That's true enough. This feature isn't anti-standard, in the sense that its existence doesn't make the whole mess less wifi compliant; but it is totally orthogonal to the wifi standards, and depends entirely on cooperation among a single vendor's devices under the control of a single provisioning controller.
I assume the increasing number of battery-powered APs(either those little cellular blobs, or phones in AP mode) will decrease the shouting a bit, just because shouting takes energy; but anything with a wall to feed from is likely to continue to be a mess...
Unless you rather enjoy off-roading, and/or do an atypically large amount of driving within the confines of giant private holdings, the government does effectively control your car on every timescale but the very near term.
Blacktop crumbles pretty quickly without upkeep, and pretty much only exists in most places because somebody eminent-domained their way through with state power and then paved with public money.
Assorted mark-of-the-beast fantasies of having vehicles directly controlled by the Master Computer in washington are obvious nonsense; but that doesn't change the fact that the 'freedom of the open road' is overwhelmingly a state construct, albeit one polite enough not to mention the fact very often(unlike that commie 'public transit' stuff)...
I think the problem in this case is that our Swiss friends managed to build a ~$1300 lock that is as vulnerable to paperclips as a base model two factors of ten cheaper.
Obviously, one has to be realistic in one's demands of devices built of pitifully limited matter; but even realistic demands won't save this design...
I would hardly underestimate the possibility of them fucking it up; but if they don't care about some method of turning "community" into profit, every penny spent on instructables was a complete waste. According to terms c. and d. of their legal blurb, instructables gains broad rights to publish and derive; but entirely nonexclusive ones, so anybody they piss off can just run to blogspot and post their hacks there.
Technologically, instructables is just another CMS-driven site, nothing particularly notable there, so if they drive people away they'll just have a cute domain name and a bunch of nonexclusive rights to assorted curious projects for their trouble. I hardly think that their motives are altruistic, it's just that there won't be anything to suck dry if people leave...
It doesn't help you much if you don't control most of the devices; but the access points we use at work have a cute little trick where they listen for other APs provisioned from the same controller and automatically adjust output power on some or all of their antennas in an attempt to provide adequate strength, without gaps or areas of unproductive 'shouting', across the entire coverage area(automatically inferred by the APs triangulating one another). We needed denser installations than originally planned to get things working in situations with large numbers of client devices concentrated in certain areas; but it otherwise pretty much does what it says on the tin(and for what the APs alone cost, you'd bloody well want it to...)
The fact that somebody managed to get a "secure" lock out the door with electrical contacts trivially accessible from the hostile side of the door is pretty damn pathetic... Couldn't they have potted the thing? Worse, it isn't as though designing systems that are supposed to be resistant to physical/electrical attacks isn't exactly an unknown field. The Nevada Gaming Commission, for example, would laugh a slot machine out of their office if it had externally accessible PCBs. The standards specifically mention that, among numerous other considerations. Heck, these super-advanced locks would seem to be rather more vulnerable than contemporary consumer hardware DRM, of the sort that protects a few bucks worth of pop-culture drivel. FFS...
The problem is intrinsically a hard one, 802.11* wasn't really designed for a zillion flacks in a large room, each toting personal cell routers and whatnot.
However, it is possible that the problem could be solved by money. Let's just say that "(Linksys, D-Link, Netgear)" isn't exactly an honorable lineup of the finest names in Serious Wifi. Cheap, yes, quite delightfully so. Built right down to price? Well, you could say that...
You might want to do some looking into the world of "industrial wifi" products. The environmental resistance of such will be total overkill for a tradeshow floor; but (successful) offerings in that sector are designed for people who need their network to work despite the fact that it is in the middle of a factory floor or next to the arc welder or what have you.
The trouble with going upmarket, though, is that it can be somewhat hard to tell what is genuinely better at wireless networking vs. what is just the same old shit on the wireless side; but in a POE, ruggedized, -40/+135 thermal resistant, with baked-in proprietary management protocols in the firmware, container. You really want the former, not the latter...
It would be slightly more difficult/costly than just tweaking the DNS server and getting 95% of the suckers for free; but your ISP isn't exactly technologically incapable of simply dropping traffic to/from known independent DNS servers, or rewriting responses therefrom...
HTTPS will(barring CA incompetence or your ISP 'install disk' quietly adding their own root certs) assure you that you are talking to the real google.
If your ISP is fucking with DNS, though, and your attempts to talk to the real google are going to a different IP entirely, it will only warn you of that, not get you where you want to go.
If only because copyright/trademark claims for a US company serving an exact duplicate of the google homepage for monetary gain could pretty quickly hit the zillions, I'm guessing that these "Paxfire" shitbags aren't actually trying to do a 100% spoof of the site you want, just redirecting you to some horrid 'search' page of the sort normally maintained by typosquatters and similar scum.
HTTPS isn't harmful under this circumstance; but it is unlikely to tell you anything you didn't already know, and it isn't even intended to solve the problem you will want to solve...
Wash. Rinse Repeat.
Macs aren't as vulnerable because they don't have a big enough footprint so they aren't stumbling upon the infected sites or aren't being targeted directly. Windows, including Windows 7, is still more prevalent and more vulnerable.
How many times are we going to get the same stories? If the user is willing to do anything the app or websites tells them to, well, you can't protect them.
You appear to have missed the bit where TFA was almost the exact opposite of the usual:
According to the security researchers quoted, OSX was essentially never the initial foothold/desktop attack; but was judged to be as weak, or weaker, than alternatives when it came to the post-foothold internal attack phase.
Most Mac/Security stories are an argument between the "It's just obscure" camp and the "superior by design" camp. This article asserts "Obscure(enough to rarely/never be the social engineering initial target) and inferior by design(in that various OSX features are comparatively weak in the face of sophisticated attackers who have finished stage one)"....
Sounds like South Africa's crime problem is good and cleared up. Maybe if they can arrest someone from 4chan the place will finally be safer than the more tepid warzones of the world...
I think that the main problem, aside from good old fashioned scope/mission creep, is that the less 'normative' online anonymity becomes, the more anonymity tends to stand out. Unless you are damn good, a substantial portion of your actual anonymity, if you are trying to be anonymous, comes from the fact that the internet is a torrent of psuedo-anonymous and unverified noise. If it becomes the case that all the good little people who have nothing to hide move neatly in authenticated rows to keep them from being pricks, the people who need anonymity will stand out like sore thumbs, unless they have serious chops or serious resources.
It seems only fair to let them lead by example. Anybody know what it would cost(in round numbers) to get more or less panopticon-caliber surveillance done, 24/7 on the upper echelons of the house that Zuck built? Perhaps some of Rupert's boys are back on the market?
In seriousness, both about the above and about my original post, this really illustrates a fairly important distinction within the set of things that fall under "culture", and which affects how cultural tolerance/intolerance, diversity, etc. work:
There are, first those elements of culture which are not mutually exclusive, or mutually exclusive in such a limited sense(oh noes! If I try to eat more than three traditional evening meals from different cultures in the same night I will be too full!) as to not matter. Funny clothes, weird food items, culturally sanctioned 'my invisible friend and/or the traditions of my ancestors say that these are my days off' days, etc. These occassionally cause minor inconveince, sometimes cause modest advantages(like Chinese take-out, or the fact that it's easier to find people to take the Christmas shifts when you've got people who aren't even culturally linked to Abrahamic monotheisms on staff...)
However, "culture" deals with more than food items and traditional dress and whatnot. It also covers things like the legitimate distribution of power, the legitimate users of force, and the legitimate circumstances, and victims, of that legitimate force. These things are mutually exclusive. You cannot have a divide-right monarch and a constitutional representative democracy as the simultaneously supreme governing power. Neither is compatible with a theocratic state.
At some point, in order to constitute a society, you pretty much have to declare a given set of cultural priorities supreme in the mutually-exclusive stuff that it defines. Some such declarations create vastly greater impositions than others on members of other cultural groups(eg. "your entire religion is heathenish satan worship, it is hereby suppressed." vs. "nope, sorry, stoning people for ritual uncleanness is murder under the law, you'll have to give that up or face the slammer."); but they all create some. You just have to decide which toes get stepped on.
I think, at that point, that we resort to some unpleasant Ultima Ratio Regum style solution and see whose culture happens to have developed more efficient means for wiping out the hosts infected by the other's...
The fact that he called them up and asked about the rules tips him pretty strongly in the direction of "geek" and away from "dirty-bomb suspect" in my estimation, so cop-style force seems a bit tactless; but if I were the hazmat guy who was called in to give him the "Yeah, I totally agree that science is cool; but people who do stupid things with dangerous materials often die and, unfortunately, sometimes take the neighbors with them" talk you bet I would be wearing a dosimeter and protective gear suitable to a potential radioactive dust hazard.
I'm afraid that my way of life obligates me to meddle in other people's affairs and ways of life. This is a cherished custom I inherited from my ancestors, and one of the vital elements of my culture. Without it I would be culturally rootless and alienated.
Please try to be sensitive and respect my deeply held customs and beliefs, rather than arrogantly forcing me to conform to yours.
The theory, I'm assuming, is that by building the side-channel into SSL interactions with neutral parties, they are making it much harder to block the side-channel without also blocking a great deal of "legitimate" activity that the regime would find useful.
Banking, commerce, the sort of stuff that induces the regime to not just block the whole damn internet. By doing that, instead of using a custom protocol, or using an SSLed connection to welovedissidentsinothercountries.us, both of which would be pitifully trivial to block, they would force the regime to either block a whole lot of economically useful traffic, or substantially degrade its security(the banks, for instance, are presumably already cooperating, so forcing them to drop SSL just makes it easier for the hackers...)
Does anybody know why, with Microsoft, there appears to be a strong pressure toward including the word "managed" in things that they are doing? Back when it was just "managed code", that sort of made sense, ok, ok, the environment manages the memory; but 'managed driving'?
As an explosion risk, this guy ranks well below a kid with a pack of sparklers. However, I can see taking some precautions around anyone who has been playing with Am241-containing items in any atypical quantity...
That stuff is a reasonably zesty alpha emitter, and modestly well absorbed if taken internally, which isn't a good mix. If some noob has been fucking around, it is hardly unreasonable to take the precautionary step of assuming that he's manage to produce a bunch of toxic and radioactive dust.
Now that I know that energy prices are actually in the hands of a combination of shadowy capital funds and petro-kleptocrats, rather than 'big oil', I will definitely be sleeping better.
There is also the fact that the stuff was a solvent, so it was presumably used for cleaning/degreasing/etc. and thus would only be considered waste once it had acquired a load of assorted dissolved materials, many of them probably nasty, which wouldn't evaporate at all and would simply be left in the soil...
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That's true enough. This feature isn't anti-standard, in the sense that its existence doesn't make the whole mess less wifi compliant; but it is totally orthogonal to the wifi standards, and depends entirely on cooperation among a single vendor's devices under the control of a single provisioning controller.
I assume the increasing number of battery-powered APs(either those little cellular blobs, or phones in AP mode) will decrease the shouting a bit, just because shouting takes energy; but anything with a wall to feed from is likely to continue to be a mess...
Unless you rather enjoy off-roading, and/or do an atypically large amount of driving within the confines of giant private holdings, the government does effectively control your car on every timescale but the very near term.
Blacktop crumbles pretty quickly without upkeep, and pretty much only exists in most places because somebody eminent-domained their way through with state power and then paved with public money.
Assorted mark-of-the-beast fantasies of having vehicles directly controlled by the Master Computer in washington are obvious nonsense; but that doesn't change the fact that the 'freedom of the open road' is overwhelmingly a state construct, albeit one polite enough not to mention the fact very often(unlike that commie 'public transit' stuff)...
I think the problem in this case is that our Swiss friends managed to build a ~$1300 lock that is as vulnerable to paperclips as a base model two factors of ten cheaper.
Obviously, one has to be realistic in one's demands of devices built of pitifully limited matter; but even realistic demands won't save this design...
I would hardly underestimate the possibility of them fucking it up; but if they don't care about some method of turning "community" into profit, every penny spent on instructables was a complete waste. According to terms c. and d. of their legal blurb, instructables gains broad rights to publish and derive; but entirely nonexclusive ones, so anybody they piss off can just run to blogspot and post their hacks there.
Technologically, instructables is just another CMS-driven site, nothing particularly notable there, so if they drive people away they'll just have a cute domain name and a bunch of nonexclusive rights to assorted curious projects for their trouble. I hardly think that their motives are altruistic, it's just that there won't be anything to suck dry if people leave...
I think that they are Aruba Networks gear, haven't had cause to check in a while...
A few CCs of potting compound would really have saved them some embarrassment...
It doesn't help you much if you don't control most of the devices; but the access points we use at work have a cute little trick where they listen for other APs provisioned from the same controller and automatically adjust output power on some or all of their antennas in an attempt to provide adequate strength, without gaps or areas of unproductive 'shouting', across the entire coverage area(automatically inferred by the APs triangulating one another). We needed denser installations than originally planned to get things working in situations with large numbers of client devices concentrated in certain areas; but it otherwise pretty much does what it says on the tin(and for what the APs alone cost, you'd bloody well want it to...)
The fact that somebody managed to get a "secure" lock out the door with electrical contacts trivially accessible from the hostile side of the door is pretty damn pathetic... Couldn't they have potted the thing? Worse, it isn't as though designing systems that are supposed to be resistant to physical/electrical attacks isn't exactly an unknown field. The Nevada Gaming Commission, for example, would laugh a slot machine out of their office if it had externally accessible PCBs. The standards specifically mention that, among numerous other considerations. Heck, these super-advanced locks would seem to be rather more vulnerable than contemporary consumer hardware DRM, of the sort that protects a few bucks worth of pop-culture drivel. FFS...
The problem is intrinsically a hard one, 802.11* wasn't really designed for a zillion flacks in a large room, each toting personal cell routers and whatnot.
However, it is possible that the problem could be solved by money. Let's just say that "(Linksys, D-Link, Netgear)" isn't exactly an honorable lineup of the finest names in Serious Wifi. Cheap, yes, quite delightfully so. Built right down to price? Well, you could say that...
You might want to do some looking into the world of "industrial wifi" products. The environmental resistance of such will be total overkill for a tradeshow floor; but (successful) offerings in that sector are designed for people who need their network to work despite the fact that it is in the middle of a factory floor or next to the arc welder or what have you.
The trouble with going upmarket, though, is that it can be somewhat hard to tell what is genuinely better at wireless networking vs. what is just the same old shit on the wireless side; but in a POE, ruggedized, -40/+135 thermal resistant, with baked-in proprietary management protocols in the firmware, container. You really want the former, not the latter...
It would be slightly more difficult/costly than just tweaking the DNS server and getting 95% of the suckers for free; but your ISP isn't exactly technologically incapable of simply dropping traffic to/from known independent DNS servers, or rewriting responses therefrom...
HTTPS will(barring CA incompetence or your ISP 'install disk' quietly adding their own root certs) assure you that you are talking to the real google.
If your ISP is fucking with DNS, though, and your attempts to talk to the real google are going to a different IP entirely, it will only warn you of that, not get you where you want to go.
If only because copyright/trademark claims for a US company serving an exact duplicate of the google homepage for monetary gain could pretty quickly hit the zillions, I'm guessing that these "Paxfire" shitbags aren't actually trying to do a 100% spoof of the site you want, just redirecting you to some horrid 'search' page of the sort normally maintained by typosquatters and similar scum.
HTTPS isn't harmful under this circumstance; but it is unlikely to tell you anything you didn't already know, and it isn't even intended to solve the problem you will want to solve...
Wash. Rinse Repeat. Macs aren't as vulnerable because they don't have a big enough footprint so they aren't stumbling upon the infected sites or aren't being targeted directly. Windows, including Windows 7, is still more prevalent and more vulnerable. How many times are we going to get the same stories? If the user is willing to do anything the app or websites tells them to, well, you can't protect them.
You appear to have missed the bit where TFA was almost the exact opposite of the usual:
According to the security researchers quoted, OSX was essentially never the initial foothold/desktop attack; but was judged to be as weak, or weaker, than alternatives when it came to the post-foothold internal attack phase.
Most Mac/Security stories are an argument between the "It's just obscure" camp and the "superior by design" camp. This article asserts "Obscure(enough to rarely/never be the social engineering initial target) and inferior by design(in that various OSX features are comparatively weak in the face of sophisticated attackers who have finished stage one)"....
Sounds like South Africa's crime problem is good and cleared up. Maybe if they can arrest someone from 4chan the place will finally be safer than the more tepid warzones of the world...
I think that the main problem, aside from good old fashioned scope/mission creep, is that the less 'normative' online anonymity becomes, the more anonymity tends to stand out. Unless you are damn good, a substantial portion of your actual anonymity, if you are trying to be anonymous, comes from the fact that the internet is a torrent of psuedo-anonymous and unverified noise. If it becomes the case that all the good little people who have nothing to hide move neatly in authenticated rows to keep them from being pricks, the people who need anonymity will stand out like sore thumbs, unless they have serious chops or serious resources.
It seems only fair to let them lead by example. Anybody know what it would cost(in round numbers) to get more or less panopticon-caliber surveillance done, 24/7 on the upper echelons of the house that Zuck built? Perhaps some of Rupert's boys are back on the market?
In seriousness, both about the above and about my original post, this really illustrates a fairly important distinction within the set of things that fall under "culture", and which affects how cultural tolerance/intolerance, diversity, etc. work:
There are, first those elements of culture which are not mutually exclusive, or mutually exclusive in such a limited sense(oh noes! If I try to eat more than three traditional evening meals from different cultures in the same night I will be too full!) as to not matter. Funny clothes, weird food items, culturally sanctioned 'my invisible friend and/or the traditions of my ancestors say that these are my days off' days, etc. These occassionally cause minor inconveince, sometimes cause modest advantages(like Chinese take-out, or the fact that it's easier to find people to take the Christmas shifts when you've got people who aren't even culturally linked to Abrahamic monotheisms on staff...)
However, "culture" deals with more than food items and traditional dress and whatnot. It also covers things like the legitimate distribution of power, the legitimate users of force, and the legitimate circumstances, and victims, of that legitimate force. These things are mutually exclusive. You cannot have a divide-right monarch and a constitutional representative democracy as the simultaneously supreme governing power. Neither is compatible with a theocratic state.
At some point, in order to constitute a society, you pretty much have to declare a given set of cultural priorities supreme in the mutually-exclusive stuff that it defines. Some such declarations create vastly greater impositions than others on members of other cultural groups(eg. "your entire religion is heathenish satan worship, it is hereby suppressed." vs. "nope, sorry, stoning people for ritual uncleanness is murder under the law, you'll have to give that up or face the slammer."); but they all create some. You just have to decide which toes get stepped on.
I think, at that point, that we resort to some unpleasant Ultima Ratio Regum style solution and see whose culture happens to have developed more efficient means for wiping out the hosts infected by the other's...
The fact that he called them up and asked about the rules tips him pretty strongly in the direction of "geek" and away from "dirty-bomb suspect" in my estimation, so cop-style force seems a bit tactless; but if I were the hazmat guy who was called in to give him the "Yeah, I totally agree that science is cool; but people who do stupid things with dangerous materials often die and, unfortunately, sometimes take the neighbors with them" talk you bet I would be wearing a dosimeter and protective gear suitable to a potential radioactive dust hazard.
I'm afraid that my way of life obligates me to meddle in other people's affairs and ways of life. This is a cherished custom I inherited from my ancestors, and one of the vital elements of my culture. Without it I would be culturally rootless and alienated.
Please try to be sensitive and respect my deeply held customs and beliefs, rather than arrogantly forcing me to conform to yours.
The theory, I'm assuming, is that by building the side-channel into SSL interactions with neutral parties, they are making it much harder to block the side-channel without also blocking a great deal of "legitimate" activity that the regime would find useful.
Banking, commerce, the sort of stuff that induces the regime to not just block the whole damn internet. By doing that, instead of using a custom protocol, or using an SSLed connection to welovedissidentsinothercountries.us, both of which would be pitifully trivial to block, they would force the regime to either block a whole lot of economically useful traffic, or substantially degrade its security(the banks, for instance, are presumably already cooperating, so forcing them to drop SSL just makes it easier for the hackers...)
Does anybody know why, with Microsoft, there appears to be a strong pressure toward including the word "managed" in things that they are doing? Back when it was just "managed code", that sort of made sense, ok, ok, the environment manages the memory; but 'managed driving'?
As an explosion risk, this guy ranks well below a kid with a pack of sparklers. However, I can see taking some precautions around anyone who has been playing with Am241-containing items in any atypical quantity...
That stuff is a reasonably zesty alpha emitter, and modestly well absorbed if taken internally, which isn't a good mix. If some noob has been fucking around, it is hardly unreasonable to take the precautionary step of assuming that he's manage to produce a bunch of toxic and radioactive dust.
Now that I know that energy prices are actually in the hands of a combination of shadowy capital funds and petro-kleptocrats, rather than 'big oil', I will definitely be sleeping better.
A rocket explosion may have had you inside because of concerns about delicious Hydrazine...
There is also the fact that the stuff was a solvent, so it was presumably used for cleaning/degreasing/etc. and thus would only be considered waste once it had acquired a load of assorted dissolved materials, many of them probably nasty, which wouldn't evaporate at all and would simply be left in the soil...