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Comment Interesting but... (Score 1) 139

At least to me, the way this post comes across is a bit.. attention seeking?

Ok, while sending your data unencrypted (and this is apparently the worst thing he found looking at 230+ apps.. I am surprised none of these apps store credentials unencrypted on the phones, etc?), we are looking at a few more hurdles than just getting a fake id.

Especially if you consider international flights, if you can get a hold of a passport that checks out in customs _and_ in the name of the southwest account holders name, then the ticket part should be doable too

Comment Depends on your applications? (Score 1) 543

The amount of RAM you have, asides from maxing it out for no good reason, is after all up to the needs of the applications you run.

I've got a dual boot machine with 8GB of RAM; when I run Linux for my day-to-day surfing, adminning, etc then most of that memory is completely wasted (except *cough* possibly partially used by firefox...).
That is of course until I have to start 2-3 virtualbox instances running e.g. Win XP/Win 7/whatev to try something I've built out in different versions of web browsers.

Then there's many other workloads to consider... I boot in to windows natively whenever I need to run pshop cs5 which generally eats RAM like hotcakes...

Comment WiFi access points, meshing and user auth (Score 2) 300

Hi,

Right this is only going from personal experience. At work we've bought UniFi access points.
Not to plug it overly but the roaming for clients between access points and easy provisioning system is a treat including the handling of the "guest" network with user/pass sign-on in the browser.

As far as cabling etc goes if you've got any largeish distance to cover then a simple wifi bridge should do the trick?

All of this of course depends on the amount of clients you are expecting to be online at one given time on the network. If you want to use this as an meshed network then you will obviously get a higher latency the further you go from the core node.
The above example would not be suitable for a very large hotel, and if you want to cover large outside areas then the antennas will cost a few buck not just in hardware but testing coverage / installation.

Games

The Brilliance of Dwarf Fortress 104

The NY Times is running a story about Dwarf Fortress, an independently produced, ASCII-rendered fantasy game that thrives on its own uniqueness and has influenced countless other game developers (and runs on Linux). Quoting: "Though it may seem ungainly at first, the game’s interface — rendered in what are known as extended ASCII characters — has a sparse elegance. As seasons change, trees, represented by various symbols, shift from green to yellow. Goblins’ eyes appear as red quotation marks; if you shoot out an eye with an arrow, the symbol becomes an apostrophe. On a message board, one fan likened the ASCII experience in Dwarf Fortress to the immersive pleasures of reading a book: 'You can let your imagination fill in the gaps.' The community that has arisen around Dwarf Fortress is remarkable. Fans maintain an extensive wiki, which remains the game’s best (and, effectively, only) instruction manual, and which even Tarn and Zach admit to consulting. ... Perhaps most fascinating are the stories that fans share online, recounting their dwarven travails in detailed and sometimes illustrated narratives. In a 2006 saga, called Boatmurdered, fans passed around a single fortress — one player would save a game, send the file to another player and so on, relay-race style — while documenting its colorful descent into oblivion."

Submission + - Gene Mapping to be offered on the NHS

Ravenscroftj writes: A complete coincidence with the 1000 Genomes Project Test Data Release; the NHS, the body that runs the UK's public health service, have started mapping Genomes on individual patients in search of per-patient cures. This is needless to say, a free service to UK citizens. According to the BBC News website, "London's Royal Brompton Hospital said the project would give doctors a better understanding of the inherited factors that help trigger heart disease... In all 10,000 patients will have their genes sequenced at the Royal Brompton Hospital, which specialises in the treatment of heart and lung conditions, over the next 10 years. "

Comment More important (Score 1) 84

"[...]they're more important than the [two vulnerabilities] that Microsoft did disclose,' said Arce. 'That means [system] administrators may end up making the wrong decisions about applying the update."

Right, there's been a fair few times where I've not applied security patches "right away" for simple reasons; like they did not affect the way my system was set up.
But in the end I am hoping "[...]end up making the wrong decisions about applying the update" is talking about a time aspect rather than if-at-all... (this should explain itself)

Then that they did not declare this in their patch info is a whole other issue; Microsoft are certainly not the only ones who have a history of not doing so...

Comment Re:"ATM's are pretty uninteresting" (Score 1) 181

> Imagine if you tell your partner "at 2am it's gonna dispense all the money, make sure you're standing there with a big bag to catch it all".

Sure, that is not my main point, however valid :) A big bag of cash is of course nice, but what you can perhaps access without being detected for some time, is another point. Hence the importance of the attack vector [in my point].

An empty ATM machine with no logs; where the money went to should sound off immediate alarm bells...

Fair game if you empty half a country's machines in one night, but the risk of doing that might outweigh other options...

Comment ATM Security (Score 2, Insightful) 181

I live in Europe, during my time having all sorts of cards that works in ATM's I've came to the conclusion that.. Most of them seem to run Windows (I've seen more BSOD's than its decent to mention).
I'm not wanting to get in to a debate about Windows security here; rather the point that there are plenty of rootkits for any given platform on the go today.

The interesting point would be the actual attack vector; getting in to a bank's internal network to access the ATM nodes would mean (from my point of view) that the ATM's are pretty uninteresting, however what else might lurk on the bank's network would be worth a lot more? On the other hand, if you could perform the "hack" quickly with just regular customer access to the machine, that'd be interesting... (thinking of terminator movie here...) ;)

According to my bank balance that is my... well, I've no cents left, damn recession!

Comment Low power server / clusters? (Score 5, Interesting) 253

I can see myself using an ARM-based linux server in the home.

If they get proper business support from some largeish vendor pushing out rack machines then that'd be great too. All the servers I admin currently run x86 from Intel. Saying that, when idling, they're not terribly power hungry; but arm boxes should be a lot better.

Lowering power consumption is never a bad idea for your bottom line, as long as the performance-per-watt is acceptable. The first thing I thought was that it would be useful for larger clusters of machines if the performance isn't on-par with power6/x86 server chips. At the end of the day the deal breaker will be just how much performance you can get out of their server chips, which will affect what type of environment they're suitable for.

Comment What I've experienced with PS store (Score 2, Interesting) 240

Well, its a funny thing actually.

I've downloaded items (like game maps, etc) using my friends accounts on MY ps3.
While I've not bought these items I've had access to them when the machine isn't logged in to their ps network account (nor mine, e.g. just logged in locally to my user).

Which basically means free game extras.. (still, paying £40 for a game then £2-5 for 6-7 extra maps is a ripoff in my book, and yes I know, its entirely optional to purchase the extra content, no flames please)

Note: The accounts aren't linked per say. I believe there's some "family" account thingy where you can share some (or all?) purchases between linked ps3 accounts.

Comment "at least without hiring outside help" - (Score 1) 124

.. This statement is interesting.
A lot of the e-commerce software you can get for free is written in common web development languages, e.g. Perl/PHP/Ruby/ASP.
So is this a question of lacking in-house competence from a SMB perspective? Most OSS e-commerce packages I've used have been a breeze to install, never mind to customize.

The truth to the statement is that some things are, at best, poorly documented. But if worst comes to worst, track down the bit of script you need to know (how it works) and read the code?

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