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Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 45

It's a start. The DMCA was a gift to big media corps and a glove wearing rodent. I agree with the EFF on many more things than the ACLU but serious copyright victory will only come from a reset to it's original constitutional purpose providing for advancement of,.. you know, the thing.

Which bears the important question of: why have none of the people who Ghislain Maxwell trafficked children to been arrested?

Submission + - Revolving-door riches: How Obama-Biden officials cashed in during Trump years

Submitted by v3rgEz
v3rgEz writes: For political appointees, being out of office can be good for the pocketbook. Recent analysis from transparency non-profit MuckRock tracked financial disclosures from a range of key appointees in the Obama and Biden administrations and found that people who were appointees in both administrations boosted their assets by an estimated 270% from 2017 to 2021. MuckRock has published the disclosure filings from a range of key officials in both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Submission + - Code bloat has become astronomical (positech.co.uk) 3

Submitted by Artem S. Tashkinov
Artem S. Tashkinov writes: An indie game programmer Cliff Harris shares his concerns about the current state of compute: Code bloat sounds like something that grumpy old programmers in their fifties (like me) make a big deal out of, because we are grumpy and old and also grumpy. I get that. But us being old and grumpy means complaining when code runs 50% slower than it should, or is 50% too big. This is way, way, way beyond that. We are at the point where I honestly do believe that 99.9% of the code in files on your PC is absolutely useless and is never even executed. Its just there, in a suite of 65 DLLS, all because some coder wanted to do something trivial, like save out a bitmap and had *no idea how easy that is*, so they just imported an entire bucketful of bloatware to achieve it.

Like I say, I really should not be annoyed at young programmers doing this. Its what they learned. They have no idea what high performance or constraint-based development is. When you tell them the original game Elite had a sprawling galaxy, space combat in 3D, a career progression system, trading and thousands of planets to explore, and it was 64k, I guess they HEAR you, but they don’t REALLY understand the gap between that, and what we have now.

Computers are so fast these days that you should be able to consider them absolute magic. Everything that you could possibly imagine should happen between the 60ths of a second of the refresh rate. And yet, when I click the volume icon on my microsoft surface laptop (pretty new), there is a VISIBLE DELAY as the machine gradually builds up a new user interface element, and eventually works out what icons to draw and has them pop-in and they go live. It takes ACTUAL TIME. I suspect a half second, which in CPU time, is like a billion fucking years.

Submission + - Are 'Google Programmers' the New 'Next-Next-Finish Programmers'? 3

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Back in 1998, Ellen Ullman wrote in Salon about The dumbing-down of programming: "My programming tools were full of wizards. Little dialog boxes waiting for me to click "Next" and "Next" and "Finish." Click and drag and shazzam! — thousands of lines of working code. No need to get into the "hassle" of remembering the language. No need to even learn it. It is a powerful siren-song lure: You can make your program do all these wonderful and complicated things, and you don't really need to understand."

Twenty-four years later, PVS-Studio has published a translation of Ivan Belokamentsev's cautionary tale of how modernizing his interviewing process from coding on paper to a computer led him to inadvertently hire 'Google Programmers', who dazzled him in interviews and initially on the job, but soon reached a plateau in productivity that puzzled him until he had a gobsmacking realization:

"It was like somebody hit me on the head with a sack of flour. It took me about two days to process it. How is it really possible? The beautiful, well-optimized code they showed me at the first interview was from the Internet. The explosive growth of productivity in the first months was due to the solutions that they found on the Internet. Those answers to user questions after the magic "We'll call you back" from these guys — were found on the Internet. They were coding without understanding the basic constructs. No, they didn't write code — they downloaded it. No, that's not it, either. To download the code is like running "npm i", it's ok. They copy-pasted the code. Without knowing how to write it. That's what angered me – what the...? Well, I understand when you surf the net to figure out how a new technology works. Or when you need to use some exotic feature and not to bloat your head with unnecessary information. But basic things! How can you copy-paste basic things from the Internet?! Do you want to know what they said? "What's the big deal?" I was ready to join the monastery out of grief. I took a break, stopped talking to them, retreated into myself, and started thinking. Of course, I realized that it was not about them. I was the problem. They only followed the laws of their own world. And I was the fool for not seeing these laws — I did not understand them, did not realize their seriousness. The seriousness of superficiality."

Comment Re:1 year old article (Score 1) 49

by ma1wrbu5tr (#62637694) Attached to: You Can Run Doom on a Chip From a $15 Ikea Smart Lamp

I remember when a site would be "slashdotted /.'ed" ( innocuosly. DDoS'ed ) by traffic driven from a slashdot article. Sadly, all the GenXers left and we're left with this. People, or accounts, driven by bots and/or teenagers with 10 phones in front of them that don't bother to check the links in the articles they are citing all while REPOSTING OF OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK. And doing almost none of their own.

Submission + - There Are 24.6 Billion Pairs of Credentials For Sale On Dark Web (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: More than half of the 24.6 billion stolen credential pairs available for sale on the dark web were exposed in the past year, the Digital Shadows Research Team has found. Data recorded from last year reflected a 64 percent increase over 2020's total (Digital Shadows publishes the data every two years), which is a significant slowdown compared to the two years preceding 2020. Between 2018 and the year the pandemic broke out, the number of credentials for sale shot up by 300 percent, the report said. Of the 24.6 billion credentials for sale, 6.7 billion of the pairs are unique, an increase of 1.7 billion over two years. This represents a 34 percent increase from 2020.

With all those credentials available for sale online, account takeover attacks have proliferated as well, the report said. Seventy-five percent of the passwords for sale online were not unique, noted Digital Shadows, which said everyone needs to be wary. Proactive account protection, consistent application of good authentication habits, and awareness of one's organizational digital footprint are necessary to protect against account takeover attacks, the study found. Individuals, the report said, should "use multi-factor authentication, password managers, and complex, unique passwords."

Submission + - Why Paper Receipts are Money at the Drive-Thru (krebsonsecurity.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Check out this handmade sign posted to the front door of a shuttered Jimmy John’s sandwich chain shop in Missouri last week. See if you can tell from the store owner’s message what happened. If you guessed that someone in the Jimmy John’s store might have fallen victim to a Business Email Compromise (BEC) or “CEO fraud” scheme — wherein the scammers impersonate company executives to steal money — you’d be in good company. In fact, that was my initial assumption when a reader in Missouri shared this photo after being turned away from his favorite local sub shop. But a conversation with the store’s owner Steve Saladin brought home the truth that some of the best solutions to fighting fraud are even more low-tech than BEC scams.

Visit any random fast-casual dining establishment and there’s a good chance you’ll see a sign somewhere from the management telling customers their next meal is free if they don’t receive a receipt with their food. While it may not be obvious, such policies are meant to deter employee theft. You can probably guess by now that this particular Jimmy John’s franchise — in Sunset Hills, Mo. — was among those that chose not to incentivize its customers to insist upon receiving receipts. Thanks to that oversight, Saladin was forced to close the store last week and fire the husband-and-wife managers for allegedly embezzling nearly $100,000 in cash payments from customers. Saladin said he began to suspect something was amiss after he agreed to take over the Monday and Tuesday shifts for the couple so they could have two consecutive days off together. He said he noticed that cash receipts at the end of the nights on Mondays and Tuesdays were “substantially larger” than when he wasn’t manning the till, and that this was consistent over several weeks. Then he had friends proceed through his restaurant’s drive-thru, to see if they received receipts for cash payments.

“One of [the managers] would take an order at the drive-thru, and when they determined the customer was going to pay with cash the other would make the customer’s change for it, but then delete the order before the system could complete it and print a receipt,” Saladin said. Saladin said his attorneys and local law enforcement are now involved, and he estimates the former employees stole close to $100,000 in cash receipts. That was on top of the $115,000 in salaries he paid in total each year to both employees. Saladin also has to figure out a way to pay his franchisor a fee for each of the stolen transactions. Now Saladin sees the wisdom of adding the receipt sign, and says all of his stores will soon carry a sign offering $10 in cash to any customers who report not receiving a receipt with their food.

Submission + - Elon Musk sued for $258 billion over alleged Dogecoin pyramid scheme (reuters.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: Elon Musk was sued for $258 billion on Thursday by a Dogecoin investor who accused him of running a pyramid scheme to support the cryptocurrency.

In a complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan, plaintiff Keith Johnson accused Musk, electric car company Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) and space tourism company SpaceX of racketeering for touting Dogecoin and driving up its price, only to then let the price tumble.

"Defendants were aware since 2019 that Dogecoin had no value yet promoted Dogecoin to profit from its trading," the complaint said. "Musk used his pedestal as World's Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure and amusement."

Johnson is seeking $86 billion in damages, representing the decline in Dogecoin's market value since May 2021, and wants it tripled.

He also wants to block Musk and his companies from promoting Dogecoin and a judge to declare that trading Dogecoin is gambling under federal and New York law.

The case is Johnson v. Musk et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 22-05037.

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