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What a non-story. The flaws in Dual EC DRBG were widely published shortly after release.

The backdoor was first published by Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson in August 2007.

Bruce Schneier wrote the same year:

My recommendation, if you're in need of a random-number generator, is not to use Dual_EC_DRBG under any circumstances. If you have to use something in SP 800-90, use CTR_DRBG or Hash_DRBG.

This was common knowledge if you had more than a passing interest in cryptography. I think TFA is mistaken when it says that it didn't get enough attention. The reason academics didn't take it more seriously is that it was seen as so obvious, it was mostly harmless shenanigans.

You would only use it in a serious cryptographic product if you were an incompetent crackhead, or if the NSA had stuffed your ass full of money.

Incidentally, RSA, the large security firm, shipped it in a serious cryptographic product for years and years.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
"NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims"
Links to the trial http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/files/512.pdf
"...made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/10/nsa-asked-for-p/
"NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims"
Links to the trial http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/files/512.pdf
"...made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request. When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Re the full extent of the surveillance.
Thanks to Snowden we have an understanding for the ~"3" ways into some tame US .com:
1. Muscular: to collect data from US .com trunk lines.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/10/nsa-hacked-yahoo-google-cables/
3. Collecting from your between your browser to the US .com internet service.
2. Prism: Asking for the data from the US .com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)
We are to believe option 1 and 3 are totally out of the skill set of the web/telco .coms?

We are covered with bacteria a lot of it is rather helpful to us. So by using Anti-bacterial soap we do kill off the good bacteria too.

Absoolutely. The hygiene hypothesis suggests that those "good" bacteria not only play a role in things like digestion, etc., but also may be necessary for a normal functioning immune system.

It may be even worse than that. Triclosan, one of the most common compound used in antibacterial soaps, tends to hang out in the environment for quite a while. What is the effect of large amounts of antibacterial stuff ending up in our systems and the environment around us? Could it eventually disrupt the growth of the normal bacterial biome around us, which is necessary to the normal functioning of our bodies?

I don't think we should be alarmist about this, but it's something at least worth studying, and perhaps being a bit cautious about.

So, there is no actual freedom being lost then when boarding an airplane since you are still free to travel. The searches for boarding an airplane go back about 40-50 years. They are completely legal and don't infringe on your 4th amendment rights. That has been decided legally long ago. So, you're either wrong or confused.

As to the immigration enforcement actions, from your link:

ACLU Assails 100-Mile Border Zone as ‘Constitution-Free’ – Update

DHS spokesman Jason Ciliberti says the ACLU’s description of the zone as "Constitution-Free" couldn’t be further from the truth and that the check points follow rules set by Supreme Court rulings.

"We don’t have the abilitty to just set up checkpoints willy-nilly," Ciliberti said. "The Supreme Court has determined that brief investigative encontuers do not constitute a serach or seizure."

So, it looks like you're both free to travel, as before, and wrong again. And the interesting thing is that these are both minor impositions on privacy, not freedoms lost.

So it looks like so far nobody is listing any actual freedoms lost. Typical. Much outcry, little outcome.

GMail will be fetching the images by default but only after the user opens the mail. So it's an improvement because the user's browser and IP address will be hidden (as it will be Google's servers doing the fetching) and it's a step back because it is tracking images will work by default. If you want the old behaviour of not showing images you will need to opt into it so only those who explicitly don't want to be tracked will remain anonymous.

Sources: Wired, Ars Technica

he learned from Chelsea Manning that trying to hide your identity after the leaks works only for so long

Oh c'mon...you're still buying into the *false narrative* of Snowden

Chelsea Manning was duped by Adrain Lamo in a chat session....Lamo is a 'hacker' who snitches for the feds.

Manning was snitched on by a 2-bit hacker, because of things Manning herself said in chat...**it was her own fault**

This is common knowledge, see the chat logs for yourself: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/

Snowden is either a total self-deluded idiot or a self-deluded victim of blackmail....he could've **leaked these anonymously** through many channels.

The US actually has really well defined journalistic protections for **journalists** who keep their sources anonymous.But Glenn Greenwald didn't do that.

... the NSA director is right about what he needs to do his job.

Wired has an article about the threats the NSA has to worry about:(sarcasm) http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/insider-threat/

Here's an article about our potential terrorist veterans: (sarcasm) http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/apr/16/napolitano-stands-rightwing-extremism/?page=all

Here's a list by paranoids: (sarcasm) http://thetruthwins.com/archives/patriots-and-christians-have-been-repeatedly-labeled-as-potential-terrorists-since-obama-became-president

On the scale of things, the thing to realize is that the 7.5 swimming pools isn't actually all that much, and the plant is small enough that you don't need pumps/elaborate cooling systems to prevent a meltdown. As for the contamination - water is actually 'pretty hard' to make radioactive, one of the reasons we like using it in reactors. Plus, what's the most likely cause of a containment failure? The biggest cause I can think of would be a meltdown, which is a lot harder the smaller your power system - it's a surface area vs internal thing, same with animals. Elephants are nearly hairless and have huge ears to help dissipate heat because they're so large, while meerkats have to have fur and huddle at night to stay warm.

After a quick soul search I realize that you're right, I probably went off a bit on that five million gallons (NYT article says ten million gallons). It probably never will get contaminated anyway. It shouldn't. It can't. And even if it does there are some great techniques being deployed at Fukushima right now to clean and filter water. But I do glimpse NuScale Power's intent here. They want to over-build the water pool infrastructure for the first unit, then encourage the purchase of additional drop-in 45MW 'thermos bottles' to ramp up the output. With each additional unit the safety margin becomes smaller, and presumably they have a threshold at which they might refuse to add another. If I was convinced this idea would scale globally I might be concerned.

But I'm not concerned. "All this for 45 megawatts??" and probably thermal megawatts to boot. By the time a steam turbine spins, maybe a couple thousand homes or a few hundred homes and a few factories, and you're done. I am sure there are remote critical use facilities and a few wealthy communities who would love one of these and could actually afford one, but I find it hard to imagine these nuclear Easy Bake Ovens as being superior in approach to stringing a reasonable amount of wire to some more distant plant of ~x20 scale.

People are thinking of small nuclear plants as safer and more do-able, and that is OK. Because they are on the way to imagining something like Robert Heinlein's 'Shipstones' that populate his novel Friday, modular forever-batteries that were available to power a wristwatch or a city. And of course it happened that the Shipstone Corporation controlled everything. Or the actual nuclear P238 Shipstone we have created to power Voyager and other deep space missions.

Part of my personal WTF factor is that I am beginning to see the same scale-down and build more and somehow we'll all survive and be all right so-called innovation for conventional nuclear as I see in other energy proposals, such as the building a couple million of these and hundreds of these. Can anyone fault the dream? No, so long as there is time to think of fun things.

I'm convinced we're running out of time. We are at a crossroads right now, because so many people in this country are enjoying this state of modern comfort and do not realize that with every passing year we approach a dangerous precipice. Not the end of all things but the end of easy choices.

"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Because we're not going to run out of this stuff. We will

Since the start had big problems, but the reasons are the worrysome ones, sometimes for misconfigured network devices, forgetting to update a SSL certificate, dealing with leap years, and even over DNS (this one was last month, and took down other MS services).

Police try to link everything to pedophiles or terrorists.

Or rape.

Of course! Because as everyone "knows," no person that is associated with open source, like Assange, or other popular movements could possibly be associated with actual crimes, could they?

Convicted Murderer Hans Reiser Ordered to Pay His Kids $60M

. With a minor tweak on Haselton's old trick, I was able to Google Credit Card numbers, Social Security numbers, and any other sensitive information."

I still don't get it. When do you go to jail for this, and when don't you?

Namely- do you go to jail when...

• You become aware of a security bug?
• If you test a security bug to make sure it exists?
• You report the bug to the owner?
• You report the bug to the media?
• You blog about your discovery of the bug?

Is it arbitrary? It seems sometimes you get a reward/bounty, sometimes a thank you, sometimes a threat, and other times you get sent to jail...

What does a reasonable/prudent person do if they stumble onto a potential (or actual) security hole in someone else's system? Someone explain please.

Kind of funny to think of overheating in space, isn't it freezing cold out there? No conductor for the heat I suppose. Anyway, maybe this explains why self-replicating space probes haven't taken over everything, it gets too hot out there. Perhaps it is time to rig up some laser cooling on the ISS.

This is the opposoite of how Carmack tells it in his recent interview:

That was a decade-long fight inside id, really, about how open we should be with the technology and with the modifiability. The two things people were concerned about were, as you say: won’t people be able to make levels and sell them in competition to us? And there were certainly some specific cases, like the whole D-Zone game that came out with the package of a million or whatever different levels somebody could find scraped off the BBSes and put out there. We know some of those things sold really large numbers. So there was definitely an element of bitterness inside some corners of the company about that. I don’t think that they ever took anything from us; it’s not like we had a competing package.

But then the other side of it was the technological evolution question, where people said, aren’t we giving away some of our secrets? When we released our source code to the builder and those different aspects. And certainly tons of people learned from that, and did go on to build things, and you know, there’s an argument to be made that the company could have perhaps held onto a lead and an edge in the market better without doing that. But I think we came out net positive.

I was really happy a decade later when Kevin Cloud, one of my partners, said that I had been right to be pushing for doing that. Because he had been looking at it not so much from the community and technological openness standpoint, but as a business risk. Coolly looked back at over the years, I think we benefited more than it might have hurt us. But in truth, I was just doing that at the time because it was something that felt really right to me.

I still remember, at the time I was commenting about how I remembered being a teenager sector-editing Ultima II on my Apple II, to go ahead and hack things in to turn trees into chests or modify my gold or whatever, and I loved that. The ability to go several steps further and release actual source code, make it easy to modify things, to let future generations get what I wished I had had a decade earlier—I think that’s been a really good thing.

No competition from Amazon. Have we already forgotten it was a hoax?

Your link doesn't even prove that it was a publicity stunt, and here's why: its conclusions are based on false premises and it's full of fud. It's also clear why you didn't bother to link to the full article; it doesn't say what you want it to say either.

First FUD: "The practical issues are manifold". Yes, welcome to the real world. FUD, not a specific objection. The specific objections are then made, and they are stupid. "[...]how does it [the drone] then find the package's intended recipient?" Probably it homes in on the mobile device used to make the order, and you'll probably have to use one. How is the transfer of the package enacted? Depicted in the video. It knows where it's being delivered. What stops someone else stealing the package along the way? You mean, by shooting it down? Ah yes, this line item was expanded into two, for filler purposes. And what happens when next door's kid decides to shoot the drone with his BB rifle? The same thing as when next door's kid (the house has a child?) shoots anything else that doesn't belong to them. Except in this case, it's recorded by high-resolution camera.

Then we have an outright lie: The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which regulates this area, intends to make commercial drones legally viable and workable by 2015, but this deadline is all-but impossible No, no it isn't. It probably won't happen anyway due to lobbying from entrenched interests. But there's no reason why existing regulations can't be applied to commercial drones. The area below 500 feet is already available due to existing restrictions on civilian air traffic.

Meanwhile, Wired claims that Amazon's delivery model makes the drones unworkable, but that is just fucking stupid. It's stupid because Amazon has already changed their model partially to add more services, and there's no particular reason they can't do it again. Sort of like how Wired changed their magazine from having purple text on black backgrounds to having black text on neon green backgrounds to having black text on white backgrounds. Two changes, see? The drones won't be able to deliver everything in Amazon's catalog. It'll be small, high-value items often ordered by themselves by people willing to pay extra for rapid delivery.

In short, while it might well have been a hoax, nothing you have presented (nor any other evidence) proves it to be so.

Well, BackBlaze is another similar backup company who is far more public about their costs and operations. I think they have said their customer break-even point is around 3-4TB. So if most customers have far less than that, then a few can have far more and it all works out.

http://www.wired.com/insights/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/backblaze-cost.png

Wired ran an article on this in 2009.

This isn't exactly news, Wired wrote about Kiva's robots in 2009. They specifically mention Kiva's use at Zappos (an Amazon subsidiary.)

You shouldn't feel bad overall then. They aren't bombing villages in Pakistan. They are sending Hellfire missiles into vehicles carrying terrorists, or into buildings where they are located. There is an occasional mistake - you can feel bad about those.

Here, read this, you should feel better: Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome

That agenda is pushing dumbass CIOs into making bad decisions. Cloud Services, Co-Lo Hosting and the services wrapped around them are good tools to have at your disposal but like any tool if you don't know how to use them you can leave your organization high and dry. IDC and Gartner have a vested interest in selling Cloud and their associated third party service vendors to businesses since they're market makers. They're no different that your stock broker calling you up trying to sell a stock that's on their "hot sheets" to drive revenue. Companies pay these idiots for their "research" which is usually some guy sitting down and reading Internet articles and going to conferences where they hear long sales pitches from CSC, Rackspace and Amazon. None of this replaces a good set of people and an Enterprise Architecture strategy that the organization needs to develop and own.

What IDC misses here is two of the big cloud players, Google and Amazon, are growing their own servers so IDC's true "insight" should be that HP, Dell and IBM are going to lose server revenue more not from larger bulk deals with cloud providers but the fact that the bigger players are just going to buy components. Also companies aren't writing blank checks to their IT organization anymore. This means those big budget projects where you roll in racks of servers will be pushed more and more to virtualization. There's also the aspect that there are a lot of businesses who will never let their data or their customers data fall into the hands of any third party, even a hosting provider and they will still need servers and disk and products because year after year their existing footprint gets older and you need more capacity and to refresh your infrastructure.

That agenda is pushing dumbass CIOs into making bad decisions. Cloud Services, Co-Lo Hosting and the services wrapped around them are good tools to have at your disposal but like any tool if you don't know how to use them you can leave your organization high and dry. IDC and Gartner have a vested interest in selling Cloud and their associated third party service vendors to businesses since they're market makers. They're no different that your stock broker calling you up trying to sell a stock that's on their "hot sheets" to drive revenue. Companies pay these idiots for their "research" which is usually some guy sitting down and reading Internet articles and going to conferences where they hear long sales pitches from CSC, Rackspace and Amazon. None of this replaces a good set of people and an Enterprise Architecture strategy that the organization needs to develop and own.

What IDC misses here is two of the big cloud players, Google and Amazon, are growing their own servers so IDC's true "insight" should be that HP, Dell and IBM are going to lose server revenue more not from larger bulk deals with cloud providers but the fact that the bigger players are just going to buy components. Also companies aren't writing blank checks to their IT organization anymore. This means those big budget projects where you roll in racks of servers will be pushed more and more to virtualization. There's also the aspect that there are a lot of businesses who will never let their data or their customers data fall into the hands of any third party, even a hosting provider and they will still need servers and disk and products because year after year their existing footprint gets older and you need more capacity and to refresh your infrastructure.

As a child, I learned a good deal about chemistry and explosives through DIY activities. Those childhood lessons (nobody got hurt) have gotten me some good jobs at major aerospace companies and at a space startup.

You and Gordon Moore

I don't know what to do except keep my passport up to date. Western civilization is slowly comitting suidice, on many fronts.

If you think the United States of Liability won't bleed over across the entire world after they see the profits being reaped by the corrupt US legal system, then you my friend are seriously delusional.

The world is fucked because of what the US is doing right now. Good luck finding the simple life again. Anywhere.

"WD40 is not patented."

Even if it had been at some point,that would have long-expired, given it hit the market in 1953.

WIred got pretty close to analysing the stuff - http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/st_whatsinside

Assuming it passes, nailing patent _Trolls_ vs inventors will be the key point.

I haven't read the whole thing but I'd be _ecstatic_ if it prevents a repeat of the rambus fisasco and pretty damn happy if there are provisions to make patent submarining illegal (or at least prevents claims being made for usage prior to the patent breaking the surface and if if covers simething in widespread use, limits licensing fees to something sensible)

Trolling may be the "in" problem now, but submarining has always been an underhanded way of nobbliing the competition that needs stomping on.

As a child, I learned a good deal about chemistry and explosives through DIY activities. Those childhood lessons (nobody got hurt) have gotten me some good jobs at major aerospace companies and at a space startup.

You and Gordon Moore

I don't know what to do except keep my passport up to date. Western civilization is slowly comitting suidice, on many fronts.

Italy has been using this for buses since 2003.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/08/induction-charged-buses/

But don't forget about: Point 8)

Learn

How

To

Insert

White

Space

In

Your

Documents.

If all you do is write long run-on sentences, then point 9) you look like an idiot and more to the point, Point 10) no one is going to bother reading them no matter how interesting and insightful it is. You could write things all day long and even though it might be spelled rite and ain't got no many atrocious grammar missteaks, as long as no one reads it then all you've done is waste both your time and theirs. Also, you've increased global warming by breathing and expending energy while you wrote your War and Peace masterpiece and it didn't make any difference in the long run. So in other words: white space on the page is just like air in your lungs, if you don't have any white space in any or your paragraphs you should just stop breathing while you write it so that you remember not to do that. Blank space also creates a slight sense of restfulness for the eyes since you don't have a giant wall of black text staring at you that you have to parse. Instead of having a massive square of text, you might try a more artistic approach for your choo-choo (See marshall). If you just don't care though, you can write as much as you want, even try to write the Great American Novel. All you're doing though is taking low-paying jobs from a million monkeys, and now-a-days putting them on the unemployment line since they're people too. I suppose that's better than being served up as Soylent Green, though. And yes I know that in slashdot you can make things look as pretty as you want in the Comment section, but if you don't delimit them and add the internal markup, then you end up with stuff that looks a lot like this, I'm the only one still here, aren't I? Gee, this is just like back in grammar school when I was the last one picked for dodge-ball, as I couldn't dodge very well. That mean old Tommy always kept picking on me and throwing the ball as hard as he could; he even broke my arm one time and then stood over me and laughed and laughed. I hated him, I've hated him for years. He was always better than I was in almost everything, but just exactly like you he didn't bother to use white space and paragraphs while writing and ... TOMMY? TOMMY, IS THAT YOU?!!? I'm going to find out where you live and we'll just see how you like to be hit with a wrecking ball instead of a hard rubber ball.

So use white space or a wrecking ball might soon come your way. Oh, and those are all good points by the way, once you find them.

1. Lawsuits will be handled by the lawyers, but they'll be pretty bored, because the EMTs will handle the people having heart attacks at a traffic stop.

2. Or the rider could just slow down to a stop like any other vehicle.

3. [citation needed]. The first drive-by-wire cars are just coming out now, and they still have mechanical fallbacks.

4. Lawyers again, but since this is a device with push-button control (rather than a slow manual deployment like spike strips), the officer in charge can abort the operation if a situation looks dangerous.

5. Just like they do now with tacks, spikes, and opportunities every time someone runs out of gas.

It is actually quite easy to do, and RMS has been talking about it for a while, this recent article mentions it in passing and links to something a more detailed reference. Think of those VISA debt gift cards that you can buy today. If you are allowed to pay cash for them without showing ID, then they are truly anonymous (unlike bitcoin), and can be used both online and in person. The systems he has in mind are basically refined versions of that basic concept.

It is actually quite easy to do, and RMS has been talking about it for a while, this recent article mentions it in passing and links to something a more detailed reference. Think of those VISA debt gift cards that you can buy today. If you are allowed to pay cash for them without showing ID, then they are truly anonymous (unlike bitcoin), and can be used both online and in person. The systems he has in mind are basically refined versions of that basic concept.

see http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/catalin-voss/ .

What a waste of electrons... whoever wrote that article managed to not say a word about what the software does, and how it works. Can't discuss without details.

But outside of that... if the GG performance is sufficient for the task, then it can be used as a medical tool - especially as a prototype. A real medical device probably has to be a bit more reliable - in terms of battery time, and in terms of dependency on external networks, and such.

Will you be admitted everywhere, even if you have a letter with you? I doubt that. The TSA is notoriously uninterested in letters that anyone can print and sign. Your GG will have to go onto the belt, along with your phone and the notebook and your shoes. Will you be admitted to a locker room while wearing the thing? I do not know. Will you want your lawyer to wear a GG while discussing your predicament, even if he has a prescription?

You can't take any dog with you into a restaurant; only guide dogs are allowed. GG could be a similar assistive technology, allowed only to those who are officially disabled, carry the permit, and so on.

However it is not very likely that GG would be a good fit as a medical device. It does not have much of video processing power to be useful to people with, say, vision problems.

But is has enough processing power to provide assistance to Aspies - see http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/catalin-voss/ . I'm looking forward to being able to purchase GG, and use an app such as that. I suppose I'd need to carry a letter from a therapist.

I hadn't heard about Elementary OS until this Wired write up yesterday. Out of curiosity, I tried it out in VirtualBox just to have a look at it. And yup, it's pretty, and simple, and it's not Unity. I considering giving it a try for real on my workstation, but it kind of barfed on my nfs shared home directory, so I think I'll pass for now. That has been my most current pet peeve; distributions that do not respect the 'Unix Way' of doing things, like having a network mounted home directory, so all my files and preferences go with me to which ever machine I log into on the network. I had just wrestled with Shotwell refusing to import some photos in my nfs home, and since the article talked up EOS's tight integration with all things Yorba, the authors of Shotwell, I didn't really want to go down that road. I did try out Yorba's email client, and liked it enough to install it on my Ubuntu machine. And it seems to work just fine so far with my networked home.

Anyhow, if you want to see what Wired is calling the Apple of Linux OSes, take a gander at Elementary OS. I can appreciate them striving for the 'Just Works' mantra, but it needs to 'Just Work' with the tried and true ways of doing things that Unix and friends have enjoyed for decades now.

And I'm not saying that it completely fails at an nfs mounted home directory, but it was competing with Ubuntu's settings (where that home directory mounts on my real machine) for simple things like the desktop wallpaper. I imagine it can be made to play nice, but I wasn't looking to spend time tweaking yet another distro to get things to work the way I want them to.

I read an article on guys who make these compartments a while back (almost always for drug dealers). They can be really well hidden and complex to open (e.g. you have to hit several locks/switches in sequence or all at once, and then a secret hatch in the door opens, or something like that). And TFA specifically said it was a hidden compartment wired up with an electronic lock.

So, this is a real thing, it's a REALLY common way to transport drugs and cash, and no, obviously your spare tire compartment isn't illegal

Actually, here's an interesting article on it http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/03/alfred-anaya/all/

It just terribly inefficient.

The understatement of the century, references to Tesla aside. Transmitting power without wires is indeed possible, but unsuitable for any kind of industrial level power transfer. Getting a few more than a fraction of a watt though free space on an electromagnetic wave is going to be really difficult and extremely inefficient. Doing it at an industrial scale will be pretty much impossible.

BTW, your Hawaiian island reference.. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/09/visionary-beams/

CDC, poultry, pigs, more pigs (the references have more). Good overview of the CDC report from Wired: here and here.

So yeah, maybe not cows, directly. Not yet.

CDC, poultry, pigs, more pigs (the references have more). Good overview of the CDC report from Wired: here and here.

So yeah, maybe not cows, directly. Not yet.

I've had enough of the 'ZOMG drones!!!11!!' from all corners...it's facile and ignorant...

Drones are just a different delivery system for the same armament...usually a hellfire missile. Nothing a 'drone' does can't be done by a piloted craft...or a cruise missile...or a piloted craft converted to a drone

Nuclear weapons **could be launched from a drone**

See how this is comparing apples and baseballs?

Let's all agree to stop the madness! 'drones' are remote-piloted versions of the human piloted vehicles....it's the **armaments** and **who we are shooting at and why** that matter...not the delivery system of the armament!!!

Is Slashdot powered by Mechanical Turk?

BAD:

At Long Last: IceCube Spots 28 High-Energy Neutrinos

Wired reports that IceCube, the detection facility built just to detect such things, has seen just what it was looking for, even though the researchers involved didn't knot it at the time. High-energy neutrinos, the target that IceCube was seeking, weren't showing up as had been hoped, but it turns out that there were quite a few (nearly 30 already, with 2013's data still being recorded) in the three years that the detector has been operating — they just weren't obvious until the data was combed for it. "Most of the 28 high-energy neutrinos so far detected originate from parts of the night sky that don’t include the Milky Way, making it quite likely that they are arriving from a distant source. There are still too few neutrinos to make any specific conclusions about AGNs or gamma-ray bursts, but the IceCube team will continue gathering new data."

Good:

At Least 28 High-Energy Neutrinos Detected by IceCube
From Wired ( http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/icecube-neutrinos-detected/ )

The high-energy neutrino detector IceCube ( http://icecube.wisc.edu/ ) has detected at least 28 high-energy neutrinos in the past 3 years. Until recently, this number was thought to be zero.

The quote from an unknown person is useless because it doesn't tell us what high-energy neutrinos are, why they didn't know about the 28 detections until now, or what AGNs are.

Galileo/GPS are useful for so much more than just navigation. Being able to get a very accurate time signal anywhere in the world is very useful too. In my line of work we deploy seismometers to the bottom of the ocean, and the clocks on these instruments to be accurate to microseconds. We can get this kind of accuracy in the middle of the atlantic with nothing more than a 2U rackmount GPS clock and a small antenna. With chip-scale atomic clocks becoming widely available, having Galileo available as an even more accurate time source will be very useful.

You mean beyond the GPS trackers that have already been found on civilian cars?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/gps-tracker-times-two/

My older brother is a VP-Eng at Google (maps). I can assure you that the whole thing is utterly corrupt. The day after active duty U.S. Navy Information Warfare Officer Dave Schroeder posted publicly here that he thought my GoogleFiber "Right To Serve" Manifesto[1] was "very good" and that he agreed with everything I wrote about the core net neutrality argument, my brother finally said he agreed with some part of my arguments. To this day he has never clarified which part, though still asserts that I should have gone about my complaint in "the better way", namely submitting myself subserviantly to the Google technocratic leaderships opinion. The fact of the matter is, IMHO, that being able to host server/s on your residential internet connection, and being able to expect the user/customer base of all "internet service" to have the same basic right, is a key aspect of reclaiming our informational privacy and security on the internet. No, it's not bulletproof, but it's the foundation with which to have a fighting chance. I personally wish the EFF would get some guts and go further in their call. The fact of the matter is that I am right about my Net Neutrality argument, though certainly resolved to believe that after the forthcoming verizon ruling, that is not legally likely going to be relevant. But I think to reclaim our ability to use the internet, rather than being used by it, we need to demand that hosting servers that control our own data, is something everyone ought to be able to do from home. And in order for the residential server software market to thrive, there can't be arbitrary bullshit raqueteering loopholes like Google's new "no-commercial-servers-allowed" activity. I mean, why the fuck is it ok for residential users to commercially profit on transactions with a 3rd party like ebay, but not if they independently run their own LAMP stack and accept payment by check via USPS? I mean seriously, what the fuck?!?

[1] http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
http://www.provobuzz.com/google-fiber-now-allows-home-servers/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/07/google-neutrality/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/01/198327/googles-call-for-open-internet.html

I read this /. post, but I also just read this:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/this-is-how-the-internet-backbone-has-been-turned-into-a-weapon/

Who to believe? ? ?

The NSA has been 'shooting' exploits at internet targets by using MITM at the backbone.

Stop playing the victim card, the whole world (except the US citizens inside the US) already knows the US is nothing more than front for international bankers to do their dirty work.

One particular trick involved identifying the LinkedIn or Slashdot account of an intended target. Then when the QUANTUM system observed individuals visiting LinkedIn or Slashdot, it would examine the HTML returned to identify the user before shooting an exploit at the victim. Any page that identifies the users over HTTP would work equally well, as long as the NSA is willing to write a parser to extract user information from the contents of the page.

Let's see if we can catch a dead salmon in a lie!

Argh - accidentally modded you funny, when I meant informative. And the bit about high performers using saved time to work on their own interests really is informative; Google used to capitalize on it with their 20% time, it's a shame I heard they were trying to cut it down, though this wired flunky speculates they probably won't be able to truly kill it partially for this exact reason.

If you run a service on the internet, you have no expectation of privacy of the data you serve. That sounds reasonable enough. But why then was weev imprisoned for downloading data from a publically facing web server?

If weev can be imprisoned for computer hacking by using a publicly facing server in ways not intended by the owner, why aren't the police here facing similar charges?

Stuxnet was delivered to Iran by slipping it onto the equipment of the Russian contractors building the nuclear plant.

Gauss was discovered in Lebanon and appears to have been built with the same toolkit, not reverse-engineered, suggesting the Israelis were responsible for its release. The other known variant, Flame, is also not found anywhere near Russia, and was also cut from the same cloth and targeted at Iran.

And, moreover, Kaspersky said it was Stuxnet, with (I'm pretty sure but don't have the time to watch the whole video) implications that it may've come by accident from an attack targeted at a Russian nuclear plant.

So... still pretty unlikely the ISS has any vulnerable systems.

That article is the worst piece of shit on the internet, everything except the fact that the ISS was infected contradicts what space.com and everyone else says, including that Linux bullshit. The entire article was made up, including SCADA being infected and that the Russians brought it up there. It infected Windows laptops, Not the SDADA, it's a minor nuisance and it isn't the first time there were viruses on the ISS.

Don't believe everything you read, kids. Check different sources. Gilbert's story is fiction and he should hang his head in shame. Stallman and Linus should sue him for slander.

frankly they should have used a software system that worked with phones with optional card if you wanted it rather than a phone

Oyster has been hacked again and again...

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/06/hackers-crack-l/

regards

John Jones