136085778
submission
goombah99 writes:
Four years ago, the magazine flagged Donald Trump’s disdain for science as “frightening” but did not go so far as to endorse his rival, Hillary Clinton. This year, its editors came to a different conclusion. “A 175-year tradition is not something you break lightly,” editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “We’d love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can’t ignore it.” In a nod to Trump’s embrace of anti-science conspiracy theories, Scientific American editors compared the people each candidate turns to for expertise and insight. Biden’s panel of public health advisers “ does not include physicians who believe in aliens and debunked virus therapies, one of whom Trump has called ‘very respected’ and “spectacular,’ ” the editors write.
134529445
submission
goombah99 writes:
What would you do if you were a freshman going to a non-free four year school? Right now, most universities are going to a "dorms-open" but most classes on-line and box lunch with no sit-down dining facilities. Some give the option of in-class or on-line for the same classes. (A few are freshman-only dorms, or single occupancy rooms, but not most). Some universities are sticky about deferrals, requiring medical excuses, or else re-application for majors and scholarships, some are more generous.
Would you defer if there's no consequences to your scholarship? (If there was?)
Why?
If you chose to attend on-line would you opt to be in the dorms or your parent's house/home town? What would you be losing or gaining by that choice, compared to socially distanced in-person?
Finally was your Freshman year before Covid transformative for you because of the classes or being there in-person and in-dorm? What does one lose by remote learning and why, either academically or sociallally.
For me, I recall not even knowing all the possible majors when I attended, and it was networks, chance, new friends and upperclassmen who were how I learned what I wanted to pursue.
Finally, if you were to just take one or two classes on-line instead of a full load, what would be the best strategy for a CS major? Take a freshman core course? Take a super hard foundational upper level course like Algorithm's and Data Structures? Or take a simpler class like "Intro to Object Oriented programming in Java". That is which of these benefit the most from having in-person study buddies and labs with in-person TAs?
101377868
submission
goombah99 writes:
Netflix is sending e-mails to subscribers announcing the end of user authored reviews on Netflix. Past reviews are being archived. The stated reason is declining usage. This follows on the previous years decision to remove range voting for user ratings (0 to 5 stars) and substitute a thumbs/up down approval voting system. One suspects that the former is an unintended consequence of the latter, since the purpose of people who write a review is to try to explain the nuances of their decision. An inexpressive rating system defeats that. It can be argued that approval voting has technical advantages in aggregating ratings for a recommendation engine as it doesn't need to normalize the biases in a rating system between different users and mostly heads off gaming the system with exaggerated degrees of rating. But evidently that was also a necessary component of the review process itself regardless of its utility for recommendation engines.
99851155
submission
goombah99 writes:
Hacking and Hackers get a bum rap. Headline scream "Every Nitendo switch can be hacked". But that's good right? just like farmers hacking their tractors or someone re-purposing a talking teddy bear. On the other hand, remote hacking a Intel processor backdoor or looting medical data base are also called hacking. Not so good. It seems like we need words with different connotations for hacking. One for things you should definitely do, like program an arduino or teddy bear. One for things that are pernicious. And finally one for things that are disputably good/bad such as hacking DRM protected appliances you own. What viral sounds terms and their nuances would you suggest?
88155875
submission
goombah99 writes:
VidAngel is a legal movie filtering and streaming service that will edit any major movie of objectionable content exactly as you request (and no more than you request) then stream it to you for $1. Such Bowlderizing and DVD streaming services are expressly written into section 110 of Title 17, the copyright act (paragraph 11 added in the 2005 Family Viewing act). Therefore both aspects that the studios are suing over, the streaming of a DVD and the editing of it by a 3rd party, is plainly legal. None-the-less all the major studios have sued and a judge has granted an injunction, making vidAngel pull almost all of it's content. VidAngel operates by purchasing DVDs then selling them to you for $20, it then streams them to you using what ever filter you tick off ("Remove N-word", etc...). After you view it you can sell it back for $19, making your net cost $1. The Family Viewing act was passed in 2005 after a dozen filtering services were sued out of business. The law seems clear but the studios say vidAngel is not doing it right. There's a petition to save this act from encroachment..
799595
submission
goombah99 writes:
After snapping up virtualization company InnoTek at the beginning of the year, Sun has recently released VirtualBox as a fully functional and highly polished free GPL open source x86 Virtual Macine. It can host 32 or 64 bit Linux, Windows XP vista and 98, openSolaris and DOS. It runs on mac, windows, and unix platforms. The download is just 27MB. A review of it on macworld, showing HD movies playing inside widows XP on a mac, demonstrates performance visually indistinguishable from VMware. Like it's competition it can run other OS's in rootless, rooted, or seamless modes display modes (where all the applications have their windows mixed at the same time). Each VM instance can only run single core (though I/O is multi-core), and it does not yet support advanced windows graphics libraries however, so some gamers may be disappointed. Slashdot discussed the InnoTek acquisition here and here."
647200
submission
goombah99 writes:
Princeton Professor, Ed Felton, has had a series (1,2,3) of blog entries in which he shows the printed tapes he obtained from the NJ voting mahines don't report the ballots correctly. In response to the first one, Sequoia admitted that the machines had a known software design error that did not correctly record which kind of ballots were cast (republican or democratic primary ballots) but insisted the vote totals were correct. Then, further tapes showed this explanation to be insufficient. In response, State officials insisted that the (poorly printed) tapes were misread by Felton. Again further tapes showed this not to be a sufficient explanation. However all those did not foreclose the optimistic assessment that the errors were benign — that is, the possibility that vote totals might really be correct even though the ballot totals were wrong and origin of the errors had not been explained. Now he has found (well printed) tapes that show what appears to be hard proof that it's the vote totals that are wrong, since two different readout methods don't agree. Sequoia has made trade-secret legal threats against those wishing to have an independent examination of the equipment. One small hat tip to Sequoia: at least they are reporting enough raw data in different formats that these kinds of errors can come to light — that lesson should be kept in mind when writing future requirements doc for voting machines.
639026
submission
goombah99 writes:
When on vacation sometimes I need to check my e-mail on a public terminal. What are techniques for avoiding key loggers? Here's some ideas that nominally work but have drawbacks. 1) Linux LiveCD can probably avoid software key loggers but requires an invasive takeover of the public terminal and thus generally not possible. 2) Kyps.net offers a free reverse proxy that will decode your password from a 1-time pad you carry around then enter it remotely. But of course you are giving them your passwords when you do this (yikes!). 3) You can run firefox off a usbstick with various plugins (e.g. RoboForm) that will autofill the page in some manner they claim to be invulnerable to key loggers. If that's true, and I can't evaluate its security, it's getting close to a solution. The problem here is keeping the password file up-to-date is mildly a nuisance. Moreover, since it will need to be a windows executable, it's not possible for people without a windows machine available to fill in their passwords ahead of time. 4) for my bussiness I have SecureID which makes 1-time passwords. Perhaps a perfect solution for bussinesses but not for personal accounts on things like gmail, etc..
So what solutions do you use, or how do you mitigate the defects of the above processes, particularly for people with mac or linux home computers?"
331129
submission
goombah99 writes:
Blackfriars's communications has an interesting discourse on why the practical difference between 3G and EDGE cellphone data networks is less than it appears to be based on a naive bandwidth metric. Their argument is that user experience of TCP/HTML is much more impacted by latency, error-rates, and processor speed than bandwidth, and Edge had the edge on all three. Additionally, EDGE may consume orders of magnitude less power, which may partly explain how the thin iphones big battery life allows it to get along without having the user lugging a second battery.
299693
submission
goombah99 writes:
According to AppleInsider, apple is about to announce that Leopard will not support G4 power PC processors. Previously developers had been told that it would require at least an 800 MHZ G4. But AppleInsider alleges only G5 and higher will now be supported because of speed issues, and testers have been told that the new os "cannot be installed" on lesser machines. This cutoff in minimum requirements means that all those original imac flat screens and titanium powerbooks are now forked to the Tiger (10.4) Update Path. Since much of Leopards advances came in the form of either under-the-hood changes (e.g. 64 bits) or added capabilities (e.g. time machine) but don't seem to substantially change the UI or API for core capabilities this may turn out to be less of a blow than it will initially be perceived as. While this apparently means there will be now two-flavors of the apple OS in widespread us, it's worth noting that Apple has also had a long standing mechanism for fat-binaries that allows a single application to transparently hold code for many different OS's and Architectures.
209321
submission
goombah99 writes:
John Edward, the presidential candidate and lawyer, is emerging as quite techno savy. He has been guest hosting on Lawrence Lessigs Blog, giving his view on the current imbalance between property right protection and the good of public access. And he has become the first presidential candidate to support "open source code" for election systems in addition to voter verified paper records. He's even personally using a twitter.
143375
submission
goombah99 writes:
Netcraft is showing a very hard to explain event happened in the Ohio 2006 election. The Secretary Of states website IP address, which normally is directed to an Ohio based IP address and handles all the election reporting, was transferred on election night to the Smarttech Corp owned servers out of state. According to the American Registry on Internet Numbers Smartech's block of IP address 64.203.96.0 — 64.203.111.255 encompasses the entire range of addresses owned by the Republican National Committee. This includes hosting the recently notorious gbw43.com used in the Whitehouse. Can Slashdotters suggest any good explanations for this seemingly dubious transfer?
105910
submission
goombah99 writes:
Editors: I corrected a grammar error in the title my almost duplicate submission. Sorry.
The SEC has taken action to halt transactions on spam touted stocks. Presumably this opens an oppotunity of denial of service attacks on stocks. However, to be effective spam generally must target penny stocks with historically low volumes and thus the actual capitalized market impact or affect on the companies for a temporary shutdown can be expected to be negligble and transient. One example was give of a touted apparel stock jumping 7 fold from 6 cents to 45 cents over a period of days before settling down to ten cents a share and near 65,000 or about $6500 in transactions (an eigth of the peak share volume, and a 50th of the peak transaction value). In other words the market distortion of a brief shutdown, even if it were a DOS attack, would be massively less than the integrated spam surge. The thing I found surprising was that for this to be an effective measure with human oversight then the number of such events must be relatively small in number. From the amount of spam I get I'd have guessed it was a tidal wave. Any thoughts on the prospects for automation of transaction halting, it's econsequences and routes to exploitation?
85808
submission
goombah99 writes:
The "creator" of the Dance move known as the electric slide has filed a DMCA based takedown notice for videos he deems to infringe and because they show "bad dancing". He is also seeking compensation from the use of the dance move at a wedding celebration shown on the Ellen Degeneres Show. Next up, the Funky Chicken, the moonwalk, and the Hustle? More seriously, does the DMCA have any limit on it's scope?
4237
submission
goombah99 writes:
Bev Harris of BlackBoxVoting.org acquired an actual Diebold Acu-vote ballot scanner and rumaged through King County's trash to get some of their tags and seals. Using this she has demonstrated a successful penetration of the seals without breaking them in under 4 minutes with no training or techincal skills required. There's a nice accessible how-to with photos over at Verified Voting New Mexico.
The demo is particularly relevant in light of the recent experience in Ohio in which there were large discrepancies between the electronic record and the paper trail, and also since many counties still permit the machines to be taken home by individuals before voting day (as a means of distributing them to precints). These "sleepover" machines were involved in the contentious narrow margin San Diego Election, and are in continued practice in many states. Moreover it's common practice for counties to contract out deliveries to third parties, such as in New Mexico where in one election, unlicensed delivery drivers took the machines on an unauthorized field trip and only got caught when they crashed the delivery truck after a stop at Hooters. The good news here is that penetrated Diebold in the phot o essay is an optical scan system not a touchscreen electronic voting system, so there's a paper trail. So what this hardware hack really shows is that without mandatory random spot checks on the paper ballots, that these may be as potentially vulnerable as the touchscreen direct recording electronic voting systems. It's perhaps worth noting that the open source voting system being developed by the Open Voting Consortium features a 100% reconcilliation of every single paper ballot with an independent electronic record.
