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Comment world's thinnest argument (Score 1) 395

Yeah, and if I sell 100 grams of fertilizer to someone, that has the potential of aiding terrorism because that person might be buying 100 grams from thousands of people to build a big bomb. Does that mean there should be a law against that? This whole "aiding terrorism" argument is so made up, it makes me physically sick... to be quoting "Friends": "congratulations, you have found the world's thinnest argument".

Submission + - How to get Gmail to unblock an IPv6 netblock

theonlyholle writes: "For the last couple of weeks I've been trying to somehow get Google to unblock an IPv6 block on their Gmail platform. The problem is that seemingly only one or two spam emails from an IPv6 address seem to trigger their automatic filter and cause it to reject further emails from the entire /64 block to be rejected due to an "unusual" amount of UCE. Of course it's not all that unusual, since I have a few customers who forward their incoming email to Gmail and occasionally a spam email slips through my spam filters. What's really annoying is that a) the filter is on such a hair trigger (I have no such problems on IPv4) and b) there seems to be no way of getting Google to adjust their filters. Has anyone been successful in getting through to Google and having an IPv6 block permanently unblocked?"
Security

Submission + - Flash exploit lets websites activate your webcam (geek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new Adobe Flash exploit has been discovered that allows any website you visit to activate your webcam and microphone giving whoever owns the website the opportunty to watch and record you sat at your machine. The exploit involves the use of a hidden iFrame and the Flash Player Settings Manager. With just four clicks of the mouse the camera can be activated silently and the user has no idea. The example given is a simple game that pops-up the webcam output once you've done the appropriate number of clicks.

Adobe has been told about the problem several weeks ago, but has yet to respond. So the exploit has been made public to try and speed things along.

Comment social shopping yes - social network no (Score 4, Insightful) 271

The problem is that all it is is a social shopping network. And of course it's a "social shopping at the iTunes store" network, so it's very, very limited. I personally think that Apple narrowed the scope of their network too much (you can't even post a link to a live video on YouTube of a song you just bought - or rather, you can but it will show up as text only with no way to click or copy&paste it) and most users will be bored by it very quickly and just ignore it. Even if Apple expands it later, a reputation once ruined is hard to improve...
Security

Submission + - Checking email for TLS support now easy (ismymailsecure.com)

theonlyholle writes: Finding out if a certain email address is able to receive email securely with TLS based encryption has always been a bit of a hassle, as you had to check every single MX manually. So I wrote a little web tool for myself and some colleagues, which is now open to the general public. Just enter an email address (the left part really doesn't matter, it's just so it's more end-user friendly) and the tool will tell you which MXs accept email for the domain and if they support TLS. Of course you still need to be sure that you support it on your end as well... try it at http://www.ismymailsecure.com/

Comment man page != end user documentation (Score 1) 769

The question in the summary shows the extent of the problem. No, a man page is not proper end-user documentation. It's great for a trained IT professional who quickly needs to look up the syntax for a command. But for my mom or my wife's dad, even getting to the man page is a challenge - and to get there, they need to know that man pages exist. Are there even man page viewers for the desktop? Ones that are readily accessible and preinstalled with the default system? But I must come to Linux's defense, too. The documentation on my latest Windows system is not much better, except that a help system is built right into the desktop. It's the availability of third party printed documentation that makes the difference.
Media

Submission + - How to sell to a pirate (po-ru.com)

theonlyholle writes: "Paul Battley has an excellent blog post on "how to sell to a pirate" that shows how artificial restrictions on media distribution kept him from paying for the content he wanted to see: "At any stage up until the last, you could have had me as a customer, if you were willing to supply it there and then in a format I could use. However, because of licensing, region coding, and DRM, my best option was the 'pirate' one.""
Security

The Real Story On WPA's Flaw 67

Glenn Fleishman writes "The reports earlier today on WPA's TKIP key type being cracked were incorrect. I spoke at length with Erik Tews, the joint author of the paper that discloses a checksum weakness in TKIP that allows individual short packets to be decrypted without revealing the TKIP key. I wrote this up for Ars Technica with quite a bit of background on WEP and WPA. Tews's paper, co-written with Martin Beck, whom he credits as discovering and implementing a working crack (in aircrack-ng as a module), describes a way to use a backwards-compatible part of TKIP to exploit a weakness that remains from WEP. ARP packets and similarly short packets can be decoded. Longer packets are likely still safe, and TKIP hasn't been cracked. Don't believe the hype, but the exploit is still notable."
Linux Business

Red Hat CEO Says Economic Crisis Favors Open Source 191

arashtamere writes "Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst predicts the enterprise open source software business will emerge from the economic crisis stronger than the proprietary market. 'I've had a couple of conversations with CIOs who said, "We're a Microsoft shop and we don't use any open source whatsoever, but we're already getting pressure to reduce our operating costs and we need you to help put together a plan for us to... use open source to reduce our costs." And we've had other customers literally looking at ripping and replacing WebLogic or WebSphere for JBoss ... I think we'll know in about six to nine months but there is no question that open source will come out of this in relatively better shape than our proprietary competitors,' he told Computerworld."
Cellphones

Submission + - petition to switch off iPhone autocorrection (please-let-us-disable-autocorrection-steve.com)

theonlyholle writes: "A swiss web designer has created an online petition asking Apple to allow users to switch off the auto-correction feature on the iPhone. This has long been one of the more annoying features of the iPhone firmware, especially since it gives preference to its own suggestions over what the user typed. German speaking users have been particularly plagued with the iPhone's strange obsession with umlauts..."

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