If I were looking for work, I'd take the job, and just add the bare minimum of details to the site. Get a bit of political clout with the supervisors, then conveniently forget to log in for a week, or a month, or "oh dear, I forgot my password, and I don't know what email account I used to sign up".
Having been unemployed recently, I'd much prefer a paycheck to a bit of already-compromised privacy.
As someone who's been routinely getting "-1, Overrated" on many of my posts for about a year, I most say: Do shut up already.
In the time it takes to downmod someone, a few people have seen the opposing post, and likely agreed, or at least posted something in response that's likely to generate more interest in the original. With the high volume of traffic Slashdot gets, even 20 accounts isn't enough to obliterate any opinion to a reasonable degree. One particularly controversial post of mine managed to get every single moderation, before ending up at "+4, Interesting". I had over a dozen "flamebait", "troll", and "overrated" mods.
Mod gaming is a known problem. Slashdot's system is still above average in my opinion, and has the benefit of enough wide participation (and light enough consequences) that it doesn't matter. Sure, it's disheartening to see one of my deeply-thought-out statements misunderstood, but it's Slashdot. It's not like anything said here has a high probability of drastically changing the world.
As a fellow computer engineer, I point you toward the field of registry cleaners, fake antivirus, and far too many consulting firms. Just enough of a success rate to make people swear there's an improvement, until a competent admin comes in and finds that swapping was disabled, and that's why everything runs so much faster until it locks up.
James Randi's tests are based on the assumption that supernatural powers are consistent, or at least repeatable upon demand. This is an acknowledged shortcoming. However, Randi's goal is not to disprove all possibility of supernatural phenomena. Rather, it is to promote critical thinking, to protect people from fraud. He thus attracts con men, and designs tests to directly measure their professed abilities. The test conditions are agreed upon by the participants, except of course for those high-profile frauds that are already actively scamming people.
Again, the point is to promote critical thinking. Even if supernatural phenomena are real, there are still hucksters out there who will use sleight-of-hand and cognitive bias to take advantage of the general public. James Randi uses his own knowledge of these tricks to highlight the techniques used in fraud, and show them to the public.
Similarly, competent system admins can disprove many of the scam software tricks, too. Make several junk entries in the registry, and see if the cleaner program finds them. Stick some viruses in a folder, and see if they're caught. As with James Randi, that's not the real fight, though. The real goal is to convince the public/managers to think critically about any promised easy fix.
At a recent convention, I attended a presentation by a man involved in fracking regulation (though I now forget his exact role, it was on the government side). He said it wasn't really the big drilling companies that caused the most severe problems with fracking, but rather the small mom-and-pop ones that aren't used to handling environmental concerns. The bigger companies have the benefit of scale, making the cost of compliance lower. They can process their waste water correctly, use higher-quality cement, and hire better nerds to do the job right. Of course that doesn't fit the conspiracy theory, so you won't find such statements in Gasland.
The first 27 seconds made a good point about comparing various products and evaluating them on their merits. The remaining 5 minutes was a mix of strawmen and fallacies. Is there supposed to be a point to that?
For us Americans, it's "purdy darned fast". It's faster than NASCAR, and faster than a shotgun shell, by a lot.
Also, it's about 136 miles per second. In each second, that's the distance of two hours of driving at most states' speed limits, one hour of driving in New Mexico (because after an hour of driving in New Mexico, any still-sane human has to stop anyway), and about 30 hours of "driving" through New York City traffic.
How many people are actually reading the FBI press release? Is the FBI actively trying to stir up public opinion against Mr. Ortmann, or are they just answering question the media usually has, stating what's alleged?
he's been granted bail with neither of these things at issue. If he was a flight risk he wouldn't have been granted bail.
[citation needed]. The article mentions that the bail restrictions include no Internet access. He may be restricted from leaving the country (which is highly likely, since one of the reasons his bail process took longer than others is that he was considered a flight risk, so they had to work out a suitable agreement.
What was the relevance of this point?
To point out that Internet access is not mandatory for any legal defense, but merely convenient. Considering that one of the issues is that Mr. Ortmann made $3.5 million more than MegaUpload paid him, he very likely already has a competent lawyer. The only reason for him to have direct Internet access would be to unjustly sway public opinion.
I was claiming that a celebrity with normal access to media can taint a jury. The defendant's lawyer, assuming competence, will make statements for the defendant that are (usually) suitably phrased to promote neutrality. He'll say things like "my client maintains his innocence, and has been working with investigators to find the truth." A competent spokesman for the police will say things like "We found a bloody handprint in the defendant's car, and a dead monkey in the kitchen" but the police don't often say "the defendant killed his wife and pet monkey."
Either side making statements that are obviously intended to sway public opinion could result in a judgement against the offender. Regardless, it certainly won't make the judge very happy. I know it goes against the popular underdog mentality here, but surprisingly, most cops are trying to do what's right, and most judges are trying to ensure a fair trial.
I'm now curious about other cases, but there is a problem with the test. This being a fairly high-profile defendant, his blog posts and public statements are likely to reach more people and be more influential than your average Joe's. The nature of the crime shouldn't have any bearing on the terms of the bail, but the capabilities of the defendant certainly should.
Every Slashdotter knows that lawyers can't be trusted! They're just greedy rent-seekers perpetuating their own existence.
While the lawyer charges $400 an hour to write about wherefores and herebys, the defendant should be trying hard to prove his innocence, using the most irrefutable and accurate evidence yet known: Protests, jury nullification campaigns, and witness intimidation.
Remember the Slashdotter motto: Gub'ment bad, whatever-I-want good.
If he told someone else to destroy evidence, the act of communication is likely to leave more evidence. Allowing him the opportunity to destroy evidence himself is much more risky.
From another aspect, the terms of his bail include no internet access. While I haven't done very much more research than reading TFA, I expect the terms also include no talk show appearances, public opinion campaigns, or other mechanisms where he could directly influence a potential juror outside the court. Even a simple blog post could cause irreparable harm to a jury's ability to be impartial. Being released on bail is a compromise between the complete preservation of evidence that the justice system needs, and the freedom to continue a normal life that the presumption of innocence needs.
My pet peeve with the use of "know" in relation to science stems from the public confusion as to what science can and cannot absolutely know.
Thanks to overstating the abilities of science to prove something, juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases, the discussion of competing theories is seen as indecision, and a scientist who accurately states a probability is often portrayed as inconclusive. By substituting "have compelling evidence" in place of "know", scientists could make accurate statements and educate the public at the same time.
No, we will not "know that a Higgs particle exists". We may have an incredibly strong indication that it does, enough to strongly believe it exists, but we will not know with 100% certainty that the particle exists, the experiments were infallible, and the data was accurate.
Repacking mortgages as a low-risk security is reasonable when it's expected that a certain (low) percentage will default, and the rest will grow enough to repay the debts. Get enough marginal mortgages together, and the package as a whole has a very low risk of failure. The risk of default for each individual mortgage was believed to be a mostly-independent event, with a fixed probability of default. When the foreclosure chain reaction started, the defaults were no longer independent. Suddenly, that wonderfully-low probability of total failure became terribly high, turning a safe asset into a toxic liability.
To use a suitably nerdy example, consider a RAID 1 array of disk drives. Discounting excessive rebuild time (as we are seeing now with multi-terabyte disks), the chance of total failure decreases as more drives are added to the array. With enough drives, the chance of failure drops down to any reasonable definition of "safe". Now, without warning, we'll assume that when a drive fails, it explodes in a spectacular fireball. Of course, this increases the chance of neighboring drives failing, and they'll also explode. Our nice safe RAID array is now wholly unreliable, and it's also likely to take out other equipment in the same room. Once the fire suppression system goes off, there will also be water damage, short-circuited equipment, and probably a few physical security breaches, as well. A simple drive failure would cause a site-wide meltdown.
How the financial crisis happened is pretty straightforward. Banks foreclosed on loans, some of which were loans made to other banks. Those other banks then foreclosed on their loans so they could have funds available to cover their debts. Once the trend of foreclosure was identified, banks became worried about having enough available funds, and they increased their own foreclosures. This continued going down the chain until the foreclosures reached individuals, who were often unable to pay back their loans immediately. Since the individuals didn't have money, the banks couldn't repay their loans, and the failures went back up the chain.
Issuing those loans out wasn't wholly irresponsible, despite what the pundits like to say, because there had been significant continuous growth in the housing market for years. That growth offsets the risk that the loans will default, because there's enough cash floating around in the market that debtors can repayloans as needed. Under normal circumstances, such risky loans are fine, because any single failure will have minimal effect on the economy as a whole. What happened was a huge number of defaulted loans all at once, which had a cumulative effect.
Banks are worried about losing money. In the case of IT changes, they can accurately predict how much will be lost, when, and how. While it is possible to say "we are in a housing bubble", it's not possible to say "the bubble will burst next month" with any degree of accuracy. All investment carries risk. IT management carries less risk.
Mainframes have legacy, locality, and privacy, which are particularly important qualities for banks and insurance companies.
The biggest problem is porting old programs to cloud systems. Sure, it can be done, but it's a million-dollar proposal, and if something goes wrong, it's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for a big bank. New systems will often use cloud solutions, but that requires convincing managers that they'll work just as well.
Whether a cloud solution will meet the throughput capabilities of a mainframe is something of an open question. Sure, cloud systems can scale more easily, but the programs they run must also be scalable. Very often, the algorithm used on the mainframe won't port cleanly to a cloud system in a way that will offer reasonable performance. There's significant re-engineering involved, which drives conversion costs higher.
With so much new code being handed off to a nebulous cloud provider, often in another company, outside the control and oversight of the IT managers, there's reasonable concern for security. While there's few incidents of actual cloud-related security breaches, there are many stories about breaches on shared systems. IT managers know that most cloud systems are shared, and it's seen as only a matter of time before something bad happens.
Clouds are new. New things are scary to the steeped-in-history banks and insurance providers. Give them time, and they'll start using cloud solutions widely, but don't hold your breath waiting.
Shockingly enough, there's more to space exploration than just putting people in it. There's analysis of radio telescope data, probes leaving our solar system, theoretical physics, simulated microgravity experiments, and an enormous number of other fields of research I simply don't know enough about to even know what they are. Discounting NASA because it doesn't currently have an operational vehicle is like saying that when your car breaks down, the rest of the world doesn't matter.
I volunteered in Ghana in 2009. I set up a lab with 19 computers at a school. Today, 5 still work.
I agree completely. I spent much of my time rearranging parts to even get Linux booting, and security training was ridiculously difficult. I was fortunate that the school had a good reputation in town, so there was already community support, and therefore less risk of theft.
As mentioned, one of our biggest problems was infrastructure. Our electricity supply was decent by African standards, but it took three tries before the room was wired correctly. Switching hot and ground wires is a rather painful problem.
Waste never appeared to be a big deal. In the area I was in, there were enough salvagers that anything thrown out was taken to a local shop where they used soldering irons to remove components, then those components were kept to fix broken devices. I never saw the melting over fires or the piles or toxin-containing waste, but I was in a fairly wealthy area of one of the wealthiest African nations.
The report details malware that connected to a particular control host, named alyac.org. The host was used in an attack on SK Communications. One particular piece of malware (the Murcy malware the paper describes) is indicated to have been used in the RSA attack.
The RSA connection is detailed in the paragraph of the report titled "Link To RSA Breach":
The majority of the known callback domains for Murcy malware were used in the March 2011 RSA
breach. This suggests that the attackers responsible
for the RSA breach also use the Murcy malware.
Given that the malware is reportedly not in
widespread use, the Chinese server communicating
with ‘path.alyac.org’ may have been compromised by
the same attackers responsible for the RSA breach
There's little else that's really information specifically about the RSA breach. Still a nice bit of information about malware, but it'd be nice if the summary mentioned SK Communications, since that's the paper's real focus.
Doc Ruby seems to be asking for an e-ink display tied to an RFID controller. The changing of the visible information would happen wirelessly, and using low amounts of power so as to remove the need for batteries. If such labels can be made cheaply enough. for instance, a box in a warehouse can be labeled with where it's supposed to be, as soon as it's assigned to go there. Place an order from NewEgg, Amazon, or any other technology-loving distributor, and your shipment could be addressed the moment you submit payment. All that remains is to gather boxes with addresses and load them in the truck.
Given this story's promise of low-cost RFID hardware, I expect this is possible, though it will be quite some time before it's perfected.
I'm not saying they don't work, but just pointing out Microsoft has an irritating habit of changing their suggested mechanisms every few years, then treating their old prodigal son as the red-headed stepchild. It may be a common trait of commercial software to show disgust toward older ideas, but with Microsoft, it seems to be their intent all along.
Microsoft changes product names based on whatever marketing program they're running at the time. I think of Windows Live Messenger (a.k.a. Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger). I think of Windows Live ID (a.k.a. Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport,.NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network). I think of Windows Live Hotmail (a.k.a. Hotmail, MSN Hotmail).
With FOSS projects, there's usually a brief period where the original project's name is hammered out around trademark conflicts, and then it sticks. Mandriva's the biggest project I can think of offhand that changed its name after it was popular, and that came after a lawsuit. Even as new projects supersede old ones, there's rarely the disdain for using something older.
Y'know, for all I hear about Linux being so fractured, I'd expect to see more coherence from Microsoft and Apple.
The vast majority of distros differ in small ways, but they all work with mostly the same paradigms. To install software, you usually install a package from a repository. To add something not in the repositories, it's usually "./configure; make; make install".
Looking at the Windows world, there's worse fracturing, but because it's all under one brand, it's somehow okay. Inter-process communication is done with DDE - no, wait - OLE. I mean sockets. Really.NET has its own IPC and you should use that now. On one system, you install with an executable file obtained from the vendor. On another system, you install through a storefront.
At least Linux accepts that it's fractured, and each distro often learns from the others.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were looking for work, I'd take the job, and just add the bare minimum of details to the site. Get a bit of political clout with the supervisors, then conveniently forget to log in for a week, or a month, or "oh dear, I forgot my password, and I don't know what email account I used to sign up".
Having been unemployed recently, I'd much prefer a paycheck to a bit of already-compromised privacy.
As someone who's been routinely getting "-1, Overrated" on many of my posts for about a year, I most say: Do shut up already.
In the time it takes to downmod someone, a few people have seen the opposing post, and likely agreed, or at least posted something in response that's likely to generate more interest in the original. With the high volume of traffic Slashdot gets, even 20 accounts isn't enough to obliterate any opinion to a reasonable degree. One particularly controversial post of mine managed to get every single moderation, before ending up at "+4, Interesting". I had over a dozen "flamebait", "troll", and "overrated" mods.
Mod gaming is a known problem. Slashdot's system is still above average in my opinion, and has the benefit of enough wide participation (and light enough consequences) that it doesn't matter. Sure, it's disheartening to see one of my deeply-thought-out statements misunderstood, but it's Slashdot. It's not like anything said here has a high probability of drastically changing the world.
As a fellow computer engineer, I point you toward the field of registry cleaners, fake antivirus, and far too many consulting firms. Just enough of a success rate to make people swear there's an improvement, until a competent admin comes in and finds that swapping was disabled, and that's why everything runs so much faster until it locks up.
James Randi's tests are based on the assumption that supernatural powers are consistent, or at least repeatable upon demand. This is an acknowledged shortcoming. However, Randi's goal is not to disprove all possibility of supernatural phenomena. Rather, it is to promote critical thinking, to protect people from fraud. He thus attracts con men, and designs tests to directly measure their professed abilities. The test conditions are agreed upon by the participants, except of course for those high-profile frauds that are already actively scamming people.
Again, the point is to promote critical thinking. Even if supernatural phenomena are real, there are still hucksters out there who will use sleight-of-hand and cognitive bias to take advantage of the general public. James Randi uses his own knowledge of these tricks to highlight the techniques used in fraud, and show them to the public.
Similarly, competent system admins can disprove many of the scam software tricks, too. Make several junk entries in the registry, and see if the cleaner program finds them. Stick some viruses in a folder, and see if they're caught. As with James Randi, that's not the real fight, though. The real goal is to convince the public/managers to think critically about any promised easy fix.
At a recent convention, I attended a presentation by a man involved in fracking regulation (though I now forget his exact role, it was on the government side). He said it wasn't really the big drilling companies that caused the most severe problems with fracking, but rather the small mom-and-pop ones that aren't used to handling environmental concerns. The bigger companies have the benefit of scale, making the cost of compliance lower. They can process their waste water correctly, use higher-quality cement, and hire better nerds to do the job right. Of course that doesn't fit the conspiracy theory, so you won't find such statements in Gasland.
The first 27 seconds made a good point about comparing various products and evaluating them on their merits. The remaining 5 minutes was a mix of strawmen and fallacies. Is there supposed to be a point to that?
For us Americans, it's "purdy darned fast". It's faster than NASCAR, and faster than a shotgun shell, by a lot.
Also, it's about 136 miles per second. In each second, that's the distance of two hours of driving at most states' speed limits, one hour of driving in New Mexico (because after an hour of driving in New Mexico, any still-sane human has to stop anyway), and about 30 hours of "driving" through New York City traffic.
How many people are actually reading the FBI press release? Is the FBI actively trying to stir up public opinion against Mr. Ortmann, or are they just answering question the media usually has, stating what's alleged?
he's been granted bail with neither of these things at issue. If he was a flight risk he wouldn't have been granted bail.
[citation needed]. The article mentions that the bail restrictions include no Internet access. He may be restricted from leaving the country (which is highly likely, since one of the reasons his bail process took longer than others is that he was considered a flight risk, so they had to work out a suitable agreement.
What was the relevance of this point?
To point out that Internet access is not mandatory for any legal defense, but merely convenient. Considering that one of the issues is that Mr. Ortmann made $3.5 million more than MegaUpload paid him, he very likely already has a competent lawyer. The only reason for him to have direct Internet access would be to unjustly sway public opinion.
I was claiming that a celebrity with normal access to media can taint a jury. The defendant's lawyer, assuming competence, will make statements for the defendant that are (usually) suitably phrased to promote neutrality. He'll say things like "my client maintains his innocence, and has been working with investigators to find the truth." A competent spokesman for the police will say things like "We found a bloody handprint in the defendant's car, and a dead monkey in the kitchen" but the police don't often say "the defendant killed his wife and pet monkey."
Either side making statements that are obviously intended to sway public opinion could result in a judgement against the offender. Regardless, it certainly won't make the judge very happy. I know it goes against the popular underdog mentality here, but surprisingly, most cops are trying to do what's right, and most judges are trying to ensure a fair trial.
I'm now curious about other cases, but there is a problem with the test. This being a fairly high-profile defendant, his blog posts and public statements are likely to reach more people and be more influential than your average Joe's. The nature of the crime shouldn't have any bearing on the terms of the bail, but the capabilities of the defendant certainly should.
Usually the jury is informed about that when they hear evidence, anyway.
Every Slashdotter knows that lawyers can't be trusted! They're just greedy rent-seekers perpetuating their own existence.
While the lawyer charges $400 an hour to write about wherefores and herebys, the defendant should be trying hard to prove his innocence, using the most irrefutable and accurate evidence yet known: Protests, jury nullification campaigns, and witness intimidation.
Remember the Slashdotter motto: Gub'ment bad, whatever-I-want good.
If he told someone else to destroy evidence, the act of communication is likely to leave more evidence. Allowing him the opportunity to destroy evidence himself is much more risky.
From another aspect, the terms of his bail include no internet access. While I haven't done very much more research than reading TFA, I expect the terms also include no talk show appearances, public opinion campaigns, or other mechanisms where he could directly influence a potential juror outside the court. Even a simple blog post could cause irreparable harm to a jury's ability to be impartial. Being released on bail is a compromise between the complete preservation of evidence that the justice system needs, and the freedom to continue a normal life that the presumption of innocence needs.
My OS is Unknown, but my browser is also "Desktop". I guess an iPad could serve as a very small desk...
My pet peeve with the use of "know" in relation to science stems from the public confusion as to what science can and cannot absolutely know.
Thanks to overstating the abilities of science to prove something, juries now expect DNA evidence in trivial cases, the discussion of competing theories is seen as indecision, and a scientist who accurately states a probability is often portrayed as inconclusive. By substituting "have compelling evidence" in place of "know", scientists could make accurate statements and educate the public at the same time.
No, we will not "know that a Higgs particle exists". We may have an incredibly strong indication that it does, enough to strongly believe it exists, but we will not know with 100% certainty that the particle exists, the experiments were infallible, and the data was accurate.
Repacking mortgages as a low-risk security is reasonable when it's expected that a certain (low) percentage will default, and the rest will grow enough to repay the debts. Get enough marginal mortgages together, and the package as a whole has a very low risk of failure. The risk of default for each individual mortgage was believed to be a mostly-independent event, with a fixed probability of default. When the foreclosure chain reaction started, the defaults were no longer independent. Suddenly, that wonderfully-low probability of total failure became terribly high, turning a safe asset into a toxic liability.
To use a suitably nerdy example, consider a RAID 1 array of disk drives. Discounting excessive rebuild time (as we are seeing now with multi-terabyte disks), the chance of total failure decreases as more drives are added to the array. With enough drives, the chance of failure drops down to any reasonable definition of "safe". Now, without warning, we'll assume that when a drive fails, it explodes in a spectacular fireball. Of course, this increases the chance of neighboring drives failing, and they'll also explode. Our nice safe RAID array is now wholly unreliable, and it's also likely to take out other equipment in the same room. Once the fire suppression system goes off, there will also be water damage, short-circuited equipment, and probably a few physical security breaches, as well. A simple drive failure would cause a site-wide meltdown.
How the financial crisis happened is pretty straightforward. Banks foreclosed on loans, some of which were loans made to other banks. Those other banks then foreclosed on their loans so they could have funds available to cover their debts. Once the trend of foreclosure was identified, banks became worried about having enough available funds, and they increased their own foreclosures. This continued going down the chain until the foreclosures reached individuals, who were often unable to pay back their loans immediately. Since the individuals didn't have money, the banks couldn't repay their loans, and the failures went back up the chain.
Issuing those loans out wasn't wholly irresponsible, despite what the pundits like to say, because there had been significant continuous growth in the housing market for years. That growth offsets the risk that the loans will default, because there's enough cash floating around in the market that debtors can repayloans as needed. Under normal circumstances, such risky loans are fine, because any single failure will have minimal effect on the economy as a whole. What happened was a huge number of defaulted loans all at once, which had a cumulative effect.
Banks are worried about losing money. In the case of IT changes, they can accurately predict how much will be lost, when, and how. While it is possible to say "we are in a housing bubble", it's not possible to say "the bubble will burst next month" with any degree of accuracy. All investment carries risk. IT management carries less risk.
Mainframes have legacy, locality, and privacy, which are particularly important qualities for banks and insurance companies.
The biggest problem is porting old programs to cloud systems. Sure, it can be done, but it's a million-dollar proposal, and if something goes wrong, it's potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for a big bank. New systems will often use cloud solutions, but that requires convincing managers that they'll work just as well.
Whether a cloud solution will meet the throughput capabilities of a mainframe is something of an open question. Sure, cloud systems can scale more easily, but the programs they run must also be scalable. Very often, the algorithm used on the mainframe won't port cleanly to a cloud system in a way that will offer reasonable performance. There's significant re-engineering involved, which drives conversion costs higher.
With so much new code being handed off to a nebulous cloud provider, often in another company, outside the control and oversight of the IT managers, there's reasonable concern for security. While there's few incidents of actual cloud-related security breaches, there are many stories about breaches on shared systems. IT managers know that most cloud systems are shared, and it's seen as only a matter of time before something bad happens.
Clouds are new. New things are scary to the steeped-in-history banks and insurance providers. Give them time, and they'll start using cloud solutions widely, but don't hold your breath waiting.
Shockingly enough, there's more to space exploration than just putting people in it. There's analysis of radio telescope data, probes leaving our solar system, theoretical physics, simulated microgravity experiments, and an enormous number of other fields of research I simply don't know enough about to even know what they are. Discounting NASA because it doesn't currently have an operational vehicle is like saying that when your car breaks down, the rest of the world doesn't matter.
I volunteered in Ghana in 2009. I set up a lab with 19 computers at a school. Today, 5 still work.
I agree completely. I spent much of my time rearranging parts to even get Linux booting, and security training was ridiculously difficult. I was fortunate that the school had a good reputation in town, so there was already community support, and therefore less risk of theft.
As mentioned, one of our biggest problems was infrastructure. Our electricity supply was decent by African standards, but it took three tries before the room was wired correctly. Switching hot and ground wires is a rather painful problem.
Waste never appeared to be a big deal. In the area I was in, there were enough salvagers that anything thrown out was taken to a local shop where they used soldering irons to remove components, then those components were kept to fix broken devices. I never saw the melting over fires or the piles or toxin-containing waste, but I was in a fairly wealthy area of one of the wealthiest African nations.
The report details malware that connected to a particular control host, named alyac.org. The host was used in an attack on SK Communications. One particular piece of malware (the Murcy malware the paper describes) is indicated to have been used in the RSA attack.
The RSA connection is detailed in the paragraph of the report titled "Link To RSA Breach":
The majority of the known callback domains for Murcy malware were used in the March 2011 RSA breach. This suggests that the attackers responsible for the RSA breach also use the Murcy malware. Given that the malware is reportedly not in widespread use, the Chinese server communicating with ‘path.alyac.org’ may have been compromised by the same attackers responsible for the RSA breach
There's little else that's really information specifically about the RSA breach. Still a nice bit of information about malware, but it'd be nice if the summary mentioned SK Communications, since that's the paper's real focus.
I do believe you missed the GP's point.
Doc Ruby seems to be asking for an e-ink display tied to an RFID controller. The changing of the visible information would happen wirelessly, and using low amounts of power so as to remove the need for batteries. If such labels can be made cheaply enough. for instance, a box in a warehouse can be labeled with where it's supposed to be, as soon as it's assigned to go there. Place an order from NewEgg, Amazon, or any other technology-loving distributor, and your shipment could be addressed the moment you submit payment. All that remains is to gather boxes with addresses and load them in the truck.
Given this story's promise of low-cost RFID hardware, I expect this is possible, though it will be quite some time before it's perfected.
I'm not saying they don't work, but just pointing out Microsoft has an irritating habit of changing their suggested mechanisms every few years, then treating their old prodigal son as the red-headed stepchild. It may be a common trait of commercial software to show disgust toward older ideas, but with Microsoft, it seems to be their intent all along.
Microsoft changes product names based on whatever marketing program they're running at the time. I think of Windows Live Messenger (a.k.a. Windows Messenger, MSN Messenger). I think of Windows Live ID (a.k.a. Microsoft Wallet, Microsoft Passport, .NET Passport, Microsoft Passport Network). I think of Windows Live Hotmail (a.k.a. Hotmail, MSN Hotmail).
With FOSS projects, there's usually a brief period where the original project's name is hammered out around trademark conflicts, and then it sticks. Mandriva's the biggest project I can think of offhand that changed its name after it was popular, and that came after a lawsuit. Even as new projects supersede old ones, there's rarely the disdain for using something older.
Y'know, for all I hear about Linux being so fractured, I'd expect to see more coherence from Microsoft and Apple.
The vast majority of distros differ in small ways, but they all work with mostly the same paradigms. To install software, you usually install a package from a repository. To add something not in the repositories, it's usually "./configure; make; make install".
Looking at the Windows world, there's worse fracturing, but because it's all under one brand, it's somehow okay. Inter-process communication is done with DDE - no, wait - OLE. I mean sockets. Really .NET has its own IPC and you should use that now. On one system, you install with an executable file obtained from the vendor. On another system, you install through a storefront.
At least Linux accepts that it's fractured, and each distro often learns from the others.