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Submission + - Emergency Broadcast System Coming to Cell Phones (aolnews.com) 1

gambit3 writes: The Emergency Broadcast System that interrupts TV programming in times of crisis is jumping to a new format where it might be able to reach you better — on your cell phone. The communications company Alcatel-Lucent announced Tuesday that it's creating a Broadcast Message Center that will allow government agencies to send cell phone users specific information in the event of a local, state or national emergency. It will be similar to the TV alerts in that the text messages will be geographically targeted for areas where a tornado alert or major road closure, for example, is in effect.

Comment Just dealt with this this week (Score 1) 108

This site is pretty straight forward: http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com/ - people can score companies based on the customer service they provide. Facebook / markmonitor.com decide for some reason that it infringes on their trademark based on this page: http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com/Facebook Which leads to the following big waste of time/resources simply to tell their legal team to leave them alone: 1) they receive the complaint 2) they contact their registrar http://www.namesilo.com/ to find out what problems if any they have with their domain 3) NameSilo recommends some trademark attorney and 4) the attorney files a response (http://www.customerservicescoreboard.com/images/CustomerServiceScoreboard_Facebook_Response.pdf) which more or less tells Facebook to please leave them alone and that their trademark infringement case is baseless. Facebook ended up dropping the threat. But this goes to show you how ridiculous the situation has become. Sites like Facebook employ services like Markmonitor.com to basically send out thousands of trademark and/or dmca threats.

Comment The real shame here.... (Score 1) 646

Is that they want to go after application layer security as well according to the NYTimes article (They want it to include "Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception."). If that is the case, then this is a direct assault on the right to privacy for all US citizens. Even worse is that it is being touted as a way to catch the bad guys instead of a means to obtain the right to spy on the general population. Any self respecting bad guy will use application layer encryption (i.e. PGP etc.) that works independent of the transport encryption. Do you really think bad guys are going to use software that plays by the rules this law creates?

If this law also goes after application layer security - in other words, it tries to make it illegal to make/use software to enforce your own privacy - then this is a HUGE problem and we all need to act to help inform those around us who don't understand the repercussions of such a law. Right now we have the right to make/use software that protects our privacy. Do you want to live in a country that has removed this right in the name of protecting its citizenry from the evil doers?

Comment Re:IMAP is a protocol, not a file format (Score 1) 385

I did not assert it was a format. As far as the format, I recommend Maildir++, which when coupled with Dovecot (the IMAP server I recommended) does exactly what you wrote "You could opt for MIME messages in a directory structure and use some fulltext index software (Google desktop, Apache Lucene etc.) You can probably find software that creates index lists (like by sender / subject / date)"

Comment Good IMAP Server (Score 5, Informative) 385

If this is really important to you, and you want it all to work across multiple workstations/OSes, your best bet will be to store it all in IMAP. If you have the means and motivation to run this yourself, I would recommend Dovecot. If you don't have the means and motivation, then you can use a service like Gmail to run your IMAP although you give up certain freedoms in doing so. For example, I use Dovecot coupled with Maildir++ as the physical storage format - as a result I can (if I wanted to) change to any email client I wish very quickly, use different email clients at the same time, etc.

Comment How does this differ from glusterfs? (Score 2, Interesting) 132

I am not real familiar with ceph and after going through the pain to learn more about glusterfs (http://www.gluster.org/) only to learn that gluster was not quite ready for primetime (this was about 6 month ago - may have changed), I am a bit skeptical. Anyone know the main differences between ceph and glusterfs (besides that glusterfs can run in userspace)?

Comment Chrome users like flash more than others it seems (Score 1) 168

Comparing this report (which shows flash plugin usage within chrome users) to this report (which shows general flash plugin usage) - it seems only 2% of chrome users have no flash plugin compared to 3.9% across all browsers.

Depending on how you look at it, this is either a sign chrome users don't need additional help getting flash installed or that google is simply catering to their users who have a special affinity for the flash plugin - you decide.

My guess would be this is some special strategic bond between Adobe and Google to further push flash since silverlight is by far the fastest growing plugin technology - but that growth is partially tied to the growth of Windows 7 which comes with silverlight.

Comment Change Permissions on Flash Cookie Directory (Score 1) 192

A while back I got tired of everybody tracking me online so I cracked down on permanent browser storage. I ended up getting rid of all cookies on browser close and ran these commands:

rm -rf ~/.macromedia/Flash_Player/*
rm -rf ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/*

With sudo:
chown -R root.root /home/user/.macromedia /home/user/.adobe/Flash_Player/
chmod -R 0600 /home/user/.macromedia /home/user/.adobe/Flash_Player/

The flash cookie problem was solved and I have not noticed anything has changed. Of course, I don't really see much flash other than flash ads - so it might break some things I am unaware of.

On windows the same directories are stored elsewhere - but the same overall technique should work fine I would think.

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