sandycheeks

The part that I find most interesting as a former enterprise systems administrator from the 90's is that the employer owns the device but does not have a pass code for it. Is this the normal IT policy for these kinds of devices?

I always wondered if the problem with the shaped charge was that the battery served to keep it from somehow being mechanically detonated rather than the battery being used to provide power for detonation. Seemed like the kind of red herring this bomb maker would use but I can't imagine how that would be hidden from x-rays.

As a small business owner, my main concern is that there are no assurances that my competitors large and small will not be able to see my contracts/suppliers/budgets/sales/processes at some point due to this ambiguous 'disclosure' mentioned or perhaps through some flaw that allows access to the data collected from the computers used in my small business.

I must be missing something here since I know Microsoft wants Windows to be used for businesses and the privacy of this information is vital to that.

I received the request to sign this recently and while I think it is good, I was concerned about its effect on the ability to pursue research into creating autonomous weapons that seek and destroy autonomous weapons. I don't know where to draw the line. Unlike nuclear and chemical WMD the barrier to entry in this may be pretty low in the near future. Therefore my greatest concern is for defense. Though I don't want the machines made at all, that won't stop others from making them. It's a tough one.

Most private investigators must be spending their Sunday night trying to get everything they can on this. They can and will make money on this data.

EDIT: Spelling

Wow! Derek has been entertaining me online for nearly thirty years now and instead of that realization making me feel old, it actually makes me feel kind of young. The parts without the words "I" or "me" sprinkled all over them made it an insightful article from someone who's opinion is based on substantial knowledge of this subject. Good or bad. Hi Derek, I know you must be reading these :)

I have been watching this unfold wondering if any of the data compromised was part of the Personnel Reliability Program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personnel_Reliability_Program

Has anything been said about this?

I had hoped for a happier ending to the 0xAA55 poem.

Now I will wait for correspondence from young explorers who find me via my old 'fix a raw drive' blog post. I expect a few.

I have tried for two years to monetize my programming blog without making $100 in that entire time while I make a nice living from ads on my other sites.

I save RAW hard drives via a post I wrote 2 years ago. It's not really a programming post on my programming blog but like forums, you have little control over the demographic that ends up flocking to your blog. Especially if it is eclectic like mine.

There are thousands of visitors daily to the post and I get emails and try to answer comments everyday.

Ads, affiliate links, Amazon, eBay, Adsense, BSA, direct ads, CPA, CPM, nothing works on my programming blog with thousands of visitors each day. Extensive a/b testing is inconclusive due to lack of actions.

So now I only have a bitcoin address in that particular post and hope one day to get something from that :)

Ads do not work for all niches on the internet. Unless, of course, you want to deceive your users and trick them into clicking on something that is not what they think it is. That always works, for awhile at least.

In the meantime, I'll keep helping the people who end up there for free as best I can because in the end, that is in line with what I have hoped the internet would be.

Or perhaps simply for a challenge.

If they gave over a third ownership to EFF things would become interesting. Don't see it happening though.

I thought it might follow backwards in space as well as time but when the book The Physics of Time Reversal by Robert G. Sachs came out in 1987 it made me skeptical of that possibility. I haven't followed the theory of CP violation for many years so this may not be a pertinent point anymore.

When I was younger I thought a lot about the physics of traveling back in time but I always seemed to hit a brick wall with spatial coordinates.

Where we are in the universe today is very far from where we were in the universe yesterday based on the movement of the earth alone. Add to that the movement of our solar system, galaxy, cluster, supercluster and movements I am not even aware exist and it becomes really far away. Grandpa would probably be light years away from me and my time machine.

Am I missing something here, because I've never heard this mentioned by anyone else?

Excellent response.

There should probably be an open discussion on the forum engaging members and other moderators where the banned user can see it. Let them discuss the ban as well as the subsequent harassment and honor their decision.

I am a former admin of a large forum. I let trolls and spammers wear me down over years and regret that I did not handle some things openly.

Didn't the RSS James Cook find a bunch of diamonds where the mantle is exposed beneath the Atlantic back in 2007?

I remember following this as an amateur geologist but never heard anything more after the diary entry found here...

http://www.classroomatsea.net/JC007/diary/diary_12-04.html

I assumed this would have a significant effect on the supply since they indicated that they got over 150 carats simply by dragging a bucket across the sea floor.

We had a site get hit hard by Panda 4.0 but we are not surprised. About a 35% drop overnight May 20th.

An observation that we have made over the years is that significant changes to Google's algorithms always seem to soften in the subsequent months for us and we return to a high level in the Google SERPs.

The site in question is a site where we curate free crafts projects and patterns which my spouse and I began in the 90's with our family and friends. The idea was to gather together excellent crafts projects on little known mostly small sites with the criteria that they are free, complete, usually require no email/login and are within two clicks of us. We still update it every week.

Over the years we have used user feedback to make design decisions. For example, when Pinterest became popular we got a lot of feedback to use masonry instead of tables for our images/links and lately we've been moving to make it fully responsive because we get a lot of feedback from tablet users.

The only time we were manually penalized by Google involved an issue where we had ignored our user's complaints about so they were right and we were wrong. We fixed it.

Our site looks thin to an algorithm and we almost always get hit by large algorithm changes but over the subsequent months, the site always moves back up and ranks very well. We can only imagine that this means the algorithm is somehow tempered by our visitor's behavior (we use adsense and analytics so they see all) and is not simply a switch that is thrown and left on.

I have to wonder how much MetaFilter has done to gather user feedback. The answer to their problem may be there.

Disclosure: The site described is AllCrafts

Yes, that is the problem. However, I know that at least one of them was penalized for using TextLinkAds and stopped advertising with us because they decided to adopt a scorched earth policy in an attempt to have manual penalties removed. They simply tried to remove all possible links to themselves that they had paid for.

I'm afraid the issue is not as black and white as I'd like it to be.

I do not believe that Google would intentionally punish sites for buying legitimate advertising.

We've noticed a decrease in tier 1 advertisers over the last 18 months. We get a million+ uniques per month and are very picky about the ads we run. The decrease in tier 1 has been small businesses who have become concerned that their ads may be misconstrued as 'link buying' and will cause them to be penalized in Google's search so all that is left for us are the large brands. Many of the small businesses had been advertising with us for over five years.

We've been considering BuySellAds because of the high quality of the ads we see them run on other sites.

Are these types of purchases primarily defensive in order to prevent new social networks from appearing that are simpler, more private or somehow more appealing?

I always thought it was inevitable that a solution will eventually evolve that allows individuals to communicate directly with each other and manage their own online social networks without intermediaries like Google or Facebook. Slowing down that evolution seems like a correct strategy for companies that stand to lose from it.

I doubt it. About . com has been using a technique like this to put adsense ads on external links for years.

I've often wondered if the feedback provided by Kinect could be used to induce trance states. As an amateur magician I spent some time studying stage hypnotism and NLP. It seems that a lot of the cues used for that could be detected through the Kinect in its current state. Please understand that I don't mean hypnotizing someone to be an assassin or cluck like a chicken every time they hear the word 'avocado'. I'm talking about making some people more prone to suggestion than they would normally be.

I wonder if the timing of the release is tied to the release of iOS 7. There is a Sprite Kit 2d framework in iOS 7.

The problem is not just malicious ads.

About 3 years ago I had Chitika ads on a busy website and one day they ran a test of their new mobile ads and accidentally turned it on for all advertisers. As a result all of the pages that had the Chitika javascript code on them displayed a huge ad that took up the bottom third of the viewport. It only lasted a couple of hours but I had over 5k uniques see it and have been extremely parsimonious with what third party javascript I put on sites ever since.

The root of the issue is in the reason that an entrepreneur is perceived of as smart.

Clients who think you are smart because you provided them an excellent service for less money than they think its value should be is good. I do data recovery jobs that work out like this.

Clients who think you are smart because you provide a solution that causes them to make a lot more money than they paid you is good. I do web design/promotion jobs that increase conversions which seem to fall into this category.

These are a completely different perception of smart than the kind generated from books I wrote or public speaking that I've done. This is my experience as an entrepreneur who may not be as smart as some people think YMMV.

I would be concerned about how dd handles a bad sector that has not been reallocated by SMART. Many drives have 1 or 2 of these. Clonezilla is a good option because it also includes GNU ddrescue (so does PartedMagic) which can cope with most file system damage like bad sectors.

About ten years ago I set out to do this using a peg memory system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system that I customized to card suits and numbers.

The best I could do was 4:25 and it was far more exhausting than I thought it would be. Trying as hard as possible three times in a day was my limit but the result was magical because I really knew the entire deck.

Instantly you can answer questions like, What is below the two of hearts? What how far is the ace of spades from the seven of diamonds? It felt surreal. I never noticed any improvement in other memory abilities as a side effect but it definitely felt like exercise of a mental sort.

The first thing I thought of was a course that I took decades ago that discussed using printers for covert channels to get data out of secure networks.

I wonder if any of those are honeypots. It may be interesting to see if any visitors do something clever or unexpected.

The Expert at the Card Table by S.W. Erdnase

It was written over one hundred years ago (1902) by a mysterious author who many, including the late Martin Gardner, have been obsessed with identifying.

I originally bought it years ago to learn sleight of hand techniques but found that the book increased my ability to detect subterfuge in many areas and not just crooked card games. There is something special about the book.

Any discussion of Myers-Briggs always makes me remember this quote attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord.

"I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent -- their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy -- they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent -- he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord

Short on important details. Specifically, what was the backup procedure and frequency? Was the backup routine affected for some time prior to the encryption and made to look like it was working but wasn't or was the backup policy lax or nonexistent?