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Comment Re:He's mentioned everything except (Score 1) 112

by Kargan (#36968838) Attached to: Living In an Unsecured World

I don't disagree with what you are saying at all, but I am curious:

Who is going to do the educating, exactly, and how? It's not like you can force people to learn things they don't want to learn. You don't need a license to use a computer or the Internet.

Make no mistake, there are actively, willfully ignorant users all over the place. They know what they need to do to learn more - use the computer more. But they don't want to, because using the system is not an enjoyable, rewarding experience. It's more like they approach it with a sense of dread -- "I could click or do something wrong and just ruin the damn thing!" Consider also that even the cheapest pc still costs a few hundred dollars, which is a lot of money for some folks.

They'd rather just have someone that already knows how to use a computer fix their issue for them, thereby separating the world into the haves and have nots (or in this case, know and know nots) that we have today.
Bitcoin

Submission + - Those 500K Bitcoins That Caused a 'Flash Crash' We (betabeat.com)

Submitted by Kargan
Kargan writes: It looks like the hacker who breached Mt. Gox made off with about $34,000 worth of Bitcoin and then artificially crashed the market by dropping a sell order for 500,000 BTC, according to the post-mortem about the hack published by Mt. Gox. But while the hacker did withdraw 2,000 in actual BTC, which Mt. Gox is replacing at their own expense, the enormous sell order was vapor:

        We would like to note that the Bitcoins sold were not taken from other users’ accounts—they were simply numbers with no wallet backing. For a brief period, the number of Bitcoins in the Mt. Gox exchange vastly outnumbered the Bitcoins in our wallet. Normally, this should be impossible.

The sales could not have been completed because there were no actual Bitcoins to transfer. The hacker had simply assigned himself a huge number of BTC, which was enough to place orders on Mt. Gox and confuse the market.

Comment The new account setup continues to suck (Score 3, Insightful) 154

by Kargan (#36616012) Attached to: Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 5

It won't let you create an account (even for testing purposes) using servers and settings that it can't "probe".

Working at a tech support firm as I do, the new account wizard that was implemented with TB3 is an absolute nightmare for users. I like TB better than MS mail clients in general, but they make us and our users' lives far more difficult than need be.

Do away with the "autoconfiguration" crap and just let people specify what they want, or at least make it optional to have TB "autodetect" everything, for cripes' sake. What's wrong with letting the end-user configure an account using any settings they want?
Cloud

VMware Causes Second Outage While Recovering From First 215

Posted by Soulskill from the third-time's-a-charm dept.
jbrodkin writes "VMware's new Cloud Foundry service was online for just two weeks when it suffered its first outage, caused by a power failure. Things got really interesting the next day, when a VMware employee accidentally caused a second, more serious outage while a VMware team was writing up a plan of action to recover from future power loss incidents. An inadvertent press of a key on a keyboard led to 'a full outage of the network infrastructure [that] took out all load balancers, routers, and firewalls... and resulted in a complete external loss of connectivity to Cloud Foundry.' Clearly, human error is still a major factor in cloud networks."

Comment Gonna kick it root down (Score 1) 44

by Kargan (#35982134) Attached to: ARIN Implements DNSSEC

So how you wanna kick it?
Gonna kick it root down!
So how we gonna kick it?
Gonna kick it root down!
So how we gonna kick it?
Gonna kick it root down!
Break it on down, gonna kick it root down

It's not a putdown, I put my foot down
And then I'm makin' some love, I put my root down
Like 'Sweetie Pie' by the Stone Alliance
Everybody knows I'm known for droppin' science

Beasties -- ahead of their time AND helping save Admins everywhere the trouble of statically configuring ARIN’s trust anchors.

Comment Re:I live in KCK, and I don't understand. (Score 1) 162

by Kargan (#35674944) Attached to: Google Fiber Comes To Kansas City
Exactly what I was going to say. It's almost as if Google chose an economically depressed but large city on purpose, to show what effects just having ultra-fast Internet will have on economic, business and educational development in a metropolitan area, to point to and say "Look what we did here, we turned this city around completely."

And even though I wholeheartedly agree that there are lots of parts in Wyandotte County that I would fear to even drive through, there is also Village West and all the new development out there to take into account.

The more I think about it, the more this starts to make sense. And I have to look on the bright side, eventually it has to be built out to the entire Greater KC area...right?

Comment "Three strikes" rules -- unusual? (Score 4, Informative) 288

I work for a tech support firm in the US, supporting a number of different ISPs, and at least a handful of them actively enforce a "three strikes" rule, once they are notified by media watchdog companies that a certain IP address that's assigned to them is guilty of copyright infringement. It goes first strike - cut off service till you contact the main office and sign a document to indicate that you've removed the copyrighted material from your pc. Second strike - same deal, except you lose your service for 3-7 days. Third strike, they cancel your service permanently. I'm kinda surprised this story is making /.

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