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Comment Re: It's illegal to give my wallet to an armed rob (Score 1) 95

Ascension hospitals' computers were taken down by ransomware a few months ago, and as far as I know, they didn't pay. Their computers were down for over a month though. Doctors, nurses, etc. had to work off of paper records. On the other hand, United Healthcare paid a $22 million ransom. They're an insurance company though, not a hospital.

Comment Re:What are the actual allegations? (Score 3, Interesting) 87

You move a piece on the board. Everyone can see what you did.

You have to be the one who decides which piece to move, and where to move it to. You can't have someone else help you decide. You can't have a computer help you decide (and computers are so much better at chess than humans these days).

Comment Re:fire up the time machine, krebs. (Score 1) 11

nearly every commercial registrar has locked domains on creation and transfer for about a decade.

That's the registrar lock, aka clientTransferProhibited, which as TFA notes, was already enabled for the domain in question. The article is about also enabling the registry lock, aka serverTransferProhibited. Registrar lock means your registrar (e.g., Dreamhost or GoDaddy) can (be social-engineered to) unlock your domain. Registry lock means someone would also need to contact the registry for the TLD and convince them to remove the lock. (E.g., for a .com domain, that would be Verisign, no matter who you used as your domain registrar). And at least according to the article, it takes more work/manual review to remove a registry lock; it's not something a low-level call center employee can do by clicking a button.

Comment Re: Finally (Score 1) 38

I like Honeywell dvrs. Install those for clients a lot. Anything non cloud based is preferable.

Honeywell just re-badges Dahua equipment, and Dahua has had some serious vulnerabilities too. (I actually use Dahua stuff myself; their cameras are pretty good. But I keep them on their own VLAN, away from the internet.)

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 93

It is conjectured that any integer can be represented as the sum of three cubes.

I think you missed an important part of the first paragraph of that Wikipedia article: "A necessary condition for n to equal such a sum is that n cannot equal 4 or 5 modulo 9, because the cubes modulo 9 are 0, 1, and 1, and no three of these numbers can sum to 4 or 5 modulo 9." So no, not any integer; there are an infinite number of integers where we know that there is no possible solution.

Comment Re:What? (Score 1) 93

Actually you would be wrong and didn't read the summary. The whole sequence of numbers from 1-100 (this includes 4 and 5 by the way) have already been solved as x^3+y^3+z^3=k (i.e. k equals any number from 1-100 including 4 and 5).

Or maybe the summary is wrong? I know that's really unlikely on an esteemed site such as /., but there's always a first time, right??

It is in fact impossible for the sum of the cubes of three integers to total 4 or 5 (or any number that has remainder 4 or 5 when divided by 9). We now have solutions to the equation where k is from 1-100 excluding the ones where k mod 9 is 4 or 5

Submission + - WebKit introduces new tracking prevention policy (webkit.org)

AmiMoJo writes: WebKit, the open source HTML engine used by Apple's Safari browser and a number of others, has created a new policy on tracking prevention. The short version is that many forms of tracking will now be treated the same way as security flaws, being blocked or mitigated with no exceptions.

While on-site tracking will still be allowed (and is practically impossible to prevent anyway), all forms of cross-site tracking and covert tracking will be actively and aggressively blocked.

Comment Re:Apple desktop bus (Score 1) 231

I am well-acquainted with ADB. It uses the same connector as S-Video, which is convenient when cable-shopping since you don't have to pay the Apple tax on an S-Video connector. My whole point was that OP didn't know what they were talking about.

Just because someone made one minor mistake about the shape of the connector doesn't mean they don't know what they're talking about. The rest of his post was accurate.

Comment Re:Why Water? (Score 1) 63

This new form of ice is arguably different from the other 17 forms of ice; as the fine article says, "Depending on whom you ask, superionic ice is either another addition to water’s already cluttered array of avatars or something even stranger. ... 'It's really a new state of matter.'" But as far as ice I through XVII goes, lots of molecules have multiple crystal structures depending on conditions. For example, scientists care a lot about graphene these days; it's a form of carbon, just as graphite and diamond are. Phosphorus comes in different forms too: white, red, black, violet. Same with silicon dioxide: take quartz and heat it up and it'll turn into tridymite; heat it and squeeze it under high pressure and you get coesite; etc...

Comment Re:See that coloured glowy thing? (Score 1) 114

That glowy thing on the other end of that HDCP connection is called "A monitor" and it doesn't show encrypted pictures nor does it do the encryption itself. Therefore it has to be getting it as raw free text.

Sounds like you don't know what HDCP is. Yes, the glowy thing does do the decryption itself if it can receive HDCP content; that's the whole point.

Education

Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You? (fastcompany.com) 480

An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing.

This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck.

In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways.

The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate.

"They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

Comment Re:Anyone apologizing for anything Comcast (Score 1) 311

Cable is fiber to a few miles away from your house, where it gets converted to coax and you're sharing that fiber with maybe 1000 people. FTTH is fiber until a box on the side of your house or in your garage, where it gets converted to Ethernet (or coax, but that's not as common), and you're sharing that fiber with maybe 30 other people. They're very different.

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