Comment PINs are next to useless. (Score 1) 167
4-digit PINS are nearly useless. I use a 16-digit pin-code plus 256-bit AES encryption of all of my sensitive data.
Comment Try Backupify.com (Score 1) 368
Backupify.com is a great way to back up your Facebook account in the cloud (along with Twitter, Picasa, Google Calendar, Google Docs, etc.). You can use the promo code savegmail to get 20 GB of storage free for a whole year.
Comment Ha ha. (Score -1, Troll) 433
Good thing I live in America. You jelly, Canadians?
Comment What about people who are afraid of heights? (Score 1) 488
I'd love to see the reactions of people who are afraid of heights when they discover that their plane is totally transparent.
Comment Re:Solution For College's Bad Network Policy? (Score 1) 699
A good tool for helping to protect yourself from Keyloggers is KeyScrambler. It encrypts your keystrokes as you type. I've tested it against a few free and commercial keyloggers, and it does the trick. The keylogger's logs show only scrambled keystrokes.
The free version protects your keystrokes in IE and Mozilla Firefox.
The free version protects your keystrokes in IE and Mozilla Firefox.
Comment Better Option: Unholy Spec'd Death Knights! (Score 1) 828
Thousands of Unholy spec'd Death Knights would get the job done.
Submission + - Last.fm User Data Was Sent to RIAA by CBS (techcrunch.com) 1
suraj.sun writes: A couple of months ago Erick Schonfeld wrote a post titled "Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA? ( http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/did-lastfm-just-hand-over-user-listening-data-to-the-riaa/ )" based on a source that has proved to be very reliable in the past. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter.
Now we've located another source for the story, someone who's very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick's story wasn't correct.
Last.fm didn't hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it.
Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for "internal use only." It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.
We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm's denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.
We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy ( http://www.last.fm/legal/privacy ) in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.
TechCrunch : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/
Now we've located another source for the story, someone who's very close to Last.fm. And it turns out Last.fm was telling the truth, sorta, when they said Erick's story wasn't correct.
Last.fm didn't hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it.
Here's what we believe happened: CBS requested user data from Last.fm, including user name and IP address. CBS wanted the data to comply with a RIAA request but told Last.fm the data was going to be used for "internal use only." It was only after the data was sent to CBS that Last.fm discovered the real reason for the request. Last.fm staffers were outraged, say our sources, but the data had already been sent to the RIAA.
We believe CBS lied to us when they denied sending the data to the RIAA, and that they subsequently asked us to attribute the quote to Last.fm to make the statement defensible. Last.fm's denials were strictly speaking correct, but they ignored the underlying truth of the situation, that their parent company supplied user data to the RIAA, and that the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users.
We believe Last.fm and CBS violated their own privacy policy ( http://www.last.fm/legal/privacy ) in the transmission of this data. We also believe CBS and Last.fm may have violated EU privacy laws, including the Data Protection Directive, and should be investigated by the appropriate authorities.
TechCrunch : http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/22/deny-this-lastfm/
Comment Re:Matt Asay (Score 1) 163
Similar, only without the need to vomit afterwards.
Comment Matt Asay (Score 0, Offtopic) 163
Every time I see Matt Asay's name mentioned in article summaries here on /., I'm shocked for a moment, because I have an uncle with that name.
Comment Smoker here. (Score 1) 575
I'm a smoker, and I have some other health problems as well, so I doubt that I'll live to see 60.
Comment Ubuntu For The Win (Score 1) 739
Once, some critical .dll files had been deleted from the Windows XP Operating System on one of the shared computers in my house, rendering the system un-usable. Nobody had made any backups, and the XP Installation DVD was nowhere to be found.
I didn't want to leave my family with an un-usable machine, so I bit the bullet and installed Debian Linux with Firefox(which I believe was branded IceWeasel at the time), OpenOffice, and some other essentials. After hearing feedback from my parents, I switched to Ubuntu (with the same apps) for the sake of user-friendliness.
Comment Autism? (Score 2, Insightful) 369
What about people who have Autism or other disorders that cause them to express emotion differently? Are you going to lock me up just because I don't seem like a regular Joe Sixpack?
Comment BOINC (Score 2, Interesting) 655
He should've at least used the stolen laptops to run BOINC projects, that insensitive clod!
Submission + - How Much Does a New Internet Cost?
wschalle writes: Given the recent flurry of articles concerning ISP over subscription, increasing bandwidth needs, and lack of infrastructure spending on the part of cable companies, I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution? How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost? How long would it take to make it happen? Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?
The IT Industry's Red Shift Theory 176
Stony Stevenson writes "Sun Microsystems' CTO, Greg Papadopoulos has come out with a Red Shift Theory for IT which posits that an 'elite group of companies are consuming inordinate amounts of IT infrastructure, well beyond most other businesses, and that their demand is growing exponentially. This trend, Papadopoulos maintains, has implications not just for IT's most insatiable consumers, but for the structure of the computing industry itself. It's not just about how many CPU cycles a company uses. Papadopoulos argues that red-shift companies will enjoy exponential business growth in the coming years. Blue-shift companies — those whose processing needs aren't exploding — will grow at about the same rate as GDP, he says.'"
