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Comment Re:USPS (Score 4, Informative) 385

So the Postal service is still the most secure legally protected method for sending data. Just mail CDs.

The USPS scans all mail
The USPS monitors mail on behalf of the feds without any authorization.
What's to stop them from opening it without a warrant? Sorry but the whole system is controlled and abused by your favorite government officials.

Sidenote: CDs were replaced by DVDs and now Blu Rays. Just fyi if you want to send more than 700mb of crap.

Comment Re:White House... (Score 2) 1350

Also, we need to have more surveillance. This could have been prevented if we just allowed the government to track us all the time and listen to every conversation and see every email.

Oh right, they already do that. Well, we need to invent something more invasive. Think of the Cartoonists!

Comment Known Customer Lists (Score 1) 92

Unlike ecommerce sites that are open to any new customers, it seems a bank could easily have warded off such an attack with a Bayesian or other learning algorithm. Assuming two-factor auth, you have a list of all of your clients most common authenticated IP addresses. Add those to an allow or positive factor list. Then take all unknown IPs and add them to a negative list. When you are being overwhelmed by a DDOS, the negative list can simply be discarded while the positive list has priority at the router. While this would not entirely stop the effects of a DDOS it should make it a much more underwhelming attack rather than a an all-out crippling of infrastructure.

Comment Re:Initiators vs promoters (Score 1) 180

The headline is highly misleading. It should read '65% of Cancers Types Caused by Bad Luck, Not Genetics or Environment'. This means the steep rise of cancer can be attributed to the 33% types that now take a larger share and depend on environmental or genetic factors. You need really careful with omitted words as people want to see and hear what they want and not what you want to converse. I guess a lot of don't regulate us, let's pollute and save money guys will soon join the bandwaggon.

Indeed, let me rephrase. No wait, let me sum up.
Remove the two largest types of cancer, breast and prostate, from the analysis. Then apply the remaining "types" of cancer, and state that 65% of those are not attributable to known factors. This is a "study" in hijinx that no one should read. People are pointing fingers at /. but it was initially picked up at WSJ - which should never be posting such muck.

Instead of getting lost in the fear factor of this thing, look at it this way. Percentage of total registered vehicles in the US:
Cars/Wagons 54%
Pickup trucks 18%
SUVs 12%
Minivans 9%
Trucks 3%
Motorcycles 3%
Now, remove those Cars and Station wagons, they have no relevance to my study. I have been able to prove that SUV Drivers are at the Highest Risk of Injury in a Vehicle. Why? Because pickup trucks have a slightly lower incidence of injury and I have excluded cars. But Wait! Did you know that the majority of the remaining vehicles are also over 4' tall? I now have a new study.
Study proves all Motorcycle Fatalities caused by SUVs and other oversized vehicles.

Well that was just some deductive reasoning. Remember I removed cars entirely? The other 2% were traffic barriers, bicyclists and pedestrians "known factors". You buy into that kind of crap and we know you are heading to stupiderville in a hurryboat.

Fuck the WSJ study and any asshole that dares to be fearmongered into believing that shit so that some sucktwit lobby group can go out and petitiion even dumber politicians that we need to impose a "35% liability limit" on all cancer lawsuits because 65% "just can't be explained!"

Submission + - Court Ruling: EA's Anti-Piracy Software Infringes on Troll's Patent

Press2ToContinue writes: Between the company's general disposition and the incredible failure of the SimCity launch, Electronic Arts is becoming a name associated directly with digital rights management. The most infamous DRM platform the company has used is probably SecuROM, which was noteworthy for being equal parts mega-annoying to paying customers, as well as being so massively ineffective that games employing SecuROM later became amongst the most pirated video games of all time.

But, results aside, EA would tell you that it needed to use DRM to protect the company from piracy. Even if SecuROM failed, the company had to at least try, or else the freeloaders that live the highlife getting around intellectual property laws would win. Violating IP laws is wrong, damn it, and EA was going to do everything in its power to right that wrong.

Including violating a notorious patent troll's intellectual property to do so, apparently — at least, according to an East Texas court, which awarded Uniloc nearly $5 million after determining that EA violated the patent troll's patent with the SecuROM platform.

I have to admit, I feel a bit like the characters at the end of the original Jurassic Park movie, who were being attacked by velociraptors only to be saved at the last moment by the tyrannosaurus rex that had nearly murdered them all earlier. You don't really root for either side; you can only pray they tear each other apart.

Comment Re:How many virgins were involved? (Score 4, Interesting) 59

Not sacrifice, just the 40 year old kind?

Well that brings me to a fun story of how I got into D&D. I was trucked off by my parents to Florida one summer to stay with a relative for a few weeks. Lucky me there was a hobby store nearby and I had stashed a jar of quarters that had been untapped all year. After looking around for a few hours (what else was there to do in Florida when you're 14?), I found the D&D books, they were already second edition but something about them intrigued me. They were way beyond the scope of playing a video game (we're talking monochromatic consoles/handhelds back then), but they offered so much wealth in terms of creation and exploration. I made the decision to buy a kit complete with DM Guide, Monster Manual and a few starter adventures. I went to the register to inquire if my terms could be met.

I asked the nice lady behind the counter "Can I pay with all quarters (in my New York accent which I didn't know until that day that I had one)" To which the lady replied "What are kawters?". I hadn't brought any with me, so it took me a few minutes to explain that 25% of a dollar was a coin that had a $0.25 value. When she finally got it she said "Oh you mean Kwat-ers." I came back the next day and paid with my Kwa-ters, laughing the whole way. It's one of those things you never forget, and part of it was because it was about D&D, a game that literally helped saved the bored skull of a preteen.

In the end, I actually became friends with someone I never got along with previously, simply because we wound up at a rather raucous D&D game together. Still best friends decades later.

Submission + - Crowds Flock to "The Interview": Free As In Speech

Rambo Tribble writes: Theatres showing "The Interview" on Christmas were rewarded with sell-out crowds. While reviews of the comedy have been mixed, many movie-goers expressed solidarity with the sentiment expressed by one, "I wanted to support the U.S." Meanwhile, some reviewers have found the film tedious, with "...forced comedy that turns you off." Another opined, "It was more serious, the satire, than I was expecting," and, ""There's a message for America in there too about America's foreign policy." Then, of course, there's the North Korean take, that it is an "act of war."

Submission + - How Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel Plans to Live 120 Years

HughPickens.com writes: Bloomberg News reports that venture capitalist and paypal co-founder Peter Thiel has a plan to reach 120 years of age. His secret — taking human growth hormone (HGH) every day, a special Paleo diet, and a cure for cancer within ten years. "[HGH] helps maintain muscle mass, so you’re much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis,” says Thiel. “There’s always a worry that it increases your cancer risk but — I’m hopeful that we’ll get cancer cured in the next decade.” Human growth hormone also known as somatotropin or somatropin, is a peptide hormone that stimulates growth, cell reproduction and regeneration in humans and other animals. Thiel says he also follows a Paleo diet, doesn’t eat sugar, drinks red wine and runs regularly. The Paleolithic diet, also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional diet designed to emulate, insofar as possible using modern foods, the diet of wild plants and animals eaten by humans during the Paleolithic era. Thiel’s Founders Fund is also investing in a number of biotechnology companies to extend human lifespans, including Stem CentRx Inc., which uses stem cell technology for cancer therapy. With the 70 plus years remaining him and inspired by "Atlas Shrugged," Thiel also plans to launch a floating sovereign nation in international waters, freeing him and like-minded thinkers to live by libertarian ideals with no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons.

Submission + - ArsTechnica gets hacked (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: It appears that some time around 12:20 PM PST ArsTechnica's website was compromised. The homepage now reads "Arse security" with a link to two twitter accounts. It's possible that this hack is actually the result of compromised DNS records as the domain name now points to an IP address of a server in Chicago.

Comment Re:Cloud (Score 1) 241

The cost of the Cloud is cheap. And for IT, we just say "not as secure, but if you're okay with that, go ahead" and when the Cloud services fail, or get breached or whatever, the CIO can simply say "not my fault, that was your choice". The real cost is hidden.

It's the security of the infrastructure that matters. A company is rarely going to lose their shirt because someone found their marketing material in cyberspace, two weeks before it would be released. Of course your mileage may vary.

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