kiscica - Slashdot User

College Police Think Using Linux Is Suspicious Behavior 1079

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday April 14, 2009 @03:42PM from the so-is-your-mom dept.

FutureDomain writes "The Boston College Campus Police have seized the electronics of a computer science student for allegedly sending an email outing another student. The probable cause? The search warrant application states that he is 'a computer science major' and he uses 'two different operating systems for hiding his illegal activity. One is the regular B.C. operating system and the other is a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on.' The EFF is currently representing him."

Comment Amazingly good online translation (Score 1) 367

by kiscica on Thursday January 29, 2009 @05:35PM (#26658921) Attached to: Lie Detector Company Threatens Critical Scientists With Suit

Actually, my first reaction on reading the article was "holy *&#$&*#*$, this is amazingly good for an automated translation."
Looks like Google's making some serious statistical-translation progress. Mindblowing.

Comment "How does Google make money off Google Health?" (Score 5, Insightful) 199

by kiscica on Tuesday May 20, 2008 @03:42PM (#23480906) Attached to: Google Health Opens To the Public

6. If it's free, how does Google make money off Google Health?
Much like other Google products we offer, Google Health is free to anyone who uses it. There are no ads in Google Health. Our primary focus is providing a good user experience and meeting our users' needs.

I've heard enough. I don't know what their long-term plan for monetizing Google Health is, and I don't really care now. I don't trust Google enough to consider even for a second entrusting my health care information to them (and I say this as someone who has thought very highly of the company since the beginning). And their weasly answer to the obvious question above, I think, justifies my mistrust.

Every for-profit company's primary focus is - making a profit. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with this, and the ideal situation arises when "providing a good user experience and meeting [...] users' needs" is aligned with the profit motive.

So why they can't be honest about their motivations in undertaking an expensive, large-scale project like this -- whatever those motivations are -- instead of trying to make us believe that they're doing it "out of the goodness of their hearts?" All their mealy-mouthedness accomplishes is to raise the suspicion that they've got something nasty up their sleeves. And that ensures that many users, including me, will never entrust their most private of private data to Google.

Firefox Security Head Says Microsoft Obscures OS Holes 214

Posted by Zonk on Monday December 03, 2007 @08:42AM from the a-feudin-and-a-fussin dept.

theranjan writes "When a Security Strategy Director at Microsoft decided to compare Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities with those of Mozilla Firefox, he may have forgotten that the Head Security Strategist of Mozilla was a former MS employee. In a rebuttal of the study, which finds IE more secure than Firefox, Mozilla said that the number of vulnerabilities publicly acknowledged was just a 'small subset' of all vulnerabilities fixed internally. The vulnerabilities found internally are fixed in service packs and major updates without public knowledge. 'For Microsoft this makes sense because these fixes get the benefit of a full test pass which is much more robust for a service pack or major release than it is for a security update. Unfortunately for Microsoft's users this means they have to wait sometimes a year or more to get the benefit of this work. That's a lot of time for an attacker to identify the same issue and exploit it to hurt users.'"

Inside the Google-Plex 130

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday July 10, 2006 @06:33PM from the belly-of-the-beast dept.

tappytibbins writes "Baseline magazine has an in-depth story about how Google manages its own IT infrastructure. From the article: 'In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting.'"

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