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Comment This isn't new! (Score 3, Interesting) 23

This isn't new, or even weird.

Almost thirty years ago I worked for a leasing company. We leased computers and equipment, not buildings, but the two things went hand in hand. Our customers would say they had a new office going in, we'd line them up for all the gear they needed.

And guess what? We'd have the vendors in there months before the place was even complete so they could install the phone system, or pre-stage cubicles, or get the switches installed.

Comment Re:Nice to see them finally breaking (Score 1) 75

Part of the reason things have been crap lately is that the studios have been running smaller and smaller writer's rooms. Why hire eight writers when you can hire four, work the hell out of them, and then lay them off before production so they can't do any rewrites?

They're pushing quantity over quality.

Security

Is Your Chip Card Secure? Much Depends on Where You Bank (krebsonsecurity.com) 38

A recent series of malware attacks on U.S.-based merchants suggest thieves are exploiting weaknesses in how certain financial institutions have implemented the technology in chip-based credit and debit cards to sidestep key security features and effectively create usable, counterfeit cards. Brian Krebs reports via Krebs on Security: Traditional payment cards encode cardholder account data in plain text on a magnetic stripe, which can be read and recorded by skimming devices or malicious software surreptitiously installed in payment terminals. That data can then be encoded onto anything else with a magnetic stripe and used to place fraudulent transactions. Newer, chip-based cards employ a technology known as EMV that encrypts the account data stored in the chip. The technology causes a unique encryption key -- referred to as a token or "cryptogram" -- to be generated each time the chip card interacts with a chip-capable payment terminal.

Virtually all chip-based cards still have much of the same data that's stored in the chip encoded on a magnetic stripe on the back of the card. This is largely for reasons of backward compatibility since many merchants -- particularly those in the United States -- still have not fully implemented chip card readers. This dual functionality also allows cardholders to swipe the stripe if for some reason the card's chip or a merchant's EMV-enabled terminal has malfunctioned. But there are important differences between the cardholder data stored on EMV chips versus magnetic stripes. One of those is a component in the chip known as an integrated circuit card verification value or "iCVV" for short -- also known as a "dynamic CVV." The iCVV differs from the card verification value (CVV) stored on the physical magnetic stripe, and protects against the copying of magnetic-stripe data from the chip and the use of that data to create counterfeit magnetic stripe cards. Both the iCVV and CVV values are unrelated to the three-digit security code that is visibly printed on the back of a card, which is used mainly for e-commerce transactions or for card verification over the phone. The appeal of the EMV approach is that even if a skimmer or malware manages to intercept the transaction information when a chip card is dipped, the data is only valid for that one transaction and should not allow thieves to conduct fraudulent payments with it going forward.

However, for EMV's security protections to work, the back-end systems deployed by card-issuing financial institutions are supposed to check that when a chip card is dipped into a chip reader, only the iCVV is presented; and conversely, that only the CVV is presented when the card is swiped. If somehow these do not align for a given transaction type, the financial institution is supposed to decline the transaction. More recently, researchers at Cyber R&D Labs published a paper detailing how they tested 11 chip card implementations from 10 different banks in Europe and the U.S. The researchers found they could harvest data from four of them and create cloned magnetic stripe cards that were successfully used to place transactions. There are now strong indications the same method detailed by Cyber R&D Labs is being used by point-of-sale (POS) malware to capture EMV transaction data that can then be resold and used to fabricate magnetic stripe copies of chip-based cards.

Comment Timothy Dexter. (Score 4, Funny) 38

> the interplanetary equivalent of sending coals to Newcastle

Famously, one man did this, Timothy Dexter. He was the world's worst businessman, but luck was with him every time.

Buy a buttload of worthless currency issued by a country destined to lose a war to the British? He was the one laughing when the British lost and the newly formed US government paid out. Ship bed-warmers to the West Indies? Well, turns out they make great ladles for molasses manufacture.

Same with the woolen mittens he sent there; His ship got there at the same time traders were leaving for what's now Siberia.

On to the coal. Someone suggested, as a joke or as an insult, that Dexter could make money shipping coal to Newcastle.

So he did.

His ship hit the harbor at Newcastle the same week the coal-miners went on strike and he was the only game in town.

Comment It Doesn't Matter... (Score 1) 151

I think in a few years we'll all be having a good laugh about how Oculus doomed themselves with this move. I think there are enough people on this planet like me who are 100% distrustful of Facebook and anything they have to do with anything. I have long size made the vow that Facebook and its affiliates get zero dollars of my money and zero seconds of my attention.

We keep reading articles about how Facebook is on the way out, its core userbase of young hip twentysomethings is evaporating quickly, and soon its largest remaining userbase will be the octogenarian set, etc. The bubble is about ready to pop, and I predict (maybe we can have a good laugh at this in a year or two as well) that Facebook is very quickly going to go the way of Myspace, Livejournal, etc.: Namely, they still kinda-sorta exist but nobody save for a very small core few actually give a fuck, and neither of them are exactly cash cows.

Comment Good, But... (Score 4, Insightful) 217

Now slap a friggin' hardware keyboard on it and we'll talk. What's the point of yet another stupid buttonless bar phone? It's got a lot of pixels and a big fat processor so it has miserable battery life and absolutely zero usability improvement. It's like putting a solid gold screen door on a submarine, then. Put a Wacom style digitizer on the thing like the Galaxy Note while you're at it, please, so we can accurately poke at hilariously tiny controls and icons on the screen. I don't care if doing so makes the damn phone .0005" thicker or whatever.

Am I the only one who's noticed that our culture has seemingly started to revolve around SMS and Twitter yet somehow at the exact same time everybody started dropping keyboards off of phones? What's the deal with that?

I think it's a conspiracy. (Okay, okay, so the only 'conspiracy' is copycattingthe buttonless design popularized with -- but not invented by -- the iPhone. But still.)

Show some cojones! Have the courage to do something different for a change. I'd love a phone with a billion and three pixels available on the display, but I'd also like a phone that I can actually type on, select things, draw on it, etc. with all those pixels. If all you're doing is tapping and sliding and swiping and poking ineffectually at a million-pixel-wide but only physically 2-inches-across virtual keyboard the damn thing may as well be 320x240.

Comment Re:There is an old anecdote (Score 1) 354

That's a case of two American chamberings being kinda-sorta incompatible with each other, largely owing to the fact that the "military" 5.56x45 is in reality a modified version of the already existing civilian .223 Remington, beefed up with a hotter load and heavier bullet. The Russians didn't enter into this one, or anyone else's military -- Us Americans did it all to ourselves. The .223 was a pretty weedy cartridge for war use at the time of its adoption in Vietnam, so the designers cooked up a more powerful cartridge of the same size that'd fit in the same gun, and then modified the gun to handle the higher pressures and heavier bullets they used.

In reality, this was never intended to present a problem. The military "should" be using the hotter 5.56x45 loads in their rifles, and civilians "should" be using .223 Remington, but as things go they all got mixed up in the ammo chain and you can buy surplus (and commercial!) 5.56x45 and stick it in your .223 deer rifle and vise versa. Now you can buy guns with mil-spec receivers that are made to accept the mil-spec ammo, which leads to a couple of manufacturers selling mil-spec civilian equipment and others just touting up their stuff as if they wish it was mil-spec (and their customers wish it was mil-spec) but it isn't.

Again, the short version: Forget the whole thing and just buy something chambered in 6.8mm SPC instead.

Comment Re:There is an old anecdote (Score 1) 354

Both anecdotes are wrong, but both stem from an urban legend about the Japanese Arisaka rifle (WW2) which allegedly was deliberately chambered in .31 caliber so it could fire American .30 caliber munitions but the Japanese cartridge would not fit an American M1903. This legend is also false, but it endures, and every time there's a new generation of military rifles some dolt starts repeating it again for no discernible reason. I imagine you heard your story from one such dolt.

The American AR-15 and its variants (M-16, M-4, etc.) are chambered in 5.56x45, AKA .223 Remington. The Russian AK-47 and its equivalents (including the AKM, etc.) are chambered in 7.62x39, which is a completely different cartridge with a completely different size. The 5.56x45 is a much longer cartridge, for a start, and also thinner. If you dropped one in the chamber of an AK like a dummy the bolt wouldn't even close all the way. It would be impossible to fire the gun out of battery like that, but if you somehow managed it the casing of the 5.56 would surely explode because it is not contained by the walls of the chamber. You couldn't even begin to fit a 7.62 in an AR-15's chamber. The cartridge is too fat. I think you'd have trouble fitting it through the ejection port, and you can forget about jamming one in the magazine. It just ain't gonna happen.

Likewise, the modern Russian AK-74 and its variants are chambered in 5.45x39, which is superficially similar in concept to the American 5.56x45, but is still a completely different size. Again it is a shorter cartridge and this time with a smaller diameter bullet. A 5.56x45 cartridge will be too long to chamber in an AK-74, and too fat for the bullet to fit down the barrel. A Russian 5.45 round dropped in an AR-15 would just rattle around in the chamber. Again, if you managed to set it off somehow it would just explode in place, because the casing doesn't fit the chamber properly.

I think some of the confusion comes from the fact that you can modify an AR-15 variant rifle -- by way of a major parts swap consisting of replacing the barrel, chamber, bolt, and attached upper receiver assembly) to fire different calibers, up to and including Russian 7.62x39. The vast majority of upscaled AR-15's are actually chambered to accept .308 Winchester (AKA 7.62x51) which is again a totally different cartridge than 7.62x39 Russian. Don't get confused by the 7.62 in both of them: The .308 Winchester is longer and stouter than the AK cartridge, and plain old will not fit in an AK-47, and vise versa.

The only result of making your rifle's chamber half a mil bigger than the enemy's ammo so you can physically fit his cartridges but he can't fit yours has no effect other than allowing the enemy's ammo to explode in your gun's chamber. This has no practical advantage at the expense of making your gun woefully unsafe to fire with the wrong ammunition in it, which you purposely designed it to be able to accept.

TL;DR: Guns do not work that way. People are confused enough about firearms as it is, so don't contribute to the problem by perpetuating falsehoods like this. It only leads to some redneck dim bulb trying to shoot a 7.62 out of his .223 deer rifle, maiming himself, and therefore causing some politician to pass a law about it that makes life harder for the rest of us.

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