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Comment Re:Well at least they saved the children! (Score 1) 790

Or which happens to be a valid image but has the same hash.

This is extremely unlikely. The whole point of hashes is that they collide as infrequently as possible.

So they got the warrant based on google reading his email?

He is a convicted child abuser who had a third party service provider independently notify the police that he was sending child pornography by email. Are you arguing that a judge shouldn't grant a search warrant under those circumstances?

Guess all the cops need for a warrant is for some throwaway email address to send a pic to your account.

Listen, if somebody tells you that you're saying dumb things because you didn't read the article, don't just say more dumb things without reading the article. The article clearly points out that Google detected it in an email he was sending, not receiving.

Comment Re:Well at least they saved the children! (Score 4, Insightful) 790

I've found it funny when I've made arguments about Google's ad scanning being something I didn't like, and people always came back with "but it's 100% automated and completely anonymous - no human ever looks at your mail".

I think that argument just got settled with this story - and I won.

No you didn't. If you had bothered to read the article, you would have seen that they detect things like this by using image hashing. It's an automatic process - unless you happen to be passing around images that are identical to known images of child pornography, at which point of course humans will get involved.

I really need to know more about whether this email triggered a thorough and careful investigation that led to the arrest of the person, or if the email WAS the trigger for his arrest.

Well, if you really need to know, then you could always read the article. It specifically states that he was arrested after police found other suspicious images on his computer (after obtaining a search warrant), and that he's a registered sex offender. Chances of this being a mistake are practically nil. All indications are that both Google and the police did their job properly, with judicial oversight.

Comment Not only not common, but not allowed (Score 2) 348

Unless *all* datafiles on your client's system are encrypted, also, and I don't think even that's enough.

ObDisclosure: I worked for about 4 months on a contract at Trustwave, a root CA.

Leaving that huge hole in your defenses... I suggest you look, if you don't already know, at .

From the 1.2 std: "Firewalls are a key protection mechanism for any computer network. Other system components may provide Firewall functionality, provided they meet the minimum requirements for Firewalls as provided in Requirement"

Even all data between two systems *MUST* be encrypted, for full compliance, if you're doing your own.

So, what this vendor is doing... I'd say you and your client need to reread the contract *VERY* closely, and if they say they're adhering to stds, they're in violation of the contract.

                        mark

Comment About the point of the article.... (Score 2) 511

I just skimmed half of the 300 or so comments, and have yet to see anyone consider the point of the article, rather than whether they said "Red Bull is a gateway drug".

Y'know, the real point: upper managers, under the heel of venture capital who want 1000% ROI next week, giving people insanely impossible deadlines, and then getting them (under threat of being fired) to work far beyond any reason when it's not a disaster zone (say, a flood) or the middle of a war zone.

And if you work like that, with not a trace of a life, and think you're Important, there's another word for you: sucker. I'd even add stupid sucker.

                mark, who swore he'd never do that again after breaking 70 hours in one week in the mid-nineties
                                              (and did I mention the pagers?)*

* Admittedly, not crazy enough to do what one of the young what-was-then-Anderson Consulting guys did: 1 week, 119 hours....

Comment Re:That... looks... horrible. (Score 3, Interesting) 82

Maltron keyboards are kind of crazy - they're still made using very low volume manufacturing techniques. The keyboard shells, AFAIK are vacuum formed and (unless things have changed recently) I think they do manual point-to-point wiring on the switches. But if you look at the sculpted shape of a Maltron, they don't lend themselves to conventional PCBs.

I'm typing on one now - I think it's quite an old one but it looks as though the design changes are mostly smallish refinements and updates to the controller / electronics. I got mine from an office clearer on eBay, otherwise they've very expensive and I probably wouldn't have got it.

I've also got a Kinesis, an ergo board which came later (and with a strikingly similar design). It feels a bit more like a slick, mass-manufactured product but I've known people insist that the Maltron is ergonomically better overall. I'm not so fussy, I'm just glad I got two cool keyboards for prices I felt I could afford!

Comment Another way of looking at it (Score 1) 227

In fact, this makes perfect sense. Consider that we *know* black holes evaporate via Hawking radiation. I haven't read the paper, but unless I miss my guess, what he's effectively suggesting is that the evaporation starts as the star collapses, and becomes stronger as it grows more dense, to the point where a balance is reached, *above* the Schwartschild Radius.

                  mark

Comment Resources... (Score 1) 98

I saw someone suggesting that the users should play nice. That'd be great... and maybe they did, 30 years ago. (We'll ignore the late 80's early 90's stealing of someone else in the lab's xterm....)

I had a user last year - an intern - like everyone, NFS-mounted home directory. It was, of course, shared with a good number of other users. He ran a job that dumped a logfile in his home directory. MANY gigs of logfile, enough to blow out the filesystem. Users were not amused. *I* was NOT AMUSED, as my home directory was on this system, and my login was screwed up, as well as my firefox bookmarks.....

My question is what order of magnitude number of users - tens? hundreds? more? If Sometimes, human to human works.

ulimit might help, too. So might putting the abusers' home directories on the same filesystem, and let them duke it out....

                    mark

Comment Re:Good grief (Score 1) 98

Do you still have the box your computer came in?
Good, please turn off your computer, disconnect it, and ship it back.
Why?
Becuase you're too fscking stupid and ignorant to use one. And as to why you even thought you should comment on something that you have no clue about, other than to display your gross ignorance in public, like a baboon's ass, I have no idea.

                    mark

Comment Destroying it all is a bad idea (Score 1) 190

Is making any species extinct a good idea? If so, why?

I mean, if it had been destroyed in '86, we'd never have sequenced it. What more info can we get from it 10 or 20 years from now?

Also, this whole "debacle" is massively overblown. Note that a) the amules were all still securely sealed, and in appropriate storage... it's just that they should have been known, and put in recorded storage.

For that matter, where's whatever you were looking for at home? Or when was the last time your boss asked you to find something that you spend hours, or weeks, on and off, looking for? Now let's talk about the NIH campus in Bethesda, with (depending on your sources) somewhere betwwn 18,000 and 35,000 people who work there every day, and sixty or eighty buildings, including a large hospital. That is *not* a small place to misplace something.

Oh, and I've yet to see or hear *anything* as to *why* it was left there. Was the team that was working on it laid off, or reorganized somewhere else?

No, destroying it all's a bad idea.

            mark

Comment But it's going to be built by a ... GOVERNMENT!!! (Score 1) 219

It can't work. I mean, no collider or supercollider can work, if they're built by a GOVERNMENT! Only private industry can build a working one...*

Oh, that's right, all of them were build by governments. No company's going to do it, because there's no ROI, or if there is, it may not be for decades....

                  mark

* Satire of libertarians, for libertarians, and others who aren't familiar with satire....

Comment This is a "study"? (Score 1) 619

a) At least two of the three authors are from business schools. They don't appear to be social scientists or psychologists.
b) Read the summary, and tell me that isn't showing outright bias and intent to find results to match preconceptions.

This isn't even vaguely science, it's propaganda. For extra credit, do the same study with people of East German origin and hedge fund managers and traders.

                  mark

Submission + - Bacteria that eat electricity (newscientist.com)

whitroth writes: There's a story in New Scientist about them: STICK an electrode in the ground, pump electrons down it, and they will come: living cells that eat electricity. We have known bacteria to survive on a variety of energy sources, but none as weird as this. Think of Frankenstein's monster, brought to life by galvanic energy, except these "electric bacteria" are very real and are popping up all over the place.

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form – naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

My first thought is to wonder if mammals generate enough electricity for them to be able to infect us... and if so, what problems they might cause, such as cardiac arrythmia?

                      mark

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