Recent Posts
@Renegade/anyone, have you tried Enyo for cross platform development ?-kilele (August 07, 2012, 09:25 AM)
Why is it so impossibly difficult to manage to stay away from copyright Nazis for just one, brief, fleeting moment? Unbelievable.-Renegade (August 07, 2012, 01:24 AM)
Because someone has discovered that Oppression can be sexy in a Skeksi kind of way.-TaoPhoenix (August 07, 2012, 10:12 AM)
Chops to you 40hz, and such a fine post is one reason I come here. Some of you guys do your homework!-TaoPhoenix (August 07, 2012, 10:04 AM)
And it's reflecting some of the pushback we're starting to see in official quarters over some of the constitutional abuses that were instituted following 9/11.
Things like this give me hope. Not everybody in government is blindly going along with the agenda of the hyper-patriot cabal.
-40hz (August 07, 2012, 10:24 AM)
I time-shift my bills, but I actually do it forward. And then I time-shift my pay back. I'm currently up to paying my next month's bills at the very least with my prior month's paycheck. It sounds crazy to do... but I have software that actually lets me (and encourages me) to do so. Of course, it drives some of my bill people crazy, because their systems aren't set up to keep track of someone who is ahead... I wonder why...
But it's incredibly freeing. I don't pay bills on the date when they say I should... I pay them at the time of month when it best fits my schedule. And I always have leeway if something unexpected comes up. Some might say that's just savings... but my savings is totally separate. The paychecks that I have set aside untouched haven't been allocated at all. Quite hard to effectively explain... but it works.-wraith808 (August 07, 2012, 07:48 AM)
I've seriously considered timeshifting my consumption of news.. Trying to make sense of the news of real-world events is incredibly inefficient, and so little of it has any immediate impact. It seems like it would be so much more manageable and relaxing to read newspapers and watch news shows on a 1yr delay.-mouser (August 07, 2012, 09:09 AM)
"It's 10.6 inch" oh shit oh shit oh shit "... and of course people play games" GULLLLP!-nosh (August 07, 2012, 01:42 AM)
The only problem I can see with time-shifting 'real time' things too much is it makes everything effectively 'virtual' - which I think has a bad effect on some people. Because once everything becomes somewhat unreal or 'less real' there's a risk of a damaging sense of alienation creeping into a person's mindset. At least from my experience with people who electively spend much of their lives in the metaverse and mostly removed from 'real world' sequential reality and causality.-40hz (August 06, 2012, 07:42 PM)
(Stuck in season 1 & 2 a week or so ago.) (Hmm... kind of sounds like 'fanboi'.) Some books are timeless. Every now and then I go back to some books of essays I have to read for fun. 20, 200, or 2000 years doesn't diminish them in the least. I wonder how much of the music and movies now will be like that? In 200 years, what movies from this period will people consider worth watching? -mahesh2k (August 06, 2012, 07:44 PM)
Well, I've done my bit of activism in my corners of the net, I'm gonna have to take a break from all this junk for a while. The emotional roller coaster is wearing me out now.I wonder how many people feel/think the same?-TaoPhoenix (August 06, 2012, 10:25 AM)
I have a theory that a lot of this nonsense is designed to desensitize people by flooding them with incessant change - you get change-induced fatigue/narcosis and stop fighting it. Even the most stalwart activists could become more malleable, less resistant and more accepting.
This is how Scientology and various other brainwashing cults operate.-IainB (August 06, 2012, 11:41 AM)
Well, I've done my bit of activism in my corners of the net, I'm gonna have to take a break from all this junk for a while. The emotional roller coaster is wearing me out now.-TaoPhoenix (August 06, 2012, 10:25 AM)
Another news item here re the TPP draft, from arstechnica: Leaked: US proposal on copyright's limits
I am confused by this. Is this really how easy it is for commercial lobbies to write their own laws and bypass the Senate? That would seem to emasculate the relatively democratic Senate approval processes and effectively make the commercial lobbyists unelected "lawmakers" - wouldn't it?-IainB (August 06, 2012, 02:32 AM)
After defeat of Senate cybersecurity bill, Obama weighs executive-order option
Senate Republicans recently blocked cybersecurity legislation, but the issue might not be dead after all.
The White House hasn't ruled out issuing an executive order to strengthen the nation's defenses against cyber attacks if Congress refuses to act.
The White House has emphasized that better protecting vital computer systems is a top priority.
Economist Nouriel Roubini is tweeting doom about the London Olympics this morning.
From @Nouriel:
UK policymakers scared so much folks before the Olympic that London is a deserted city: non-olympic tourists are away; londoners are gone!
The Olympics are an economic failure as London is totally empty:hotels, restaurants, streets. They scared all off with crowd excess warnings
By scaring every1 to stay out of London with warnings about too many people coming here it turns that London is totally empty, a zombie city
We've come up with 43 reasons that we think the Olympics will be remembered as a disaster, and trust us, the list could have been longer — we probably could have come up with dozens of reasons related to the IOC "brand police" or the G4S fiasco alone.
)I'm boycotting the Olympics this year.-40hz (August 05, 2012, 09:01 PM)
Yay~! More people need to boycott the Olympics. 
Here's what a very advanced trs-80 full screen graphics game looked like back in those days: (see attachment in previous post)-mouser (August 05, 2012, 09:33 AM)
Interesting legal decision reported by arstechnica: MPAA "embedding is infringement" theory rejected by court
(The text of the post is in the spoiler below.)-IainB (August 04, 2012, 06:51 PM)
1. I seriously doubt that the hacker brute forced the iCloud account password. iCloud (as does Google) allows for only a limited number of password attempts before locking up. Then you have to answer two of three security questions (the two factor authentication). Therefore, unless you use an extremely easy password to guess, brute force is going to fail since it will take too much time to do.
2. MORE LIKELY: The Hacker is someone the person knows who then got access to his password or someone who used a keylogger. With a keylogger, if you ever log into any of your accounts on someone else's computer or public terminal, you are screwed immediately.
3. Since the iCloud account was used as the person's central account, any other account which uses that central account as the backup email address (such as his Google and Twitter accounts) became vulnerable to a password resent request.
4. The Hacker easily gained access to his Gmail Account and Twitter Account even without knowing the password by simply knowing those accounts' backup addresses and sending a password reset request. This shows that Gmail and Twitter are also not very secure.
5. Remote Wipe is a good thing. The only problem is if a Hacker gains access to the account that can do a remote wipe, you can be remote wiped. Thus, to guard against this possibility, always do backups of your data.
6. Backups are clearly important. If the person used Time Machine AND another app (such as ChronoSync) to do hourly backups AUTOMATICALLY AND WITHOUT SUPERVISION, then he would only lose 1 hour of work.
7. Using only one backup email address is bad. This can occur not only with iCloud but also Google and any other email accounts. The key is that the person used his iCloud account as the backup email account for every other account he had - his Google account, his Twitter account, etc. This links these other accounts to the original account. This problem is the same if he used his Gmail account as his primary backup account. It isn't limited to using Apple's iCloud account. Using only one email as the primary backup account makes every other account linked to it insecure and accessible because all these other accounts are easy to access via a password request - Google, Twitter are easily accessed.
8. Strong passwords and regularly changing passwords are important. This helps protect against keyloggers and people you know from accessing your account if they don't do it immediately. Being able to mix numbers, capital letters, and small letters helps make the password more secure. Being able to add symbols (e.g. !
or *, etc.) to the password increases security even more.
The most important lessons:
1. any account can be hacked.
2. backup, backup, backup, backup, backup, backup,...
We need some sanity. My fear is that we don't get it...-Renegade (August 03, 2012, 12:23 PM)
Some sanity? Never fear Renegade. We won't get it.-40hz (August 03, 2012, 04:49 PM)
