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Comment 1300 taboo words?!? (Score 2) 78

What kind of nanny state do we live in where there are 1300 words considered “taboo”, whatever that means. Is there a fleet of Sunday-school teachers making up this list. Seriously, I get to about word number 50 in my list of worst coarse language and I’ve fallen into the realm of “mildly offensive to the thin-skinned”. With an average vocabulary of 20-30 thousand words, this is 4-7% of our words. Sure glad I don’t have a host of risk-averse corporate advertisers my life depends on as I’d be telling the would-be censors to stuff it.

Comment An IoT padlock makes about as much sense as... (Score 4, Insightful) 59

... a Bluetooth refrigerator. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? They are hard to get right in the first place... let's add buffer overflows to bypasses. There are actually lock innovators in Canada without resorting to the "let's add network" approach to innovation. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bowleylockcompany.com%2F comes to mind. Sometimes less is more.

Comment Isn't this just a repost of a recent story? (Score 2) 388

Read this post a few days back: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F19%2F11%2F15%2F2221231%2Fus-workers-show-little-improvement-in-21st-century-skills
1 in 6 isn't convinced the earth is round? The fact that 'Almost one in three [American respondents ages 16-to-65] couldn't correctly answer "how much gas is in a 24-gallon tank if the gas gauge reads three-quarters full."' might help explain that. If that's the level you are working at, how on this flat earth are you to critically evaluate any claim you are faced with. I see this as a symptom of a highly inequitable education system feeding into the appeal of a counter-culture more than anything else. Of course the educated among these guys... no excuse... just loony.

Submission + - Scientists create DNA-based exploit of a computer system. (technologyreview.com)

Archeron writes: It seems that scientists at UW-Seattle have managed to encode malware into genomic data allowing them to gain full access to a computer being used to analyze the data. While this may be a highly contrived attack scenario, it does ask the question whether we pay sufficient attention to data-driven exploits, especially where the data is instrument-derived. What other systems could be vulnerable to a tampered raw data source? Perhaps audio and RF analysis systems?

Comment Aren't they missing the point? (Score 1) 468

Seems to me, the reason we have marked police cars is that part of their crime prevention strategy is to maintain a high degree of visibility. Were this not the case, all cars would be unmarked. This app then simply expands that visibility so you can know that big brother's little brother is watching. I am assuming most unmarked cars will not show up in this app, so that tool is still available to law enforcement. Plus, as a criminal, are you really going to trust the cell-phone-wielding masses to catch them all?

Submission + - TrueCrypt is dead? What now? 7

Archeron writes: A colleague visited Truecrypt.org today and brought this to my attention. All the links are gone and the front page contains the message:
"The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP." It goes on to list migration instructions. Is this the end for our beloved open source, multi-platform crypto solution? The question is what now? Planned forks? Any recommendations for freely available, open and multi-platform solutions that will allow for moving storage devices from Linux -> Windows -> Mac?

Comment Re:Did anyone ever actively use it? (Score 1) 327

Like others here, I was invited. I started watching their intro video with two of the least compelling and homely promotional staff ever droning on and on and ZZzzzz...
By the time I woke up some time later, I had forgotten what I was doing and never went back. Perhaps they should have hired Godaddy's or Budwieser's publicists.

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