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Comment Re:Yes (Score 1) 615

My own experience would agree with being able to work leading to far more hours being spent working .. but that's not necessarily a good thing for your if you're a salaried worker. In my case I was finding myself working extra long hours on regular tasks because it felt like I had extra time to do so and going through emails as soon as I got up (at 4am), which eventually burned me out somewhat. I would do it again, but ideally it'd be something that had a set stopping point each working day.

There are definite benefits to remote work but at the same time there can be significant drawbacks depending on what your work style is, you have to know or learn very quickly to get off work.

Comment Does not compute (Score 1) 150

From what news sources in Korea (much closer to Japan than China) have been saying throughout, increased radiation is being detected but it's not to the level where you'd have health concerns or need to destroy anything. Similarly I don't recall reading of radiation levels in japan itself (eg. Tokyo) that might point to the need to destroy luggage or hospitalise people .. maybe the people from near the reactor might cause concern but I think their concern would be for their homes and family rather than with travelling to china.

I have to say that this sounds like propaganda from the CCP.

Comment Re:FUD Campaign (Score 1) 183

I was a little leery of the actors story too even though I don't consider Samsung (or any other large corporation for that matter) as being the paragons of ethics, but in this case I'm guessing that it was just a case of an id10t shooting off at the mouth rather than someone paid to spread propaganda.

If he was paid to write that I hope for his sake it was enough to retire on because now his credibility in the field is effectively negative (ie. people will avoid him). For me the worst thing he's done is that he might have damaged the credibility of real security researchers through this stunt.

Comment Re:epic FAIL (Score 4, Insightful) 183

Not to blow my own horn, but there were some of us who were sceptical of the story until it was proven by independent sources (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170).

Basically the qualifications of the author aren't technical and he's commenting on a technical topic and the story was lacking on details so such a big claim couldn't (and shouldn't) be taken at face value without independent validation.

In this case the independent validation seems to very strongly refute the claim, which is unfortunate for the author's reputation .. I hope he's learned a lesson from this, nobody needs security people talking about things they don't understand.

Comment Re:So much for being a CISA CISSP MSIA ... (Score 1) 183

No it doesn't mean that they're worthless .. they're just not technical certifications so in this case we should've been sceptical (like I said in the original story, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170) because the certifications aren't relevant to the abilities required to make an informed comment.

Comment Re:Extremely Sceptical (Score 3, Insightful) 515

Agree with your scepticism .. While the author seems to have good security qualifications, they're mostly non-technical or managerial level and the articles are awfully devoid of details and I'm concerned that he starts with attempts to equate his accusations with the Sony incident before even providing his evidence .. it sounds like he's experiencing confirmation bias.

If this is part of the standard install it should be easy to duplicate and with the publicity this is sure to generate it's likely to be attempted.. personally I'll wait for a technical person to comment on this and more importantly provide the details rather than "After an in-depth analysis of the laptop, my conclusion was that this software was installed by the manufacturer, Samsung" (that's not good enough imho).

Comment Re:Xenophobia... (Score 1) 200

I was responding to the parent's comment that xenophobia is ok as long as it doesn't affect us .. suffice to say that if that were acceptable then the holocause would be acceptable. Were you or your own directly affected by the holocaust? Most people would see that as unacceptable.

In regards to your comment about maintaining ethnic and cultural identity, if that were the extent of the deal then the label xenophobia wouldn't be appropriate, but that's not the root cause of seeking to replace temporary migrant workers with robots. By and large the temporary workers aren't going to be settling in japan on a permanent basis (both due to their own desires and the restrictive laws against it) so the argument that they're seeking to protect ethnic and cultural identity doesn't ring true.

One particularly interesting example of the attitude of japanese society is the treatment of japanese-brazilians .. they're effectively treated like 'gaijin', ie. a threat to japanese culture, even though for all intents and purposes they'd be seen as japanese in a society that wasn't xenophobic.

Comment Re:Polio Vaccine (Score 1) 131

The trouble is that selfish individuals will then take advantage of that .. Jonas Salk refuses to patent the polio vaccine? I'll patent it and sue him for a 'clear' breach of my invention.

Sure, the 'prior invention' conditions should prevent this, but you can just DOS the patent offices by issuing requests for the most trivial things to prevent them from examining things in too much detail.

The system doesn't punish patent grabbing, it encourages it in fact, so you have to get patents for defensive purposes .. truly a sad state of affairs.

Comment Re:Not SiO2 glass (Score 2) 242

Back in the materials engineering classes glass was defined as being "a supercooled liquid of infinite viscosity" .. but looking now it seems that it'd be more accurate to refer to it as an 'amorphous solid'

Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.

Solids are highly organized structures. They include crystals, like sugar and salt, with their millions of atoms lined up in a row, explains Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Liquids and glasses don't have that order," he notes. Glasses, though more organized than liquids, do not attain the rigid order of crystals. "Amorphous means it doesn't have that long-range order," Ediger says. With a "solid—if you grab it, it holds its shape," he adds.

When glass is made, the material (often containing silica) is quickly cooled from its liquid state but does not solidify when its temperature drops below its melting point. At this stage, the material is a supercooled liquid, an intermediate state between liquid and glass. To become an amorphous solid, the material is cooled further, below the glass-transition temperature. Past this point, the molecular movement of the material's atoms has slowed to nearly a stop and the material is now a glass. This new structure is not as organized as a crystal, because it did not freeze, but it is more organized than a liquid. For practical purposes, such as holding a drink, glass is like a solid, Ediger says, although a disorganized one.

Like liquids, these disorganized solids can flow, albeit very slowly. Over long periods of time, the molecules making up the glass shift themselves to settle into a more stable, crystallike formation, explains Ediger. The closer the glass is to its glass-transition temperature, the more it shifts; the further away from that changeover point, the slower its molecules move and the more solid it seems.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-fiction-glass-liquid

Comment Re:Hang on... (Score 1) 203

I see where you're coming from, but I suspect this is an error in translation .. IMHO there's a missing 'if found guilty by investigation' after penalize and he's speaking on behalf of the justice process.

Given that they've not even spoken to the developer and don't have the facts in hand (eg. the program in question) it's fair to say what the final conclusion should be is still uncertain.

Comment Re:Hang on... (Score 1) 203

It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information such as whether this data collection was his work (intended or otherwise) or he was ordered to include this 'feature'. Followed by determining why it's there, eg. was it his own work or was it because of an order from above, etc. Juristiction is being mentioned because SK police obviously don't have the right to interview a US citizen without the cooperation of the US government, but beyond that the story so far is pretty stock standard for an ongoing police investigation.

Comment Re:The South Korean Government is no fan of Google (Score 3, Informative) 203

The real-name laws in korea were created for two reasons:

1. Serious instances of unfounded slandering against various people, especially celebrities.but not restricted to them. The aim is to encourage people to behave responsibly on the internet by tieing what they post or upload back to the individual, beyond that the SK government doesn't give a rat's arse what you do online or which sites you go to.

Case in point being, to continue with your example, that Google (or more specifically Youtube) was required either to have a system to point back to the real-person or alternatively restrict the ability to post or upload potentially slanderous material. Google chose the latter and it's worthy of note that people can do everything else, eg. view videos.

Basically it's the side effect of having the highest rate of internet participation in the world .. you get all sorts of people just like normal society, including those who enjoy malicious rumour mongering and think they can engage in that behind the privacy of the internet. Ironically in a large proportion of cases it turns out the posters were immature school kids (including primary schoolers) being just that .. immature.


2. Many government functions that in real-life require authentication are fully online. This is probably beyond the experience of most people on slashdot, but you can do all sorts of personal activities online (eg. taxation, etc) and by definition you can't take people at their word when talking about those. Therefore real-name identification is required there also, particularly as there's rampant attempts at ID theft from china for various reasons.

Ironically your post is a perfect example of scenario 1, ie. malicious slandering by people hiding behind internet anonymity, in the manner in which you deliberately twist the SK's request and google's actions with unsubstantiated additions like:

- It's no secret that the South Korean government isn't overly fond of Google

Hardly, the government has only required that google comply with the laws that were created to address the previously listed comments. Beyond that Google has been free to operate as it sees fit .. calling that repressive is ridiculous, the government doesn't track people's activities nor are companies required to do anything beyond enabling the tracking down of people for legal purposes, eg. lawsuits for slander.

We're not talking about china and it's so-called golden shield (or shower to be more accurate).


- Google chose to block posts to YouTube from Korea

No, google chose to remove the functionality to post without an account liked to a real person. To quote from the article:

YouTube has decided to restrict its video upload and comment functions in South Korea.” It also stated, “Because there is no upload function, users won’t be required to confirm their identification.”

Note that viewing videos is not restricted at all and uploads/comments to sites that are linked to a real-person are unrestricted beyond the uploader being aware that they should be sociable in their behaviour.

I wouldn't be surprised if Google simply didn't feel it cost effective to create complex functionality that would be country specific (with all the possibilities that different countries would then start asking for their own items) so it was easier to simply remove rather than add.

- while encouraging those users to change their country preference to somewhere else

Where exactly did they say that?



It's fair to say that your post is a perfect example of what the law is designed to address, slanderers hiding behind anonymity to post all sorts of lies and half-truths. We'd all like to think that this type of people don't exist, but unfortunately some people only feel better by putting others down, one only has to look at Youtube comments unfortunately.

This type of crap isn't restricted to SK only though, it's being addressed there first because society at large has an understanding of the online world, but there's plenty of this kind of BS taking place in other countries .. it's just not taken as seriously as it should.

A Melbourne mother has blamed her 14-year-old daughter's suicide on the internet and the tragic case has highlighted the problem of cyber bullying among young people.

In Australia, one of the first comprehensive studies of cyber bullying shows about 10 per cent of teenagers and children have experienced some form of sustained bullying using technology.

It is a behaviour that can have tragic consequences.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/23/2633775.htm

10% is a very large proportion of people victimised by cowards .. people need to sit up and take notice.

Comment Re:Wait a minute... (Score 1, Insightful) 608

North Korea is beyond liberation. For change, the entire nation and it's culture must be obliterated . But that would be a genuine crime against humanity. So, we wait for South Korea to go up in smoke. That's when the endless talking with the Chinese and Russians start. Next, we decide on how best to rebuild that nation on the terms of the North Korean regime based on special provisions and treaties.

No, the Western World doesn't have the balls to face evil anymore. We are...pussies.

Someone once thought that way .. His name was Adolf Hitler and he thought that ridding the world of Jews was a good thing. Luckily the US fought against him 70 years back.

If you want to talk about evil, then perhaps you should look in the mirror first.

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