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Comment Re:bit of a tricky question with forums (Score 1) 171

Not exactly. From that link:

If you later decide that you would like to reactivate your account, you can do so at any time by signing in to Nextdoor using the same email address and password as before, and then clicking Reactivate.

So everything is still there.

Why not kill the account completely except for the past posts? And put the username and email address into a do-not-allow list so that a future user won't be able to take it over.

The reason is that they want to be able to sell your information.

Comment Re:call them (Score 5, Interesting) 171

And if that doesn't work then change as much as you can. Your email address should be the easiest. Then any other personal information that you can alter. If they won't delete it then make it worthless to them.

And this is another reason to fight against the current trend of requiring real names for accounts.

Comment Mod parent up! (Score 1) 213

Or even use the PIN as part of the encryption key used to encrypt a random string sent from the bank once authentication is requested.

And the connection between the PoS and the bank should also be encrypted.

And that connection should be 100% private. ISDN or whatever. Nothing going across the Internet. Not even with a VPN.

Comment Re:Trust none of them (Score 5, Interesting) 291

An even easier test of trust:

The post, carefully worded to avoid discussing whether or not the company took $10m from the NSA, concluded with the following statement:

Did RSA take $10 million from the NSA and if so for what service?

So far it looks like they aren't arguing that they did NOT take the money.

Comment Mod parent up. (Score 1) 612

There's nothing wrong with helping women (and other minorities) deal with actual bullying and dismissive attitude that does, in fact, exist.

That is the important part. Once you start going against society's expectation of acceptable careers for your sex/gender/race/whatever then you're going to be dealing with it in school and with your family and even in the job market once you graduate.

Getting more of X to attend classes in STEM is easy.

Getting more of X to love STEM enough to stick with a career despite the constant societal pressures to conform is very difficult.

Comment Re:The mote in god's eye. (Score 2) 612

Men avoid working for public school systems because their policy is now dictated by feminist trained soccer moms who think all men are potential rapists/pedophiles.

Not exactly. But that does show how the larger society will influence/dictate what careers are "acceptable" to which genders/sexes.

As a male, you will have fewer problems and more social support as an engineer than as a teacher (except college professor).

Comment Re:Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist (Score -1, Flamebait) 612

Unless there are roaming gangs of white nerdy kids beating up anyone with the wrong color that I haven't heard of.

It doesn't have to be that overt to still be racist or sexist.

But the first issue is whether Computer Science (and "STEM" in general) is more or less racist/sexist than the larger society.

Talk to women who take the bus to college and ask them whether their experiences on the bus are better or worse than in the classroom. Or even join an on-line game with a female avatar and name.

In the classroom it is usually more subtle. But when you depend upon a good grade from a sexist/racist teacher there will be issues.

Comment Huh? (Score 2) 489

Though he's probably proposing it for all the wrong reasons, Draper's terrible plan is premised on a totally salient criticismâ"it's absurd that California only sends two senators to Washington when it is by far the country's most populous state.

He's never heard of the "House of Representatives"?

Or is he just unhappy that each state gets an equal vote in the Senate?

Comment Re:Wait a second... (Score 5, Insightful) 199

They claimed several prevented attacks but refused to provide details.

And given the way they publicise the "attacks" that they "stop" which are really just an informant giving fake bombs/weapons to some nut job ... you know they'd be shouting any successes from every rooftop they could get to. They'd be doing the talk show circuit and hosting their own news conferences.

The first problem is that the kind of "terrorism" that they want to focus on is almost non-existant in the USofA. The real terrorists had one huge success and that's all.

The second problem is that the real terrorists don't spend time gossipping on the phone with all their terrorist friends. Yes, it is a way to map out a social network. But this isn't Facebook. Sam the suicide does not have to call Bill the bomb every Tuesday at 7 to chat.

The metadata and phone location are useful for reconstructing the final days and those contacts AFTER an attack. And they don't need years of data for that. Or even months.

Comment Re:So VirtualBox to the rescue? (Score 1) 137

I doubt it took the FBI that long to track someone who was not trying to hide.

I don't have that much faith in the FBI. If anything, the ease with which they can gather as much data as they do would indicate that they just aren't very good at targeted objectives.

Now, I will make my own now. He did bounce his connection, and that is why they needed to use a trojan aimed at his account.

In which case he'd have the same results using Tor. And that takes a lot less skill.

Instead, if he had any competency he'd be using a cracked system so that any compromises would happen on the cracked system. And he'd use a command and control protocol that was different than the HTTP used to connect to Yahoo!.

Comment Re:So VirtualBox to the rescue? (Score 1) 137

Or if he had any skill at all he'd have cracked another computer and bounced all the traffic through the zombie.

And now the world has an example of FBI virus to dissect.

Couldn't the FBI just ask Yahoo! for the IP address of the account that sent those messages?

Comment Re:Of course people who navigate... (Score 2) 97

Also from the summary:

Questioning cognitively active, passive, and mixed travelers about distances from a survey site to LA's city hall, the research demonstrated that the passive bus and subway riders have less of a grip on distance.

Rather they had a better grip on how distance is really measured ... the time it takes you to get there.

Which is more useful for a traveler to know:
a. The miles between A and B?

b. The time it will take to get from A to B?

Comment Re:Porn browsing? (Score 1) 415

In theory it is not that they watch it but what they watch.

Suppose the NSA loads up the computer of some "radical" with 100's of gigs of interracial gay enema porn and then "reveals" the dirty sex browsing history to the world.

In reality, you'll just be convincing the people who already don't like that person that he is a filthy disgusting bad person. And the people who approved of his ideas will claim it is a conspiracy by the NSA/FBI/CIA/whatever to discredit him and that those pictures were planted.

Comment Mod parent up. (Score 1) 107

However it does do a good job at removing an entire type of attack, i.e. from remote.

Exactly. And Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on that concept. He calls it "attack trees".

https://www.schneier.com/paper-attacktrees-ddj-ft.html

I think that the biggest problem here is that there isn't a recognized definition of "security" as it applies to computers.

Security is not about becoming invulnerable. That is impossible. Mostly because there is no "secure". There is only "more secure" or "less secure" than your starting point.

Improving security is, initially, about reducing the number of people who can EFFECTIVELY attack you. Then increase the number of people REQUIRED to attack you.

And that isn't even addressing the issue of whether you KNOW that you're being attacked and/or whether the data has been compromised.

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