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Comment Missed the point (Score 1) 444

Well, how about spending tax money for public schools? Because it matters a lot less if you don't have to cope with tuition fees and other oligarch bullshit.

And while we're at it, how about enacting a decent social and healthcare system, where you don't have to drown in debts just because somebody in your family needed a cure or lost its job?

Security

'Do Not Track,' the Privacy Tool Used By Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything (gizmodo.com) 228

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: When you go into the privacy settings on your browser, there's a little option there to turn on the "Do Not Track" function, which will send an invisible request on your behalf to all the websites you visit telling them not to track you. A reasonable person might think that enabling it will stop a porn site from keeping track of what she watches, or keep Facebook from collecting the addresses of all the places she visits on the internet, or prevent third-party trackers she's never heard of from following her from site to site. According to a recent survey by Forrester Research, a quarter of American adults use "Do Not Track" to protect their privacy. (Our own stats at Gizmodo Media Group show that 9% of visitors have it turned on.) We've got bad news for those millions of privacy-minded people, though: "Do Not Track" is like spray-on sunscreen, a product that makes you feel safe while doing little to actually protect you.

Yahoo and Twitter initially said they would respect it, only to later abandon it. The most popular sites on the internet, from Google and Facebook to Pornhub and xHamster, never honored it in the first place. Facebook says that while it doesn't respect DNT, it does "provide multiple ways for people to control how we use their data for advertising." (That is of course only true so far as it goes, as there's some data about themselves users can't access.) From the department of irony, Google's Chrome browser offers users the ability to turn off tracking, but Google itself doesn't honor the request, a fact Google added to its support page some time in the last year. [...] "It is, in many respects, a failed experiment," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant computer science professor at Princeton University. "There's a question of whether it's time to declare failure, move on, and withdraw the feature from web browsers." That's a big deal coming from Mayer: He spent four years of his life helping to bring Do Not Track into existence in the first place.
Only a handful of sites actually respect the request -- the most prominent of which are Pinterest and Medium (Pinterest won't use offsite data to target ads to a visitor who's elected not to be tracked, while Medium won't send their data to third parties.)

Comment Break your onw security absolutely (Score 1) 421

If you want backdoors, you undermine your security. And this is asymmetric. Because the security of your hospitals, power plants, electrical grid, communications infrastructure, emergency response, water treatment plants, military(!) and so on, will also be subverted. In contrast, any adversaries probably don't care about infrastructure because they don't run any.

Basically what these morons are saying is "we want to open our whole infrastructure to abuse by criminals, terrorists and other adversaries".

Comment Re:The real problem is having an open discussion (Score 2) 351

Coming from a country with a high percentage of guns per capita, but with a very low homicide rate, I can give you a hint: We have rifles, not handguns. And that is true for most of the countries with similar profiles: Canada, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Austria, Iceland, Germany, New Zealand, Finland.

This might not be the reason for less homicides, but there is probably some underlying factor influencing both, homicides and handgun proliferation.

So you might really want to start looking into that: Why do your people want to have handguns?

Comment Using Technology for the Wrong Purpose (Score 1) 189

This is exactly using technology for something it is completely unsuited.

Facial recognition is useful as second or third-factor authentication of a small and clearly defined user base. Like checking the face of a person wanting to pass a security door whilst the same person is in possession of a RFID badge. Not only do you match against a smallish set of people who "shall pass", but against the very small set of people who may pass with that specific RFID badge, exactly one, that is. And in this case, security is immensely increased by facial recognition.

Security

More Evidence Ties Alleged DNC Hacker Guccifer 2.0 To Russian Intelligence (techcrunch.com) 210

An anonymous reader shares a report: It may be a while since you've heard the handle "Guccifer 2.0," the hacker who took responsibility for the infamous DNC hack of 2016. Reports from the intelligence community at the time, as well as common sense, pegged Guccifer 2.0 not as the Romanian activist he claimed to be, but a Russian operative. Evidence has been scarce, but one slip-up may have given the game away. An anonymous source close to the U.S. government investigation of the hacker told the Daily Beast that on one single occasion, Guccifer 2.0 failed to log into the usual VPN that disguised their traffic. As a result, they left one honest IP trace at an unnamed social media site.

That IP address, "identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency's headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow," the Daily Beast reported. (The GRU is one of the Russia's security and intelligence organs.) Previous work by security researchers had suggested this, but it's the first I've heard of evidence this direct. Assuming it's genuine, it's a sobering reminder of how fragile anonymity is on the internet -- one click and the whole thing comes crashing down.

Comment Re:Windows S O S (Score 1) 115

Everyone who claims Linux is an alternative doesn't use their PC for gaming. Or, is part of the extremely tiny minority of gamers that is happy with the limited subset of games run on Linux.

That subset is about one third of the games that run on Windows. That's around 4000.games. More than you can play through in your life anyway.

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