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Submission + - Can we abandon Confidentiality for Google Apps? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I provide IT services for medium sized medical and law practices and have been getting a lot of feedback from doctors and lawyers who use gmail at home and believe that they can run a significant portion of their practice IT on Google Apps. From a support standpoint, I'd be happy to chuck mail/calendar service management into the bin and let them run with gmail, but for these businesses, there is significant legal liability associated with the confidentiality of their communications and records (eg HIPPA).

For those with high profile celebrity clients, stating that "Google employees can read your stuff" will usually end the conversation right there, but for smaller practices I often get a lot of pushback in the form of "What's wrong with trusting Google?" and "Google's not interested in our email/calendar". Weighing what they see as a tiny legal risk against the promise of Free IT Stuff(TM) becomes increasingly difficult in the face of the clear functionality/usability/ubiquity that they experience when using Google at home. So my question to the Slashdot community is this:

Are they right? Is it time for me to remove the Tin Foil Hat from their confidentiality obligations and stop resisting the juggernaut that is Google?
If not, what's the best way to clarify the confidentiality issues?
Data Storage

Submission + - Pool: How many hard disk partitions do you use? 2

Submitted by JonMerel
JonMerel writes: Pool: How many hard disk partitions are there on your primary computer?

1 We are in 2009, why partition anymore?
1 for each hard disk because my OS forces me to.
2 The system and my data separated
3 System, data, swap
4 or more (specify)
0 I am not using a file based OS
Intel

Submission + - Intel: donate your idle CPU time to research (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by
RobbieB
RobbieB writes: "Chipzilla has kicked off a new campaign which allows users to donate idle time on their processors for research efforts. The new initiative is called 'Progress Thru Processors', is being promoted via a Facebook site and aims to divert idle computing time to the Rosetta@Home distributed computing project, the climateprediction.net project and the Africa@Home Malaria research effort. For more ideas, Liz Tay recommends five other things to do with an idle CPU here."
Networking

Submission + - Unethical Private ISP (ntc-com.com) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I've backed myself into a corner this semester: I signed a lease for an apartment without first researching which ISP's were available there. It turns out that one company, NTC Cable, has a monopoly on the ethernet wired in the building. Since they are my only option for cable internet, I read up on their policies. Apparently, they charge by the connection to each room of the apartment; at the time of writing their rate is ~$32/month and routers are against their Terms of Service. This means that in order for my roommates and I to connect our four laptops we would be paying in excess of $120/month. NTC also states that gaming devices and handhelds also need their own connection. This is ridiculous and ought to be considered usury; I'm wondering what recourse I have in this matter. How might they be detecting individual devices, and how might I circumvent this detection. I thought of using an old desktop as a wireless access point and routing our laptops through that, but would that be detectable?
Government

Submission + - SPAM: Bruce Sterling laughs at "Singularity Food Fig

Submitted by
destinyland
destinyland writes: "It's being called the Transhumanist/Singularitian Political Food Fight. PayPal founder Peter Thiel wrote "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" in an essay published by the libertarian CATO Institute — prompting a disclaimer from the Singularity Institute for Advanced Intelligence. (Thiel also helps fund the SIAI, but the organization insists they're not exclusively for libertarians). Mike Treder, who heads the Center for Responsible Technology, argued "no more libertarians" and criticized the SIAI for claiming neutrality toward the controversy. And Bruce Sterling simply asked why "these advanced conceptualists arguing about suffrage for Artificial Intelligences?" and called the whole discussion "Transhuman, Singularitarian, and Cranky""
Link to Original Source
Image

iPhone App Tracks Sex Offenders 358

Posted by samzenpus from the there's-a-sweaty-app-for-that dept.
The Narrative Fallacy writes "All 50 states in the US require the 50,000 people convicted of sexual offenses to sign a register so that their whereabouts can be tracked and monitored. The Telegraph reports that now users of the iPhone Offender Locator application can search for sex offenders living nearby a friend or colleague whose address is stored in their Apple iPhone address book, or they can type in a street address to generate a list of convicted sex offenders in the local area. 'Offender Locator gives everyone the ability to find out if registered sex offenders live in their area,' says the application developer, ThinAir Wireless, on its iTunes page. 'Knowledge equals safety. They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.' Offender Locator uses the iPhone's built-in GPS to pinpoint the user's location, and then provide a map listing sex offenders in the local area. Tapping on one of the 'pins' dropped on to the map brings up a photograph of the offender, as well as their address, date of birth and list of convictions."

Comment sneaky business (Score 1) 334

by lordharsha (#28878211) Attached to: EMI Only Selling CDs To Mega-Chains From Now On

EMI probably read this, figured something had to be done to get rid of piracy, and decided to hamper their sales. This way when the next study is conducted, they can blame piracy.

Before someone points it out, this is supposed to be funny. I might be overly paranoid, I might hate them greedy buggers, and a little conspiracy theory does the soul good, but this is probably just corporate stupidity. Been seeing a lot of it lately.

Comment Bullies in the playground (Score 4, Insightful) 172

by lordharsha (#28863743) Attached to: China Bans Games That "Glorify Gangsters' Lives"

*sigh* Gorram governments.

When I was a kid, politics was this big boring thing that all the grown ups with moustaches and beards went on and on about.

Now that I'm older, it's a hell of a lot more like a pissing contest, with each country trying to introduce more asinine laws and control each and every moment of their citizens lives. Hell, it's almost like a black comedy.

I'd laugh at the whole thing, but some of the shit that the governments of the world do in our name really scare me. Eventually enough people are going to come to their senses and fight back.

That's it for my rant. Mod me up, mod me down, ignore me, but I felt I had to get my 2c in.
Programming

Submission + - The Best First Language For A Young Programmer (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year C.S. curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As McAllister sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck, McAllister writes. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"

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