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Comment Re:Simple (Score 4, Insightful) 346

by eksith (#43405019) Attached to: EA Repeats As 'Worst Company In America'

I'm not so sure about #2. There are now quantitative (though, not comprehensive) ways of measuring piracy these days. Researchers would debunk a claim like that in short order, I think.

But I'm pretty sure if EA keeps going the same direction, #1 will be followed by more and more people. Likewise, I feel indie studios/developers will be getting more exposure.

Comment Re:I have a habit of never deleting emails (Score 1) 134

by eksith (#43394955) Attached to: British ISP Bombards Users With Deleted Emails

Gotta completely ruin your week, if not a few weeks. This can not only ruin productivity, it can also potentially end a relationship with a client(s) or even cost new opportunities. Why would anyone trust someone who couldn't even get their emails in order (although if it's someone with understanding, they could potentially make it through), but that's an awful lot of duplicates.

An absolute disaster.

Comment I have a habit of never deleting emails (Score 2) 134

by eksith (#43391041) Attached to: British ISP Bombards Users With Deleted Emails

...Unless they're really useless or are too sensitive (I never send sensitive information via email, but despite my best efforts, I do get them sent to me). But I guess even that's not consolation that the information was private by any stretch of the imagination.

I keep trying to explain to people, email with Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail etc... is like having a private conversation in a coffee shop or something. Yeah, you can get "some" privacy, but really, anyone can listen in or record if they really wanted to since you don't control the venue. Anything without PGP/GPG encryption is like that.

I can only imagine what this might be like for those folks. If this happened to me, and if I do delete messages, I'd be not only livid, but hosed as well. How can you sift through that much info in a single morning... or a week's worth of mornings?

Comment Fuel costs money (Score 2) 587

by eksith (#43347441) Attached to: Samoa Air Rolling Out "Pay As You Weigh" Fares
That's really the bottom line here. Despite the negative stigma this may cause to the airline, I'm actually suprised this hasn't come about sooner. As it says, these are not big jets; they're small planes and the population doesn't exactly have a reputation for being skinny (and we can blame industrial "progress" for that).
Government

Submission + - Albright: There's a place in Hell for women who don't help one another (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "Speaking at the CIA Women's History Month Celebration this week former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright offered a number of career advancing suggestions for women in the workforce. Albright said her storied career — which really began at age 39 after raising three children and obtaining her Ph.D. — owes its success to making the most of opportunities presented. "I never imagined that I would one day become secretary of state," she said. "It's not that I lacked ambition. It is just that I had never seen a secretary of state in a skirt.""
Electronic Frontier Foundation

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the bending-the-rules dept.
Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"
Networking

Misconfigured Open DNS Resolvers Key To Massive DDoS Attacks 179

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the check-your-sources dept.
msm1267 writes with an excerpt From Threat Post: "While the big traffic numbers and the spat between Spamhaus and illicit webhost Cyberbunker are grabbing big headlines, the underlying and percolating issue at play here has to do with the open DNS resolvers being used to DDoS the spam-fighters from Switzerland. Open resolvers do not authenticate a packet-sender's IP address before a DNS reply is sent back. Therefore, an attacker that is able to spoof a victim's IP address can have a DNS request bombard the victim with a 100-to-1 ratio of traffic coming back to them versus what was requested. DNS amplification attacks such as these have been used lately by hacktivists, extortionists and blacklisted webhosts to great success." Running an open DNS resolver isn't itself always a problem, but it looks like people are enabling neither source address verification nor rate limiting.
The Media

What Does It Actually Cost To Publish a Scientific Paper? 166

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the one-trillion-dollars dept.
ananyo writes "Nature has published an investigation into the real costs of publishing research after delving into the secretive, murky world of science publishing. Few publishers (open access or otherwise-including Nature Publishing Group) would reveal their profit margins, but they've pieced together a picture of how much it really costs to publish a paper by talking to analysts and insiders. Quoting from the piece: '"The costs of research publishing can be much lower than people think," agrees Peter Binfield, co-founder of one of the newest open-access journals, PeerJ, and formerly a publisher at PLoS. But publishers of subscription journals insist that such views are misguided — born of a failure to appreciate the value they add to the papers they publish, and to the research community as a whole. They say that their commercial operations are in fact quite efficient, so that if a switch to open-access publishing led scientists to drive down fees by choosing cheaper journals, it would undermine important values such as editorial quality.' There's also a comment piece by three open access advocates setting out what they think needs to happen next to push forward the movement as well as a piece arguing that 'Objections to the Creative Commons attribution license are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be as closed as possible.'"
The Almighty Buck

The Man Who Sold Shares of Himself 215

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the social-experiments-gone-awry dept.
RougeFemme writes "This is a fascinating story about a man who sold shares in himself, primarily to fund his start-up ideas. He ran into the same issues that companies run into when taking on corporate funding — except that in his case, the decisions made by his shareholders bled over into his personal life. This incuded his relationship with his now ex-girlfriend, who became a shareholder activist over the issue of whether or not he should have a vasectomy. The experiment continues." The perils of selling yourself to your friends.

Comment Re:Decaying infastructure is a huge problem (Score 1) 112

by eksith (#43298307) Attached to: Washington's Exploding Manholes Explained?

I'm not posting exactly where I live on the internet, but my "train-taking" MTA Harlem line which passes through quite a few of those bedroom communities and then the subway (see above), which in my view is wasted land that could have been used to reduce the environmental footprint of having everything shipped over. That would have also brought the infastructure closer to the city. The raising chickens bit was obviously hyperbole and your calling me "ignorant of the rest of the world as the typical New Yorker" speaks volumes about your own insular view of the world. You know nothing about me.

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