belmolis - Slashdot User

Submission + - Canadian Prisons Restrict Technology to the 1990s

Submitted by belmolis on Monday September 04, 2023 @12:13PM

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.

Submission + - Dispute over database use may disrupt US organ transplant system (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by belmolis on Tuesday July 04, 2023 @03:48PM

belmolis writes: The United Network for Organ Sharing, which coordinates organ transplants in the United States, is threatening to revoke the access of Buckeye Transplant Services, a major organ-screening company, to its database. UNOS claims that Buckeye extracts and resells information that it is not entitled to, in competition with UNOS. Experts differ on how bad the consequences would be: some say that people will die. It is unclear why UNOS could not simply restrict data access at its end.

Submission + - Canada to Adopt On-Line Voting? (www.cbc.ca) 1

Submitted by

belmolis

on Wednesday August 17, 2011 @09:30PM

belmolis writes: "Here in Canada we have an old-fashioned paper ballot voting system that by all accounts works very well. We get results quickly and without fraud. Nonetheless, Elections Canada wants to test on-line voting. Is it worth trying to fix a system that isn't broken?"

Submission + - Is Algeria Deleting Facebook Accounts? (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by belmolis on Saturday February 12, 2011 @09:01PM

belmolis writes: Algeria is reported to be shutting down ISPs and deleting Facebook accounts in an effort to prevent anti-government protests from escalating as they did in Egypt. Is it likely that they are deleting FB accounts? Unless Facebook is cooperating, this would either require hacking FB to obtain administrator privileges or cracking the password of each account they wish to delete.

Submission + - Cyberwarfare in International Law (powerblogs.com)

Submitted by

belmolis

on Thursday January 24, 2008 @03:02AM

belmolis writes: "If the CIA is right to attribute recent blackouts to cyberwarfare (Slashdot story), cyberwarfare is no longer science fiction but reality. In a recent op-ed piece and a detailed scholarly paper, legal scholar Duncan Hollis raises the question of whether existing international law is adequate for regulating cyberwarfare. He concludes that it is not:

Translating existing rules into the IO context produces extensive uncertainty, risking unintentional escalations of conflict where forces have differing interpretations of what is permissible. Alternatively, such uncertainty may discourage the use of IO even if it might produce less harm than traditional means of warfare. Beyond uncertainty, the existing legal framework is insufficient and overly complex. Existing rules have little to say about the non-state actors that will be at the center of future conflicts. And where the laws of war do not apply, even by analogy, an overwhelmingly complex set of other international and foreign law rules purport to govern IO.

and proposes a new legal framework."

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