Mr. Mann was given that a grant, which was only $214,700, to investigate, and I quote, 'the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah.' (The rest of the $500,000 went to other researchers.)
Which, of course, has nothing to do with climate change at all, and as far as anyone can tell he's actually done the work he was given the grant to do.
He's being investigated because he previously wrote an other page, not using Virginia funds, and the Virginia AG claims he got the savannah grant because he listed the climate change paper in his list of credentials.
In other words, this isn't even about the rather idiotic thing you claim it's about, it's about something even dumber. He wrote a paper, which he actually did, listed it, quite correctly, as one of the papers he wrote when he got hired for some other work, did that other work, and is now being sued for 'fraud' because someone asserts that other paper is somehow not true.
This isn't just a 'witch hunt', this is an EPIC WITCH HUNT. It's the idea that if you don't like what someone else wrote, and they at any time took any money, from someone they've mentioned that paper to, you can sue them for fraud.
Do you see how batshit insane this is? This is suing someone for fraud for lying on their resume (Which is crazy in the first place), except the 'lie' isn't even an actual lie or even a careful 'not lie' that's still misleading...he did write the paper.
This is like suing someone for fraud because they put on their resume 'Worked at Joe's Car Wash', and you claim they didn't work very hard at Joe's Car Wash, so collecting their salary from their new employer was 'fraud'. WTF? That's not any workable legal theory of 'fraud'.
Any 'cost' of leaving them there is entirely dwarfed by the cost of just operating the White House, which in turn is a microscopic part of the budget.
And, I might point out, utterly dwarfed by many of the other symbolic gestures the US makes.
Hell, if we're worried about costs, we could probably removed a single White House tour for a single day and saved enough money to have left them on roof. Or had a slightly smaller state dinner for Canada or something.
Something like a fourth the money in the White House operating budget is for symbolic gestures. We use the White House as a symbol all the time, that's half of what it's for. We hold Easter Egg hunts there, we meet dignitaries there, we hold state dinners there, we have a rose garden there.
And I should mention the solar panels weren't removed for cost reasons. According to Reason, they were removed because they interfered with the 'look' of the White House.
It was entirely symbolic, and quite purposeful. It was to show that Reagan didn't go along with all that Dirty Hippy environmentalism and energy reduction that Carter was talking about. (Because apparently everyone had forgotten that Carter had a damn good reason for trying to reduce our long-term energy usage. The American people are goldfish.)
Reagan didn't just take the solar panels off the white house, that's symbolic.
You're right about everything, but I think you glossed over this.
Everyone, read that sentence and think about it. The White House is fairly small as government buildings go, and is fairly well maintained. The solar panels on it are mostly symbolic and it doesn't really matter how well they work.
And Reagan took them down. Not disconnected them because they were too much trouble, he actually had them removed. Yes, yes, they were given to some school or something, but that's not the point.
Now, you can argue against putting them up, that they were wasted spending...but, seriously, a few hundred thousand dollars is nothing compared to the cost of running just the White House. And once installed, they didn't cost anything. Their entire yearly cost was probably less than the cost of shipping the White House Christmas tree to the White House, much less actually operating it.
Saying it had something to do with cost is akin to arguing that people should put condiments on their fast food before driving home with it, to save the cost of hauling the plastic condiment container. Um, no. That cost is not even measurable.
Carter put them up to send a message, not actually save any power. This message was 'We should work on reducing our oil dependence.'.
Reagan removed them to send a message. The exact opposite message of Carter. The message that 'We're America and we'll waste as much power and oil as we want!'.
Indeed. 95% of the people out there are using like ten different apps that post crap, so just hide those apps.
And there will be the last 5% who seem to go through a new app every day, and they eventually get hidden entirely, with them none the wise. They can still send me messages or post on the wall, I just don't see status updates from them.
i don't really understand people's attitudes towards facebook. No one's saying you have to read everything anyway. It's entire possible to login and read just the stuff directed at you.
Or maybe he's referring to lines laying on the ground.
Which we certainly don't need. In fact, that's a bad idea. Around here, we run all our telephone and cable lines through the air or underground. If they just lay on the ground people run over them with lawnmowers.
It's just that TV networks have hit upon the idea of not actually having the TV program at the 'highest volume', so you turn it up to hear it. Then the commercials come on at the max volume.
Whoever made the original law forgot, or chose to ignore, that volume is relative because it's adjustable. The problem isn't 'loud' stuff, because there's no magical absolute volume of TVs...it's 'sudden jump in volume' stuff.
You can deploy any sort of network that can talk to any other sort of network if you put a damn NAT in the middle. There are ways to talk to IPv4 addresses over IPX.
This is just a NAT that does some clever A rewriting to general AAAA records, which it then understands when the IPV6 side tries to connect to those records and maps them back to the real site.
You'll notice that it has to make up these IPv6 addresses, because despite there being two entire sets of IPv6 addresses that 'correspond' to IPv4, neither of them actually, you know, are defined to be the same thing.
There's actually no IPv6 address that is the IPv4 address '1.2.3.4' (plus a prefix). And hence you need a NAT instead of a bridge.
You'll notice that even if you assign the IPv6 side of this addresses in 'the IPv4 range', no computer on the IPv4 side can actually connect to them.
Ironically, they'd didn't place the damn IPv4 address space in IPv6 because it would be 'complicated' or some such nonsense, but it would sure as hell be easier than NAT64. (Which, I must point out, is not an RFC yet.) If all IPv4 addresses actually corresponded to IPv6 addresses, it, at least, would only have to do a remapping on outward packets.
And not even that if people inside the network used IPv4-compatible IPv6 addresses, which would let it do a straight bridging. Or even put a IPv4 NAT in front of said bridge, which sounds silly, but most existing DSL routers can do that NATing, so that's free. And then you could put a single bridge after the router to talk to your IPv6 network, which has real IPv6 addresses you map to 10.* addresses (So your existing router can talk to them.), but also does a IPv6 tunnel out for IPv6-only stuff. So your computers talk IPv6, your connection talks IPv4, and IPv6 is tunneled. And you can put all the IPv4-only devices on the other side of the bridge. And at some point your ISP upgrades, and gives you a new IPv6 router. You know, an actual upgrade path for home users.
But it's got to do the mapping both ways, thanks to idiots. Including rewriting DNS, which I have to admit is a neat trick, but one it shouldn't have to do at all.
In fact, if IPv4 was a subset of IPv6, DNS servers could do that A->AAAA record rewrite themselves. If you ask for an AAAA, and there isn't one, it could make a correct one out of the A. And if it couldn't, the IPv6 stack in the end user's computer could. Or, hell, just make AAAA requests implicitly mean 'Or give me the A record if you don't have an AAAA.'.
Instead, because it makes up the mapping and needs to keep track of it, the NAT64 device must do it, cleverly managed to map in two directions at once.
You hit the nail on the head about the actual problem and the actual solution, but your last line is wrong.
The translation has not be defined, as they decided that IPv6 is not suppose to work that way. The problem isn't lack of hardware supporting such standards, it's that the actual standard defined it the way people are doing it, with dual stacks and no edge translation. (And, strictly speaking, IPv4 address don't even exist in the IPv6 address space. Sure, you get some free IPv6 addresses if you have IPv4 ones, but they aren't actually 'the same' address....feel free to put them on entirely different computers.)
The idea that IPv6 addresses are a superset of IPv4 addresses, and routers can just 'convert' them back and forth as long as they're in the IPv4 address space, is the most common utterly incorrect misconception about IPv6, and really should be shot down by some giant notice required on all slashdot stories about IPv6.
The 'IPv4-MAPPED IPv6' convention just made things even stupider. Those are not actual routeable IPv6 addresses, people! That's just a way to hold an IPv4 address in an IPv6-sized field, and your computer contacts it as IPv4.
Anyone actually publishing such addresses should be shot. It's just a helpful way to store IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same place, and even treat them the same, and have the OS figure out which protocol to use.
IPv4-Compatible IPv6 Addresses, OTOH, are actual IPv6 addresses you get free with IPv4 addresses...but are, indeed, entirely separate addresses. You can put them on entirely different computers, and no one can convert or even assume it's the same device.
There is no modem that can 'convert'. There is no way to convert from IPv4 to IPv6, or vis versa.
You can pass traffic for one over the other, to some other endpoint that will reverse the process, but that's tunneling, not converting.
You cannot convert, because IPv4 and IPv6 do not share the same address space, at all. (Some IPv6 addresses are given out free to people with IPv4 addresses, but you could use those addresses on entirely different computers if you want.)
It is a common misconception that IPv6 is a superset of IPv4. It's not. There's no IPs that can 'convert' back and forth.
No, IPv6 clients cannot, under any circumstances, talk to IPv4 ones. They also have to run IPv4. There is no conversion at all, and the IPv4 address space 'inside' IPv6 will never, under any circumstances, be turned into IPv4 when it hits the 'edge' of IPv6, nor will it be turned into IPv6 going the other way.
And, no, routers cannot 'convert' between protocols, as there is no way to convert back and forth. There are ways to tunnel, but no way to convert. The IPv4 address space in IPv6 is just a goofy allocation scheme, saying 'If you have some addresses in another protocol, you get these addresses free also.' They are utterly different addresses in any sense of the word, you can have them on different computers or even different networks.
Christ, you read an article about how IPv6 is broken because the way that people expect the upgrade to work is broken, and you walk away going 'What an idiot. The way people thinks it works is great, and I've decided to ignore the place where points out that way is not, in fact, how it actually works.'
How you think it works, how everyone including djb thinks it should have worked but doesn't, was not chosen, for no apparent reason. Instead, we've got a damn stupid 'dual stack' approach.
Incidentally, I'm no djb fanboy, he's a total idiot in my book. He has no idea of the proper way to actually follow standards and write software, instead choosing to invent entirely different control systems, and that's just the start of the problem.
But that doesn't mean anything written by him is wrong. He's exactly right about how IPv6 fucked up, and if it had been a superset of IPv4 we might actually have an internet that's 90% IPv6 and 10% IPV4, and we'd be talking about the sysadmin's hard choice to keep paying for IPv4-compat IPs or use IPv6-only IPs.
Instead, IPv6 is still almost completely unused, and we've run out of fucking time.
Yes, but 'recording' isn't automated-listening-to, and they probably don't listen to all the calls. This adds a layer of non-automation required. Even if they are listened to, I suspect that person has no ability to go in and edit the list of called phone numbers, so if someone requests 'a list of numbers called', it's not going to show up on that, even if someone figures out what you did.
Plus, while they probably can record all calls made by inmates, there's still different expectations of privacy required, and hence different standards in court. Technically speaking, you have no expectation of privacy from the numbers you dial on the phone, and hence they need no permission at all to record the number, whereas they can't just record and use calls willy-nilly in court. (For example, they must demonstrate it's not your lawyer you were talking to.)
In other words, if they want to prove, in court, that you have contact with someone else, they have more hoops to jump through if you called them some other way, and a simple automated scan of the phone numbers you called won't show that person at all. Strictly speaking, they don't need a warrant to ask the phone company to turn over those records, you don't have an expectation of privacy when talking to an operator either...but they do have to go and ask.
This is only helpful if the cops are lazy...but they are. They'll get a printout from the jail, scan it, and not see the number. Even if they see a '0', they then have to get permission (Even if it's not a 'warrant', they do have to get permission to listen to any call, because, like I said, it might be your lawyer.) to listen to that to find out who you really called.
Annoyingly, this only works at places like jails and places that monitor called numbers themselves. If the cops have actually put a 'pen register' on your home phone, that used to be an actual device, and still is in the case of self-monitoring, but with a third party one for the cops, all that actually means is they get a list of the phone numbers you called, according to the phone company, which obviously includes numbers the operator dialed for you. (The phone company has to know about those to bill you.)
Still useful for getting around phone locks built into phones, though.
But, yes, most criminals, at least those arrested, do make stupid mistakes, so are unlikely to do anything moderately intelligent. OTOH, I'm talking to the intersection of arrested people and slashdot readers, who are probably slightly more intelligent.
It can be done, but why? It's much easier to just ask the operator to dial for you.
The fun thing about asking the operator is that even the smartest 'pen register' tap can't figure it out. Even if they can do pulse dialing, they'll just see you dialing 0.
It sounds silly, but in actuality jail phones often have such a device on them.
Indeed, when I heard that FEMA was going into the DHS I was baffled.
FEMA in theory responses to security issues in a sense, but it's not actually aimed at security issues, and most of its job is natural disasters and manmade accidents. I don't actually know that it knows how to deal with security threats...it's supposed to fix problems, not figure out if the command center they just set up is about to get attacked.
I'd like to see it turned into an entirely coordinating agency, like you said. Either standalone, or under Health and Human Services, which puts it with the CDC and ATSDR in case there actually was some sort of biological or chemical attack. And the FDA if there's some sort of massive country-wide food or drug contamination that's large enough to be an emergency.
Also, I'd like to see the 'supply' aspects of it, where it stockpiles and supplies stuff to disasters, turned over to the National Guard, who are the actual people doing it anyway.
Or, hell, if FEMA's in HHS, there's always the PHSCC to use. That raises some interesting possibilities. If we're really going to use the National Guard to fight wars, it would be nice to have a military service that was entirely used for disaster response. The PHSCC, right now, is rather too small for that, but it could always add more categories like 'Flood containment expert' and whatnot, and expand.
It is dramatically reduced by the assumption that people will pick places with meaning to them, which means places they've been to.
Well, yes, but places people have been to are a lot harder to figure out than, for example, words that are familiar to them.
Sure, they might choose the pizza place they went on their first date with, but that's a lot more difficult for a cracker to figure out then the name of their dog.
A lot of meaningful places to people are never recorded anywhere, even if talked about.
Incidentally, I'm somewhat hoping that, while you choose the general area of the map, they'll randomize it slightly when they give to you, and not indicate in any way what the coords of the map are.
Which would, at the very least, require some rather amazing image recognition if someone was going to try to programmatic try anything.
You laugh, but some GPSes are using that specific idea, although it's in combination with a PIN.
You simply set a 'password recovery' location in the GPS. You forget your PIN, you drive there, do the password reset, and it lets you in.
Some people use their house, but I always thought that was silly...if someone steals your GPS, they could easily find your house (After all, it's in the damn GPS.) and drive there and park close enough. They're unlikely to figure it out if it's the parking lot of the local Arbys.
Indeed, the password reminder clue would be pretty interesting. 'It's the place where you got that flat tire that time' or 'Won't ever eat there again' or 'The weird sign'.
Incidentally, I love that clip, as it has the single realistic 'hack' in the entire movie. If you're on a phone where you can't dial at all, hang up the phone, take it back off the hook, click the switchhook ten times, which dials '0' in rotary, and you get an operator, who can dial for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Mann was given that a grant, which was only $214,700, to investigate, and I quote, 'the interaction of the land, atmosphere and vegetation in the African savannah.' (The rest of the $500,000 went to other researchers.)
Which, of course, has nothing to do with climate change at all, and as far as anyone can tell he's actually done the work he was given the grant to do.
He's being investigated because he previously wrote an other page, not using Virginia funds, and the Virginia AG claims he got the savannah grant because he listed the climate change paper in his list of credentials.
In other words, this isn't even about the rather idiotic thing you claim it's about, it's about something even dumber. He wrote a paper, which he actually did, listed it, quite correctly, as one of the papers he wrote when he got hired for some other work, did that other work, and is now being sued for 'fraud' because someone asserts that other paper is somehow not true.
This isn't just a 'witch hunt', this is an EPIC WITCH HUNT. It's the idea that if you don't like what someone else wrote, and they at any time took any money, from someone they've mentioned that paper to, you can sue them for fraud.
Do you see how batshit insane this is? This is suing someone for fraud for lying on their resume (Which is crazy in the first place), except the 'lie' isn't even an actual lie or even a careful 'not lie' that's still misleading...he did write the paper.
This is like suing someone for fraud because they put on their resume 'Worked at Joe's Car Wash', and you claim they didn't work very hard at Joe's Car Wash, so collecting their salary from their new employer was 'fraud'. WTF? That's not any workable legal theory of 'fraud'.
Erm, right, billions, sorry.
Trillions would be rather impossible.
Any 'cost' of leaving them there is entirely dwarfed by the cost of just operating the White House, which in turn is a microscopic part of the budget.
And, I might point out, utterly dwarfed by many of the other symbolic gestures the US makes.
Hell, if we're worried about costs, we could probably removed a single White House tour for a single day and saved enough money to have left them on roof. Or had a slightly smaller state dinner for Canada or something.
Something like a fourth the money in the White House operating budget is for symbolic gestures. We use the White House as a symbol all the time, that's half of what it's for. We hold Easter Egg hunts there, we meet dignitaries there, we hold state dinners there, we have a rose garden there.
And I should mention the solar panels weren't removed for cost reasons. According to Reason, they were removed because they interfered with the 'look' of the White House.
It was entirely symbolic, and quite purposeful. It was to show that Reagan didn't go along with all that Dirty Hippy environmentalism and energy reduction that Carter was talking about. (Because apparently everyone had forgotten that Carter had a damn good reason for trying to reduce our long-term energy usage. The American people are goldfish.)
Reagan didn't just take the solar panels off the white house, that's symbolic.
You're right about everything, but I think you glossed over this.
Everyone, read that sentence and think about it. The White House is fairly small as government buildings go, and is fairly well maintained. The solar panels on it are mostly symbolic and it doesn't really matter how well they work.
And Reagan took them down. Not disconnected them because they were too much trouble, he actually had them removed. Yes, yes, they were given to some school or something, but that's not the point.
Now, you can argue against putting them up, that they were wasted spending...but, seriously, a few hundred thousand dollars is nothing compared to the cost of running just the White House. And once installed, they didn't cost anything. Their entire yearly cost was probably less than the cost of shipping the White House Christmas tree to the White House, much less actually operating it.
Saying it had something to do with cost is akin to arguing that people should put condiments on their fast food before driving home with it, to save the cost of hauling the plastic condiment container. Um, no. That cost is not even measurable.
Carter put them up to send a message, not actually save any power. This message was 'We should work on reducing our oil dependence.'.
Reagan removed them to send a message. The exact opposite message of Carter. The message that 'We're America and we'll waste as much power and oil as we want!'.
Unlike the trillion dollars to gas and the trillion dollars to coal the Federal government gives out each year.
Whereas in the US, we aren't so crazy as to subsidize solar.
We just subsidize coal and gas, and then go around talking about how much cheaper than solar they are.
Someone's going to have to explain to me how something that costs $1 billion a month and doesn't do anything causes a 'net loss in jobs'.
Oh, I see. The article doesn't say that at all.
Indeed. 95% of the people out there are using like ten different apps that post crap, so just hide those apps.
And there will be the last 5% who seem to go through a new app every day, and they eventually get hidden entirely, with them none the wise. They can still send me messages or post on the wall, I just don't see status updates from them.
i don't really understand people's attitudes towards facebook. No one's saying you have to read everything anyway. It's entire possible to login and read just the stuff directed at you.
It's not an 'option'. Just right click on the menu and choose 'Customize', and you can move anything anywhere.
Or maybe he's referring to lines laying on the ground.
Which we certainly don't need. In fact, that's a bad idea. Around here, we run all our telephone and cable lines through the air or underground. If they just lay on the ground people run over them with lawnmowers.
OTOH, you do read a hundred comments into a discussion about TV, so you can find somewhere to mention that you don't watch it.
Interesting. Very interesting.
Sound levels still are regulated.
It's just that TV networks have hit upon the idea of not actually having the TV program at the 'highest volume', so you turn it up to hear it. Then the commercials come on at the max volume.
Whoever made the original law forgot, or chose to ignore, that volume is relative because it's adjustable. The problem isn't 'loud' stuff, because there's no magical absolute volume of TVs...it's 'sudden jump in volume' stuff.
You can deploy any sort of network that can talk to any other sort of network if you put a damn NAT in the middle. There are ways to talk to IPv4 addresses over IPX.
This is just a NAT that does some clever A rewriting to general AAAA records, which it then understands when the IPV6 side tries to connect to those records and maps them back to the real site.
You'll notice that it has to make up these IPv6 addresses, because despite there being two entire sets of IPv6 addresses that 'correspond' to IPv4, neither of them actually, you know, are defined to be the same thing.
There's actually no IPv6 address that is the IPv4 address '1.2.3.4' (plus a prefix). And hence you need a NAT instead of a bridge.
You'll notice that even if you assign the IPv6 side of this addresses in 'the IPv4 range', no computer on the IPv4 side can actually connect to them.
Ironically, they'd didn't place the damn IPv4 address space in IPv6 because it would be 'complicated' or some such nonsense, but it would sure as hell be easier than NAT64. (Which, I must point out, is not an RFC yet.) If all IPv4 addresses actually corresponded to IPv6 addresses, it, at least, would only have to do a remapping on outward packets.
And not even that if people inside the network used IPv4-compatible IPv6 addresses, which would let it do a straight bridging. Or even put a IPv4 NAT in front of said bridge, which sounds silly, but most existing DSL routers can do that NATing, so that's free. And then you could put a single bridge after the router to talk to your IPv6 network, which has real IPv6 addresses you map to 10.* addresses (So your existing router can talk to them.), but also does a IPv6 tunnel out for IPv6-only stuff. So your computers talk IPv6, your connection talks IPv4, and IPv6 is tunneled. And you can put all the IPv4-only devices on the other side of the bridge. And at some point your ISP upgrades, and gives you a new IPv6 router. You know, an actual upgrade path for home users.
But it's got to do the mapping both ways, thanks to idiots. Including rewriting DNS, which I have to admit is a neat trick, but one it shouldn't have to do at all.
In fact, if IPv4 was a subset of IPv6, DNS servers could do that A->AAAA record rewrite themselves. If you ask for an AAAA, and there isn't one, it could make a correct one out of the A. And if it couldn't, the IPv6 stack in the end user's computer could. Or, hell, just make AAAA requests implicitly mean 'Or give me the A record if you don't have an AAAA.'.
Instead, because it makes up the mapping and needs to keep track of it, the NAT64 device must do it, cleverly managed to map in two directions at once.
You hit the nail on the head about the actual problem and the actual solution, but your last line is wrong.
The translation has not be defined, as they decided that IPv6 is not suppose to work that way. The problem isn't lack of hardware supporting such standards, it's that the actual standard defined it the way people are doing it, with dual stacks and no edge translation. (And, strictly speaking, IPv4 address don't even exist in the IPv6 address space. Sure, you get some free IPv6 addresses if you have IPv4 ones, but they aren't actually 'the same' address....feel free to put them on entirely different computers.)
The idea that IPv6 addresses are a superset of IPv4 addresses, and routers can just 'convert' them back and forth as long as they're in the IPv4 address space, is the most common utterly incorrect misconception about IPv6, and really should be shot down by some giant notice required on all slashdot stories about IPv6.
The 'IPv4-MAPPED IPv6' convention just made things even stupider. Those are not actual routeable IPv6 addresses, people! That's just a way to hold an IPv4 address in an IPv6-sized field, and your computer contacts it as IPv4.
Anyone actually publishing such addresses should be shot. It's just a helpful way to store IPv4 and IPv6 addresses in the same place, and even treat them the same, and have the OS figure out which protocol to use.
IPv4-Compatible IPv6 Addresses, OTOH, are actual IPv6 addresses you get free with IPv4 addresses...but are, indeed, entirely separate addresses. You can put them on entirely different computers, and no one can convert or even assume it's the same device.
Uh, no.
There is no modem that can 'convert'. There is no way to convert from IPv4 to IPv6, or vis versa.
You can pass traffic for one over the other, to some other endpoint that will reverse the process, but that's tunneling, not converting.
You cannot convert, because IPv4 and IPv6 do not share the same address space, at all. (Some IPv6 addresses are given out free to people with IPv4 addresses, but you could use those addresses on entirely different computers if you want.)
It is a common misconception that IPv6 is a superset of IPv4. It's not. There's no IPs that can 'convert' back and forth.
Hey, did you actually read the fucking article?
What djb says is exactly what's wrong with IPv6.
No, IPv6 clients cannot, under any circumstances, talk to IPv4 ones. They also have to run IPv4. There is no conversion at all, and the IPv4 address space 'inside' IPv6 will never, under any circumstances, be turned into IPv4 when it hits the 'edge' of IPv6, nor will it be turned into IPv6 going the other way.
And, no, routers cannot 'convert' between protocols, as there is no way to convert back and forth. There are ways to tunnel, but no way to convert. The IPv4 address space in IPv6 is just a goofy allocation scheme, saying 'If you have some addresses in another protocol, you get these addresses free also.' They are utterly different addresses in any sense of the word, you can have them on different computers or even different networks.
Christ, you read an article about how IPv6 is broken because the way that people expect the upgrade to work is broken, and you walk away going 'What an idiot. The way people thinks it works is great, and I've decided to ignore the place where points out that way is not, in fact, how it actually works.'
How you think it works, how everyone including djb thinks it should have worked but doesn't, was not chosen, for no apparent reason. Instead, we've got a damn stupid 'dual stack' approach.
Incidentally, I'm no djb fanboy, he's a total idiot in my book. He has no idea of the proper way to actually follow standards and write software, instead choosing to invent entirely different control systems, and that's just the start of the problem.
But that doesn't mean anything written by him is wrong. He's exactly right about how IPv6 fucked up, and if it had been a superset of IPv4 we might actually have an internet that's 90% IPv6 and 10% IPV4, and we'd be talking about the sysadmin's hard choice to keep paying for IPv4-compat IPs or use IPv6-only IPs.
Instead, IPv6 is still almost completely unused, and we've run out of fucking time.
Yes, but 'recording' isn't automated-listening-to, and they probably don't listen to all the calls. This adds a layer of non-automation required. Even if they are listened to, I suspect that person has no ability to go in and edit the list of called phone numbers, so if someone requests 'a list of numbers called', it's not going to show up on that, even if someone figures out what you did.
Plus, while they probably can record all calls made by inmates, there's still different expectations of privacy required, and hence different standards in court. Technically speaking, you have no expectation of privacy from the numbers you dial on the phone, and hence they need no permission at all to record the number, whereas they can't just record and use calls willy-nilly in court. (For example, they must demonstrate it's not your lawyer you were talking to.)
In other words, if they want to prove, in court, that you have contact with someone else, they have more hoops to jump through if you called them some other way, and a simple automated scan of the phone numbers you called won't show that person at all. Strictly speaking, they don't need a warrant to ask the phone company to turn over those records, you don't have an expectation of privacy when talking to an operator either...but they do have to go and ask.
This is only helpful if the cops are lazy...but they are. They'll get a printout from the jail, scan it, and not see the number. Even if they see a '0', they then have to get permission (Even if it's not a 'warrant', they do have to get permission to listen to any call, because, like I said, it might be your lawyer.) to listen to that to find out who you really called.
Annoyingly, this only works at places like jails and places that monitor called numbers themselves. If the cops have actually put a 'pen register' on your home phone, that used to be an actual device, and still is in the case of self-monitoring, but with a third party one for the cops, all that actually means is they get a list of the phone numbers you called, according to the phone company, which obviously includes numbers the operator dialed for you. (The phone company has to know about those to bill you.)
Still useful for getting around phone locks built into phones, though.
But, yes, most criminals, at least those arrested, do make stupid mistakes, so are unlikely to do anything moderately intelligent. OTOH, I'm talking to the intersection of arrested people and slashdot readers, who are probably slightly more intelligent.
I don't think you need to put in the PIN every time you use the GPS, I thought it was just for configuration, but I really don't know.
It can be done, but why? It's much easier to just ask the operator to dial for you.
The fun thing about asking the operator is that even the smartest 'pen register' tap can't figure it out. Even if they can do pulse dialing, they'll just see you dialing 0.
It sounds silly, but in actuality jail phones often have such a device on them.
Indeed, when I heard that FEMA was going into the DHS I was baffled.
FEMA in theory responses to security issues in a sense, but it's not actually aimed at security issues, and most of its job is natural disasters and manmade accidents. I don't actually know that it knows how to deal with security threats...it's supposed to fix problems, not figure out if the command center they just set up is about to get attacked.
I'd like to see it turned into an entirely coordinating agency, like you said. Either standalone, or under Health and Human Services, which puts it with the CDC and ATSDR in case there actually was some sort of biological or chemical attack. And the FDA if there's some sort of massive country-wide food or drug contamination that's large enough to be an emergency.
Also, I'd like to see the 'supply' aspects of it, where it stockpiles and supplies stuff to disasters, turned over to the National Guard, who are the actual people doing it anyway.
Or, hell, if FEMA's in HHS, there's always the PHSCC to use. That raises some interesting possibilities. If we're really going to use the National Guard to fight wars, it would be nice to have a military service that was entirely used for disaster response. The PHSCC, right now, is rather too small for that, but it could always add more categories like 'Flood containment expert' and whatnot, and expand.
It is dramatically reduced by the assumption that people will pick places with meaning to them, which means places they've been to.
Well, yes, but places people have been to are a lot harder to figure out than, for example, words that are familiar to them.
Sure, they might choose the pizza place they went on their first date with, but that's a lot more difficult for a cracker to figure out then the name of their dog.
A lot of meaningful places to people are never recorded anywhere, even if talked about.
Incidentally, I'm somewhat hoping that, while you choose the general area of the map, they'll randomize it slightly when they give to you, and not indicate in any way what the coords of the map are.
Which would, at the very least, require some rather amazing image recognition if someone was going to try to programmatic try anything.
You laugh, but some GPSes are using that specific idea, although it's in combination with a PIN.
You simply set a 'password recovery' location in the GPS. You forget your PIN, you drive there, do the password reset, and it lets you in.
Some people use their house, but I always thought that was silly...if someone steals your GPS, they could easily find your house (After all, it's in the damn GPS.) and drive there and park close enough. They're unlikely to figure it out if it's the parking lot of the local Arbys.
Indeed, the password reminder clue would be pretty interesting. 'It's the place where you got that flat tire that time' or 'Won't ever eat there again' or 'The weird sign'.
Incidentally, I love that clip, as it has the single realistic 'hack' in the entire movie. If you're on a phone where you can't dial at all, hang up the phone, take it back off the hook, click the switchhook ten times, which dials '0' in rotary, and you get an operator, who can dial for you.
This virus doesn't just spread via the internet. It also spreads via USB sticks. Yes, just by insertion.