If you run BIND, rather than getting your alerts via/. look into a support contract so you get them directly from the vendor.
Very true. Its funny, that this morning I had applied security patches to a debian stable box and thought "hmm, looks like BIND is getting fixed, wonder what thats about" before this even got posted to slashdot.
YEAH! You're so right, just because privacy implications of using service X are well understood means you have NO excuse not to understand the privacy implications of Y. Even if X makes it clear by the inherent nature of X, and Y hides it from the user as much as possible, there is exactly no difference.
Yeah and I spent a few weeks working in a town on the border. Its not all Canadians, nor is it actually said a-boot (that was just used to lampoon it, but somehow caught on in pop culture), its more like a-boat, and depending on accent is anywhere between close and very close to way about is pronounced in the States.
Yet Slashdot has never ran a story on the Tea Party.
Don't be tempted to create false equivalence in effort to "balance" sides of political matters. Occupy wallstreet has been camping out for many weeks and are now subject to police force. The tea party rallies were permitted, short, and not subject to police force and shared most properties of any other plolitical rally. Most rallies fly under the slashdot radar.
The purpose is security theater. When something bad happens they activate the theater (or it doesn't need to be activated, as in a passive system or something that by its very nature is an always on system) and then they point at it and say "see we did something so you can't blame us." Instead of you know, actually improving security.
The Emergency Alert System isn't a security system, it's a System to Alert citizens about Emergencies.
(Bad analogy) Its purpose isn't to reinforce water levees, it is to tell you when they're breached so you know to get the fuck out of town.
As I understand it, the system was supposed to take away the local broadcasters control over the alert.
The broadcaster doesn't lose technical control over their systems, they are obligated by the FCC to use their systems to relay alerts.
The hardware for the EAS is owned and operated by the broadcaster themselves. In some places, individual broadcasters failed to receive the alert at all due to a failure upstream. In that case failure to transmit it is not on them, but if the upstream did transmit, responsibility is handed to the broadcaster. When I worked at a radio station, basically we had two different upstream radio frequencies to monitor, if there was an alert on either of them that met the criteria for us to retransmit, it was our responsibility for doing so.
But you are wrong about the FCC's ability and intent to enforce the current EAS regulations. Not only do the Feds take it VERY seriously, the regs have teeth and can cost stations tens of thousands of dollars in multiplying fines (and because of the complex nature of compliance and the amount of monitoring, gear, and paperwork required, it's usually the smallest, most marginally profitable stations that wind up taking the hits here).
Huh, interesting to hear, I was just operating off of assumptions made from observations in market I operated in once upon a time. We observed plenty of other stations not following EAS procedures, heard verbal accounts from consultant engineers we brought in every now and then, and my own shock at how lax some of the EAS requirements were when reading FCC rules. I guess it just worked out that nobody from that area manged to get on the wrong side of the FCC.
So can we say in advance that that aspect of the test quite clearly FAILS?/facepalm
Not really.
This test probably just focuses on FEMAs ability to get the message to the PEP (Primary Entry Points) for the EAS network, not the end broadcaster to properly transmit, or even receive from the PEP (thats what weekly tests are for). And once the message gets to the PEP, its going to look an awful lot like every other EAS test anyway.
Its not like its TV stations are going to pop up messages saying "ALERT! EMERGENCY! OH MY GOD! EVERYTHINGS OVER!" with no additional information. Its going to be like the EAS test that happens every single week. Not overriding video is IIRC tolerable under the FCC requirements. The audio message will be there like always.
Is it not the same down there in the US? The fact that this might not pop up "THIS IS A TEST" on the majority of home TV systems would be enough for me to consider the entire system completely broken. There is no point in having a warning system that causes as much panic as a real event its intended to help warn against if you choose to test it.
Its not broken, its just that some people are really, really dumb.
Not only will the actual audio of the alert be there saying that its just a test, there should be no panic at the presence of an alert if it were real. Every broadcast station here is required to activate the alert system for a test once a week and its used for real whenever there is severe weather.
There doesn't need to be a graphic "this is just a test" message, the emergency alerts in our country are audio-based with a bit of textual metadata (which is really only necessary for the broadcaster). The audio recording will say its a test. Some TV stations just have their audio signal overridden and continue displaying program video. Yes, its because they're too cheap for a character generator, but its not really a failure of the system to deliver a message. Perhaps a failure of the FCC's requirements and they should mandate video to be overridden too, but the message is still delivered fine.
The real story here is that Fed.Gov can take over control of any media outlet without the consent of the media outlet.
No. That is not the story; those are paranoid delusions. Each broadcast station operates their EAS hardware. It can be overridden in many ways, from changing the control setting from "automatically forward messages" to "wait for my cue before forwarding" all the way to removing the electric relay that allows the encoder to inject between the program signal and transmitter.
If we're ever in enough trouble where EAS is used to "take over a media outlet", there will be enough problems going on that no broadcaster will give two shits about the FCC ramifications of not forwarding EAS messages (which are currently pretty weak anyway and not enforced anyway).
Thats where the attack ads come in. You scare the people who would sit at home because they're not pleased with any candidate, into going to the poll to vote for "not the other guy".
In other news, assistant U.S. attorney Thomas “Tad” DiBiase has stepped down. Readers will recall that DiBiase is “the ‘Kevin Bacon’ of high-powered D.C. legal...
That one and a half sentence summary ought to be enough to raise multiple red flags to anyone considering pulling some legal bullying on this guy.
Maybe Righthaven just wanted a lower DiBiase number?
For the duration of the test, I was locked out of my TiVo. So while the system might not be as broad reaching as you are suggesting, it's definitely been changed from your grandparents' EAS.
There was the EBS/EAS change was back in '97, but for your case your TiVo just knows how to detect an aler header/tone and EOM. Those have always been cornerstones of emergency broadcast tech.
Why aren't they hooked to e.g. youtube (interrupt and replace all running video streams), and cell networks (at least send everyone a broadcast text message, could have a link to the video for smartphones).
The tech exists, as does the EAS successor CAP (cryptographically signed xml, obtained over the interbutts). Unfortunately the roll-out of this kind of thing is incredibly slow, especially as our existing alert infrastructure suits our existing alerting needs OK (more or less depending on who you ask) and the country hates the idea of government making buisness do anything.
I'm sorry but until our monopolistic telecom overlords decide to replace all their copper with fiber, we will never have download-only consoles.
And it still won't be a good idea until those connections are fast, reliable, and ubiquitous and the user won't experience any loss of bought goods if the console manufacturer's servers go offline forever unexpectedly. Then and only then will digital distribution come even close to having the properties inherent to physical media distribution.
Because Xerox cooperate wanted to focus on making copiers, the guys at Xerox PARC invited Jobs over for a tour so that _someone_ would use the tech, Xerox management either didn't see the market opportunity and/or didn't want to invest in it.
Wait a minute, RIM came up with that about A DECADE AGO with their blackberry enterprise server (BES) platform.
The other smartphones can VPN too, the real problem that still exists for all the phones is for the regular user who neither knows whats going on, nor has a server already available to tunnel through.
Mitnick made his way by stealing the personal identification of *dead infants*. He's a sociopath.
Maybe if he stole them for shits and giggles, but the identities of dead infants have two significant properties: They're real identities and they're not in use. If there was another class of people with the same or better potential for clean identity theft, he probably would have stolen their identities too.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the clear explanation.
If you run BIND, rather than getting your alerts via /. look into a support contract so you get them directly from the vendor.
Very true. Its funny, that this morning I had applied security patches to a debian stable box and thought "hmm, looks like BIND is getting fixed, wonder what thats about" before this even got posted to slashdot.
has NO leg to stand on.
YEAH! You're so right, just because privacy implications of using service X are well understood means you have NO excuse not to understand the privacy implications of Y. Even if X makes it clear by the inherent nature of X, and Y hides it from the user as much as possible, there is exactly no difference.
Certainly many of us consider the relationship of the Doctor and Rose to be a little over the line
It was way, way, way over the line. Oh, you mean the sexualzation? I meant the fact they cast Billy Piper at all.
Yeah and I spent a few weeks working in a town on the border. Its not all Canadians, nor is it actually said a-boot (that was just used to lampoon it, but somehow caught on in pop culture), its more like a-boat, and depending on accent is anywhere between close and very close to way about is pronounced in the States.
They're the department that bought the $16 muffins. link
It turned out what happened was a $16 breakfast, that among other things included muffins, got recorded as muffins.
http://www.startribune.com/nation/132803818.html
Good thing the public threw a shitfit over that.
As good as steam is, like any other distribution platform it asks for a lot from the developer. In this case, too much for notch.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch
Yet Slashdot has never ran a story on the Tea Party.
Don't be tempted to create false equivalence in effort to "balance" sides of political matters. Occupy wallstreet has been camping out for many weeks and are now subject to police force. The tea party rallies were permitted, short, and not subject to police force and shared most properties of any other plolitical rally. Most rallies fly under the slashdot radar.
Read this on Failblog last night. Might want to aim for slightly more originality.
Failblog might want to too, I read it on cracked before then, not to mention hearing various incarnations of it for years.
The purpose is security theater. When something bad happens they activate the theater (or it doesn't need to be activated, as in a passive system or something that by its very nature is an always on system) and then they point at it and say "see we did something so you can't blame us." Instead of you know, actually improving security.
The Emergency Alert System isn't a security system, it's a System to Alert citizens about Emergencies.
(Bad analogy) Its purpose isn't to reinforce water levees, it is to tell you when they're breached so you know to get the fuck out of town.
As I understand it, the system was supposed to take away the local broadcasters control over the alert.
The broadcaster doesn't lose technical control over their systems, they are obligated by the FCC to use their systems to relay alerts.
The hardware for the EAS is owned and operated by the broadcaster themselves. In some places, individual broadcasters failed to receive the alert at all due to a failure upstream. In that case failure to transmit it is not on them, but if the upstream did transmit, responsibility is handed to the broadcaster. When I worked at a radio station, basically we had two different upstream radio frequencies to monitor, if there was an alert on either of them that met the criteria for us to retransmit, it was our responsibility for doing so.
But you are wrong about the FCC's ability and intent to enforce the current EAS regulations. Not only do the Feds take it VERY seriously, the regs have teeth and can cost stations tens of thousands of dollars in multiplying fines (and because of the complex nature of compliance and the amount of monitoring, gear, and paperwork required, it's usually the smallest, most marginally profitable stations that wind up taking the hits here).
Huh, interesting to hear, I was just operating off of assumptions made from observations in market I operated in once upon a time. We observed plenty of other stations not following EAS procedures, heard verbal accounts from consultant engineers we brought in every now and then, and my own shock at how lax some of the EAS requirements were when reading FCC rules. I guess it just worked out that nobody from that area manged to get on the wrong side of the FCC.
So can we say in advance that that aspect of the test quite clearly FAILS? /facepalm
Not really.
This test probably just focuses on FEMAs ability to get the message to the PEP (Primary Entry Points) for the EAS network, not the end broadcaster to properly transmit, or even receive from the PEP (thats what weekly tests are for). And once the message gets to the PEP, its going to look an awful lot like every other EAS test anyway.
Its not like its TV stations are going to pop up messages saying "ALERT! EMERGENCY! OH MY GOD! EVERYTHINGS OVER!" with no additional information. Its going to be like the EAS test that happens every single week. Not overriding video is IIRC tolerable under the FCC requirements. The audio message will be there like always.
Is it not the same down there in the US? The fact that this might not pop up "THIS IS A TEST" on the majority of home TV systems would be enough for me to consider the entire system completely broken. There is no point in having a warning system that causes as much panic as a real event its intended to help warn against if you choose to test it.
Its not broken, its just that some people are really, really dumb.
Not only will the actual audio of the alert be there saying that its just a test, there should be no panic at the presence of an alert if it were real. Every broadcast station here is required to activate the alert system for a test once a week and its used for real whenever there is severe weather.
There doesn't need to be a graphic "this is just a test" message, the emergency alerts in our country are audio-based with a bit of textual metadata (which is really only necessary for the broadcaster). The audio recording will say its a test. Some TV stations just have their audio signal overridden and continue displaying program video. Yes, its because they're too cheap for a character generator, but its not really a failure of the system to deliver a message. Perhaps a failure of the FCC's requirements and they should mandate video to be overridden too, but the message is still delivered fine.
The real story here is that Fed.Gov can take over control of any media outlet without the consent of the media outlet.
No. That is not the story; those are paranoid delusions. Each broadcast station operates their EAS hardware. It can be overridden in many ways, from changing the control setting from "automatically forward messages" to "wait for my cue before forwarding" all the way to removing the electric relay that allows the encoder to inject between the program signal and transmitter.
If we're ever in enough trouble where EAS is used to "take over a media outlet", there will be enough problems going on that no broadcaster will give two shits about the FCC ramifications of not forwarding EAS messages (which are currently pretty weak anyway and not enforced anyway).
Know of any good gps apps for that (terrain-oriented maps)?
Thats where the attack ads come in. You scare the people who would sit at home because they're not pleased with any candidate, into going to the poll to vote for "not the other guy".
In other news, assistant U.S. attorney Thomas “Tad” DiBiase has stepped down. Readers will recall that DiBiase is “the ‘Kevin Bacon’ of high-powered D.C. legal...
That one and a half sentence summary ought to be enough to raise multiple red flags to anyone considering pulling some legal bullying on this guy.
Maybe Righthaven just wanted a lower DiBiase number?
For the duration of the test, I was locked out of my TiVo. So while the system might not be as broad reaching as you are suggesting, it's definitely been changed from your grandparents' EAS.
There was the EBS/EAS change was back in '97, but for your case your TiVo just knows how to detect an aler header/tone and EOM. Those have always been cornerstones of emergency broadcast tech.
Why aren't they hooked to e.g. youtube (interrupt and replace all running video streams), and cell networks (at least send everyone a broadcast text message, could have a link to the video for smartphones).
The tech exists, as does the EAS successor CAP (cryptographically signed xml, obtained over the interbutts). Unfortunately the roll-out of this kind of thing is incredibly slow, especially as our existing alert infrastructure suits our existing alerting needs OK (more or less depending on who you ask) and the country hates the idea of government making buisness do anything.
I'm sorry but until our monopolistic telecom overlords decide to replace all their copper with fiber, we will never have download-only consoles.
And it still won't be a good idea until those connections are fast, reliable, and ubiquitous and the user won't experience any loss of bought goods if the console manufacturer's servers go offline forever unexpectedly. Then and only then will digital distribution come even close to having the properties inherent to physical media distribution.
Can opensource projects stop with this utterly terrible use of the major.minor numbering...
You're right. The sky is in fact falling.
Because Xerox cooperate wanted to focus on making copiers, the guys at Xerox PARC invited Jobs over for a tour so that _someone_ would use the tech, Xerox management either didn't see the market opportunity and/or didn't want to invest in it.
Wait a minute, RIM came up with that about A DECADE AGO with their blackberry enterprise server (BES) platform.
The other smartphones can VPN too, the real problem that still exists for all the phones is for the regular user who neither knows whats going on, nor has a server already available to tunnel through.
That will just push companies to go offshore too.
Good. Maybe that way maybe the US gov't will stop PAYING GE so goddamn much of our money in tax rebates.
Mitnick made his way by stealing the personal identification of *dead infants*. He's a sociopath.
Maybe if he stole them for shits and giggles, but the identities of dead infants have two significant properties: They're real identities and they're not in use. If there was another class of people with the same or better potential for clean identity theft, he probably would have stolen their identities too.