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User: TubeSteak

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  1. Re:Amazon better watch their backs. on Amazon Will Be Off All Oracle Databases By End of 2019, Says AWS Chief · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Oracle can't let this work without a hitch.

    Last year, Oracle taunted Amazon into abandoning Oracle.

    10/2/2017: Oracle's Ellison: Amazon & SAP Use Our Database Because We're Better
    https://www.lightreading.com/e...

    I'd say that two years is pretty quick for replacing and re-engineering a non-trivial chunk of your infrastructure.

  2. Re:Only Democrat/Progressive Misinformation Allowe on Can Facebook Keep Large-Scale Misinformation From the Free World? (sfgate.com) · · Score: 1

    This post is a perfect example of the garbage that the right-wing noise machine loves to produce and amplify. It's aggressive, dishonest, makes far reaching conclusions with no factual basis, feeds a persecution complex, and treats the left as some kind of boogeyman responsible for all that is bad.

    Not only will they control everything you see they will also control everything you can say and do by threatening to cut you off from their increasingly mandatory monopoly for any reason they feel like.

    Projecting is another strong suit of the right-wing machine.

    FFS, the President of the United States just revoked the white house pass of a journalist, supported the action with a doctored video from an Infowars contributor, and threatened to revoke the pass of another journalist.

    officially so you have no right to complain according to liberals....Ahhh America...land of the Free...

    It's not liberals' fault that the right wing immerses itself in conspiracy theories and lies.

    If the right wing would clean up its own house, a cartel of megacorporations wouldn't have to.
    Your victimization is self inflicted.

  3. No relevance to human exposure on Study of Cellphone Risks Finds 'Some Evidence' of Link To Cancer, At Least In Male Rats (nytimes.com) · · Score: 2

    I remember digging into the preliminary draft that's mentioned in TFA. Here are the two highlights:

    NTP conducted the studies in phases, including several phases to determine the correct field strengths that would not raise the animal's body temperature.

    They were exposed for 10-minute on, 10-minute off increments, totaling a little more than nine hours [of radiation over an 18 hour period per day] from before birth through two years of age.

    First they had to figure out the "correct field strength" that wouldn't cook the rodents.

    Then they cycled that just-below-cooking field on and off over the course of 18 hours per day, for two years, over the entire body, beginning (for the rats) in the womb

    AFACT, there's nothing in the published materials that implies a relationship exists between the study and human health..

  4. Re:AI is different, and getting better every year on Machine Learning Confronts the Elephant in the Room (quantamagazine.org) · · Score: 1

    AI vision can do some things that no human can do. Quickly and accurately identify handwritten postcodes on envelopes was an early win.

    The USPS has an office with hundreds of people, staffed 24/7/365 and all they do is decipher pictures the OCR can't figure out.

    If those guys/gals can't fill in the blanks, someone at the sorting facility has to try and decode the address. From there, it goes to the dead letter warehouse.

    The problems that "AI" are intended to solve tend to be so large that, if the algorithm is not hitting 99.999% success, there's still a non-trivial amount of work for humans to do.

  5. Re:Can that really work? on US Health Insurer Premera Blue Cross Accused of Destroying Evidence in Data Breach Lawsuit (zdnet.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The spoliation inference is a negative evidentiary inference that a finder of fact can draw from a party's destruction of a document or thing that is relevant to an ongoing or reasonably foreseeable civil or criminal proceeding: the finder of fact can review all evidence uncovered in as strong a light as possible against the spoliator and in favor of the opposing party.

    E-mail/document retention policies are not a get out of jail free card.

    If the company can "reasonably foreseeable" the documents will be needed, they're obliged to preserved them, lawsuit or not.

    At the bare minimum, a judge will tell the jury to interpret destroyed evidence in the worst possible light for the destroyer.

    In a worst case scenario, depending on your jurisdiction, destroying evidence will spawn a separate civil lawsuit or a criminal prosecution (fines and jail time).

    Destroying evidence means you're stupid or hiding something much worse.

  6. Re:Let me guess... on How Microsoft's Windows Red Team Keeps PCs Safe (wired.com) · · Score: 1

    Microsoft's solution to insecure code was to graft on a layer of insecure security code.
    They tried. But the hackers are trying harder and winning.
    Again and again and again and again.

  7. I wonder why banks would rely on a crypto currency like Ripple, of which 60% is held by the company and a further 20% is held by the founders.

    The value of [coin] is completely arbitrary and doesn't matter.

    If SWIFT wants to grab a million Bitcoin and declare that only those million Bitcoins will be part of their network, then who cares what "the market" thinks Bitcoin is worth? "The market" will treat those coins as if they're dead. Meanwhile SWIFT says 1 Satoshi = 1 US Dollar, making a SWIFTBitcoin worth 100 million USD and they're off to the races.

    Except for the small problem that Bitcoin's throughput sucks, which is why various alternatives like Ripple have popped up. Ripple 'only' divides into 1 million drops, but the end result is still a finely grained transaction ledger.

    Once you take away all the arbitrage pump and dump stock market hodling bullshit, it's easy enough to see why you might rely on a company like Ripple. All that matters is for the platform to be fast, stable, and have at least four nines of uptime.

  8. Re:Insurance on Ask Slashdot: What Are Ways To Get Companies To Actually Focus On Security? · · Score: 1

    Your cynical take on the insurance industry kind of makes me want to say "fuck it, hack all of the companies, all of the time, and let God sort it out."

  9. Re:Insurance on Ask Slashdot: What Are Ways To Get Companies To Actually Focus On Security? · · Score: 4, Informative

    The insurance actuaries can insist on audits

    Target was certified as PCI compliant a few months before they were hacked.
    They only problem is that the PCI audit would never have caught the memory scrapers that were used to infect Target's point of sale systems.

    Most of the major credit card hacks in recent memory involve companies who've been certified as PCI compliant.

    I'm not against audits, but it should be nakedly obvious that the audits we have are not the audits we need.

    All of which is to say that having insurance companies cook up security standards doesn't mean anything will become more secure. /The PCI standard has a section on vulnerability scanning and penetration testing. It should be considered the bare minimum, not a reasonable security goal.

  10. Money on Ask Slashdot: Is Deliberately Misleading People On the Internet Free Speech? · · Score: 5, Informative

    Once money is involved, it's no longer free speech, it becomes "commercial speech."

    Commercial speech operates under a different set of rules, with significantly more restrictions.
    "False or misleading" commercial speech is explicitly against the law.

    There is some wiggle room for "puffery" (world's best hamburger.)
    There is also some wiggle room as long as warnings or disclaimers are included.

    Some warnings and disclaimers are what we'd call "compelled speech," because the government requires businesses to say them.
    Compelled speech is pretty much the opposite of free speech.

  11. What I think he's really talking about, when you read between the lines, is cross-marketing.

    What he's talking about, when you read between the lines, is a dystopian surveillance state.

    Even if it's all opt-in, the mere infrastructure to so intimately intertwine the online with the offline is inherently dangerous.

    Not just because there is a risk of official abuse, but also because it'd be a big shiny target for hackers.

    Even the companies who should be taking the most precautions still end up making thoughtless choices like tying in-air entertainment networks into avionics systems or in-car entertainment systems directly connected to the CANBUS.

    It's not that this can't be done securely, it's just that it's nearly impossible that it would be.

  12. Re:Facebook kills clickbait with one simple tweak. on Facebook Might Finally Kill Clickbait With New Algorithm Tweaks (thenextweb.com) · · Score: 1

    Clickbait headlines are so formulaic... it almost seems like the first step in the clickbait war would be to nuke anything with one of those formulaic headlines.

    I'm not sure that clickbait is inherently bad, so perhaps evolutionary pressure to create a better headline would not be bad either.

  13. Re:Markdown please on The State of Slashdot: Https, Poll Changes, Auto-Refresh, Videos, and More · · Score: 1

    1. Faster/easier to type than verbose and pedantic HTML. (no more typing
      after and between lines!)

    Uh.... To the left of the Preview button is a drop down menu.

    If you dig around in your user preferences, you can set Plain Old Text as the default.
    It automatically recognizes line breaks and will put html tags around any raw link you post (see below).

    Speaking of preferences
    I think I'm going to hang onto the [Fuck Beta] sig until the "classic" SlashCode is unfucked.
    With javascript disabled, all these links show the exact same Slashboxes pref page

    https://slashdot.org/prefs/
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/d1
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/d2_...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/thr...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/tim...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/use...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/pas...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/mes...
    https://slashdot.org/prefs/123...

    And if our overlords are taking requests, please unfutz whatever it was that the previous slave masters did to the links.
    Whoever thought that links posted under Plain Old Text should be truncated... they were out of their minds
    It only serves to dirty up the conversation. I chose POT so I wouldn't have to type out any markup in my posts.

    /Heck, consider defaulting everyone to Plain Old Text
    //It's like half of /. forgot it exists as an option

  14. Re:Easy Hack on Hackers Leak DHS Staff Directory, Claim FBI Is Next (csoonline.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If you gather together enough unclassified information, you can frequently distill from it facts that are considered classified.

    Like tracking the tail numbers of international flights to uncover the CIA's rendition program.

    Not to mention that a staff directory is exactly what you want for spearfishing campaigns.

  15. Re:Missed the Boat? on Ask Slashdot: Time To Get Into Crypto-currency? If So, Which? · · Score: 1

    associated by who?

    Pretty much everyone, including law enforcement.
    The media loves to link Bitcoin to "the dark web" and terrorism.

    invested hundreds of millions of dollars into blockchain technology.

    Blockchain technology is not virtual currency, it's merely a distributed/verified ledger of transactions.

    Lots of companies want to get involved with using the blockchain concept, not all of them want to get involved with using Bitcoin.

    Even SWIFT, the 800 lb gorilla of financial transactions, is trying to figure out how to revamp their business to use blockchain technology as the foundation. Likely a private blockchain which they can control.

  16. Re:Let vs Lets on The Pirate Bay Now Let You Stream Movies and TV, Not Just Download · · Score: 1

    You blame timothy
    I blame our corporate overlords

    I also blame whatever CMS /. currently uses for not having spelling and grammar checks.
    Firefox/IE/Edge/Chrome does a better job than whatever /. is using.

  17. Re:I can finally on After More Than a Decade, MSN Chat Authentication Is Documented (goo.gl) · · Score: 1

    I'd be interested in how you have GTalk working on Trillian.

    For the life of me I can't convince it to connect.

  18. Re:Why don't they have a sat link? on Undersea Cable Break Disrupts Life In Northern Mariana Islands · · Score: 2

    A sat link isn't a viable alternative for providing data access to a government, much less an entire country.

    TFA mentions the microwave backup being down, because commercial microwave links actually can provide significant levels of bandwidth.
    The only real limit is line of sight and how much you want to spend.

    And as always: Two is one and one is none.
    There's a reason why NASA uses triple redundancy when they want something to never fail.

  19. Re:FOIA isn't meant to support a business model. on Making FOIA-Requested Data Public: Too Much Transparency For Journalists? · · Score: 1

    And waste more taxpayer money forcing a public employee to go through all the work again?

    I can't recall the name, but there's an organization that spends its free time re-requesting FOIA'ed documents just to see what is or isn't redacted in subsequent releases.

    It's basically a social engineering approach to un-redacting documents.

  20. Re:Cry More on Making FOIA-Requested Data Public: Too Much Transparency For Journalists? · · Score: 1

    but I found these two quotes to be interesting:

    Heh. The problem is not the fees.
    The problem is that journalists and activists overwhelmingly end up having to sue Federal (and State) Agencies in order to get a response or responsive documents to their FOIA requests.

    This is despite the fact that Federal Agencies are required by law to respond to FOIA requests within 30(?) days.

    "Even when a journalist acts with the utmost diligence in filing a FOIA request and pursuing his or her rights in court, agency feet-dragging can frustrate a journalist's attempt to obtain records at the time when they are needed most," [Jason "FOIA Terrorist" Leopold] wrote [in his written testimony before Congress].

    "Investigative journalists should be spending their time and resources investigating, not litigating," he added. "Unfortunately, some agencies refuse to conduct adequate searches and fail to properly apply FOIA's exemption provisions until a lawsuit has been filed."

    It can take years of litigation to get documents out of Federal Agencies.
    Years. Of paying lawyers.
    And then their scoop is gone.

    I see the merits of arguments in favor of "upload immediately" (which IMO should be the default position) and "give the journalists a chance."
    I think this trial run will expose the lie in any unsupported assertions being made by journalists arguing their position.

  21. Re:I believe it... on Adblock Plus Reduces University's Network Traffic By 25 Percent · · Score: 1

    Students were again instructed to mimic surfing to a designated basket of URLs (Table I) as they might perform research for a paper, casual surfing (news). They were required to spend at least 5 - 15 minutes on each site.

    Table 1: Basket of URLs Visited
    youtube.com
    bild.de
    gamestar.de
    cnn.com
    shopping.com
    bloomberg.com
    spiegel.de
    ebay.com
    nytimes.com
    mashable.com
    yahoo.com
    huffingtonpost.com
    digg.com
    washingtonpost.com
    reddit.com
    abcnews.go.com
    buzzfeed.com
    cbs.com
    yelp.com
    espn.com
    msn.com
    dailymail.co.uk
    skysports.com
    imgur.com
    imdb.com
    techcrunch.com
    alibaba.com
    reuters.com
    cnet.com
    thesun.co.uk
    stackoverflow.com
    bbc.com

    Phase II of the testing was conducted from March 15, 2015 to May 1, 2015 with 103 students participating. Phase II revealed some interesting results. For the purposes of analysis, we selected two computers with the most web traffic, one with Adblock Plus (Computer Y) and one without any ad-blocking technology (Computer S).

    That's an interesting test methodology and a highly questionable way to cherry pick analyze 2 weeks worth of data.

  22. Re:Links to the actual study on Study: Major ISPs Slowing Traffic Across the US · · Score: 2

    What I don't understand is why people assume congestion is intentional throttling by ISPs for them to profit later with imagined fast lanes.

    Assume? The ISPs have been fighting (a losing battle) for a legal structure that will allow them to do it.
    Hell, they're even telling us that is exactly their plan.

    FTFA:

    In Atlanta, for example, Comcast provided hourly median download speeds over a CDN called GTT of 21.4 megabits per second at 7pm throughout the month of May. AT&T provided speeds over the same network of â... of a megabit per second. When a network sends more than twice the traffic it receives, that network is required by AT&T to pay for the privilege. When quizzed about slow speeds on GTT, AT&T told Ars Technica earlier this year that it wouldnâ(TM)t upgrade capacity to a CDN that saw that much outgoing traffic until it saw some money from that network (as distinct from the money it sees from consumers).

  23. Connected? on Windows 10 Will Be Free To Users Who Test It · · Score: 1

    build and connected with the [Microsoft account] you used to register, you will receive the Windows 10 final release build and remain activated.

    Is this like Windows 8 where it nags you to sign in with a @msn or @hotmail account?
    Because I'm very much uninterested in having Microsoft follow along with my daily activities.

  24. Re:Trade authority on Trade Bill Fails In the House · · Score: 1

    It is important to realize here that this does not mean that the bills would be automatically passed, rather that congress either has to say "yes" or "no," they can't add pork to the bill (like they tried on this one).

    They also can't amend it to remove super shitty clauses that were negotiated in secret over a period of years.

  25. Re:So, how did ... on Missing Files Blamed For Deadly A400M Crash · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A jet engine that fails by disintegration has a high chance of slicing other airplane parts with ripped off fan blades.

    It's actually exceedingly rare for there to be an uncontained failure.

    That engine shroud is intended to handle catastrophic failures at full throttle.
    This video is a test of the Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine that went into the Airbus A380. The test starts ~3:25 in.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j973645y5AA

    Then again, this is the same engine after an oil leak led to an internal engine fire
    https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/2891294/vh-oqa-fig7.jpg
    https://www.atsb.gov.au/media/4173628/ao-2010-089_vh-oqa.jpg

    The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) found that a number of oil feed stub pipes within the High Pressure / Intermediate pressure (HP/IP) hub assembly were manufactured with thin wall sections that did not conform to the design specifications. These non-conforming pipes were fitted to Trent 900 engines, including the No. 2 engine on VH-OQA. The thin wall section significantly reduced the life of the oil feed stub pipe on the No. 2 engine so that a fatigue crack developed, ultimately releasing oil during the flight that resulted in an internal oil fire. That fire led to the separation of the intermediate pressure turbine disc from the drive shaft. The disc accelerated and burst with sufficient force that the engine structure could not contain it, releasing high-energy debris.

    Most of the shroud's strength is focused around the main fan blades instead of the turbine blades that are much deeper in the engine.