grahamsaa - Slashdot User

+ - How can I keep the US government off of my domains? 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Friday February 17, 2012 @02:54AM

grahamsaa writes "SOPA and PIPA are dead, or at least in hibernation now, but I'm very troubled by what happened to JotForm recently.

I'm a contract sysadmin, and I manage and develop for a number of small companies and domains. While it's unlikely that any of them will be taken down (I don't host any content that is illegal), it is incredibly troubling that registrars like GoDaddy seem willing to take down entire domains without a court order.

What can I do to keep the US government, or any government, corporation, or third party from taking my domains offline? Are some registrars better than others?"

+ - Former DHS official: no "property interest" in data-> 1

Submitted by grahamsaa on Sunday February 05, 2012 @02:09PM

grahamsaa writes "Stewart A. Baker, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security is quoted in the New York Times today as saying “You can’t really have a property interest in data,” he argued. “It’s going to get cheaper to reproduce it. It’s going to get reproduced and stored. It’s going to get copied.”

Of course, he was talking about your personal data — in his opinion, personal data can be stored, aggregated, copied and used to track your activities online. But this raises an interesting point — if one can't have a property interest in data, why are people getting sued, fined and arrested for copyright infringement? It seems that you can't have it both ways. If data is going to get copied, and if there's no enforceable property interest, what's the problem with online piracy?"
Link to Original Source

+ - Maryland Robocall Conviction Puts Political Dirty -> 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @07:35PM

grahamsaa writes "Today an attempt to deceive likely-democratic voters in Maryland resulted in a conviction of the man who served as campaign manager for the effort of Maryland's former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr.'s to regain the governorship.

A Baltimore jury found Paul Schurick guilty of election fraud on state charges related to 2010 voter-suppression robocalls meant to keep some African American voters, predominantly Democrats, away from the polls on election day.

Whatever you think of the result, this is unprecedented."
Link to Original Source

+ - Dealing with a partially defunct employer 1

Submitted by grahamsaa on Wednesday November 09, 2011 @01:22AM

grahamsaa writes "I recently updated my resume and checked the web site of one of my previous employers to see how it might look to, well, anyone who looks at my resume. I was horrified to find that while the company is still (sort of) in business, their web site is horribly out of date. It lists a phone number that doesn't work anymore. Signing up for automated e-mail from them results in an auto-reply from an employee who long since quit (saying that he no longer works there). Not too recently, I did good work for this company as a contractor, but now their website lives on, undead, and if any prospective employer looks at my resume and decides to check this company out, it doesn't give a very good impression. So what have other people in this position done to mitigate the damage of a (fairly recent) work history with a zombie company?"

+ - Netflix - streaming only; Qwikster - DVDs by mail 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Monday September 19, 2011 @07:06AM

grahamsaa writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, sent an e-mail to subscribers this morning apologizing for the way they handled recent pricing changes. It also announced that Netflix will be split in two. A new service called Qwikster will handle all DVD mailings for Netflix. Netflix will now only provide streaming content. According to Hastings, "Streaming and DVD by mail are really becoming two different businesses, with different cost structures . . . "

Is this a good move for Netflix, or a sign of tough times ahead?"

+ - Could rooting Android devices become mainstream?-> 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Sunday March 27, 2011 @11:06AM

grahamsaa writes "NPR's Weekend Edition aired a story today on how rooting the Nook Color can turn it into a full fledged and relatively inexpensive Android tablet. The story claims that the process takes about half an hour, and only requires the purchase of a Nook and a microSD card, and points listeners to a YouTube tutorial on how to root the device. Could this signal a change in how mainstream users see devices like this? Could rooting Android devices like the Nook ever become mainstream?"
Link to Original Source

+ - NY Times Switches to digital subscription model-> 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Thursday March 17, 2011 @12:11PM

grahamsaa writes "The New York Times just announced that they are switching to a digital subscription model, which will require readers to pay a fee ($15-35 per month, depending on whether they want to view news on computer, smartphone or tablet devices) if they wish to read more than 20 articles a month on the site. Is this model sustainable? Is it time to start looking for another source for online news?"
Link to Original Source

+ - Pirate Bay is back online-> 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Monday August 24, 2009 @01:46PM

grahamsaa writes "After 3 hours of downtime, the Pirate Bay is now live again."
Link to Original Source

+ - Google is spam filtering its own messages 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Monday August 10, 2009 @03:52PM

grahamsaa writes "After renewing my subscription to Google Earth Pro today I was surprised to find that my receipt went to my spam box. This wouldn't normally be unusual, except that Google is my e-mail provider, and the message went to my Google Apps account. Google tagged its own message to me as spam!

They also affixed this warning to the message: "Warning: This message may not be from whom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or of providing the sender with any personal information."

Does this strike anyone else as odd / funny?"

+ - Alternative to slow virus scans? 0

Submitted by grahamsaa on Monday June 22, 2009 @11:30AM

grahamsaa writes "I work for a small company (about 30 employees) and have found our current anti-virus solution (AVG) to be fairly unworkable. I disabled daily scanning because it slows people down in general, the scans take a long time, and it seems fairly redundant (particularly as resident shield seems to be fairly good). Once every few weeks I do a full scan, and I rarely find anything more threatening than tracking cookies.

Still, these scans take a long time (often over an hour) and slow people down. Most employee machines are laptops, and most people take their computers home at night, so there's no good way to set an automatic scan late at night (as the machines will likely be off by that point). Does anyone have an idea at how to scan for viruses more efficiently?"

+ - Temporary passwords for FreeRADIUS authentication? 2

Submitted by

grahamsaa

on Saturday October 11, 2008 @02:42PM

grahamsaa writes "Hi everyone,

I've been poking around with FreeRADIUS for a few months now, with limited success. It seems that most of the documentation available is hopelessly out of date (referring to version 1.7 or earlier), and while it's clear that MySQL can work as a backend authentication database, I haven't seen any implementations which allow the use of temporary credentials.

Basically what I'm looking to do is to set up a hotspot system (and yes, I've already tried Chilispot . . . it doesn't meet my needs) that allows users to connect to my WLAN for a limited period of time using a randomly generated password. This password could be printed on a cafe receipt or given out some other way. Also, if possible, I'd like to use an up to date version of FreeRADIUS if possible (not 1.x). Has anyone done this? Do you know of any good resources for documentation? Thanks!"