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Comment A likely placebo effect (Score 2, Insightful) 652

There is likely to be something similar to a placebo effect (in addition to confirmation bias and other psychological pitfalls) that will reinforce the idea that this works for officials there. If they believe it works, it is likely at least some bombers will, too. So it has a deterrent effect that is likely measurable. Therefore if they do some correlation studies later, they are likely to find places that do use these will have lower rates of incident (as long as you don't compare to places with actual bomb detection).

Comment A bit alarmist (Score 1) 280

I do research in the field of anonymization and can say that I agree with a lot of his points, but he takes each of them too far and sounds very alarmist. He seems to see things in a very binary way. One can have anonymization that is effective at preventing reversal for 99% of indviduals or certain types of attacks. For example, I may be able to release a data set that has almost a 0% chance of revealing any particular user but a 100% chance that someone could be revealed.

Anyway, one of the good points he brings out is how stupid the requirements in HIPAA are. One can anonymize with the safe harbor rules (from EU I think) which basically destroy information needed for most kinds of analysis, or they can get a statistician to certify that it has been statistically de-identified without any specific standard for what that means. So in practice you can get anything released if you hire the right statistician.

Comment OCZ already released the GC tool, but for Win only (Score 2, Interesting) 156

I see OCZ already released some sort of garbage collection tool, but it only works on Windows. Kind of annoying since I bought their "Mac Edition" drive for my MacBook. Hopefully they'll put this in a firmware update, too, and hopefully I won't have to boot DOS on my Mac to update the firmware with a utility that blows over my partition table this time. That was a lot of fun going from version 1.10 to 1.30 firmware.

Comment Two unstoppable idiot hacks (Score 2, Insightful) 1235

1. Cut the wire where it is soldered to the speaker. You just need a second phone for your child porn.

2. Use a small digital camera and not a cell phone. Just remember to turn off the flash.

This is kind of like putting up a 10 mile long wall along the Mexican border to stop illegals. You can pretty much guarantee they won't go over the wall, but that is a pretty useless guarantee.

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