My understanding is that large amounts of what we think of as "international law" sound a bit odd; but make complete sense if you think about them from the context in which they were written. A substantial portion was laid down after the first WW or the second, with various addenda added since.
During the first world war, you had substantial proportions of the male populations of the involved countries in the field, and fairly limited medical techniques(ie. no antibiotics). People learned the hard way that certain weapons divided people more-or-less-neatly into "living" and "dead"(without fairly sophisticated medivac, field surgery, and other medical stuff that didn't exist, bullets basically qualified; but something like poison gas didn't.) Having a whole bunch of people killed by bullets would, of course, by tragic; but having a whole bunch blinded and never again able to breath properly because of gas would be a traumatic drain on your country for the rest of their lives. In a total war situation, such laws of war could, in theory, substantially reduce the longterm burden.
Post WW2, you got the stuff based on the recent experience with both serious genocide(people have been trying to kill one another off since before recorded history; but never with such teutonic efficiency) and with modern air power applied to concentrated civilian populations. Again, if you think about the "laws of war" as being, essentially, a series of rules designed from the perspective of when they were written to reduce the long-term costs of war, the prohibition on really serious massacring of civilians is fairly logical. A system where both sides field armies, which fight it out until one collapses, and then territory changes hands, is a system with built-in safeguards against wholesale destruction. A system where both sides simply attempt to leave not one stone upon another can leave the place looking like, well, most of Europe immediately following the war...
It is arguable that some international law is basically subject to revision according to technological change(for instance, modern battlefield medicine has made bullets much more of a "maiming" weapon than they used to be, since people are now surviving much more horrific injuries than they used to, and once growing new retinas in vats becomes cheap and routine, the prohibition on blinding weapons will probably look pretty quaint.) On the other hand, while they do have utilitarian logic things like the ban on wholesale slaughter of civilians are arguably more ethical than technical. It could certainly be changed; but that would be an ethical reassessment, not a response to new technology.
Obviously, war crimes trials cannot be "conducted against" the winning side(in the classic Nuremberg sense of "war crimes trial") because "conducting a trial against" somebody requires that they be in your physical possession, or likely to be in the near future.
In that sense, it is practically a tautology that war crimes trials are never conducted against the winning side.
However, and this is important, all armies have internal codes of conduct and(unless they are really breaking down logistically, which means they probably aren't the winner) do enforce them at least much of the time. Thus, unless the army in question in fact endorses war crimes, the process of "war crimes trial" will be a series of individual, internal trials of members of the army, by that army, for breaking the rules. You can only be prosecuted for doing things that your army approves of if you lose; but any army that isn't currently disintegrating carries out internal punishment more or less continually for violations of its rules.
There is already a tabletop demo version, for tradeshow use. The range is short; but it's just a little desktop box that people can hold their hands in front of, to get a sense of the sensation that the nice folks at Raytheon would enable them to inflict at range for a really very modest price.
Something of slightly greater scale, inverter powered, would probably go nicely on your average sinister looking riot vehicle...
The entity actually doing the flogging will be theDefense Reutilization & Marketing Service. They've been handing out the goodies to law enforcement types for years(particularly ones who know the magic words: "drugs" or "terrorism"). They only deal with surplus, so the inventory is kind of a luck-of-the-draw thing; but on a good day even podunk PD can walk away with APCs, choppers, assault rifles...
While such a device is too expensive to replace every instance of goons with blunt objects, it(or its scaled down for trade-show demonstrations counterpart), is a virtually perfect torture device, and people are frankly right to worry.
By all accounts, being hit with it feels like being on fire, except without leaving a mark(and without killing nerves, so the pain isn't self-limiting). The theory is that, if using it on a crowd or people approaching something sensitive, it will be a self-limiting deterrent because they will just move.
If the person it is aimed at happens to be restrained at the time, rather horrible agony of substantial duration could be trivially inflicted, all without the pesky physical damage that the lower-tech goon route usually involves...
As I understand it, the interesting thing about the exploit this article discusses is that it allows you to hit the router from the LAN side if the user visits a maliciously crafted web page.
Yes, it still needs to be coupled with an actual exploit; but it is something of a big deal because, while the WAN side security of routers is at least OKish(your vendor has to be really crap to be running the web interface, telnet, or anything of that nature on the outside), the LAN side security is somewhere between woeful and nonexistent.
To use your door analogy, most people have reasonable locks, that are usually locked, on their outside doors. Relatively few people lock their inside doors, or have outside doors that cannot be trivially opened from the inside. It would be fairly big security news if somebody discovered a technique of attacking your door from the inside if you happened to look at them through your window...
There is no way in hell that I would touch their model, I'm just trying to understand their motivation and behavior structure as accurately as possible.
It is, unequivocally, the case that "cloud gaming" is a far bigger attack on your ability to "own" what you buy than even the nastiest of DRM systems, and it is only logical to assume that the company behind it would do absolutely anything to you that isn't actually illegal if they thought it would improve their balance sheet by a nickel.
However, as best I can tell, arbitrarily cutting off players of old games(unless the cost of supporting them gets too high, or the number of players in a given region drops below a certain value) is not an economically rational behavior, and I would, thus, not expect them to do it.
I find their value proposition deeply uncompelling, and losing that much control over what I buy distasteful on ethical grounds(and, unlike something like Steam, they aren't even offering a good deal in exchange for your principles and your ownership rights...) and I have no intention of signing up; but I still base my analysis of their expected behavior on the assumption that they are value-rational, amoral, and money-seeking, rather than evil per se. Evil is, after all, only sometimes profitable.
Unfortunately, with many, if not all, of the consumer networking brands these days, the most technical guy on staff is the "chief sticker engineer", who makes sure that the right adhesives are used when rebadging OEM products, or maybe the CAD guy who modifies the OEM plastic case to have the appropriate brand name embossed in it...
That would actually probably help a lot(though not as much as a real password).
In any exploitation scenario where the router login page isn't simply sitting on the WAN side, happily accepting all comers to try their luck, the hypothetical attacker would probably use a list of default username/password pairs for common router brands, or a list of known exploits for common router models.
Even the most trivial password change would save you entirely from the former, and no password change available would save you from the latter. A password brute-force attack system, written in javascript and injected via the method described, is conceivable; but it would only have until you close the browser window, and it would be subject to any rate-limiting imposed by the router's login page or the browser's JS engine, so it would probably be pretty tepid.
Obviously, if you are going to change your password, change it right; but the difference between default password and bad password is likely a good deal greater than the difference between bad password and good password, when it comes to crackability...
At one point, just out of morbid curiosity, I cranked up a copy of OpenVAS(the OSS fork of nessus) and told it to just hit everything on my home network with all "safe" tests(the program offers the option of either including or excluding tests that are likely to crash/DOS the target, rather than simply confirm/deny the presence of a vulnerability).
When the run was finished, all the real computers in the house had passed, with the exception of a few informational messages(Hey! this computer is running an SSH server, did you do that or should you be freaking out right now?). On the other hand, I had to physically reset over half of the assorted little-bitty-embedded-plastic-boxes-of-various-network-functions to get them working again.
And that was with the "safe" tests.
Based on the version and vulnerability information being reported(for devices that I do, in fact, update vendor firmwares on, when those are available) the state of consumer embedded devices is absolutely fucking pathetic. Blatantly outdated and known-vulnerable services listening merrily away in the latest vendor firmwares for products less than a year old...
A pretty sizable chunk of scientific and other academic journals have operated reasonably successful paywalls(though their cases probably differ a bit because their main market is University/Institutional libraries and negotiating site licenses with the same. Their paywalls don't actually need to rack up many, if any, individual subscribers, they just have to make the prospect of using the journal without an institutional subscription, or a compelling need, so ridiculous that the institution caves and buys a site license).
On the other hand, they've drawn some fairly massive flack over the issue, so, if the open access guys get their way, it could end up costing them rather badly in the long run.
Crossmr is being a touch blunt; but he has a point.
The real problem is, hardcore twitch gamers aren't going to be happy; but the further you get from twitch gamers, the less valuable the "cloud gaming" features become. Were it possible to serve them, twitch gamers would benefit the most; because they require the most expensive hardware, upgrade the most frequently, play the newest games that may not have been ported yet, etc. The further you get from them, the less valuable the service is. At the other extreme, the "casual" gamer, much of what they play is Flash-based(and thus about as "multiplatform" as anything currently available), and has resource requirements satisfied by a netbook. The technophobe market is pretty well served by a mix of casual flash that you just have to go to a web page to get, or (now relatively cheap) consoles that you can get brick-and-mortar buys/rentals for, pop in and play.
The set of games that are, simultaneously, "non twitch" and "highly system intensive" and "tolerant of relatively low resolution" is vanishingly small. Dwarf Fortress?
Particularly since the game you played on their system was 1280×720(with some compression artefacts; which more or less add up to the equivalent of playing on "low" or "medium", depending on the specific game's settings system)...
You can bring almost any system to its knees by demanding enough pixels(and, if your monitor isn't that big, demanding that they be 16x anti-aliased, buffed, and polished before delivery, to bump the effective resolution that needs to be rendered); but if you are comparing to a fairly low fixed resolution, pretty much any GPU whose name doesn't start with "Intel Extreme" or "GMA" can probably handle it in the very near future.
I assume that the game license isn't really at issue(given that anything but a super-popular AAAAAA title will be selling for just over the cost of disc and distribution out of the bargain bin in two years, it isn't as though OnLive is going to be able to make money selling the licences off or anything, even if their contracts with the publishers allowed that). I'd imagine that it is the fact that, for OnLive to allow you to "own" a game, they still have to have at least one server up in your area with the hardware and software capable of running that game. Presumably, since their systems are somewhat specialized, they may also forsee greater difficulties or higher costs in some of the longevity strategies commonly used by hobbyists(DRM cracking if some licensing server goes down is probably off the table, for a corporation with visibility and actual assets, piles of lovingly handcrafted shims and hacks and 3rd party engine tweaks may or may not be compatible with their distribution system, and they almost certainly want their hardware costs to get lower over time, so the emulation strategy of just throwing lots of modern hardware at the problem is unlikely to please them).
Assuming the punters are still happy to play, and the game is still working with their systems, they would be nuts to arbitrarily pull old games out of circulation just because they can(people playing older games means the same subscription fee; but lower hardware utilization and already-paid-for licenses, why would they turn that down?); but they probably want to be sure that they are incurring no actual obligation, in a legal sense, to support a game for any particularly great length of time, or to go to any heroic measures to do so if they don't feel like it....
I suspect that they would find the economics of doing that either untenable or unhelpful...
Presumably, since a game that you must be connected to a fast, low-latency internet connection to play at all, even single-player, has lower utility than a game playable standalone(and such a game is pretty much immune to piracy, and revocable at any time) the OnLive people can negotiate lower per-unit prices from the publishers. That and they can presumably do some license sharing, since not everyone will be playing a given game at a given time.
If they give their customers the option of cloud or download, these advantages evaporate. They'll likely face the same per unit costs as any other download seller, plus the costs of keeping their servers and lights on. If they offer the download option as a separate service, priced separately and distinct from the cloud stuff, they would avoid that; but their download service would be just another commodity CDN with a game-focused website slapped on top. How many of those are there now? At least a few that already matter enough to be called "incumbents" and dozens of more or less interchangeable minor competitors, at least.
Yeah, their "innovation" looks oddly like a network device that uses existing techniques; but asserts itself to have slightly more robust integrated VLAN-esque features.
I'm not really in the market for fiber stuff on the high end, so I don't know if people are being shafted by the incumbent vendors and forced to buy more Us of expensive boxes to get this featureset; but their innovation doesn't sound like it is on the optics side...
Orders of magnitude less dense, and considerably less cooperative.
There are certainly a few large bits and pieces that could probably be of great use to, say, hypothetical Mars explorers(the ISS, maybe a few of the larger junk satellites or upper rocket stages); but the overwhelming majority of the stuff is tiny little bits and pieces, zipping around at horrid velocities in a variety of orbits across a vast volume of space. By comparison the (fairly tenuous and soupy) Pacific garbage patch is practically solid, and it is all more or less sitting there, just waiting to be scooped up, rather than zooming around(plus, life is much easier when you can get your capture apparatus shipped in by boat, rather than by rocket).
Lasers of that power are certainly more expensive than the lower-power tracking variety; but I suspect that the major stumbling block would be political.
There are, for instance, a number of influential entities with rather expensive satellites continually exposing fancy CCDs through even fancier optics. A laser powerful enough to blow vapor off of space junk, focused through the sort of optics used in ground surveillance satellites, shining on a piece of silicon specifically designed to be light sensitive. Yeah, that'd make the National Reconnaissance Office really happy...
Slashdot Mirror
People who live in sandy countries just have such high levels of pre-existing corneal damage from windblown grit, dontcha know?...
My understanding is that large amounts of what we think of as "international law" sound a bit odd; but make complete sense if you think about them from the context in which they were written. A substantial portion was laid down after the first WW or the second, with various addenda added since.
During the first world war, you had substantial proportions of the male populations of the involved countries in the field, and fairly limited medical techniques(ie. no antibiotics). People learned the hard way that certain weapons divided people more-or-less-neatly into "living" and "dead"(without fairly sophisticated medivac, field surgery, and other medical stuff that didn't exist, bullets basically qualified; but something like poison gas didn't.) Having a whole bunch of people killed by bullets would, of course, by tragic; but having a whole bunch blinded and never again able to breath properly because of gas would be a traumatic drain on your country for the rest of their lives. In a total war situation, such laws of war could, in theory, substantially reduce the longterm burden.
Post WW2, you got the stuff based on the recent experience with both serious genocide(people have been trying to kill one another off since before recorded history; but never with such teutonic efficiency) and with modern air power applied to concentrated civilian populations. Again, if you think about the "laws of war" as being, essentially, a series of rules designed from the perspective of when they were written to reduce the long-term costs of war, the prohibition on really serious massacring of civilians is fairly logical. A system where both sides field armies, which fight it out until one collapses, and then territory changes hands, is a system with built-in safeguards against wholesale destruction. A system where both sides simply attempt to leave not one stone upon another can leave the place looking like, well, most of Europe immediately following the war...
It is arguable that some international law is basically subject to revision according to technological change(for instance, modern battlefield medicine has made bullets much more of a "maiming" weapon than they used to be, since people are now surviving much more horrific injuries than they used to, and once growing new retinas in vats becomes cheap and routine, the prohibition on blinding weapons will probably look pretty quaint.) On the other hand, while they do have utilitarian logic things like the ban on wholesale slaughter of civilians are arguably more ethical than technical. It could certainly be changed; but that would be an ethical reassessment, not a response to new technology.
Obviously, war crimes trials cannot be "conducted against" the winning side(in the classic Nuremberg sense of "war crimes trial") because "conducting a trial against" somebody requires that they be in your physical possession, or likely to be in the near future.
In that sense, it is practically a tautology that war crimes trials are never conducted against the winning side.
However, and this is important, all armies have internal codes of conduct and(unless they are really breaking down logistically, which means they probably aren't the winner) do enforce them at least much of the time. Thus, unless the army in question in fact endorses war crimes, the process of "war crimes trial" will be a series of individual, internal trials of members of the army, by that army, for breaking the rules. You can only be prosecuted for doing things that your army approves of if you lose; but any army that isn't currently disintegrating carries out internal punishment more or less continually for violations of its rules.
There is already a tabletop demo version, for tradeshow use. The range is short; but it's just a little desktop box that people can hold their hands in front of, to get a sense of the sensation that the nice folks at Raytheon would enable them to inflict at range for a really very modest price.
Something of slightly greater scale, inverter powered, would probably go nicely on your average sinister looking riot vehicle...
The entity actually doing the flogging will be theDefense Reutilization & Marketing Service. They've been handing out the goodies to law enforcement types for years(particularly ones who know the magic words: "drugs" or "terrorism"). They only deal with surplus, so the inventory is kind of a luck-of-the-draw thing; but on a good day even podunk PD can walk away with APCs, choppers, assault rifles...
While such a device is too expensive to replace every instance of goons with blunt objects, it(or its scaled down for trade-show demonstrations counterpart), is a virtually perfect torture device, and people are frankly right to worry.
By all accounts, being hit with it feels like being on fire, except without leaving a mark(and without killing nerves, so the pain isn't self-limiting). The theory is that, if using it on a crowd or people approaching something sensitive, it will be a self-limiting deterrent because they will just move.
If the person it is aimed at happens to be restrained at the time, rather horrible agony of substantial duration could be trivially inflicted, all without the pesky physical damage that the lower-tech goon route usually involves...
IEtab doesn't implement IE on systems that don't have it, it just calls the IE libraries embedded in Windows in a more civilized browser.
The nice man on Fox told me that, if we don't, a drug smuggling illegal mexican will lay an al qaeda anchor baby in my bed while I sleep.
Only absolute trust in, and obedience to, the desires of our security forces can secure freedom...
I probably don't want to know; but I'm guessing that the old line "Vxworks: Doesn't." applies?
As I understand it, the interesting thing about the exploit this article discusses is that it allows you to hit the router from the LAN side if the user visits a maliciously crafted web page.
Yes, it still needs to be coupled with an actual exploit; but it is something of a big deal because, while the WAN side security of routers is at least OKish(your vendor has to be really crap to be running the web interface, telnet, or anything of that nature on the outside), the LAN side security is somewhere between woeful and nonexistent.
To use your door analogy, most people have reasonable locks, that are usually locked, on their outside doors. Relatively few people lock their inside doors, or have outside doors that cannot be trivially opened from the inside. It would be fairly big security news if somebody discovered a technique of attacking your door from the inside if you happened to look at them through your window...
There is no way in hell that I would touch their model, I'm just trying to understand their motivation and behavior structure as accurately as possible.
It is, unequivocally, the case that "cloud gaming" is a far bigger attack on your ability to "own" what you buy than even the nastiest of DRM systems, and it is only logical to assume that the company behind it would do absolutely anything to you that isn't actually illegal if they thought it would improve their balance sheet by a nickel.
However, as best I can tell, arbitrarily cutting off players of old games(unless the cost of supporting them gets too high, or the number of players in a given region drops below a certain value) is not an economically rational behavior, and I would, thus, not expect them to do it.
I find their value proposition deeply uncompelling, and losing that much control over what I buy distasteful on ethical grounds(and, unlike something like Steam, they aren't even offering a good deal in exchange for your principles and your ownership rights...) and I have no intention of signing up; but I still base my analysis of their expected behavior on the assumption that they are value-rational, amoral, and money-seeking, rather than evil per se. Evil is, after all, only sometimes profitable.
Unfortunately, with many, if not all, of the consumer networking brands these days, the most technical guy on staff is the "chief sticker engineer", who makes sure that the right adhesives are used when rebadging OEM products, or maybe the CAD guy who modifies the OEM plastic case to have the appropriate brand name embossed in it...
That would actually probably help a lot(though not as much as a real password).
In any exploitation scenario where the router login page isn't simply sitting on the WAN side, happily accepting all comers to try their luck, the hypothetical attacker would probably use a list of default username/password pairs for common router brands, or a list of known exploits for common router models.
Even the most trivial password change would save you entirely from the former, and no password change available would save you from the latter. A password brute-force attack system, written in javascript and injected via the method described, is conceivable; but it would only have until you close the browser window, and it would be subject to any rate-limiting imposed by the router's login page or the browser's JS engine, so it would probably be pretty tepid.
Obviously, if you are going to change your password, change it right; but the difference between default password and bad password is likely a good deal greater than the difference between bad password and good password, when it comes to crackability...
At one point, just out of morbid curiosity, I cranked up a copy of OpenVAS(the OSS fork of nessus) and told it to just hit everything on my home network with all "safe" tests(the program offers the option of either including or excluding tests that are likely to crash/DOS the target, rather than simply confirm/deny the presence of a vulnerability).
When the run was finished, all the real computers in the house had passed, with the exception of a few informational messages(Hey! this computer is running an SSH server, did you do that or should you be freaking out right now?). On the other hand, I had to physically reset over half of the assorted little-bitty-embedded-plastic-boxes-of-various-network-functions to get them working again.
And that was with the "safe" tests.
Based on the version and vulnerability information being reported(for devices that I do, in fact, update vendor firmwares on, when those are available) the state of consumer embedded devices is absolutely fucking pathetic. Blatantly outdated and known-vulnerable services listening merrily away in the latest vendor firmwares for products less than a year old...
A pretty sizable chunk of scientific and other academic journals have operated reasonably successful paywalls(though their cases probably differ a bit because their main market is University/Institutional libraries and negotiating site licenses with the same. Their paywalls don't actually need to rack up many, if any, individual subscribers, they just have to make the prospect of using the journal without an institutional subscription, or a compelling need, so ridiculous that the institution caves and buys a site license).
On the other hand, they've drawn some fairly massive flack over the issue, so, if the open access guys get their way, it could end up costing them rather badly in the long run.
Crossmr is being a touch blunt; but he has a point.
The real problem is, hardcore twitch gamers aren't going to be happy; but the further you get from twitch gamers, the less valuable the "cloud gaming" features become. Were it possible to serve them, twitch gamers would benefit the most; because they require the most expensive hardware, upgrade the most frequently, play the newest games that may not have been ported yet, etc. The further you get from them, the less valuable the service is. At the other extreme, the "casual" gamer, much of what they play is Flash-based(and thus about as "multiplatform" as anything currently available), and has resource requirements satisfied by a netbook. The technophobe market is pretty well served by a mix of casual flash that you just have to go to a web page to get, or (now relatively cheap) consoles that you can get brick-and-mortar buys/rentals for, pop in and play.
The set of games that are, simultaneously, "non twitch" and "highly system intensive" and "tolerant of relatively low resolution" is vanishingly small. Dwarf Fortress?
Particularly since the game you played on their system was 1280×720(with some compression artefacts; which more or less add up to the equivalent of playing on "low" or "medium", depending on the specific game's settings system)...
You can bring almost any system to its knees by demanding enough pixels(and, if your monitor isn't that big, demanding that they be 16x anti-aliased, buffed, and polished before delivery, to bump the effective resolution that needs to be rendered); but if you are comparing to a fairly low fixed resolution, pretty much any GPU whose name doesn't start with "Intel Extreme" or "GMA" can probably handle it in the very near future.
I assume that the game license isn't really at issue(given that anything but a super-popular AAAAAA title will be selling for just over the cost of disc and distribution out of the bargain bin in two years, it isn't as though OnLive is going to be able to make money selling the licences off or anything, even if their contracts with the publishers allowed that). I'd imagine that it is the fact that, for OnLive to allow you to "own" a game, they still have to have at least one server up in your area with the hardware and software capable of running that game. Presumably, since their systems are somewhat specialized, they may also forsee greater difficulties or higher costs in some of the longevity strategies commonly used by hobbyists(DRM cracking if some licensing server goes down is probably off the table, for a corporation with visibility and actual assets, piles of lovingly handcrafted shims and hacks and 3rd party engine tweaks may or may not be compatible with their distribution system, and they almost certainly want their hardware costs to get lower over time, so the emulation strategy of just throwing lots of modern hardware at the problem is unlikely to please them).
Assuming the punters are still happy to play, and the game is still working with their systems, they would be nuts to arbitrarily pull old games out of circulation just because they can(people playing older games means the same subscription fee; but lower hardware utilization and already-paid-for licenses, why would they turn that down?); but they probably want to be sure that they are incurring no actual obligation, in a legal sense, to support a game for any particularly great length of time, or to go to any heroic measures to do so if they don't feel like it....
Never mind the green wires, pity the uptimes of the poor bastards whose traffic goes over the black and tan ones...
I suspect that they would find the economics of doing that either untenable or unhelpful...
Presumably, since a game that you must be connected to a fast, low-latency internet connection to play at all, even single-player, has lower utility than a game playable standalone(and such a game is pretty much immune to piracy, and revocable at any time) the OnLive people can negotiate lower per-unit prices from the publishers. That and they can presumably do some license sharing, since not everyone will be playing a given game at a given time.
If they give their customers the option of cloud or download, these advantages evaporate. They'll likely face the same per unit costs as any other download seller, plus the costs of keeping their servers and lights on. If they offer the download option as a separate service, priced separately and distinct from the cloud stuff, they would avoid that; but their download service would be just another commodity CDN with a game-focused website slapped on top. How many of those are there now? At least a few that already matter enough to be called "incumbents" and dozens of more or less interchangeable minor competitors, at least.
They've really been putting the "fail" in "Fianna Fáil", eh?
Yeah, their "innovation" looks oddly like a network device that uses existing techniques; but asserts itself to have slightly more robust integrated VLAN-esque features.
I'm not really in the market for fiber stuff on the high end, so I don't know if people are being shafted by the incumbent vendors and forced to buy more Us of expensive boxes to get this featureset; but their innovation doesn't sound like it is on the optics side...
Orders of magnitude less dense, and considerably less cooperative.
There are certainly a few large bits and pieces that could probably be of great use to, say, hypothetical Mars explorers(the ISS, maybe a few of the larger junk satellites or upper rocket stages); but the overwhelming majority of the stuff is tiny little bits and pieces, zipping around at horrid velocities in a variety of orbits across a vast volume of space. By comparison the (fairly tenuous and soupy) Pacific garbage patch is practically solid, and it is all more or less sitting there, just waiting to be scooped up, rather than zooming around(plus, life is much easier when you can get your capture apparatus shipped in by boat, rather than by rocket).
I suspect that the answer depends too heavily on technological hypotheticals to say anything really useful...
If they arrive on some delicate, bubble-like world ship that is planning on entering earth orbit? Not actually all that much.
If they've invented a classic sci-fi "energy shield"? Probably enough to preclude nearly all human satellite activity.
If "they" are actually just a drifting cloud of space-hard spores or berserker nanites? Nothing short of a solid shell will be of the slightest use.
Lasers of that power are certainly more expensive than the lower-power tracking variety; but I suspect that the major stumbling block would be political.
There are, for instance, a number of influential entities with rather expensive satellites continually exposing fancy CCDs through even fancier optics. A laser powerful enough to blow vapor off of space junk, focused through the sort of optics used in ground surveillance satellites, shining on a piece of silicon specifically designed to be light sensitive. Yeah, that'd make the National Reconnaissance Office really happy...