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Comment Re:say wha? (Score 4, Insightful) 68

by Arker (#47412415) Attached to: 'Rosetta Flash' Attack Leverages JSONP Callbacks To Steal Credentials
"English translation: as usual, Flash is useless except as a vector for malware, viruses, trojans and keyloggers. Remove Flash from your system."

That's actually not quite true. Flash is a great way to develop simple games quickly and cheaply.

The problem isnt Flash itself (which is on the whole a fine product, used correctly) but the idea of using Flash as a substitute for a webpage, the installation of it as a browser plugin, and the auto-execution of it by the browser. None of that should be tolerated.

It's still possible to get a standalone flash interpreter and only feed it local, vetted files, which is really fine (or as close to fine as lots of other things you do every day, at least.)  But Adobe seems to be trying their best to discourage that and force everyone to use it as an auto-enabled browser component instead. The one way to use the program that causes major problems is also the one way they want you to use it.

Everyone who has been infected as a result of this should really get together and sue these arseholes, because money is the only language they understand.

Comment Re:haven't we learned from the last 25 exploits? (Score 5, Insightful) 68

by Arker (#47412367) Attached to: 'Rosetta Flash' Attack Leverages JSONP Callbacks To Steal Credentials
Excellent advice.

Expect to be flamed into oblivion by all the 'web devs' that cant be bothered to learn how HTML works and rely on this crap instead, though.

The web - the real web, the HTML web, appears to be shrinking at the moment. New content is often hidden behind some kind of opaque app crap for no apparent reason and with no actual webpage for fallback (thanks google!) and old content occasionally gets removed as well. Each time this happens, it makes it even harder and less likely to revive the healthy web we once built with such love and care.

And naturally the people that are making a profit on this crap will just keep right on cranking it out as long as that is true.

The real victims here are future generations, who should inherit that world-wide web, but are set to inherit something entirely different - and inferior in every way (when judged from the users perspective - from the perspective of big Advertising of course the story will be different, but we built this web for humans, not for marketing.)

Comment Re:I doubt the dna stuff will come true (Score 1) 353

by Arker (#47410185) Attached to: Here Comes the Panopticon: Insurance Companies
"The real problem we are having is not the loss of privacy per se, it's the abuse of private information. Most people are fine letting Onstar know their current location. We are not fine with Onstar telling anyone that information - not the police, not our wife, not our boss. "

It sounds more like the real problem is that people are so stupid they do not realize that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If Onstar has the information, others will be able to obtain it, whether by hook or crook.

If you want your privacy you must defend it consistently, not only when it is convenient and inexpensive to do so.

Comment Re:Got To Be A Ritual (Score 1) 63

by Arker (#47406753) Attached to: IBM Tries To Forecast and Control Beijing's Air Pollution
"You're a bit too literal."

And you are a bit too soft-headed, at least on this issue.

"Noise pollution," "heat pollution," and "light pollution" also involve an excess of something that naturally occurs in the environment.

And all three are BS terms. Marketing terms, where they verbally associate item X with item Y even though it does not belong, simply because they believe it will provoke the emotional response they want. THIS is real pollution - of the language. This fits in the same bucket with the 'wars' on 'drugs' and 'terror'- it's language being used to prevent, not to facilitate, accurate thinking and accurate communication.

This is where effective manipulation of the population starts, and this is where it needs to be rejected.

Excessive noise, excessive heat, and excessive light are perfectly accurate terms. The 'pollution' variants are inaccurate, marketing terms, chosen to provoke an emotional response in a desired direction. Lies, to speak plainly.

"So it's a bit naïve to claim that just because something naturally occurs in the environment, an excess won't be bad for society (and shouldn't be controlled)."

It would be, except I made no such claim. Go back, re-read my post, as many times as you want. It simply does not say that.

This is how bad you (and it's not to pick on you personally, this is a general pattern today) have had your own head loused up at this point with marketing-inspired BS that you automatically read that claim into what I said, and responded to it, even though I did NOT say it and did not even imply it in any way.

I simply pointed out that CO2 is not a pollutant. And then moved on to my main point. And both the replies I get ignore the main point entirely and respond, not to what I actually wrote, but to some sort of pre-programmed straw-man image of what I *must* believe, no matter that it is completely inaccurate.

Comment Re:Good idea, but terrible implementation (Score -1) 110

by Arker (#47404379) Attached to: YouTube Issuing "Report Cards" On Carriers' Streaming Speeds
"First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book?"

It's not really a webpage. 'Designers' have never liked the web and love to break it - this is the result. 884 lines of idiocy, full of 'favicons' and malicious attempts to direct my browser to Facebook! of all things, but no actual webpage, not even a fallback apology when viewed with a sane browser, nothing but a title and a blank page.

But to answer your question, what gives? Cranial rectosis. It's an epidemic, and obviously it's hitting google pretty hard right now too.

Comment Re:Got To Be A Ritual (Score 1) 63

by Arker (#47403463) Attached to: IBM Tries To Forecast and Control Beijing's Air Pollution
"Oxygen isn't a pollutant either, unless you breath too much of it. Similarly for nitrogen."

How much you breath has absolutely nothing to do with it. Oxygen, Nitrogen, and CO2 are the natural components of the atmosphere, not pollutants.

"Here's a clue, have a sense of proportion. Pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere, big surprise, the atmosphere heats up. Don't want to believe it is problem? Please, don't. However, you cannot ignore the CO2 acidifying the oceans and taking out coral reefs and shell fish. Don't think that's a problem? The ocean is the base of the food chain. Surely, you care about that, eh? Nah? Okay, please go back to sleep."

This does not appear to be relevant to anything I posted, indeed, you appear to behaving quite the conversation with an imaginary friend there.

Comment Re:Got To Be A Ritual (Score 2) 63

by Arker (#47402641) Attached to: IBM Tries To Forecast and Control Beijing's Air Pollution
Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant.

It's a natural component of the atmosphere, produced every time an animal breaths or respirates in any manner (fish do it too.)

Now, focus on the real pollution for a moment and realize that there are still very real and enormous costs to your proposed policy of 'If it pollutes simply end it.'

So what are you going to use for power, Solar? Do you have any idea how much pollution you have to create BEFORE you get a PV cell ready to START producing a miniscule trickle of electricity? Hydro-electric damages the riverine ecology and there is still plenty of pollution attributable to its construction and maintenance on top of it. The latter goes for wind as well. *You cannot even construct* your "clean" power plant without polluting to do it, so electricity is out the window, welcome to the new dark ages.

Unless that is really what you want, you will have to adjust your expectations. Some level of pollution being unavoidable, the question becomes how to keep it within safe bounds.

Comment Re:TSA = the USA's Gestapo (Score 2) 702

by Arker (#47399559) Attached to: TSA Prohibits Taking Discharged Electronic Devices Onto Planes
"Hahahaha, Nazis? Unless you're taking a direct flight to a concentration camp, gtfo."

The iconic image of the Nazis I was raised on was the Gestapo agent demanding papers. The US is supposed to be better than that. No internal passports, a free man (or woman) has the right to go about their business in peace, does anyone still remember those days?

Comment Re:What's worse? (Score 1) 201

You misunderstand the function of law enforcement.

It is not, directly, to help the victim. In many cases the victim is, after all, beyond help.

Rather, it is to prevent future victims. First by putting the victimizer out of business - and if that doesnt help the existing victim, in fact even if hurts the victim, it still has to be done, for the sake of the potential future victims. This is why we ask rape victims to testify even though they may find that as traumatic as the original crime. Not to fix the damage that's been done (that's the function of civil law, not criminal law) but to prevent future damage.

Comment Memory? (Score 2) 415

by Arker (#47397403) Attached to: Police Using Dogs To Sniff Out Computer Memory
I am not surprised that the reporter is a technical illiterate who cant tell memory from storage, but surely the submitter or the editor one could show half a brain cell working and correct it?

All the devices mentioned are storage, not "memory".

Anyway, police dogs are a scam. Like Clever Hans, they are more attuned to their trainers emotions than s/he is, and can baffle and impress the unwary with seemingly impossible tricks as a result. Granting a warrant based on a dog alerting is effectively the same thing as granting it because a cop has a hunch.

Comment Re:Not surprising. (Score 0) 725

by Arker (#47393427) Attached to: When Beliefs and Facts Collide
Human activity has an affect on the environment, and has been having an effect on the environment for *at least* 10,000 years. That's not in dispute.

But how big an affect, in what direction at what time, and how that all works in context of the much larger and more powerful forces that also effect climate change? That's something that bears investigating.

Carbon is not a pollutant, it's a normal and necessary component of the atmosphere. The concentration varied widely over time long before humans evolved. There are several feedback mechanisms involved - both positive and negative.

An example of positive feedback - higher CO2 raises the temperature slightly which causes the oceans to release yet more Co2, raising the temperature further in a vicious cycle... but wait!

An example of negative feedback - higher CO2 increases plant growth. Plants harvest CO2 from the atmosphere and exhale O2 - reducing CO2 and thus bringing the temperature back down!

The biggest difference, on a scientific level, between the AGW crowd and their detractors seems to boil down to differing estimates of the net affect of all those feedback loops. The AGW folks insist it is positive, and thus that increasing the C02 concentration can be counted on to trigger runaway warming and catastrophe. The skeptics think it's a net negative, in which case any disturbances caused by CO2 emissions will correct themselves given a little time.

That's a factual dispute and one that should be relatively easy to settle, were politics not involved.

Comment Re:interesting times... (Score 0) 221

by Arker (#47388381) Attached to: IeSF Wants International Game Tournaments Segregated By Sex [Updated]
No, I'm forgetting none of this (although some is not exactly true,) despite so many replies from people that did not grasp the thread. This was the GP I was defending;

"This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock [wikipedia.org] won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan [wikipedia.org]) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.

So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it."

To recap, in previous times, while women may have faced some discouragement from competing, they DID compete in open competition right along with the men, and in many cases performed very well. This did not sit right with some men and so we got segregated events where women have, if we believe another poster, not produced the same sorts of scores their predecessors did shooting against men.

I am not swearing that last part is true - I dont now - but accepting it for the sake of argument, the lesson would appear to be that humans perform better when they are allowed to compete at their level as determined by skill, not gender.

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