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Comment Old news ;) (Score 1) 131

It's funny to see the windows people taking such satisfaction in Linux bugs and completely disregard the time it takes from disclosure to a fix is available. Usually I've already installed the fixed version before I read about it on slashdot. It's just a matter of subscribing to my distro's security announcement mailinglist and upgrade if I run the affected software.
So in most cases, when i read about bad bugs in Linux it's 'old news'.

(Blatantly ignoring the six years it took to actually get the fix into the kernel this time)

Comment Not again... (Score 1) 316

Don't they ever get tired of throwing these numbers around? And do anyone believe them?

If those numbers were even close to be real they would have managed to stop piracy long ago. I mean, who in their right mind will sit and idly watching billion after billion trickling out of their wallet and all they manage to come up with is some bizarre DRM schemes that never works. One would think that with such amount of money involved investing more in stopping piracy should be well worth it. Say a billion dollars or so.

It's all BS. We know it and they know it.

Businesses

Submission + - Ninth suicide at iPhone factory. (bbc.co.uk)

__aapspi39 writes: A ninth employee has jumped to his death at Taiwanese iPhone and iPad manufacturer Foxconn, China's state media reports. The 21 year old worker was the the eighth fatality this year. This raises questions as to whether the shiny finish of the lifestyle statements available from mega corporations are tarnished by such information, and whether the mistreatment of workers deserves to be highlighted when considering such firms.

Submission + - Security at Automobile Dealerships.

An anonymous reader writes: I am in the IT security field and recently purchased a car, one of the salesmen used his laptop to enter all of my information in for the credit and many other things. While I was waiting on the car purchase to finish I walked out to my car to do some work. I looked for a customer access point and found, it was named linksys. I hopped onto it because they had a sign saying free internet access, I got interested and snooped a little around. Upon investigation I found that all kinds of customer data was being pushed through the air unencrypted, including what could be used for identity theft. Hidden under some very archaic software called Reynolds and Reynolds, http://www.reyrey.com/ with the only "encryption" being used was telnet over TVI955. In less than 30 minutes I had seen administrator screens usernames and passwords and customer information with never entering any type of password. This scared me and I put a fraud alert on my credit file, how common is this and why don't we see any more situations like this. I destroyed all the data that I saw instantly but this could be disastrous for someone.
Science

Submission + - Scientists genetically engineer synthetic cell (wsj.com)

s2theg writes: Scientists have created the first man-made genetic organism from the dna up.

From the article:

"Heralding a potential new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday."

Submission + - A contrarian stance on Facebook and privacy (oreilly.com)

macslocum writes: Amidst the uproar over Facebook's privacy maneuvers, Tim O'Reilly offers a contrarian view. He writes: "... let's not make privacy a third rail issue, pillorying any company that makes a mistake on the privacy front. If we do that, we'll never get the innovation we need to solve the thorny nest of issues around privacy and data ownership that are intrinsic to the network era ... With that in mind, I'm willing to cut Facebook some slack. For now."

Submission + - Bank of America Alerts

An anonymous reader writes: When I received my new Bank of America card in the mail, my phone had just died, and was awaiting a replacement phone. I thought I would activate my card online, back in March. Within the first 2 weeks I received countless alert emails from them. I signed in, and turned off, every alert I could find. The emails slowed down, but I was still getting 2-3 every single month. I contacted them via their chat, they sent me to a PDF manual on how to turn off the alerts. But sadly, the pdf screenshots, looked nothing like my screen, I didn't even have some of the menu options that were pointed out. Was told there are technical issues at times (not sure how that changes a screen). I had to call them on the phone, where a rep assured me she had made sure all my settings were changed, and said she fixed everything. To this day, i still get 2-3 emails from them. I ended up finally changing my email address on their server to something that is aliased to /dev/null . Has anyone ever been able to get out of receiving BoA alerts?

Submission + - MechWarrior 4 bittorrent Infected with Trojan 4

societyofrobots writes: Yesterday I saw on the MekTek site that users were reporting the MechWarrior 4 game was infected with a virus and causing 'data loss'. MekTek theorized it was a false alarm.

Today Norton AV started detecting various instances/names of this trojan in various locations on my laptop:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/security_response/writeup.jsp?docid=2004-080910-5958-99

Scanning MW4Mercs.exe revealed the same trojan, verifying the bittorrent is in fact infected with a trojan. uTorrent detected over 7000 people downloading the game within the first 3 days, so thats quite a lot of infections . . .

Comment Re:Ignorance abounds indeed (Score 1) 559

Except that we must rethink our expectations of privacy. Nobody has ever expected everything they do to be private, but a lot of people are surprised to learn that some aspect of their life which is not public may be revealed by seemingly unimportant aspects that are public. The well known example of determining sexual orientation from a person's "friend list" on Facebook is a good example -- public information can be used to reveal information that a person may be actively trying to keep private.

Yes, in a technical sense, this data is all public. It used to be the case that we knew we could separate our public lives from our private lives, but efforts like this undermine our ability to assume such a separation.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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