thing. And I have to keep doing the face-palm maneuver every time some dope e-mails me a document, then insists that a scanned .PDF with my signature isn't acceptable, but a crappy analog copy (at great inconvenience to me) is golden. I hope all those office drones are replaced by real robots soon.
THANKS!
My stupid Droid X crashed hard and needed a factory reset last week. I had no idea the Tricorder had even gone missing.
The problem with communism is that it doesn't scale well. Works fantastically well for a nuclear family --maybe even a whole village or commune. But once a group gets large enough that accountability is obscured, there are too many that shamelessly take (or don't give much) and it all falls apart in a downward spiral of cynicism and demoralization.
Here's my plan:
We have manufacturers quietly replace every fax machine's innards with a scanner that sends 256-bit encrypted e-mails to other "fax machines" while letting techno-Luddites continue struggling to punch in the right numbers and standing around like idiots waiting for a wasted piece of paper that says something was sent. So nobody gets wise, we can degrade the image quality when their "fax machine" prints out the message at the other end. We could even keep the things plugged into POTS if the idiot users think that's an important part of the magic.
Everyone who works in a medical office is required to be educated about and sign a HIPAA compliance form. Every employee is liable.
I'm sure most places try to keep faxes secure, but how do you figure a big, unguarded pile of paper is more secure than e-mails that require a login? I can't even count all the places I've worked where faxes with SSNs and other dangerous information are just left scattered about until someone threw them away.
If someone is willing to go through enough trouble to intercept a company's email, they'll happily do the same for their fax line.
Phone lines are more difficult to break into than a protocol that is passed over the public internet. At least for now.
Hmmm... I agree with the previous poster. I knew people in high school that did their own wire taps. Intercepting e-mail might be easier and more anonymous, but in either case, if someone thinks the fax or e-mail is valuable enough, interception isn't that hard. Now tell me how one encrypts a fax... Maybe you could encode your ugly analog message in scrambled hex or binary? Use a really big font to compensate for the extremely degraded image on the other end.
Well... It all depends on your frame of reference I suppose. If you consider the blink of the cosmic eye we're been here, it's a supernova-like population explosion.
But, if you only consider modern times (and believe in projections), it looks like we're slowing down.
The fascinating part is how our closed system had a much lower point of equilibrium for the human population for millennia --and then we changed the system.
I say "wallpaper". Really, how awesome would that be!
Exactly. How about an update to the somewhat cheesy 1970s panorama scenes that took up a whole wall, but this time it's reincarnated as a super high-def. video feed in 360 degrees?
No need to ever go outside again.
I'll be brief, although it's hard to not attack the ridiculous notion that Democrats are somehow to blame for poverty with mountains of evidence to the contrary.
The game here in "The Land of Opportunity" is getting increasingly rigged, like some ugly game of king of the hill, where the middle class is increasingly being squeezed into (relative) poverty --and it ain't because of people excited to get on welfare. Payments have been dropping and the percentage of Americans dependent on welfare has also dropped. It's convenient to think that a bunch of lazy poor folk are stealing your money through a program the constitutes the tiniest sliver of our GPD, but that's nothing more than a conservative fairy tale to rationalize their lack of compassion.
Take a look at this graph of changes in the Gini coefficient over the last 60 years in various countries. The conservative, anti-government contingent are absolutely right about people suffering a heinous redistribution of wealth, they just have the mechanics completely reversed.