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+ - Obama Not Allowed an iPhone for Security Reasons-> 1

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes "President Barack Obama admitted Wednesday he was not allowed to have an iPhone owing to security fears — explaining why he is sometimes seen with a bulky super secure BlackBerry. "I'm not allowed for security reasons to have an iPhone," Obama told a group of young people at the White House for an event promoting his health care law.

Within days of being inaugurated president, Obama won his battle with the Secret Service to hang on to his BlackBerry, despite fears that it was vulnerable to being hacked. The White House says the president's personal email address was strictly limited to a small list of senior officials and personal friends, but will not detail the encryption devices that are used to secure his communications.

Obama did say that his daughters Sasha and Malia spend a lot of time on their iPhones."
Link to Original Source

+ - RBS Admits to 'Decades' of Underinvestment in IT After Major Glitch->

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes "Royal Bank of Scotland's CEO admitted on Tuesday that the bank had failed to invest in its IT systems "for decades", after a glitch left customers unable to access cash for three hours.

Chief executive Ross McEwan said it was unacceptable that customers could not use their credit and debt cards for a period of the evening on "Cyber Monday", one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

"For decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems," McEwan said. The bank said in a statement earlier Tuesday that the "systems issues" that caused Monday's outage had been resolved and all services were now working normally.

The latest glitch follows an incident in June 2012 when a software upgrade left hundreds of thousands of people unable to make or receive payments for several days, and cost the group £175 million (290 million) in compensation."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:Inevitable inference (Score -1, Troll) 623

by pitchpipe (#45579037) Attached to: Lawsuits Seek To Turn Chimpanzees Into Legal Persons

Chimps, for example, are a different species; chimps and humans can't have offspring.

Lots of humans can't have offspring. Are they then a different species?

Their brains are obviously quite different.

The point is?

They are also vicious and aggressive animals.

I'd argue that some humans are more vicious and aggressive.

Enlightenment philosophers generally recognized that animals could suffer and that humans had some moral responsibility towards them, but did not generally recognize them as persons.

I'm sure they also didn't recognize blacks as being equal to whites, or that gays should be able to marry. Times change, so does thinking on what's right and wrong.

It seems to me that scientists have judged animals as guilty of being unconscious until proven conscious. This seems backward to me as we know that there is no magical 'stuff' that humans have that animals don't. Also, through evolution consciousness has been built up over the eons through layers in the brain. To say that somehow consciousness was just suddenly switched on 100,000 years ago just seems absurd.

Comment: Girls are assholes (Score 1) 192

by pitchpipe (#45562233) Attached to: AI Reality Check In Online Dating

The problem here is that if you are Average Joe and try asking out Supermodels Ann, Barbara and Cheryl, you're unlikely to get a reply.

The problem here is that a lot of girls think they're supermodels, when in reality they're just average Jane themselves. Then they label a guy 'creepy' just because he's not very attractive and girls are assholes.

Comment: Re:We all slated Windows for doing this (Score 1) 134

by pitchpipe (#45561063) Attached to: Google Is Building a Way To Launch Chrome Apps Without Installation

Chrome apps are submitted in a manifest along with all of their files to Google, which charges a fee to be a developer ($5), establishes a limit on the number of apps, and has automated checks to make sure that security precautions are applied.

Translation: With Google apps U can feel real good about ur security. We check it with Norton ANTI-virus and then run it in a VIRTUAL machine for extra protection. We care about U.

+ - New Windows XP Zero-Day Under Attack-> 1

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes "A new Windows kernel zero-day vulnerability is being exploited in targeted attacks against Windows XP users. Microsoft confirmed the issue and published a security advisory to acknowledge the flaw after anti-malware vendor FireEye warned that the Windows bug is being used in conjunction with an Adobe Reader exploit to infect Windows machines with malware.

Microsoft described the issue as an elevation of privilege vulnerability that allows an attacker to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full administrative rights."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Re:spirals (Score 3, Insightful) 415

by pitchpipe (#45541171) Attached to: NSA Planned To Discredit Radicals Based On Web-Browsing Habits

In a few words, mainly ammunition for the government to persecute and discredit critics (which isn't new), but also alarmingly but unsurprisingly, a way for those with access to this information (specific individuals within law enforcement and government) to exert this power over other private individuals for spite, profit, blackmail, coverup, etc.

It's even worse than that. Because they have these systems they don't need any actual evidence. If they don't like you (or you're divorcing someone they care about) they can just accuse you of wrongdoing that they "discovered" through surveilling you. How are you going to prove that you didn't do what they accuse you of? Audit their systems? Mmm hmm, I'm sure they'll let a known pedophilistic-terrorist or his designee in to check everything out. Even when you can audit systems it's hard enough to prove a negative.

To err is human, to moo bovine.

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