Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Also in The Register (Score 5, Interesting) 492

There is another (I believe better) article about this in The Register: “Donald Trump dumps on Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg”. Some quotes from Trump, extracted from the article, are below.

We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program. More than half of H-1B visas are issued for the program's lowest allowable wage level, and more than eighty percent for its bottom two. Raising the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in favor of the H-1B program.

Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and minorities.

Comment Re:This is the NSA's fault (Score 1) 173

If the NSA spent their time making the cyber defenses of this country stronger instead of making it weaker with compromised encryption, rampant back doors, etc., there's a good chance this data breach would not have happened.

That is an extremely important point. The NSA is charged with protection of U.S. government communications and information systems against penetration and network warfare. Thus, the SF86 breach is a clear failure of the NSA. Had the NSA kept its focus on what it is supposed to be doing, the breach might well never have happened. Instead, though, the NSA has shifted its focus to activities that are illegal, unconstitutional, and seriously harmful.

This is further strong evidence that the top people at the NSA should be wholesale removed.

Comment Koomey's law (Score 4, Interesting) 101

Moore's law is sort of a mangled version of Koomey's law. Koomey's law states that the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated has been doubling every 1.6 years. It appears to have been operative since the late 1940s: longer than Moore's law. Moreover, Koomey's law has the appeal of being defined in terms of basic physics, rather than technological artefacts. Hence, I prefer Koomey's law, even though Moore's law is far more famous.

There is another interesting aspect to Koomey's law: it hints at an answer to the question "for how long can this continue?" The hinted answer is "until 2050", because by 2050 computations will require so little energy that they will face a fundamental thermodynamic constraint—Landauer's principle. The only way to avoid that constraint is with reversible computing.

Comment CFR Science Lecture on Rise of Robots (Score 1) 101

The Council on Foreign Relations recently had its Annual Lecture on Science and Technology: the topic was "Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of Robots". The panelists were Rodney Brooks (MIT), Abhinav Gupta (CMU), and Andrew McAfee (MIT). The video is available. Robophobia was one of the main themes.

Submission + - Court overturns Dutch data retention law, privacy more important (dutchnews.nl) 1

wabrandsma writes: DutchNews.nl writes:
Internet providers no longer have to keep their clients phone, internet and email details because privacy is more important, a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday.

Digital Rights organisation Bits of Freedom writes in a Blog:
The law’s underlying European directive was meant as a tool in the fight against serious crimes. The Dutch law, however, is much more expansive, including everything from terrorism to bike theft. During the hearing, the state’s attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft. The judge’s response: it doesn’t matter if you exploit the possibility or not, the fact that the possibility exists is already reason enough to conclude that the current safeguards are unsatisfactory.

Comment Hillary on e-mail, in 2000 (Score 3, Informative) 609

Here is a quote from Hillary, video recorded in 2000, when she was a Senator.

As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that, you know, why would I—I don’t even want—why would I ever want to do e-mail? .... Can you imagine?

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/watch-an-old-home-movie-from-2000-where-hillary-clinton-said#.re86K3GRo

When she became Secretary of State, she had to use e-mail. Hence, she got her own private server (at home where it was under protection of the 4th Amendment).

Comment Printing out the e-mails (Score 4, Insightful) 609

Clinton printed over 50,000 pages of e-mails, which were then shipped to the State Department. It would have been less work for her to send those e-mails electronically. What was her purpose in doing that extra work?

Printed texts take more time to search, and they do not contain all the internal meta-data. Perhaps too she just wanted to show her middle finger to the people who asked for her e-mails.

This is honorable behavior?

Comment This would benefit from improvement (Score 3, Insightful) 93

If ... anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable.

It does not matter how every person feels. There are some people who get offended about almost anything. The above quote seems to be part of the extreme political correctness that is infecting society—I never imagined that Linux development would go that way. Additionally, if people feel “uncomfortable”, that might well be well warranted and help them to develop.

The quote would be better replaced by something that omits mention of feelings (which are internal and cannot be independently assessed). I suggest appealing to the “reasonable person”, as is commonly done in law. Here is an example: “Personal abuse and threats are unacceptable, as is any behavior that reasonable people would deem to be highly or persistently offensive”.

Comment Five reasons to blame Apple (Score 3, Informative) 311

There is a good article "Five reasons to blame Apple in nude celebrity photo leak", in The Hamilton Spectator. Here are the key points (read the article for elaborations).

1. The vulnerability is Security 101 stuff (even a good password, like “D0nM@tt1ngly!”, was still vulnerable).
2. The vulnerability was publicly known since May.
3. Apple defaults users into the cloud (and Apple makes it very hard to not store in the cloud).
4. Apple does not encourage two-factor authentication (it discourages this).
5. Two-factor authentication wouldn't have worked anyway (it is not actually enforced on iCloud).

Submission + - NSA was the sole editor of ISO crypto-PRNG standard

Sara Chan writes: A Congressman, Alan Grayson, has sent a letter to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. The letter asks several questions, in particular, this one: "How did the NSA become the sole editor of the ISO 18031 specification?" ISO 18031 specifies a model for a pseudorandom number generator that is suitable for cryptography. Thus, according to the letter, the NSA was the sole editor of an ISO cryptographic standard. The letter will probably not do much, though, given Clapper's prior perjury.

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Working...