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Comment Re:Law of unintended consequences... (Score 1) 33

Everyone wants to throw their hands up, powerless to do anything real about the big slurp data problem because we feel we're powerless against our government, lest we be traitors, seditionists, or get put on a no-fly list. Blacklisted, barred, or simply fucked in the data mines.

The Koch Bros are financing even more, see http://www.politico.com/story/... for questions, so that we can all be individually profiled beyond what we're already hooked to.

Breaches and security can't hold back the lakes and oceans of data we're amassing and hoarding, and sooner or later (if it hasn't been already), various of your personal events will be conflated to something that puts you on a radar screen somewhere. Liberty is in the crapper, and the hacker groups are financed by taxpayers, who are unwitting or willfully ignorant of the influence of big money on their legislatures. Behavior analysis will be light and soft, but the consequences deep. Just wait and see.

Comment Re:RFID/card scanner (Score 1) 127

I'd agree with this. There comes a point where people will avoid 2Fa if it's too complex. Sometimes it just means adding nagware, timeouts, and WTFs if auth isn't congruent. And sometimes weird legal dept senses of regulatory compliance enter in, too. Indeed that might be the best place to start if audit/compliance is a side-output of the process.

Comment Re:RFID/card scanner (Score 1) 127

Use a YubiKey and OAuth APIs. Neat and clean, and although it can be spoofed, it's not easy to do, and is as good as you get without easy to screw up "bio-authentication" infrastructure. You keep it on your badge fob, and it squirts a string as a single-key USB keyboard. Grab the string, use it with OAuth or as an identifier, and be on your way with sanity.

Comment Re:Not the holder's money (Score 1) 98

Unlikely.

The university can fine you for parking violations, smoking where you're not supposed to, being in wanton possession of whatever.

Should they want to turn your name over to another entity with whom you've performed allegedly bad behaviour, they can do that. Or not, should it suit them.

Comment Re:morality a hindrance or help? (Score 1) 197

Ends justifying the means gives rise to lots of bad stuff. I'll avoid politics as a citation. Instead, I'll choose organizations that focus on morality, their customers, their employees, as well as their investors.

In each case, if you pick amoral customers, employees, or investors, any one of the three will bring you down, because each has a greed stake, rather than a value stake, in the outcome of the working machine that is the organization.

Those managing the organization can pick moral or amoral, each with decidedly different outcomes. Tossing aside morality for short periods will upset the equations of long term success. If you're going for short term success, then it's your soul that counts. If you have one.

Comment Re:Early adopters (Score 4, Insightful) 154

The fulcrum of backlash against the device in an almost uniform, vehement, and studied way exposing Google's complete disdain for respect of privacy might have something to do with it as well. Pulling back the Oz Curtain and exposing that Google's business model is the complete ownership of your personal information for their profit might be just too much advance with just one product.

Comment Re:What's the Difference? (Score 1) 102

There's also a HUGE ecosystem, very profitable, that after two dozen years, actually works-- expensive as it is. Oracle DBAs and SQL coders aren't the sort of person that's after the latest "edgy" new db scheme.

I would venture that most of them don't like JSON, have no clue for hadoop, and are the online/never-fail sorts. They're not going to use REST against an AJAX app, are clueless about puppet, and believe in middleware. Not gonna get them to fix what they perceive as not-broken.

There is a small amount of wisdom in this philosophy, but like COBOL, mainframes/minis, and AS/400s/AIX, time will eventually pass them by, slowly, but unerringly, IMHO.

Comment Re:CYA (Score 1) 127

And if either the banks, the retailers, and/or any member of the supply chain gave up a single point in transactions TO UPGRADE THEIR SECURITY INFRASTRUCTURE and SELF POLICE, then government interaction would be unnecessary and consumer safety would soar.

It's always someone else's problem, and someone else needs to eat the costs. So crappy POS, putting your fingers in your ears when IT warns you that your systems are about to explode, be breached, or become a PR nightmare, are all OK because it's the other guy's problem, never your own.

Fuck that.

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