If the debian team cannot keep their own products secure in their own environments, how can we expect to take them seriously in the enterprise?
The previous attack was one that can be applied against any platform: somebody used their password over an unencrypted channel (presumably a non-Debian channel, since all the project ones should be encrypted), and somebody else sniffed it and used it to gain access. You can't really do anything about that.
The secondary attack was a local kernel exploit that was first discovered when it was used to attack the debian.org hosts. The attacker(s) came up with something genuinely new (the brk() exploit), there's not a great deal to be done about that either. While the Debian team did make a few mistakes that were cleaned up at that time, none of them were involved in the attack - it wasn't admin error, like you imply.
Everyone else in this building, however, uses MS Word as their Blunt Instrument to do whatever task they have to get done.
Unless that task involves numbers, in which case they use MS Excel as their Blunt Instrument. I've never yet seen a case where Excel was the right tool to use, but they do it anyway (using spreadsheets as a database even with MS Access installed, argh!).
They use Word primarily because it's what they know, it works (albeit poorly) and in the end, they're uncomfortable with computers. To a lot of the general population, even an office population, computers are still magic black boxes. I'm not sure if there's a way to combat that fear.
This is true, and I don't think it can be solved directly. What is needed instead is to minimize the need to have contact with such people, and to stop them from getting technical jobs. It doesn't really matter if the manager's secretary can't use anything but Word, because all she does is transfer his words onto paper. It does matter if somebody starts pushing their fear onto other people, by insisting that they can communicate only using Word documents, or if the IT 'support' technicians only know how to reboot Windows.
It's probably easier to attack the 'symptoms' (interface requirements and unqualified staff) than it is to tackle the root cause (people are dumb).
How many people can change their own oil? Fix their own TV?
True, but the problem is the people who attempt to change the oil in their TV instead of leaving it to somebody who knows what a TV is.
But, most people stopped using text editors and makefiles when IDEs matured.
Yes, but only because they were all VB kiddies. "Most people" is not an interesting metric when talking about complex tasks, like programming or publishing. Word is the VB of publishing. It's used by semi-literate people to bash out some crud that nobody else with any sense would want to touch, even with gloves and tongs.
Most non-crappy programs are still written with (smarter) text editors and makefiles (or make-equivalents, like ant). Not because it's "faster", but because it gets the job done right where nothing else does.
Isn't "questioning laws of nature" by definition what scientists do? Question, hypothesis, experiment, theory, law, lather, rinse, repeat - right?
No, it's typically more: try, swear, try, swear, try, swear, try, wtf happened that time? investigate, swear, cry a bit, try something else, inspiration, hypothesis, experiment, revelation, and then swear some more about how stupid you were to try all those other things.
Scientists do question the laws of nature from time to time, but most discoveries are made by tripping over the laws of nature and breaking your nose.
Yet, once they catch someone, they give him a draconian punishment that ruins his life, just look at Mitnick.
While this is generally fairly accurate, in the case of Mitnick they seem to have made him a career, not ruined his life. Before he was nobody; now he's getting all kinds of stuff because of all the publicity the government paid for. I'm really not sure what they thought they were doing.
What happens when someone's Neo-Nazi cutting service takes your movie and figures out how to cut out the sympathetic parts so that it almost turns into a modern-day Birth of a Nation? Then, they market the 'altered' version in much the same way that this cleaning service market's their services.
Actually, they could make a case for this being legitimate. Since they are not reproducing your product, but are instead creating something new, it is 'transformative'. That means it is possible to classify this as fair use. Even with commercial intent, even with significant copying, it can still be okay. The significant case here is the SCOTUS ruling about 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman" remake.
Obviously you'd have to prove in court that it wasn't just a cheap attempt to undercut the original, but you could make a good case for it.
An end of a contract happens all the time, you can end your contract with your employer if you don't like your work, the other way around, etc. etc
Under UK law, an employer CANNOT end your contract if they "don't like your work". They have to prove (before the unfair dismissal tribunal that is now almost inevitable) that you are incompetant, acting in bad faith, or that they have made a determined effort to explain why they don't like you and to get you to change your behaviour. The employee is free to leave, but the employer can't do anything without a good reason.
Short of willful destructive behaviour (calling the customer a faggot), genuine inability to perform the task (hired as a software developer but doesn't know how to write code), or continued disobedience (you were told in writing not to wear fishing waders to work but continued anyway), it's almost impossible to fire somebody.
UK companies very rarely fire people nowadays. Instead, they either engage in 'constructive downsizing' (where you fire x% of the least productive parts of your workforce to cut costs, but can't show favouritism), or they approach the problematic employee and offer them three months salary if they'll resign now and not come back. Most employees are willing to be paid off, especially since it guarantees them a decent reference (you can't give somebody a bad reference unless you fired them - more laws about that stuff).
UK law is often like this. It only recognises free contracts between equals. Two citizens are equals and can form any contract they like; a corporate entity and a citizen are probably not equals, the corporation is probably dictating the terms of the contract, so there are lengthly and complicated restrictions on what they can and cannot do, plus a truly immense quantity of case law about how that contract is to be interpreted.
I don't believe there is much precedent in the field of ISP AUPs, they're quite a recent invention that isn't quite the same as anything else. Courts could go either way on this, but it's entirely plausible under UK law that a court would reject a clause saying that the ISP could cancel the customer's account at whim. If this happened, and the customer can show actual damages as a result of their account being terminated (lost mail, websites offline, etc) then the court would almost certainly order the ISP to pay for it all. To the best of my knowledge there hasn't been a significant case like this yet, so this is rather speculative - but I don't think anybody in the UK legal industry would be particularly surprised by either outcome. Could go either way. IANAL, TINLA, etc.
D. Open the mission manual at page 579, "What to do when you find yourself drifting in space with no hope of rescue"
This is NASA. They have procedures for everything. They have procedures for scratching your arse in space. They have procedures for how to open the manual and find the correct procedure. Everything that happens is carefully planned and choreographed on the ground.
It's basically like making a movie, except that nobody's quite sure what the ending will be. NASA's just government-funded entertainment to most people anyway (probably including some of the NASA management).
I am an American but have no answer to this. Can a slashdotter enlighten an ignorant fellow?
NASA have a marketing department who generate this 'buzz' by aggressively promoting everything they do. This exercise is justified as necessary to keep attention on NASA and thusly secure funding, in an entertainment-driven political environment.
The Russians don't - I'm not entirely sure how their political system works, but it isn't based around soundbites for Fox 'news'.
What you want, rather, what everyone wants, is a system where extensions describe _what_to_do_ with the file, and not _what_it_contains_.
WTF? I don't want an extension telling me what to do with the file. I want to tell the computer what to do with the file. That's what everybody who isn't a moron wants (the morons want the computer to psychically infer what to do with the file, but they're unsatisfiable).
If I want to compile the file as C, I run 'gcc -c file'. If I want to print it, I run 'lpr file'. I don't want an extension to describe these things. Different platforms may provide different methods for choosing the action, but the choice of action is made by the user, not by the file.
Choosing actions based on the file is exactly why we have so many mail worms going around named foo.doc.exe - the user wanted to say "load this in openoffice", but they actually end up running the program instead. Nobody but programmers understand this stuff; most users are hopelessly confused by it.
What other applications could this have besides boot time?
Replacement for battery-backed cache memory in hardware RAID controllers. Nothing worse than having the server go down and then discovering that the battery is dead, so you've got to spend the next eight hours running fsck.
In general, this stuff would make a great *write* cache for larger-but-slower hard disks in high-end applications. Read caching can be accomplished with regular volatile memory, but volatile write caching is always risky. In consumer applications you just live with the risk, but at the top of the market there's definitely a use for fast and safe caching.
It probably also has any number of useful applications in embedded systems, as a faster alternative to flash.
But we knew about all this ten years ago. Magnetic memory is one of those things that has been around forever but nobody ever manages to get to market in a practical and affordable fashion. It remains to be seen whether these people can pull it off (so far, their results are underwhelming).
Two of them had the same motherboard, both of which were completely dead, and both of which were no older than six months. When I called Dell to request new motherboards (since the machines were under warranty) they promptly told me that they could not replace motherboards.
You got what you paid for. It's a good bet that those Dell boxes were bought because they were cheap (for the listed spec). Dell boxes are cheap because they are made from cheap components and don't last as long as most of the competition. You pay less money to get a box with less value (because it doesn't last as long). Them supplying free replacements would kinda defeat the point.
If you want boxes that will last, don't buy the cheapest ones available. And definitely don't buy Dells.
I do not like taxes either, but they are the price we pay to live in a civil society.
You mean "they are the price we pay to live in a warmongering, corrupt society". Eliminate those two and your taxes will drop to less than half what they currently are. Do not underestimate the power of government waste.
Density sells disks in high-street stores. Access times do not. If you want to improve disk bandwidth, you're probably rich and so you can stripe the data over multiple disks. It's a stupid answer but it's the bottom-line answer, so it's the one that the disk makers are interested in.
If you want to improve latency, sorry, you're screwed. Hard disk latency hasn't changed in years, since it's based entirely on spin speed and that hit a practical physical limit ages ago (disks that spin significantly faster than 10kRPM would need to be much stronger to survive, and there's no material that's both strong enough and cheap enough for mass production). Use battery-backed SDRAM instead.
I've always felt that the shuttle crew (the astronauts that are about to go up in the thing) should have at least 50% say in go/no-go decisions based on findings like this.
If you told the shuttle crew that your launch plan was to strap them to a lump of metal and then loft them into orbit by repeatedly shooting them with heavy cannon, they would still fly. That's the sort of people that NASA flight crews are. That's the sort of person you have to be to get on the flight roster there. If the launch crew will launch them, the flight crew will be on that thing no matter what the risks. They actually do have a say in the matter, but I'm not sure if anybody even bothers to ask them because everybody at NASA knows an astronaut will say go if he can draw enough breath to get the word out.
Personally, I think they've been eating too much of the insulation foam, and are entirely crazy.
If I've purchased a legitimate copy, and I installed it with a license agreement prior to the release of WGA, by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?
Executive authority. The current US administration has effectively given them a get-out-of-jail-free card, by telling the DoJ not to spend money on prosecuting Microsoft. Civil suits they can simply outspend, by dragging the lawsuit out so long that nobody but another megacorp can afford to finish it - and other megacorps are always willing to settle for cash or cash-equivalents.
So you use software to dial home and verify authenticity, check itself and other files to make sure that they're running and not tampered with, restore each other if necessary, and quite possibly re-confirm that they're authentic from the dial home. Does that make you an evil beast who deserves to die?
Yes. You are punishing the users who paid for your software (the ones who didn't will just install the crack to remove the malware you added). Treating your paying users like criminals is not only evil, it's also very stupid. Deliberately introducing what amounts to a remotely exploitable security hole in order to control the computers of your paying customers is extremely evil.
But wait, it's Microsoft.
No. It's the gaming and 'content' industry. It's EA, the Starforce authors, Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, and all the others. I have never observed any specific bias against Microsoft on this subject; I don't know where you got the idea. Nobody likes using software that is defective by design. No matter how much you may think these people have a 'right' to make money, I know that you still don't actually like what they're doing, because nobody ever woke up in the morning and thought "I want my computer to work less effectively". The only distinction is between people who merely dislike it, and people who hate the evil bastards who are doing this.
Launch a watchdog application and let that watchdog application launch the real OS in a virtualized environment, as soon as a rootkit wants to fiddle the watchdog application takes notice and there would be no way for the rootkit to either detect or by pass the watchdog.
Well, it's possible, but you're presupposing the existence of a function that can reliably tell whether or not a rootkit is present, assuming it has full access to look at anything it wants. That would be a very useful tool in its own right. Unfortunately it's very very hard to create.
There were some motherboard BIOSes that had built in boot sector virus scanning, but they didn't know anything about Free operating systems.
All the ones I've seen didn't know anything about any operating systems. They just trapped all writes to the boot sectors. You were expected to turn it off while installing an operating system.
Re:How do Microsoft Programmers sleep at night?
on
Microsoft Sued Over WGA
·
· Score: 3, Funny
How do Microsoft Programmers sleep at night?
Microsoft programmers sleep during the day. At night they go out and prey upon the living.
I also don't see damaged enamel being fixed by this thing; once enamel is gone, it's pretty much gone.
I'm not sure about the rest, but this bit is wrong. Tooth enamel is worn down all the time by your teeth being used, both from abrasion and acidity; this is the normal way they are supposed to work. It is continually replaced by your body, through a chemical process based around your saliva that deposits minerals on the teeth from the outside. So long as the environment in your mouth is not acidic (ie, you haven't been eating sugary food recently) and your diet supplies all the necessary minerals (mostly calcium), fresh enamel will be deposited. Damaged enamel doesn't really need "fixing", you can just let it reform.
The reason why people tend to think that it can't reform is because the process that grows the teeth in the first place can't be repeated - that deposits enamel in a completely different manner. Also, the reenameling process is quite slow and will only work if you don't snack on sugary things all day.
The problem is when the tooth is damaged below the level of the enamel; this can't be regrown currently (and prevents the tooth from re-enameling over the top) because the damage from eating progresses faster than the tooth can heal. If the enamel has been worn through completely, damage to the tooth below is inevitable - that's when your dentist drills it out and fills it. If this invention can do something about that, it's a significant step forward.
Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.
These days they have a third option: use the device on the suspected terrorist and find out what he knows, then store him in an offshore prison for the rest of his life to be held without trial. That way they get the best of both worlds (assuming that everybody is a terrorist).
Slashdot Mirror
The previous attack was one that can be applied against any platform: somebody used their password over an unencrypted channel (presumably a non-Debian channel, since all the project ones should be encrypted), and somebody else sniffed it and used it to gain access. You can't really do anything about that.
The secondary attack was a local kernel exploit that was first discovered when it was used to attack the debian.org hosts. The attacker(s) came up with something genuinely new (the brk() exploit), there's not a great deal to be done about that either. While the Debian team did make a few mistakes that were cleaned up at that time, none of them were involved in the attack - it wasn't admin error, like you imply.
Goodness knows what this one was.
Unless that task involves numbers, in which case they use MS Excel as their Blunt Instrument. I've never yet seen a case where Excel was the right tool to use, but they do it anyway (using spreadsheets as a database even with MS Access installed, argh!).
This is true, and I don't think it can be solved directly. What is needed instead is to minimize the need to have contact with such people, and to stop them from getting technical jobs. It doesn't really matter if the manager's secretary can't use anything but Word, because all she does is transfer his words onto paper. It does matter if somebody starts pushing their fear onto other people, by insisting that they can communicate only using Word documents, or if the IT 'support' technicians only know how to reboot Windows.
It's probably easier to attack the 'symptoms' (interface requirements and unqualified staff) than it is to tackle the root cause (people are dumb).
True, but the problem is the people who attempt to change the oil in their TV instead of leaving it to somebody who knows what a TV is.
Yes, but only because they were all VB kiddies. "Most people" is not an interesting metric when talking about complex tasks, like programming or publishing. Word is the VB of publishing. It's used by semi-literate people to bash out some crud that nobody else with any sense would want to touch, even with gloves and tongs.
Most non-crappy programs are still written with (smarter) text editors and makefiles (or make-equivalents, like ant). Not because it's "faster", but because it gets the job done right where nothing else does.
No, it's typically more: try, swear, try, swear, try, swear, try, wtf happened that time? investigate, swear, cry a bit, try something else, inspiration, hypothesis, experiment, revelation, and then swear some more about how stupid you were to try all those other things.
Scientists do question the laws of nature from time to time, but most discoveries are made by tripping over the laws of nature and breaking your nose.
"Sharper than a cricket stump", with a nod to Murray Walker.
It all depends on how you define 'visit'. These rankings are typically just an exercise of the prejudices of the people who compile them.
While this is generally fairly accurate, in the case of Mitnick they seem to have made him a career, not ruined his life. Before he was nobody; now he's getting all kinds of stuff because of all the publicity the government paid for. I'm really not sure what they thought they were doing.
Actually, they could make a case for this being legitimate. Since they are not reproducing your product, but are instead creating something new, it is 'transformative'. That means it is possible to classify this as fair use. Even with commercial intent, even with significant copying, it can still be okay. The significant case here is the SCOTUS ruling about 2 Live Crew's "Pretty Woman" remake.
Obviously you'd have to prove in court that it wasn't just a cheap attempt to undercut the original, but you could make a good case for it.
Under UK law, an employer CANNOT end your contract if they "don't like your work". They have to prove (before the unfair dismissal tribunal that is now almost inevitable) that you are incompetant, acting in bad faith, or that they have made a determined effort to explain why they don't like you and to get you to change your behaviour. The employee is free to leave, but the employer can't do anything without a good reason.
Short of willful destructive behaviour (calling the customer a faggot), genuine inability to perform the task (hired as a software developer but doesn't know how to write code), or continued disobedience (you were told in writing not to wear fishing waders to work but continued anyway), it's almost impossible to fire somebody.
UK companies very rarely fire people nowadays. Instead, they either engage in 'constructive downsizing' (where you fire x% of the least productive parts of your workforce to cut costs, but can't show favouritism), or they approach the problematic employee and offer them three months salary if they'll resign now and not come back. Most employees are willing to be paid off, especially since it guarantees them a decent reference (you can't give somebody a bad reference unless you fired them - more laws about that stuff).
UK law is often like this. It only recognises free contracts between equals. Two citizens are equals and can form any contract they like; a corporate entity and a citizen are probably not equals, the corporation is probably dictating the terms of the contract, so there are lengthly and complicated restrictions on what they can and cannot do, plus a truly immense quantity of case law about how that contract is to be interpreted.
I don't believe there is much precedent in the field of ISP AUPs, they're quite a recent invention that isn't quite the same as anything else. Courts could go either way on this, but it's entirely plausible under UK law that a court would reject a clause saying that the ISP could cancel the customer's account at whim. If this happened, and the customer can show actual damages as a result of their account being terminated (lost mail, websites offline, etc) then the court would almost certainly order the ISP to pay for it all. To the best of my knowledge there hasn't been a significant case like this yet, so this is rather speculative - but I don't think anybody in the UK legal industry would be particularly surprised by either outcome. Could go either way. IANAL, TINLA, etc.
D. Open the mission manual at page 579, "What to do when you find yourself drifting in space with no hope of rescue"
This is NASA. They have procedures for everything. They have procedures for scratching your arse in space. They have procedures for how to open the manual and find the correct procedure. Everything that happens is carefully planned and choreographed on the ground.
It's basically like making a movie, except that nobody's quite sure what the ending will be. NASA's just government-funded entertainment to most people anyway (probably including some of the NASA management).
NASA have a marketing department who generate this 'buzz' by aggressively promoting everything they do. This exercise is justified as necessary to keep attention on NASA and thusly secure funding, in an entertainment-driven political environment.
The Russians don't - I'm not entirely sure how their political system works, but it isn't based around soundbites for Fox 'news'.
WTF? I don't want an extension telling me what to do with the file. I want to tell the computer what to do with the file. That's what everybody who isn't a moron wants (the morons want the computer to psychically infer what to do with the file, but they're unsatisfiable).
If I want to compile the file as C, I run 'gcc -c file'. If I want to print it, I run 'lpr file'. I don't want an extension to describe these things. Different platforms may provide different methods for choosing the action, but the choice of action is made by the user, not by the file.
Choosing actions based on the file is exactly why we have so many mail worms going around named foo.doc.exe - the user wanted to say "load this in openoffice", but they actually end up running the program instead. Nobody but programmers understand this stuff; most users are hopelessly confused by it.
Replacement for battery-backed cache memory in hardware RAID controllers. Nothing worse than having the server go down and then discovering that the battery is dead, so you've got to spend the next eight hours running fsck.
In general, this stuff would make a great *write* cache for larger-but-slower hard disks in high-end applications. Read caching can be accomplished with regular volatile memory, but volatile write caching is always risky. In consumer applications you just live with the risk, but at the top of the market there's definitely a use for fast and safe caching.
It probably also has any number of useful applications in embedded systems, as a faster alternative to flash.
But we knew about all this ten years ago. Magnetic memory is one of those things that has been around forever but nobody ever manages to get to market in a practical and affordable fashion. It remains to be seen whether these people can pull it off (so far, their results are underwhelming).
You got what you paid for. It's a good bet that those Dell boxes were bought because they were cheap (for the listed spec). Dell boxes are cheap because they are made from cheap components and don't last as long as most of the competition. You pay less money to get a box with less value (because it doesn't last as long). Them supplying free replacements would kinda defeat the point.
If you want boxes that will last, don't buy the cheapest ones available. And definitely don't buy Dells.
I do not like taxes either, but they are the price we pay to live in a civil society.
You mean "they are the price we pay to live in a warmongering, corrupt society". Eliminate those two and your taxes will drop to less than half what they currently are. Do not underestimate the power of government waste.
Density sells disks in high-street stores. Access times do not. If you want to improve disk bandwidth, you're probably rich and so you can stripe the data over multiple disks. It's a stupid answer but it's the bottom-line answer, so it's the one that the disk makers are interested in.
If you want to improve latency, sorry, you're screwed. Hard disk latency hasn't changed in years, since it's based entirely on spin speed and that hit a practical physical limit ages ago (disks that spin significantly faster than 10kRPM would need to be much stronger to survive, and there's no material that's both strong enough and cheap enough for mass production). Use battery-backed SDRAM instead.
If you told the shuttle crew that your launch plan was to strap them to a lump of metal and then loft them into orbit by repeatedly shooting them with heavy cannon, they would still fly. That's the sort of people that NASA flight crews are. That's the sort of person you have to be to get on the flight roster there. If the launch crew will launch them, the flight crew will be on that thing no matter what the risks. They actually do have a say in the matter, but I'm not sure if anybody even bothers to ask them because everybody at NASA knows an astronaut will say go if he can draw enough breath to get the word out.
Personally, I think they've been eating too much of the insulation foam, and are entirely crazy.
Not a bad deal. I'm sure Google will end up paying him for the 1 year vacation.
I'm sure his hiring bonus was at least one year's salary.
If I've purchased a legitimate copy, and I installed it with a license agreement prior to the release of WGA, by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?
Executive authority. The current US administration has effectively given them a get-out-of-jail-free card, by telling the DoJ not to spend money on prosecuting Microsoft. Civil suits they can simply outspend, by dragging the lawsuit out so long that nobody but another megacorp can afford to finish it - and other megacorps are always willing to settle for cash or cash-equivalents.
So you use software to dial home and verify authenticity, check itself and other files to make sure that they're running and not tampered with, restore each other if necessary, and quite possibly re-confirm that they're authentic from the dial home. Does that make you an evil beast who deserves to die?
Yes. You are punishing the users who paid for your software (the ones who didn't will just install the crack to remove the malware you added). Treating your paying users like criminals is not only evil, it's also very stupid. Deliberately introducing what amounts to a remotely exploitable security hole in order to control the computers of your paying customers is extremely evil.
But wait, it's Microsoft.
No. It's the gaming and 'content' industry. It's EA, the Starforce authors, Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, and all the others. I have never observed any specific bias against Microsoft on this subject; I don't know where you got the idea. Nobody likes using software that is defective by design. No matter how much you may think these people have a 'right' to make money, I know that you still don't actually like what they're doing, because nobody ever woke up in the morning and thought "I want my computer to work less effectively". The only distinction is between people who merely dislike it, and people who hate the evil bastards who are doing this.
Launch a watchdog application and let that watchdog application launch the real OS in a virtualized environment, as soon as a rootkit wants to fiddle the watchdog application takes notice and there would be no way for the rootkit to either detect or by pass the watchdog.
Well, it's possible, but you're presupposing the existence of a function that can reliably tell whether or not a rootkit is present, assuming it has full access to look at anything it wants. That would be a very useful tool in its own right. Unfortunately it's very very hard to create.
There were some motherboard BIOSes that had built in boot sector virus scanning, but they didn't know anything about Free operating systems.
All the ones I've seen didn't know anything about any operating systems. They just trapped all writes to the boot sectors. You were expected to turn it off while installing an operating system.
How do Microsoft Programmers sleep at night?
Microsoft programmers sleep during the day. At night they go out and prey upon the living.
I also don't see damaged enamel being fixed by this thing; once enamel is gone, it's pretty much gone.
I'm not sure about the rest, but this bit is wrong. Tooth enamel is worn down all the time by your teeth being used, both from abrasion and acidity; this is the normal way they are supposed to work. It is continually replaced by your body, through a chemical process based around your saliva that deposits minerals on the teeth from the outside. So long as the environment in your mouth is not acidic (ie, you haven't been eating sugary food recently) and your diet supplies all the necessary minerals (mostly calcium), fresh enamel will be deposited. Damaged enamel doesn't really need "fixing", you can just let it reform.
The reason why people tend to think that it can't reform is because the process that grows the teeth in the first place can't be repeated - that deposits enamel in a completely different manner. Also, the reenameling process is quite slow and will only work if you don't snack on sugary things all day.
The problem is when the tooth is damaged below the level of the enamel; this can't be regrown currently (and prevents the tooth from re-enameling over the top) because the damage from eating progresses faster than the tooth can heal. If the enamel has been worn through completely, damage to the tooth below is inevitable - that's when your dentist drills it out and fills it. If this invention can do something about that, it's a significant step forward.
Seems to me the government has a choice: They can use the device on the suspected terrorist if they decide it's worth letting him go later (rather than prosecuting him) for detecting and stopping the plot.
These days they have a third option: use the device on the suspected terrorist and find out what he knows, then store him in an offshore prison for the rest of his life to be held without trial. That way they get the best of both worlds (assuming that everybody is a terrorist).