(sorry, forgot we are in HTML-land for a moment there, I frequent markdown-ville more these days: in the above " commented on " should have been "<friend> commented on <thing>")

To top it off when someone posts such a comment via facebook their contacts (who might be similarly minded) sometimes get a " commented on " notification which might pique their interest and bring them in to spout more of the same vitriol in defense of their friend (or just a show of solidarity).

Ern, is there any particular reason you brought those thoughs up? The thread you;ve joined is talking about the reviews people leave on sports articles.

So is spouting hate or other language people find offensive. Making something illegal does not automatically stop people from doing it, especially without enforcement. What are facebook gonig to do? Ban the acconut? Too late, the posts have already been made. Call the authorities? They likely don't have sufficient evidence and even if they did I doubt any enforcement personage is going to consider it really worth their time. Sue? Certainly not worth the cost of their lawyer's time.

Not in the same sense as the examples given by the posts above, from the point of view of the man on the street. /. manages to maintain a certain amount of its "community spirit" so people are willing to put that little bit of effort in, but having navigated through the LA Times paywal people are not going to want to give even that much extra ("I'm paying for this, someone else should be making sure it is worth me paying for" would be a common thought on the matter).

Then again epopel spend time making reviews on Amazon and the like (the good reviews that is: the bad ones are peope with an axe to grind so that isn't quite the same) so perhaps it could work, though they'd still have the problem of the moderation being "off message" and to avoid that they'd be back to paying someone (thsi time paying them to moderate the moderators).

That works for many thing, but not games with online interaction or access to other online resource. While some will ignore Steam once lanuched and implement their own communication to the outside worlds, some will expect you to reconnect your Steam account before enabling online features (or running at all).

If the company has a policy of not permitting social media sites like facebook to be used on-site (because they have geniune security concerns that mean they want strong control on communication from withing the company, or they are just grumpy old fuddy duddies that don't want anyone else to have a good time) then this appearing will be a red flag - it may be decided that the update can not go in until the change has been reviewed by a security team to make sure it does not circumvent their blocks in any way (intentionally or otherwise), that review could be delayed behind a pile of higher priorities, and older versions of firefox pulled from desktops due to not being the latest and therefore possibly not contained all the latest security updates.

Do you know how hard it is, to this very day, to get some companies to take of the blinkers long enough to take half a look at considering anything other than Internet Explorer onto their machines? This could change their minds back.

(yes, I know IE10 is actually said to be pretty decent, many people have already told me, but I'm so bitter about the years of stagnation caused by "classic" IE that I'll not be using it by choice any time soon)

Those provisions don't neccesarly defend against a bad actor in the DC, so in some high security situations allowing this to exist is a breach of security clauses in service provision contracts. Securioty in dpeth and all that.

If the backdoor existed for customer service reasons, the customer would be told about it rather than HP having to admit it exists only after someone spotted it and went public.

This could mean we can't consider purchasing HP equipment and have to get rid of any we already have - our contracts with some of our clients (banks, a police force or two, and so forth) demand that every one working for our company and any third party that has access to our equipment in any way is fully background checked. If there are accounts on there for which we don't control the credentials then we can not give them assurances that such due diligence clauses are satisfied. While needing network access is a mitigating factor limiting opportunities to abuse this hole, may not satisfy such contract clauses as we need to account for breaks in security elsewhere in our provisions (theft of equipment, unexpectedly clueless or gruntle-less individuals in the DC, ...).

TFS doesn't say the user has to activate it, just they they intend to gain permission before using it. This might be by means of it being disabled until the user takes action to allow access, but the wording does not explicitly say that and if it is open aside from proper firewalling and other provisions it might be exploitable by a bad actor with your DC.

The key concern from my PoV is more that it exists but was "hidden", rather than what it actually does. It causes the appropriately paranoid to ask "what else is in there that we do not know about?". While there is an assurance that it does not allow access to data they confirm it allows enough access to be used for DoS purposes and as the feature was not previously documented at all (hidden, to take a more negative spin on "not documented") I would prefer some 3rd party confirmation before taking that statement as any sort of assurance.

There are a few reasons more likely than the simply no longer supporting XP at all:

* Perhaps this release changes nothing that is relevant to XP. Perhaps all the changes are in codepaths only touched under DX10 or later which is irrelevant to XP.

* Perhaps the early testing was done on limited systems. OK so it is odd for a platform to be ignored in beta tests, but I perhaps if the expected impact on XP is low or zero (see above) they didn't publically release the alpha for XP and someone forgot to update the release details for the beta.

... to state two.


While XP's market share is dropping rapidly now, there are still plenty of home installs out there - plenty enough that ATI/AMD aren't going to risk creating uproar by not supporting them until the official death date from MS (April next year).

But who truthfully stays away from the porn?!

Though I'm with you on the 'king memes.

I presume the assumption is that you'd use it as an inconvenient cycle when the battery power got low, or for parts of your journey where being off the ground would be even less safe (built up areas with many over-head communication and power lines, for instance).

First though: I need one of them.

Second thoughts: I wonder how many minutes it would take before I killed myself with it, and how many innocent lives I'd take with me?

Definitely. As far as is possible we should stop users accidentally doing something stupid by making sure that they can only do the right things. This is not always practical though as for a start there are factors outside our control (for the password example we can't control how the user might store and potentially distribute their credentials in other services (password managers) or in the real works (bits of paper)).

I can't see a way that could be implemented which is not essentially an attempt to enumerate the bad, which is never a good idea. Even if it was for the most part, some of the things that make lousy passwords are again well out of our control: there is no way in software "don't use the same credentials for everything" can be enforced.

Security awareness is a lot more than just properly managing passwords and such - there are real world interactions that users need to be aware of so some training is definitely needed no matter how close to perfect the security in your applications is.

Definitely though this isn't legislation (i.e. governement dictated and legally enforced), it is a much more localised preference about what goes on in a particulat home/business/whatever. It is more akin to banning someone playing loud music in the corner of the pub or not letting someone back in your garden unless they promise not to urinate on the rabbit like they did last time.

Perfectly normal human hypocrasy I think. For what it is worth I have no problem with them protecting their business model by legal and moral means, my problem is that when those means fail they pervert the legal system in a morally questionable way - they are hypocrits too in that they are quite happy to stoop very very low in order to defend their relatively unchangfing view of the world that is changing (changes that some low people, mentioning no myselfs in particular, might sometimes use to borrow some bits).

I for one have no problem with monitoring with CCTV and such, especially in places where problems are known to happen (pubs full of people some of which have had a bit too much, alley ways, carparks, ...), though I wounldn't want uncrontrolled individuals monitoring me as quite franky I don't really trust the average member of the general public. Of course the people monitoring that CCTV and it's stored output can also be questionable but you have to trust (and sometimes test) that relevant precautions/checks/balances exist and are working to prevent bad apples upsetting the cart as much as practically possible.

Definitely. I'm lucky that my employer is happy with me being a human with a few flaws one of which being a rather strong liking for social gatherings involving alcohol (heck, my manager is often there, as we are a company that tries to get along socially as well as professionally where possible and he is entertaining company). As long as what you do in your personal life does not affect your performance at your job or result in you otherwise somehow damaging your company or its reputation it should be no concern of your employer or potential employer (there are some professions where your private behaviour can legitimately be considered though, such as thoughs were you are a part of the company's public image or jobs like being a police officer (who, in the UK at least, are never officially off duty as they are warrented to take action on behalf of the law at any time rather than their arrest rights being contracted to specific hours)). Unfortunately we live in an imperfect world full of imperfect people who will make judgements based on infomation recorded in this manner and distributed accidentally or with the intention of doing harm - it isn't practical to expect legislation (or common sense) to fix that any more than it can fix the privacy issues in the first place. I'm not sure how we can, as a society, fix that.