"productivity sinks. (social media namely, but we do block youtube for some groups of employees.)"
I trust you also block TVTropes?
3313 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007
Derek ... Clive ...
"an established “custom of the sea” "
As explained by no less than Sir William Schwenck Gilbert
"In the US, men are three times as likely as women to use spyware to monitor their current partner or an ex."
I've seen stories that a lot of women will check on a possible partner online in case he is dangerous. Just where you draw the line between that and cyberstalking is ... probably multiple different answers depending on who you ask. But a man doing the same thing might well be accused of stalking.
So they are spending lots of money and effort to try to reproduce what can be done far easier and cheaper using dogs?
NIH syndrome?
As I understand this story, it implies that a stalker who can somehow get access to a victim's Wi-Fi will be able to prove to their victim that they know exactly what they are doing all the time. It's an obvious extension of things they already do such as planting tracking devices on cars. Many victims will be completely non-technical and have no idea how this is happening.
I don't give a shit what fancy applications can be enabled by this tech - if it enables this it is completely unacceptable.
Not that this will stop it of course - the police forces will insist on being able to do the same thing.
Get into work, check that the lines to the subsidiary offices are OK. Nope, one of the cards is dead, no lights showing.
Phone that office, ask the switchboard to put me through to the computer room.
"Sorry, we can't transfer calls at the moment, we've had a power cut"
"Ah thanks, that answers the question I was about to ask!"
Unfortunately bad people exist. And bugs in software exist. Yes, you should be able to store whatever you want on your private account. Yes, it ought to be safe there. But just as you have to have high-security locks on your house if you live somewhere there's lots of burglars even though you should be able to leave it open if you want, if you store your photos on the net then you've put them somewhere there are a lot of hackers. The only way to be certain something isn't stolen off the public net is to not put it on there. Saying it's victim blaming doesn't change the fact that there are some extremely nasty people out there.
If two people are coming at you and several other people with butcher knives, you don't pause and say "Excuse me, would you perhaps like to reconsider?" Apart from all other considerations, it gives them time to hide behind a hostage. All sorts of things could go wrong. You can't give consideration of their lives over and above the lives of the people they are attacking without cause.
Youtube has decided to ban videos "that create serious emotional distress in minors."
Implying that they are perfectly OK with videos that create serious emotional distress in adults?
Adults who might already be suffering problems, who might be severely traumatised by such treatment.
Why connect to the internet at all for something that must work reliably locally, and which has confidential information that you don't want Bezos or Zuckerberg to see?
Much the same functionality could be created in local kit, probably run off a Pi. Video storage? Terabytes are cheap these days.
The only need for connection is if you want (by your choice) to let PC Plod see the video feed, or if you want to connect via your phone when on holiday.
I had a call that a web sales site had started giving weird errors. Got the client to send me their copy of the files, and found that:
1> They'd added a call to an exterior function that was somehow trashing the login cookie.
2> Someone had hashed out the line that checked that the cookie was still present (and kicked you back to the login screen if it wasn't) immediately before the call to the very complex SQL stored procedure that did all the charging.
At a guess they'd put in the exterior call, got fed up with going to the login screen, took out the line that did that, ...
"a new cloud to serve customers dealing with Top Secret classified data."
We're on a Top Secret cloud so everything is secure, so we can relax a bit on our own security.
Well, actually, we've relaxed quite a lot because it makes things easier.
Oh look, someone has found one tiny flaw in the cloud security and swiped everything on it.
I get occasional emails in Spanish from people who forget to put '.ec' on the end of my .org address. I've notified postmaster@xxxx.org.ec but had no response and the emails are still coming. At first I responded telling them they had the wrong address but I can't be bothered now, they just get deleted.
I also used to get emails to my xxxxin.com address intended for xxxxinc.com (i.e. xxxx Inc) but that eventually stopped after I emailed the postmaster.