The hypocrisy part only comes in when we consider the fact that the very same groups of MPAA and friends were(during the same time period) crying bitterly to anybody who would listen about how youtube was one of the four horsemen of the piratepocalypse, and(DMCA compliance to the contrary) an illegal hive of scum and villainy. I believe that there were even a number of cases where a given studio's legal arm ended up DMCA-takedowning the material that the same studio's PR arm was putting up, and then accusing youtube of a sinister role in contributory infringement...
I don't know if that has been settled. I assume that the management would just sidestep any potential legal complications by having the most grating asshole currently on shift dump it into a paper cup for you. All the alienation, if not more, and very cheap in bulk.
Their practical ability to do so is, naturally, bounded by customer sentiment and their continued desire to have customers; but there is absolutely nothing requiring them to satisfy anybody's notions of logical consistency in expelling people. They ask you to leave. You leave or are trespassing.
If their customer base is alienated by that, the establishment may encounter solvency issues. If they approve, they've got a selling point.
Please, sir, be reasonable: requiring "facts", "citations", or (perish the thought) "evidence" of the sort that would earn a passing grade in Stats101 would be the absolute death of the sort of op-ed "journalism" that pads out newspapers across the land. How could you be so cruel?
Were it not for allowing their scribbling hacks to inflate personal grudges and tiny-value-of-N anecdotes into "trends", the NYT would probably have to do something comparatively expensive, like actual investigative reporting, to fill the space. Won't somebody please think of the Lifestyle section?
The stuff from Leaf Labs is a bit light in the RAM department for full-blown linux; but gives you a 72MHz, 32bit ARM in either an arduino shield-compatible format or a native format that exploits more of the microprocessor's pinout. Fully open toolchain and documentation. Not bad for $50. They apparently also have a version with an FPGA.
If you want to run a full embedded-linux computer, you pretty much have to go one step further. NSLU2s are discontinued now; but should run you under $100 for an ARM board with full debian support. Gumstix is a bit pricier; but smaller and has the advantage of being in production. The various Marvell *plug devices are also pretty cool for the $100 range...
It seems as though, given a little time, the markets do an excellent job of corrupting their own legitimacy, and taking the entire national economic well-being with it. Just ask Iceland, or Ireland, or the US...
There is also the fact that, coming from a position of relative weakness, and explicitly disclaiming any patents that need to be licensed in order to independently implement the spec, Google can write whatever spec they want; but they don't have very much leverage, which sharply limits their ability to piss people off.
Neither they nor their users have an interest in an incompetent spec, so interests are aligned there; and were Google to somehow come up with a way to bake anticompetitive evil of some flavor into the spec, there would be absolutely nothing stopping everyone else from shrugging and continuing to use "WebM without 'mustdecodeat50%ofrealtimeunlessuserisrunningchrome' enabled"... They don't have any "hook IP" by which to enforce conformity.
It remains to be seen whether they will gain enough traction for WebM to be relevant; but their unilateral spec is a long way from being dangerous at present...
I'm a bit surprised that he ran into trouble, my understanding was that titanium/bone interfacing, while still a bit more brutal than would be ideal, was a more or less solved problem. All sorts of rods, plates, screws, and whatnot get used routinely to patch together assorted horrors of skeletal misfortune, and remain implanted for the life of the patient.
Perhaps it was an issue with having the implant protruding through the skin, or carrying a load that probably got bumped and jostled from time to time?
The socially interesting(if probably ugly) phenomenon will be the steep rise of the cost of living in the suburbs and the exurbs...
With the recent partial collapse of the enormous bubble in real estate prices, we saw all kinds of hell break loose. Most major financial institutions were shown to be idiots rolling rigged dice in a burning casino, the middle and upper-middle class collectively shit themselves and demanded that Something Be Done when their god-given right to ever-increasing home values was pulled, and things generally got unpleasant.
An increase in the cost of driving would mean a permanent, structural, reduction in the value of suburbs and exurbs: too far from the city for efficient walking/mass transit, too dense for self-sufficient farming. Some will, certainly, hang on as places for the genuinely wealthy to escape from crime and those of the pigmented persuasion; but Joe "Middle Class" isn't going to be able to afford a white picket fence and two hour commute.
A lot of people's real-estate holdings will collapse in value, while the city centers will presumably be gentrified good and hard. What shape the new suburb/exurb slums will take remains to be seen...
Arguably, there was a period where that experiment was tried: Much of the early European colonial activity took place under the auspices of some combination of the Mercantilist theory that the "national wealth" had to be enhanced by generating trade surpluses and the age-old 'conquest theory of acquisition' that you could, in fact, conquer cheaply enough to usefully shift the costs of your consumption onto other people.
However, the nations that undertook it proved(with varying degrees of tenacity) that the theory was false. Even by the time the US was founded, the less jingoistic Brits were getting tired of paying very high taxes for the privilege of having an empire upon which the sun never set. Unless you can conquer on the very, very, cheap, plunder turns out to be a false economy(obviously so for the plundered, less obviously; but still so, for the people of the plundering nation. A few well-placed individual plunderers make out like bandits; but everybody else is effectively subsidizing them).
The economic success or failure of interventions to secure favorable trade positions are somewhat less clear, and thus have continued to the present day; but straight (pulled verbatim from a bumper sticker actually seen in the wild) "Kick their ass, take their gas" economics just don't work out.
In principle, you are correct. In practice, an increasing number of devices(especially space or cost constrained ones) implement "RS-232" that behaves pretty much exactly the same way as would be expected by anything post-20mA loop, with the exception of voltage. For cost and board space reasons(and because they are not intending to address the "terminal across the electrically noisy building from the minicomputer" use case), they omit any voltage conversion or protection circuitry and simply depend on the attached hardware to do either 5v/0v or 3.3v/0v, or whatever their logic-level happens to be.
Even an increasing number of supposedly-genuine RS-232 devices(especially laptops) don't generate anything near the +-12 swing of the old days. 12v/0v is more likely, or even 5v/0v, though such devices tend to, at least, have better tolerance for over-voltage than the little guys do.
Because it is so close to RS-232(all you need is a dumb level converter, no logic/protocol translation required), I tend to fall into calling it "RS-232" colloquially, even though it technically isn't.
Some of these plugs are powerful enough(or, more importantly, have enough RAM) that the only thing that really marks them as "embedded" is the fact that they have no video out and you have to deal with mtd devices rather than block devices...
Compiling on a 1.2GHz ARM with 128-512MB of RAM(depending on variant), when every cheap Wintel/Lintel is some 2+GHz dual core beast with 3GB of RAM is, certainly, somewhat masochistic; but the system can run perfectly normal debian ARM, compile natively, and either reflash its bootloader from the OS or reflash its OS from the boatloader, as well as updating portions of the OS from within a live system, just as in desktop and server Debian.
Certainly more "embedded" than "not-embedded"; but it's a pretty roomy flavor of "embedded"...
Unless you've decided to mess with uboot(which is likely a bad idea, unless you are totally comfortable with JTAG...), you shouldn't need anything scarier than some way of speaking RS-232 at suitably low voltage. Re-flashing a device over a serial line is tedious; but not terribly challenging, and even the various Kirkwood-platform products that are "no user-serviceable parts inside" almost certainly have an accessible serial header somewhere, albeit likely unpopulated or even unmarked...
If you've gone and nuked the bootloader, on the other hand, it is, as you say, JTAG time...
My understanding(IANAL), is that they would have to demonstrate intent to destroy evidence. See here starting on page 16 and page 64 for a summary of the Federal stuff...
If you don't know about the investigation, and always destroy hard drives after use, proving the necessary intent would likely be pretty tricky, even if the HDDs sometimes contained evidence of some crime or other. They might well tack it on, just to see if it would stick; but the other evidence would have to be really compelling.
If there were evidence that your SOP was what it was because you were operating a criminal enterprise and wished to avoid discovery, well, you might have a much clearer problem.
If you specifically destroy something after you hear about the investigation, you are fucked.
If you specifically destroy something after a subpoena for that something, double fucked.
You might want to come up with an evidence-destruction plan that doesn't result in your filesystem timestamps showing that your work machine(which anybody from the janitor on up will be able to testify that you use daily) wasn't touched for six months after IT issued it, and then started seeing a burst of use the day after news of fed interest in you came out...
On a modern OS/system software setup of any complexity, generating convincing fake timestamps and system activity is a bit on the nontrivial side. If the investigator has little or no evidence about your computer habits, or circumstantial evidence of what you've done, it isn't too hard; but if they have enough circumstantial evidence to work from, you might face issues.
This would be especially the case in a somewhat paranoid corporate environment(which I would imagine a hedge fund is). Even in my(far less tight-wound) shop, you would probably get a visit from IT to figure out WTF is going on were your machine to suddenly leap back 6 months in patch/AV update status, or (while retaining the same MAC) turn into a linux box or a non-domain windows machine from time to time... In an environment where IT is running scared about corporate espionage, Sarbanes-Oxley, or even just the rigors of dealing with backups of high value files on a mobile workforce of laptops, they would almost certainly be considerably more attentive.
Especially if the company has a strong reason to want to throw you under the bus(large, secretive hedge fund? You. Fucking. Bet. that they want the SEC/Fed investigation to end as soon as possible, ideally with just a couple of disposable peons "acting without authorization", as they say...) they would likely prove quite cooperative in helping to prove that you were hiding something. Particularly if that reduced their odds of having to hand over much larger swaths of their data/backups to investigators.
Why ration hatred? It isn't exactly a terribly limited resource. Seems entirely reasonable to hate the game and(since joining the game is voluntary) all the players.
IANAL; but my understanding is that it doesn't constitute an admission of guilt per se(particularly in these days of high-capacity hard drives, there would be no reasonable way to bound the number of things you could have been guilty of with just one HDD...); but, destruction of evidence and/or "obstruction of justice" are typically crimes in themselves.
If they have a recording of you describing how you ripped apart and surreptitiously disposed of your HDD after you heard that the feds were on your trail, those charges are going to be very hard to dodge...
Merely destroying your hard drive, out of caution or paranoia, and then learning later that the feds would really have liked to have a look through it, is one thing; but if you are caught on tape describing why you destroyed it, game over, man.
Perhaps we shouldn't be whining about tech-clueless management after all... This seems like a much worse alternative. On the plus side, he probably didn't even think about the mailserver backups...
True, I doubt that anyone has ever masturbated to electoral footage. Real live torture, on the other hand, could probably attract a decent slice of late-night pay-per-view traffic...
Even the parts that are classified right down to their budgets, and don't even bother filling out their statutorially required reports on what they are doing to congress?
I apologize if this doesn't fit with the Boy Scouts' Patriotic History of America; but the US has been accumulating dubiously-accountable spook shops like its a hobby at least since the cold war, if not earlier.
It would appear that a variety of groups, representing a de-facto merger of state and corporate power, are allied to destroy you.
On a scale from "1" to "highly ironic" how would you describe this confirmation of your assertion that the "representative" goverments actually pend a lot of time doing dirty deeds in the shadows?
What happened to the reliable old standbye of kidnapping an executive and/or their family and threatening to return one finger every hour until the organization starts taking security more seriously? We've gone soft, I tell ya...
Slashdot Mirror
The hypocrisy part only comes in when we consider the fact that the very same groups of MPAA and friends were(during the same time period) crying bitterly to anybody who would listen about how youtube was one of the four horsemen of the piratepocalypse, and(DMCA compliance to the contrary) an illegal hive of scum and villainy. I believe that there were even a number of cases where a given studio's legal arm ended up DMCA-takedowning the material that the same studio's PR arm was putting up, and then accusing youtube of a sinister role in contributory infringement...
I don't know if that has been settled. I assume that the management would just sidestep any potential legal complications by having the most grating asshole currently on shift dump it into a paper cup for you. All the alienation, if not more, and very cheap in bulk.
Their practical ability to do so is, naturally, bounded by customer sentiment and their continued desire to have customers; but there is absolutely nothing requiring them to satisfy anybody's notions of logical consistency in expelling people. They ask you to leave. You leave or are trespassing.
If their customer base is alienated by that, the establishment may encounter solvency issues. If they approve, they've got a selling point.
Please, sir, be reasonable: requiring "facts", "citations", or (perish the thought) "evidence" of the sort that would earn a passing grade in Stats101 would be the absolute death of the sort of op-ed "journalism" that pads out newspapers across the land. How could you be so cruel?
Were it not for allowing their scribbling hacks to inflate personal grudges and tiny-value-of-N anecdotes into "trends", the NYT would probably have to do something comparatively expensive, like actual investigative reporting, to fill the space. Won't somebody please think of the Lifestyle section?
Wow. I didn't even mention regulation or deregulation...
Now I don't know whether I should be stocking up on EMP weapons or coathangers in order to battle the robot uprising. Thanks a lot, Japan.
The stuff from Leaf Labs is a bit light in the RAM department for full-blown linux; but gives you a 72MHz, 32bit ARM in either an arduino shield-compatible format or a native format that exploits more of the microprocessor's pinout. Fully open toolchain and documentation. Not bad for $50. They apparently also have a version with an FPGA.
If you want to run a full embedded-linux computer, you pretty much have to go one step further. NSLU2s are discontinued now; but should run you under $100 for an ARM board with full debian support. Gumstix is a bit pricier; but smaller and has the advantage of being in production. The various Marvell *plug devices are also pretty cool for the $100 range...
It seems as though, given a little time, the markets do an excellent job of corrupting their own legitimacy, and taking the entire national economic well-being with it. Just ask Iceland, or Ireland, or the US...
There is also the fact that, coming from a position of relative weakness, and explicitly disclaiming any patents that need to be licensed in order to independently implement the spec, Google can write whatever spec they want; but they don't have very much leverage, which sharply limits their ability to piss people off.
Neither they nor their users have an interest in an incompetent spec, so interests are aligned there; and were Google to somehow come up with a way to bake anticompetitive evil of some flavor into the spec, there would be absolutely nothing stopping everyone else from shrugging and continuing to use "WebM without 'mustdecodeat50%ofrealtimeunlessuserisrunningchrome' enabled"... They don't have any "hook IP" by which to enforce conformity.
It remains to be seen whether they will gain enough traction for WebM to be relevant; but their unilateral spec is a long way from being dangerous at present...
I'm a bit surprised that he ran into trouble, my understanding was that titanium/bone interfacing, while still a bit more brutal than would be ideal, was a more or less solved problem. All sorts of rods, plates, screws, and whatnot get used routinely to patch together assorted horrors of skeletal misfortune, and remain implanted for the life of the patient.
Perhaps it was an issue with having the implant protruding through the skin, or carrying a load that probably got bumped and jostled from time to time?
The socially interesting(if probably ugly) phenomenon will be the steep rise of the cost of living in the suburbs and the exurbs...
With the recent partial collapse of the enormous bubble in real estate prices, we saw all kinds of hell break loose. Most major financial institutions were shown to be idiots rolling rigged dice in a burning casino, the middle and upper-middle class collectively shit themselves and demanded that Something Be Done when their god-given right to ever-increasing home values was pulled, and things generally got unpleasant.
An increase in the cost of driving would mean a permanent, structural, reduction in the value of suburbs and exurbs: too far from the city for efficient walking/mass transit, too dense for self-sufficient farming. Some will, certainly, hang on as places for the genuinely wealthy to escape from crime and those of the pigmented persuasion; but Joe "Middle Class" isn't going to be able to afford a white picket fence and two hour commute.
A lot of people's real-estate holdings will collapse in value, while the city centers will presumably be gentrified good and hard. What shape the new suburb/exurb slums will take remains to be seen...
Arguably, there was a period where that experiment was tried: Much of the early European colonial activity took place under the auspices of some combination of the Mercantilist theory that the "national wealth" had to be enhanced by generating trade surpluses and the age-old 'conquest theory of acquisition' that you could, in fact, conquer cheaply enough to usefully shift the costs of your consumption onto other people.
However, the nations that undertook it proved(with varying degrees of tenacity) that the theory was false. Even by the time the US was founded, the less jingoistic Brits were getting tired of paying very high taxes for the privilege of having an empire upon which the sun never set. Unless you can conquer on the very, very, cheap, plunder turns out to be a false economy(obviously so for the plundered, less obviously; but still so, for the people of the plundering nation. A few well-placed individual plunderers make out like bandits; but everybody else is effectively subsidizing them).
The economic success or failure of interventions to secure favorable trade positions are somewhat less clear, and thus have continued to the present day; but straight (pulled verbatim from a bumper sticker actually seen in the wild) "Kick their ass, take their gas" economics just don't work out.
In principle, you are correct. In practice, an increasing number of devices(especially space or cost constrained ones) implement "RS-232" that behaves pretty much exactly the same way as would be expected by anything post-20mA loop, with the exception of voltage. For cost and board space reasons(and because they are not intending to address the "terminal across the electrically noisy building from the minicomputer" use case), they omit any voltage conversion or protection circuitry and simply depend on the attached hardware to do either 5v/0v or 3.3v/0v, or whatever their logic-level happens to be.
Even an increasing number of supposedly-genuine RS-232 devices(especially laptops) don't generate anything near the +-12 swing of the old days. 12v/0v is more likely, or even 5v/0v, though such devices tend to, at least, have better tolerance for over-voltage than the little guys do.
Because it is so close to RS-232(all you need is a dumb level converter, no logic/protocol translation required), I tend to fall into calling it "RS-232" colloquially, even though it technically isn't.
Some of these plugs are powerful enough(or, more importantly, have enough RAM) that the only thing that really marks them as "embedded" is the fact that they have no video out and you have to deal with mtd devices rather than block devices...
Compiling on a 1.2GHz ARM with 128-512MB of RAM(depending on variant), when every cheap Wintel/Lintel is some 2+GHz dual core beast with 3GB of RAM is, certainly, somewhat masochistic; but the system can run perfectly normal debian ARM, compile natively, and either reflash its bootloader from the OS or reflash its OS from the boatloader, as well as updating portions of the OS from within a live system, just as in desktop and server Debian.
Certainly more "embedded" than "not-embedded"; but it's a pretty roomy flavor of "embedded"...
Unless you've decided to mess with uboot(which is likely a bad idea, unless you are totally comfortable with JTAG...), you shouldn't need anything scarier than some way of speaking RS-232 at suitably low voltage. Re-flashing a device over a serial line is tedious; but not terribly challenging, and even the various Kirkwood-platform products that are "no user-serviceable parts inside" almost certainly have an accessible serial header somewhere, albeit likely unpopulated or even unmarked...
If you've gone and nuked the bootloader, on the other hand, it is, as you say, JTAG time...
My understanding(IANAL), is that they would have to demonstrate intent to destroy evidence. See here starting on page 16 and page 64 for a summary of the Federal stuff...
If you don't know about the investigation, and always destroy hard drives after use, proving the necessary intent would likely be pretty tricky, even if the HDDs sometimes contained evidence of some crime or other. They might well tack it on, just to see if it would stick; but the other evidence would have to be really compelling.
If there were evidence that your SOP was what it was because you were operating a criminal enterprise and wished to avoid discovery, well, you might have a much clearer problem.
If you specifically destroy something after you hear about the investigation, you are fucked.
If you specifically destroy something after a subpoena for that something, double fucked.
You might want to come up with an evidence-destruction plan that doesn't result in your filesystem timestamps showing that your work machine(which anybody from the janitor on up will be able to testify that you use daily) wasn't touched for six months after IT issued it, and then started seeing a burst of use the day after news of fed interest in you came out...
On a modern OS/system software setup of any complexity, generating convincing fake timestamps and system activity is a bit on the nontrivial side. If the investigator has little or no evidence about your computer habits, or circumstantial evidence of what you've done, it isn't too hard; but if they have enough circumstantial evidence to work from, you might face issues.
This would be especially the case in a somewhat paranoid corporate environment(which I would imagine a hedge fund is). Even in my(far less tight-wound) shop, you would probably get a visit from IT to figure out WTF is going on were your machine to suddenly leap back 6 months in patch/AV update status, or (while retaining the same MAC) turn into a linux box or a non-domain windows machine from time to time... In an environment where IT is running scared about corporate espionage, Sarbanes-Oxley, or even just the rigors of dealing with backups of high value files on a mobile workforce of laptops, they would almost certainly be considerably more attentive.
Especially if the company has a strong reason to want to throw you under the bus(large, secretive hedge fund? You. Fucking. Bet. that they want the SEC/Fed investigation to end as soon as possible, ideally with just a couple of disposable peons "acting without authorization", as they say...) they would likely prove quite cooperative in helping to prove that you were hiding something. Particularly if that reduced their odds of having to hand over much larger swaths of their data/backups to investigators.
Why ration hatred? It isn't exactly a terribly limited resource. Seems entirely reasonable to hate the game and(since joining the game is voluntary) all the players.
IANAL; but my understanding is that it doesn't constitute an admission of guilt per se(particularly in these days of high-capacity hard drives, there would be no reasonable way to bound the number of things you could have been guilty of with just one HDD...); but, destruction of evidence and/or "obstruction of justice" are typically crimes in themselves.
If they have a recording of you describing how you ripped apart and surreptitiously disposed of your HDD after you heard that the feds were on your trail, those charges are going to be very hard to dodge...
Merely destroying your hard drive, out of caution or paranoia, and then learning later that the feds would really have liked to have a look through it, is one thing; but if you are caught on tape describing why you destroyed it, game over, man.
Perhaps we shouldn't be whining about tech-clueless management after all... This seems like a much worse alternative. On the plus side, he probably didn't even think about the mailserver backups...
True, I doubt that anyone has ever masturbated to electoral footage. Real live torture, on the other hand, could probably attract a decent slice of late-night pay-per-view traffic...
I sure am glad that my right to pay steve 30% of the price for everything I want to run on my iDevice is at least keeping me secure!
Even the parts that are classified right down to their budgets, and don't even bother filling out their statutorially required reports on what they are doing to congress?
I apologize if this doesn't fit with the Boy Scouts' Patriotic History of America; but the US has been accumulating dubiously-accountable spook shops like its a hobby at least since the cold war, if not earlier.
It would appear that a variety of groups, representing a de-facto merger of state and corporate power, are allied to destroy you.
On a scale from "1" to "highly ironic" how would you describe this confirmation of your assertion that the "representative" goverments actually pend a lot of time doing dirty deeds in the shadows?
What happened to the reliable old standbye of kidnapping an executive and/or their family and threatening to return one finger every hour until the organization starts taking security more seriously? We've gone soft, I tell ya...