Comment Re:The founding documents present a path... (Score 1) 161
{Darth Vader voice}
"We will crush this 'rebel alliance' and destroy all who oppose the Empire!"
{/Darth Vader voice}
Strat
Comment Re:Turn it on them (Score 4, Interesting) 161
Surely it wouldn't be beyond the collective wit of the internet to set up a parallel surveillance system targeting judges, politicians and others involved in dismantling these freedoms. After a couple of months of having their every private movement made public I suspect they'd change their outlook.
Quite a while back I posted a comment suggesting a smartphone application that allows people to take a snapshot of a government official/bureaucrat/judge/LEO/agent as well as officials/employees of NSA/NRO/CIA/etc private contractors and upload it and location/time and other relevant data to a website in a non-5-eyes nation where facial recognition and data-mining software could analyze it and make that information and analysis publicly available. Track all their travel, associations, purchases, everything possible.
Strat
Comment Re:Base Stickers??? (Score 1) 843
ALL AF bases and the majority of the the other services did away with base stickers several years ago and now everyone in the vehicle over the age of 16 has to display a valid Government issued ID to get on base.
All? I'd swear last time I accompanied my father (retired AF) on base at either Nellis or Wright-Patterson, the skycop just asked for his ID, not mine. It might be different overseas, and it's been different here at various times in the past, but unless they've changed things yet again since this past December, they most likely only care about the driver's ID.
Submission + - Business Insider: Iran's nuclear program has been an astronomical waste (businessinsider.com)
Lasrick writes: Business Insider's Armin Rosen uses a fuel-cost calculator from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to show that Iran's nuclear program 'has been astronomically costly for the Islamic Republic.' Rosen uses calculations from this tool to hypothesize that what Iran 'interprets as the country's "rights" under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty is a diplomatic victory that justifies the outrageous expense of the nuclear program.' Great data crunching.
Submission + - Medium.com ditches passwords to increase security (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Remembering all of the passwords required to gain access to all of your online accounts is a pain. You could opt to use a password manager, or you might decide to use the same password for everything. But Blogging platform Medium.com has another option — just don't use one!
The site has been anti-password for some time; users log into their accounts using an existing Twitter or Facebook account. For people who are not social network users, however, there's a new option. Working in a similar way to the 'I've forgotten my password' system used by many sites, Medium allows users to log in using nothing but their email address — and says the system is more secure than regular passwords.
Ditching passwords as well as Twitter and Facebook-based logs might seem as though it would open up accounts to unauthorized access, but Medium says that this is far from being the case. Passwords can be very easily compromised, but by emailing time-limited login links to users, Medium thinks it has come up with a solution.
The site has been anti-password for some time; users log into their accounts using an existing Twitter or Facebook account. For people who are not social network users, however, there's a new option. Working in a similar way to the 'I've forgotten my password' system used by many sites, Medium allows users to log in using nothing but their email address — and says the system is more secure than regular passwords.
Ditching passwords as well as Twitter and Facebook-based logs might seem as though it would open up accounts to unauthorized access, but Medium says that this is far from being the case. Passwords can be very easily compromised, but by emailing time-limited login links to users, Medium thinks it has come up with a solution.
Comment Re:Drone It (Score 0) 843
Is there a minus -1 knows nothing prejudiced mod ?
Submission + - Apple Loses Ebook Price Fixing Appeal, Must Pay $450 Million (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A federal appeals court ruled 2-1 today that Apple indeed conspired to with publishers to increase ebook prices. The ruling puts Apple on the hook for the $450 million settlement reached in 2014 with lawyers and attorneys general from 33 states. The Justice Dept. contended that the price-fixing conspiracy raised the price of some e-books from the $10 standard set by Amazon to $13-$15. The one dissenting judge argued that Apple's efforts weren't anti-competitive because Amazon held 90% of the market at the time. Apple is unhappy with the ruling, but they haven't announced plans to take the case further. They said, "While we want to put this behind us, the case is about principles and values. We know we did nothing wrong back in 2010 and are assessing next steps."
Submission + - Celebrating Workarounds, Kludges, and Hacks (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: We all have some favorite workarounds that right a perceived wrong (like getting around the Wall Street Journal paywall) or make something work the way we think it ought to. From turning off annoying features in your Prius to getting around sanctions in Crimea and convincing your Android phone you're somewhere you're not, workarounds are a point of pride, showing off our ingenuity and resourcefulness. And sometimes artful workarounds can even keep businesses operating in times of crisis. Take, for example, the Sony employees, who, in the wake of the Great Hack of 2014 when the company's servers went down, dug out old company BlackBerrys that, while they had been abandoned, had never had their plans deactivated. Because BlackBerrys used RIM's email servers instead of Sony's, they could still communicate with one another, and employees with BlackBerrys became the company's lifeline as it slowly put itself back together.
Submission + - 16 facts about our slowly mutating energy consumption (networkworld.com)
coondoggie writes: Electricity consumption has slowed while the use of natural gas, wind, and solar have become larger portions-- with coal and nuclear becoming less — of the nation's electricity generation between 2001-2013. That was one observation of an interesting report issued by the Government Accountability Office this week that looked at the changing ways in which the US generates and uses electricity.
Submission + - Samsung SSD doesn't support Linux because its "open-source". (launchpad.net)
Comment Re:One sided. (Score 2) 210
Clearly, the answer is for some smooth-talkin' Slashdotter to seduce Angie. Then, once the deed is done, put a nasty negative review on Angie's List. "C-, would not bang again." BOOM goes the dynamite!
Wait... smooth talkin' Slashdotter? Never mind. It will never work.
Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight 843
schwit1 sends this report from the War Is Boring column:
A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January. And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him. The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon. Your tax dollars at work.
Comment Re:yeah yeah (Score 1) 53
It does matter if you are under a standard like PCI DSS. Even internally, PANs must only be transmitted over an encrypted connection, and systems where the PAN is stored must be administered with encrypted connections.
Comment OMG (Score 0) 31
WTF? YOLO. RIP
Comment Re:Uber this! (Score 4, Insightful) 334
France can always be counted on to do things in the least logical way possible.
In which alternate universe is arresting the people running an illegal business the "least logical way possible"?
The fact that it's illegal for a private person to accept payment for a car ride principally to protect politically-connected businesses practicing an outdated/obsolete business model is both corrupt and illogical. It's protectionist crony-capitalism. Rather than logically correcting such a corrupt system, they doubled down on it. Just because a government declares something "illegal" does not mean it is morally and/or ethically wrong, or a detriment to society and/or the economy.
Strat
