Slashdot Mirror

Double post but this one is from 2002

Here are more reasons. These are stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date, to 2010-09-11:

Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)

GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)

GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)

GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)

GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)

MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26) That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names.

Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)

GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)

850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)

According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.

GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)

ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)

GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)

KnujOn Updates Top 10 Spam-Friendly Registrars List (2009-02-06, 80 comments) GoDaddy is on the list.

R.I.P. FTP (2009-07-13, 359 comments) The GoDaddy web site is extremely complicated. Quote: "In that case, why don't more people switch to administering their sites via SFTP instead of FTP? Here are the steps it took me to enable SFTP on my GoDaddy hosting account. Feel free to use this as a reference, but the obvious point is that as long as this many steps are required, it's safe to say that most users won't be switching: 1) Go to the 'Hosting' menu and pick 'My Hosting Account.' 2) Next to the name of your website, pick 'Manage Account.' This will open the Hosting Control Center. 3) In Hosting Control Center, click to expand the 'Settings' options. 4) In the 'Settings' control panel, click the 'SSH' icon. 5) You will see a page saying 'SSH is not set up', and prompting you to enter a phone number so that their automated service can call you with a PIN number. After you enter your phone number, the phone rings a second later, and you enter the PIN in a form on the GoDaddy website. 6 ) You will then see a page which says: Current Hosting Account Status: Pending Account Change -- Your request to enable SSH is being processed. This upgrade may take up to 24 hours." [Punctuation and emphasis changed for clarity.]

Registrars Still Ignoring ICANN Rules (2009-07-22, 122 comments) Quote: "GoDaddy (and their reseller arm, Wild West Domains) have a different problem: They still block transfers for 60 days after a registrant's contact update, even after the ICANN update specifically prohibited doing so. They freely admit it, too."

While not quite using paint or parking lots, the Germans embraced Solar power ten years ago and have certainly not looked back.

After hearing yrs. of /. penguins & "Linux = secure, Windows != secure" & the data on android that keeps coming in my posts isn't weakening my case.

* I merely state facts when asked for them... plenty more where that came from too! Here are 8 more (making my total @ this point 25 already in my posts here now up to this one):

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/09/16/spyeye-targeting-android-users-zeus-strategy/?utm_source=Non-campaign&utm_medium=eNews-newsletter&utm_campaign=eNews-NL-20110912

http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/android-traveling-texts

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/15/android_malware_skyrockets/

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/08/android-malware-explodes-ios-remains-safe/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/17/android_trojan_click_fraud_scam/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/07/difference_between_smartphones_and_superphones/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/01/android_trojan_rash/

http://blogs.computerworld.com/17355/zombies_and_angry_birds_attack_mobile_phone_malware

---

* Continuing the trend via continuous data in each of my replies to "naysayer trolls" (especially the AC ones), in proofs of ANDROID security issues over time... 25++ & counting thusfar!

APK

P.S.=> I have 25++ recent issues regarding ANDROID (a Linux variant) security problems as of THIS post... Would you like more?

... apk

When you dun goofed, you apologise.

It's not clear that the US "dun goofed". There have been a lot of indications over a number of years that Pakistani troops are either directly involved in attacking US troops or turning a blind eye to Taliban troops even when they're launching attacks against Afghani/NATO/US troops. You're essentially apologizing for beating up the guy who tried to jump you in a dark alley.

Frontline Pakistani troops aid and abet lethal insurgent attacks on American forces across the Afghan border, according to the day-to-day commander of the NATO war effort. It’s a big reason why rocket and mortar attacks have quadrupled since 2010. “You’ll see what just appears to us to be a collaboration or was a collaboration or, at a minimum, looking the other way when insurgents conducted rocket or mortar fire in what we believe to be visual sight of one of their posts,” Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti told Pentagon reporters on Thursday morning.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/pakistan-rockets-us-troops/

WikiLeaks presents a new depth of detail about how the U.S. military has seen, for six years, the depths of ISI facilitation of the Afghan insurgency. For instance: a three-star Pakistani general active during the ’80s-era U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi sponsorship of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Hamid Gul, allegedly met with insurgent leaders in South Waziristan in January 2009 to plot vengeance for the drone-inflicted death of an al-Qaeda operative.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/wikileaks-drops-90000-secret-war-docs-fingers-pakistan-as-insurgent-ally/

Of course, even if the Pakistani troops are directly involved in attacks, it still might be a good strategic move to apologize, even though you're essentially apologizing for killing people who were attempting to kill you.

When you dun goofed, you apologise.

It's not clear that the US "dun goofed". There have been a lot of indications over a number of years that Pakistani troops are either directly involved in attacking US troops or turning a blind eye to Taliban troops even when they're launching attacks against Afghani/NATO/US troops. You're essentially apologizing for beating up the guy who tried to jump you in a dark alley.

Frontline Pakistani troops aid and abet lethal insurgent attacks on American forces across the Afghan border, according to the day-to-day commander of the NATO war effort. It’s a big reason why rocket and mortar attacks have quadrupled since 2010. “You’ll see what just appears to us to be a collaboration or was a collaboration or, at a minimum, looking the other way when insurgents conducted rocket or mortar fire in what we believe to be visual sight of one of their posts,” Lt. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti told Pentagon reporters on Thursday morning.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/pakistan-rockets-us-troops/

WikiLeaks presents a new depth of detail about how the U.S. military has seen, for six years, the depths of ISI facilitation of the Afghan insurgency. For instance: a three-star Pakistani general active during the ’80s-era U.S.-Pakistani-Saudi sponsorship of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Hamid Gul, allegedly met with insurgent leaders in South Waziristan in January 2009 to plot vengeance for the drone-inflicted death of an al-Qaeda operative.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/wikileaks-drops-90000-secret-war-docs-fingers-pakistan-as-insurgent-ally/

Of course, even if the Pakistani troops are directly involved in attacks, it still might be a good strategic move to apologize, even though you're essentially apologizing for killing people who were attempting to kill you.

Kepler 22b might be more up your street - its surface temperature appears to be a balmy 22 degrees Celsius. In addition it seems unlikely to be tidally locked (not being too close to its parent star), and its surface gravity while opressive compared to Earth isn't too over the top compared to other 'super-earths'.

So Manning certainly knew about this kind of thing, but either didn't do it or didn't do it correctly. I wonder how difficult it is to mess something like that up?

Well,

Johnson testified that he found two attempts to delete data on Manning’s laptop. Sometime in January 2010, the computer’s OS was re-installed, deleting information prior to that time. Then, on or around Jan. 31, someone attempted to erase the drive by doing what’s called a “zerofill” — a process of overwriting data with zeroes. Whoever initiated the process chose an option for overwriting the data 35 times — a high-security option that results in thorough deletion — but that operation was canceled. Later, the operation was initiated again, but the person chose the option to overwrite the information only once — a much less secure and less thorough option.

All the data that Johnson was able to retrieve from un-allocated space came after that overwrite, he said. Jolt in WikiLeaks Case: Feds Found Manning-Assange Chat Logs on Laptop

First you actually have to shred the files you don't want around, then do a quick single pass ZeroFill then on a frequent basis defrag the harddisk and do a high-level ZeroFill; few will have the patience to do this consistently enough to be effective. It's simply human nature to get sloppy and over-confident after a while.

How about just slow things down a bit and increase the illusion of danger instead of the illusion of safety?*

* http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html

This probably had something to do with it. Verizon found a way to buy as much spectrum as they wanted while jumping through way less regulation hurdles. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/verizon-buys-up-spectrum/2/

Geez, you really haven't been paying much attention, have you?

An Open Letter From Internet Engineers to the U.S. Congress

Today, a group of 83 prominent Internet inventors and engineers sent an open letter to members of the United States Congress, stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills that are under consideration in the House and Senate respectively.

Blacklisting Provisions Remain in Stop Online Piracy Act

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) urged panelists to remove the DNS and firewall aspects of the bill.

Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina) said he was not a technological “nerd,” but said he did not “believe” security experts who said that the internet would become less secure unless Issa’s amendment was adopted. “I’m not a person to argue about the technology of this,” Watt said before he voted against the amendment. Issa’s amendment failed 22-12.

Congressional SOPA hearings: no opponents of the bill allowed
Nov. 15

As the House of Representatives opens hearings on SOPA, the worst piece of Internet legislation in American history, it has rejected all submissions and testimony from public interest groups and others who oppose the bill.

        Irony Alert: The House is holding hearings on sweeping Internet censorship legislation this week -- and it's censoring the opposition! The bill is backed by Hollywood, Big Pharma, and the Chamber of Commerce, and all of them are going to get to testify at the hearing.

        But the bill's opponents -- tech companies, free speech and human rights activists, and hundreds of thousands of Internet users -- won't have a voice.

There is plenty of commentary by tech people out there on the detrimental effects to the internet by SOPA and PRO-IP. Just fucking google it.

you could end up with the unholy abomination that is the appblaster (WARNING: worse than goatse)

And just to beat the dead horse...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/youtube-universal-megaupload/

UMG was lying about the supposed agreement. The court case is going forward and UMG is undoubtedly going to lose.

Kinda messes with your Google-bashing and trying to claim that they're the evil ones in this mess, doesn't it.

There's a theory that some chronic back pain is due to low-virulent bacterial infection, and you can cure it with a course of the right antibiotics: http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/42/12/969.full

I won't be surprised if that's true. Periodontal bacteria has been linked to heart disease, and antibacterial mouthwash reduces the risk of preterm deliveries ( http://www.thehealthage.com/2011/02/anti-bacterial-mouthwash-reduces-risk-of-preterm-deliveries/ ).

It took a while for people to find out and prove that helicobacter pylori was responsible for many cases of chronic gastritis and gastric ulcers.

Not all bacteria are harmful and not in all cases. It can get quite complex - the same bacteria might be fine in one person or fine when with other bacteria. Nowadays some doctors are even resorting to fecal transplants to cure certain gastrointestinal problems: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/fecal-transplants-work/
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/10/31/fecal-transplants-have-the-ick-factor-but-research-suggests-they-work/

Hence many of these chronic problems actually being caused by bacteria or an imbalance in bacterial ecosystems would not be surprising to me.

If UMG wins on their defense (that the automated system is not a DMCA notice), then YouTube can take down their automated system and require content rights holders to submit DMCA takedown requests in writing, right?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/universal-megaupload-video/

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/kepler-22b/ At 1% of the speed of light (which is still probably technically impossible) it would take 6000 years. People would have to "sleep" (cryogenics?) to reach it. The craft would be massive, containing thousands of individuals. It would accelerate constantly to the halfway point then decelerate constantly from there; that would be a challenge in and of itself. Lots of interesting stuff that you could just make up from there. :)

Here are a couple:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1265676/Britney-Spears-releases-airbrushed-images-digitally-altered-versions.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/photo-alteration-analysis/?intcid=story_ribbon&pid=2550&viewall=true

If America's military efforts have any weakness, it's overconfidence. The assumption that its enemies are idiots. That it's enemies could never pull off a sophisticated operation or countermeasure.

Sometimes the US is right. Unfortunately for America, sometimes they're wrong.

Anyone catch, several years ago, the story about the Iranian concrerte? There are competitions between universities for producing high strength concrete, and a couple years ago one was won by a team from the University of Tehran. The compressive strength they got was just absurd, about 400MPa. Unreinforced and with only 28 days of ageing. The professor in charge of the team works in two fields: civil engineering, and... yes, you guessed it... nuclear science.

Anyway, this current story reminds me of a twist on an old story from the Cold War days. Once the US started getting really good communication encryption, they were very disappointed to find out that the Soviets seemed to still be able to intercept their messages. They eventually figured out what was going on. Certain types of messages had characteristic lengths, and so the Soviets figured out they didn't need to crack the messages, merely look at the length.

I notice you didn't have the balls to back up your opinion with an account, kinda sad that. As for says who? Show me a SINGLE THING that we have bought in the past 30 damned years that has come in ON TIME and UNDER BUDGET. Hell our last truly decent plane was the F/a-18 Hornet and that came from the same 70s cook off that gave us the also excellent F-16. The F-22 is a fricking money sink, with a flyaway cost of something like 370 odd million and has already had to be grounded once already, the F35 you are bragging about has more problems than a Kardashian marriage and looks to cost us another assload of cash before the thing will even fly.

Meanwhile the SU 27 has something like a 30 million flyaway cost, the MiG31 for $60 million, which means our enemies are gonna be able to put up TEN planes for every ONE of ours. That ain't good, as we saw in WWII when Germany could put up frankly better aircraft like the BF109 G and the BF 262 but simply was overwhelmed by our cheap as dirt Thunderbolts and Mustangs the guy that can throw more planes into the air usually wins. Add in the fact that china has snatched most of our best tricks thanks to both the F-117 they dug up in Kosovo along with the stealth chopper and now the drone in TFA which I have NO doubt they'll be making deals with Iran for full access, means the current clusterfuck isn't doing anyone but MIC CxOs any good.

Various governmental departments, people, staff, generals, politicians are involved upto their necks in the development and robotisation and automation of weapons systems. Only the cretinously stupid could believe that they might build giant fleets of robot aircraft that are controlled from somewhere else, and have a wireless (I use the term loosely) method of command and control. The absolute faith in the idea that you can make such systems and maintain a functional and viable operation was just nullified by a second / third world state. I am *glad* they have done so.

It could be far worse.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/

The technology at somepoint has to be broken down to grunt level (because at the end of the day, grunts hump around and do the fighting, and are mucho cheaper than scientists or expensive pilots who you 'retired' or made redundant as part of the 'benefits' of moving to a drone fleet.

Foreign powers like the chinese would not even have to invest in the structures to match, they just look at how the core can be circumvented, and they gain control of your fleet and bomb you back to your own stone age by your own weapons. And you'd deserve every inch of it for your own stupidity.

The last time I can recollect in this level of folly in aeronautics was in pre Vietnam days where the US got itself into a high level theory that manned flight and guns were no longer needed. It could all be done with missiles.

The US and the West in general have suffered a disaster of large proportion. The technology was circumvented, and is now sat in the enemies hands. Soon it will be sold on to the Chinese and Russians, and the billions spend in the core research handed over to the enemy states for just about zero.

The US might have played a part in Stuxnet, and since that day, automated systems have been rightly under the review rader. The paradoxical level of comedy that the Iranians just Stux'xxed a US drone out of the sky and onto their landing strips just makes the paradox a hilarious one.

The last thing I ever want to see is the disgusting Mullahs crowing around on their media, making a mockery of the universe. But they got themselves a bunch of prestige they do not deserve, and its ass kicking time in the US. Heads need to roll, and a complete revision of this stupidity needs to take place.

I'm sure the Chinese government has their crack team of hackers, just like we do. Having said that...

I run a honeypot at work. 70% of the attacks do come from Chinese machines, but I suspect that's because the Chinese buy those $2 pre-hacked warez'd Windows CD's at the market and don't install security updates.

Of the actual living, breathing hackers that log into my honeypot, 1/3 of them come from Romanian IP's, and another 1/3 come from other eastern European countries, but the text files/strings in their utilities are Romanian. Wired has a good article which partly corroborates this.

      http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_hackerville_romania/all/1

I see two modes of attack. 98% are single machines launching 100's of attacks. 70% of those are in China. The other 2% are distributed attacks. These are more likely to be major power intelligence agencies, and don't have anywhere near the geographic concentration as the single-machine attacks (Chinese IP's are 15% of distributed attacks, same as Brazil).

Regarding TMI, there's a huge difference from what the official report concluded in the immediate aftermath to what they actually found when they finally cut the reactor core into pieces for shipment to Idaho--at a cost of $300 million of which I imagine a fair chunk was spent on rad-hard remote-controlled cutting robots with state-of-the-art dust suppression systems carving slow precise grooves at the bottom of the reaction vessel just a few inches away from the outside diameter. I vaguely recall it was less than a day away from dripping molten steel off the snub end of its radioactive nut sack had they not finally turned the right valve. The official story, at first, was that none of the internal fuel assemblies had melted and sagged to the bottom.

Is the island big enough to build a supercolider with meter thick walls that run 100m deep? Make lemonade from lemons. We could be crowing about the Higgs instead of those snotty Europeans.

Also, the monumental confusion in the control room about the correct mitigation measure matches anything that went on in Japan. The situation was not helped by politicians showing up to look important and tying up all the phone lines. Our phone systems are better now.

We also matched the Russians in the high-stakes game of "rules are for sissies".

The closure of these valves was a violation of a key NRC rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance.

Rather than trying to meet a five year plan, the TMI site in America was rushed to completion to satisfy executive bonuses concerning the delivery of operating revenue to impatient banks and investors, following capitalist dictates that have since matured into a healthy, insolent puberty that's too big to spank:

Trillion-Dollar Jet Has Thirteen Expensive New Flaws

In a democracy, the public good is a hefty, highly-visible surface containment structure. Inside that giant structure, the profit motive wanders around with no pants on and you only find out when they really fuck up. Bankers and physicists, you'd think they were related somehow.

The less highly visible sub-soil containment structure was not so impressive. It largely amounted to "publish the report damn quick before we learn anything we'd rather publish under dimmer lights when the mayfly media are feeding on a different frenzy". It worked a charm. The post-autopsy report was largely ignored.

In a subsequent incident high over head, the White Physicist cracked the quench code in the sodium hypocritite blame suppression system, but our avarice to Feynman ratio has since gone from poor to divide by zero.

Goes above DHS, it's our congress critters at work.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/dhs-unwanted-drones/

Linus open-sourced Linux because he thought it would be more useful that way, not because he thought that he was doing something morally right.

It's also worth noting that Linus first released Linux in 1991, but continued to study at the university of Helsinki until 1996. He did get some free stock from Red Hat and VA Linux that hit $20 million at the top of the dotcom, but by the time he could sell it the dot-bust had already happened and it was a tiny fraction of that. I think this quote is quite telling:

Torvalds hesitated before buying himself his first expensive bauble, a two-seater BMW convertible. "I was a bit nervous about people's reaction," he confesses. "Are they going to think I've gone over to the dark side?" In the end he decided that the shape and price of the hunk of metal he drove to and from work each day was his own business. Despite counsel to the contrary, Torvalds wisely sold all of his stock and spent almost all of the windfall on his home and his cars, trusting that he'd always be able to earn a good salary as an engineer.

You got to love his style but he's not exactly out there to make money, if you're looking to make a business, earn money and get rich he's not exactly the best example to follow. Then you'd better look to Gates or Jobs or some of the other closed source fellows who are happy to be billionaires. If you start worrying when you buy a BMW, then I think he'd die of guilt from that kind of money.

I suspect it's a bit more convoluted. The shell company that technically owns the jets and that will be using 2/3rds of the hangar has an odd relationship with NASA, refurbishing old jets, from small fighters to Boeing 767's, and turning them into "science" planes. It's more like this company is subsidizing the government. Sort of.

That "sort of" is what's intriguing. The jets are being refurbished, thanks to a massive pool of unaudited money, for vague "science" missions. The closest thing that comes to mind is Hughes and his odd relationship with the government: that entanglement produced the Glomar Explorer ostensibly for deep-sea mineral research but really for a CIA program to recover a Soviet submarine. The Google-NASA public-private partnership for "science" or "research" may be a way of hiding expensive and highly experimental espionage programs from auditors by keeping programs off the public books. The flights so far have included "observation" of a returning ESA space vehicle, so they have the capability to monitor signals from an inbound object; maybe also satellites? If you think all this sounds a bit paranoid, consider that Google and the CIA have some similar investment interests.

That really glosses over the importance of the centrifuges. They are massive, expensive machines to replace, and they directly handle the material. If failure occurred during operation (which was exactly what Stuxnet was designed to do), then on top of losing the machines, the nuclear material itself would be lost. The centrifuges are a critical part of the entire program, and their loss set Iran back years. It's unlikely that "full nuclear catastrophe" was ever a plan, given Stuxnet's precise design. Iran under a nuclear fog makes for bad PR, after all.

For those of you who haven't read it, here's a great summary of the unravelling of Stuxnet, the key players, and conclusions made. Or you could listen to the US cyber analyst blame "them Ruskies".

Sorry if I am wrong here, but are you not just producing wild theories here? Surely you don't know what Stuxnet intended to do, so how could you rule that it could not have caused a nuclear catastrophe?

There was an analysis by German researchers that he bases his information on.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1
http://www.ted.com/talks/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon.html

Russia sells products and services around the world. Why would they stuff up a project they got paid for and what to get done?
Every project Russia brings in on time, on budget ect. is a great showcase to the world - to buy more nation building Russian or Russian related tech.
Its very simple, you pay Russia, big product arrives and works.
Stuxnet seems to be very well tested by people with a deep understanding of a subset of German hardware and very closed US software with the desire to create many problems.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/with-stuxnet-did-the-u-s-and-israel-create-a-new-cyberwar-era/

They've already solved this problem ;) http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/so-you-got-a-space-rocket-but-nowhere-to-launch-it/

Now, this isn't dismemberment, brain damage, or anything that will cause long term damage.

Minimizing, are you? Let's not try to fool ourselves (or your audience), there's plenty of real pain and suffering for lab animals. (Look at the cute rat! And he's blue! Oh. And he's waiting to have his spine crushed. Huh.)

These are researchers trying to learn ... how to make things better ... leads to things which let you live a little longer.

When you put it that way, it feels pretty evil. Causing suffering to extend my life? I was okay with a little suffering to help the greater good, but the way you phrase it makes me feel dirty. I'm not a soul-sucking fantasy villain.

... what options do these monkeys have really?

Well, I suppose they could have not been captured or bred. You think they're better off enjoying the luxuries of the lab than out in the wilds they evolved for? ("Really, I'd prefer the woodlands. Keep your clean cage and fresh linens.")

Or they could contribute to society in a more meaningful way by being part of a study.

The thing is, you don't seem to consider them part of our "society." Meaning, you don't see them benefiting from the experiments. Well, maybe you could quickly think up some intellectual benevolence for test subject species if you thought for a second, but thinking about all this in the abstract you lack a true emotional reaction to the suffering. Is the suffering of others okay if it benefits us? That is the worst kind of selfishness. It's the foundation of war atrocities, of torture and genocide. The Us v. Them mentality.

I'm not opposed to animal testing. I'm not opposed to a modicum of suffering to benefit the greater good. I'm opposed to "species-centric sociopathy," which is really a short step away from general sociopathy.

Look closer. See the suffering in greater detail. Expand your understanding of it. It's easier to push buttons that bomb distant people, or cast ballots that fund violence when the suffering is abstract.

Myopia is a kind of sociopathy.

Six word stories have been very enlightening.

In support - learning to improvise, usually in jazz, is sometimes a difficult thing to kick-start. Playing the same pattern, adjusting pitch to match the chord changes, is a standard technique. Play the same thing over and over, pretty soon your brain just wants to do something different.

I've seen well-known people hit a mental block (it's obvious once you listen to piles of them playing the same tune differently). The easy way to get out of it is sit on a single note, or a simple rhythm, until you get inspired. People like to say it's a clever use of repetition to establish expectations and then break those expectations. It might be, sometimes.

Lots of new things in art have been a result of limitations which force you to think in new ways.

Wasn't there a virus that infected the "cockpits" of the drones. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/

Actually, he pretty much did say that: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2002/01/49823?currentPage=all.

Also, I don't think the culture of Microsoft was ever described as yes-men.

But anyway, that's still pretty much irrelevant.

Links for what? Well we've got a source for the accident and cover-up in TFS, so here's one about it being preventable:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/11/gm-defends-safety-of-chevrolet-volt/

They didin't drain the battery after the crash as the manufacturer recommended. This is the electric car equivalent of draining the gas from a crashed car.

Remember this story from back in October?

Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet

Ever since I read Iran claimed they didn't shoot it down, I've been wondering if or how much that virus and this "cyber warfare" attack might be connected...

Actually, many drones are programmed to just fly home if the signal is lost. From Wired: "Like just about every spy drone operating today, the RQ-170 can follow GPS waypoints, instead of being steered by a remote operator. And when drones like the Sentinel loses radio or satellite contact with their human overlords, they are usually programmed to do something reasonable, ranging from circling until contact is resumed to continuing with the mission autonomously to flying home. Moreover, Pentagon spokesman Capt. John Kirby told reporters there was no indication the Sentinel was brought down by “hostile activity of any kind.”"

If you read the updates on this article, there's still some doubt:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/iran-drone-video/

This is the daily mail, pretty pointless reading anything they say about computer without a quick fact check. The wired article make more sense: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/video-games-war-crime/ Playing the game is not a war crime, using a realistic game to train soldiers who then go onto commit the crime in real life could mean the trainer is commiting one as well as the trainee.

I wish I could be smug just laugh at India and its stupid corrupt politicians.

Unfortunately this kind of hare brained ideas aren't limited to the third world.

In Australia the filtering plan seems to be on hold for now, but you don't even need a slippery slope argument to know how batshit insane and scary the idea of a secret internet censorship blacklist is: http://nocleanfeed.com/

Or have we already forgotten the UK plan to censor social media during times of social unrest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/aug/11/uk-riots-day-five-aftermath-live#block-33

Think of how easily that could be used in the style of the Arab governments to cripple organised protests against the government.

Or we can mock India for wanting to intercept and read Blackberry messages, and ignore the implications of legislation like the Patriot Act: http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/12/02/1923207/patriot-act-clouds-picture-for-tech

Or have we forgotten the domain seizures to try to block pirated content with no due legal process: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/domain-seizures-defended/

Even extending to attempts to block a Firefox add on: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20060636-281.html

Blocking sports streams when they still cannot find a way of offering pay per view streaming of major sports events over the internet, where your only way of viewing a couple of hours of sports content a week is to sign up for an expensive cable package that gives lots of stuff you will never watch and THEN purchase an extra expensive add on for the sports content. And the US government is protecting that business model by seizing domains with no legal notice or court enforced legal process.

I would love to be able to just mock India, if we could afford to be that complacent...

Nobody is buying a 350kg vehicle with room for 4. It's either too dangerous or too expensive.

both of those assumptions are wildly wrong! you simply cannot have a 350kg vehicle be more expensive than a 1500kg vehicle, just based on the quantity of materials alone - unless you've done something daft like use carbon fibre or a research-based material that is not yet in mass-production [which you simply do not need to do]

google "aixam mega", "ligier" and other Category L7E vehicles. google "gordon murray design".

french insurance company research shows that, actually, Category L7E "quadbike" cars paradoxically get into *less* accidents than traditional vehicles. my speculation on this is that these Category L7E vehicles look so different and the performance is so different that both the driver and other road users treat them with "kid gloves", which *automatically* calms everyone down.

if you still believe after reading the above that somehow 350kg vehicles are too dangerous or too expensive, go read up on someone who knows what he's talking about - gordon murray. http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/09/gordon-murray-qa/

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September.

I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

The process does a lot more than that! It shows that we have the potential to actually bring extinct wild animals back into existence for ANY reason. Perfecting that capability is tremendously exciting from a scientific and evolutionary standpoint.

Obviously there are ethical implications. Like with other capabilities (moon landing, nuclear weapons, fracking), they will be debated as the technology is actively developed. Is that the "right" approach? Well, that's an ethical issue unto itself.

Are you really worried about the accidental release of a wooly mammoth into the wild? If so, it's probably be pretty easy to find.

Wired Mag had their article about this back in September.
I believe this to be an ethical issue that really needs to be thought through before folks go off tinkering with genes. As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation? In a broader sense, what is the real value in cloning something that was selectively removed from the environment? Hell we cannot even keep from releasing invasive species to control other species without completely screwing it up. This process does nothing more than allow a scientist to study an animal that doesn't exist by bringing it into existence.

Several people have mentioned Google Books versus the Guilds, but not much about individual authors who are in favor of a different copyright/distribution system. Ursula LeGuin's arguments against the settlement seem to boil down to, "It's mine!" and I didn't find many of the other names on the list of co-signers very impressive. Of course the Steinbeck estate got some media attention, but the man himself is dead.

One of the most radical things about this settlement for small authors, I think, is that it would establish a baseline of profit-- 37% that they got from Google Books, no matter how obscure they are. I knew a guy who broke onto some Amazon top 10 list for a few days, but he got less than a dollar per book, despite selling tens of thousands of copies, so he's going to have to keep his day job. I'm not sure what his agreement with the publisher was for subsequent editions, or if there was a limit to what they could print, but he will never have the clout that Ursula LeGuin does when she talks to publishers.

For the vast majority of minor authors, real success will depend on word of mouth. So I really doubt the motives of all these "big name" authors who have come out against the settlement. For the small guys, Google Books might actually help them get fairer contracts, and have better control of their copyrights.

And for god's sake, the blind people! This is really looking like giant corporations versus the handicapped. Who's going to ride into town and put this situation right?

From a Wired article:

But the court said that went too far, because the settlement was giving away the “property rights” of people without their consent, and the problem of orphan works was better left to legislators.

Judge Chin’s view isn’t novel: There’s a fairly broad consensus that the problem of orphan works needs to be addressed by Congress.

Oh shit.

According to this video Carrier IQ has the ability to capture URLs that are entered, including HTTPS URLs. When a browser makes a secure connection (HTTPS), the URL is encrypted before the browser transmits it to the target webserver to protect any sensitive information it may contain. So the carrier would not be able to log such URLs through their equipment -- Carrier IQ allows them to do it by intercepting before encryption is applied.

The NSA has been doing this since 2003, probably before. It's extra creepy that DARPA is now in on the act, but that's about it. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

There would be political panic in the US if Iran sent a drone over the East Coast to have a look at NYC or Washington. Iran does have drones, and could launch one from a freighter in the Atlantic if they were so inclined.

> General use PCs have proven to become virus/worms/problem infested in the hands of "normal" users..

This. Normal users have lived with the crapware infested mess that is "general PCs" for years, and they HATE IT.

Macs are general use PCs and have proven to be virus/worm/problem free for years in the hands of "normal" users. Winblowz users might hate their machines, but buying an iPhad and walling yourself off from Pulitzer prize winning writers is not the only option.

• Holograhic Principle
• Holographic Universe
• World’s Most Precise Clocks Could Reveal Universe Is a Hologram

http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/01/33571

Network Solutions' administrative policies are once again being blamed for Internet domain hijackings that took at least brief control over some major Web domains.
Beginning Saturday, an unidentified individual began attempts, some successful, to seize control over domains including major Web hosting service Exodus, Web standards body World Wide Web Consortium and Emory University.
And all the misappropriation required was a simple spoofing of email addresses.

The only good thing about it was getting my name in Wired.

Because nice guys finish last:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/do-nice-guys-finish-last/

This has come up in the past. While dropbox uses S3 for the base encryption layer, the staff at dropbox have access to the encryption keys. In fact because of a FTC complaint dropbox had to change the terms of use as explained on their blog To clearly indicate that while the contents are encrypted, that dropbox staff still have access to be able to comply with the US justice system. And the US can order the dropbox to disclose the data without telling you that the data was disclosed. At least if the courts come after the data in the server sitting under some IT guy's desk, you will know about it.