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Comment My JAVA security fix (Score 1) 1

by u64 (#43471565) Attached to: Oracle Fixes 42 Security Vulnerabilities in Java

1. I Uninstall JAVA wherever possible.
2. I make best efforts to create blocks against people installing JAVA on their machines by mistake.

But some banks requires JAVA in the browser. So i'm thinking of getting a separate portable browser for
just the JAVA plugin. And harden the browser to only allow visiting the bank site...

Maybe there's an addon for that. To only run JAVA plugin on a few whitelisted sites...

Submission + - Magic trick transforms conservatives into liberals - and vice versa (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: When US presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people’s political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden’s 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds.
Hall’s group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed.

Comment Re:Well the ultimate value of Bitcoin is (Score 2) 605

by u64 (#43419449) Attached to: BitCoin Value Collapses, Possibly Due To DDoS

All currencies have a subjective value for each individual at each point in time. Unlike an objective value as say, 1 meter, or 1 gram.

When i'm willing to trade 1 BTC for 1 USD or 1 g Gold that's my choice, and if anyone else agrees during that time we can trade.

I'm having a zen-like moment where i'm thinking as a ferengi and a hippie at the same time... Money is a game that we're all forced to play, and naturally there are many that looses. Then comes the problem that the rich can rig the game so that they win no matter how stupid they are.

Comment Low hanging fruits (Score 1) 2

by u64 (#43402701) Attached to: Bruce Schneier: IT for Oppression

The clueless masses uses the default settings and the default installed software. Several things can be improved right now,

  • Does Linux and BSD distros come with TorBrowser installed by default...
  • Does the Free browsers use DuckDuckGo or StartPage.com by default...
  • Does the Free browsers have HTTPS-Everywhere by default...

Submission + - Bruce Schneier: IT for Oppression (schneier.com) 2

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Whether it's Syria using Facebook to help identify and arrest dissidents or China using its "Great Firewall" to limit access to international news throughout the country, repressive regimes all over the world are using the Internet to more efficiently implement surveillance, censorship, propaganda, and control. They're getting really good at it, and the IT industry is helping. We're helping by creating business applications — categories of applications, really — that are being repurposed by oppressive governments for their own use.

Comment Keep XP (Score 1) 1

by u64 (#43388735) Attached to: Set your watches for the end of Windows XP

Does everyone really need XP updates. Just switch to a sane Browser. Stay away from MS Office. Uninstall JAVA. Uninstall Flash and use HTML5. Install a good Antivirus and proper Firewall. Use Foxit Reader rather than Adobe Reader. In short, just secure XP and it should be fine for another decade or so.

Do something *useful* with the money rather than paying for Windows upgrades over and over.

Finally, try out some Linux distros on a few machines. [ducks an avalanche of chairs from Ballmer]

Submission + - WikiLeaks releasing 1.7 million records called "The Kissinger Cables" (wikileaks.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The cables are all from the time period of 1973 to 1976. Without droning about too many numbers that can be found in the press release, about 200,000 of the cables relate directly to former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. These cables include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco's Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels. The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the "Yom Kippur war"). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalled access to journalists and the general public.

"The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975

Submission + - French intelligence agency forces removal of a Wikipedia article

Submitted by twkozlowski
twkozlowski writes: After being refused by the Wikimedia Foundation — the organisation that operates Wikipedia — the French intelligence agency DCRI (Direction Centrale du Renseignement Intérieur) forces a volunteer Wikipedia administrator to remove an article about a military radio station in central France, citing the French penal code and threatening him with "serious and immediate reprisals".

The article had been deleted as demanded, but in a revenge move, it was restored by a different volunteer administrator, improved, and subsequently translated into English for the whole wide world to read.

The story has since hit the German news, and received an official statement from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Submission + - Film critic Roger Ebert dead (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by AndyKrish
AndyKrish writes: Chicago Sun-Times reports of the passing of Roger Ebert — arguably the world's most famous film critic — succumbing to cancer.

Submission + - Massive data leak reveals how the ultra rich hide their wealth (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by bshell
bshell writes: According to the CBC, there was a massive leak of "files containing information on over 120,000 offshore entities — including shell corporations and legal structures known as trusts — involving people in over 170 countries. The leak amounts to 260 gigabytes of data, or 162 times larger than the U.S. State Department cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010...In many cases, the leaked documents expose insider details of how agents would incorporate companies in Caribbean and South Pacific micro-states on behalf of wealthy clients, then assign front people called "nominees" to serve, on paper, as directors and shareholders for the corporations — disguising the companies' true owners." Makes a good read and there are some good interactive components. Perhaps slashdot readers can figure out how the source of the leak, the D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists got their hands on this data.

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