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No you are wrong. Coal is crappy. Coal will produce more and wider spread radiation then nuclear ever will while also producing tons of carbon. Speaking of long term effects both Coal and natural gas produce many times the carbon of Nuclear.
Solar can not work for base load. Wind is a bit better but it still needs natural gas fired peaking plants to back it up. Simple truth is you are spouting the same FUD we hear all the time about nuclear.
The anti-nuclear people are as bad as the climate change deniers.

Here are some scientists that say you are wrong.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/03/...
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...

And a co founder of Greenpeace. http://www.wired.com/science/p...

I suspect that (particularly when dealing with foreign subjects; but in general because they don't have many field agents) the NSA prefers full-featured rootkits; but agencies with more boots and fewer nerds are known to have taken advantage of the weaknesses of cellular firmware.

In this case, for instance, (atypically well documented, because of the court spat; but probably also occurs more quietly elsewhere), the FBI set up a stingray, then had verizon do a silent PRL push that reconfigured the target's cell modem to switch over to the stingray as its preferred tower. That isn't even an 'exploit', in the sense that PRLs are supposed to be able to do that, and carriers are supposed to be able to push them, and it still adds up to a fairly hairy security problem.

So nobody pitied your choice to agree to prevent users from controlling their computers ("I once worked on a project where part of the technology stack came with a legal requirement to take steps to prevent customers from reverse-engineering").

Well, it's not as if I asked for pity from anyone, including you.

I worked on a consumer-electronics device that happened to have a cheap embedded computer inside it. One feature was to play DVDs. So yes, my soul must forever bear the black stain of having worked on a DVD player that legally licensed the technology to unscramble the CSS protecting DVDs. (You know, the dark secret you can buy on a T-shirt. But go figure, large companies would rather sign a legal license than be sued.)

And nobody pitied you complaining that you couldn't find developers who were willing to be taken advantage of themselvesâ"giving you code in exchange for nothing ("so LGPL was just as radioactive as GPL").

There's that "pity" word again. Where did you get the idea I was looking for some?

We couldn't use LGPL code. So we didn't use the LGPL code. We used something else. I'm not crying about it. I'm sorry that I seem to have upset you so badly.

Or perhaps it was your namecalling (code licensed to not let you hurt others is "radioactive") that helped drive them away.

I apologize for not writing dry, lifeless prose that is inoffensive to all. But I don't apologize very much. I think most people understand that "radioactive" is just a metaphor that means, in this case, "must be avoided".

So, a question: in your mind, selling a DVD player to a customer is "hurting" the customer?

Tell me, I'm curious. Microwave ovens contain embedded computers. Modern cars and digital watches and pocket calculators all contain embedded computers. Do you have source code for all of those embedded computers in your life? If not, do you only drive cars from the 1970s or older, only use a slide rule and an abacus, only wear mechanical watches? In fact, do you own a device that can play DVDs?

Do you feel that the guys who wrote the embedded software in these things should feel guilty over all the "hurting others" they have done?

Do you think that I should feel guilty for working on a DVD player?

Not really. he allegedly did some shady deals which he failed to report. So business as usual in financial circles except he got caught.

Does anyone else see this as an unholy alliance in the tech war? Google and Samsung just called a truce. Each has huge patent portfolios, and not only that the agreement is binding on future technology for the next 10 years.

Their main competitors being Apple and Microsoft, I am fairly certain hell would freeze over before those two unite...

Pretty strong strategic plan for the future dominance.

Well then, Hell has frozen over, SOLID!

"What have we done to China so far?"

http://www.wired.com/wiredente...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ke...

Given that China has the second largest output for research papers nowadays I'd imagine there's quite a lot for the US to learn from them even if they are stereotyped as a backwater state which the US could learn nothing of value from.

a Steam Machine can switch to GNOME and run a completely free game.

Fortunately humblebundle is starting to encroach on the Steam situation by noticeably not requiring DRM on a majority of their titles and so does desura.

And you can run these games on your Steam Machine. A Steam Machine runs a free operating system, which is noticeably less evil than a console from a company that has in the past compared startup developers to contestants on American Idol .

Neither of those examples are correct from the Stallman perspective.

I don't believe that the Stallman perspective as you characterize it is the most efficient in a market heavily distorted by video games. The purpose of the GNU project is to provide a source-compatible alternative to the UNIX system under a free software license. U.S. federal courts have ruled that reimplementing a platform from its specification does not infringe (Oracle v. Google). But on the other hand, courts are cracking down on this practice of reimplementation in the field of video games (Tetris v. Xio).

It's already making a compromise by merely being in those situations, merely for the sake of (reason omitted because you sure as hell didn't provide one).

I understand that you are unsatisfied with the level of detail provided in my previous comment. Please first allow me to reason by process of elimination. There are three ways to switch from proprietary applications on a proprietary platform to free applications on a free platform. The first is to replace the applications first. The second is to replace the platform first. The third is to replace both at the same time. In practice, the third has caused interoperability issues that the vast majority of users have found unacceptable because there's no way to do it gradually. The most gentle method of introducing free software, and likely the most successful method is a mix of the first and second methods over four steps.

The first step is to consider what free platforms could eventually replace your proprietary platform. Theoretically, ReactOS is closer to Windows than GNU/Linux is, but I haven't seen evidence that ReactOS is anywhere near the maturity of GNU/Linux.

The second step is to phase out applications exclusive to one platform in favor of applications compatible with the chosen free platform. For example, replace applications exclusive to Windows that do not run in Wine with applications that are ported to GNU/Linux or run in Wine. Preferably these are free applications such as Firefox, GIMP, and LibreOffice, but if no free application is available at the moment, that can wait. Even the Free Software Foundation has realized that a transition has to be done in steps and has begun to compile a list of free applications for Windows as one step.

The third step is to switch to a free platform and bring compatible applications with you. When I switched to GNU/Linux on my laptop, this was relatively painless because I had become comfortable with the result of the second step.

Finally, phase out the proprietary applications. This final phase may never finish if one's workload includes video games.

MS needs to make windows GPLv3

That'd be fine if you could put your money where your mouth is. Implementing your suggestion would cost half of Microsoft's market cap (currently $307.25 billion, therefore $153.63 billion).

Could they still make money in that situation? Absolutely.

Could they make as much money as they used to? I'm skeptical. Such a decision to cut expected earnings per share so drastically would likely make Microsoft the defendant in a shareholder lawsuit.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.

Where does water vapor come from, if not liquid water?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Those articles reference water vapor, not liquid water.

The Blackbird.

It was chunky by modern standards, but back in 1994 it was elegant and sleek. I still think it looks really good. More importantly, I think the 540c was the best computer for *working on* I've ever had. It had a terrific keyboard, a trackpad whose operation has never been equalled in my opinion, and you could swap out the optical drive for a second battery for a then-astounding four hours of battery life.

The screen was in modern netbook range for size (9.4 inches/24 cm diagonal), and very low resolution (640 x 400), but somehow it was very comfortable to work on for a long time. The entire system had only 4MB of RAM, but the software was built around this and it felt like plenty. About the only thing I didn't like was the proprietary Ethernet transceiver connector, (a) because it was proprietry and (b) because it was garbage. That's it. Everything else was as perfect as the technology of the day could make it.

If I could have a mint 540c with software and a pair of fresh batteries, I'd use it instead of my modern laptop for a lot of things like writing where I had to focus on one thing for a long time, use a keyboard and didn't need a lot of CPU. Alternatively I'd settle for a laptop with a really good keyboard.

Asteroids, gas giants and --- say --- the moon don't have liquids.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie...

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/13/...

Apparently, not too difficult.

Europa

Use of "telephone technology" doesn't mean the carriers gave it to them.

It means, you know, they used telephone technology. A 'pirate cell tower' -- still telephone technology.

And, really, we know damned well that Western agencies are using the fake cell towers at demonstrations and for surveillance for more or less the same purpose. So except for the magnitude of the response (which I wouldn't rule out in the West either) ... this is no different from what we know is already being done elsewhere.

As long as we continue to act like this is a legitimate thing to do, other countries will say "it is when we do it as well".

What a stark contrast. The Daily Beast article speaks of "prison" and "bizarre hybrid" and "wires and nodes" and "forced medication", while the promotional clip for the movie posted on Wired shows the supposed victims of this cruel outrage sitting around in a decent environment playing cards, happily shooting the BS, and generally enjoying their leisure time.

I think I'll put more weight on the video and less on the sensationalist Beast article.

Stop treating your consumers like dirt

And your developers, allegedly. The 1- to 3-man home-based family businesses that helped Apple's App Store eat away at much of the casual market are something Nintendo wouldn't even consider courting three years ago. Only very recently did this begin to change, and unfortunately, my citation about this ("Tales from the trenches: how Microsoft is losing the battle for indie developers" by Ben Kuchera, March 2013) has become a dead link.

Stop making mario based games

That'd be like telling Hasbro to stop making My Little Pony based toys.

What got me was the announcement that John Podesta (Clipper chip) would be heading the Government review panel on privacy. Excuse me? The man who wanted to build in Big Brother to all electronic communications is going to review our privacy. I'd say that it was something out of the Onion, but apparently, it's serious. Wired

  Cynic - The back doors won't need to be slipped in under the covers, they'll be mandated by Government policy, "to help preserve our privacy"

Someone save us from the people who are supposed to "help us"

The correct link is this.

These Guys Are Creating a Brain Scanner You Can Print Out at Home

- http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/openbci/

-- http://www.openbci.com/
-- https://github.com/OpenBCI

"Bootstrapped with a little funding help from DARPA â" the research arm of the Department of Defense â" the device is known as OpenBCI. It includes sensors and a mini-computer that plugs into sensors on a black skull-grabbing piece of plastic called the âoeSpider Claw 3000,â which you print out on a 3-D printer. Put it all together, and it operates as a low-cost electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave scanner that connects to your PC."

Archived: http://web.archive.org/web/20140113131516/http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/openbci/

Can we hope for the proper decision (that police need a warrant)?

The big brother can, ~ and has, ~ tapped into telephonic data without the need to take physical control of your phone.

Feds have been caught setting up fake cell towers to intercept wireless traffics.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/feds-fake-cell-phone-tower/

http://www.scmagazine.com/tower-dump-of-consumer-mobile-data-a-popular-police-snooping-tactic/article/324789/

Oh, yes, NASA is a wonderful example. Okay, they don't publicly pray to God before every launch (although i bet many of them pray privately), however, they do adhere to a bunch of other superstitious nonsense. Having birthday cake before each launch. Continually fixing up the same old RV that has been used since the '60s. Peanuts in the control room, playing cards before launch, eating steak and eggs, the list goes on.

These Guys Are Creating a Brain Scanner You Can Print Out at Home

        - http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/openbci/

        -- http://www.openbci.com/
        -- https://github.com/OpenBCI

        "Bootstrapped with a little funding help from DARPA â" the research arm of the Department of Defense â" the device is known as OpenBCI. It includes sensors and a mini-computer that plugs into sensors on a black skull-grabbing piece of plastic called the âoeSpider Claw 3000,â which you print out on a 3-D printer. Put it all together, and it operates as a low-cost electroencephalography (EEG) brainwave scanner that connects to your PC."

        Archived: http://web.archive.org/web/20140113131516/http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/01/openbci/

Objection!

We, MS haters, have Ballmer's hygiene as well - you seen them sweat stains whenever he's jumping all hyped up on stage? May be that's what indirectly sparked Bill Gates' philantropy, he probably seen that some day and thought "Gee, if one could extract all the water from that shirt, it probably would be enough to save a drought-striken African village or two".

Oh, and let's not forget Steve "I'm-vegan-therefore-I-don't-need-to-shower" Jobs.

Somebody should research hygiene/tech leadership correlation, like that old "inventor's facial hair/programming language success" one.

So, if we're doomed in 5 minutes, what does 24 hours represent?

One ampere, perhaps?

A new standard for the kilogram?

It could be anything. Seriously -- it makes about as much sense. If "probability of disaster" is somehow equated to a time duration, frankly I think we could say it's equal to just about anything.

Fucking genius! If only it were iron it would be corroding, but it's platinum and irridium. Corrosion is not a big factor. Forgetting to dust it would alter the mass more.

Actually, remembering to dust it is what causes its mass to change. The problem of how to properly clean the things has been going on for years.

The Target POS machines were running Linux

You're as ignorant of science as you are of economics.

He's not totally off-base on the science.

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You can read more via the pdf at http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121392 or a mirror at http://publicintelligence.net/dod-unmanned-systems-2013/
The US gov wants to try pre-programmed tasks, new algorithms, more sensors, and complex machine learning to remove the need for constant expensive, skilled teams to be working with the 'drone' 24/7.
Expect to see a drone swarm been released or more than 1 drone converging on a target area with less human guidance.
The other aspect is need to shape "cultural hurdles" after double tap drown strikes.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2208307/Americas-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-killing-49-people-known-terrorist-Pakistan.html
Facial recognition is still http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/drones-never-forget-a-face/ been worked on at great distances.
What is left is a 'group' or 'person' in the wrong place at the wrong time doing wrong things or a 'helpful' local has placed a tracking chip on a person to be removed.

We've already had automated weapons go rogue and unleash carnage: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/

- 3D chips are decades old and have never materialized.

24-layer flash chips are currently produced by Samsung. IBM works on 3D chip cooling. Just because it "never materialized" before, doesn't mean it won't happen now.

- Memristors do not enable any new approach to computing, as there are neither many problems that would benefit form this approach, nor tools. The whole idea is nonsense at this time. Maybe they will have some future as storage, but not anytime soon.

Memristors are great for neural network (NN) modelling. MoNETA is one of the first big neural modelling projects to use memristors for that. I do not consider NNs a magic solution to everything, but you must admit they have plenty of applications in computation-expensive tasks.

And while HP reconsidered its previous plans to offer memristor-based memory by 2014, they still want to ship it by 2018.

- Photonics is a dead-end. Copper is far too good and far too cheap in comparison.

Maybe fully photonic-based CPUs are way off, but at least for specialized use there are already photonic integrated circuits with hundreds of functions on a chip.

- Spintronics is old and has no real potential for ever working at this time.

MRAM uses electron spin to store data and is coming to market. Application of spintronics for general computing may be a bit further off in the future, but "no potential" is an overstatement.

- Quantum computing is basically a scam perpetrated by some part of the academic community to get funding. It is not even clear whether it is possible for any meaningful size of problem.

NASA, Google and NSA, among others, think otherwise.

So, no. There really is nothing here.

I respectfully disagree. We definitely have something.

So far, this hasn't seemed to have happened, but if it does become public, there will be a backlash, especially OnStar which has the ability to track and disable cars in realtime [1].

Ahem. Just a few links that spring to mind. You can easily find others.

TomTom sorry for selling driver data to police

“Government Motors” To Track Drivers With OnStar, Sell Data to Police

OnStar Tracks Your Car Even When You Cancel Service

Busted! Your car's black box is spying, may be used against you in court

"it launched last year as its attempt to muscle in on that other flavour-of-the-month market: the so-called Internet of Things."

I had to specifically point out to the Wired.com journalist writing about my "Right To Serve" issue that he was putting the phrase "Internet of Things" into my mouth in his first draft article. The "Internet of Things" from what I can tell is the establishment dipping its toes into the wonderous waters of IPv6, but finding a way to do it without allowing the residential user to _profit in any way_ from their "internet of things". Because all profit shall be reserved for the establishment. Or so goes the party line.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/google-neutrality/
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/google-we-can-ban-servers-on-fiber-without-violating-net-neutrality/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
http://crossies.com/pissed.html
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/google-fiber-now-explicitly-permits-home-servers/
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198327/googles-call-for-open-internet.html

What did I make up? That if you zoom out far enough the climate is cooler now then the average. Nope I'm pretty sure that's agreed upon by most. The implicit fact that that makes the prior argument invalid? Nope that's just logic. (It should be noted the an argument being logically invalid does not negate or affirm it's conclusion). That we are naive when it comes to climate science? Again, this one I'm pretty sure of, I've heard many climate experts say that mankind is the species that has impacted the environment the most, but I'm pretty sure that that distinction goes to the species of bacteria that evolved into chloroplasts.

You seem to have refuted my point about how well we understand the environment, with a couple of examples of similarly complicated systems that we are making great strides with. First of all there is the logical fallacy that progress in some complex systems implies progress in others. That's just not a sound way to refute the point. I'm considered an expert in somethings but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in everything. Then there are the examples of complex things that we have "mastered". Let's start at the Human body. Drug companies, who tend to hire some of the people that know the most about the human body end up with a lot of failed attempts at new drugs. Some of the time it happens because of unintended consequences, but a lot of the time it's because a correlation that was thought to be causal turned out not to be. ( Here's a wired article about the phenomena http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/all/1 ). The other is space. Sure we have some successes but we also have a number of failures. In late 2011 we were looking at abandoning the ISS because of a string of Souyez rocket malfunctions. Also of the 3 mars missions launched during the 2011 launch window, only 1 (that's 33%) reached mars, so while Curiosity is cool, it's the exception not the rule. So to say that we've mastered either field is also not logically valid. Of course in both of those fields we can perform somewhat rigorous experiments so our progress is also faster.

That's not to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with naive science. Our understanding of gravity is still undergoing refinement, but it's force has been part of our engineering for quite some time. But having a naivety of gravity employed in a lot of the engineering hasn't been a downfall. I would say that the goal should be to know when you are doing naive science and respond accordingly perhaps by leaving terms in generic equations abstract, so that they are more readily adjusted if need be or can have more complex expressions plugged in as appropriate (for example gravitational attraction to the earth).

But on the whole your comment as an attempt to refute mine was trash. You start off with an attack, which is not a logically valid method of refutation, and justify the attack with a logically invalid argument that was based on logically invalid arguments. Then you go on talking about climate experts (which I denied the current existence of and you failed to validly refute), which you then use to declare your attempt to refute my comment successful, which does not logically make it so.

My comments were about logical validity, the absolute level of our understanding of the climate, and how the nature of our academic system interacts with fields like the climate that are very hard to study. I'm happy to go off on tangents relative to discussing those topics, but if what you're really trying to do is show me to the curb because you think I'm denying climate change, then you can rest assured that that is not my goal at all.

Or levitate them!

http://www.wired.com/design/2014/01/whoa-watch-scientists-control-levitating-beads-with-sound-waves/

Not quite.

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

I suggest anyone interested in this controversy read the following:

How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA

Although this is in regard to GCHQ, it probably applies to NSA as well: ‘We Can Trust GCHQ On Encryption’

You exaggerate things, which is consistent with much of the discussion on this. I suggest reading the whole article at the link.

How a Crypto ‘Backdoor’ Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA

Jon Callas, the CTO of Silent Circle, whose company offers encrypted phone communication, delivered a different rump session talk at the Crypto conference in 2007 and saw the presentation by Shumow. He says he wasn’t alarmed by it at the time and still has doubts that what was exposed was actually a backdoor, in part because the algorithm is so badly done.

“If [NSA] spent $250 million weakening the standard and this is the best that they could do, then we have nothing to fear from them,” he says. “Because this was really ham-fisted. When you put on your conspiratorial hat about what the NSA would be doing, you would expect something more devious, Machiavellian and this thing is just laughably bad. This is Boris and Natasha sort of stuff.”

Indeed, the Microsoft presenters themselves — who declined to comment for this article — didn’t press the backdoor theory in their talk. They didn’t mention NSA at all, and went out of their way to avoid accusing NIST of anything. “WE ARE NOT SAYING: NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG,” read the last slide of their deck.

The Microsoft manager who spoke with WIRED on condition of anonymity thinks the provocative title of the 2007 presentation overstates the issue with the algorithm and is being misinterpreted — that perhaps reporters at the Times read something in a classified document showing that the NSA worked on the algorithm and pushed it through the standards process, and quickly took it as proof that the title of the 2007 talk had been right to call the weakness in the standard and algorithm a backdoor.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/atms-jackpotted/ Thanks for the tip

And then in a big cat and mouse game, all the teenagers move to a different social media site.

They already have (at least in the UK). I can't remember the name of the site, but Facebook was where you put things to show mum, and the other site where you did what you wanted.

Ah -- found it -- the app is WhatsApp.

Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov?

I think it's important to remember that, in order for this movement to be successful, the entire surveillance apparatus needs to be dismantled - not just the US component of it. The US is a terrible offender when it comes to mass surveillance, but the UK is just as bad. If we also don't restrict the actions of the GCHQ and other entities, it would be pretty easy for the US to farm the intelligence work out to foreign countries by making sure that all communications are being routed overseas. It's easy to imagine a deal where the US and UK only collect metadata about foreign communications (which include UK communications rerouted through the US to make them foreign and US communications rerouted through the UK) with the intent of sharing that data in an intelligence partnership.

So... why am I not rioting? Well, I live in the middle of no where and there aren't enough of us TO riot. If I could have attended the anti-NSA protests in Washington, I would have... and I think this is a general problem with US protests. Our country is too large for large protests to be easy from a logistical prospective and the current protest movement hasn't addressed the logistics in the same way that former protest movements have.

Beyond that, I also think that the system fundamentally works. Call me crazy - and there are plenty that do - but I believe that voters still have the power to cause change. I can vote for leaders that will restrict the NSA's actions. Unfortunately, believing in the system means that there isn't much I can do when it comes to restricting the actions of the GCHQ. The best I can do is not give the UK my tourism, despite a life long dream of visiting London.

Right, my comment was just concerning the summary's claim that Snapchat's popularity was due to NSA privacy concerns.

Although there are conflicting claims about whether the NSA listens to phone calls, as outlined on the Wikipedia page covering the NSA's Utah Data Center), I suspect the truth is that they maybe collect recordings of most of the activity taking place on the internet and phone networks (the haystack), but never have to search for a needle because they don't look through it unless they have a specific target (a specific phone number or email/IP address). If they don't actually listen to that content without a warrant, then their statement that they don't "listen in on phone calls" could be true even though they are collecting them all. They have the storage space for it there, so it's not out of the question, and what else could they use it for? And according to a Wired Magazine article from March, they are wired into the phone network. (Note the article is 5 pages long; the talk about wiring into telecom is on the top of page 3).

The article is older than all the recent concern over privacy from the NSA, and I suppose it's possible that all this has turned around since then as a result of the outcry. But who knows?

Right, my comment was just concerning the summary's claim that Snapchat's popularity was due to NSA privacy concerns.

Although there are conflicting claims about whether the NSA listens to phone calls, as outlined on the Wikipedia page covering the NSA's Utah Data Center), I suspect the truth is that they maybe collect recordings of most of the activity taking place on the internet and phone networks (the haystack), but never have to search for a needle because they don't look through it unless they have a specific target (a specific phone number or email/IP address). If they don't actually listen to that content without a warrant, then their statement that they don't "listen in on phone calls" could be true even though they are collecting them all. They have the storage space for it there, so it's not out of the question, and what else could they use it for? And according to a Wired Magazine article from March, they are wired into the phone network. (Note the article is 5 pages long; the talk about wiring into telecom is on the top of page 3).

The article is older than all the recent concern over privacy from the NSA, and I suppose it's possible that all this has turned around since then as a result of the outcry. But who knows?

I wondered if plasma funaces could ever be used to extract the base elements from trash. Right now they just turn heavier elements into inert 'slag'.

.

Only a complete and utter moron would buy from them after this.

Remember how the RSA SecureID authentication system was hacked?

Now, the way you do these tokens is to have a counter or timer inside them that's synchronized with an external system. You simply encrypt the counter and that's your verifiable ID code. The server can authenticate a couple counts in the past or present to give a wider window, and updates if drift is detected to stay in sych.

There's a concept in security called "single point of failure" that all competent security researchers are aware of and attempt to avoid, but RSA didn't. They didn't let you seed your own SecureIDs. Instead, they seeded them. In this way you had to rely on RSA to authenticate the tokens for you, instead of let you run your own server. So, this immediately raises several red flags for a security aware person: Denial of Service == All your cards stop authenticating at RSA's whim. Additionally, RSA can grant access to other people, say the NSA, by seeding a SecureID with a duplicate of yours. Furthermore, if RSA is compromised then everyone who uses SecureID is at risk, they've made themselves a single point of failure.

A better approach is to allow businesses to seed your security cards yourself, and run your own servers. This way there's no single point of failure for the entire card system -- Compromise one business doesn't leak to others. You don't have to rely on external servers for validation so even if all external lines are cut, your intranet can still validate cards. And you don't have to worry about the NSA compromising the folks you bought the cards from after you purchased them -- Only your systems know the authentication codes -- The crackers have to crack your database.

It wasn't surprising to me that RSA would get compromised because they were the single point of failure, it was only a matter of time (if not pre-compromised from inception). It wasn't surprising at all when defense related companies like Lockheed Martin and L-3 Communications were compromised thanks to RSA's SecureID breech.

Now, given the ineptitude you'd have to have as a team of premier security researchers to screw the pooch this badly in the design of your security product, and given how asinine it would be to select the absolute worst and slowest random number generator as the default for your BSafe security product, knowing you have many embedded platform use-cases, and given that it was known well in advance that trusting the PRNG was ill advised... Then considering Snowden leaks info explaining that the NSA was paying RSA to botch and weaken their security systems. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Given a gag order I'd understand RSA keeping quiet on this. If they cared about security of their customers then at that point we'd see RSA engineering a completely new line of security products with a goal to put our minds at ease, and inexplicably discontinue their past offerings. However, since they opened their fool mouths and claimed not to be screwing up everything on purpose... At least if they were forced to mess things up this bad I could understand, and once the spying apparatus has been dismantled I'd consider RSA still viable. However, if the NSA wasn't paying RSA to botch their security systems, then they can never be trusted again.

I use YubiKey instead. I can run my own server, install my own codes in the tokens, or let yubico do it if the application doesn't require such security. The protocol and server source code is open. I hear Google's partnering with them too.

Sad, really. Now anything RSA has touched I'm distancing myself from.

Try that in Texas... hell, try it in any state in the union. A foreign aggressor who pulled that on Americans would without doubt create new "terrorists" more quickly than they could kill them.

No, a foreign aggressor that did that would be in a war, just like al Qaida is. Yet somehow you fault the US for defending itself in this case. There is a key difference between the US and Pakistan, for example. The US government controls all of its own territory whereas Pakistan's central government does not. The tribal territories in Pakistan are largely outside the control of the central government. That is where various guerillas and terrorists flourish. That is where much of the drone activity that you decry occurs. There are without a doubt occasional mistakes made in targeting, but the US has made efforts to avoid that, and probably has caused much less collateral damaged that most wars in the past. The Pakistani army has a view about that.

Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

There is an unacknowledged asymmetry in your grievance. You only complain about the occasional random mistake by the US, but you have nothing to say about the regular, planned, and deliberate brutality of the Taliban and al Qaida, including at weddings.

17 Beheaded in Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan for Attending Wedding Party with Dancing

A massacre of 17 deliberate beheadings at a wedding versus the unfortunate rare accidental strike on a wedding. The regular occurrence, versus the rare occurrence. Do you think that the Taliban should worry about its wedding massacres too? Or just the US?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/wired_opinion_patrick_ball/all/
This means that in practice, CryptoCat is no more secure than Yahoo chat, ... Any host-based system that delivers the encryption engine to you each time you log in, and in which your keys reside on the server, you are never secure against the host (there’s new research on this called “host-proof hosting,” but it’s a long way from being ready to use in real applications). That means that if the host attacks you, or they fail to protect themselves, your encrypted data will be available to them. Remember that the host might attack you because someone evil has taken control of the host. If you are the hypothetical dissident in the Middle East, your government might contract a hacker to break into the CryptoCat server, Hushmail, or other host-based server, and thereby get access to all your data. Or they could bribe an employee at a host-based service. Again: in host-based security, all your security rests on your personal trust for the people at the host, and their ability to protect the server. There’s no real security in a technical sense.

Yes Thanks to Snowden we have an understanding for the ~"3" now known ways into some tame US .coms:
1. Muscular: to collect data from US .com trunk lines (unencrypted).
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables/
2. Collecting from between your browser to the US .com internet service.
3. Prism: Asking for the data from the US .com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
Expect to see the usual sock puppets trying to avoid the "making clear that it will not in any way subvert, undermine, weaken, or make vulnerable generally available commercial encryption" aspect on page 22 of the linked pdf or the http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/16/nsa-phone-surveillance-likely-unconstitutional-judge ongoing US law ref or aspects.
A huge PR stunt to show one part of the collection side is now 'over' and can be quoted as been legally 'fixed'.

Has that been tested?

Yes, it has. The government can compel you to decrypt. But they cannot compel you to admit that you know the key if knowing the key is in itself incriminating. So it is complicated.