Republicans love to champion states' rights vs. the federal government, but then get all upset when you apply their same reasoning to cities' rights vs. states.
528 posts • joined 3 Nov 2007
Republicans love to champion states' rights vs. the federal government, but then get all upset when you apply their same reasoning to cities' rights vs. states.
You're forgetting that for a large percentage of the US, "another vendor" doesn't exist. I've lived in places where Comcast was the ISP; there was no choice. If ISPs decided to be evil, most people would put up with it, not because they want to, but because the only alternative is to give up internet access entirely.
Also, the notion that 'if one company is bad, they'll be forced to back down when all their customers leave for competitors' doesn't really hold up when you look at historical precedents. For example, commercial airlines started cutting services and adding fees for everything in the late '90s. None of them went bankrupt or had to reverse course over it, because in short order all of the airlines were doing the same thing.
You mean something like the Single Unix Specification/POSIX?
If extended support is ending and there won't be any security patches, what exactly are people supposed to be paying for?
I don't know exactly how AV signatures are generated, but if there's any way to force collisions (like with md5), this could be a very bad idea. I'm sure plenty of people would love to have their malware whitelisted because it's identified as a core Windows component.
Not a bad idea, pretty much naked short selling bitcoins. Promise sales (of something you don't actually have yet) at one price, trigger a market panic, buy cheap and deliver. This would be illegal in a regular stock market, but due to the lack of regulation of bitcoins, you could get away with it. Once.
There's at least some plausible basis for fancy audio cables for analog connections, where noise or interference can affect the output. (Whether or not that effect is noticeable or not is beside the point.) Once things are digitized, though, all the ridiculously expensive materials become irrelevant; as long as it still resolves to the same sequence of 1s and 0s, it doesn't matter how much noise there is in the signal.
Nice to see an eloquent counter to the "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" argument. When it's been brought up, many people dismiss it out of hand, but few have been able to explain why it's a bad argument.
Particularly the parts where they say it would work equally well with Google Voice on Android, or with VoIP phones.
There might be a use for upward directory traversal for specifying files to delete (e.g., "rm ../*.c"), though it would probably be safer to navigate upward first, then call rm. The -r option definitely shouldn't attempt to process . or ..; on the Mac/BSD implementation, it throws an error to even try "rm -r ..", but it will accept "rm -r ../*".
You mean BFHs. BOFHs are actually competent at what they do.
...which isn't necessarily what they want.
Someone takes a work-issued laptop home? That changes the number of licenses on site; notify Microsoft. They bring it back? Notify them again. A device turns off? Arguably, that changes the number of licenses, so notify Microsoft again; same when it turns on. Shouldn't take too long before Microsoft decides to clarify what they mean by "any changes".
There are 8,760 hours in a typical year, give or take a few. By some fairly basic calculations, the Azure uptimes should be 99.5098% and 99.8757%. I don't know how CloudHarmony came up with their numbers, but I wonder if Microsoft 'encouraged' them to use some alternative voodoo calculations so they can claim "99.9% uptime", when any service that is down for more than 8.76 hours clearly fails to meet that standard.
This will result in more neurotic parents freaking out over every slight variation in the kid's vital signs, because they don't have the medical knowledge necessary to understand what it means and what is or is not cause for concern. I wonder if some hospital executive is behind this, trying to see how many more urgent care visits they can get and bill for.
Sure; the Shellshock bug was introduced back in 1989. Once it was reported, though, there was a patch available in 12 days, from someone who maintains Bash for free as a side project. Microsoft pays thousands of people to work on Windows as their full-time job, so not being able to respond to vulnerability reports in a timely manner is embarrassing, to say the least.
The only way security-minded people would accept a version of Skype as 'compromise-free' is if it's completely open-source, and can be reliably compiled to be byte-for-byte identical to any distributed binaries. If we can't inspect the code and prove that there are no backdoors or weak, home-rolled crypto systems, it will still be considered compromised, no matter what anyone at Microsoft says.
If every node delays every packet by a random amount in the same range, all this will do is slow down the network. With enough packets to analyze, the randomness averages out and isn't a significant obstacle. A better approach might be to add delays depending on the speed of the individual connections between nodes; the idea is that all traffic takes the same amount of time to transit through a node, no matter where it came from or where it's going.
Some airlines (such as SouthWest, IIRC) don't assign specific seats in advance, and flight overbooking is routine, so seat conflicts aren't necessarily a problem. You'd still have to deal with getting an ID to match, though.
More likely they deployed as soon as their software was ready.
As Steve Davies mentioned, there will be security vulnerabilities found in the .NET libraries; it's a question of when, not if. The real problem is what to do about them, now that the libraries are bundled with apps.
On the one hand, they could let developers release new versions of their apps every time the libraries are updated. Realistically, most of them won't bother, which creates a large attack vector. I'm sure VXers will find a way to take advantage of it, such as convincing users to install vulnerable apps which can be exploited. (E.g., "you need XX video player to watch this clip of [celebrity]".) Will antivirus programs have to start flagging anything with outdated libraries as potentially harmful? This way lies madness.
The alternative is to push security patches through Windows Update. Except this is supposed to be cross-platform, so you don't necessarily have Windows Update. Maybe solvable with an updater service, but now that also has to be bundled with apps as well, and could lead to issues with multiple instances and version incompatibility if you install several .NET apps. Even with that solved, pushing updates could break signed apps.
Anyone have better ideas on how to not have this turn into a nightmare?
Why would any app need a list of all other (running) apps? Gathering that information and sending it off for 'analysis' definitely counts as spyware. If app functionality depends on the presence of certain other apps, the OS should provide a means to query whether those specific apps are installed, rather than revealing all of them.
I can understand the need for some of the permissions, such as access to the camera and storage so you can post photos. But I'd love to see their explanation for why it needs to be able to modify contact information, read text messages, change network connections, or modify battery information.
Unless Windows 9 (or whatever it's called) goes back to a familiar user interface, I think this will be an increasingly tempting option for enterprises. If they're going to have to retrain users anyway, why pay an arm and a leg for Windows + Office licenses, plus the inevitably required hardware upgrades? In most cases it would be cheaper to hire an on-site migration assistant from a distro provider than to stay with Microsoft.
Trust management problems in 73 percent of the top 1000 apps, but only 36% of the next 9,000 most popular apps. Webkit issues in 77% of the top 1000, but just 6% of the next 9,000. Why are the most-downloaded apps so much more prone to security problems than ones that aren't quite as popular?
Apparently you missed the bit about Google removing access to App Ops late last year; as of 4.4.2, you can't use it without rooting the device, and it's possible they'll remove it entirely in future versions.
Amazon and Ebay aren't actually that unreasonable – they're probably trying to look up your postal/zip code so they can automatically calculate shipping costs. Still, it would be nice to have the option to turn that off, in case you're shopping while not at the location you want things delivered to.
There are multiple grammatically-valid ways of parsing that statement, but I believe he meant "limit (i.e., reduce) [the number of] casualties to non-coms".
I'm not trying to defend the NSA here, but as far as targets go, this one isn't unreasonable. People who are looking into ways to hide their online communication are more likely than the average netizen to be doing something of interest. They might be terrorists or other spies, they might be Chinese pro-democracy activists or Iranian counter-revolutionaries; in any case, the NSA wants to know what they're up to. Of course, there are also plenty of people doing nothing of interest who happen to be conspiracy theorists or just don't like being spied upon, but I don't know of an easy way to tell the difference short of spying on them more.
I don't like the overbroad dragnet espionage, but at least there were some attempts to focus on valid targets. If it had emerged that they were scrutinizing visitors to dailykitten.com, that would raise serious questions about their competence.
'll' isn't actually its own command; it's usually implemented as an alias (to 'ls -la' or similar) in your .fooshrc file. What exactly it does, and if it's present by default at all, depends on your distro.
That would only happen if it were claimed that Paypal is inherently a criminal enterprise, not just that the CEO has committed a crime. Pretty much everything being sold on Silk Road was illegal, which is what justified shutting it down and seizing its assets. Even if the CEO was using Paypal for money laundering or such, most traffic on that site is legitimate, so they'd only seize the related accounts, not everything.
Wouldn't have been Icahn – he only cares about short-term profiteering. Bidding high enough to win all of the blocks of coins means they probably paid above market value, so this is probably someone who expects their value to continue growing long-term.
It could have been done reasonably well. Throw up a notification asking if people are willing to be part of an experiment on social behavior, which may alter their experience of Facebook for the next week. Explain that providing any more details about the experiment would alter people's behavior and invalidate the results, but provide more information about the study and which group people were in after it's over. Not complete information, but enough for reasonably informed consent, and far better than how they provided no information and obtained no consent.
Claiming that there's no battery, but it "stores the energy in a uniquely designed power bank." Sounds a lot like a battery to me. Somehow it's able to contain all the circuitry, the power-harvesting antennas, the Bluetooth antenna, the not-a-battery™, the accelerometer, and possibly other components. It can somehow tell the difference between being shaken intentionally by a person and being shaken incidentally when attached to a dog's collar. They're able to connect a wired diagnostic interface to it, but it's sealed and waterproof.
Supposedly they have working prototypes, but there's no clear demonstration or explanation of how they are used. My guess is that it would use some sort of roundtrip timing signal, which would only give a distance to the tag, and no information on direction. If the phone can track its own location accurately enough, I suppose it could do some sort of automatic triangulation. However, AFAIK, GPS isn't accurate to less than about ten feet at best, which is too fuzzy to use for finding something within a house only a few tens of feet wide.
It doesn't seem like this would be particularly hard to do; you could probably borrow a lot of the code from web browsers, which already do a fairly good job of handling malformatted HTML. There are three main types of XML error that I can see:
Orphaned tags with no matching closing or opening tag, which is what Trevor's problem seems to have been. Easy enough to delete or escape as text.
Transposed tags, such as < a ...>< p >< /a >...< /p >. This would take a bit more work to detect, but the fix is obvious.
Broken tags, particularly missing right angle brackets. Escape the left bracket and recheck the document, as this will probably create an orphaned closing tag.
And furthermore, how secure are the built-in encryption schemes? Both Microsoft and Apple are subject to pressure from the NSA, and there's no way to independently audit their proprietary code.
Sounds like the Nintendo Zapper, which also used a camera-based method of determining where it was pointed, and by far predates the patent filing.
Integer overflow is very different from buffer overflow (and to be pedantic, heartbleed is a buffer overread issue). It can cause mathematical issues (e.g., for a signed byte, 100 + 100 = -56), but it's not easy to turn that into a security flaw.
Using a cloud service isn't an excuse for this. Would you be comfortable putting sensitive data on a server in Beijing? If you don't even know where your data is, you have no idea how well it's secured – and it might as well not be.
NASA uses older chips because they have larger wire traces and other components, which are less vulnerable to interference from high-energy particles. Outside the earth's magnetosphere, solar and cosmic radiation are major problems.
and not one prone to collisions. If they're using something weak like md5, there's a potential denial-of-service attack here: identify a (legitimate) file you want removed, upload a copyrighted image or video carefully padded to have the same hash, issue DMCA notice, and they'll block access to both files.
Trying to make more money for himself while contributing absolutely nothing to the economy.
Maybe not quite as well, but you can hide *nix malware fairly well using similar techniques. Keep most of the payload, scratch files, etc. in an encrypted virtual file system; to anyone else it looks like a regular binary file. The only exposed part would just open the VFS and load the rest of the code; give this a name confusingly similar to a known daemon, and it could easily be overlooked. It may not be as easy as it is on Windows, but don't say it can't be done.
Good analogy; much like the California Gold Rush, the people who really make a profit aren't the miners themselves, but the people selling equipment to them. In this case, it's the companies making Bitcoin mining machines. Low-end models cost $2000 or so, top of the line ones are $10,000 to $20,000. Due to the rapid pace of development, they quickly become outdated and too slow to be competitive, so people need to keep buying new ones.
The problem with a remote killswitch is that it can easily become a nasty denial-of-service attack target. It might be possible to implement it properly, but knowing the state of the industry, it probably wouldn't.
Obviously written by a lawyer: by saying the press report as a whole is inaccurate, they have carefully avoided having to either confirm or deny any of the specifics. They may or may not be having discussions with Lenovo about something. They might be considering a business alliance with a different company. They might be planning to sell the Vaio unit entirely. I suspect they are up to something, but they don't want anyone to know yet.
Degradation doesn't even have to be that obvious. If an ISP delayed every packet to or from Netflix by 1 ms, no one would be able to tell the difference. Add another millisecond of delay every week, and see how it takes for anyone to notice. Netflix videos would still work without any obvious glitches, but they'd be a bit slower and take longer to buffer than the ISP's service. If only streaming data is throttled, and not ICMP traffic (such as pings and traceroutes), it would be almost impossible to prove that anything unusual is happening.
This is essentially an off-the-shelf MIG welder with the gun attached to a 3D-printer style mount. Not a complicated idea, though getting it to work reliably is the tricky part. It's fed with standard spools of welding wire and inert gas; there's no way to throw random scrap metal into it, and you wouldn't want to anyway – the resulting objects would be little better than scrap themselves.
Depending on the wire alloy and shielding gas used, the printed parts could be reasonably strong. It'll never be as good as forged steel, but still more than adequate for most low- and medium-strain applications.
That would be quite fascinating, but I think you mean 'not orbiting anything'. As for "six times the size of Jupiter", is that referring to diameter or mass?
What software testing teams?
Your analogy was unclear at best. By the same logic, shouldn't Flash, Silverlight, Python, and every other interpreted language be turned into an ISO standard as well?