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Comment Re:Umm (Score 1) 126

by lordDallan (#34731076) Attached to: Four IT Consultants Charged With $80M NYC Rip-Off
But it must have been a well vetted and efficient plan because Mikey Bloomberg is running NYC and he brings the skills from the business world that cut through government bureaucracy and waste right? RIGHT???

Sorry for the snark, but I just get tired of hearing that business people are so much better at running government and yet when they take over, the same graft and corruption goes on and in the meantime they cut services and raise prices in a way that's punitive to the least among us, usually to justify tax breaks for the most privileged among us.

Comment Re:Wow. Please Slashdot, CORRECT the lies! (Score 1) 1060

by lordDallan (#34476250) Attached to: Wikileaks Founder Arrested In London
Be careful about grouping all news organizations together as "the media". That's the kind of mental shortcut that makes it easy to manipulate public opinion. Someone might say "the media" is in the Obama Administration's pocket? Would they be including Fox? Would they then fallback to the "liberal media"? "The mainstream media"?

I've been reading The New York Times coverage of this story for awhile and I haven't felt like they were against Assange.

I'm not trying to be pedantic or nit-picky here. I think it's very important to not fall prey to oversimplifications that are much too freely used in discussions today. And for the record I have felt like "NBC Nightly News" and the other two major network nightly newscasts seemed strangely against Assange as you so correctly point out.

Submission + - Comcast Outage affects thousands in Mid-West (chicagoist.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A DNS outage affected thousands of Comcast subscribers in the Chicago area, northwest Indiana, southwest Michigan and Minnesota.

Submission + - A Nude Awakening — TSA and privacy (oudaily.com)

Submitted by DIplomatic
DIplomatic writes: The Oklahoma Daily has a terrific, well-written editorial about the current state of airport security. Though the subject has overly-commented on, this article is well worth the read.

          The risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn’t make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly.
          There's no purpose in security if it debases the very life it intends to protect, yet the forced choice one has to make between privacy and travel does just that. If you want to travel, you have a choice between low-tech fondling or high-tech pornography; the choice, therefore, to relegate your fundamental rights in exchange for a plane ticket. Not only does this paradigm presume that one'(TM)s right to privacy is variable contingent on the government's discretion and only respected in places that the government doesn't care to look — but it also ignores that the fundamental right to travel has consistently been upheld by the Supreme Court.
          If we have both the right to privacy and the right to travel, then TSA's newest procedures cannot conceivably be considered legal. The TSAâ½Â's regulations blatantly compromise the former at the expense of the latter, and as time goes on we will soon forget what it meant to have those rights.
Google

Submission + - Google Makes Adobe Vanish with Chrome 8

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Using Google Chrome and can't figure out what-the-heck is wrong with your Adobe PDF documents? You're probably not alone. With the release of Chrome 8 on Thursday, reports the Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro, Adobe Reader and Preview users may be confused by the absence of familiar PDF toolbars and the absence of save, print and rotate buttons, now that Google's built-in PDF reader takes the place of their usual PDF plug-in. Google touts that its PDF viewer is secured in Chrome's sandbox, although the recently-shipped Adobe Reader X also offers sandboxing protection. Some are finding the now-enabled-by-default PDF Viewer to be more of a bug than a feature. 'To disable the Chrome PDF Viewer,' a helpful Googler tells some frustrated users, '1. Type 'about:plugins' into the address bar and hit Enter. 2. Find the entry called 'Chrome PDF Viewer' 3. Click on 'Disable'. Intuitive, no?
Programming

Submission + - 12 Programming Mistakes To Avoid (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
snydeq
snydeq writes: "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner outlines the 12 most common programming mistakes, and how to avoid them. 'Certain programming practices send the majority of developers reaching for their hair upon opening a file that has been exhibiting too much "character." Spend some time in a bar near any tech company, and you'll hear the howls: Why did the programmer use that antiquated structure? Where was the mechanism for defending against attacks from the Web? Wasn't any thought given to what a noob would do with the program?' Wayner writes. From playing it fast and loose, to delegating too much to frameworks, to relying to heavily on magic boxes, to overdetermining the user experience — each programming pitfall is accompanied by its opposing pair, lending further proof that 'programming may in fact be transforming into an art, one that requires a skilled hand and a creative mind to achieve a happy medium between problematic extremes.'"
Security

Submission + - WikiLeaks publishes list of sites US calls "vital" (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by ubermiester
ubermiester writes: CBC News reports that Wikileaks has published "a secret U.S. State Department list of key infrastructure sites in foreign countries ... that Washington considers vital to the national security of the United States." The sites, which include nuclear facilites, mines, dams, undersea cables, factories, etc., were deemed vital because they "could seriously harm the U.S. if they were targeted by terrorists or destroyed by other means." The leaked cable includes the "locations of [British] undersea cables, satellite systems and defence plants." Calling Wikileaks "irresponsible, bordering on criminal", the British Foreign Secretary is quoted as saying "This is the kind of information terrorists are interested in knowing". It is unclear why Wikileaks chose to release this information.
Politics

Submission + - Wikileaks Reveals US Climate Accord Manipulation (guardian.co.uk)

Submitted by ScientiaPotentiaEst
ScientiaPotentiaEst writes: Embassy dispatches show America used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord. The US mounted a secret global diplomatic offensive to overwhelm opposition to the unofficial document that emerged from the ruins of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009.

Submission + - Sites Guilty of Hi-Jacking History (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Gunkerty Jeb
Gunkerty Jeb writes: A recent study launched by the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science to determine the scope of privacy-violating information flows at popular websites shows that popular Web 2.0 applications such as mashups, aggregators, and sophisticated ad targeting are teeming with various kinds of privacy-violating flows. Ultimately the researchers determined that such attacks are not being adequately defended against.

Submission + - Scientists: Concerns with TSA body scan safety (npr.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Leading scientists express urgent concerns over the safety of TSA body scanners. Past safety evaluations have been fundamentally flawed. Read the beginning of the letter:

We are writing to call your attention to serious concerns about the potential health risks of the recently adopted whole body backscatter X-ray airport security scanners. This is an urgent situation as these X-ray scanners are rapidly being implemented as a primary screening step for all air travel passengers.

Our overriding concern is the extent to which the safety of this scanning device has been adequately demonstrated. This can only be determined by a meeting of an impartial panel of experts that would include medical physicists and radiation biologists at which all of the available relevant data is reviewed.

An important consideration is that a large fraction of the population will be subject to the new X-ray scanners and be at potential risk, as discussed below. This raises a number of ‘red flags’. Can we have an urgent second independent evaluation?

Comment Re:This Could Be Cool (Score 1) 256

by lordDallan (#34259522) Attached to: Emergency Broadcast System Coming To Cell Phones
I think that's a bogus scenario. If it's a really severe weather event people aren't going to be outside. If it's a nuclear war, I don't really care about the mob.

I was more thinking something like a systemwide test. And maybe you mean does a panicked stampede sound as cool? Or perhaps "panic stampede" is some kind of new band and in that case I haven't heard them and don't know how cool they sound.

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