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Can We Abandon Confidentiality For Google Apps? 480

An anonymous reader writes "I provide IT services for medium-sized medical and law practices. Lately I 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 (e.g., HIPAA). For those with high-profile celebrity clients, simply telling them 'Google employees can read your stuff' will usually end the conversation right there. But for smaller practices, I often get a lot of push-back 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 lopsided given the clear functionality / usability / ubiquity that they experience when using Google at home. So my question to the Slashdot community is: Are they right? Is it time for me to remove the Tin Foil Hat on the subject of confidentiality and stop resisting the juggernaut that is Google? If not, what is the best way to clarify the confidentiality issues for these clients?"
Image

English DJ Claims Wi-Fi Allergy Screenshot-sm 515

path0$ writes "British Ex-DJ Steve Miller claims that his Wi-Fi allergy is making his life one big misery , forcing him to live in an iron-clad home far from any neighbors. According to the article, more and more people are suffering from an allergy like his. The only positive side to this is that at least Miller didn't think of suing anybody yet, like these people did, who claim to suffer from the same condition and were mentioned in a Slashdot article in 2008."
The Courts

P.I.I. In the Sky 222

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A judge rules that IP addresses are not 'personally identifiable information' (PII) because they identify computers, not people. That's absurd, but in truth there is no standard definition of PII in the industry anyway, because you don't need one in order to write secure software. Here's a definition of 'PII' that the judge could have adopted instead, to reach the same conclusion by less specious reasoning." Hit the link below to read the rest of his thoughts.

Comment Re:double bubble, toil and trouble (Score 2, Informative) 124

So... Webkit renders html as far as I know. So the proposal seems to be to render the entire Gnome gui by feeding html at it. I hope I'm wrong, because if that is correct then it would be a really goofy way of going about things.

You're wrong, don't worry.

A window manager pretty much manages the window decorations (title bar, borders, et cetera) and window actions (close, maximize, resize, move, roll-up, sticky, always on top, always on bottom, et cetera).

Metacity is a window manager and nothing else. It doesn't handle what is in the windows themselves.

Oh, and their only proposing to use CSS. No HTML.

Earth

Earthquake Invisibility Cloak 121

BuzzSkyline writes "The same folks who brought us the tsunami invisibility cloak last year have now come up with an earthquake invisibility cloak. They show that a platform made of just the right configuration of elastic rings could make a structure invisible to earthquakes by effectively steering a quake around the structure. It doesn't work well for compression waves, but the researchers claim it could hide buildings from the slower-moving, more destructive shear earthquake waves. The research is due to be published soon in the journal Physical Review Letters."

Comment Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score 1) 152

To an extent, this was what he was warning against (though he set no time constraints) -- that eventually people would complain about the existence of copyright regardless of length of time. He argued that making the law too broad and absurd (arguable - I'm not debating whether he was right on this issue) would cause people to view the entire thing as an unnecessary evil.

What we see in the past is copyright being extended and broadened continually over time, and people eventually arguing against it as a whole once they have a means to violate it easily.

Of course it is not perfectly what he predicted (and it is extremely late), but it does kind of fit some of the points.

Comment Re:They don't even go back far enough. (Score 3, Insightful) 152

No, by the fact that there is a rising Pirate Party in a few countries. I don't dispute that it is currently very disorganized and ill-defined, but it exists.
It is by the fact that more and more people are obtaining copyrighted content from the internet illegally.
It is by the fact that more and more people think that this is okay.

Right now, many governments of the world and the recording industry are trying to fight it. Whether they are winning or not, only time will tell. In that respect, not everything he said has come true, but what hasn't come true still has the potential to.

The main point the GP was trying to make is that he predicted that in the future it would become extremely easy to copy something; so easy, in fact, that anybody could do it. That did come true, and that did take 160 years.

Comment Re:cron + rsync + tar (Score 1) 121

You could probably pretty easily write an extension for mediawiki that attaches to the 'ArticleAfterFetchContent' hook and augments the page with content fetched on the fly from Wikipedia. That would be easy enough to do. Just make sure that when the user is editing the page, the function you attach to the hook does not activate (otherwise you will end up saving the wikipedia content into your page, and it will be there twice when a user visits the page).

The Internet

Integrating Wikipedia With a Local Intranet Wiki 121

An anonymous reader writes "I work for a large company taking a preliminary look at developing an honest-to-goodness wiki. We have tried to launch a company-wide wiki before, but with little success. The technical domains of each part of the company are different, thus each article needs a good deal of background to be useful. Of course, due the proprietary nature of our work we cannot share our articles outside of the intranet. What we would like to do is leverage existing wikis by augmenting our internal wiki with an external wiki. When a user accesses Wikipedia from inside our intranet, they receive the wikipedia content, plus the local domain specific information. For example, links to company-specific wiki pages would be available in Wikipedia pages. Has anyone else tried to do something like this? I know it sounds like a logistical nightmare; are there any thoughts on how to make this successful?"
Security

Hackers' Next Target — Your Brain? 295

Hugh Pickens writes "Wired reports that as neural devices become more complicated — and go wireless — some scientists say the risks of 'brain hacking' should be taken seriously. '"Neural devices are innovating at an extremely rapid rate and hold tremendous promise for the future," said computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington. "But if we don't start paying attention to security, we're worried that we might find ourselves in five or 10 years saying we've made a big mistake."' For example, the next generation of implantable devices to control prosthetic limbs will likely include wireless controls that allow physicians to remotely adjust settings on the machine. If neural engineers don't build in security features such as encryption and access control, an attacker could hijack the device and take over the robotic limb." Relatedly, several users have written to tell us that science may be closer to the science fiction "mind wipe" than previously thought. Put this all together and I welcome the next step in social networking; letting the cloud drive my limbs around town via a live webcam and then wiping the memory from my brain. Who has MyLimb.com parked and is willing to deal?

Comment Re:About time (Score 1) 383

Another simple way to reproduce:

1) Turn off immediately switching to new tab
2) Go to the slashdot index page
3) Middle click "Read More..." on any article
4) Try to scroll down the page
5) ???
6) Profit!

But in all seriousness, this can be a problem when browsing slashdot!

Comment Re:About time (Score 1) 383

By blocking, BitZtream is talking about blocking for a significant amount of time. Technically, all calls are blocking, but there is a significant difference between blocking for a few milliseconds or blocking for a few tenths of a second. For example, reading from a pipe can block for a long time if nothing is writing to the other end; however, you can tell the read function to be non-blocking, and just return an error or nothing if there is nothing to read at the moment.

Obviously, these are system calls. And, being system calls, they are talking to another process, namely part of the kernel. However, this does not make your program multithreaded, because if it did, by that definition, there would be no such thing as a single threaded program on any OS that uses process switching.

Comment Re:About time (Score 1) 383

> But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal?

Somewhat. It doesn't get blogged about much, and when it's blogged about the press doesn't pick it up because nitty-gritty arch work is boring. But there have in fact been significant simplifications to all sorts of stuff in the meantime...

So does this mean that it won't take several hours to compile it anymore?

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