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Comment Re:obligatory (Score 1) 328

Brit here. Parallel with "Cool Britannia" (remember that?) I saw a lot of use in the press of the "Naughty Nineties" (modelled on the "Swinging Sixties"). So if the astonishingly imaginative trend continues, I imagine the next decade will be christened the Naughteens.

Comment Re:Why Are We Deferring to an Economic Organizatio (Score 0) 715

I live in Montreal. When I got married 42 years ago on Nov 10th, (A weekend), I can tell you that two days later, winter hit with a 2 foot snowfall and sub-zero weather. Winter started the 12th of November and that was the norm. Since then, on the average, winter has been arriving one day later each year. Last week, on Dec 7th, winter arrived. Snow and cold. Today (15 Dec) is the kind of weather we usually had in November. From my perspective, in the past 60 years, I have seen winter shortened by one month in the fall, and around 15 days in the spring. Living in Canada, with global warming, we will be OK as the earth warms. But the mid-west USA and elsewhere will become unbearable in summer, and the USA will experience (in my view) severe water shortages. We do have to go on the assumption that the trend is there, and to ignore it is to cause your grand-children to pay the hardship price for today's inaction.

Comment Re:Yahoo's promise to discard data after 3 months? (Score 2, Interesting) 301

Cuil was launched last year with great fanfare regarding its privacy policy which promised not to track users' personally identifiable information. See their current policy alongside a warning that it is soon to change somehow here: http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy/

I use and normally recommend Clusty which says in plain English that "We at Clusty don't track you." (http://clusty.com/privacy) and in legalese that they do collect "Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, referral data, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies (described below) that may uniquely identify your browser" (http://clusty.com/privacypolicy).

That's either ethical or useful for you. tl;dr - one beginning with "C".

Comment Re:Sleazy and disgraceful (Score 1) 408

Firefox extensions and browser plugins proper certainly can be disabled/prevented from installing by Mozilla. See https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/blocklist/ for the (en-US only?) naughty list.

I don't know what SeaMonkey, Camino, Iceweasel, etc do, but filtering for "blocklist" on about:config shows your browser's exact settings. Notably the extensions.blocklist.enabled pref allows the user to turn the remote killswitch off if they so desire.

Comment Re:Huh wot ? (Score 2, Insightful) 161

Amusingly enough, the propensity to unthinkingly invoke Orwell is akin to his concept of duckspeak. Reading multiple +5 Insightful "1984 wasn't an instruction manual maaaan" posts in a single Brit-related topic makes me wonder about the duckmods though. Perhaps it's hard to peck out the -1 Overrated with a bill?

Games

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Team Not Art Thieves 62

Via Kotaku an Inquirer article reports that, despite earlier claims to the contrary, it looks like the folks behind the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title are not guilty of art theft. It seems both Half-Life 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. use textures from a pack produced by Marlin Studios. The similarities are there because both teams used pre-canned materials for their titles, not because of any tom-foolery on the part of GSC GameWorld.
Security

Submission + - Google Calendar Lets Corporate Data Slip

narramissic writes: "An ITworld article opens: 'It's not clear what gets discussed during McKinsey & Co.'s weekly internal communication meeting, but the dial-in number and passcode for the event can be easily found by searching with Google.' It just so happens that the Search Google Calendar feature, which was added to Google's Web-based calendar service last November, is both a cool way to discover interesting events and a way to unearth sensitive corporate data. Of course, the trouble lies not with the technology, but with oblivious users. Marv Goldschmitt, vice president of business development with data auditing appliance vendor Tizor Systems Inc. says, 'this kind of data leakage is a growing problem for corporations, whose employees are adopting a new generation of Web-based productivity tools without necessarily understanding the security implications.'"

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