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User: Catbeller

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  1. Re:Easy! on CCC Says Apple iPhone 5S TouchID Broken · · Score: 1

    "The idea is to get the phone, put some evidence on it, and THEN arrest you. :-)"

    Odd that few people notice this little loophole. Since the integrity of police is unassailable in court, the obvious trick for police, or any other malicious party, is to just toss some kiddie porn on the phone, alter the logs, and then "find" it and ruin your life. Or force you to give up someone else with truthful or perjured testimony. Or, say, give the man standing outside your car all your cash or you get dragged in. Oh, the fun they'll have!

    And how would we ever know people are being framed? Their complaints? This is a perfect way to take anyone down. Anytime. If it isn't being done yet - it will be.

  2. Use it to our advantage on CCC Says Apple iPhone 5S TouchID Broken · · Score: 1

    Make a fake print. Or use someone else's print.
    Use it to authenticate your iPhone.
    Imagine the fun questions you can ask if someone shows up to ask about your fake print. Like, how do you know, and how do you have my actual prints...

    Fun!

  3. No. Wrong. No. Not right. Damn it. on Could Humanity Really Build 'Elysium'? · · Score: 1

    The space colony concept has been misunderstood every time I have heard it from other people. The O'Neill Cylinder and Stanford Torus space colonies were never to be launched from Earth, never, ever, EVER. Indespensibly the raw lunar materiel was to be launched from the moon using solar-electrically powered mass-drivers using recirculating maglev buckets (speed up, release, slow down, return on looped track, reload), and captured using nothing less than giant kevlar bags, themselves *propelled* by miniature versions of the same mass-drivers at one of the Lagrange points. The lunar soil was to be melted and rendered using solar mirrors in zero gravity at the construction site. Size is not all that big a deal in zero G; might as well build large as small. With a steady stream of metallic soil, endless really, the build is merely a matter of time and patience.

    The concept was brilliant, and frankly is the only way we can get off this planet. Mars is not an option, not for the majority of the people on Earth; if you want new worlds, you build them. Much easier to live on, and you landscape to suit. Water and lighter elements are the real block, but such things can be solved using hyperspeed launchers on earth (liquid H2 can take a few thousand Gs). Comets and other sources would eventually bring nitrogen and hydrogen to the party.

    In the how-do-we-pay-for-it column, the O'Neill groups came up with : power. Build a colony, build hundreds of solar power sats to beam power back to earth. Rinse and repeat.

    Man gets endless new land to live on, energy comes from the sky into rectennas, and paradise reigns on earth. But people never read the source ideas and always go back to dismissing the madness of launching a giant space colony using earth resources. We've lost 40+ years due to almost willlful misunderstanding on the parts of people who should know better.

    Read "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill. Essential reading if you want to save humanity from killing the earth. Asimov was a proponent, as I was. It can be done, it should have been done. Instead, we're fracking the earth with water to pump out a few trillion more dollars worth of fossil fuels and arguing about shutting schools down to save money for tax cuts... and people wonder why I am so furious.

  4. Re:How would that be different... on Iris Scans Are the New School IDs · · Score: 1

    Already done. They've been ordered to lie on the floor for dogs to sniff them for over two decades. The generation that bends over for every security excess is now in it's twenties and thirties, and we see in every way the outcome of that conditioning. There is no fight in them, no rebellion, no sense. They don't even know what the hell the point is about security *in your own person* and privacy in general. They've been prisoners in an open-air prison their entire lives, like the Soviets used to be and the Chinese now are. If you can't move, talk, or write without scrutiny and punishment, you are in a prison, no matter how many times you get to watch Netflix.

  5. Surprise! on Iris Scans Are the New School IDs · · Score: 1

    Can't wait until the first time someone looks into a scanner and is blinded by an intentionally amped-up light. Easy hack, no? I do not, ever, wish to put my eye against a mystery light source in a box. You see, I believe that people, even white rich people, can spawn evil assholes.

    We'll give up every freedom we have for "security", yet we'll put our eyes into a laser/light on demand.

  6. E-systems WILL be manipulated if motivation exists on Hacker Exposes Evidence of Widespread Grade Tampering In India · · Score: 0

    E-voting, e-grading, any system that people have motivation to cheat with will be used to cheat. This is why e-voting is a recipe for wholesale theft of the future. Combine wealthy interests which own the e-voting companies with motivation numbering in the trillions of dollars, and voting is and will be a farce. Shut it down.

  7. TYS on In France, a Showcase of What Can Go Wrong With Online Voting · · Score: 1

    These systems have no other purpose but cheating.

    The Canadians have a manual paper system with multi-party guarded counts. It scales, it works, it can be recounted.

    E-voting was an idea slammed home in every case. It cannot be secured. No purpose but an invisible and unstoppable means to alter vote counts. The counts have been altered, the machines and systems compromised numerous times on investigation. And that's just outside cracking; anyone on the inside can change code, accumulated totals, and elections at will, if they aren't stupid enough to get greedy. Recounts recount altered votes, so they are useless. We can't analyze code; it can change on the fly. We can't look at the data, because all wee see is the altered datasets.

    We need to shut these cheating boxes down and switch to paper before we can't actually cast a meaningful vote ever again.

  8. How do you confiscate all the guns? Seriously? on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 1

    Prohibition 1: Liquor. Failed, created criminal sydicates.
    Prohibition 2: "Drugs". Failed, etc.
    Prohibition 3: "Piracy". Failed, made most people criminals.
    Prohibition 4: Guns. But it can't happen, not even massive background checks can't work. There are far more guns than people in the country. How are we going to take them away from the people, now criminal, who own them? Background checks, house checks, trackers, whatever - a massive, guaranteed-to-fail undertaking which will manufacture a lot more criminals.

    We can't keep trying to fix everything we don't like by making it illegal. It just won't work.

    Guns are bad, yes, because they are designed to kill. Societies like ours like to use them to settle scores, here and abroad. But what possible scenario can one envision that makes them go away? Think! Cure worse than disease. And a lot of gun owners aren't going to cooperate.

  9. Re:What's next? on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 1

    I don't understand. You don't believe in anticipating the next obvious steps, when the whole planet is breathlessly trying to make replication happen?

    You deal with the consequences *now*, before the train hits your car.

  10. Re:That's nice on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 1

    I've had guns pointed at me twice. You haven't? How does that alter the fact?

    Your logic, isn't.

  11. Re:That's nice on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 1

    Second that mod up.

  12. Here come the end of unmonitored 3D printing on The First Fully 3D-Printed Gun Has Been Successfully Test-Fired · · Score: 1

    Copyright and patent infringement, combined with people finally realizing that at-home manufacturing can build anything, eventually, will result in Kindle-like DRM - you can put your own e-books on a Kindle, but you have to upload those first to Amazon for conversion to their format, before Amazon lets it display on your Kindle. And then they know what illegal books you might have on your Kindle. No hassle now, but the option to hassle is indefinitely retained.

    So it goes with 3D printing, although it will happen much faster than it did with e-books. 3D printer manufacturers will be given de facto ultimatums to install DRM backdoors on all printers, at least, to enable a looksee by whomever to monitor what is being printed. I imagine the next step will be IP examination and of course seeing if you are being naughty and printing something like a gun or a suspicious casing for a bomb or whatever else they would like to stop.

    "I can't do that, Dave.", your printer will say. And you get a copyright warning in the mail, or sometimes a visit from men in a black official car who want to take you somewhere while others borrow your hard drives.

    Yup, you easily can build your own printer. Which, eventually, will be a crime. How fast did Bittorrent become criminal? And yes, it is considered criminal in most minds now. Ten years. Less. How fast you think they will make printing your own Glock illegal? Or the machine that can.

  13. Moeinvt: on Florida Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Search Cell Phones · · Score: 0

    My reply wasn't directed at your post particularly, so sorry if it sounded as if it were. Just a general point.

  14. Re: Good on Florida Supreme Court Rules Police Need Warrant To Search Cell Phones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Slavery was legal because some states said so; we had to fight a bloody war to make the point that it was not. States are not independent. Get over it. The state's rights thing has been invoked in slavery/gay-sex-crime/keep-the-former-slaves-out-of-our-schools/miscegenation/jesus-is-king/we-can-marry-kids case for over a hundred fifty years. No matter how many times the Confederacy trots this out, we will slap it down.

    Marriage was, is, and will be a government-controlled institution. You aren't married by the power of Jesus, but by the power vested by the State in the justice of the peace, or minister, or druid. And there was marriage long before we invented gods.

  15. Re:Playing the race card again on Florida Teen Expelled and Arrested For Science Experiment · · Score: 1

    Read it all; well and good. But it strikes me that all who argue the two stories shouldn't be connected are probably 1) white and 2) male. I'd throw in libertarian for fun as number 3.

    It is fact, cold, numeric fact, that black teenagers are far more likely to be charged and convicted for crimes that white teenagers skate past.

  16. Computers lie if they are told to lie on MPAA Executive Tampers With Evidence In Piracy Case · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Point I've made in the computerized voting systems ongoing fiasco: if you are "in" the system, you control the output. This is counter intuitive for geeks and ATM users everywhere. Automated systems aren't automated if the owners of the system output have control at any point. You, as the accused or someone looking at a computerized vote counting system, cannot tell if some man in the middle changed the output.

    Sometimes, tho, that isn't true, as in this case. Altering text logs. But after this, be assured that in the future the owners of systems will make sure the carpet matches the drapes.

    How many times has this happened? That's the point: if the logs lie, *you can't ever know*. The truth is whatever the system owner, of a logfile or the source code itself, tells you is true.

    Altering logs and calculations used to be part of my job. I was that man in the middle.

  17. Not afraid; I *know* what will happen on Eric Schmidt: Google Glass Critics 'Afraid of Change,' Society Will Adapt · · Score: 1

    I'm not afraid of what will happen; I know what will happen when surveillance is universal. A quiet settling, as we modify our behavior to be "normal" and inoffensive to whomever and whatever may take an interest in us. And that's just the current generation. The next generation that is born into our worldwide prison will tend to never even think of doing anything remotely offensive to powers seen and unseen. The human race will change into an obedient horde, for good and ill (normal behavior doesn't have to be *moral* behavior). A irrevocable experiment.

    And of course the people on the other end of the surveillance will not be under quite the same restrictions. Anyone trying to find out what they are up to with all this knowledge will be Manninged. The Kochs and Cheneys of the world will not allow their activities to be known to us proles. Two worlds; the powerless, under glass, and those on the other end, who only answer to each other, fighting little secret wars unknown to us.

  18. Hippies: join up on The Dark Side of Amazon's New Pilots · · Score: 1

    I see the little slams against RMS "cultists", silly programmer hippies and similar software flower children that the right-wing millennials and Gen-Xers love to dismiss as fools. Because Hippies.

    But the reason Stallman and the open software movement despises DRM was shown to you, precisely, when your "rights" disappeared.

    So, who's the fool? As usual, as in the support for civil rights, the fight against wars started for lies, the rejection of Victorian sexual repression, the rejection of environmental destruction, and all the other things that Hippies were despised for, the Hippies were god damned right and everyone else was wrong, wrong, wrong. So that's why the hate, really.

    If you'd have listened to the hippies, there'd been no Vietnam, no Iraq, no Afghanistan, and computers that would actually do what they are told to do by their, you know, actual owners. Instead of a PC, you now have a set-top DRM box, pretending to be a PC, managed by the powers-that-be, among whose number you will never be counted.

  19. Sigh, my people on Hyundai's Flying Car Flies For an Audience · · Score: 1

    Americans - their idea of the future is the 1950's, only with smartphones. Like grandpas wearing their fedoras and suit-n-tie, they want to keep on looking like they did when they were young and on top of the world. Cars and freeways, only with faster cars that don't look too silly, that is, that look like something that they grew up with.

    A multi-rotor platform, with a little work, *is* a flying car. A flying car will not look like a flying Delorean. It will look like what a flying car will look like. And they'll probably pop up in African countries and Japan first. Cultures that aren't wedded to their own past glories.

  20. Re:Did he really do it? on Pirate Bay Co-Founder Indicted For Hacking, Fraud · · Score: 3, Informative

    He has accused of absolutely nothing. There are no accusations, and no charges. What there is, is a really concerted effort to get him into a snatch zone. "Rape" was a pretext, always was.

  21. Re:tell me again on Explosions at the Boston Marathon · · Score: 2

    What happened? Obama "bargained" with the right wing in congress, and half the stimulus went to tax breaks - useless when the problem is unemployment, as no demand = no need to make as much - and the rest of the stimulus was nowhere near enough to jumpstart the economy. So, as Krugman and the other gets-it-right economists predicted, it helped, but fizzled almost immediately.

    When money is cheap to borrow, and you need to get people working, you spend, and spend big. And not on contractors in Iraq who pretty much stole the money and walked away (and that was on the credit card to future generations - we never raised taxes to pay for that war). You spend it on poor people who will actually spend their money on the street and generate sufficient electromotive force that will jumpstart the motor of the economy. Instead, the money that is being accumulated is going to the top five percent or so of the population - and it is staying there. So here we are. Dead in the water - plenty of money to borrow at zero interest, and no incentive to spend it on putting people to work. Plenty of incentive to hoard it overseas.

    Fix it? Start state banks, like North Dakota's, who will actually lend money to people rather than putting it into derivatives. Make that free-to-get money go to people who need it. Build roads. Replant forests. Build a real seawall for New Orleans. Rebuild Louisiana's wetlands. Build solar power farms in the desert, and build a new transmission grid to move the power to where it is needed. So much to do, but no incentive to give it to workers to do anything when financial instruments make so much more money than lending money to entrepreneurs to open factories.

  22. Re:tell me again on Explosions at the Boston Marathon · · Score: 1

    Fox will blame liberals.

    MS-NBC will actually hold the line, waiting for actual information to come to light. If, however, as the date suggests, it is the work of Tax Warriors, they, unlike every other news outlet on TV/Cable, WILL talk about the enormous right-wing loony terrorist networks that have been shooting people and planting bombs for years. And the fact that, less than three years ago, the FBI was told to dismantle the domestic right-wing terrorist task group because of enormous pressure from right-wing congressmen and women who felt that their constituents were being persecuted. And that Obama hadn't the balls to fight them. Again.

  23. It is not about the teachers on Teachers Know If You've Been E-Reading · · Score: 1

    The issue isn't what the teachers are doing with the data. That's a grease stain from the real horror here.

    The issue is, as we go forward, ebook readers will be pretty much the only way kids read library books and any other words, for that matter. When the libraries slowly shut down the paper stacks, we will be looking at a system that as a matter of course tracks every word that a human child, or adult, later, will input into their skulls.

    This means: tracking for seditious or suspicious writings. Personality analysis, broken down by year, type, and growth of particular concentration of interest. I'm not saying they will be correct analyses - but they don't have to be, as credit scores and polygraph use attests.

    Our society shows, doubtlessly, that such metrics will be undertaken for "security" reasons. Mostly, really, it will be done "because power". Power is all the reason they will ever need. The ability to track not only location, associations, but the very thoughts you, as a kid and beyond, are reading and processing to make you, you.

    Billions of paper books will still exist, of course, and smart people will read those to keep their reading habits off the radar, but for the most part, people will accept the monitoring. Watch what you say, watch what you do, and of course watch what you read. And you have nothing to worry about, naturally, if you don't read the wrong things, we will say.

    This is hell.

  24. Re:Not unexpected on Navy To Deploy Lasers On Ship In 2014 · · Score: 1

    I should have wrote, "determined to end all life on Earth, if that's what it took, to insure Karl Marx would never win."

    Patton wanted to immediately invade the Soviet Union at the end of WWII. A hell of a lot of Congresscritters and other commieharks wanted to take them out before they could spread into our world, and sleep with our women, I suppose. These characters built up the nuke force, on rockets, long before the Soviets got started building theirs. They lied to us and themselves about the power and intent of the Russians, and made the issue of who was right into a argument that would end the world.

    The sole idea was to nuke the Soviets - let's not kid ourselves - if they showed signs of winning the war for the finances of the world. The Soviets never intended to blow up the world to win - but we would have done it in a heartbeat, "for freedom". Most people alive today have no inkling how fucking crazy America was about communism back then. They would have burned life out forever to save the capitalist system. The least politically sophisticated people on the planet have held the kill switch for generations - and they still don't get that they almost wiped out life forever. And it ain't over - we still are sitting on the "kill 'em for God" switches. Hell, we're rebuilding the nuke arsenal. Power, ours, that's what it always was about, and we are still willing to kill everything to win. Not that we would do it on a whim - but we reserve the right to do so.

  25. Re:Small Boats on Navy To Deploy Lasers On Ship In 2014 · · Score: 2

    The ocean is big, and pirates are very small. Hard to spot. Sort of like muggers; not many, but they pop up anywhere. Also, Somali businessmen are financing theses operations for profit - ransom is lucrative. This isn't about kids on a boat. This is big business (while it lasts).