What's most interesting about your experience was that Amazon had "about a dozen reviews" for a product that hadn't even gotten into the hands of American consumers. If anyone is spamming Amazon, it sounds like the marketing company selling the product astroturfed Amazon with fake pre-release reviews.
I hope these kooks come to "SSXW" in Spring of 2012 as promised.
If you are pulled over by the cops on your way to purchase a car from a guy on Craigslist, the cops can outright confiscate your money if you're holding more than $10k in cash.
Since most people on Craigslist require cash transactions, that jeopardizes a great many peoples' right to presumption of innocence. After the money is confiscated, they are put into the position of proving they are innocent.
The problem with getting rid of the security theater is that true security will be impractical for air travel to continue. What has been implemented now is an expensive, ineffective compromise between 'protection' and enabling air travel. The main result is the inconvenience of millions of people and the wasting of billions of dollars.
Example: According to the TSA site, rules prohibit a passenger from carrying more than 100ml of liquid through a security checkpoint. I have no idea how much explosive liquid it would take to cause a serious problem aboard a plane, but I would assume a liter of something would achieve a terrorist's goal. This could easily be accomplished under current rules by having ten terrorists each bring a 100ml bottle of explosive fluid through the security checkpoint, then combining the volume once inside the plane. Even easier would be for one terrorist to simply make ten trips through security, each time bringing in another 100ml bottle of explosive fluid and stashing them somewhere within the gates area to then be combined into a 1-liter explosive bomb.
I used to host my own server for a small user community. I found myself burning up dozens of hours at a go dealing with annoying and basic administration responsiblities when I really wanted to work on higher-level stuff like performance-tuning and content management. Hackers were an ongoing threat to my free time.
You can rationalize away all of this and intend to just do things right from the start.You're going to eventually get hacked in some way. This isn't your primary job, so eventually a vulnerability will arise in one of your web apps and it's going to get exploited on your server. What's your backup strategy? Are you going to want to reformat the hard drive, reinstall the OS, and roll the database back to a recent snapshot prior to the break-in?
Let the administration be the hosting provider's headache. With a company like Dreamhost, if your web app becomes compromised, you can roll back the database and filesystem to backups taken hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Your site will be up within minutes and then you can work on patching.
Seth
lack of real-world experience
on
Printing a Building
·
· Score: 3, Informative
If this grad school student were to spend a summer working with concrete, he would learn that it's not a medium suited for 3-D printing.
Civil engineers would reject any concrete structure design proposed with 3-D printing. They despise cold joints, and if a vertical support consisted of dozens of cold joints, that's a no-go from the beginning. That's just one dimension of this flawed concept. Comparing a flexible material like a palm tree to an absolutely rigid material like concrete is pure folly. Concrete structures don't bend under load. They crack and break.
Sure, Google's offerings are diverse and far from consistently successful. But the distinction is that most of them are home-grown efforts. Sure, there were huge acquisitions like YouTube, Picassa, and SketchUp. But all of these pale in comparison to the gargantuan squandering of resources Yahoo is guilty of in a single purchase: Broadcast.com.
What can $2 billion dollars accomplish? As was demonstrated by an idiot savant, $2 billion will buy you an NBA championship ring. Management of the $2 billion Yahoo spent acquiring Broadcast.com was handled by Marc Cuban, who used the money to buy one of the shittiest teams in the NBA, then slowly stock it with talent until the Mavericks won a title. Meanwhile, Yahoo figured out that Broadcast.com was little more than a clever pitch that played well in the boardroom, but failed to ever turn any kind of profit. Now it doesn't much exist as even a URL.
And who was the mental giant that hoodwinked yahoo? The same guy who:
Launched an HD tv station thinking he would beat all the other broadcasters to the format.
Don't measure Yahoo by the wisdom of its own ideas. Measure it by the ideas of those who have successfully tricked Yahoo in the past. To clarify, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion, of which Cuban ran off with about $2 billion. As far as Yahoo is concerned, it literally vaporized $5.7 billion in wealth through this transaction.
Apple has been twisting Intel's arm (that IS a pun) about power consumption and threatening to dump their chips in favor of ARM. Another way Intel limits Apple is that their product cycles are tied to Intel's product cycles, which constrains Apple to a parity with other laptop vendors. By moving to a homebrewed CPU, it would give Apple even more architectural control / freedom which would assist in differentiating Apple products from their competition.
Funny how it all comes full circle. Apple suffered from having its unique RISC architecture for many years. Then Apple conformed to X86 for just a few years and leveraged that to get enough marketshare that they can move back to an independent architecture again.
I would agree with a lot of what you say. The main weakness with these security systems is the true quality of the images.
In 2008, a man set fire to the Texas Governor's Mansion with a molotov cocktail. The structure essentially burned to the ground. He had to jump a fence and walk across the mansion grounds to lob the bottle. It's all on video. Three years later, no one has been charged with the crime.
Video camera footage is pretty hit-and-miss, while hard data like IP addresses, license plate photos, etc. are hard to evade. In the case of this collar bomber, the police likely had an easy path to follow. Google turned over the IP address that created the Gmail account. That pointed them at the Chicago airport. From that, they could have possibly collected a log of MAC addresses from the free wifi provider. Since the suspect had driven his car to the airport, they had photos of his license plate. That easily cross-references with the plane tickets to Australia to perform the attack. The MAC addresses also would cross-reference against the logs of paid wifi service providers.
However, times have changed, games have been tailored to higher resolutions
Not trying to initiate a debate here, but are recent games really tailored to higher resolutions? Seems like most consumers are only running 1080p displays. Since so many games are developed with consoles in mind, I'd think the resolutions would be bound to what the consoles are connecting to, which is also 1080p.
And when your friends come over checking the system out, they might ask, "Why does the speaker manufacturer's name have an exclamation point at the end of it?" You tell them, "Because when you're throwing a party and someone asks, 'What kind of speakers are those?' you're going to have to yell, 'CERWIN VEGA!'"
Even so, I was re-watching Pulp Fiction a couple of months ago and looking at Uma in her scene with Travolta at the 50s diner. As she kept exhaling cigarette smoke I couldn't help but look at her face and notice things I didn't remember from back in the nineties. She's got really buggy eyes, and that Betty Page haircut really hasn't aged well. She was definitely 'IT' when Pulp Fiction came out, but her attractiveness isn't timeless.
Since you're being frank with me, I'll be frank right back. You are completely out of touch with contemporary cinema. There have been plenty of excellent movies released by 'the industry' and screened in Portland theaters over the past 4 years. You just aren't connected with what is going on in film these days.
How can we encourage children to be active if anything "active" thay they would think about doing (running, playing tag, climbing trees, skateboarding, etc...) is seen in a negative light?
I just Google+ friended you for that statement. There are so many activities, such as the great examples you gave, that the author could rewrite this study substituting for the word 'playground.' One of the bees in my bonnet these days is how diving boards are being phased out at public swimming pools.
It started with phasing out high-dives. Now low-dives are also an endangered animal. New public pools are built shallow with water slides instead of diving boards. From the first to the 10,000th time a kid slides down a waterslide, they've developed exactly zero skills at doing anything. It's passive entertainment. There's no sense of performance or challenge. With a diving board, there are a whole host of dynamics a child can attempt to master. Our society is taking that structure away from children in so many areas.
If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, you might have seen the Chinese divers dominate in all categories. American children might have seen that and said, "Mommy, I want to become a diver and win a gold medal at the Olympics." To which an honest parent would have to say, "Unfortunately, you live in America and aren't permitted to engage in that activity. Perhaps if we move to a dangerous country like China you'll have that option in life."
What world do you live in where the FBI couldn't wrangle some information out of the NSA if they needed it?
I live in a world where the NSA is above the FBI in the organizational pecking order. In this world, the NSA will stand by and watch entire buildings go up in flames rather than divulge information that would reveal its spying capabilities.
That's not to say the NSA doesn't tip off law enforcement in special ways. Consider the 2000 NYE bomb plot foiled by custom agents. It's likely that the NSA had a hand in this but hid their communications intercepting capabilities by enabling the perpetrator to be caught through a 'random' customs inspection.
In the case of the Anonymous arrests, the court will have to see evidence of why the feds believe these suspects are the perpetrators of cyber hooliganism. The feds won't be able to say, "Well, we captured every packet traveling on the internet backbone and traced these packets to the mac addresses of these people's computers." The NSA won't allow that because all the bad guys would then see that communication channel is compromised.
Relying on multiple proxy servers as the first line of defense can be rendered useless by those with unfettered access to the Internet backbone and ISP data centers.
Hmmmm... I wonder what the search warrant for that wiretap looks like. Oh, wait. That wouldn't be admissible in court.
The tools of the NSA are not at the disposal of the FBI for domestic surveillance. The NSA uses them to passively gather intelligence. If they were used in an overt manner, then the people the NSA are spying on would be tipped off to the compromised communication channels. The NSA isn't going to divulge their methods to the criminal public at large so the FBI can collar a few script kiddies. The tools are just too valuable to render useless for such a small prize.
the police video tape the public every time they stop a vehicle.
In Austin, Texas, when the police shoot someone they've pulled over, they are allowed to review the dash camera before having to give a statement or answer any questions about the incident. This policy was instituted by police chief Art Acevedo to ensure that the descriptions of the incidents given by officers would align with the video taped evidence. Civilians are not afforded this privilege, however.
Reading your comment here, it is clear that you haven't wasted the time to research the philosophy / structure of the anonymous group. Which is a perfectly fine way to go about your life. You haven't missed out on much.
But to clarify the expected result of this raid, I thought it might be valuable for those unfamiliar with Anonymous to know that the group is entirely anonymous, even among members. The people who were captured would probably love to roll on others in order to avoid jail time. That is not a choice for them, however. This makes it an attractive mob to manipulate.
The feds will relish a day or two capturing headlines, pretending that "something" has been done to curtail these nefarious hackers. It's exactly as theatrical as the war on terror. At most they'll charge these individuals with possession of child pornography, as their browser cache is undoubtedly filled with thumbnails of illegal content inadvertently picked up while trawling 4chan. It's quite doubtful the FBI has captured anyone of significance.
More than those two, Wired itself has been untrustworthy since the Conde Nast acquisition. Since then, advertorial has increased dramatically. The most recent, glaring, example was the piece fawning about Symantec staff dissecting stuxnet. Read through that piece and count how many references there are to the size and scale of Symantec's resources.
Of the article's 54 usages of the name "Symantec", the 3rd one down the page is a classic example of PR designed to raise a company's profile among its competitors:
In 2002 he took a job with an antispam firm, which was gobbled up by Symantec soon afterwards. O Murchu eventually transferred to the corporate giant's Culver City office, leaving Dublin for Southern California.
The article is absolutely riddled with praise like that.
I think we're both on the same side of this issue and only splitting hairs at this point.
As for 'eventuations', we've had a shoe bomber and an underwear bomber succeed in smuggling explosive PETN past the TSA's Maginot defenses. In both cases, the bombing attempts were foiled by flimsy detonation systems. As much as other passengers seemed to have intervened, a competent plan wouldn't have provided any opportunity for passengers to respond. For instance, had either bomb-carrier attempted to detonate the concealed PETN while in the lavatory, no one could have recognized what was happening.
TSA's huge investment is equally elaborate as the Maginot line, and equally as simple to circumvent. The only difference is that the buffoons who have to date attempted, made other errors in their execution. The errors are so trivial, that it further illustrates the limited resources and intelligence required to circumvent the TSA security system.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. TSA is a very expensive security theater troupe creating a ridiculous Maginot line around our airports.
Not only will these expensive body scanners not be effective against internally-hidden explosives, even if the TSA cat-scanned passengers, the screeners would need a medical degree to recognize the difference between explosives and artificial joints, plates, etc.
The explosives hidden in the printer cartridges were x-rayed and eluded detection. Consider this from Wikipedia:
Both parcels in the 2010 cargo plane bomb plot were x-rayed without the bombs being spotted.[40] Qatar Airways said the PETN bomb "could not be detected by x-ray screening or trained sniffer dogs".[41] The Bundeskriminalamt received copies of the Dubai x-rays, and an investigator said German staff would not have identified the bomb either.[40][42] New airport security procedures followed in the U.S., largely to protect against PETN.[15]
The Maginot Line metaphor is especially valid as none of the recent airplane bomb plots have originated from within the US, so installation of expensive body scanners domestically does little to prevent bombs aboard inbound international flights.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah. It might be.
Seth
What's most interesting about your experience was that Amazon had "about a dozen reviews" for a product that hadn't even gotten into the hands of American consumers. If anyone is spamming Amazon, it sounds like the marketing company selling the product astroturfed Amazon with fake pre-release reviews.
I hope these kooks come to "SSXW" in Spring of 2012 as promised.
Seth
If you are pulled over by the cops on your way to purchase a car from a guy on Craigslist, the cops can outright confiscate your money if you're holding more than $10k in cash.
Since most people on Craigslist require cash transactions, that jeopardizes a great many peoples' right to presumption of innocence. After the money is confiscated, they are put into the position of proving they are innocent.
Seth
That was a hilarious link.
Like people are going to be all, "Oh, I can't be bothered to go down to the jewelers. I'll just buy this $200,000 watch from a website."
Seth
The problem with getting rid of the security theater is that true security will be impractical for air travel to continue. What has been implemented now is an expensive, ineffective compromise between 'protection' and enabling air travel. The main result is the inconvenience of millions of people and the wasting of billions of dollars.
Example: According to the TSA site, rules prohibit a passenger from carrying more than 100ml of liquid through a security checkpoint. I have no idea how much explosive liquid it would take to cause a serious problem aboard a plane, but I would assume a liter of something would achieve a terrorist's goal. This could easily be accomplished under current rules by having ten terrorists each bring a 100ml bottle of explosive fluid through the security checkpoint, then combining the volume once inside the plane. Even easier would be for one terrorist to simply make ten trips through security, each time bringing in another 100ml bottle of explosive fluid and stashing them somewhere within the gates area to then be combined into a 1-liter explosive bomb.
Please mod this up. The parent post succinctly explains the true legality behind shooting photos on private property.
Seth
That's fine. You're irrelevant. There were millions of people like you in Egypt, too.
seth
I used to host my own server for a small user community. I found myself burning up dozens of hours at a go dealing with annoying and basic administration responsiblities when I really wanted to work on higher-level stuff like performance-tuning and content management. Hackers were an ongoing threat to my free time.
You can rationalize away all of this and intend to just do things right from the start.You're going to eventually get hacked in some way. This isn't your primary job, so eventually a vulnerability will arise in one of your web apps and it's going to get exploited on your server. What's your backup strategy? Are you going to want to reformat the hard drive, reinstall the OS, and roll the database back to a recent snapshot prior to the break-in?
Let the administration be the hosting provider's headache. With a company like Dreamhost, if your web app becomes compromised, you can roll back the database and filesystem to backups taken hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. Your site will be up within minutes and then you can work on patching.
Seth
If this grad school student were to spend a summer working with concrete, he would learn that it's not a medium suited for 3-D printing.
Civil engineers would reject any concrete structure design proposed with 3-D printing. They despise cold joints, and if a vertical support consisted of dozens of cold joints, that's a no-go from the beginning. That's just one dimension of this flawed concept. Comparing a flexible material like a palm tree to an absolutely rigid material like concrete is pure folly. Concrete structures don't bend under load. They crack and break.
Seth
What can $2 billion dollars accomplish? As was demonstrated by an idiot savant, $2 billion will buy you an NBA championship ring. Management of the $2 billion Yahoo spent acquiring Broadcast.com was handled by Marc Cuban, who used the money to buy one of the shittiest teams in the NBA, then slowly stock it with talent until the Mavericks won a title. Meanwhile, Yahoo figured out that Broadcast.com was little more than a clever pitch that played well in the boardroom, but failed to ever turn any kind of profit. Now it doesn't much exist as even a URL.
And who was the mental giant that hoodwinked yahoo? The same guy who:
Don't measure Yahoo by the wisdom of its own ideas. Measure it by the ideas of those who have successfully tricked Yahoo in the past. To clarify, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion, of which Cuban ran off with about $2 billion. As far as Yahoo is concerned, it literally vaporized $5.7 billion in wealth through this transaction.
Seth
Apple has been twisting Intel's arm (that IS a pun) about power consumption and threatening to dump their chips in favor of ARM. Another way Intel limits Apple is that their product cycles are tied to Intel's product cycles, which constrains Apple to a parity with other laptop vendors. By moving to a homebrewed CPU, it would give Apple even more architectural control / freedom which would assist in differentiating Apple products from their competition.
Funny how it all comes full circle. Apple suffered from having its unique RISC architecture for many years. Then Apple conformed to X86 for just a few years and leveraged that to get enough marketshare that they can move back to an independent architecture again.
Seth
Fuck Facebook.
Fuck Ticketmaster.
Seth
I would agree with a lot of what you say. The main weakness with these security systems is the true quality of the images.
In 2008, a man set fire to the Texas Governor's Mansion with a molotov cocktail. The structure essentially burned to the ground. He had to jump a fence and walk across the mansion grounds to lob the bottle. It's all on video. Three years later, no one has been charged with the crime.
Video camera footage is pretty hit-and-miss, while hard data like IP addresses, license plate photos, etc. are hard to evade. In the case of this collar bomber, the police likely had an easy path to follow. Google turned over the IP address that created the Gmail account. That pointed them at the Chicago airport. From that, they could have possibly collected a log of MAC addresses from the free wifi provider. Since the suspect had driven his car to the airport, they had photos of his license plate. That easily cross-references with the plane tickets to Australia to perform the attack. The MAC addresses also would cross-reference against the logs of paid wifi service providers.
--seth
Not trying to initiate a debate here, but are recent games really tailored to higher resolutions? Seems like most consumers are only running 1080p displays. Since so many games are developed with consoles in mind, I'd think the resolutions would be bound to what the consoles are connecting to, which is also 1080p.
I miss the days of high resolution gaming....
Seth
My ideal setup:
Done.
And when your friends come over checking the system out, they might ask, "Why does the speaker manufacturer's name have an exclamation point at the end of it?" You tell them, "Because when you're throwing a party and someone asks, 'What kind of speakers are those?' you're going to have to yell, 'CERWIN VEGA!'"
Seth
No doubt you are correct.
Even so, I was re-watching Pulp Fiction a couple of months ago and looking at Uma in her scene with Travolta at the 50s diner. As she kept exhaling cigarette smoke I couldn't help but look at her face and notice things I didn't remember from back in the nineties. She's got really buggy eyes, and that Betty Page haircut really hasn't aged well. She was definitely 'IT' when Pulp Fiction came out, but her attractiveness isn't timeless.
Seth
Examples:
Seth
I just Google+ friended you for that statement. There are so many activities, such as the great examples you gave, that the author could rewrite this study substituting for the word 'playground.' One of the bees in my bonnet these days is how diving boards are being phased out at public swimming pools.
It started with phasing out high-dives. Now low-dives are also an endangered animal. New public pools are built shallow with water slides instead of diving boards. From the first to the 10,000th time a kid slides down a waterslide, they've developed exactly zero skills at doing anything. It's passive entertainment. There's no sense of performance or challenge. With a diving board, there are a whole host of dynamics a child can attempt to master. Our society is taking that structure away from children in so many areas.
If you watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics, you might have seen the Chinese divers dominate in all categories. American children might have seen that and said, "Mommy, I want to become a diver and win a gold medal at the Olympics." To which an honest parent would have to say, "Unfortunately, you live in America and aren't permitted to engage in that activity. Perhaps if we move to a dangerous country like China you'll have that option in life."
Seth
I live in a world where the NSA is above the FBI in the organizational pecking order. In this world, the NSA will stand by and watch entire buildings go up in flames rather than divulge information that would reveal its spying capabilities.
That's not to say the NSA doesn't tip off law enforcement in special ways. Consider the 2000 NYE bomb plot foiled by custom agents. It's likely that the NSA had a hand in this but hid their communications intercepting capabilities by enabling the perpetrator to be caught through a 'random' customs inspection.
In the case of the Anonymous arrests, the court will have to see evidence of why the feds believe these suspects are the perpetrators of cyber hooliganism. The feds won't be able to say, "Well, we captured every packet traveling on the internet backbone and traced these packets to the mac addresses of these people's computers." The NSA won't allow that because all the bad guys would then see that communication channel is compromised.
Seth
Hmmmm... I wonder what the search warrant for that wiretap looks like. Oh, wait. That wouldn't be admissible in court.
The tools of the NSA are not at the disposal of the FBI for domestic surveillance. The NSA uses them to passively gather intelligence. If they were used in an overt manner, then the people the NSA are spying on would be tipped off to the compromised communication channels. The NSA isn't going to divulge their methods to the criminal public at large so the FBI can collar a few script kiddies. The tools are just too valuable to render useless for such a small prize.
Seth
In Austin, Texas, when the police shoot someone they've pulled over, they are allowed to review the dash camera before having to give a statement or answer any questions about the incident. This policy was instituted by police chief Art Acevedo to ensure that the descriptions of the incidents given by officers would align with the video taped evidence. Civilians are not afforded this privilege, however.
Seth
Reading your comment here, it is clear that you haven't wasted the time to research the philosophy / structure of the anonymous group. Which is a perfectly fine way to go about your life. You haven't missed out on much.
But to clarify the expected result of this raid, I thought it might be valuable for those unfamiliar with Anonymous to know that the group is entirely anonymous, even among members. The people who were captured would probably love to roll on others in order to avoid jail time. That is not a choice for them, however. This makes it an attractive mob to manipulate.
The feds will relish a day or two capturing headlines, pretending that "something" has been done to curtail these nefarious hackers. It's exactly as theatrical as the war on terror. At most they'll charge these individuals with possession of child pornography, as their browser cache is undoubtedly filled with thumbnails of illegal content inadvertently picked up while trawling 4chan. It's quite doubtful the FBI has captured anyone of significance.
Seth
Of the article's 54 usages of the name "Symantec", the 3rd one down the page is a classic example of PR designed to raise a company's profile among its competitors:
The article is absolutely riddled with praise like that.
Seth Johnsnon
I think we're both on the same side of this issue and only splitting hairs at this point.
As for 'eventuations', we've had a shoe bomber and an underwear bomber succeed in smuggling explosive PETN past the TSA's Maginot defenses. In both cases, the bombing attempts were foiled by flimsy detonation systems. As much as other passengers seemed to have intervened, a competent plan wouldn't have provided any opportunity for passengers to respond. For instance, had either bomb-carrier attempted to detonate the concealed PETN while in the lavatory, no one could have recognized what was happening.
TSA's huge investment is equally elaborate as the Maginot line, and equally as simple to circumvent. The only difference is that the buffoons who have to date attempted, made other errors in their execution. The errors are so trivial, that it further illustrates the limited resources and intelligence required to circumvent the TSA security system.
Seth
Not only will these expensive body scanners not be effective against internally-hidden explosives, even if the TSA cat-scanned passengers, the screeners would need a medical degree to recognize the difference between explosives and artificial joints, plates, etc.
The explosives hidden in the printer cartridges were x-rayed and eluded detection. Consider this from Wikipedia:
The Maginot Line metaphor is especially valid as none of the recent airplane bomb plots have originated from within the US, so installation of expensive body scanners domestically does little to prevent bombs aboard inbound international flights.
Seth