Uh-oh
You guys (El Reg) use cloudflare, don't you? Hope your HTML is well-formed.
1602 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2011
I can think of some legitimate reasons for the distinction, for instance with a password, it's possible you forgot it or they've got the wrong guy and you never even knew it. But you can't forget your fingerprints and if it turns out yours isn't the right finger, that would been you're off the hook, rather up the creek.
That said, I totally agree with the judge that this kind of fingerprint dragnet is over the line.
I'm not saying it's a good change, but the assumption that the new domestic violence laws will be bad is a bit kneejerk in my opinion. Harsher penalties do not always reduce crime or lead to better outcomes in general. I do not know how they concluded this was the way to go, but I bet more went into the decision than some idea that domestic violence isn't that big a deal.
As far as the moral limits aspect, I'm doubtful that all (or perhaps any) of the attacker believed they were derailing and crashing real trains. They might have reasonably (and at least in this case correctly) concluded that there was no way a system that lets you derail trains would really be accessible over the internet.
Great for headlines, but I wouldn't read too much into it. Also, wasn't there a movie about this?
Regarding the fear that this will let criminals store their data where no government can reach, it's worth remembering that if this involves a serious crime Uncle Sam certainly has the option of presenting the evidence to an Irish court and getting a warrant issued there. This leads me to believe that either the government is more interested in the precedent than the case itself, or the reason they want these emails is incredibly trivial if not outright bogus.
It's probably fair to note that "one frigging state" has significantly more people than Australia.
But yeah, way too much money being spent on this, I certainly wouldn't disagree there.
And DougS, it's exactly like one guy giving $144M to a campaign. Except, one gal in this case, and it was her own campaign. If I'm keeping the numbers straight, she received a relatively unimpressive $16M additional from other people.
I think the FBI has been very naughty. So much so, apparently, that what the defendant was accused of pales in comparison. I don't buy the explanation that the exploit itself is too valuable to reveal. More likely than not it was something already fixed in Firefox but not yet patched in the Tor Browser. That's what they used on Freedom Hosting IIRC. So when they say "endanger future investigations" it sounds more like "endanger future convictions" (because judges might balk if they knew what was really going on).
It could be argued that virii is valid as a "humorous" or jargon plural in a computer context, much like boxen. As I understand it, the original Latin word was uncountable and meant something along the lines of miasma (but wetter), so it's not like there's specific correct way to pluralize it.
But I do object to "virii infections". You wouldn't say "diseases infections", so that shouldn't have been plural in the first place.
It's beige, so that's not it.
I think the idea that it's intended to replace food completely is pretty much hype. I'm sure a few people really use it that way, but mostly I think it's just a convenience food. For the record I've tried the stuff and found it inoffensive. With a little sweetener and flavoring, you can even bring it up to mildly pleasant! For lunch on the go or breakfast in a hurry it's a fine option.
Also it's cheap, at $1.80 per "meal". I don't think that's a big consideration for most of the people who buy it, but at least you don't feel like you're getting ripped off.
The only bad thing is the shelf life isn't particularly impressive, so it's really not a good option for apocalypse supplies.
As I understand it, GRAS basically means "historically accepted as something people eat". I'm not certain how true that is of algal flour... but other forms of algae have been eaten long enough I guess. I think there's a way to obtain GRAS status through scientific study as well, but presumably it's abbreviated compared to what you'd have to do to prove some completely original synthetic chemical is safe for food.
I kind of like approval voting better. It's so impressively simple.
If it was just "porn sites" that would be an almost surmountable problem, "almost" because I'm sure 100s of new sites spring up daily, but the real trouble is user-generated content sites. I don't see any feasible way to make this work with say Tumblr or 4chan aside from blocking them completely.
This probably show my own ignorance more than anything, but why is it that something like this has such severe effects? Doesn't DNS get cached in various places? It seems like a relatively short outage like this could be smoothed over almost completely taking advantage of that. At least for large sites which ISPs have doubtless accessed many times over the past hours.
I'm not a fan of either scheme, but it seems a little more plausible that the average non-pedoterrorist user would want to be "protected" from accidental exposure to CP than TP* Although the IWF's blacklist was actually working as intended when it messed up Wikipedia, where as this one only did it by accident, so I guess that's a point for France.
*terrorist propaganda
I was thinking of that too. No action is better than overreaction. And one credit card charge is an incredibly thin basis for swooping in and raiding someone's home. Still, in an ideal world they would be carefully sifting through those records and looking for stranger evidence against a few, instead of just ignoring them.
I skimmed the manual for this thing (online, I don't actually have one, thank goodness) and it talks about "pairing" the pump and remote, and also says the remote can check the pump's status. So they have two-way communication. If they hadn't that would have made security a bit difficult, but since they seem to be perfectly capable little gadgets, there's really no excuse.
For the record, I tried this and it didn't work. I did it from a phone with a paid-up SIM but no data plan, which sounds like the same thing the teen hacker did, but of course it may not have been exactly the same plan. That was a couple days ago, but after I read another article about it of course, so perhaps it was already fixed.