Having worked in IT for 9 years at a college, this kind of thing is a nightmare.
One application we used for tracking students allowed a student to enter their SSN, which would then be replaced by their benign student ID and display their name. Even something like this is pretty dangerous.
If I know that most students at the college are going to be residents of a certain, I can limit myself to searching just for SSNs assigned to that state by looking at the first three numbers. The next two numbers are the assignment group, which will vary based on when the SSN was assigned.
But, being from the same area, it was even easier than that. I could assume that there is a good chance that someone might be born in my state and assigned an SSN in the same group as me, which means I only have to guess the last four numbers, starting with the same five numbers that I have. (As a DBA, I had access to all of this information anyways.)
Starting with my SSN, I began incrementing by one. It only took six increments to reach another persons SSN. By using this application, I could type in my variations of a known SSN and find new SSNs, along with the name of the person who belongs to that SSN.
Out of curiosity, I did a 'group by' query on the first five numbers of all the SSNs in the database (roughly 60k SSNs) and found that in the most populous grouping, you would have a 1 in 20 chance of getting an SSN just by guessing the last four numbers of this group.
Bioshock (PS3), which came out last October, is new on Amazon.com for $27.99 with free shipping, while the best price right now through Amazon marketplace for a used copy is $23.19 + $4 shipping. If companies lowered their prices, people would buy the games new. I've never paid $60 for a game, and I never plan to. I'll buy used or wait for a price drop or use Gamefly, if I have the free time to make it worthwhile.
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.
I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others.
You nailed it. The important thing isn't how silly you might look, but whether or not the student gets the concepts.
One of my students in my intro class where I've used this book (briefly) is failing her other classes and has a learning disability, but is getting an 'A' in my class and is excited about working on extra credit (some data modeling problem solving) that she doesn't even need.
Today, in class, I talked about how the intro skills they have learned in Access scale up, and passed around Oracle books on SQL, PL/SQL, OAS Reports, and was pleasantly surprised when the students actually spent time looking through the books. (The books were Oracle only because that is my background and graduate focus.)
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute this quotation to Voltaire."
Re:down for maintenance
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you look at DSL Reports over time, Packet 8 has experienced a lot of growing pains. If you go far enough back though, you actually see some of the Packet 8 staff responding to reviews, which was pretty cool.
Packet8 doesn't have the features of Vonage (like I would love to have email notification of voicemail), but at 20$ a month, it felt great to tell Verizon off one last time.
Funny thing though, you start to develop a paranoia regarding the quality. A lot of my friends have called me from their cell phones, and I think my phone is freaking when they are actually walking under a bridge or going down to their basement.
I live in a rural area. Packet 8 (unlike Vonage) offered me a local VoIP number, but I think the numbers they have are either a new exchange or an exchange that is normally used by cell phone numbers. So... I don't think I have anything to worry about on that account. Isn't it illegal to knowingly spam cell phone exchanges?
One thing these companies need to do is add a blocking feature to the DTA boxes so you can block certain incoming phone numbers. I don't see how it could be that difficult. It would be nice if I could filter my phone calls as easily as I can with my gmail account.
Maybe in the future, we will see custom third party firmware like we do with SVEASOFT and Linksys routers, offering features that the original manufacturers do not.
Spyware, Spam, Viruses... It's just different ways of doing the same thing... stealing someone else's resources and time.
Which is why this is such a great hypocricy on that Lycos, that a company with a spyware history, is trying to fight spam. Next we will see Real Media making a parasite cleaner and SCO lobbying for IP reform.
If you have mod points, please mod the parent post up.
Lycos is only doing this to get mentioned in the media.
Lycos is a known spyware distributer/collaborator. If I had to choose between the lesser of two evils (weevils?), I would much rather have spammers than spyware. At least with Spam, I can use Spambayes.
My department has three people who support 800+ computers that need to run MSIE. Spam is a pest and an inconvenience. Spyware disables the machine and causes a lot of work when a machine must be returned to working order. There isn't one product that finds 100% of this crap, and our users aren't deemed smart enough by management to be able to use two browsers, so we are stuck with MSIE being the only browser on these machines.
However, the challenge of achieving both efficient lift and thrust with flapping wings was far greater than simply using the wings for lift and providing thrust with a separate propulsor.
Isn't current technology all about brute forcing things? Efficiency takes time. It's easier to just throw power and money at a problem. Like the excellent example I saw somewhere about how Arches are more efficient, but most of our construction (except for bridges and the like) are based on stronger materials and shapes that aren't as likely to give us headaches.
Their straw-man seems to be the idea (which noone, of course, has claimed) that Linux somehow was created in a vacuum.
By the same token, SDI was not created in a vacuum... and while the proposed outcome may have seemed like quackery, do we have any regrets about the real outcome (ie., the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union [1])?
Why mock someone for spreading FUD, and then in the same breath, only become guilty of it yourself?
(I refering of course to the poster of the article.)
Or are they just a lot of ten year old boys you are hearing over Voice Comm?
I never felt so old as when they added voice communication to counter-strike and I realized half the people who were kicking my ass hadn't hit puberty yet./sigh
Let me get this straight: that episode featured a main plot of the dog getting sick and a subplot of Capt. Archer fantasizing about his super sexy vulcan science officer and you wasted your prayers on the fuckin' dog?!?
I dunno... maybe I figured if we got rid of the damn mutt, the rest of his problems would just sort themselves out.
Anyways... last thing you'd want would be a vulcan girlfriend... seven years? hell.. married people have sex more often than that.
Andromeda First season was cool and funny... but as soon as they changed the title theme from cool riffs done by the guy from Rush to the "Hercules in Space" orchestral wailings... everything else seemed to begin to suck as well. My understanding was that some of the good creative talent was kicked out. Can't watch it anymore.
Enterprise The captain strikes me as whiny... I prayed for the dog to die in one of the more recent episodes. But a lot of the episodes have a cool spooky atmosphere.
Odyssey 5 The science sucks... but the dialog is great. "Praise Jesus... and fuck you."
Firefly Great funny dialog... poor science... (Still using gunpowder, but somehow they have excellent gravity generators and inertial dampeners)... except... I do like how every explosion in space is not accompanied by these nifty sound effects that noone should hear. I also like how the captain has no objection to just outright killing defenseless bad guys.
Farscape I loved the show... but it seemed to go down hill in the fourth. The end of the second season was fantastic. I liked how they never tried to explain the science... and especially how the aliens looked more like the guys in the mos eisley cantina that stupid trek aliens with head and nose ridges.
I did love Farscape. The story arcs in the first three seasons were excellent, but the this season hadn't seemed to be going anywhere until the last episode that was aired.
I'm really not surprised. I don't think the show was at all ratings friendly. It was too difficult to catch reruns.. too difficult to pick up the gist of the story mid-season. Thanks to ADV, way too freaking expensive to buy the dvds. If you didn't watch every week, you never knew where those new characters came from.
Re:Funny, I just happened to read Tolkien's view o
on
The Hype of the Rings
·
· Score: 1
I would say he had made that choice, with cash.
"There wasn't much he [Christopher Tolkein] could do, however, to stop the filming of the new version, since J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film rights in 1968, apparently to pay an overdue tax bill. Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz (The English Patient) picked up the rights and, after a pitstop at Miramax, New Line snapped up the rights and, in an unprecedented deal, signed Jackson to shoot the entire $270 million trilogy concurrently in New Zealand. "
You should be ashamed of yourself for having so little concern about your own privacy. Since you have no problem allowing Verant to search your hard drive remotely, lets see how far you will go...
It's a game and it's the least of my worries as far as violating my privacy.
I'm more worried about my bank, college, prior places of employment, electric company, gas company, ad naseum... and the people who work there having access to my Social Security number and other personal information.
First of all they were scanning or talking about scanning my computer's memory, and I don't really care if they know that I am running ActiveSync or Norton's Antivirus.
Would you allow them to search through a record of your recent purchases (looking for hacking-related products)?
Amazon.com already does this to me. I get email from them when an author has published something new, and I have purchased a book of their's in the past. My recommended books get screwed up because I've bought presents for my nieces and nephews.
As for the rest of what you said....
Would you agree to allow Verant to send people to search your computer in person?
Would you allow them to search your home for books and tools related to reverse engineering?
The scary thing is not that I would let them into my house, but that I may not have a choice. If they could convince a judge that I was breaking a law and come in with federal agents and warrant, how do I stop that? If there is something on my computer that I don't want someone else to see, I encrypt it. I doubt that would stop the government tho, especially after reading what's-his-names-book on the NSA.
Silly, you say, but once you start down that path, you can say goodbye to any privacy you think you have.
Absolutely!... but we've already started down that path, and I've already said goodbye to my privacy after some of the horrible things i've seen with my own eyes concerning other peoples credit card numbers and social security numbers.
All we can do is hope democracy keeps it all in check.
I play on a production server and I misread/misunderstood the posts on the verant board.
However, unless I am mistaken this time around, there are only a couple of hundred people playing on the test server at a time and it is with the understand that your character can be deleted at anytime, or other nasty things may happen.
The Verant Management has maintained a very open line of communication with their customer base,
Really? They had an "April Fools" joke recently which cause an outrage from its customers, mainly because they didn't TRUST Verant that it was a joke.
The april fools joke was another case where people were hacking the software.
There is an Everquest server called Test where they make all of there modifications before patching the on the live servers. From what I understand, on this server, they have the spells for next ten levels of the game that will be available once they release the expansion pack called Ruins of Kunark.
The JOKE was that they nerfed (massively weakened) a major spell for every casting class. Now the spells they nerfed were not actually available in the game. The only way you would know they had changed was if you were hacking the program files.
The average player didn't know (or care) about the joke until it was well over with.
I think you have overheard generalizations from the discussion boards and made a hasty uninformed decision. The Verant Everquest boards lack moderation, unlike Slashdot - Thank god!, and are filled with people trolling and being jackasses.
Slashdot Mirror
Am I missing something?
The CATO article you linked and the posted article linked above are written by the same person. Look at the authors.
Who knows... maybe the guy doesn't get around to reading his own stuff.
Having worked in IT for 9 years at a college, this kind of thing is a nightmare.
One application we used for tracking students allowed a student to enter their SSN, which would then be replaced by their benign student ID and display their name. Even something like this is pretty dangerous.
If I know that most students at the college are going to be residents of a certain, I can limit myself to searching just for SSNs assigned to that state by looking at the first three numbers. The next two numbers are the assignment group, which will vary based on when the SSN was assigned.
But, being from the same area, it was even easier than that. I could assume that there is a good chance that someone might be born in my state and assigned an SSN in the same group as me, which means I only have to guess the last four numbers, starting with the same five numbers that I have. (As a DBA, I had access to all of this information anyways.)
Starting with my SSN, I began incrementing by one. It only took six increments to reach another persons SSN. By using this application, I could type in my variations of a known SSN and find new SSNs, along with the name of the person who belongs to that SSN.
Out of curiosity, I did a 'group by' query on the first five numbers of all the SSNs in the database (roughly 60k SSNs) and found that in the most populous grouping, you would have a 1 in 20 chance of getting an SSN just by guessing the last four numbers of this group.
Exactly.
Bioshock (PS3), which came out last October, is new on Amazon.com for $27.99 with free shipping, while the best price right now through Amazon marketplace for a used copy is $23.19 + $4 shipping. If companies lowered their prices, people would buy the games new. I've never paid $60 for a game, and I never plan to. I'll buy used or wait for a price drop or use Gamefly, if I have the free time to make it worthwhile.
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.
I guess this is one of those cases where you dilute the market with a whole bunch of different ways to get concepts out to people and some stick better than others.
You nailed it. The important thing isn't how silly you might look, but whether or not the student gets the concepts.
One of my students in my intro class where I've used this book (briefly) is failing her other classes and has a learning disability, but is getting an 'A' in my class and is excited about working on extra credit (some data modeling problem solving) that she doesn't even need.
Today, in class, I talked about how the intro skills they have learned in Access scale up, and passed around Oracle books on SQL, PL/SQL, OAS Reports, and was pleasantly surprised when the students actually spent time looking through the books. (The books were Oracle only because that is my background and graduate focus.)
No, see the sample below. I own the book and use a couple of pages in my intro to database class as a review.
http://www.tinker.tv/download/databases_ch2.pdf
This is for NYS:
How Do I Fire an Incompetent Teacher? (Flowchart)
As has been said on Usenet...
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to misattribute this quotation to Voltaire."
http://www.dslreports.com/comment/2413/47493
Packet8 doesn't have the features of Vonage (like I would love to have email notification of voicemail), but at 20$ a month, it felt great to tell Verizon off one last time.
Funny thing though, you start to develop a paranoia regarding the quality. A lot of my friends have called me from their cell phones, and I think my phone is freaking when they are actually walking under a bridge or going down to their basement.
I live in a rural area. Packet 8 (unlike Vonage) offered me a local VoIP number, but I think the numbers they have are either a new exchange or an exchange that is normally used by cell phone numbers. So... I don't think I have anything to worry about on that account. Isn't it illegal to knowingly spam cell phone exchanges?
One thing these companies need to do is add a blocking feature to the DTA boxes so you can block certain incoming phone numbers. I don't see how it could be that difficult. It would be nice if I could filter my phone calls as easily as I can with my gmail account.
Maybe in the future, we will see custom third party firmware like we do with SVEASOFT and Linksys routers, offering features that the original manufacturers do not.
Exactly.
Spyware, Spam, Viruses... It's just different ways of doing the same thing... stealing someone else's resources and time.
Which is why this is such a great hypocricy on that Lycos, that a company with a spyware history, is trying to fight spam. Next we will see Real Media making a parasite cleaner and SCO lobbying for IP reform.
Bob? Bob? Is that you?
If you have mod points, please mod the parent post up.
Lycos is only doing this to get mentioned in the media.
Lycos is a known spyware distributer/collaborator. If I had to choose between the lesser of two evils (weevils?), I would much rather have spammers than spyware. At least with Spam, I can use Spambayes.
My department has three people who support 800+ computers that need to run MSIE. Spam is a pest and an inconvenience. Spyware disables the machine and causes a lot of work when a machine must be returned to working order. There isn't one product that finds 100% of this crap, and our users aren't deemed smart enough by management to be able to use two browsers, so we are stuck with MSIE being the only browser on these machines.
However, the challenge of achieving both efficient lift and thrust with flapping wings was far greater than simply using the wings for lift and providing thrust with a separate propulsor.
Isn't current technology all about brute forcing things? Efficiency takes time. It's easier to just throw power and money at a problem. Like the excellent example I saw somewhere about how Arches are more efficient, but most of our construction (except for bridges and the like) are based on stronger materials and shapes that aren't as likely to give us headaches.
My Bad...
By the same token, SDI was not created in a vacuum... and while the proposed outcome may have seemed like quackery, do we have any regrets about the real outcome (ie., the eventual downfall of the Soviet Union [1])?
Why mock someone for spreading FUD, and then in the same breath, only become guilty of it yourself?
(I refering of course to the poster of the article.)
Do you know they are girls for a fact?
/sigh
Or are they just a lot of ten year old boys you are hearing over Voice Comm?
I never felt so old as when they added voice communication to counter-strike and I realized half the people who were kicking my ass hadn't hit puberty yet.
I dunno... maybe I figured if we got rid of the damn mutt, the rest of his problems would just sort themselves out.
Anyways... last thing you'd want would be a vulcan girlfriend... seven years? hell.. married people have sex more often than that.
First season was cool and funny... but as soon as they changed the title theme from cool riffs done by the guy from Rush to the "Hercules in Space" orchestral wailings... everything else seemed to begin to suck as well. My understanding was that some of the good creative talent was kicked out. Can't watch it anymore.
Enterprise
The captain strikes me as whiny... I prayed for the dog to die in one of the more recent episodes. But a lot of the episodes have a cool spooky atmosphere.
Odyssey 5
The science sucks... but the dialog is great. "Praise Jesus... and fuck you."
Firefly ... except... I do like how every explosion in space is not accompanied by these nifty sound effects that noone should hear. I also like how the captain has no objection to just outright killing defenseless bad guys.
Great funny dialog... poor science... (Still using gunpowder, but somehow they have excellent gravity generators and inertial dampeners)
Farscape
I loved the show... but it seemed to go down hill in the fourth. The end of the second season was fantastic. I liked how they never tried to explain the science... and especially how the aliens looked more like the guys in the mos eisley cantina that stupid trek aliens with head and nose ridges.
I did love Farscape. The story arcs in the first three seasons were excellent, but the this season hadn't seemed to be going anywhere until the last episode that was aired.
I'm really not surprised. I don't think the show was at all ratings friendly. It was too difficult to catch reruns.. too difficult to pick up the gist of the story mid-season. Thanks to ADV, way too freaking expensive to buy the dvds. If you didn't watch every week, you never knew where those new characters came from.
I would say he had made that choice, with cash.
e ns_ring_in_family_feud_1.html
"There wasn't much he [Christopher Tolkein] could do, however, to stop the filming of the new version, since J.R.R. Tolkien sold the film rights in 1968, apparently to pay an overdue tax bill. Oscar-winning producer Saul Zaentz (The English Patient) picked up the rights and, after a pitstop at Miramax, New Line snapped up the rights and, in an unprecedented deal, signed Jackson to shoot the entire $270 million trilogy concurrently in New Zealand. "
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20011203/en/tolki
My favorite example of why you should design for what people do, not what you want them to do.
http://www.baddesigns.com/sidewalk.html
I'm more worried about my bank, college, prior places of employment, electric company, gas company, ad naseum ... and the people who work there having access to my Social Security number and other personal information.
First of all they were scanning or talking about scanning my computer's memory, and I don't really care if they know that I am running ActiveSync or Norton's Antivirus.
Amazon.com already does this to me. I get email from them when an author has published something new, and I have purchased a book of their's in the past. My recommended books get screwed up because I've bought presents for my nieces and nephews.As for the rest of what you said....
The scary thing is not that I would let them into my house, but that I may not have a choice. If they could convince a judge that I was breaking a law and come in with federal agents and warrant, how do I stop that? If there is something on my computer that I don't want someone else to see, I encrypt it. I doubt that would stop the government tho, especially after reading what's-his-names-book on the NSA. Absolutely!All we can do is hope democracy keeps it all in check.
Ok, got me there.
I play on a production server and I misread/misunderstood the posts on the verant board.
However, unless I am mistaken this time around, there are only a couple of hundred people playing on the test server at a time and it is with the understand that your character can be deleted at anytime, or other nasty things may happen.
Thanks for correcting me on that =)
There is an Everquest server called Test where they make all of there modifications before patching the on the live servers. From what I understand, on this server, they have the spells for next ten levels of the game that will be available once they release the expansion pack called Ruins of Kunark.
The JOKE was that they nerfed (massively weakened) a major spell for every casting class. Now the spells they nerfed were not actually available in the game. The only way you would know they had changed was if you were hacking the program files.
The average player didn't know (or care) about the joke until it was well over with.
I think you have overheard generalizations from the discussion boards and made a hasty uninformed decision. The Verant Everquest boards lack moderation, unlike Slashdot - Thank god!, and are filled with people trolling and being jackasses.