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Comment There are SERIOUS issues that make drones insecure (Score 1) 74

by Futurepower(R) (#49450679) Attached to: Amazon Gets Approval To Test New Delivery Drones
Quoting the parent comment: "You aren't even a little bit clever and you clearly don't know enough about the state of drones to start making bullshit claims about making it crash."

There is a huge social cost to being disrespectful.

Also, there are SERIOUS issues that make drones insecure. The comment just above this one lists some of them. Others:

1) RFI, Radio Frequency Interference: Someone is outside on the street welding something using an electric welder. Electric welding generates interference on ALL frequencies. The drone receives nothing but noise.

It is not necessary to list some of the places a drone should not land.

2) Drone lands, dog jumps out of the bushes and tackles the drone. Dog thinks someone has thrown an extra large frisbee. Or, dog has been trained to attack all intruders. Drone is damaged beyond repair.

3) It's rare, it happens maybe only once or twice a day, but sometimes there are HUGE gusts of wind. A crash into a tree could result in a drone dropping to the ground and killing someone.

4) Someone shoots at a drone with a BB gun. Drone crashes.

Many more issues have not been considered.

Submission + - Being Overweight Reduces Dementia Risk (bbc.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: Being overweight cuts the risk of dementia, according to the largest and most precise investigation into the relationship. The researchers were surprised by the findings, which run contrary to current health advice. The team at Oxon Epidemiology and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine analysed medical records from 2 million people aged 55 on average, for up to two decades. Their most conservative analysis showed underweight people had a 39% greater risk of dementia compared with being a normal healthy weight. But those who were overweight had an 18% reduction in dementia, and the figure was 24% reduction for the obese. Any explanation for the protective effect is distinctly lacking. There are some ideas that vitamin D and E deficiencies contribute to dementia and they may be less common in those eating more. Be it any way, let's still not forget that heart disease, stroke, diabetes, some cancers and other diseases are all linked to a bigger waistline. Maybe being slightly overweight is the optimum to strike, if the recent study is to be followed.

Submission + - Social Media Is Ruining Marriage for the Millennial Generation

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Anthony D'Ambrosio writes at USA Today that marriage seems like a pretty simple concept — fall in love and share your life together. Our great grandparents did it, our grandparents followed suit, and for many of us, our parents did it as well. So why is marriage so difficult for the millennial generation? "You want to know why your grandmother and grandfather just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary? Because they weren't scrolling through Instagram worrying about what John ate for dinner. They weren't on Facebook criticizing others. They weren't on vacation sending Snapchats to their friends." According to D'Ambrosio, we've developed relationships with things, not each other. "Ninety-five percent of the personal conversations you have on a daily basis occur through some type of technology. We've removed human emotion from our relationships, and we've replaced it colorful bubbles," writes D'Ambrosio. "We've forgotten how to communicate yet expect healthy marriages. How is it possible to grow and mature together if we barely speak?"

D'Ambrosio writes that another factor is that our desire for attention outweighs our desire to be loved and that social media has given everyone an opportunity to be famous. "Attention you couldn't dream of getting unless you were celebrity is now a selfie away. Post a picture, and thousands of strangers will like it. Wear less clothing, and guess what? More likes," writes D'Ambrosio. "If you want to love someone, stop seeking attention from everyone because you'll never be satisfied with the attention from one person." Finally D'Ambrosio says the loss of privacy has contributed to the demise of marriage. "We've invited strangers into our homes and brought them on dates with us. We've shown them our wardrobe, drove with them in our cars, and we even showed them our bathing suits," writes D'Ambrosio. "The world we live in today has put roadblocks in the way of getting there and living a happy life with someone. Some things are in our control, and unfortunately, others are not."

Submission + - The 'Page 63' Backdoor to Elliptic Curve Cryptography 3

Submitted by CRYPTIS
CRYPTIS writes: The security of Elliptic curve cryptography is facilitated by the perceived 'hard' problem of cracking the Discrete Logarithm Problem (DLP) for any given curve. Historically, for FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards) compliance it was required that your curves conformed to the FIPS186-2 document located at http://csrc.nist.gov/publicati... . Page 63 of this specifies that the 'a' and 'b' elliptic curve domain parameters should conform to the mathematical requirement of c*b^2 = a^3 (mod p).

Interestingly, back in 1982, A. M. Odlyzko, of AT & T Bell Laboratories, published a document entitled “Discrete logarithms in finite fields and their cryptographic significance” ( http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzk... ). Page 63 of this document presents a weak form of the DLP, namely a^3 = b^2*c (mod p).

It seems then, that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), driven in turn by the NSA, have required that compliant curves have this potentially weak form of the DLP built in; merely transposing the layout of the formula in order to obtain what little obfuscation is available with such a short piece of text.

Submission + - DARPA wants software that adapts, lasts over 100 years (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: The program, called Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability by developing the computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust in excess of 100 years.

Comment Being anti-male makes women unhappy. (Score -1, Offtopic) 892

"misogynistic overgeneralization"

Here is a Google Image search: anti-male. Since 1953, there has been in the U.S. a huge amount of hostility aimed toward men.

Read the books by Warren Farrell. For example, Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It or The Myth of Male Power.

"hyper aggressive alpha type" and "tend to view all interpersonal interactions as a contest that they need to win"

I agree exactly with that evaluation. The way to solve the problem of people like that is to do what you do: Recognize the problem and avoid recommending someone like that.

Read this comment below: How will you weed out sociopaths, when a sociopath is at the helm?

Comment Negotiating is necessary. (Score 1) 892

MightyMartian, somewhat above-average Earthman here.

I think the whole situation is better characterized as doing what women in the U.S. often do, make themselves miserable. Underneath her statement is possibly a feeling that she doesn't like talking with men. (If you want to meet women who are, in general, much happier, go to Brazil.)

No negotiating? That's crazy! Negotiating is just talking. When there is good communication, there will be better decisions. To give one small example, maybe there is a clerical error in the human resources department that makes the person being interviewed seem less valuable to the company than he or she really is.

If someone makes exaggerated claims, that person is dishonest. Don't hire a dishonest person. If someone asks for 10% more pay than offered, ask why, and investigate any information that supports the request.

Ellen Pao appears to be another Carly Fiorina. (Look at that terrible photo of Ms. Fiorina.) To me, Ellen Pao seems to lack social sophistication.

Submission + - Google is too slow at clearing crap from the Chrome extension store (betanews.com)

Submitted by Mark Wilson
Mark Wilson writes: Malware is something computer users — and even mobile and tablet owners — are now more aware of than ever. That said, many people do not give a second thought to installing a browser extension to add new features to their most frequently used application. Despite the increased awareness, malware is not something a lot of web users think of in relation to extensions; but they should.

Since the beginning of 2015 — just over three months — Google has already received over 100,000 complaints from Chrome users about "ad injectors" hidden in extensions. Security researchers have also discovered that a popular extension — Webpage Screenshot — includes code that could be used to send browsing history back to a remote server. Google is taking steps to clean up the extension store to try to prevent things like this happening, but security still needs to be tightened up.

Submission + - With H-1B Cap Hit, Zuckerberg and Ballmer-Led Groups Press for More Tech Visas

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With the FY2016 H-1B visa cap reached in the first week of April (only the USCIS knows how many applications were submitted by outsourcing companies and from Bentonville, AR), it's no surprise that groups like Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC and Steve Ballmer's Partnership for a New American Economy Action Fund are pooh-poohing Jesse Jackson's claims that foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs, and promoting the idea that what's really holding back Americans from jobs is a lack of foreign tech workers with H-1B visas. What is kind of strange, though, is the photo of a young black male (his American job presumably created by high-skilled immigrants) that occupies most of the first page of the three-page H-1B Employment Effect "research brief" touted by the groups, which is identical to one that graces the website of a UK memory distributor, except it's been photoshopped from color to civil-rights-era-black-and-white to produce the H-1B Poster Child version. So, do America's tech billionaires need to be reminded that it's not cool to manipulate images to fake racial diversity?

Comment Google has been degrading rapidly. (Score 3, Interesting) 104

by Futurepower(R) (#49425735) Attached to: Google Let Root Certificate For Gmail Expire
wonkey_monkey, I'm guessing you are actually wonkey_human.

Yes, I think I have an explanation. Google has been degrading rapidly. More and more Google is out of control. To me, that is very sad. For years, Google was an amazingly excellent company.

The Google traffic map near Portland, Oregon shows traffic accidents in Seattle, 3 hours away. The design of the text in the upper left corner of Google maps is very poor.

There are many other issues of that nature.

Submission + - Windows 10 Successor Carries Codename 'Redstone' And Will Splash Land In 2016 (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Windows 10 isn't even out the door yet, so what better time than now to talk about its successor? Believe it or not, there's a fair bit of information on it floating around already, with its codename being particularly interesting: Redstone. Following in the footsteps of 'Blue' and 'Threshold', Redstone is an obvious tie-in to Microsoft's purchase of Minecraft, which it snagged from Mojang last year. Redstone is an integral material in the game, used to create simple items like a map or compass as well as logic gates for building electronic devices, like a calculator or automatic doors. The really important news is that we could see Windows Redstone sometime in 2016.

Submission + - The Difference Between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Business Insider reports that Bill Gates gave a perfect explanation of the difference between him and Steve Jobs in the new book on Jobs "Becoming Steve Jobs":

[Jobs] had an expectation of superlative things in his own work and in the products they would create. Steve had a design mind-set. When I get to a hotel room, I don't go, 'Oh, if I had designed this car I would have done this and this.' People like Jony Ive and Steve Jobs are always looking at stuff that way. You know, I look at code and say, 'Okay, this is architected well,' but it's just a different way of understanding the world. His most natural, innate sense was a world-class instinct about whether this or that object met certain standards. He had extremely high standards of what was shit, and what was not shit."

Submission + - Google let root certificate for Gmail expire (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Gr8Apes
Gr8Apes writes: The certificate for Google's intermediate certificate authority expired Saturday The certificate was used to issue Gmail's certificate for SMTP, and the expiration at 11:55am EDT caused many e-mail clients to stop receiving Gmail messages. While the problem affected most Gmail users using PC and mobile mail clients, Web access to Gmail was unaffected. Guess Google Calendar failed to notify someone.

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