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Comment Re:The bashing is sometimes justified... (Score 2) 113

I can also show a swastika on my U.S.-hosted site and criticize public officials without fear of ridiculously heavy-handed libel/defamation laws. And don't even get me started with the bullshit cultural and language laws in France. It's amazing anything gets done in that country at all.

Oh, I dunno; I've seen any number of sites similar to this one, whose information is mirrored at zillions of locations on the web, including many outside the US. There are historical and cultural reasons for including the symbols at code points 534D and 5350 in Unicode, and I doubt that anyone has ever been prosecuted for installing full Unicode charsets or lookup software on their web sites.

I haven't looked for such pages on French sites, but I'd be surprised if they don't exist (with the text in French rather than English), and I'd also be surprised if the French government has tried to suppress such character codes in the Uncode lookups.

It's possible that such things has happened and I just haven't read about them. Does anyone know of cases of official harrassment for including pages like the above on a web site? For example, has any Islamic or other religious government ever harrassed people for allowing the U+271D char code on a web page?

(And yes, I do have a couple of experimental dictionaries on my own web sites, including one dealing with Chinese characters which includes an entry for the swastika characters. Nobody has even suggested that these glyphs shouldn't be there. Possibly it's because nobody has ever looked at my dictionaries, but still ... ;-)

Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 92

Many situations require the encryption of SSL without necessarily requiring the authentication of SSL. This is the case when the risk is more from something like accidentally or casually disclosing sensitive information and there is little or no risk of intentional attack, but where there are liabilities for routine exposure. This scenario isn't really a job for SSL, but what else do we have to work with?

Comment Re:Dang... (Score 3, Informative) 139

Interesting. Science is wrong, and "creationist parks" get the blame.

Hmmm ... This isn't really a case of scientists being wrong. The old images of dinosaurs have generally been "artists' interpretations" of the evidence, and scientists generally agreed that they had little evidence of the outer appearance of dinosaurs. Skin and other soft tissues don't fossilize too well, and we haven't had many samples until recently.

And the idea that birds are close relatives of or descended from dinosaurs isn't new. It was suggested by none other than Charles Darwin himself, based on similarities in the skeletons. Many of his colleagues agreed, but they even more agreed with the reply "Yeah, that's certainly interesting; can you find us some better evidence?" The situation stayed that way until the 1970s or so, because birds don't fossilize well. New fossil discoveries finally supplied enough evidence so that in the 1980s, the birds got officially reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs.

But it was still well understood that there were a lot of loose ends, and Further Research Is Needed. Were feathers a development of the birds, for flight? Or had their non-flying ancestors had feathers, perhaps for insulation? The evidence wasn't nearly good enough, and it was left as an open question. Over the past decade or so, the evidence has trickled in, and this report seems to be filling in the gap. People who've followed the story aren't surprised; they're just happy to read about the evidence.

In any case, it never was a case of "Scientists thought that dinosaurs didn't have any sort of fur or feathers, but they've been proven wrong". It was more like "We didn't have the evidence, since feathers don't fossilize well, and now we've collected enough evidence that we can be pretty sure that those old artistic interpretations reptilian dinosaurs with bare skin were inaccurate; most of them (except the largest) probably did have feathers." This isn't considered a criticism of the artists, of course, since they didn't have evidence either, and many of them stated repeatedly that most of their drawings included a large shovel-full of conjecture. It was expected that, as evidence trickled in, they'd have to revise their drawings a lot.

But it likely is a good example of non-scientists saying "Scientists proved wrong" when the scientific data goes from "we don't really know ..." to "we've found the evidence ...". This is sorta the flip side of the constant "Those scientists just wasted time and money doing research to prove something that we knew all along" comments from people who have little understanding of what science is all about (and have always "known" things based on no evidence at all).

(Actually, since I first read about this topic back in the 1970s, I've been rooting for the tyrannosaurs having big, colorful cockatoo-like crowns of feathers. But that's just me, and I'm still waiting. But I won't be surprised either way. ;-)

Comment Re:Propaganda (Score 1) 667

I thought Obama was Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America, not the world.

For the past several decades, the US political system has considered these to be equivalent. Google "only remaining superpower" to read the evidence. You'll also find lots of uses of the phrase by non-Americans implying that they accept this as fact. Some of them complain, of course, but they often do so in ways that effectively acknowledge the fact of US rule. The US government is now immune from any so-called laws and is free to use its power as it likes anywhere in the world.

Comment Re:I don't see the problem. (Score 3, Interesting) 667

"Terrorist" is the wrong word, it's obvious from the intercepts this was a tactical error on someone's part.

Terrorism isn't defined by actions so much as the reason. For the love of Jebus, it has a well understood meaning folks, look it up.

That may have been true 10 or 20 years ago. Nowadays, here in the US and in many other countries, the common media and governmental meaning of "terrorist" is now "anyone we don't like".

This is a rather familiar sort of linguistic change that has happened to many other words in the past. There's not a whole lot we can do to persuade people to stick with the original definitions. After all, we can't even persuade people to stop using "literally" to mean "figuratively". What's our chance of persuading politicians that they shouldn't similarly retarget handy insult words to refer to their opponents?

Comment Re:Yep, how the music industry was killed... (Score 2) 192

You're right. But most of the rest of them got big-enough advances from record labels though so that they could try making music for a living for a couple years. The money for those advances came from record sales of the few acts that did make it. Now, there's little money coming in from record sales from the acts that made it - only peasly subscription revenue and $0.99 tracks. Less money coming into the labels, less money going out as advances to artists.

Comment Re: Missing information (Score 1) 32

Determining what is "related" is not an easy thing to do, programmatically speaking.

It's especially difficult for the Media, since for most of them, "computer", "IBM machine", "Microsoft" and "Windows" are synonyms. A few have heard of things like unix and linux, and some even use a mac. But hose gadgets are never called "computers", so they're not relevant to any news story dealing with computers. In common speech, saying that some new virus infects "computers" is all that needs to be said, since there are no brand names in the computer industry, only IBM and Microsoft (and maybe Apple, if that's a brand name).

I have seen a number of instances where some geeks will try to bring up non-IBM/Microsoft systems, and the media folks are clearly baffled by why people would try to change the subject, when the topic is clearly computers, not those other electronic thingies. I remember back in the early 1980s, when IBM first introduced their new DOS machines, and the reaction of lots of business and media people was "Finally there's a desktop computer." They didn't see any need to mention the brand name, because computers didn't have brand names. (The more knowledgeable did know that computers actually do have brand names, but since there was only one, it was a waste of time and page space to mention it.)

Comment Re:Blog post gone? (Score 1) 390

Speaking only to the example in the L3 blog post: the utilization on L3's network before hitting the L3/Verizon connection point is about the same as it is in Verizon's network downstream of that connection point. That suggests that each company's network can handle about the same bandwidth. Any additional traffic on Verizon's network coming from L3 would obviously also be on L3's network. Why is L3 willing to take on this additional traffic, but Verizon isn't?

Comment Re:Missing information (Score 1) 32

Well it runs on Windows obviously. With the number of reported infections, the speed with which it happened, and the fact that it is a Trojan (meaning you need to trick the user into running it), it can only be Windows. There wouldn't be 11,000 Linux users tricked into running it in 24 hours even if it would run correctly on all their distros because we know Linux users are too smart to run Trojans. Hell, there probably weren't 11,000 Linux machines with users sitting in front of them to BE tricked into running it in that amount of time. With Macs - well every Mac user will tell you they don't get Trojans or viruses. That leaves Windows. Lots of doofuses to be tricked there.

While I can appreciate your sarcasm, I also followed the summary's first link to the report at labs.bitdefender.com, and thought it was interesting that in the "Related posts" in the column at the right, there's a Tags section, and the very first is "android" in a large font. There's no instance of "window" or "micro" or "soft" on the page. The obvious inference to a reader is "Hmmm ... Can this actually be a major infestation on android, i.e., linux?"

But no, this list of "Related ... Tags" appears to be some sort of subtle redirection or FUD or something, because as others have already reported here, this is indeed yet another MS Windows trojan infestation. The report page lists keywords including "android", "bitcoin", "facebook", "etc, but doesn't mention MS or Windows as related.

Anyone have any idea why the folks at bitdefender might do things this way?

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