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Comment Re:Wreak havoc on corporate networks, SSL observat (Score 4, Insightful) 90

Sorry! I'm totally wrong! The corporate MITM will work just fine once it is updated:

The UA will not be able to detect and thwart a MITM attacking the
      UA's first connection to the host. (However, the requirement that
      the MITM provide an X.509 certificate chain that can pass the UA's
      validation requirements, without error, mitigates this risk
      somewhat.) Worse, such a MITM can inject its own PKP header into the
      HTTP stream, and pin the UA to its own keys. To avoid post facto
      detection, the attacker would have to be in a position to intercept
      all future requests to the host from that UA.

Comment Re:Never useful info given with patches (Score 4, Insightful) 140

How can a consumer make an informed decision to go ahead and install patches or not without hours of looking up KB numbers?

Consumers don't make such decisions. If you want that level of control over your OS, don't use Windows. This isn't a knock against Windows or anything: it's just part of the closed-source model. You trust them. If they do a good job, then it saved you effort. If they do not, you get burned. That is the trade-off.

Comment Re:Google needs to clean up search (Score 1) 126

If you want to be a good citizen, submit feedback to Google using their Adwords feedback page.
I also did a search for "Firefox" and got a different scammer. I just submitted a feedback form for it. The scammer I saw also used the trademarked Firefox logo, but don't even mention that because you can't report that unless you represent the trademark holder. Just select that they are a counterfeit site and mention the scamware/malware aspect.

Naturally, Google should be able to use common sense and filter this out themselves. This is the problem with a fully automated world.

Comment Is this really a win? (Score 3, Insightful) 35

despite Google having already paid licensing fees for the technology.

Since Google is paying the patent troll licensing fees, this doesn't sound much like a win.

The article also doesn't explain why someone would sue even though they were being paid. Did Beneficial Innovations (OMG, even the name is trolling) not realize these customers were covered?

Comment Re:Will the cameras work? (Score 1) 643

but then it will immediately put suspicion on the police officer

It doesn't work that way today.

There was an example of where a woman claimed she was raped by a police officer. The condom vanished from the evidence lock-up before trial. But the absence of evidence does not good for the woman. Even if it put suspicion on the police officer, that suspicion is not enough to prove rape.

Similarly, there are cases where police car-mounted cameras fail. I don't think those usually work-out well for the defendant who claimed he was attacked just as the camera cut out.

Comment Re:The death of leniency (Score 1) 643

This may sound odd, but that's actually a good thing. In short: If laws are enforced consistently, then bad laws are eventually removed. If laws are enforced selectively, they are used to punish those who don't have the political power to change them.

Let me clarify: When laws are selectively enforced, it introduces the problem that the person doing the selection can "bias" that law. They can apply it to uncooperative people, or ugly people, or certain races, etc. So, for example, everyone speeds. But not everyone is pulled-over for speeding in a completely random distribution. Instead, the law targets the person in the sporty red car, or the one who looks like they might smoke weed, or the minority race. But if *every single person* got pulled-over for speeding every day, we would probably change the law!

Criminal prosecutors cause this kind of problem a lot because they can selectively enforce laws. Wealthy people or businesses are often given a fine, while while an average individual will be given jail time. Or rather than going after everyone using insider information, they pick the high profile TV celebrity. The NSA and the phone companies have no consequence to violating wiretapping laws, but individuals are often frightened to record a phone conversation with tech support.

Comment Re:Doesn't need much to make it right (Score 4, Interesting) 251

Everybody on Slashdot talks about how Windows 8's flaw is the Start Screen. But as someone who has used Windows 8 extensively, the fundamental problem isn't just that the start menu is now full-screen. That is just the first big jarring change you see. But fixing that alone won't solve the problem.

The real issue is that half of the OS uses the desktop UI, and the other half uses the "metro" UI. The built-in metro apps are inferior and redundant to the desktop counterparts. The metro photo viewer doesn't have as many features, you can't navigate photos in a folder. There are at least 4 wizards for adding a printer, some are metro-based and some are desktop based. System restore is another one like that, and there are lots more. There is a redundant registry area for desktop IE and the Metro IE, so some things like IE proxy settings can get out of sync between them. You can't even get to some of those settings from Metro. You can't put apps in the Startup folder.

The bottom line is that they just didn't finish the Windows 8 UI.

Look back at the Windows XP and 7 start menu. The shortcuts are usually a mess: folders with only one icon in them. Or folders with 3 icons: the app, the readme, and the uninstall. Can you remember which things are under "Accessories" versus the ones under "System Tools?" How many icons are on there that aren't apps at all? (Ex: I have a Silverlight icon - why?) The Windows 7 start menu is capped at 1/2 the screen height, wasting space and requiring scrolling. Installs typically put icons onto the desktop, the quick launch bar, and the start menu.

There are actually a lot of good improvements to Windows 8. Full-screen apps isn't a *terrible* idea necessarily. But they just haven't figured out how to offer full-screen apps with all the power of the desktop. I'm not sure anyone has figured that out yet. Time will tell.

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