Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Image

Facebook Master Password Was "Chuck Norris" 319

Posted by samzenpus from the ad-nauseum-roundhouse dept.
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."
Image

What Does Google Suggest Suggest About Humanity? 513

Posted by samzenpus from the fire-makes-things-hot dept.
CNETNate writes "You'll laugh, but mostly you'll cry. Some of the questions Google gets asked to deliver results for is beyond worrying. 'Can you put peroxide in your ear?', 'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?', and 'Why can't I own a Canadian?' being just a selection of the truly baffling — and disturbing — questions Google is regularly forced to answer."
Privacy

Submission + - 16 yr old jailed under Patriot act due to spoofers

Submitted by Joe 'Nova'
Joe 'Nova' writes: Full story here, digg up.
http://digg.com/world_news/FBI_arrest_10th_grader_under_Patriot_Act

Apparently, a 16 yr old has an IP phone, and it gets spoofed. Spoofer sends in a bomb threat, family gets rude awakening at 10pm despite alibi for son. During initial hearing, the agent(no name as yet) disregards the fact many similar incidents have happened, and denies spoofing even exists! When I heard this on the radio today, I knew just the sleuths to help on it. ;)
Because he is charged under the Patriot Act(ironic, no?), he has no rights ala Gitmo. This has all the feel of bad precedent case law, and his own mother, Annette Lundeby, has severely limited visitation. There is an interview with her second hour on http://www.infowars.com/stream.pls or http://www.infowars.com/infowars.asx . She is currently searching for a pro-bono, better than public defender that can represent her case, IANAL, all computers and game consoles were confiscated.
Any cases proving phone spoofing would be greatly appreciated, I don't know his specific make/model, more details to come. The mother has documented the spoofers on youtube bragging on how they made this family suffer, can a slashdotter find? Youtube(Liveleak) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KmgCT5abSA
Very chilling indeed!
Censorship

Submission + - QWest confirms, then denies rate limiting YouTube

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I live in western Washington. My DSL provider is QWest: I bought 1.5Mb/800Kb. About a week ago, my companion said that her download speed with YouTube, TED and others was substantially less than it had been. I suggested that it might be the outbound load on host site. Her complaints about poor performance persisted. The short of it is that after a long dialog with QWest, they first confirmed that they are rate limiting. They subsequently contacted me to say that they are not rate limiting.

This morning I ran some standard tests: speed test (speedtest.net) reports that I have the full 1.5Mb/sec I bought. I tried viewing a YouTube video, a long one (50 minutes) and found the experience painful, about 20% of the speed it should be. I suspected QWest of rate limiting. I used an external proxy server to view the same YouTube video. It appeared to download at full speed.

I called QWest DSL support. They were unhelpful, even when I escallated to a supervisor. I next called "customer service". The lady I talked to said she wasn't a techie and barely understood the terms "rate limiting" and the like. She transferred me to "Broadband Retention". I explained the apparent rate limiting to that individual. He denied knowing anything about it, but did transfer me to "Louis" in some tech department (not regular DSL support). I explained my observations and tests one more time to "Louis". He denied that QWest was rate limiting. Louis did put me on hold for a good while. When he came back he referred me to the QWest "subscriber agreement" at:
http://www.qwest.com/legal/highspeedinternetsubscriberagreementfilesHSI_Subscriber_Agreement_ENG_v20_042209.pdf
He cites the second page, end of the first paragraph, where it says that QWest may limit speeds. He also cites a "FAQ on Excessive use Policy"
http://www.qwest.com/internethelp/eup/16915_EUP_Details-15.pdf
and admitted that QWest was, indeed, rate limiting YouTube and other streaming sites.

I asked for a discount based on degraded service. Louis conferenced me to "Jason" in the "loyalty group". I told Jason that I thought 1.5Mb/sec but with rate limited access to YouTube, etc, was worth about $10/month. Jason offered $15/month for 3 months. I said, "Not good enough. Make it permanent". He declined.

I told both Jason and Louis that would post a summary of my discussion with QWest to Consumerist, Reddit and Slashdot. I ended the conversation with a polite "Good day".

About 20 minutes later Lousi called to change his previous statement that QWest rate limits YouTube and others. He now declares that QWest does not rate limit. — From my observation, it does appear that QWest does rate limit. Maybe smarter folks than I can determine the truth.
The Internet

Submission + - President to be able to shut down the Internet? (joelbdalley.com)

Submitted by
filmmaker
filmmaker writes: "In the following YouTube clip, Rep. Weiner suggest to House subcommittee that the President have on/off switch for the Internet. This goes right along with Jay Rockefeller's Senate Bill S. 773, which would limit all kinds of Internet freedoms, for instance, giving the President the aforementioned "on/off" switch for the entire 'net (in the U.S., at least) and requiring anyone who works in computer security, even if for a private firm, to register into a Federal gov't database..."
Government

Submission + - CIFTA Treaty and You (infowars.com)

Submitted by
cagrin
cagrin writes: "From this article discussing Obama bringing up support for CIFTA Treaty with Mexican President Felipe Calderon:

"Obama has promised Mexican President Felipe Calderon that he would urge the Senate to take up CIFTA. He is doing this under the cover of the drug cartel violence in Mexico. Obama and Calderon quoted a statistic echoed by the corporate media that 90% of the weapons seized in Mexican raids were purchased from U.S. gun shops and a reason why the U.S. needs to ratify this treaty. In fact, this is a lie — only a mere 17% of guns found at Mexico crime scenes have been traced to the U.S."

Lou Dobb's also discusses the affect it would have on 2nd amendment rights if ratified in Senate.

"One of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors" — Plato"

Comment Cyber threat fear is being drummed up right now (Score 3, Insightful) 247

by filmmaker (#27701635) Attached to: Hundreds of Thousands of Chinese Black-Hats
Ok, over the last couple weeks, several stories have made their way into the news about cybersecurity.

These stories overstate the threat, and, in particular, only serve to loudly announce things which are already well known. For example, the fact that DoD systems are probed continuously by the Chinese. But! That's always been true. Where were all the alarming sounding news reports last year? Two years ago? Ten years ago? Where was Jay Rockefeller's Senate bill, S. 773, which aims to restrict Internet freedom in the United States in previous years? We can all expect the media heat to increase even more as the public is whipped into a frenzy of fear, and then comes to accept that we need the Federal Government to restrict our Internet freedom--for our own safety, of course!

As these stories come through Slashdot, we all bicker amongst ourselves as to how grave the threat is. Or where it's coming from. Or how we might combat it. It's so predictable. And while we're distracted with these irrelevant (although admittedly interesting in some cases) discussions, Senate and House bills are moving through our Congress right now which I consider to be "Patriot Acts" for the Internet. Nobody is talking about those, though.

We get what we deserve when we demand nothing at all.

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Close