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Submission + - Secret state: the hidden world of governmental black sites (independent.co.uk)

An anonymous reader writes: To carry out the extraordinary rendition programme which was one of President George W Bush's answers to the 9/11 attacks, seizing suspects from the streets and spiriting them off to countries relaxed about torture, the CIA created numerous front companies: grinding through flight records and using the methods of a private detective, Paglen identified them, visiting and covertly photographing their offices and managers.

The men and women who carried out the rendition programme were equipped with fake identities: Paglen has made a collection of these people's unconvincing and fluctuating signatures, "people," as he puts it, "who don't exist because they're in the business of disappearing other people".

Comment Re: Incompetent -- Learning Archival Strategies (Score 2) 396

Losing a day's or even an hour's data entry is not an option.

If you have that kind of requirements (less than an hour lost data), then you are not looking for just backup/archive. You are looking for a fully redundant storage system.
In addition to the backup system, of course.

For reading, check up on backupentral.com, Symantec.com (Backup Exec/Netbackup) emc.com (Avamar, networker).
I once managed a Filemaker database server (v5), and it has a built in featuer to copy the database files for backup. Real simple. Cannot remember if the database had to be taken offline, as we had users only during normal working hours, but these days that should NOT be a requirement.

Submission + - Daniel Ellsberg criticizes Kerry for calling Snowden a coward and traitor (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defence Department staff who leaked the Vietnam War Pentagon Papers to the New York Times has some harsh criticism of Kerry's recent call for Snowden to come back to USA and "man up".

"Nothing excuses Kerry's slanderous and despicable characterisations of a young man who, in my opinion, has done more than anyone in or out of government in this century to demonstrate his patriotism, moral courage and loyalty to the oath of office the three of us swore: to support and defend the Constitution of the United States," he concludes.

Comment Re:License fees are a hidden tax (Score 1) 131

When looking at a cost, you have to consider what the licensees get,
By paying a nominal sum per unit sold, the manufacturers gets access to an established market with more or less certain sales due to the widespread use of the technology. Is it not reasonable that hose who have in effect created a huge market for the product also get part of the profit?

I could understand the negativity if the license contributed significantly to the cost of the end product (which is the case for mobile phones), but when the license is so low that it does not really contribute much to the end cost, whaqt is the problem?.
For a cable it is 1% of the sales price (cheap cables) or less (not so cheap cables). For a TV, it is fractions of a percent. Even for a cheap unit like a chromecast unit (got one, it is too cheap not to get one), it is one seventh of a percent of the sales price. Hardly significant...

Comment Re:Some Reasonable Arguments (Score 1) 105

The "security" feature has a documented workaround, and is there because the components reading older versions have vulnerabilities. It si quite simple to define a folder as "safe" and move the documents there, or to define the folder where the documents are located as "safe". This feature has been ther esince Office 2003, and your IT support people should know this.

If your boss could not open ODF in MS Office, then maybe it is because Office open ODF files according to the standard. The problem is that most of the vendors using ODF have added extensions which are not (yet) part of the standard. Is that Microsofts fault?

When you are writing negatively about OOXML, at least get your facts correct. There is no "Do it like Excel 2007" in there. There are a few "do it like Office 95 Word", but those are only needed to correctly render a few minor formatting features on documents originally created in Word 95. How critical is it to ensure that every minor formatting detail from a document created more than ten years ago is correct?

As for your last paragraph: Even without the spec, you can get the content of any OOXML document. Any OOXML document is a zipped folder structure with the text stored as plain text with XML tags. No risk of losing access to the content. Quite an improvement compared to the old DOC/XLS formats, and for those who remember, the WordPerfect formats (yes, I have tried to decode it).

Comment Re:License fees are a hidden tax (Score 1) 131

The return is completely disproportionate to the initial investment. How much do you think it cost to come up with the standard for the HDMI cable? How much do you think is being made worldwide if even $1.00 US is going for license fees?

But what if $0.05 is the fee per cable/unit?
Because that is the actual license fee for HCMI.
Why make up numbers when the actual numbers are available through a simple search? http://www.hdmi.org/manufactur...

Submission + - Publishers to remove 100s of computer-generated gibberish conference proceedings (nature.com)

savuporo writes: The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. Sokal has opened a completely new avenue for science.

Comment A product with no market. (Score 3, Interesting) 44

Cheap flat HD TVs killed the projector market (if there ever was one). Putting a low resolution projector in a PC will not help.
If I need to view content from my PC, I use Chromecast (and there are probably dozens of this type of devices within a year). Simple and easy, and no need for a white wall to project on and to dim the room lights.

Submission + - Iran Behind 'Saffron Rose' Cyberespionage Campaign (fireeye.com)

Arthur Liberty writes: A group of Iranian hackers has been targeting American defense contractors since October 2013 in an elaborate and technically advanced campaign that American security researchers call "Operation Saffron Rose." The group behind Saffron Rose is Ajax Security Team, whose members are thought to have conducted politically-motivated website defacements for several years. The group's "graduation" from vandalism to espionage shows that Iranian actors in the cyber attack space are becoming more sophisticated.

Ajax Security Team uses a combination of fake login pages, phishing emails and custom-built malware to steal login credentials and other data. In one attack, the group targeted U.S.-based aerospace companies by creating a fake registration page for the 2014 IEEE Aerospace conference. Ajax Security Team then uses a Trojan Horse spyware called "Stealer." Stealer snoops on infected computers by keylogging, taking screenshots, gathering system information (IP addresses, usernames, hostnames, open ports, installed applications), collecting email and instant messaging information, and collecting browser-based information such as login credentials, browsing history, cookies and bookmarks.

For all its sophistication, Iranian fingerprints were not difficult to find as Stealer was set to Iran Standard Time (which is uniquely three and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time) and had a Persian-language setting.

Submission + - Why tech activists must become campaign finance reform activists (nathanmarz.com)

Funksaw writes: In a blog post called: 'Why we in tech must support Lawrence Lessig', former Twitter engineer Nathan Marz makes the argument that technological issues, such as net neutrality, broadband monopolies, and extended copyrights, can't be addressed until campaign finance reforms are enacted, and that initiatives such as Lawrence Lessig's Mayday PAC need to be supported. FTA:

This issue is so important and touches so many aspects of our society that I believe it's our duty as citizens to fight for change any way we can. We have to support people who are working day and night on this, who have excellent ideas on how to achieve reform.


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