Comment Re:European Air Force? (Score 2) 148
I was as confused as you are. But I found that such a thing was actually proposed just over a year ago and even got a lot of support!
Submission + - The EU proposes all companies share their encryption keys with the government (statewatch.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Statewatch published a document revealing that Gilles de Kerchove, the EU counter terrorism coordinator, is advising the EU:
... to explore rules obliging internet and telecommunications companies operating in the EU to provide under certain conditions as set out in the relevant national laws and in full compliance with fundamental rights access of the relevant national authorities to communications (i.e. share encryption keys).
Submission + - Doomsday Clock is now 3 minutes to midnight! (thebulletin.org) 1
Lasrick writes: Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had helped develop the first atomic weapons in the Manhattan Project, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists created the Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. The decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made every year by the Bulletin's Science and Security Board in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 17 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world's vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and new technologies emerging in other domains. Today, the Clock was moved up 2 minutes; it is now 3 minutes to midnight. Here is the Board's statement on the move.
Comment Re:Modern board games (Score 1) 171
Settlers of Catan, you've probably heard about, but that was just the game which enabled the genre; honored for it, but otherwise left behind as a deeply flawed example of what a truly strategic board game should be.
While I agree with the general premise, you manage to give Catan both too much and too little credit. It was definitely not the first game in the genre, though it was probably the one that brought it to mainstream attention. But I don't agree with your statement that it is deeply flawed. I still find the basic game a lot of fun to play.
Comment Asimov: "Not as We Know it" (Score 1) 221
I'll confess immediately that I didn't read TFA. I just want to drop this link to a nice Isaac Asimov essay, back from 1962:
Not as We Know it – The Chemistry of Life
Remember that Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. In the article, he investigates alternatives to the chemistry of life as we know it. He comes up with the following list:
[H]ere, then, is my list of life chemistries, spanning the temperature range from near red heat down to near absolute zero:
1. fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
2. fluorocarbon in sulfur
3.*nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
4. nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
5. lipid in methane
6. lipid in hydrogen
Of this half dozen, the third only is life-as-we-know-it. Lest you miss it, I've marked it with an asterisk.
When you read the article, you may want to skip the first bit and start from about the paragraph "Well, that's what I want to discuss."
Comment Re:Why is he worried (Score 1) 583
Life is life.
Na-naaa naa-na-na.
Comment "Anonymous" is not anonymous at all (Score 1) 95
Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.
In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.
Comment Re:Not a QC! (Score 1) 96
Please, please use a command like \mathit or \text around text used in maths mode. I see $italics$ far too often still in papers and presentations.
So, you should e.g. write: $\Psi_\mathit{classical computer}$
See also: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mathstext
Low Levels of Toxic Gas Found To Encourage Plant Growth 103
olsmeister writes "Hydrogen Sulfide is a toxic, flammable, foul-smelling gas that some theorize may have been at least partially responsible for some of Earth's mass extinctions, including the Permian-Triassic event, which killed well over half of the species on the planet. Now, thanks to a fortuitous accident, doctoral student at the University of Washington seems to have discovered that very low doses of the gas seems to greatly enhance plant growth, causing plants to germinate more quickly and grow larger. The finding could have far reaching implications for both food and biofuel production."
Comment This guy at seclists.org nailed it (Score 3, Interesting) 65
Michael Sinatra over at seclists.org had the following to say:
This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users. That needs to stop. Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are redirected through other systems. IMO, we should put an end to *all* legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails for when new things appear on the portal. In addition, we could modify our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user. Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we never ask them for passwords.
If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in phishing attacks. The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing it. Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy pickings.
Comment Re:Risky != Risky??? (Score 4, Informative) 110
What Cisco's report actually said is that behaviour often perceived as "safe" (such as online shopping) carries more risk than generally thought.
Comment Re:TFA got the probabilities backward (Score 4, Insightful) 110
...and Slashdot's title for the story that "Online Ads Are More Dangerous Than Porn" takes it still a level further. It's certainly not what Cisco said.
Comment TFA got the probabilities backward (Score 4, Informative) 110
The summary, and the Security Week article, write that "Users are more 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping sites than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site".
Cisco's report says that "Online shopping sites are 21 times more likely to deliver malicious content than counterfeit software sites."
Those statements are not equivalent. Online shopping sites have many more visitors than counterfeit software sites, so they have more opportunity to deliver malware. The same goes for the factor of 27 for search engines.
Also, it's hard to check the factor of 182 for adult sites, since the report doesn't include that number, or in fact even the words "porn" or "adult".
Comment See this comparison. Wikipedia is moving, too. (Score 5, Interesting) 116
Here is a
comparison of MariaDB vs MySQL.
Probably most important to Fedora is this:
Probably most important to Fedora is this:
Truly Open Source
- All code in MariaDB is released under GPL, LPGL or BSD. MariaDB does not have closed source modules like the one you can find in MySQL enterprise edition. In fact, all the closed source features in MySQL 5.5 enterprise edition are found in the MariaDB open source version.
- MariaDB includes test cases for all fixed bugs. Oracle doesn't provide test cases for new bugs fixed in MySQL 5.5.
- All bugs and development plans are public.
- MariaDB is developed by the community in true open source spirit.
Wikipedia, too, is moving from MySQL to MariaDB.
Fedora 19 Nixing MySQL in Favor of MariaDB 116
An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat developers are planning to replace MySQL with MariaDB in Fedora 19. For the next Fedora update, the MariaDB fork would replace MySQL and the official MySQL package would be discontinued after some time. The reasoning for this move is the uncertainty about Oracle's support of MySQL as an open-source project and moves to make the database more closed." Update: 01/22 13:47 GMT by T : Note: "Nixing" may be a bit strong; this move has been proposed, but is not yet officially decided.
