I'd assume that the wavelength chosen represented a compromise between what team engineering could get to operate without catching fire and the wavelength that theory would expect to be transmitted most efficiently in the atmosphere(and, in a naval context, that probably means generous doses of water vapor and possibly aerosol droplets in addition to the usual oxygen/nitrogen).
Anybody more familiar than I with variations in transmission efficiency by frequency have a guess as to whether IR was chosen for good behavior, or because that is what they could get a solid state laser to do at sufficiently high power?
TFA(although horribly light on details) specifically mentions that these devices are too feeble and short ranged to pose any threat to such larger missiles. TFA also expresses uncertainty about hitting fast moving targets(I'd hope that the tracking capabilities are at least not-worse than existing CIWS hardware; but if it takes several seconds to set the target on fire, that would entail a greater delay...)
In fact, short of being a tech demo for something that might eventually be mature, it isn't entirely clear what this system can do that any of the better regarded WWII-era light cannon(retrofitted with modern targeting systems) couldn't...
True, the cheerleading for North Korea and China on Slashdot is almost embarrassing.
Absent, but embarrassing.
I have to wonder at the thought processes of somebody who, when you say "Y'know, our support of Operation Condor was really pretty disgusting", somehow hears "I love Communism so much that I'd kiss Uncle Joe right on his death camps! Viva La DPRK!" and begins frothing at the mouth...
C'mon, you know you liked going pixel-by-pixel across an entire screen full of static forest background until your cursor changed to let you know that you'd found the one "stick" in the entire place that you can add to your inventory!
I'm no Ford fan(he just had such a short term and relatively bland reputation that he seemed a viable candidate for a "eh, ok" designation); but Nixon isn't a saint even by those standards. His petty politicking around the Paris Peace accords cost us(not to mention the poor bastards who lived there) a substantial bill in blood in Vietnam.
The moral of the story is that once you realise the "alright" president/prime minister/premier/whatever is actually up to all sorts of no-good, then the ones you don't think so much of are positively up to their necks in it.
Umm, 1973-76 would place these cables in the Nixon administration, with some later Ford material. Ford may have been feckless enough to secure 'alright' status; but did Nixon ever qualify as anything other than a nasty piece of work?
He sounds like he's joking there. I suspect that Kissinger was smart enough, and...er... ethically dis-inhibited enough, to be a truly epic troll when he felt like it.
The two most notable trojans in the wild today being the one that compromises your system while telling you that it will let you run Java applications, and the one that compromises your system while telling you that it will let you view flash videos...
It's really pathetic watching neocolonial fanboys tear apart any non-western nation censoring anything yet always finding reason and righteousness when a Western government does it. If you are going to tout freedom and other ideological bs, at least maintain consistency.
Your post is the 4th top level post on the page. There are exactly zero neocolonial fanboys or even mentions of non-western nations above your post.
Laziness is the optimistic option... The pessimistic possibility is that they are currently doing a nontrivial amount of surveillance that meets the (somewhere between low and nonexistent, depending on how you ask) standard of evidence for pen registers and similar; but would not meet the standards that would apply if they had to ask a judge to let them demand the goods from Apple.
Honestly(while the rulings in class action cases tend to be ridiculously likely to allow offenders to pay in coupons, software, and other 'in-kind' nonsense that costs them pennies on the dollar), it would probably be better if people thought of class action suits as something more like a criminal proceeding, except handled by private sector actors based on financial incentives.
When a criminal case comes up, the first zillion comments aren't "The criminal justice system is a total scam: the prosecutor gets a salary and everything and the victim of the crime gets nothing!" because that isn't the point, the point is dealing with criminals and making committing crimes more risky and less attractive. Obviously, if the class-action system were better at getting the financial penalty distributed to the wronged parties, rather than just attorneys or imaginary-accounting-dollars paid out in product and coupons, this would be a major improvement; but even if the 'class' never got anything, a system that encourages lawsuits against entities who wrong large classes of people is a good in itself.
That would be saner than just storing the key; but I suspect that virtually everybody's password is substantially less entropic than all but the most horrible and obsolete cryptographic keys...
Unless the DEA is actively 'leaking' in order to attempt to move people into a vulnerable channel with a false sense of security(not impossible; but I'm inclined to suspect that the higher level drug runners take their paranoia seriously, or they wouldn't have lasted long enough to level up, and the lower level ones are probably more often foiled by the fact that they need to solicit customers, any one of which could be a plant), I'd be inclined to a more prosaic explanation.
With SMS, architectural security during transmission is somewhere between pitiful and nonexistent and the entity that handles the messages during their voyage is the phone company, which has substantial legal incentives to, and a long history of, supine cooperation with the authorities.
With iMessage, it looks pretty much like SMS on the handset; but it's all just data to the telco, and Apple presumably included some SSL/TLS or similar implementation that isn't totally broken, meaning that going through the telco is totally useless(this would also be why the leaked memo specifically mentioned that iMessages sent to non-Apple devices, which would be crunched into SMS at some stage, were still often recoverable).
The fact that Apple can, apparently, retrieve your iMessage history for you suggests that, indeed, a subpoena of Apple would leave you in the open; but I imagine that the DEA is much more familiar with, and pleased by, the 'service-oriented' attitudes of the phone companies, who are extremely forthcoming with customer information, with very low bars to clear, and minimal pesky judicial process.
Certainly not a good idea to trust anything that the service operator can 'recover' or 'restore' for you to be secure(since it can't possibly be); but the DEA jackboots probably do encounter significantly greater hassle with a message that is never available to the notoriously friendly telcos. You are still up shit creek if they are building a case against you specifically(or if Apple caves and starts providing bulk access at some future time); but casual fishing is likely to be more difficult.
Presumably imply the existence of a feature-complete TeX implementation in the browser, that would render and display whatever TeX snippet was included within the tag...
I'm pretty sure that there are some server-side convenience plugins for at least a few of the major OSS CMS packages that will let you use TeX or LaTeX and then digest the results into images that get plunked into the actual HTML that gets shoveled out to clients; but the odds of coaxing browser makers to include a completely separate, extremely powerful, and highly mature(if baroque) rendering engine alongside the one they already have, just to support a TeX tag seem slim...
Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.
I suspect that it depends on what flavor of radioactives you are working with. The worst-case scenario is that a substantial quantity of them are (like Strontium, which looks almost like Calcium) compounds that are readily water-soluble and readily absorbed by organisms in the water and concentrated up the food chain.
Best case scenario is that it's mostly larger silt-type particles that are largely insoluble and not bioavalable, which still isn't great but should at least end up hanging out on the bottom for most of its lifetime.
Does anybody know what makes this delicious fluid tick?
That was exactly my thoughts when I first saw the headline. A top-end core i7 can manage a mere 20 Mhashs/s, while a GPU can do 2000 MH/s. The professional miners have moved on from GPUs to custom ASICs that can churn out as much 50GH/s.
The only way the malware purveyors are going to get anything of value out of this is if they get lucky and infect a number of high-end gaming rigs.
What I find a bit surprising is that doing something so relatively overt would still be a viable use of a botnet. Running the CPU full tilt, especially given how many computers are ill-cooled and battery powered these days, is something that even a total non-techie is relatively likely to notice. I'm amazed that any bot-herder decided that the increased attrition from being noticed would be less expensive than CPU-mining bitcoins would be valuable(especially when alternatives like keylogging for bank and other valuable logins exist and don't make the fans howl like a legion of the damned).
The trouble is(that while class actions do generally pay the lawyers too much and the class too little) the alternative to a class action is generally inaction, which pays the class nothing and doesn't even cost the malefactor money.
The 'transaction costs', so to speak, of taking something to court are high. Doubly so(if you are lucky, could be substantially more than doubly) if you are going up against a deep-pocketed foe who really doesn't want adverse precedent or inconvenient discovery to take place. For anything outside of the most trivial cases, this means that your right to individual redress in civil court is mostly theoretical.
What I find most odd about the denial of 'class' status in this case is that an illegal cartel arrangement to push down wages is exactly the sort of situation where it would be very difficult for any specific employee(unless they are allowed to take their case to discovery and dig up a bunch of juicy internal documents mentioning them by name) to prove any specific salary delta between the competitive and noncompetitive situations; but it should be relatively simple(by economic modeling standards) to arrive at an approximate figure for overall savings on wages by the cartel members. And, while precisely allocating the unpaid hypothetical wages to the people who lost them would be gravy, just getting to the point where the malefactors are punished would at least have deterrent value, and hopefully make such agreements less common elsewhere and in the future.
The non-Biafra 'Dead Kennedys' are an unmitigated waste of time; but Biafra himself went on to do some side projects and collaborations with various other outfits. I think he's still around.
I'm honestly surprised that Angry Birds has avoided controversy.
You control a bunch of birds, who are enraged by something or other, and conduct a series of suicide bombings targeting pigs(of all ages, combatants and noncombatants) and their infrastructure. Unless you succeed in porcine genocide, you lose the level.
I somehow imagine a 1 for 1 sprite swap called "Jihad Jump!" would not be a smash hit to quite the same degree...
Just classify them as "Obscene". Nobody actually seems to know what that is; but rigorous empirical study has allowed me to reach the conclusion that, functionally, "Obscene" is a shorthand term for "It isn't covered by the first amendment if it hurts my feelings sufficiently".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd assume that the wavelength chosen represented a compromise between what team engineering could get to operate without catching fire and the wavelength that theory would expect to be transmitted most efficiently in the atmosphere(and, in a naval context, that probably means generous doses of water vapor and possibly aerosol droplets in addition to the usual oxygen/nitrogen).
Anybody more familiar than I with variations in transmission efficiency by frequency have a guess as to whether IR was chosen for good behavior, or because that is what they could get a solid state laser to do at sufficiently high power?
TFA(although horribly light on details) specifically mentions that these devices are too feeble and short ranged to pose any threat to such larger missiles. TFA also expresses uncertainty about hitting fast moving targets(I'd hope that the tracking capabilities are at least not-worse than existing CIWS hardware; but if it takes several seconds to set the target on fire, that would entail a greater delay...)
In fact, short of being a tech demo for something that might eventually be mature, it isn't entirely clear what this system can do that any of the better regarded WWII-era light cannon(retrofitted with modern targeting systems) couldn't...
True, the cheerleading for North Korea and China on Slashdot is almost embarrassing.
Absent, but embarrassing.
I have to wonder at the thought processes of somebody who, when you say "Y'know, our support of Operation Condor was really pretty disgusting", somehow hears "I love Communism so much that I'd kiss Uncle Joe right on his death camps! Viva La DPRK!" and begins frothing at the mouth...
I, for one, am happy adventure games have died.
C'mon, you know you liked going pixel-by-pixel across an entire screen full of static forest background until your cursor changed to let you know that you'd found the one "stick" in the entire place that you can add to your inventory!
I'm no Ford fan(he just had such a short term and relatively bland reputation that he seemed a viable candidate for a "eh, ok" designation); but Nixon isn't a saint even by those standards. His petty politicking around the Paris Peace accords cost us(not to mention the poor bastards who lived there) a substantial bill in blood in Vietnam.
The moral of the story is that once you realise the "alright" president/prime minister/premier/whatever is actually up to all sorts of no-good, then the ones you don't think so much of are positively up to their necks in it.
Umm, 1973-76 would place these cables in the Nixon administration, with some later Ford material. Ford may have been feckless enough to secure 'alright' status; but did Nixon ever qualify as anything other than a nasty piece of work?
He sounds like he's joking there. I suspect that Kissinger was smart enough, and...er... ethically dis-inhibited enough, to be a truly epic troll when he felt like it.
'Fascist Dictatorship' is verging on hate speech. Please use the term 'Stability-Enhanced Administration' or 'American Regional Security Ally'.
You are defending the LIFEWORK of a PORN dealer
get over your little righteous selves
Y'know, even if we accept the conclusion that dealing in porn is evil, would that more upstanding citizens had projects nearly as worth defending...
The two most notable trojans in the wild today being the one that compromises your system while telling you that it will let you run Java applications, and the one that compromises your system while telling you that it will let you view flash videos...
It's really pathetic watching neocolonial fanboys tear apart any non-western nation censoring anything yet always finding reason and righteousness when a Western government does it. If you are going to tout freedom and other ideological bs, at least maintain consistency.
Your post is the 4th top level post on the page. There are exactly zero neocolonial fanboys or even mentions of non-western nations above your post.
There was this boat in New Zealand that pissed the French off that one time...
Laziness is the optimistic option... The pessimistic possibility is that they are currently doing a nontrivial amount of surveillance that meets the (somewhere between low and nonexistent, depending on how you ask) standard of evidence for pen registers and similar; but would not meet the standards that would apply if they had to ask a judge to let them demand the goods from Apple.
Honestly(while the rulings in class action cases tend to be ridiculously likely to allow offenders to pay in coupons, software, and other 'in-kind' nonsense that costs them pennies on the dollar), it would probably be better if people thought of class action suits as something more like a criminal proceeding, except handled by private sector actors based on financial incentives.
When a criminal case comes up, the first zillion comments aren't "The criminal justice system is a total scam: the prosecutor gets a salary and everything and the victim of the crime gets nothing!" because that isn't the point, the point is dealing with criminals and making committing crimes more risky and less attractive. Obviously, if the class-action system were better at getting the financial penalty distributed to the wronged parties, rather than just attorneys or imaginary-accounting-dollars paid out in product and coupons, this would be a major improvement; but even if the 'class' never got anything, a system that encourages lawsuits against entities who wrong large classes of people is a good in itself.
That would be saner than just storing the key; but I suspect that virtually everybody's password is substantially less entropic than all but the most horrible and obsolete cryptographic keys...
Unless the DEA is actively 'leaking' in order to attempt to move people into a vulnerable channel with a false sense of security(not impossible; but I'm inclined to suspect that the higher level drug runners take their paranoia seriously, or they wouldn't have lasted long enough to level up, and the lower level ones are probably more often foiled by the fact that they need to solicit customers, any one of which could be a plant), I'd be inclined to a more prosaic explanation.
With SMS, architectural security during transmission is somewhere between pitiful and nonexistent and the entity that handles the messages during their voyage is the phone company, which has substantial legal incentives to, and a long history of, supine cooperation with the authorities.
With iMessage, it looks pretty much like SMS on the handset; but it's all just data to the telco, and Apple presumably included some SSL/TLS or similar implementation that isn't totally broken, meaning that going through the telco is totally useless(this would also be why the leaked memo specifically mentioned that iMessages sent to non-Apple devices, which would be crunched into SMS at some stage, were still often recoverable).
The fact that Apple can, apparently, retrieve your iMessage history for you suggests that, indeed, a subpoena of Apple would leave you in the open; but I imagine that the DEA is much more familiar with, and pleased by, the 'service-oriented' attitudes of the phone companies, who are extremely forthcoming with customer information, with very low bars to clear, and minimal pesky judicial process.
Certainly not a good idea to trust anything that the service operator can 'recover' or 'restore' for you to be secure(since it can't possibly be); but the DEA jackboots probably do encounter significantly greater hassle with a message that is never available to the notoriously friendly telcos. You are still up shit creek if they are building a case against you specifically(or if Apple caves and starts providing bulk access at some future time); but casual fishing is likely to be more difficult.
Pissing off Donald Knuth would be like kicking the Dalai Lama.
So extremely disrespectful; but violence against somebody who would have to step severely out of character to respond in kind? Sounds low-risk...
Presumably imply the existence of a feature-complete TeX implementation in the browser, that would render and display whatever TeX snippet was included within the tag...
I'm pretty sure that there are some server-side convenience plugins for at least a few of the major OSS CMS packages that will let you use TeX or LaTeX and then digest the results into images that get plunked into the actual HTML that gets shoveled out to clients; but the odds of coaxing browser makers to include a completely separate, extremely powerful, and highly mature(if baroque) rendering engine alongside the one they already have, just to support a TeX tag seem slim...
Can't they mix this water into the ocean, diluting it to background levels? Surely the ocean has a certain amount of naturally occurring radioactive materials in it and I'm sure this wouldn't change it much.
I suspect that it depends on what flavor of radioactives you are working with. The worst-case scenario is that a substantial quantity of them are (like Strontium, which looks almost like Calcium) compounds that are readily water-soluble and readily absorbed by organisms in the water and concentrated up the food chain.
Best case scenario is that it's mostly larger silt-type particles that are largely insoluble and not bioavalable, which still isn't great but should at least end up hanging out on the bottom for most of its lifetime.
Does anybody know what makes this delicious fluid tick?
That was exactly my thoughts when I first saw the headline. A top-end core i7 can manage a mere 20 Mhashs/s, while a GPU can do 2000 MH/s. The professional miners have moved on from GPUs to custom ASICs that can churn out as much 50GH/s.
The only way the malware purveyors are going to get anything of value out of this is if they get lucky and infect a number of high-end gaming rigs.
What I find a bit surprising is that doing something so relatively overt would still be a viable use of a botnet. Running the CPU full tilt, especially given how many computers are ill-cooled and battery powered these days, is something that even a total non-techie is relatively likely to notice. I'm amazed that any bot-herder decided that the increased attrition from being noticed would be less expensive than CPU-mining bitcoins would be valuable(especially when alternatives like keylogging for bank and other valuable logins exist and don't make the fans howl like a legion of the damned).
The trouble is(that while class actions do generally pay the lawyers too much and the class too little) the alternative to a class action is generally inaction, which pays the class nothing and doesn't even cost the malefactor money.
The 'transaction costs', so to speak, of taking something to court are high. Doubly so(if you are lucky, could be substantially more than doubly) if you are going up against a deep-pocketed foe who really doesn't want adverse precedent or inconvenient discovery to take place. For anything outside of the most trivial cases, this means that your right to individual redress in civil court is mostly theoretical.
What I find most odd about the denial of 'class' status in this case is that an illegal cartel arrangement to push down wages is exactly the sort of situation where it would be very difficult for any specific employee(unless they are allowed to take their case to discovery and dig up a bunch of juicy internal documents mentioning them by name) to prove any specific salary delta between the competitive and noncompetitive situations; but it should be relatively simple(by economic modeling standards) to arrive at an approximate figure for overall savings on wages by the cartel members. And, while precisely allocating the unpaid hypothetical wages to the people who lost them would be gravy, just getting to the point where the malefactors are punished would at least have deterrent value, and hopefully make such agreements less common elsewhere and in the future.
The non-Biafra 'Dead Kennedys' are an unmitigated waste of time; but Biafra himself went on to do some side projects and collaborations with various other outfits. I think he's still around.
Win-win! I wonder if John Carmack knows that he's an amazingly effective social worker?
I'm honestly surprised that Angry Birds has avoided controversy.
You control a bunch of birds, who are enraged by something or other, and conduct a series of suicide bombings targeting pigs(of all ages, combatants and noncombatants) and their infrastructure. Unless you succeed in porcine genocide, you lose the level.
I somehow imagine a 1 for 1 sprite swap called "Jihad Jump!" would not be a smash hit to quite the same degree...
Just classify them as "Obscene". Nobody actually seems to know what that is; but rigorous empirical study has allowed me to reach the conclusion that, functionally, "Obscene" is a shorthand term for "It isn't covered by the first amendment if it hurts my feelings sufficiently".