I'm not an expert on British law, but it seems to me that by arresting this person the UK government has taken a police action to protect corporate profit and corporate interests. Was there destruction of property somewhere that we haven't heard of? If I protest outside a McDonald's to stop customers from entering the store, would I be made such a spectacle out of by the state?
You can criticize Richard Branson on plenty of things, but I don't recall him ever selling any of his ventures as being philanthropic. From my vantage point he has been pretty clear on the fact that he does what he does because he has the money to do it, and if it somehow helps others along the way that's just gravy.
Now, there are plenty of others who try to spin their adventures as being for "humanity", but I don't recall an adventure of his where he went for that label.
It must have been devastating to Sony's and Microsoft's profits, right?
It is quite hard to demonstrate that notion, one way or the other. How many people who would have registered that day would have purchased something through it that same day? Would they not have purchased it 1 or 2 days later once things worked?
Were any consoles returned 1 day later because they couldn't connect that day? $400 is not a trivial amount of money to spend on a gaming system; I wouldn't expect many people would give up on it after only one day - especially considering how well known the attack was.
Did it ever occur to you guys that his title was just hyperbole? I doubt he seriously, literally meant they should be stoned to death, for real.
Are you new here? Your geek card is threatened with revocation if you don't support public execution of spammers. It could be he was employing hyperbole but in this crowd it is more likely he was actually speaking what he really thinks.
Holy shit, put on your big boy underwear and take your inhaler. Some hackers disrupted a couple of gaming services. This was not even remotely close to that level of offense. Did you happen to notice that the sun still went up that morning and went down that evening, or were you just to furious to look at the window? So you were prevented from sending more money to your favorite console maker for around 24 hours; did it occur to you to maybe spend that time with real live people or do actually DO something with your life (even if only for one day)?
If you wonder why "gamers" get such a bad rap in the real world, look in the mirror and think about how worked up you just got over this.
No, there are lots of things that have happened in the past week that qualify as devastating, but these were not on that list. A major annoyance? Sure. Devastating? Not so much. Just because some people who paid too much for a gaming system weren't able to use it the first day after they got it; and the companies who sold it to them had to wait a little longer to get credit card numbers to charge monthly fees for these people, doesn't make it devastating.
These various silly "extras" that we add on to DUI sentences don't seem to do much to reduce the DUI rates in this country. I think it is time we join the rest of the industrialized world and start treating DUI as a felony-level offense. Put some fear of real punishment into the hearts of the people who can't control their drinking and they might be less inclined to try their luck.
The cable companies know that people are paying attention to this right now. Soon there will be something more interesting provided by the news networks and the public will have forgotten about this. Then it will quietly pass through as though there was never any opposition to it at all.
Great! Apparently there are two of us on slashdot, then! I thought every slashdot user other than myself thought the lens flares were the most important aspect of either movie (to complain about).
I saw both of Abrams' Star Trek movies in the theatre. I didn't think the lens flare was that big of a deal. I didn't think it really added much to it, but I wasn't bothered by it either. Yet here again I see people complaining endlessly about it as if the lens flare was to Star Trek what Jar-Jar Binks was to The Phantom Menace.
This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,
I honestly didn't think they had more than one. Considering how few people there are allowed to leave the country - physically or digitally - I really expected there would be only one router. They have only one neighbor who they share a land border with who will talk with them, so they likely don't really have a way to set up a redundant second route.
I didn't realize that 11.3% of the US workforce hardly exists.
Every year that number goes down or at best stays the same. Either way every year the unions give up a little more of what little power they have. Bargaining is supposed to be a give-and-take procedure where labor gets some of what they want and management gets some of what they want. Yet every time labor comes to the table management further diminishes their clout. With union enrollment this low it is very easy for management to say "we'll just hire non-union replacements for you" and labor knows that they can do it.
Coincidentally, when was the last time you got more than a token raise or a meaningful increase in your benefits? This is what happens when all the power shifts back away from the worker.
Samzenpus forgot to blame this on the freedom-oppressing and america-hating labor unions. Clearly they are some how at fault here if fox news has been disconnected. I would have expected him to at least have read the article far enough to find a way to make that connection happen.
ICANN is a bunch of incompetent greedy buffoons. I wouldn't expect them to be any more capable of resisting a phishing attack than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.
The current prevailing theory is that North Korea hired outside hackers for this job. That fits the level of skill shown (less than CIA-level, more than skiddie level), the damage done, and even North Korea's response (had it been homegrown hackers, I'm not sure Kim could have helped but shout it out to the world).
That is a rather difficult hypothesis to support. How do you show that the hackers were hired by North Korea? What would North Korea be able to offer in compensation?
Also, pointing out that an action was illogical in no way proves that it was not North Korea. They have shown time and time again to be a country that makes bad decisions, and acts with little regard for the consequences.
The third generation Kim is not quite the rogue actor his predecessors were. Jong-Un seems to be aware of the fact that his country is under a microscope now and that he can't always just do what he wants. Furthermore he seems aware of the fact that the support they used to enjoy from China is quickly becoming exactly that - support they used to enjoy. While not the most logical guy at the party, Kim Jong-Un seems to have a little more awareness of the world than what we used to see from North Korea.
Unless I'm forgetting something, 9/11 involved planes crashing into large buildings. Most movie theaters in the US are single-story buildings and seldom have much around them of great significance (ie they are in big empty suburban parking lots). They would have to completely destroy dozens of theatres in order to match the death total of 9/11, and in the process wouldn't come close to the monetary damage.
But that leaves the giant question of how. You can't take down a full movie theatre with one suicide bomber, you would need several (at least one for each screen, somehow synchronized to maximize damage). 9/11 was 19 terrorists killing almost 3,000 others; you can't get anywhere near that level of destruction with suicide bombers.
It's pretty transparent that these hackers are North Korean. Fuck North Korea.
Really? What would North Korea have to gain by doing this? They already have less than one friend on the global stage (ie, only partial support from China). If they go around encouraging cyber warfare like this they are only inviting more pain back towards themselves.
Even more so this is likely beyond the technical capabilties of North Korea. Some people have suggested that this hack took upwards of 100TB of data. First of all, it is unlikely that North Korea has the ability to move that much data through their connection to the internet in the amount of time that transpired. Second, even if all the "best" hackers from North Korea did their best job to steal this data and place it elsewhere, it would have been pretty easy to figure that out as well.
So really, scratch North Korea off the list.
Some people have suggested that the hackers are "sympathetic to North Korea". To this I say bullshit as well. If someone wanted to make North Korea look like victims, launching a cyber attack is not a good way to do that. And how would a cyber attack on Sony make North Korea look strong or capable?
I would say the most likely case is we have some hackers who really despised Sony and found a way in. They then laid this "North Korea" cause as a red herring.
We found useful amounts of oil off the Cuban coast not terribly long ago. It just took this long for the oil companies in this country to put enough pressure on the US government to move towards "normal" relations.
Tucows had a reputation for some time as a registrar who was very spammer-friendly. Are they going to sell bandwidth to the spammers as well to get a cut of that action too? It is noted that they just managed to spamvertise their own services here on the slashdot front page as well...
I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish. Next after Chinese (which is after English) would be Russian, followed likely by German. Whether Spanish is spoken in my field as much as Arabic is debatable.
In other words, the value of a language comes down to who you want to use it to communicate with.
I could never stand the interface of the original iPod. Apparently though, I was the only person ever to live who did not like that silly interface (or so I have been told many many times). While touchscreens aren't really much of an improvement in phones, IMHO, they made a huge improvement for music players.
... is that all of this, going back to 9/11, then back to the bombing of the USS Cole, then back to Oklahoma City, then back to Vietnam, then back to WWII, and WWI before that, back to the war of 1812 and before that even, is Obama's fault. He should have prevented all of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not an expert on British law, but it seems to me that by arresting this person the UK government has taken a police action to protect corporate profit and corporate interests. Was there destruction of property somewhere that we haven't heard of? If I protest outside a McDonald's to stop customers from entering the store, would I be made such a spectacle out of by the state?
You can criticize Richard Branson on plenty of things, but I don't recall him ever selling any of his ventures as being philanthropic. From my vantage point he has been pretty clear on the fact that he does what he does because he has the money to do it, and if it somehow helps others along the way that's just gravy.
Now, there are plenty of others who try to spin their adventures as being for "humanity", but I don't recall an adventure of his where he went for that label.
Are there 100,000 DVD players or PCs in private hands in North Korea? This doesn't seem like it is likely to have much effect.
It must have been devastating to Sony's and Microsoft's profits, right?
It is quite hard to demonstrate that notion, one way or the other. How many people who would have registered that day would have purchased something through it that same day? Would they not have purchased it 1 or 2 days later once things worked?
Were any consoles returned 1 day later because they couldn't connect that day? $400 is not a trivial amount of money to spend on a gaming system; I wouldn't expect many people would give up on it after only one day - especially considering how well known the attack was.
Did it ever occur to you guys that his title was just hyperbole? I doubt he seriously, literally meant they should be stoned to death, for real.
Are you new here? Your geek card is threatened with revocation if you don't support public execution of spammers. It could be he was employing hyperbole but in this crowd it is more likely he was actually speaking what he really thinks.
Holy shit, put on your big boy underwear and take your inhaler. Some hackers disrupted a couple of gaming services. This was not even remotely close to that level of offense. Did you happen to notice that the sun still went up that morning and went down that evening, or were you just to furious to look at the window? So you were prevented from sending more money to your favorite console maker for around 24 hours; did it occur to you to maybe spend that time with real live people or do actually DO something with your life (even if only for one day)?
If you wonder why "gamers" get such a bad rap in the real world, look in the mirror and think about how worked up you just got over this.
devastating
No, there are lots of things that have happened in the past week that qualify as devastating, but these were not on that list. A major annoyance? Sure. Devastating? Not so much. Just because some people who paid too much for a gaming system weren't able to use it the first day after they got it; and the companies who sold it to them had to wait a little longer to get credit card numbers to charge monthly fees for these people, doesn't make it devastating.
These various silly "extras" that we add on to DUI sentences don't seem to do much to reduce the DUI rates in this country. I think it is time we join the rest of the industrialized world and start treating DUI as a felony-level offense. Put some fear of real punishment into the hearts of the people who can't control their drinking and they might be less inclined to try their luck.
The cable companies know that people are paying attention to this right now. Soon there will be something more interesting provided by the news networks and the public will have forgotten about this. Then it will quietly pass through as though there was never any opposition to it at all.
Great! Apparently there are two of us on slashdot, then! I thought every slashdot user other than myself thought the lens flares were the most important aspect of either movie (to complain about).
I saw both of Abrams' Star Trek movies in the theatre. I didn't think the lens flare was that big of a deal. I didn't think it really added much to it, but I wasn't bothered by it either. Yet here again I see people complaining endlessly about it as if the lens flare was to Star Trek what Jar-Jar Binks was to The Phantom Menace.
This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,
I honestly didn't think they had more than one. Considering how few people there are allowed to leave the country - physically or digitally - I really expected there would be only one router. They have only one neighbor who they share a land border with who will talk with them, so they likely don't really have a way to set up a redundant second route.
In America we hardly have unions any more...
I didn't realize that 11.3% of the US workforce hardly exists.
Every year that number goes down or at best stays the same. Either way every year the unions give up a little more of what little power they have. Bargaining is supposed to be a give-and-take procedure where labor gets some of what they want and management gets some of what they want. Yet every time labor comes to the table management further diminishes their clout. With union enrollment this low it is very easy for management to say "we'll just hire non-union replacements for you" and labor knows that they can do it.
Coincidentally, when was the last time you got more than a token raise or a meaningful increase in your benefits? This is what happens when all the power shifts back away from the worker.
Samzenpus forgot to blame this on the freedom-oppressing and america-hating labor unions. Clearly they are some how at fault here if fox news has been disconnected. I would have expected him to at least have read the article far enough to find a way to make that connection happen.
ICANN is a bunch of incompetent greedy buffoons. I wouldn't expect them to be any more capable of resisting a phishing attack than the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.
The current prevailing theory is that North Korea hired outside hackers for this job. That fits the level of skill shown (less than CIA-level, more than skiddie level), the damage done, and even North Korea's response (had it been homegrown hackers, I'm not sure Kim could have helped but shout it out to the world).
That is a rather difficult hypothesis to support. How do you show that the hackers were hired by North Korea? What would North Korea be able to offer in compensation?
Also, pointing out that an action was illogical in no way proves that it was not North Korea. They have shown time and time again to be a country that makes bad decisions, and acts with little regard for the consequences.
The third generation Kim is not quite the rogue actor his predecessors were. Jong-Un seems to be aware of the fact that his country is under a microscope now and that he can't always just do what he wants. Furthermore he seems aware of the fact that the support they used to enjoy from China is quickly becoming exactly that - support they used to enjoy. While not the most logical guy at the party, Kim Jong-Un seems to have a little more awareness of the world than what we used to see from North Korea.
Unless I'm forgetting something, 9/11 involved planes crashing into large buildings. Most movie theaters in the US are single-story buildings and seldom have much around them of great significance (ie they are in big empty suburban parking lots). They would have to completely destroy dozens of theatres in order to match the death total of 9/11, and in the process wouldn't come close to the monetary damage.
But that leaves the giant question of how. You can't take down a full movie theatre with one suicide bomber, you would need several (at least one for each screen, somehow synchronized to maximize damage). 9/11 was 19 terrorists killing almost 3,000 others; you can't get anywhere near that level of destruction with suicide bombers.
It's pretty transparent that these hackers are North Korean. Fuck North Korea.
Really? What would North Korea have to gain by doing this? They already have less than one friend on the global stage (ie, only partial support from China). If they go around encouraging cyber warfare like this they are only inviting more pain back towards themselves.
Even more so this is likely beyond the technical capabilties of North Korea. Some people have suggested that this hack took upwards of 100TB of data. First of all, it is unlikely that North Korea has the ability to move that much data through their connection to the internet in the amount of time that transpired. Second, even if all the "best" hackers from North Korea did their best job to steal this data and place it elsewhere, it would have been pretty easy to figure that out as well.
So really, scratch North Korea off the list.
Some people have suggested that the hackers are "sympathetic to North Korea". To this I say bullshit as well. If someone wanted to make North Korea look like victims, launching a cyber attack is not a good way to do that. And how would a cyber attack on Sony make North Korea look strong or capable?
I would say the most likely case is we have some hackers who really despised Sony and found a way in. They then laid this "North Korea" cause as a red herring.
We found useful amounts of oil off the Cuban coast not terribly long ago. It just took this long for the oil companies in this country to put enough pressure on the US government to move towards "normal" relations.
Tucows had a reputation for some time as a registrar who was very spammer-friendly. Are they going to sell bandwidth to the spammers as well to get a cut of that action too? It is noted that they just managed to spamvertise their own services here on the slashdot front page as well...
I can tell you that in my field, Chinese is used at least 4x more often than Spanish. Next after Chinese (which is after English) would be Russian, followed likely by German. Whether Spanish is spoken in my field as much as Arabic is debatable.
In other words, the value of a language comes down to who you want to use it to communicate with.
Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame. And it's not even paywalled, you can download it from anywhere. You're welcome.
The kinds of MTBF I've been seeing with Seagate lately have caused me to select any drive other than theirs for any data storage needs.
I could never stand the interface of the original iPod. Apparently though, I was the only person ever to live who did not like that silly interface (or so I have been told many many times). While touchscreens aren't really much of an improvement in phones, IMHO, they made a huge improvement for music players.
... is that all of this, going back to 9/11, then back to the bombing of the USS Cole, then back to Oklahoma City, then back to Vietnam, then back to WWII, and WWI before that, back to the war of 1812 and before that even, is Obama's fault. He should have prevented all of this.