Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading: "PC inspection software provides richer information than server-based clientless CDI software. It can read information from the operating system registry, serial numbers off a hard drive or the Media Access Control ID from an Ethernet card."

Online service providers, such as online banks and e-commerce sites, should start planning to phase out their reliance on Flash local storage (also referred to as local shared objects and Flash cookies) for device identification-based fraud detection, according to Gartner, Inc. Mounting global regulatory concerns over consumer privacy, and Adobe's responses with new privacy settings in its Flash player, are driving this transition.


"The days of tagging customer PCs to identify 'good' customers logging into user accounts are numbered, as regulatory privacy concerns and privacy settings in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 give end users explicit control over information downloaded to their PCs using Flash Player," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Service providers who depend on Flash to identify client devices — such as PCs — in order to prevent fraud should evaluate and implement alternative technologies."

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading

Gartner: Days Of Easy Tagging Of User PCs With Flash Local Storage Drawing To An End - DarkReading
Online service providers, such as online banks and e-commerce sites, should start planning to phase out their reliance on Flash local storage (also referred to as local shared objects and Flash cookies) for device identification-based fraud detection, according to Gartner, Inc. Mounting global regulatory concerns over consumer privacy, and Adobe's responses with new privacy settings in its Flash player, are driving this transition.


"The days of tagging customer PCs to identify 'good' customers logging into user accounts are numbered, as regulatory privacy concerns and privacy settings in Adobe Flash Player 10.1 give end users explicit control over information downloaded to their PCs using Flash Player," said Avivah Litan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "Service providers who depend on Flash to identify client devices — such as PCs — in order to prevent fraud should evaluate and implement alternative technologies."

Greg Brown -- Lyrics for FURTHER IN

Greg Brown -- Lyrics for FURTHER IN: "I got two little feet to get me across the mountain two little feet to carry me away into the woods two little feet big mountain and a cloud comin' down cloud comin' down cloud comin' down

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Apple Music Event Heavy on Metrics | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

Apple Music Event Heavy on Metrics | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD: "300 Apple Stores in 10 countries (soon to be 11)
More than 1 million visitors to those stores on some days
120 million iOS devices sold since the first iPhone debuted
230,000 iOS devices activated each day
6.5 billion apps downloaded from the App Store to date
200 apps downloaded from the App Store each second
1.5 billion games and entertainment downloads to the iPod touch alone
250,000 apps currently available in the App Store
25,000 of those are iPad apps
275 million iPods sold to date
160 million active iTunes accounts
12 million songs in the iTunes store
11.7 billion songs downloaded from iTunes
450 million TV episodes downloaded via iTunes
100 million movies downloaded via iTunes
35 million books downloaded via iTunes
The iPod touch is the No. 1 mobile gaming device worldwide, outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
Apple’s share of the portable gaming market: 50 percent"

AMD's Chip Architect Brad Burgess on Mobile Computing's Future | Fast Company

AMD's Chip Architect Brad Burgess on Mobile Computing's Future | Fast Company: "AMD is in a prime position to capitalize on this as it's got expertise in designing both types of processor (unlike Intel, as pretty much anyone who's ever had to rely on Intel's 'integrated graphics' solutions will attest)."

Ouch!

Scientist at Work - Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com

Scientist at Work - Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier - Debunking Myths of the Medical World - NYTimes.com: "While Dr. Redelmeier enjoys his patient interactions, he appears incapable of resisting the lure of a good research topic. Several years ago he compared medical school class presidents to a control group of others in the class and found that the presidents died an average 2.5 years earlier than those in the control group. The type who would run for class president, he concluded in the resulting paper, “may also be the type who fails to look after their health or is otherwise prone to early mortality.”

The idea came to him one day in a hallway at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, where he had stopped to admire a century’s worth of class photos showing mostly white men.

“Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ ” Dr. Redelmeier said. “But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ” Thus was born another Redelmeier classic.

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My Way News - Arizona governor stumbles during debate

My Way News - Arizona governor stumbles during debate: "'We have, uh, did what was right for Arizona,'
AZ Governor Jan Brewer showing her true intellectual prowess

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com

A Syllabus and Book List for Novice Students of Science Fiction Literature | Underwire | Wired.com: "Anathem, Neal Stephenson
Not only is this novel a celebration of the monastic life of scholars, but it is also a series of lessons about science, math and philosophy. A group of young researchers first discover, then analyze, an object that has arrived in orbit around their planet, and we learn with them about the most rational way to approach that which is truly alien. Theories of mind and matter are the subjects of entire chapters in this story about the struggle between logic and superstition

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The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions

The U.S. Electronic Passport Frequently Asked Questions: "An Electronic Passport is the same as a traditional passport with the addition of a small integrated circuit (or “chip”) embedded in the back cover. The chip stores:
The same data visually displayed on the data page of the passport;
A biometric identifier in the form of a digital image of the passport photograph, which will facilitate the use of face recognition technology at ports-of-entry;
The unique chip identification number; and
A digital signature to protect the stored data from alteration"

Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery

Memorable Quotes from Alt.Sysadmin.Recovery: "I never really understood how there could be things that would drive you insane just because you knew them until I ran into Windows.

Peter da Silva

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Intel’s McAfee Deal: A National Security Nightmare - The Firewall - the world of security - Forbes

Intel’s McAfee Deal: A National Security Nightmare - The Firewall - the world of security - Forbes: "When I read the news Thursday that Intel is buying McAfee for $7.68 billion, I was stunned by its national security implications.

Intel has had a cozy relationship with the Russian government and its Federal Security Service (FSB) since 2002 with its sponsorship of a laboratory on wireless technology at Nizhny Novgorod State University (NNGU).

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There's something about macro

There's something about macro: "Finally, sticky prices play a crucial role in converting this into a theory of real economic fluctuations; while I regard the evidence for such stickiness as overwhelming, the assumption of at least temporarily rigid nominal prices is one of those things that works beautifully in practice but very badly in theory.

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Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes - WSJ.com

Spreading Hayek, Spurning Keynes - WSJ.com: "Austrian school of economics that opposes government intervention in markets and decries federal spending to prop up demand during times of crisis

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Sailing faster than the wind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sailing faster than the wind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "On July 2, 2010, the propeller-powered land yacht Blackbird set the world's first certified record for going directly downwind, faster than the wind, using only power from the wind. The yacht achieved a dead downwind speed of about 2.8 times the speed of the wind.[46][47][48]

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Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age: "The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers. And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are.

The Real Bozo Attempts to Atone: Why the DDWFTW Car Works : Good Math, Bad Math

The Real Bozo Attempts to Atone: Why the DDWFTW Car Works : Good Math, Bad Math: "And the answer to that is 'Yes'. This thing does do it. It's not magic, it's not perpetual motion. In fact, it's really astonishingly simple, once you realize that the behavior of things moving through air is quite different from the simple rigid system that it appears to be equivalent to"

Internet2: IDEA Award Winners 2010

Internet2: IDEA Award Winners 2010: "Shibboleth
Shibboleth® Federated Single Sign-On Software is developed and supported by a growing international community. Nominated by Jack Suess, Vice President of Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, an institutional user of the software, Shibboleth is a standards-based, open-source solution for Web-based single sign-on across and within organizational boundaries. Implementing widely used federated identity standards, principally OASIS' Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Shibboleth simplifies the management of identity and permissions by allowing sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner."

Beware the smart phone data plan con - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com

Beware the smart phone data plan con - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets - Back to School - msnbc.com: "So, how much will your smart phone cost? Forget that number between $0 and $299 that you pay up front. The number you should focus on is the total cost of ownership, which for smart phones is usually around $2,000. (Regular 'dumb' phones with unlimited text messages generally cost half that over the same period.)"

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

Unlocking Apple's iPhone is legal, ethical, and just plain fun. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine
Part of the copyright code, Section 1201 of the famous Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, makes it illegal to break digital locks to get at copyrighted works. But that doesn't make unlockers criminals. The reason is an explicit exemption for personal unlocking issued by the librarian of Congress in 2006. As the librarian wrote, the locks "are used by wireless carriers to limit the ability of subscribers to switch to other carriers, a business decision that has nothing whatsoever to do with the interests protected by copyright." If that's good enough for the librarian of Congress, that's good enough for me

Some more comments... : On a New Road

Some more comments... : On a New Road
It's not so much that the game favors evil, but that the definition of "good" is really twisted:
Good adj: anything which increases the stock price.
Considerations about employees, products, customers and community are all secondary. They only enter the equation as ways to achieve goal 1. Morality or high principles have no place in the corporate discourse. They maximize the stock price, within the bounds of the law. Corporations like Oracle and Exxon tend to be perfectly rational. They "buy laws" because it's perfectly legal to spend money on lobbyists and political campaigns. While you and I might think that it is morally reprehensible to buy elections, like the recent case with Target, it is nonetheless totally legal. Given the rules of the game, it would be bad for a corporation to not buy an election, if failing to do so would negatively impact their stock price. I could rant for a long time on this one, but not today… The whole modern concept of a public company is deeply flawed. But the game is what it is.