Slashdot Mirror
Military Electronics That Shatter Into Dust On Command
First time accepted submitter MAE Keller writes "Two U.S. companies are joining a military research program to develop sensitive electronic components able to self-destruct on command to keep them out of the hands of potential adversaries who would attempt to counterfeit them for their own use. From the article: 'Last Friday DARPA awarded a $2.1 million contract to PARC, and a $3.5 million contract to IBM for the VAPR program, which seeks to develop transient electronics that can physically disappear in a controlled, triggerable manner.'"
Also, fuck beta!
Remember, if you or any of your IM force are caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge.
Good bye Mr. Phelps.
Why has Dice declared war on the slashdot user base?
just saying the obvious
So...slashdot's user base is set to shatter when beta goes live?
Car analogy time:
I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.
Too bad Slashdot beta won't shatter into dust on command
Time to offend someone
Ob note: uck-fay eta-bay
Electronics that smoke themselves? Have had plenty of them.
They all spewed magic smoke shortly after warranty expiration. Coincidence? I THINK NOT! BWAHAHA!
Just like Slashdot will spew magic smoke when its bitch daddy Dice pulls the plug on classic. All that will remain is a box full of bad smells and no life.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
. . . oh, wait. Disappear in a controlled, triggerable manner . . . Never mind, Bill.
No doubt about it Slashdot beta sucks and everyone hates it. But, the Slashcrew, like Digg of old, refuse to listen.
Show them the error of their ways, boycott Slashdot 2/7/14.
Can I fire some at beta?
So, does this mean when I throw my Google Glasses off a cliff, will they explode in spectacular style?
Too bad Slashdot beta won't shatter into dust on command
Time to offend someone
Can we declare Slashdot Beta to be VAPRware?
fuckbeta
Keep classic /.
oh and does anyone else hear the crickets??
They've gotten IBM and PARC to design nanomachines to destroy the eletronics on command. Because I doubt there are very many other "feasible" ways to do that.
Maybe once they are done designing them, we can sneak some into Slashdot Beta. Because that'd only be an improvement. But it's not hard to improve on crap. Especially steaming piles of crap.
If they have a technology to make chips have their underlying silicon substrate crack into unusable bits, that is one thing... but wouldn't e-fuses and on-die capacitors be another route to this with established technology? e-fuses may not be Michael Bay type of material, but the ability to render CPUs, RAM, ASICs, and other silicon on a board completely unusable on a physical basis might be just as good.
I have used dice to find many jobs, including the one I have right now, but I will not use Dice again if this beta isn't reversed.
Dice makes way more off of a placement than some silly adverts, if the technical professionals who read this site want to make a stand, kill your Dice profile - want to find a job? target your goal city and call head hunters, they will get you good jobs if you have a good skill.
I'm not sure why the editors think that simply continuing to blindly post stories is going to change things here.
We aren't talking about the news!
Respect your users!
It's a program to make hardware self-destruct 'into dust', and it's called 'VAPR' and _nobody_ tagged the article 'Vaporware'? Come on, people!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I've been looking for an excuse to reclaim some time in my day.
Fuck Slashdot Beta Fuck Dice
Is Dice Holdings that owns /. the same Dice that creates Battlefield? Just curious.
I left Yahoo Groups because they totally destroyed their hierarchical UI and make following conversation impossible. Well there was always Slashdot. But now you guys too?! Count me out when you finally switch over.
1. Military electronics
2. Dice Holdings, Inc.'s bottom line.
That's pretty much the sentiment. But here's an idea: Rob Malda (may God bless him in our time of ultimate need) gave us a tool to fight off our oppressors: The source code that powers classic slashdot. The kryptonite of the Overlords. Let us come together now with a kickstarter project, crowdsource our way into the amazon cloud, and free ourselves of these idiot fucktard web 2.0 morons. We have the technology! We can build it faster. Better. Stronger.
And free of Dic--Derp Holdings. Discuss.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Ironic story. When military equipment is captured by enemies it shatters into dust. When Slashdot is captured by terrible Dice BETA "innovation" the user base detonates.
Fuck Beta.
They could hire Dice. They seem to be going a pretty good job of self-destructing Slashdot.
Fuck beta.
It's terrible. I haven't seen such horrors since I had a fever dream about At the Mountains of Madness.
Beta sucks!
Mission impossible :P
How long until adversaries get the codes to remote destroy US military equipment while it is in use?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
For those who haven't seen "slashdot media" yet, our beloved /. is now categorized as "Social Media for B2B Technology". See for yourself: http://slashdotmedia.com/about...
Go on, click the "Tour the new Slashdot" button (can't be opened in a new tab) and wait for the nausea to kick in. Meaningless marketing buzzwords, "feedback tools", "user engagement" and so on and so forth.
It's over. The trained monkeys in marketing have won. A sad day indeed.
:/- spoon(_).
If you hate Beta, DO NOT VISIT Slashdot on 2/7!!
How you you show them Beta sucks? You drop their ad impressions!
Keep Classic/Fix Beta, or we walk.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss the Beta - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Discussion of Beta
Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live
Alternative Slashdot
I got a message urging me to try it, so I clicked on it, looked at the Beta and thought: oh, this looks like Slashdot on my phone. And clicked back to the original interface after only a short while. Learn a lesson from Win8: Interfaces that look good on a phone, are crap for a desktop.
I mean, you have people on this site that actually believe that a CLI is a superior interface. And you try to impress them with eye-candy that takes functionality away? Goodluckwiththat.
What were you guys thinking?
All that will remain is a box full of bad smells and no life.
So, your mom's basement, then?
Miss enough payments, and all the circuitry inside your computer, your car, the home theater you got from Rent-A-Center, or whatever... *poof*
Of course, it'll put a lot of repo-men out of work...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
No way to see replies to your comments, no way to link to your comments to check by hand. Discussion is impossible.
It's called C-4 explosive. it will shatter any laptop into dust on command if you use enough of it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I prefer the beta, it's clean and works just fine. Seriously, what is it that's making it so horrible for you?
Threaded conversations where you can choose ahead of time to see all replies. But you likely won't see this reply, if you use beta.
Hey, I fell for that when I decided to play Duke Nukem Forever. I'll never get those 10 minutes of my life back. Fool me once...
BETA, I command you: turn into dust NOW.
underlined doesn't work
altslashdot.org gave me a bluescreen (win8.1/ff28) :(
Beta still sucks bing donkey ballz though
Anyone else read a book called 'The Third Fury'? The basic idea was that a US General, an electronics manufacturer that sold chips to the military, and a TV executive who owned a satellite came up with a plan to help safeguard the USA. It involved creating two versions of a certain common microchip- one version had a special circuit that would fry the chip when it received a signal sent from the TV satellite. The 'special' chip, dubbed Cerberus after the three-headed dog that guarded Hades, would be put into all military hardware that was sent to allies or sold outside the USA, while the normal chip was in all our military and civilian equipment. The title comes from the fact they code-named themselves after the three Furies.
It’s years later, and weird things are happening. The General is retired. The TV executive is facing a hostile takeover of his network, and the electronics genius is being gently, but firmly forced out of the business he founded. Suspicious, he investigates and finds the Cerberus style chip is the only one being produced now. This means all US military hardware is vulnerable. He attempts to warn the other furies before being killed.
Now it’s a race to see if the TV exec can re-gain control of the satellite before the bad guys can shut down the USA.
The point being, we need to be careful a system like this isn’t used against us.
I really had a comment that related to this article from when I was in the Air Force in the early 1970's and bugging the Ho Chi Minh trail. However, I made the mistake of taking a look at the slashdot beta and now it is gone forever. Kind of like taking a very strong laxative.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
..
This and that group did it.. trust us!
Yes, we're here generating traffic. Today.
Piss off your users, and they first get loud and tell you what you're doing wrong. Then, they get quiet. REAL quiet. As in, no longer visiting your site. And, for Slashdot, if people aren't visiting, then they aren't posting, they aren't submitting stories, and they aren't looking at your ads.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Dice can't see it, since they are new here (he he)...
But, the most loyal long time most avid readers of Slashdot, are not trolling the site, in protest of the failed beta.
Where is GNAA, Natalie Portman grits, and frist prost when you need them!
They won't have a clue what I am saying ...
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
More to come, stay tuned.
That's one of the real nasty bits of it. Any kind of long-lasting discussion is out of the question. Some of the best threads I've ever seen on /. came from deep, ongoing discussions between knowledgeable people. The beta makes it difficult to have any real back-and-forth.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
I've emailed them... they ignore... the more they ignore the quicker their downfall.
Ignore your userbase, and you shall have none. If I am ignored much longer, I will leave. Just like I left mashable after their AOL'ed it.
PS. I've been a slashdotter for 7+ years.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
This could be used by dissidents in various countries worried about the government seizing their computers and using the information contained therein against them. Or heck, criminals would be interested too, if the feds come a knocking, they just hit some buttons and turn all their criminal record data to unreadable dust.
Glad I'm still on classic. :-)
Alice Hill does not work for Dice, and hasn't for a while. She has nothing to do with the Beta. Put down the pitchfork.
So what's with the the beta not being able to quote parent comment, not automatically providing a comment subject, not being able reply anonymously, not being able to see your own comment scores, not being able to see replies to your comments, or read the threads on polls? Those are some serious deficiencies.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'm just a casual slashdot reader. Can you elucidate about what the you feel the problem with the new beta format is?
Well, it's apparently too kind to trolls, for a start.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Add yet another vulnerability to our military.
Wait until some enterprising hacker from the other side figures out how to trigger the self-destruct.
And then our shit becomes useless, from operator-recognizing rifles to vehicles.
Motherfucking morons.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Slashdot was a reasonable source of technical dialogue once. Solved a lot of problems by talking to each other.
I'll miss it.
Goodbye.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
surely you can see the replies somewhere I just haven't found it yet. on classic all the replies are in the top right corner. where did they move it to?
I agree those are deficiencies, but surely they will add in this functionality as the beta develops.
Yes that aspect is true, 'mobile reactive organic targets' usually give instant results of your mad skillz. They can be tricky targets. Good training! ;-)
Unlike Jar Jar, I'm afraid that slashdot beta will be even MORE zombie-like than SCO, thus EVEN harder to kill.
However is responsible for making this mandatory needs to be VR headset fitted, castrated with a bench vise...half turn of the handle ever 15 minutes, while standing barefoot on hot coals, and at random intervals...goosed with an electric cattle prod, all while "Cannibal: The Musical" is playing on the aforementioned headset.(in 3D, immersive ,but not interactive, in surround sound-you could shove the sub woofer up their ass...goatse may need a heir)
Then made to walk the plank, get keel hauled, crucified, impaled an a short spike, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake, hung, then torn into itty bitty pieces, and BURIED ALIVE!
Then we nuke them from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I agree those are deficiencies, but surely they will add in this functionality as the beta develops.
They never should have escaped alpha testing.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
agreed, yet here we are, camperdave. here we are.
A long time ago, Slashdot hid all the links to http://slashdot.org/~TubeSteak/comments (even from the classic users)
Beta just transparently gives you the http://slashdot.org/~TubeSteak/ version even if you include "comments" in the link.
Am I supposed to go thread to thread in order to see which of my comments have been modded up or down? /. has ever done?
Is Beta some kind of clean sheet design that ignores everything that
Give me Classic or give me Death.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
For $5.4 million, they better be talking about more than simply damaging the electronics beyond use. I could throw something together to do that overnight for less than $100.
I bet the editors just want to see how many different ways all of you can segue from the article into "fuck beta" in a comment.
It even derailed a juicy flamewar-bait topic like Wozniak To Apple: Consider Building an Android Phone
I started today at the bottom and have been working my way up the page with the articles.
'Soulskill' joined in the discussion about the beta that was raging on the Quakecon article(IIRC).
Here's my take:
According to him, the editors are reading the comments and sending them upstream to their Dice corporate overlords, and have been warning same OL's that this was likely to happen. Many of the editors feel the same way, but the editors are too far down the ladder to have much say about this.
He also said that feedback was pouring in and they were trying to take it all in.
One of the things, from the sounds of it, a classic version is not an option when the beta goes live in April. I hope I misunderstood.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
and the enemy can use it too to disable the army itself, because if the US can disable the electronics remote, so can their enemy...
Yes I hate the fact that you cannot link to comments anymore. The site becomes less useful that way.
Like the /. community when Beta will be implemented.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
I have to agree that Beta is not so awesome. Doesn't work on my droid phone so I lose 30 mins a day looking at other sites.
A lot of the issues go deeper than Beta though. Firstly, as IT folks we are (mostly!):
Educated
Have disposable income
Revel in nerdy stuff
Have decision making/influencing power.
All the above is an IT advertisers wet dream
I am starting to find the content rather dull and repetitive.
Can you imagine the sort of stories that could be brought to Slashdot as an exclusive if Slashdot actually paid for original unique content and also got editors that can do the job to a higher standard. Imagine the uber geek stuff that could be created if people were motivated enough. Original stuff that brings new blood, new thinking, decent ad revenue. Think of the interesting stories that could be told by you guys, right here, if you had the incentive.
I can't disclose exactly what I am writing about at present, but all the good stuff is going to people who pay me for my time. Slashdot needs some of this!
In short rather than messing with beta, start getting some original content. Differentiate Slashdot, make it relevant, make it fresh.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I thought the MI group already had this tech
...could give new meaning to 'planned obsolescence'.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
http://www2.geeks.com/
Their site doesn't work anymore, but you can still go to their physical store and buy electronics that vaporizes after a few uses !
which seeks to develop transient electronics that can physically disappear in a controlled, triggerable manner.'
You mean like regular commercial electronics do right after the warranty expires?