The fifth is one of those things(like the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' evidence rules) which is almost certain to produce a steady stream of specific 'this case is a miscarriage of justice, how can they let him off on a technicality like that!!!!' instances, without a similar stream of obvious saves; because it exists largely to reform broader practice, and prevent situations from ever occurring, than it does as a rule of procedure in specific instances:
'Fruit of the poisonous tree' more or less always looks bad when it comes up in court(because its primary ability to to get true-but-improperly-collected evidence thrown out); but it certainly does a hell of a lot more than the vacation-planners in Internal Affairs to deter illegal evidence gathering methods.
The Fifth, similarly, pretty much never looks noble when it actually comes on stage; but it creates a strong institutional pressure toward needing to prove your case with evidence, rather than just squeezing a few confessions out of people and calling it a day.
Demanding a 'proof' that occurs within the scope of a single case is like the various tubthumping hicks who demand "Were's the experiment where a bacteria evolved into a man? Evilution refuted!"
I hope that their bold plan merely involves IMEI blacklisting(though, if so, why are they inviting handset makers, rather than bitching at the telcos?); but if the demand is being made at the handset vendors, I get a sinking feeling that it might involve some sort of client-side software that is designed to be impossible to remove/circumvent. I'm sure that the vendors would implement that in way totally unproblematic for people who want to root/jailbreak/run custom ROMs...
It's really for stolen phones.. just like the kill switch for the internet was for emergency purposes. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cutting off people's means of communicating effectively with each other.
Paranoia is fun, and often highly predictive; but only if you keep things architecturally realistic:
Does 'the man' want control over your communications, especially if they get caught with their pants down as in the London riots incident a while back? Sure, that's plausible enough.
Is there any reason why he would want a client-side kill switch to achieve this objective? That's a lot less convincing. A cellphone is worth approximately fuck-all without its network. Voila! control over communications is already in the hands of the (highly cooperative with the authorities, as long as it doesn't have anything to do with antitrust law, consumer protections, etc.) telcos... You can easily enough shut down service to given areas, or, thanks to the fact that carriers have cared about billing since forever, nuke individual undesirables without the slightest disruption to the rest of the network. Burning the handset just isn't necessary, and it's the mechanism that is most likely to be hacked, circumvented, or discovered and leaked at some hacker conference. Why bother?
They're outsourcing to robots really, not to us. It just happens to be convenient for the robots to live in North Carolina in this case, probably due to regulatory issues in some governments/businesses over purchasing Chinese-made computers.
I'd imagine that this facility probably helps with turnaround time on custom orders as well. Popping in CPUs and option cards isn't terribly demanding work; but if you give customers the option to choose exactly what CPU/RAM/cards combination they want you either have to be really good at guessing ahead of time, willing to quote lead times based on container-ship speeds, or relatively close to the customer.
Valid, and stupid on their part. That is why I said should.
Fair enough. I'm just deeply pessimistic that the (wise and superior) "knowledge of the algorithm Must Not compromise the system" standard that crypto systems are held to prevails with keyless entry systems.
For whatever reason(whether it be power/gate constraints, cultural sharing with the world of locksmithing, or vendor lousiness uninhibited by the ruthlessness of the internet), keyless-entry/RFID auth/etc. seems to be one of the last major bastions of vendors talking about 'Proprietary Encryption' as though it were a feature, rather than a point of shame. Encryption algorithms on general purpose computers went through that stage, at one time; but the lightweight RF hardware market seems to be lagging considerably in terms of awareness.
Having access to the algorithms should not compromise security.
Assuming that they are using some actually-competent cryptosystem, and didn't add a 'convenience feature' somewhere foolish to make it easier to create replacement fobs.
Given the historical enthusiasm in lock and key circles for 'blind codes' that are super-magical-secure and can only be turned into bitting codes with the equally super-magical-secure codebooks that Trustworthy Authorized Locksmiths are supposed to have access to, I wouldn't be 100% optimistic about the market being handled according to the standards of professional cryptoanalysts...
Unicodes is a bit sprawling; but ASCII is only 128 characters(unless dealing with the wonderful world of nonstandardized non-latin extensions or ad-hoc 8-bit extensions-of-convenience is your problem, in which case I'd advise shirking your duties and drinking heavily), making preserving the whole thing even by chiselling it into stone monuments or other archaic methods potentially viable.
I think you will find that there's a little known branch of academia called "history" which sometimes takes a curious interest in even the most trivial of past information.....
Even if you don't care about the historians, I'm sure the lucky people who have the pleasure of handling property deeds at your local governance hive can tell you a story from within the last week or two about needing to pull some rather seriously dusty documents to allow a present-day transaction to go through without incident.
Many data will, indeed, be of no interest at all, or the same historical interest that neolithic refuse dumps are; but data in the nontrivial-number-of-decades range are still live in more than a few contexts.
I think that given MS office and LibreOffice are in XML, it shouldn't be difficult at all to reverse engineer in the future.
Binary formats were standard for everything up through Office 2003. Office 2007(2003 with optional converter pack and some weird bugs) could output something XML based, though I have the vague memory from the OpenDocument/Open Office XML slugfest that 2007 produced something that deviated from the theoretical ideal of OOXML in some respects, and that full conformity happened at 2010 or 2013. I might be remembering that wrong; but anything before 2003, and a lot from 2003 were definitely binary.
Don't forget the gigabytes of 'example code' stashed on their computers, and how you always seem to see an IDE being frantically closed if you open a door behind them when they aren't expecting it...
Given that wifi punches through walls reasonably adequately, for most values of 'wall', you wouldn't really have to share a residence with somebody, it would likely work on at least the adjacent houses or apartments if sited correctly.
A vehicle could presumably also scan a building for movement from outside. Possibly even get decent location accuracy with some directional antenna tricks...
Wouldn't the DOJ just LOVE this if they could force manufacturers to give them remote access. With a warrant, of course (wink wink!) Is there nothing in a modern house that can't be re-purposed to spy on us anymore?
Why would they have to force them? If history is anything to go by, your ISP will bake the function voluntarily into their dreadful CPE shit so that they can sell the data for advertising purposes, at which point the feds can just ask them for it...
Tasers are less lethal torture devices mainly used to force compliance.
Your disinformation disguists me and all responsible citizens, AC. The manual clearly states, right on page 19:
"RECOMMENDED DRIVE-STUN AREAS FOR MAXIMUM EFFECT Drive the X26C into the following areas for maximum effectiveness. Carotid (sides of neck) (see warning below). Brachial plexus tie-in (upper chest). Radial (forearm). Pelvic triangle (see warning below). Common peronial (Outside of thigh). Tibial (calf muscle). WARNING: Use care when applying a drive-stun to the neck or pelvic triangle. These areas are sensitive to mechanical injury (such as crushing to the trachea or testicles if applied forcefully). However, these areas have proven highly effective targets. "
How responsible as that? A safety warning because they care just that much. Can you say that you care that much about Safety? I thought not.
Is IBM's present 'cloud' stuff broken in some way that would make something that Softlayer does particularly attractive/valuable as an IP or product buy, or is this more of a straight purchase of Softlayer's already-deployed facilities and existing customers to more swiftly expand their marketshare?
I wonder if it's merely a coincidence that this...became available... at roughly the same time that Euro Hawk's ICAO-togetherness issues became insurmountable(it certainly would be a convenient one, if somebody wanted to twist that particular knife, very good footage at a very good time), or whether photogenic leaks and procurement debacles are both more or less continuous phenomena and so necessarily overlap from time to time?
As best I can tell, the footage is from the forward-facing camera, whose view is slightly obscured by the nose-antenna-harpoon-thing(technical term) visible on the front of the drone in this shot.
That would presumably also be present in competent fake footage; but it is consistent with the line of sight that you'd infer from the drone's layout, and from the shots on the manufacturer's puff page.
The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way. Windows RT is a disaster because it lacks app compatibility. MS needs to retire it and fully embrace x86 now that intel has fixed it with Haswell.
I suspect that Intel hasn't 'fixed it' in a sense fully agreeable to Microsoft:
When a PC sells, there are two main winners: Microsoft and Intel. Everybody else gets to make it up in volume. With desktops and larger laptops that doesn't vex Microsoft quite as much(since AMD anchors the low and some of the midrange and Apple is in the same boat as they are). If MS wants a bright, shiny, touch-whatever future, though, sharing the margins with the single vendor who can implement x86 sufficiently efficiently to hit those sizes and battery lives isn't going to be nearly as entertaining, especially when the rest of the market is buying near-interchangeable ARM SoCs from themselves or whoever wins the knife-fight-of-pricing today.
I'm not an expert, so ignore me if one shows up; but my suspicion would be that they cool down enough that we can't see them anymore: You'd get a lot of heat, initially, when the planet coalesces; but if it isn't massive enough to ignite fusion and become a star, it'll just keep bleeding radiation into space until it reaches whatever equilibrium temperature the intensity and location of its local star provide for. As they get colder, their output gets weaker, until it gets to the point where our instruments are insufficiently sensitive to distinguish it from the background(unless it passes in front of its star, which has allowed us to indirectly infer the existence of smaller objects that we can't see directly).
Slashdot Mirror
The fifth is one of those things(like the 'fruit of the poisonous tree' evidence rules) which is almost certain to produce a steady stream of specific 'this case is a miscarriage of justice, how can they let him off on a technicality like that!!!!' instances, without a similar stream of obvious saves; because it exists largely to reform broader practice, and prevent situations from ever occurring, than it does as a rule of procedure in specific instances:
'Fruit of the poisonous tree' more or less always looks bad when it comes up in court(because its primary ability to to get true-but-improperly-collected evidence thrown out); but it certainly does a hell of a lot more than the vacation-planners in Internal Affairs to deter illegal evidence gathering methods.
The Fifth, similarly, pretty much never looks noble when it actually comes on stage; but it creates a strong institutional pressure toward needing to prove your case with evidence, rather than just squeezing a few confessions out of people and calling it a day.
Demanding a 'proof' that occurs within the scope of a single case is like the various tubthumping hicks who demand "Were's the experiment where a bacteria evolved into a man? Evilution refuted!"
I hope that their bold plan merely involves IMEI blacklisting(though, if so, why are they inviting handset makers, rather than bitching at the telcos?); but if the demand is being made at the handset vendors, I get a sinking feeling that it might involve some sort of client-side software that is designed to be impossible to remove/circumvent. I'm sure that the vendors would implement that in way totally unproblematic for people who want to root/jailbreak/run custom ROMs...
industry-wide 'kill switch' system
It's really for stolen phones .. just like the kill switch for the internet was for emergency purposes. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cutting off people's means of communicating effectively with each other.
Paranoia is fun, and often highly predictive; but only if you keep things architecturally realistic:
Does 'the man' want control over your communications, especially if they get caught with their pants down as in the London riots incident a while back? Sure, that's plausible enough.
Is there any reason why he would want a client-side kill switch to achieve this objective? That's a lot less convincing. A cellphone is worth approximately fuck-all without its network. Voila! control over communications is already in the hands of the (highly cooperative with the authorities, as long as it doesn't have anything to do with antitrust law, consumer protections, etc.) telcos... You can easily enough shut down service to given areas, or, thanks to the fact that carriers have cared about billing since forever, nuke individual undesirables without the slightest disruption to the rest of the network. Burning the handset just isn't necessary, and it's the mechanism that is most likely to be hacked, circumvented, or discovered and leaked at some hacker conference. Why bother?
Humans are the only species that matters though.
Humans ... who are Americans.
You needn't be so redundant, it's not as though there are non-American humans, so why belabor the obvious?
Looks like the paleo diet didn't work for Grok after all...
They're outsourcing to robots really, not to us. It just happens to be convenient for the robots to live in North Carolina in this case, probably due to regulatory issues in some governments/businesses over purchasing Chinese-made computers.
I'd imagine that this facility probably helps with turnaround time on custom orders as well. Popping in CPUs and option cards isn't terribly demanding work; but if you give customers the option to choose exactly what CPU/RAM/cards combination they want you either have to be really good at guessing ahead of time, willing to quote lead times based on container-ship speeds, or relatively close to the customer.
Valid, and stupid on their part. That is why I said should.
Fair enough. I'm just deeply pessimistic that the (wise and superior) "knowledge of the algorithm Must Not compromise the system" standard that crypto systems are held to prevails with keyless entry systems.
For whatever reason(whether it be power/gate constraints, cultural sharing with the world of locksmithing, or vendor lousiness uninhibited by the ruthlessness of the internet), keyless-entry/RFID auth/etc. seems to be one of the last major bastions of vendors talking about 'Proprietary Encryption' as though it were a feature, rather than a point of shame. Encryption algorithms on general purpose computers went through that stage, at one time; but the lightweight RF hardware market seems to be lagging considerably in terms of awareness.
Having access to the algorithms should not compromise security.
Assuming that they are using some actually-competent cryptosystem, and didn't add a 'convenience feature' somewhere foolish to make it easier to create replacement fobs.
Given the historical enthusiasm in lock and key circles for 'blind codes' that are super-magical-secure and can only be turned into bitting codes with the equally super-magical-secure codebooks that Trustworthy Authorized Locksmiths are supposed to have access to, I wouldn't be 100% optimistic about the market being handled according to the standards of professional cryptoanalysts...
But your EBCDIC documents are absolute rubbish now and the tools to convert them aren't commonplace any more.
How deep are your pockets?
*IBM Consulting*
Unicodes is a bit sprawling; but ASCII is only 128 characters(unless dealing with the wonderful world of nonstandardized non-latin extensions or ad-hoc 8-bit extensions-of-convenience is your problem, in which case I'd advise shirking your duties and drinking heavily), making preserving the whole thing even by chiselling it into stone monuments or other archaic methods potentially viable.
I think you will find that there's a little known branch of academia called "history" which sometimes takes a curious interest in even the most trivial of past information.....
Even if you don't care about the historians, I'm sure the lucky people who have the pleasure of handling property deeds at your local governance hive can tell you a story from within the last week or two about needing to pull some rather seriously dusty documents to allow a present-day transaction to go through without incident.
Many data will, indeed, be of no interest at all, or the same historical interest that neolithic refuse dumps are; but data in the nontrivial-number-of-decades range are still live in more than a few contexts.
I think that given MS office and LibreOffice are in XML, it shouldn't be difficult at all to reverse engineer in the future.
Binary formats were standard for everything up through Office 2003. Office 2007(2003 with optional converter pack and some weird bugs) could output something XML based, though I have the vague memory from the OpenDocument/Open Office XML slugfest that 2007 produced something that deviated from the theoretical ideal of OOXML in some respects, and that full conformity happened at 2010 or 2013. I might be remembering that wrong; but anything before 2003, and a lot from 2003 were definitely binary.
Don't forget the gigabytes of 'example code' stashed on their computers, and how you always seem to see an IDE being frantically closed if you open a door behind them when they aren't expecting it...
Given that wifi punches through walls reasonably adequately, for most values of 'wall', you wouldn't really have to share a residence with somebody, it would likely work on at least the adjacent houses or apartments if sited correctly.
A vehicle could presumably also scan a building for movement from outside. Possibly even get decent location accuracy with some directional antenna tricks...
Wouldn't the DOJ just LOVE this if they could force manufacturers to give them remote access. With a warrant, of course (wink wink!) Is there nothing in a modern house that can't be re-purposed to spy on us anymore?
Why would they have to force them? If history is anything to go by, your ISP will bake the function voluntarily into their dreadful CPE shit so that they can sell the data for advertising purposes, at which point the feds can just ask them for it...
That's crazy talk. Everybody knows that warheads just shrivel up if you provide them with life support and cushy seats!
Tasers are less lethal torture devices mainly used to force compliance.
Your disinformation disguists me and all responsible citizens, AC. The manual clearly states, right on page 19:
"RECOMMENDED DRIVE-STUN AREAS FOR MAXIMUM EFFECT
Drive the X26C into the following areas for maximum effectiveness.
Carotid (sides of neck) (see warning below).
Brachial plexus tie-in (upper chest).
Radial (forearm).
Pelvic triangle (see warning below).
Common peronial (Outside of thigh).
Tibial (calf muscle).
WARNING: Use care when applying a drive-stun to the neck or pelvic triangle. These areas
are sensitive to mechanical injury (such as crushing to the trachea or testicles if applied
forcefully). However, these areas have proven highly effective targets. "
How responsible as that? A safety warning because they care just that much. Can you say that you care that much about Safety? I thought not.
Is IBM's present 'cloud' stuff broken in some way that would make something that Softlayer does particularly attractive/valuable as an IP or product buy, or is this more of a straight purchase of Softlayer's already-deployed facilities and existing customers to more swiftly expand their marketshare?
At least it didn't get shot down...
I swear to god if they do dailies of farming, I'll /ragequit the movie and punch the guy at the ticket counter.
No problem. You'll already have purchased popcorn, candy, and soda at the real-money-concession-stand at that point, so who cares?
World of Warcraft: The Grind of Darkness
I wonder if it's merely a coincidence that this...became available... at roughly the same time that Euro Hawk's ICAO-togetherness issues became insurmountable(it certainly would be a convenient one, if somebody wanted to twist that particular knife, very good footage at a very good time), or whether photogenic leaks and procurement debacles are both more or less continuous phenomena and so necessarily overlap from time to time?
As best I can tell, the footage is from the forward-facing camera, whose view is slightly obscured by the nose-antenna-harpoon-thing(technical term) visible on the front of the drone in this shot.
That would presumably also be present in competent fake footage; but it is consistent with the line of sight that you'd infer from the drone's layout, and from the shots on the manufacturer's puff page.
The suggestions involved are klunky and the idea of splitting it into 3 OSes is going the wrong way. Windows RT is a disaster because it lacks app compatibility. MS needs to retire it and fully embrace x86 now that intel has fixed it with Haswell.
I suspect that Intel hasn't 'fixed it' in a sense fully agreeable to Microsoft:
When a PC sells, there are two main winners: Microsoft and Intel. Everybody else gets to make it up in volume. With desktops and larger laptops that doesn't vex Microsoft quite as much(since AMD anchors the low and some of the midrange and Apple is in the same boat as they are). If MS wants a bright, shiny, touch-whatever future, though, sharing the margins with the single vendor who can implement x86 sufficiently efficiently to hit those sizes and battery lives isn't going to be nearly as entertaining, especially when the rest of the market is buying near-interchangeable ARM SoCs from themselves or whoever wins the knife-fight-of-pricing today.
I'm not an expert, so ignore me if one shows up; but my suspicion would be that they cool down enough that we can't see them anymore: You'd get a lot of heat, initially, when the planet coalesces; but if it isn't massive enough to ignite fusion and become a star, it'll just keep bleeding radiation into space until it reaches whatever equilibrium temperature the intensity and location of its local star provide for. As they get colder, their output gets weaker, until it gets to the point where our instruments are insufficiently sensitive to distinguish it from the background(unless it passes in front of its star, which has allowed us to indirectly infer the existence of smaller objects that we can't see directly).