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Privacy

EU Privacy Chief Says ACTA Violates European Law 136

Posted by kdawson from the ain't-nobody's-business-if-i-do dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Peter Hustinx, the European Data Protection Supervisor, has issued a 20-page opinion expressing concern about ACTA (PDF). Michael Geist's summary of the opinion notes that it concludes that the prospect of a three-strikes and you're out system may violate European privacy law, that the possibility of cross-border enforcement raises serious privacy issues, and that ACTA transparency is needed now."
Censorship

French Net Censorship Plan Moves Forward 108

Posted by CmdrTaco from the this-is-gonna-be-just-swell dept.
angry tapir writes "French lawmakers have voted to approve a draft law to filter Internet traffic that Slashdot previously discussed. The government says the measure is intended to catch child pornographers. The Senate, where the government has a majority, will soon give the bill a second reading. If the Senate makes no amendments to the text, that will also be its final reading, as the government has declared the bill 'urgent,' a procedural move that reduces the usual cycle of four readings to two."

Comment Duh. (Score 0) 189

by castironpigeon (#31170084) Attached to: Rogue PDFs Behind 80% of Exploits In Q4 '09
It's not difficult to figure out why PDFs are targeted.
  1. Most big corporations and academia use PDFs for everything from forms to memos to sending photos of last week's retreat.
  2. Most big corporations and academia hire super-specialists that can, for example, diagnose a medical issue that occurs in 1 in 10,000,000 people within 5 minutes, but these people cannot function in the larger world and have no time, patience, or idea of what to do with these things you call "files."
  3. Most of these aforementioned corporations and academia will have ridiculously oversized bureaucracies that can agree to standards once every 15 years, are easily swayed by easy solutions, such as those advertised by Adobe, and don't really know or care about whether anything gets done so long as the policies they set 15 years ago are followed to the letter.
  4. And yes, Adobe makes awful, bloated software that's full of security holes and doesn't get patched for weeks or months after those holes are made public.

In other words, the issue is roughly 25% bad software and 75% PEBKAC.

Comment Re:How Companies Work (Score 3, Interesting) 316

by castironpigeon (#31064402) Attached to: A Reflection On Sun Executive Payouts For Failure

the average person can not be bothered to concern himself enough so that in the aggregate with other people that person can effect change.

This is because the average person probably isn't thinking much farther ahead than what he'll have for lunch tomorrow. By the time he realizes he won't have anything for lunch tomorrow he's no longer in a position to do anything about it.

Comment There must be more than 10% of us in the market... (Score 1) 307

by castironpigeon (#31010636) Attached to: ARM Exec Says 90% of PC Market Could Be Netbooks
...otherwise hardware vendors would fail. By us here I mean the folks who assemble computers from individual parts because the stuff sold pre-assembled is garbage hardware with garbage bloatware pre-installed. So I don't see how 90% of the PC market will ever be portable platforms, let alone netbooks.

Comment Re:I feel divided about this. (Score 1) 450

by castironpigeon (#30948578) Attached to: Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches
Nationalism doesn't count for nearly as much as it did during the Cold War. Big business owns government, big business is multinational, and big business is connected with big business. If India or China put a permanent settlement on the moon before the US it'll be only because big business found a cheaper, more desperate labor pool there.

Comment Re:A sound plan (Score 1) 450

by castironpigeon (#30948422) Attached to: Reported Obama Plan Would Privatize Manned Launches

Private firms can probably get a LOT more manned launches done per year for the same cost, but they'll be a little riskier. More astronauts will be killed. I don't see this as a problem : there's 6 billion people on the planet, and I for one if faced between possibly dying during a trip to space or dying from old age would choose the former.

And it's a great way to cull excess population without the social stigma of war...
Patents

IBM Patenting Airport Profiling Technology 129

Posted by Soulskill from the now-we-can-all-be-potential-terrorists dept.
An anonymous reader writes "InformationWeek's Wolfe's Den reports that IBM has filed a dozen applications to patent a sophisticated airport security system which supports passive software-based profiling of potentially dangerous passengers off of pre-programmed rules. The setup uses a collection of sensors — video, motion, biometric and even olfactory — in terminals and around the airport perimeter, to supply raw data. 'These patents are built on the inference engine, which [analyzes sensor data and] has the ability to calculate very large data sets in real time,' says co-inventor Roger Angell. A small grid of networked computers delivers the necessary processing power. Two applications go one better than Israeli-style security, analyzing furtive glances to detect, according to the title of the patent application, 'Behavioral Deviations by Measuring Eye Movements,' as well as measuring respiratory patterns."

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