And if you're performing illicit activities, wouldn't you want to use a pre-paid credit card for that? Why would you use your official MasterCard, which has you home address listed, reports to credit agencies, has sales records that could be subpoenaed
I also don't get what MasterCard gets out of sucking up to the RIAA et al.
Sure, but what you have right now is multiple points of failure, which is worse. If any of the dumb websites you use (any single one) gets hacked, then the password you use everywhere is useless.
I'd rather sign up with Verisign or somebody, who's entire business is security, who can give me a hardware fob for 2-factor authentication, or via SMS, whatever. If Verisign gets hacked, I just have to fix it in 1 place - at Verisign. With what we have now, these poor schmucks get to go change every account they have. How is that better?
It protects you against automated attacks, but not people. If I saw that your password for Gawker was s3cret4gawker, I could try s3cret4chase, s3cret4usbank, etc for awhile until I got a hit. Chances are you're using the same username in all places too, it's just easier to remember.
So it's better than using the exact same password, but it wouldn't be that hard to figure out the pattern you were using.
Sure, but this looks like a loosing battle. My "good" password pattern that I use for my computer, bank, etc, is 9 characters long. This is definitely approaching the limit of what I can remember, or be bothered to type in all the time. From you post, it sounds like cracking a 9-digit password via rainbow tables is pretty trivial, yeah? As computers get faster and storage gets cheaper, the value of "trivial" gets correspondingly larger, but humans aren't getting any better at remembering passwords.
SecureID may not be the answer (I have a tough time figuring out how to implement it, and few sites support it) but we need something. It's not reasonable to expect people to generate and keep track of dozens of unique passwords for all of the sites they use, especially if the passwords have to be > 12 digits. Breaches like this will keep happening, we need to think about moving beyond username/password for these things.
For now, maybe. But it seems like viewing video online is definitely here to stay. I actually watch much more than 1 movie per week from Netflix, since I like to watch old TV shows pretty regularly. Ideally, I would like to cut the cable completely and watch Netflix/Hulu/etc. Do you think the ISPs could handle it if we all were watching videos that way? If they started upgrading the networks right now, how long would it take them to get to that level?
Just because current speeds are arguably "ok" for most people's current usages doesn't mean the ISPs should stop trying to make it faster. Just getting to the speed that allows medium-quality videos resulted in a bunch of great innovations like YouTube, Hulu, and of course ChatRoulette. If it was even faster, what else could be invented, that we can't even imagine right now?
Also, DNS is for more than just convenience. We used to have various other systems to find the IP address of a host that we knew was out there (Archie?), and now DNS maps human-recallable names to an address.
Let's say the DNS entry for twitter.com was pulled down. What's the IP address for Twitter? I have no idea. Even if I Google it, the Google entry still points me to "http://twitter.com" We nerds could probably figure out a way around it; find somebody that posted the address somewhere, type it in manually, update our hosts file, etc. But to the vast majority of internet users that might be interested, wikileaks.org has effectively disappeared.
Interestingly, when you Google "wikileaks" right now, Google points you to http://213.251.145.96/ I assume they had to hack that somehow, so kudos to Google. Since a lot of people apparently do a search for wherever they want to go rather than entering the URL, this may have less of an effect than the government would want.
Kudos to the Washington Post for putting the survey results up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_11222010.html
Some interesting results (to me). On supporting the new scanners:
64% support, 37% strongly
32% oppose, 18% strongly
So overall it has support from those surveyed, but 45% are in the middle. The survey also asks people how much they fly, so I'd be interested to see how frequency of flying correlates with support of the scanners. I can see that if you fly once a year, you might not care too much. If you get frisked every week in your suit and tie, you may not be so supportive.
The pat-down is more polarized, with 48% saying it's justified, and 50% saying it's not.
70% support profiling
The top 3 criteria for profiling were Personal Behavior, Travel History, and Nationality. For Race and Religion, more people opposed it than supported it, which is refreshing, although there was more support than I would like (40%)
When your livelihood requires that you fly, it's kind of bogus to claim that you are flying voluntarily. On that same argument, you are not "required" to work in a mine, so we really shouldn't force safety standards on mine operators. They can just go work somewhere else, right? Most of us believe that safety standards are a Good Thing overall, although I know some people disagree. Those people generally have not been forced by circumstance to work jobs that really need OSHA standards, so I don't have a lot of patience for that.
The concept that just because you do something of your own volition, you sign away all of your rights, is ridiculous. It's not unreasonable to demand that the TSA only take those steps that are demonstrably effective, and don't cross the line of being gross violations of our rights. It's not unreasonable to expect them to do their jobs better, and not resort to security theater.
When the TSA figures out how to scan ALL of the luggage, not just some of it, without valuables "disappearing", when they take some lessons from countries that have been dealing with actual threats for years, when they are consistent from airport to airport in the SAME COUNTRY, get back to me. Until then, stop poking screaming 6 year olds, stop lying about what your scanners can and cannot do
Here's a question though, sure they have stats now like only 50% of people completing Mass Effect, but how do they know more people used to finish games when those games were nearly always offline and hence they have no way of measuring completion rates of old games?
Dead on. I never totally finished any of the old Mario Brothers games, or Metroid, or Final Fantasy, etc. You could rarely save your place on the NES console; some had a small battery to hold your saved game, some would give you codes you could enter to get you back to where you were, but most did not. Shut off the console, and you would have to start over again. I remember putting sticky notes on my NES "Mom! Please don't turn this off!"
There's no way that more people finished games then, than do now.
This story is the first time I've seen the stupid "read more" link actually do something useful; displaying the second half (!!) of the post, rather than displaying the user's sig.
Also, "only" as much as a chest x-ray is still pretty horrifying. Every time I've gotten an x-ray, they drape a lead-filled shield over my crotch, and then the tech scurries out of the room before turning the beam on. We all know that you're not supposed to get too many doses of this. How often do you typically get an x-ray? Every few years, max?
So now we're supposed to get the same dose, multiple times a year? Do we get a little dose just waiting in line? What if you have to travel each week for work? If you develop carcinoma, can you file for workman's comp?
Yup, I'll opt to have a 19-yo grab my junk. Or not. The whole thing sucks.
The video was taken down from YouTube, but this guy has it for now:
http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1258192/pg1
That was the most heart-wrenching thing I've seen in a long time. The girl wasn't being bad or anything, she was just freaking out that this strange woman was poking her all over.
I'm driving for Christmas this year (12 hours) rather than fly. I want to visit an old friend of the family that lives in Alabama, and I'm in Chicago. I really hope they stop this BS before then. I'm just glad I don't have kids yet, I would probably assault a TSA agent if they did this to my child. You guys would write me in prison, right?
If all else fails, lower your standards.
