The exploit doesn't allow unauthorized access or remote root. It only allows a denial of service against Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 products. It doesn't seem that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 are vulnerable. That really mitigates that risk. I have a Windows Home Server 2011 box that shouldn't be vulnerable because it's based on the WS2008R2 code base. Furthermore, there's already a patch for this bug. Therefore, if you're still running an old version of Windows that you neglected to patch, then your server might be crashed remotely. I don't think it's really that deadly or scary.
I am far from an apologist for Iran, but Ahmadinejad never said that he would wipe Israel off the map. He said that the Zionist government of Israel should be erased from history. In effect, he was calling for regime change just like we did. The story was based on a misreporting of the translation.
My dad was pulled over the other day for talking on his cellphone. I was in the passenger seat and no one was using a cellphone, so it was clearly a bullshit stop. The cop looked the car over to find a reason to justify his search; he checked the registration sticker, the inspection sticker, the headlights, everything. My dad didn't have his driver's license at the time because the DMV lost it in the mail so the cop gave him a hard time about it. The cop then asked me for ID, so I handed him my business card. I'm a lawyer. The cop walked back to his car, came back a minute later, and said that we were free to go.
Seriously, folks, cops can do really shady things. Don't get me wrong, I love cops because they've saved my ass a few times, but there are some rogue ones who really should be slapped down. I mean, if cops can lie to get you into tickets, then what the fuck incentive do we have for doing the right thing (aside from doing the right thing)?
This kind of free market rhetoric doesn't really play out in the real world. Does a prostitute really have the ability to defend herself against being raped and robbed by her johns? Even if you vet a guy, and he beats the shit out of you, what can you do as a prostitute without muscle behind you?
It's not only that he was released after serving his prison term; he was released on PAROLE. If he had served his term, then the slate is wiped clean and the presumption of innocence is restore. However, he was released conditionally on parole, which requires him to not act like an asshat. Thus, he is presumably an asshat for the crimes that he was convicted of by a jury of his peers, and the law can still see him that way.
Also, note that under the Constitution, parolees are afforded less civil liberties in return for early release. Parole officers can do a lot of stuff that would normally require a warrant. Certainly, prisoners don't have a right against search and seizure of their cells. Therefore, parolees aren't protected against illegal search and seizure of their personal property. In this case, the government has all sorts of strong corroborating evidence in support of their warrant.
Thus, I'm not too worried about this. It isn't a warrantless search against some innocent guy. It's a well-supported motion against a guy who is on parole for doing lots of shitty things, which means that he was jailed, then released conditionally on him not continuing his asshat activities, and it seems that he has violated the terms of his parole.
And we also have a spaceplane that's been in orbit for over a year now. Keep in mind that there's ton of top secret stuff that we don't know about as well. The Blackbird itself was a secret program for a long time. God knows what we have in the wings.
It wasn't the court that refused to do anything about it, but rather a jury of men and women who acquitted the cops. A member of the jury who voted to acquit said that she was horrified at the beating, and thought that it was inhumane, but that the evidence was that the LAPD's protocol at the time to disable a violently resisting suspect was to break their long bones until they physically could not resist. (Yes, following protocols, however brutal, was a defense but following orders was not. Hrrrm.) The cops were not supposed to hit the head or spinal column or joints. So the jury looked at the videos again and again to see if the cops hit Rodney King in a prohibited area and concluded that they did not. Following the law, the jury voted to acquit the police.
Cops should not be above the law, and they should be tried with extra scrutiny, but we shouldn't impose super-harsh laws only because they are cops.
The concept of cryptography has been around for thousands of years but the idea that security by obscurity was a bad idea is relatively new. The entire code talkers scheme was pure obscurity. The novelty is that mathematical cryptography is secure even when its mechanism is disclosed.
We didn't locate Bin Laden because his courier had shitty phones. We located Bin Laden because we caught some dude on the battlefield and Gitmod him with a five dollar wrench until he coughed up the courier's name (along with, presumably, part of his lungs). Even using a secure sat phone or encrypted phone wouldn't help Bin Laden because we would have triangulated on the signals, caught the guy, then Gitmo'd him with a five dollar wrench. In a practical sense, XKCD still has it right. If we want to catch your ass without Constitutional concerns, then we wouldn't bother with decryption.
The notion of a "born secret" is pretty bullshit, too, which is why the government never tried it in court. The idea is that some things are so secret that they are secret even if arrived at independently by third parties who did not use any secrets in doing so. Therefore, if you sat on a mountaintop and came up with nuclear bomb blueprints by yourself, the government would consider that classified material even though it was independently created. That's awesome in theory, but still fucking annoying.
It's called a battery pull. Sure, there might be a smaller battery or capacitor sitting somewhere powering the device in a stealthy manner, but that would be a concern even with your DIP switch theory--someone might put a smaller transmitter on the back of your microphone to enable signals to be sent while the DIP switch to the "real" transmitter is ostensibly disabled.
The NSA has been pretty good at strengthening commercial encryption. Part of their mandate is to help strengthen America's commercial security infrastructure as well as to hack that same security infrastructure, which makes them not so trustworthy in some eyes but practical helpers in others. Aside from the Clipper chip, the NSA helped strengthen DES through changes to the S-box, helped make Windows 7 more secure by working with Microsoft (lol), and of course, SE Linux.
Marcy: Steve, don't tell them about your insane quest to create the 99 cent coin. Steve: Al, I invented the 99 cent coin. Have you ever noticed how things cost $7.99? $14.99? $99.99? My coin will eliminate the messy change that only catches the attention of obnoxious beggars who hassle you on the way to your Mercedes. What do you think of it, Al? Al: What about tax?
So in theory, BP should have done a great job with Deepwater Horizon, right? After all, they're huge, hired Halliburton, etc. The problem is that they're a profit-seeking enterprise. That made them rush the job, and to do stupid things in the name of increased profits. Let's not kid ourselves. Anyone will do bad stuff to get more money.
I read similar stories when US Apollos astronauts went to Star City for a PR tour. Everyone knew their rooms were bugged so they would intentionally complain about stuff so they would get better rooms and beer and stuff. Interestingly, and as an aside, the Russian astronauts believed Houston was a fake city. "Where is this place, filled with so many important people that everyone has a car?" "Uh, everyone in America has a car." "So why the buses?" "Sometimes we're too lazy to drive so we take the bus." "Bullshit."
Forget totaling the car. If this guy has an accident due to age-related declines in driving reaction time, or if he drives tired, he might kill someone because of his speeding. Liability payouts for a dead pedestrian is much more expensive than just property damage.
Uh, yeah. If you're in a high-security field such as medicine, defense contracting, or the like, you should not return hard drives that contain sensitive information. You should just suck it up and destroy the drive if you can't reliably wipe the data off of it.
Of course a person must cooperate with the prosecution in their own conviction within certain limits. Otherwise, the accused can destroy evidence, plant evidence, lie to investigators, have others lie to investigators, and all these other things. So within limits, it is almost assumed that the accused with cooperate with the prosecution.
The Fifth Amendment only prevents someone from being compelled to testify against himself, not from providing evidence. A man charged with a hate crime was asked by the prosecution to submit to photos of his chest, which was covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. His claims of the Fifth Amendment were in vain because the courts held that he wasn't being asked to testify or otherwise incriminate himself.
"U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site â" surrounded by huge sand berms â" following a wave of looting after Saddam's fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns."
This is utter bullshit. The US decided to disband the Iraqi police force and military, then refused to provide security against looters or criminals because the invasion force was undermanned. Remember the LA riots? Imagine that except we got rid of the police and National Guard, then left the armories open so any moron could walk off with a bazooka. There would be instant chaos even if no one was Muslim.
The fall of Iraq was caused by the rank stupidity of the Paul Wolfowitz types.
We are only following Germany's example with respect to the really big stuff, like the stealth bomber, the F-35, and the F-22. We will use these weapons in a limited fashion, anyway. At the end of the day, our conventional stuff like the F-15, F-16, F-18, B-52 will carry the bulk of the fighting, as they are already world-class by themselves. In any likely conflict, we'll use the advanced systems as the vanguard fleet to knock out air defense systems, command and control systems, decapitate the enemy to the extent we can, establish air dominance, then use our conventional and lower-cost weapons to complete the mission of blowing lots of shit up. That's what we did in the First and Second Gulf Wars, and I doubt that this will change anytime soon. I guess that any invasion would also be supported by drone strikes against choice targets such as radar arrays, which were taken out in the First Gulf War by Apache helicopters.
In short, we'll use the Stealth Bomber to open a door, the Stealth Fighter to kill off some aircraft, then use B-52s and F-15s to carpet bomb our enemies into submissions.
It's true that successive attacks aren't cumulative but we did drop two successive bunker busters on one of Saddam Hussein's compounds back in the first Gulf War. I can't find a cite right now, but they were the original laser-guided bunker busters made from howitzer barrels that were dropped by two F-111 Aardvarks onto a ventilation shaft cover that was one square yard in size. The second bomb caused secondary explosions indicating a hard kill.
Advances in guidance technology, especially with GPS, will allow the bombs to be dropped at higher altitudes. I'm not sure what the terminal velocity of a bomb is, but it might increase from 30,000 ft to 50,000 ft. GPS will also allow the bombs to hit the same location with the same near-perpendicular angle as the ground, which will increase penetration. Furthermore, dirt carries shock really well. Concussion from the bomb may enable soft kills against equipment such as centrifuges and computers.
A B-2 can carry two of the MOPs. Two B-2s can drop four. Putting four of these suckers on the same location can probably cause much more penetration and concussion than only one, though not four times as much.
Slashdot Mirror
The exploit doesn't allow unauthorized access or remote root. It only allows a denial of service against Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 products. It doesn't seem that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 are vulnerable. That really mitigates that risk. I have a Windows Home Server 2011 box that shouldn't be vulnerable because it's based on the WS2008R2 code base. Furthermore, there's already a patch for this bug. Therefore, if you're still running an old version of Windows that you neglected to patch, then your server might be crashed remotely. I don't think it's really that deadly or scary.
I am far from an apologist for Iran, but Ahmadinejad never said that he would wipe Israel off the map. He said that the Zionist government of Israel should be erased from history. In effect, he was calling for regime change just like we did. The story was based on a misreporting of the translation.
My dad was pulled over the other day for talking on his cellphone. I was in the passenger seat and no one was using a cellphone, so it was clearly a bullshit stop. The cop looked the car over to find a reason to justify his search; he checked the registration sticker, the inspection sticker, the headlights, everything. My dad didn't have his driver's license at the time because the DMV lost it in the mail so the cop gave him a hard time about it. The cop then asked me for ID, so I handed him my business card. I'm a lawyer. The cop walked back to his car, came back a minute later, and said that we were free to go.
Seriously, folks, cops can do really shady things. Don't get me wrong, I love cops because they've saved my ass a few times, but there are some rogue ones who really should be slapped down. I mean, if cops can lie to get you into tickets, then what the fuck incentive do we have for doing the right thing (aside from doing the right thing)?
This kind of free market rhetoric doesn't really play out in the real world. Does a prostitute really have the ability to defend herself against being raped and robbed by her johns? Even if you vet a guy, and he beats the shit out of you, what can you do as a prostitute without muscle behind you?
It's not only that he was released after serving his prison term; he was released on PAROLE. If he had served his term, then the slate is wiped clean and the presumption of innocence is restore. However, he was released conditionally on parole, which requires him to not act like an asshat. Thus, he is presumably an asshat for the crimes that he was convicted of by a jury of his peers, and the law can still see him that way.
Also, note that under the Constitution, parolees are afforded less civil liberties in return for early release. Parole officers can do a lot of stuff that would normally require a warrant. Certainly, prisoners don't have a right against search and seizure of their cells. Therefore, parolees aren't protected against illegal search and seizure of their personal property. In this case, the government has all sorts of strong corroborating evidence in support of their warrant.
Thus, I'm not too worried about this. It isn't a warrantless search against some innocent guy. It's a well-supported motion against a guy who is on parole for doing lots of shitty things, which means that he was jailed, then released conditionally on him not continuing his asshat activities, and it seems that he has violated the terms of his parole.
Stupid to say this as Japan is the first country to get nuked. Twice.
And we also have a spaceplane that's been in orbit for over a year now. Keep in mind that there's ton of top secret stuff that we don't know about as well. The Blackbird itself was a secret program for a long time. God knows what we have in the wings.
It wasn't the court that refused to do anything about it, but rather a jury of men and women who acquitted the cops. A member of the jury who voted to acquit said that she was horrified at the beating, and thought that it was inhumane, but that the evidence was that the LAPD's protocol at the time to disable a violently resisting suspect was to break their long bones until they physically could not resist. (Yes, following protocols, however brutal, was a defense but following orders was not. Hrrrm.) The cops were not supposed to hit the head or spinal column or joints. So the jury looked at the videos again and again to see if the cops hit Rodney King in a prohibited area and concluded that they did not. Following the law, the jury voted to acquit the police.
Cops should not be above the law, and they should be tried with extra scrutiny, but we shouldn't impose super-harsh laws only because they are cops.
The concept of cryptography has been around for thousands of years but the idea that security by obscurity was a bad idea is relatively new. The entire code talkers scheme was pure obscurity. The novelty is that mathematical cryptography is secure even when its mechanism is disclosed.
We didn't locate Bin Laden because his courier had shitty phones. We located Bin Laden because we caught some dude on the battlefield and Gitmod him with a five dollar wrench until he coughed up the courier's name (along with, presumably, part of his lungs). Even using a secure sat phone or encrypted phone wouldn't help Bin Laden because we would have triangulated on the signals, caught the guy, then Gitmo'd him with a five dollar wrench. In a practical sense, XKCD still has it right. If we want to catch your ass without Constitutional concerns, then we wouldn't bother with decryption.
The notion of a "born secret" is pretty bullshit, too, which is why the government never tried it in court. The idea is that some things are so secret that they are secret even if arrived at independently by third parties who did not use any secrets in doing so. Therefore, if you sat on a mountaintop and came up with nuclear bomb blueprints by yourself, the government would consider that classified material even though it was independently created. That's awesome in theory, but still fucking annoying.
It's called a battery pull. Sure, there might be a smaller battery or capacitor sitting somewhere powering the device in a stealthy manner, but that would be a concern even with your DIP switch theory--someone might put a smaller transmitter on the back of your microphone to enable signals to be sent while the DIP switch to the "real" transmitter is ostensibly disabled.
The NSA has been pretty good at strengthening commercial encryption. Part of their mandate is to help strengthen America's commercial security infrastructure as well as to hack that same security infrastructure, which makes them not so trustworthy in some eyes but practical helpers in others. Aside from the Clipper chip, the NSA helped strengthen DES through changes to the S-box, helped make Windows 7 more secure by working with Microsoft (lol), and of course, SE Linux.
From Married ... With Children:
Marcy: Steve, don't tell them about your insane quest to create the 99 cent coin.
Steve: Al, I invented the 99 cent coin. Have you ever noticed how things cost $7.99? $14.99? $99.99? My coin will eliminate the messy change that only catches the attention of obnoxious beggars who hassle you on the way to your Mercedes. What do you think of it, Al?
Al: What about tax?
So in theory, BP should have done a great job with Deepwater Horizon, right? After all, they're huge, hired Halliburton, etc. The problem is that they're a profit-seeking enterprise. That made them rush the job, and to do stupid things in the name of increased profits. Let's not kid ourselves. Anyone will do bad stuff to get more money.
I read similar stories when US Apollos astronauts went to Star City for a PR tour. Everyone knew their rooms were bugged so they would intentionally complain about stuff so they would get better rooms and beer and stuff. Interestingly, and as an aside, the Russian astronauts believed Houston was a fake city. "Where is this place, filled with so many important people that everyone has a car?" "Uh, everyone in America has a car." "So why the buses?" "Sometimes we're too lazy to drive so we take the bus." "Bullshit."
Forget totaling the car. If this guy has an accident due to age-related declines in driving reaction time, or if he drives tired, he might kill someone because of his speeding. Liability payouts for a dead pedestrian is much more expensive than just property damage.
Uh, yeah. If you're in a high-security field such as medicine, defense contracting, or the like, you should not return hard drives that contain sensitive information. You should just suck it up and destroy the drive if you can't reliably wipe the data off of it.
Of course a person must cooperate with the prosecution in their own conviction within certain limits. Otherwise, the accused can destroy evidence, plant evidence, lie to investigators, have others lie to investigators, and all these other things. So within limits, it is almost assumed that the accused with cooperate with the prosecution.
The Fifth Amendment only prevents someone from being compelled to testify against himself, not from providing evidence. A man charged with a hate crime was asked by the prosecution to submit to photos of his chest, which was covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. His claims of the Fifth Amendment were in vain because the courts held that he wasn't being asked to testify or otherwise incriminate himself.
I Googled "Iraqis having yellowcake"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25546334/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/secret-us-mission-hauls-uranium-iraq/#.Ty1roFyPkb0
"U.S. and Iraqi forces have guarded the 23,000-acre site â" surrounded by huge sand berms â" following a wave of looting after Saddam's fall that included villagers toting away yellowcake storage barrels for use as drinking water cisterns."
This is utter bullshit. The US decided to disband the Iraqi police force and military, then refused to provide security against looters or criminals because the invasion force was undermanned. Remember the LA riots? Imagine that except we got rid of the police and National Guard, then left the armories open so any moron could walk off with a bazooka. There would be instant chaos even if no one was Muslim.
The fall of Iraq was caused by the rank stupidity of the Paul Wolfowitz types.
We are only following Germany's example with respect to the really big stuff, like the stealth bomber, the F-35, and the F-22. We will use these weapons in a limited fashion, anyway. At the end of the day, our conventional stuff like the F-15, F-16, F-18, B-52 will carry the bulk of the fighting, as they are already world-class by themselves. In any likely conflict, we'll use the advanced systems as the vanguard fleet to knock out air defense systems, command and control systems, decapitate the enemy to the extent we can, establish air dominance, then use our conventional and lower-cost weapons to complete the mission of blowing lots of shit up. That's what we did in the First and Second Gulf Wars, and I doubt that this will change anytime soon. I guess that any invasion would also be supported by drone strikes against choice targets such as radar arrays, which were taken out in the First Gulf War by Apache helicopters.
In short, we'll use the Stealth Bomber to open a door, the Stealth Fighter to kill off some aircraft, then use B-52s and F-15s to carpet bomb our enemies into submissions.
It's true that successive attacks aren't cumulative but we did drop two successive bunker busters on one of Saddam Hussein's compounds back in the first Gulf War. I can't find a cite right now, but they were the original laser-guided bunker busters made from howitzer barrels that were dropped by two F-111 Aardvarks onto a ventilation shaft cover that was one square yard in size. The second bomb caused secondary explosions indicating a hard kill.
Advances in guidance technology, especially with GPS, will allow the bombs to be dropped at higher altitudes. I'm not sure what the terminal velocity of a bomb is, but it might increase from 30,000 ft to 50,000 ft. GPS will also allow the bombs to hit the same location with the same near-perpendicular angle as the ground, which will increase penetration. Furthermore, dirt carries shock really well. Concussion from the bomb may enable soft kills against equipment such as centrifuges and computers.
A B-2 can carry two of the MOPs. Two B-2s can drop four. Putting four of these suckers on the same location can probably cause much more penetration and concussion than only one, though not four times as much.