I'm subletting a room from a friend for the summer, a pretty regular occurrence in student towns, but there has been a few hiccups. First the current roommates don't want to give me a key until I actually move in, whereas my strong preference would be to receive at the start of my lease (I am after all paying for it, and I have over nine hours of driving to do on the day I move in, and don't want to wait around for some mysterious roommate to bother coming home). Second, the landlord has decided he wants my driver's license number. Back in first year, I would have provided it without a second thought, he wants it, I want a room and have it, why not? Now of course I am a couple years older, and hopefully a couple years wiser, so several questions popped into my head: Why does he want it? What is he going to do with it? What about all those identity theft specials the networks have been pushing for the past few years? etc.
It is has been rather common for some form of identification to be required when signing a lease, if you don't pay the rent the landlord wants to be able to track you down. I can almost understand that, but I think the reciprocal should always be true; the landlord should give you his identification so if he doesn't fix the washing machine you can track him down. But this isn't the case here, I'm not renting from him, my friend is, and likely my friend provided him with all appropriate identification. Should I fail to pay the rent it really isn't of his concern, my friend will be pissed off, but it doesn't effect the legal relationship they have in any way.
Should he demand my drivers license number, I will probably provide it, in exchange for his.
I wonder what Canada's new privacy laws say or require about situations like this?
I now have a mount, a special thanks goes to Sajja & Duncaan, with a very special thanks to Nichi.
Someone made a post to a list to which I subscribe today, which ended with a statement like "RFC's, in my opinion, are made to be broken when it comes to usability", a statement I disagree with vehemently.
Short Answer: It's exactly that line of thinking that put us in our current situation where websites have to be designed twice, once for Internet Explorer, and once for everything else.
Long Answer: The problem with throwing standards away for the sake of usability is that you are throwing away common documentation for the sake of your view of what usability is, in your circumstance. This probably works okay when you are developing for a very limited audience, and your end product isn't required to interact with anything else. Take the current (English) keyboard layout for example, a common standard to which you are likely well aware if you are reading this. It works because it's a standard, you can use computers at home, at work, at the library, wherever, and they will give you a reasonably similar interface.
If Martians landed tomorrow, and we stuck them in a small camp to teach them how to type (so they could imbue us with the knowledge of the stars), we might give them special customized keyboards. Probably ones shaped a little differently to suit there hands, possibly with an optimized layout for speed (or even optimized for the type of messages we expect them to write), etc. Limited Audience, minimal interaction, it might work. However, after a while, the Martians get tired with their little camp, blow up the gate with their ray guns and explore the real world. After a time they come to a computer, and want to send an email back to Aunt Mae who stayed back at the camp, they're screwed. The keyboards are completely different: differently shaped, different size, different key configuration. The Martians get pissed off (not able to use these strange keyboards) and use their ray guns to blow up the city and everyone in it. That city could have been saved if we has just followed standards and given them regular keyboards.
Follow Standards, Save Lives.
Wrote the test, look at what I got!
| Squirt You scored 82 %! |
| You are aware and adventurous! You've been studying! |
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My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Finding Nemo trivia Test written by clymerchick on Ok Cupid |
I have joined what I might assume is a reasonably large group of people who went out and purchased the Nintendo DS shortly after it was released. Then, after playing with it for a while thought "Gee, this is really cool, now if there was only a cool game (that didn't come out eight years ago) to play with it". Then the Sony PSP was released, which came out with not one, but several cool games to play. So I put my Nintendo DS aside, and went out and picked up a Sony PSP, which came with Spiderman 2 (the movie) & Gretzky NHL (hockey game), I dutifully picked up Lumines& Twisted Metal Head On at the same time. Having been a Nintendo DS owner for the past few weeks, let me say, owning a portable console that has fun games to play right now (rather than six months from now) is pretty cool. I've watched the first minute or so of Spiderman 2, and the LCD screen is awesome, great colour and detail, decent sound from the speakers as well.
To speak to the games I've got. I haven't played Gretzky yet, I'm not a big hockey game fan, so it will probably stay on the bench until a friend comes over who wants to give it a try. Twisted Metal Head On is good, I'm still trying to get used to the controls, but I loved Twisted Metal Black, so I have high expectations for this one. Lumines, ahh Lumines, where exactly to start with this one. Simply put Lumines is the new Tetris (or, if you are younger than I, how about Lumines is the new Snood), but with a better sound track. It's a fast paced piece dropping from the top of the screen game. Every piece that drops from the top of the screen is square, and contains four blocks. The goal is to match four blocks of the same colour together in a 2x2 square. Here is a screenshot from the Sony website, I won't embarrass myself trying to take a picture of the PSP with my digital camera.
So, if you're going out to buy a portable console, and want to play fun games now (or watch movies, or listen to music, or do slideshows of your digital pictures), go buy the PSP. If you are more of a forward thinker, and happen to be attached (as I am) to several of the upcoming DS titles buy a DS. Or you know, just blow a stupid amount of money like I did, and get both (just get them from Amazon, and do it from a link on this page okay
). Having my own dedicated server, I am privy to all the fun little logs that the system generates. Now like any computer connected to the net, there are all manner of port knocks going on from various infected systems, looking for already present trojans, or known vulnerabilities to exploit. That being said however, I also receive more serious brute force attacks, attempting to log in via SSH. These attacks show up in my logs looking something like this:
I changed the IP
alex/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
ana/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
andrea/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
andrew/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
angel/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
bank/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
barbara/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
betty/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
billy/password from 127.0.0.1: 2 Time(s)
bob/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
brandon/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
brian/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
buddy/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
carmen/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
charlie/password from 127.0.0.1: 1 Time(s)
Several of the recent attacks have come from customers of the same host as me, so I have dutifully followed up with the security staff. Overall though, I haven't been too impressed with the level of response I have received. My understanding is that once they receive a complaint, they send a nice little email to whomever owns the attacking machine, letting them know what is going on, and offering to assist in securing the machine as obviously it has been compromised by a third party. This does absolutely nothing if the attacker has legitimate access to the machine in question, and leaves a large window for an attacker with illegitimate access to the machine to continue their work while they wait for the machines owner to respond.
At what point do these attacks become sufficiently severe to warrant involvement of a law enforcement agency? Is a brute force attack as shown (in part) above enough? Do they have to actually gain access to my system? If it's the former, who do I call? The local police, the RCMP, the police local to where my system is hosted, or even the FBI? If it's the latter, doesn't this give attackers free reign to continue to attack other systems, until they find one less secure?
Finally the possibility exists that the attack is merely one head of a worm, which has already compromised the attacking machine, and is merely seeking another vulnerable machine. Should this possibility effect my reaction?
