LongestPrefix - Slashdot User

Alan Turing Gets an Apology From Prime Minister Brown 576

Posted by timothy on Thursday September 10, 2009 @07:20PM from the mitigation-is-tricky-50-years-later dept.

99luftballon writes "The British government has officially apologized for the treatment of Alan Turing in the post war era. An online petition got more than enough signatures to force an official statement and Prime Minister Gordon Brown has issued a lengthy apology. 'Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: we're sorry, you deserved so much better.'"

Working Off the Clock, How Much Is Too Much? 582

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday August 10, 2009 @05:54PM from the volunteering-isn't-voluntary dept.

The Wall Street Journal has word of yet another suit against an employer who required an "always on" mentality to persist because of easily available communications. Most of us working in some sort of tech related job are working more than 40 hours per week (or at least lead the lifestyle of always working), but how much is too much? What methods have others used in the past to help an employer see the line between work and personal life without resorting to a legal attack? "Greg Rasin, a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP, a New York business law firm, said the recession may spawn wage-and-hour disputes as employers try to do the same amount of work with fewer people. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act says employees must be paid for work performed off the clock, even if the work was voluntary. When the law was passed in 1938, 'work' was easy to define for hourly employees, said Mr. McCoy. As the workplace changed, so did the rules for when workers should be paid."

Subverting PIN Encryption For Bank Cards 182

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @11:01AM from the pin-number-atm-machine dept.

An anonymous reader sends in a story at Wired about the increasingly popular methods criminals are using to bypass PIN encryption and rack up millions of dollars in fraudulent withdrawals. Quoting: "According to the payment-card industry ... standards for credit card transaction security, [PINs] are supposed to be encrypted in transit, which should theoretically protect them if someone intercepts the data. The problem, however, is that a PIN must pass through multiple HSMs across multiple bank networks en route to the customer's bank. These HSMs are configured and managed differently, some by contractors not directly related to the bank. At every switching point, the PIN must be decrypted, then re-encrypted with the proper key for the next leg in its journey, which is itself encrypted under a master key that is generally stored in the module or in the module's application programming interface, or API. 'Essentially, the thief tricks the HSM into providing the encryption key,' says Sartin. 'This is possible due to poor configuration of the HSM or vulnerabilities created from having bloated functions on the device.'"

Comment Re:Alll's Well that ended well. (Score 1) 420

by LongestPrefix on Sunday March 15, 2009 @01:27PM (#27200973) Attached to: iPhone App Causes Google To Shut Down SMS Service

Google's service was offered free to their users, and it can be revoked at any time, just like all the other free Google services. Google users used the free service. The Infinite SMS application made it easy for them to do so.

It costs Slashdot money to run these servers. Are you a thief to access their web pages?

It costs Google money to host Gmail, or perform your searches. Is Firefox enabling theft because it makes Google searches easy?

Of course not. The argument seems to be that popularity, i.e., heavy use in the way it was intended to use, means that the service was being abused, is specious.

Comment Peopleware, Mythical Man Month, & other though (Score 1) 551

by LongestPrefix on Saturday December 13, 2008 @03:11PM (#26104789) Attached to: How Do I Manage Seasoned Programmers?

I'll second recommendations to read "Peopleware" and "Mythical Man Month". Both give a lot of insight here.

Hopefully, your team is a profit center, and not a cost center. If your team is generating the profit, then the people who make the products are Kings. All stars. You should have the goal of making the finest systems possible -- under your constraints of time and budget.

Expect the developers to keep learning; "We don't have expertise in that," should be replaced with, "we should explore XYZ".

Plan on three versions of any important system: Force them to develop prototypes; demand basic functionality within a month of starting. Then revise and replace that prototype with another, better prototype. Then plan on a final version (The Third System) that discards the stuff you didn't need.

Work to avoid heavy-weight programming. I was once hired at $240/hour to write code for a company that had a large team of developers already. I knew only slightly more about the domain than they did. Their problem: this company had allowed the developers to just examine everything to death. They hired me to help because I could actually deliver within rough deadlines.

I disagree with the concept of hiring junior programmers, unless they're just apprentices. Do you want to hire a junior surgeon to do your operation? Or hire a junior Engineer to build the bridge your wife drives? No: senior people do important work. Junior people learn how, and do less critical, separate projects.

Good, adult programmer/engineers don't need much managing, but you need them to make the product. They do need somebody to help them see the bigger picture -- but any team of two engineers can do that for each other in turn. So you're really there to service them.

Fire the jerks. Develop some standard of productivity -- even if it's lines of code + group source code reviews -- and fire the people who are clearly not fitting in.

The DRM Scorecard 543

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @08:26PM from the guess-who's-ahead dept.

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWeek blogger Alex Wolfe put together a scorecard which makes the obvious but interesting point that, when you list every major DRM technology implemented to "protect" music and video, they've all been cracked. This includes Apple's FairPlay, Microsoft's Windows Media DRM, the old-style Content Scrambling System (CSS) used on early DVDs and the new AACS for high-definition DVDs. And of course there was the Sony Rootkit disaster of 2005. Can anyone think of a DRM technology which hasn't been cracked, and of course this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't the industry just give up and go DRM-free?"

Ohio Establishing State Wide Broadband Network 105

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 01, 2007 @07:01PM from the fast-internet-for-the-people dept.

bohn002 writes "In order to coordinate and expand access to the state's broadband data network, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has signed an executive order establishing the Ohio Broadband Council and the Broadband Ohio Network. The order directs the Ohio Broadband Council to coordinate efforts to extend access to the Broadband Ohio Network to every county in Ohio. The order allows public and private entities to tap into the Broadband Ohio Network — all with a goal of expanding access to high-speed internet service in parts of the state that presently don't have such service."

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