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Comment Most people just don't care (Score 1) 601

In 10 years as a software developer, I've had an almost countless number of passwords, credit card numbers, highly sensitive documents, and more sent to me via unencrypted email. Almost on a daily basis.

No matter how hard I try, people just won't use encryption. I managed to convince everyone in the office to use S/MIME, but this lasted about a week before people decided it was too much work.

It's not like they don't understand the risks so much as there doesn't seem to be any 'easy' turnkey systems out there that are cheap or free. S/MIME is included in all major email clients, but it's a pain in the arse to setup - I ended up having to do it for everyone myself.

Personally I think email clients should automatically (without user intervention) generate an s/mime key and sign all outgoing mail, and encrypt all outgoing mail where a signature is known. This way you'd end up encrypting all email without even realizing it. (Of course you'd still require user intervention to copy private keys between your different computers......)

Comment Re:The university deserves it (Score 1) 359

This is a story I've seen plenty of times on projects I've worked on personally.

90% of the time the problem is a client that won't cooperate with developers, don't understand their own requirements, have a constantly moving target, and are difficult to deal with.

I've gotten pretty good at figuring out these clients before we start, and usually just decline the project if I think it's going to be too painful - but you can't pick them all.

Of course this doesn't mean that's what happened in this case, but I'd wager it was a significant factor.

Comment Re:Life Adapts (Score 1) 745

> So where is everybody?

The universe is massive, both in space and *time*.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, the universe almost 14 billion years.

Human civilization has existed for a few tens of thousands, if that. We've had radio technology for around 100 years, and who knows how long until we move on to something else?

It's entirely possible that tens of millions of advanced civilizations have risen and fallen throughout our galaxy alone, but the chances that they were also broadcasting on radio at exactly the right time to hit earth from one of the few star systems SETI has actually looked at, with enough strength for us to be able to detect it... seems pretty small.

Comment Re:US Only :-( (Score 1) 240

True - but I can do that now through dozens of different music stores available in my country without VPN hacks and fake billing addresses.

The selling point for Google Music is the 'Cloud Storage' - I can redownload whenever I like, and access on any device. Without that feature, I might as well just stick with existing stores.

Comment Re:US Only :-( (Score 3, Interesting) 240

Proxies and VPNs are a pain in the arse to use, and I certainly don't want to be buying music only to lose access to it because Google closes the loophole. (It's like a game of whackamole sometimes, as many services will block known proxies and VPNs to stop this happening).

I presume once it's out of Beta they'll work at bringing it to other countries, so here's hoping it eventually makes it to Australia.

Comment Hammer and chisel (Score 1) 1016

I had to do this a while back with a stack of old drives. I ended up just smashing the circuit board and breaking off the connector pins.

This of course will only stop a casual attacker. I'm not so concerned about the government recovering the platters and accessing my tax documents, mostly because they already have a copy.

By now I suspect they are buried in a tip somewhere, ready to be dug up in 2000 years by an archaeologist trying to infer information about the period in history where everything was lost in the terrorist EMP attack of 2150.

Comment Re:Party host should be responsible (Score 1) 100

Not really. An open facebook invite could show up in anybodies feed, and most people take "Open Invitation" to mean "I can go if I want".

A lot of people actually organize open parties like this intentionally, and so a lot of people assume an open invitation is designed to handle larger numbers of people.

Comment Party host should be responsible (Score 1) 100

It's no different from slapping "Open Party" banners on signposts and having 5,000 people turn up - I'm pretty sure the police would hold you responsible for the turnout and any resulting carnage.

As such, why not make the host responsible for posting an open party invite? A few hefty fines for likely convince people to make events private unless they really mean it.

Facebook should also do more to encourage private events... but that's another story.

Comment .... after a complain from the victim (Score 1) 200

He gained access to photos from a womans Facebook account, and published them on the Internet. This woman then made a complaint to the police, which they followed up. No charges have been filed.

Nothing to see here people. This isn't a big conspiracy. Facebook themselves didn't send the goon squad. Simply the police following up a complaint by another citizen.

Comment Re:More reason to build your own (Score 1) 265

rsync based solutions are a dime a dozen, however they don't really replace a full Dropbox implementation.

One of the key features of Dropbox is versioning (the ability to restore deleted files, and roll back files to previous iterations). There are very few solutions out there that do this at all, yet alone as well as dropbox does

Comment Re:Spideroak is a good alternative (Score 2) 265

It was definitely Spideroak.

They didn't reset the password, they reset the account. (Essentially they deleted the account and allowed me to sign back up again under the same email address).

Naturally none of the data was been recoverable, however they happily deleted the account without verifying I was the owner.

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