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Comment Re:NYPD (Score 1) 135

If any of the edits were deliberately false,

...that would be very troubling, but what if they were corrections to edits by people with even more bias?

Who cares? Bias people are allowed to sit around and post any crap they like on their own time and equipment. Even employees of private companies should be able to do crap like this if there employer wants them to.

With public servants this is different though as they all technically work for us, the public. Sitting around, making edits to wikipedia entries detailing their own actions (real or alleged) is not something that most of the public would like to see officers doing. Maybe if they did less of this and more actual policing our streets would be a little safer.

Comment Re:The majority? (Score 1) 277

Yeah, most people don't care. Or think they don't. They still have to waste time adjusting to it, though.

Only morning people actually like it, because they get to be extra smug for the following week while their co-workers, friends, and neighbors adjust.

As someone who has spent my whole life living under a system of DST I actually quite like it. Here in the UK it means that for the winter months i do not have to wake up while it is still pitch black outside in order to get to work for 8:30. It does mean it is dark when I am driving home but who cares then? it probably would be anyway actually as with the clock change it gets dark at about 4ish.

As to getting used to it? Wow, it is only one Saturday night that is either longer or shorter, half the time I don't even notice now as all my clocks just switch over automatically and I often get varying amount of sleep each night due to things like staying watching crap on TV or playing video games. My days of having a regimented bedtime that I had to stick to every night went away about 30 years ago. I find it difficult to believe that too many people really have trouble adjusting to this.

Comment Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In (Score 1) 471

Are you new to this industry, or just pushing an agenda?

No, not new to the industry being now in my late thirties and having worked for the last decade as and server admin and developer. Don't really have an agenda as I have moved into pure development now and have no interest in moving back to being a sysadmin as I have a family now and the out of hours on call bit of being a sysadmin sucks.

Deployment numbers certainly do NOT indicate stability - 20 years of Windows' dominance is your counter-evidence there - at best, it's implied.

You say that but in my last sysadmin role I was responsible for supporting a pair of IIS servers we needed to serve certain crap developed for windows (needed to be case insensitive, and had occasional chunks of ASP). Windows 2003 Server was rock solid in this regard and managed similar uptimes to apache which we used for most stuff.

MS desktop offerings might be utter shit without a reboot but I was pleasantly surprised by IIS. I would still never choose to use again out of principle though as do I think open source is a good thing.

We've already started the process of migrating our infrastructure from Ubuntu Server LTSes back to FreeBSD.

Jesus, why would you even think about using Ubuntu in a server anyway? Everywhere I ever worked or heard of used RHEL, Centos or occasionally Debian. Since I discovered Mint I would not even waste my time using Ubuntu on a desktop.

Comment Re:Ain't freedom a bitch... (Score 1, Insightful) 551

What you're doing, though, is just to flame him... for speaking his mind... while trying to accuse him of being against the speaking of minds.

His mind, in this case is that a piece of free software should be less functional, in order to lock you in to not using LLVM if you use the Emacs debugger, just because both separate packages are from the GNU stable. This seems remarkable similar to the sort of tactic Microsoft has been accused of for years.

Comment Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In (Score 1) 471

If that were the only reason people didn't like/want/trust it, you might have a point. Considering that the "crash" complaint is one of the more minor ones, however, it just comes across as ignoring the legitimate problems and concerns for the sake of keeping it a politicized issue and/or delusions of persecution.

But equally, thousands of companies now trust systemd to run enterprise servers since centos or RHEL is pretty much the defacto linux distribution in this regard. The fact that this is the case does indicate that it must be pretty stable when correctly configured.

If there are bugs in systemd, then report them and maybe even help diagnose them to make it better. It has huge traction now so there is zero chance of it disappearing.

Comment Re:My FreeBSD Report: Four Months In (Score 1) 471

I concur, I have been using Fedora for quite a few years and have never had a problem with systemd.

While you may have a point that judging it based on testing branch distros may be a bit unfair, "it doesn't crash as much as people say" isn't much of a selling point.

What about "people keep saying it crashes but they are making it up or blaming it when the fault is somewhere else just because they hate the developer and do not agree with the reason for its development"?

Comment Re:It all comes down to payroll (Score 1) 271

Hire a new FTE programmer/H1B programmer for 50% of the fired employee's salary = 50% savings.

In my experience most H1B programmers are not actually that much cheaper to hire that people already here. The real problem is that too many young geeks in the developed world are arrogant, over entitled assholes who are a pain to work with. Whereas generally that guy or girl from India or eastern europe is polite, professional and happy to work hard but without throwing a childish hissy fit when they don't get everything their own way. They just want to go to work and get paid.

Also, the best code is always produced by a team of developers who all practice things like pair programming and peer code review (every single commit should be reviewed by another member of the team). In that environment, not being an arrogant dick matters more than anything.

Comment Re:Yep it is a scam (Score 2, Interesting) 667

And not having access to pesticides like DDT.

Nope. The real problem is that DDT is no longer effective against mosquitos in many parts of the world as they have evolved to be immune to it. The stuff that is still effective against them is so damn toxic that it has to be used carefully in case too much gets into drinking water, makes it into the food chain in other ways or even just poisons the rivers and kills all the fish on its way to the sea.

Comment Re:No. (Score 1) 562

If the court approves, they can just go and obtain the computers. That is already solved.

They want to listen in, not shut the conversation down so storming in anywhere armed with your court order is not a solution.

So many people here are ranting on about this but what he said is actually 100% reasonable in that he stipulated the government needing a court order. The truth is that if they can stand in front of a judge and convince him you are a legitimate target then you have very little expectation of privacy. Based on that judges say so they can legally sneak in to your home and plant listening equipment if they have information that indicates they have a chance of recording you discussing engaging in illegal activities.

A few years ago things were much simpler for them, they could ask a judge nicely and he could order a tap your phone line. Nowadays though, that does not help them as much as it used to. They can take that warrant to your ISP, get full access to all your email, and still be none the wiser about what you are discussing if you have decent encryption.

If some could come up with a perfect solution to this problem where a judge could order something decrypted and only then could government use their magic key to access it then I personally would have no problem with it, providing a few other safeguards were also in place, such as full disclosure in the case that nothing is found after 6 months or a year or something. Obviously, this magic key would also have to be bulletproof so that there was no possible other way that government or anyone else could decrypt it.

The problem is that this perfect solution is is not what government goes looking for, instead they always seem to look for something that provides us no safeguards whatsoever. So even if it is possible (which I personally doubt anyway), there is sod all chance of them ever coming up with it and if anyone else does I can seem them actually supporting it.

Comment Re:Shouldn't this be a civil case? (Score 1) 86

Then a free market capitalist consumer would be behooved to make it increasingly difficult for such unwanted additional DRM systems to exist in their market by any peaceful means neccesary, such as using that system as frequently as possible to make its operating cost higher, right?

Quite right, I would actually consider that a perfectly legitimate form of protest providing the requests were coming from actual consumers who had paid for said product. You have to actually buy something in order to be a legitimate consumer.

I bet this is not what this retard was doing though, he was most likely triggering off thousands of illegitimate calls from PC's emulating the DRM system not from consoles owned by people who had bought a game.

Also, it is worth bearing in mind that some consumers out there who buy games (like me) actually like things like DRM because I do not see why some other free loading little shit should get free access to something that I pay my hard earned wages for. If you can't afford something like a game or DVD, you should go without it as they are luxury items anyway.

Comment Re:Shouldn't this be a civil case? (Score 4, Insightful) 86

No, missuse of a computer system is a criminal offence

Generally, misusing your own computer system is not a criminal offense unless you really go to extremes. If I set my router to ping flood Sony or Microsoft all day long that generally is not a criminal offense. Previously it was said that this "Lizard Squad" attack was done by a group of people, until we have an idea of how many people were in said "squad" it will be really hard to say whether or not any one person had a meaningful role individually.

Here in the UK it probably doesn't really matter what you were actually doing, if your INTENT was to stop or prevent people engaging in a lawful activity then that is most likely a criminal offence. This is generally how our laws are written then we just let juries sort it out.

In this case we passed a law in 2006 called the Police And Justice Act. Here is an old register article about it: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

Our legal system generally has intent woven into its fabric at a far deeper level than in the US so that if the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service) feel there is a reasonable likelihood of them being able to convince a jury that an individuals intent was malicious then they can drag you through the courts. In this case whether this retard is charged will probably depend on how clean his PC's were when they raided him.

You might note that I have zero sympathy for him, being susceptible to getting DDOS'd is not really a security issue worth exposing. If you throw enough traffic from a bot-net at an awful lot of sites they will go down. The simple truth is that when companies provision any sort of on-line infrastructure or offering you look and how much load it is expected to be under during normal operation then plan from there by adding a certain safety margin. In this case it sounds like this service was only going to be called each time a game was started so creating far more load then this by lots of bots pretending to start games over and over again thousands of times a minute was miles away from the intended traffic volumes.

I know some people say this vulnerability never should have existed as this phoning home is a form of DRM and this should not happen but the probably is that without it there are an awful lot of people out there who just freeload and play stuff without paying. Of course companies are going to try an make this difficult in order to stay in business, that is what capitalism dictates they must do in order to maximise shareholder returns.

I hope this guy also realises that he has utterly screwed over any chance he had in life of actually becoming a real paid security researcher with this stupid stunt. With a prior arrest on public record like this he is just not worth the risk, especially as he has not really showed any special technical skills. He will be lucky to get any sort of computer work for the next 10 years.

Comment Re:and that's how we got the world of FIREFLY (Score 1) 265

seriously though, the Chinese can destroy our country without setting a single boot on the ground simply through economic measures.

The problem is that would also destroy them economically at the same time as they require US consumers to buy all the crap they produce. China keep their own currency artificially low just to keep their exports going.

Comment Re:About Fucking Time (Score 1) 435

You will note in the 2012 presidential election, the majority of Cuban Americans in South Florida voted for Obama; and he carried Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties with huge margins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

The GOP's hold on South Florida is broken; it was primarily among older Cuban who came over during the revolution. This issue has been less polarizing for their children and grandchildren. Indeed, 3rd and 4th generation Cuban-Americans have real no intention of moving back to the island and view their grandparent's property claims as a lost cause.

Add to that they might like to visit the place for a cheap holiday.

Comment Re:Under US Jurisdiction? (Score 2) 281

Long ago for that AC to forget about it.

And in a related note: If we have to discuss if and how to avoid supporting law enforcement, something went really, really wrong.

Exactly.

Who gives a shit about storing your data with google or anyone else, at this point we should be storming the Pentagon / White House / Senate en masse to demand and take real freedom. There is no terrorist threat that actually warrants this level of intrusion, our own police seem to be better at killing defenceless citizens than terrorists anyway over the last year.

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