You might actually want to be careful about characterizing European privacy law: while some of the traditional tax shelters may still be almost as quiet about banking details as Nevada is about incorporation, but broader protections of privacy can be rather patchy(It's generally not a good sign if a given country has people appealing to ECHR Article 8 for lack of more robust national laws).
The trouble with the US is not so much that our privacy laws are lousy (with respect to the government, with respect to private third parties Europe is merely toothless, while we practically take it as a point of national pride to ensure that the data brokers can do business unhindered by stifling regulation); but that we are really, really good at violating them; and have built up an impressive infrastructure for doing so.
Given the amount of cooperation from our various overseas friends revealed by the NSA leaks, I'd be a trifle nervous about assuming that a given European jurisdiction is necessarily more likely to be obeying its own laws, let alone providing a higher level of protection. (And I'm guessing that the past week or two are...unlikely...to be particularly helpful in encouraging privacy improvements.)
Did I miss something? The Drug Enforcement Administration has been accused of a great many things(frequently with ample justification); but a warm and fuzzy relationship with minorities is not one of them. They don't even have an emotionally compelling and questionably true anecdote, like the 'welfare queen' to work with. If anything, the DEA is probably among the least liked TLAs in active practice(maybe the BATF is slightly lower ranked?)
What allusion is your comment making that I'm supposed to be picking up on?
Sure; but do you think the suckers hand-delivering bombs, starting gun battles with entire municipal police forces, and doing similarly thankless grunt work are the masterminds, or the stupid religious hicks?
I don't doubt the presence of cynics; I'd just start looking for them in the cushy gigs, rather than the morgue.
Empirically, you could probably get the supreme court to determine that the Interstate Commerce Clause provided sufficient grounds for a federal ban on the practice, if they liked the idea.
That said, It would be fully appropriate for state lawmakers to have their asses held to the fire about why state and local cops weren't forbidden by state law from touching asset forfeiture with somebody else's ten foot pole years ago. Hopefully that will actually happen.
I think this is a great first step, but practically speaking how will it affect local police departments operating under state or municipal laws?
It depends on the state and locality, of course; but one major reason why letting a seizure be 'adopted' by the feds was common practice was that, even though they got their cut, the federal rules allowed the cash to go straight to the department, a perfect slush fund for purchases that wouldn't withstand the scrutiny of budgeting from public funds(and sometimes outright purchases for personal use; because what are you going to do about it?).
Because of this (trivially obvious, whoever approved of this in the first place was either stupid or evil) conflict of interest, many state laws don't allow seized assets to remain with the police, and route them to some state-level general fund. It's still fundraising through highway robbery; but since the cops don't see the proceeds, except whatever scraps they manage to be sent through the state budgeting process, they have much less incentive to be as aggressive. They probably won't stop; but they will be hard pressed to retain the enthusiasm that comes with getting to keep 50-80% for yourself.
The GOP maybe, but this has been a hot-button issue for conservatives for a while, and the current sentiment is "wait, who did this wonderful thing, I must have heard you wrong". The difference between conservatives and the GOP is left as an exercise for the reader.
It is true that any 'conservative' with the slightest shred of principle has been vehemently against the practice for years(one can certainly imagine more unconstitutional programs; but it's hard to think of any that we actually carry out on anything like this scale).
That said, given the percentage of a lot of local police budgets currently covered by stealing stuff, it will be interesting to see whether the people who are always drifting toward the theory that freedom can be measured as a direct function of tax rate will be able to keep it together when next year's municipal budgets start being adjusted to account for this.
Inconveniently, there isn't enough epistemological common ground for asking for justification to work terribly well. Religions based on revelation(which includes islam, along with the other Abrahamic monotheisms, and a number of others to greater or lesser degrees) consider 'because god said so.' to be not only not a shoddy cop-out; but to be the best, most certain, category of justification.
Exactly how it is that they came to know that god said so(since he didn't say so to them; but allegedly to some other guy, now dead, can be a little touchy; but I've rarely found it to be a productive avenue for discussion.
Can you think of any good targets? Religious radicals with a...vehemently...nostalgic enthusiasm for an imaginary medieval ideal tend not to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture production.
Come to think of it, a movement with that sort of ready access to alienated 20something guys who loath the foundations of the society around them could probably be competitive in the production of Punk, and maybe some metal subgenres, except that they think all that stuff is haram. Oh well.
Who cares about root! My home directory is WAY more important than the system.
This is a fairly serious hole in a lot of traditional security mechanisms, blowing away the entire OS is easy, replacing the documents that any process running as you can scribble on is hard; but SELinux could definitely be used to contain the damage in a situation like this.
With SELinux, even if Steam is running as the user, its process could run in a different domain, and have access exclusively to files in the appropriate security context(presumably only the ones it created in the first place).
You could also use the hackier; but simpler, method of running the steam process under a different user account; but(especially once X enters the picture and you want integration with your DE's menus and whatnot) that gets kind of gross.
Aside from areas where it's legally unavoidable(medical devices, avionics, probably some nuclear applications), applications that take the slightest responsibility for their actions are virtually unheard of, under any license. On a good day, a proprietary application might accept liability up to the value of a refund; but not further, if it fucks up really egregiously; but that's about the extent of it.
You can get software that promises more; but it will cost you mightily.
Despite the fact that I know that the probe's namesake was the HMS Beagle, of Darwin fame, the news that a lost beagle has been found on mars still conjures up an enormously sad image of a small dog, curled up tightly; but still frozen solid, in the vast emptiness of the martian landscape.
Given the state of real-world security, 'cyber war games' are going to look like a particularly enthusiastic WWI reenactor event if the participants take the gloves off.
Who feels like a little speculation: Will the offensive teams be fairly picked(from people with suitable skills) and actually try, resulting a a resounding bloodbath, or will the 'exercise' be largely a whitewash?
More because of ecosystem vendor DRM enthusiasm that because of any real competence on app writers' part, app updates are actually more likely to be safe. Updating may or may not reveal what apps you have installed; but iOS will flat-out refuse to run anything not signed by Apple(which makes it pretty hard to quietly modify or spoof an update) and Android can be made to be more trusting; but the defaults for play store stuff aren't a whole lot more liberal.
The apps themselves, though, seem to be amazingly shoddy a striking amount of the time. In some cases, outfits that have perfectly respectable, properly SSLed, web sites somehow manage to have 'apps' that are basically just wrappers around a browser view; but still are less safe than just accessing their site directly. I'm not sure if this is just because the 'app' craze has attracted a lot of dumb new entrants, or whether it's because there are fewer people firing up wireshark on their phone and revealing the shameful truth.
What's wrong with that? Whenever I use an open hotspot, I *assume* the worst... if I can ssh to https into whatever, so what?
If I don't care about stuff, (e.g. reading cnn.com, for example), then who cares if it's encrypted or not?
Stunts like this scare people into not using/providing open internet access... I'd rather we have *more* open wifis (monitor whatever you want out of them), just have them be all over whenever I need them.
I largely agree with you, open hotspots are excessively demonized(both 'if you touch one you'll get cyber-syphilis!' and 'if you operate one pedophiles will smell it from miles away and you'll go to jail forever!'); but they can be dangerous, and people frequently don't take enough precautions.
Awareness of VPNs is actually pretty high, all things considered; but mostly for the purposes of getting Netflix in foreignistan, or getting to facebook at school/work. This tends to mean that even people who know about, and use, them typically don't ensure that all chatter from their computer(unless you are very careful, that's often a lot, from all sorts of updaters, autodiscovery agents, and annoying background processes) goes over the VPN, since their use of VPNs is all about ensuring that a specific, normally blocked, bit of traffic makes it out alive, rather than ensuring that no traffic leaks locally.
The area I would argue with you about is 'unimportant' HTTP: Do I care that somebody knows I visited CNN? No. However, if I make an HTTP connection, do I have the slightest assurance that I'm actually visiting CNN, rather than 'CNN, plus some rewrites that add a suite of common browser exploits'? Not so much. That can, and does, happen even on a trusted connection, through sites being hacked or ad network fuckery; but adding another party who can trivially rewrite the site with god-knows-what isn't really something you want.
If you have a proper VPN, with all traffic either heading over it or blocked before it leaves your system, though, all good.
The only upside is that whether or not someone agrees with the assessment that this is 'subversive' is an excellent(and relatively quick to administer) assay for determining whether or not they are a worthless authoritarian shitsack who would be better off deported to some hellhole with a nice abusive father figure that they can look up to and salute.
Effectively, while the Pope is the leader of a competitor to Islam, they are both in the same industry, with the same basic goals(notably, the recognition that old men with amusing hats and alleged access to divine law are society's rightful authority figures).
Having him deliver a "well, shooting people is bad and stuff; but Do Not Blaspheme!" speech is about as surprising as discovering that two different member companies of the BSA think that software piracy is evil, even if they are competitors and differ somewhat in their preferred DRM.
That aside, the pope is either being foolish or being mendacious if he thinks that you can have 'free speech' if you also insist that it is impermissible to 'offend religious beliefs'. This isn't merely incompatible in the free-speech-absolutist sense of 'any restriction on speech compromises freedom of speech!'; but on a much broader and more practical level. By design religions tend to have opinions and rules about lots, and lots, and lots of things. Depending on the exact circumstances in which they grew up, they can encompass guidance on moral, social, and political matters, gender roles, diet, dress, epistemology, cosmology, biology, etc, etc.
If someone can shut down an avenue of speech by having their religious feelings offended, there are precious few things you can safely talk about, because religions serve so many functions(and, in a society with multiple religions, the at least one is likely to have an opinion on any given topic, even if not all do).
Even religion itself becomes nearly impossible to practice if you can't offend the religious sentiments of others. The pope, for instance, operates an organization that bills itself as the sole route to salvation(with the actual heavy lifting being done by some combination of the Father and the Son in the trinity, of course). Is that not rather strikingly offensive to those who are (whether or not they state it implicitly, or are still praying for the conversion of the jews, as they did until quite recently) hellbound? The Protestants, for their part, only exist because of the premise that the church of Rome is a corrupt institution that has strayed from Christian practice, and only a reformed church, suitably grounded on faith and scripture, can address our salvation requirements. Only the really looney ones(like Jack Chick) spend much time screaming about how the Pope is the 7 headed whore of Babylon and things; but even your mild-mannered Lutheran is a rather brutal implicit insult to Catholicism.
I don't know whether he knows this, and just doesn't give a damn if it means stumping for more religious authority(by most accounts, you don't become pope by being an idiot; but you can become pope by being dogmatic and/or ruthless); or if he simply hasn't thought it through; but it's true either way.
Christ. Partying like it's 1915 in a tiny, sealed, underwater tube. That's overtly horrifying. I imagine that motivating whoever was responsible for checking for leaks was not that difficult?
If anybody knows about refrigeration it's probably the people that designed the cooling system on the ISS.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I thought they'd screwed up; but my own(quite limited) knowledge of the subject had led me to assume that something other than ammonia would have been used, so I was curious about what it was that I didn't know that made ammonia the choice.
I'm not sure whether their patches add bugs, or whether their original code quality was so atrocious that they are trying to fix a transfinite number of flaws by removing them at a finite rate.
Aside from the bad PR, unless the 'transport inspector' people are not even close to some flavor of cop, and have markedly weaker powers, "deliberately fucking with the agents investigating your lawbreaking" is often more of a crime than whatever you were doing in the first place.
Also(again, unless 'transport inspector' is a much, much, weaker category of enforcement, and doesn't even have any friends in agencies with actual power) a little friendly technical assistance from at least one bank and phone company(two areas of business that are generally happy to assist the government, unless it involves having to compete or pay taxes) could provide as many CC numbers, IMEIs, and IMSIs as one could reasonably need.
Sure, if you actually have to buy a burner at the sleazy cell kiosk, like some kind of drug dealer, every time, that adds up; but it's not as though the numbers themselves are expensive for some reason, if you can get them in bulk right from the vendor.
How does the FDA draw the line between 'must be approved' and 'not our problem' for devices that connect to a greater or lesser degree to other equipment?
I assume that the HDD was drawn in because it was unlucky enough to be an internal part; but with, say, something like this unit, which can burn CDs, transfer to USB devices, or connect to an ethernet network, do you need magic FDA CD-R blanks and flash drives, or is it just things considered 'integral' to the system(even if logically speaking they are no more or less important than something non-integral) that fall under certification requirements?
I don't know if it is routine; but I think that it isn't all that uncommon for 3d prints to be used, pre-surgery, by the surgical team to 'rehearse' the planned operation, entry, exit, important blood vessels, etc. Even where it isn't used, if medical imaging equipment that provides a 3d model was used, they'll pull the model up on screen and examine it both for diagnostic purposes and as a planning aid for chopping their way in and making the necessary repairs without too many unpleasant surprises, unnecessary scars, and so on.
While it's cool that this guy took the job on himself, and ended up getting much better results, this story seems to be, at least in part, "How at least one radiologist fucked it up, and the guy who luckily second guessed him."
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if they'll find a way to keep it from feeling like little more than a reasonably ambitious Civ5 mod, notably unlike last time?
You might actually want to be careful about characterizing European privacy law: while some of the traditional tax shelters may still be almost as quiet about banking details as Nevada is about incorporation, but broader protections of privacy can be rather patchy(It's generally not a good sign if a given country has people appealing to ECHR Article 8 for lack of more robust national laws).
The trouble with the US is not so much that our privacy laws are lousy (with respect to the government, with respect to private third parties Europe is merely toothless, while we practically take it as a point of national pride to ensure that the data brokers can do business unhindered by stifling regulation); but that we are really, really good at violating them; and have built up an impressive infrastructure for doing so.
Given the amount of cooperation from our various overseas friends revealed by the NSA leaks, I'd be a trifle nervous about assuming that a given European jurisdiction is necessarily more likely to be obeying its own laws, let alone providing a higher level of protection. (And I'm guessing that the past week or two are...unlikely...to be particularly helpful in encouraging privacy improvements.)
Did I miss something? The Drug Enforcement Administration has been accused of a great many things(frequently with ample justification); but a warm and fuzzy relationship with minorities is not one of them. They don't even have an emotionally compelling and questionably true anecdote, like the 'welfare queen' to work with. If anything, the DEA is probably among the least liked TLAs in active practice(maybe the BATF is slightly lower ranked?)
What allusion is your comment making that I'm supposed to be picking up on?
Sure; but do you think the suckers hand-delivering bombs, starting gun battles with entire municipal police forces, and doing similarly thankless grunt work are the masterminds, or the stupid religious hicks?
I don't doubt the presence of cynics; I'd just start looking for them in the cushy gigs, rather than the morgue.
Empirically, you could probably get the supreme court to determine that the Interstate Commerce Clause provided sufficient grounds for a federal ban on the practice, if they liked the idea.
That said, It would be fully appropriate for state lawmakers to have their asses held to the fire about why state and local cops weren't forbidden by state law from touching asset forfeiture with somebody else's ten foot pole years ago. Hopefully that will actually happen.
I think this is a great first step, but practically speaking how will it affect local police departments operating under state or municipal laws?
It depends on the state and locality, of course; but one major reason why letting a seizure be 'adopted' by the feds was common practice was that, even though they got their cut, the federal rules allowed the cash to go straight to the department, a perfect slush fund for purchases that wouldn't withstand the scrutiny of budgeting from public funds(and sometimes outright purchases for personal use; because what are you going to do about it?).
Because of this (trivially obvious, whoever approved of this in the first place was either stupid or evil) conflict of interest, many state laws don't allow seized assets to remain with the police, and route them to some state-level general fund. It's still fundraising through highway robbery; but since the cops don't see the proceeds, except whatever scraps they manage to be sent through the state budgeting process, they have much less incentive to be as aggressive. They probably won't stop; but they will be hard pressed to retain the enthusiasm that comes with getting to keep 50-80% for yourself.
The GOP maybe, but this has been a hot-button issue for conservatives for a while, and the current sentiment is "wait, who did this wonderful thing, I must have heard you wrong". The difference between conservatives and the GOP is left as an exercise for the reader.
It is true that any 'conservative' with the slightest shred of principle has been vehemently against the practice for years(one can certainly imagine more unconstitutional programs; but it's hard to think of any that we actually carry out on anything like this scale).
That said, given the percentage of a lot of local police budgets currently covered by stealing stuff, it will be interesting to see whether the people who are always drifting toward the theory that freedom can be measured as a direct function of tax rate will be able to keep it together when next year's municipal budgets start being adjusted to account for this.
Inconveniently, there isn't enough epistemological common ground for asking for justification to work terribly well. Religions based on revelation(which includes islam, along with the other Abrahamic monotheisms, and a number of others to greater or lesser degrees) consider 'because god said so.' to be not only not a shoddy cop-out; but to be the best, most certain, category of justification.
Exactly how it is that they came to know that god said so(since he didn't say so to them; but allegedly to some other guy, now dead, can be a little touchy; but I've rarely found it to be a productive avenue for discussion.
Can you think of any good targets? Religious radicals with a...vehemently...nostalgic enthusiasm for an imaginary medieval ideal tend not to be on the cutting edge of technology and culture production.
Come to think of it, a movement with that sort of ready access to alienated 20something guys who loath the foundations of the society around them could probably be competitive in the production of Punk, and maybe some metal subgenres, except that they think all that stuff is haram. Oh well.
Who cares about root! My home directory is WAY more important than the system.
This is a fairly serious hole in a lot of traditional security mechanisms, blowing away the entire OS is easy, replacing the documents that any process running as you can scribble on is hard; but SELinux could definitely be used to contain the damage in a situation like this.
With SELinux, even if Steam is running as the user, its process could run in a different domain, and have access exclusively to files in the appropriate security context(presumably only the ones it created in the first place).
You could also use the hackier; but simpler, method of running the steam process under a different user account; but(especially once X enters the picture and you want integration with your DE's menus and whatnot) that gets kind of gross.
Aside from areas where it's legally unavoidable(medical devices, avionics, probably some nuclear applications), applications that take the slightest responsibility for their actions are virtually unheard of, under any license. On a good day, a proprietary application might accept liability up to the value of a refund; but not further, if it fucks up really egregiously; but that's about the extent of it.
You can get software that promises more; but it will cost you mightily.
Exception handling. No exceptions. Now go.
Despite the fact that I know that the probe's namesake was the HMS Beagle, of Darwin fame, the news that a lost beagle has been found on mars still conjures up an enormously sad image of a small dog, curled up tightly; but still frozen solid, in the vast emptiness of the martian landscape.
Given the state of real-world security, 'cyber war games' are going to look like a particularly enthusiastic WWI reenactor event if the participants take the gloves off.
Who feels like a little speculation: Will the offensive teams be fairly picked(from people with suitable skills) and actually try, resulting a a resounding bloodbath, or will the 'exercise' be largely a whitewash?
More because of ecosystem vendor DRM enthusiasm that because of any real competence on app writers' part, app updates are actually more likely to be safe. Updating may or may not reveal what apps you have installed; but iOS will flat-out refuse to run anything not signed by Apple(which makes it pretty hard to quietly modify or spoof an update) and Android can be made to be more trusting; but the defaults for play store stuff aren't a whole lot more liberal.
The apps themselves, though, seem to be amazingly shoddy a striking amount of the time. In some cases, outfits that have perfectly respectable, properly SSLed, web sites somehow manage to have 'apps' that are basically just wrappers around a browser view; but still are less safe than just accessing their site directly. I'm not sure if this is just because the 'app' craze has attracted a lot of dumb new entrants, or whether it's because there are fewer people firing up wireshark on their phone and revealing the shameful truth.
What's wrong with that? Whenever I use an open hotspot, I *assume* the worst... if I can ssh to https into whatever, so what?
If I don't care about stuff, (e.g. reading cnn.com, for example), then who cares if it's encrypted or not?
Stunts like this scare people into not using/providing open internet access... I'd rather we have *more* open wifis (monitor whatever you want out of them), just have them be all over whenever I need them.
I largely agree with you, open hotspots are excessively demonized(both 'if you touch one you'll get cyber-syphilis!' and 'if you operate one pedophiles will smell it from miles away and you'll go to jail forever!'); but they can be dangerous, and people frequently don't take enough precautions.
Awareness of VPNs is actually pretty high, all things considered; but mostly for the purposes of getting Netflix in foreignistan, or getting to facebook at school/work. This tends to mean that even people who know about, and use, them typically don't ensure that all chatter from their computer(unless you are very careful, that's often a lot, from all sorts of updaters, autodiscovery agents, and annoying background processes) goes over the VPN, since their use of VPNs is all about ensuring that a specific, normally blocked, bit of traffic makes it out alive, rather than ensuring that no traffic leaks locally.
The area I would argue with you about is 'unimportant' HTTP: Do I care that somebody knows I visited CNN? No. However, if I make an HTTP connection, do I have the slightest assurance that I'm actually visiting CNN, rather than 'CNN, plus some rewrites that add a suite of common browser exploits'? Not so much. That can, and does, happen even on a trusted connection, through sites being hacked or ad network fuckery; but adding another party who can trivially rewrite the site with god-knows-what isn't really something you want.
If you have a proper VPN, with all traffic either heading over it or blocked before it leaves your system, though, all good.
The only upside is that whether or not someone agrees with the assessment that this is 'subversive' is an excellent(and relatively quick to administer) assay for determining whether or not they are a worthless authoritarian shitsack who would be better off deported to some hellhole with a nice abusive father figure that they can look up to and salute.
Effectively, while the Pope is the leader of a competitor to Islam, they are both in the same industry, with the same basic goals(notably, the recognition that old men with amusing hats and alleged access to divine law are society's rightful authority figures).
Having him deliver a "well, shooting people is bad and stuff; but Do Not Blaspheme!" speech is about as surprising as discovering that two different member companies of the BSA think that software piracy is evil, even if they are competitors and differ somewhat in their preferred DRM.
That aside, the pope is either being foolish or being mendacious if he thinks that you can have 'free speech' if you also insist that it is impermissible to 'offend religious beliefs'. This isn't merely incompatible in the free-speech-absolutist sense of 'any restriction on speech compromises freedom of speech!'; but on a much broader and more practical level. By design religions tend to have opinions and rules about lots, and lots, and lots of things. Depending on the exact circumstances in which they grew up, they can encompass guidance on moral, social, and political matters, gender roles, diet, dress, epistemology, cosmology, biology, etc, etc.
If someone can shut down an avenue of speech by having their religious feelings offended, there are precious few things you can safely talk about, because religions serve so many functions(and, in a society with multiple religions, the at least one is likely to have an opinion on any given topic, even if not all do).
Even religion itself becomes nearly impossible to practice if you can't offend the religious sentiments of others. The pope, for instance, operates an organization that bills itself as the sole route to salvation(with the actual heavy lifting being done by some combination of the Father and the Son in the trinity, of course). Is that not rather strikingly offensive to those who are (whether or not they state it implicitly, or are still praying for the conversion of the jews, as they did until quite recently) hellbound? The Protestants, for their part, only exist because of the premise that the church of Rome is a corrupt institution that has strayed from Christian practice, and only a reformed church, suitably grounded on faith and scripture, can address our salvation requirements. Only the really looney ones(like Jack Chick) spend much time screaming about how the Pope is the 7 headed whore of Babylon and things; but even your mild-mannered Lutheran is a rather brutal implicit insult to Catholicism.
I don't know whether he knows this, and just doesn't give a damn if it means stumping for more religious authority(by most accounts, you don't become pope by being an idiot; but you can become pope by being dogmatic and/or ruthless); or if he simply hasn't thought it through; but it's true either way.
Excellent, thank you.
Christ. Partying like it's 1915 in a tiny, sealed, underwater tube. That's overtly horrifying. I imagine that motivating whoever was responsible for checking for leaks was not that difficult?
If anybody knows about refrigeration it's probably the people that designed the cooling system on the ISS.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I thought they'd screwed up; but my own(quite limited) knowledge of the subject had led me to assume that something other than ammonia would have been used, so I was curious about what it was that I didn't know that made ammonia the choice.
I'm not sure whether their patches add bugs, or whether their original code quality was so atrocious that they are trying to fix a transfinite number of flaws by removing them at a finite rate.
Aside from the bad PR, unless the 'transport inspector' people are not even close to some flavor of cop, and have markedly weaker powers, "deliberately fucking with the agents investigating your lawbreaking" is often more of a crime than whatever you were doing in the first place.
Also(again, unless 'transport inspector' is a much, much, weaker category of enforcement, and doesn't even have any friends in agencies with actual power) a little friendly technical assistance from at least one bank and phone company(two areas of business that are generally happy to assist the government, unless it involves having to compete or pay taxes) could provide as many CC numbers, IMEIs, and IMSIs as one could reasonably need.
Sure, if you actually have to buy a burner at the sleazy cell kiosk, like some kind of drug dealer, every time, that adds up; but it's not as though the numbers themselves are expensive for some reason, if you can get them in bulk right from the vendor.
How does the FDA draw the line between 'must be approved' and 'not our problem' for devices that connect to a greater or lesser degree to other equipment?
I assume that the HDD was drawn in because it was unlucky enough to be an internal part; but with, say, something like this unit, which can burn CDs, transfer to USB devices, or connect to an ethernet network, do you need magic FDA CD-R blanks and flash drives, or is it just things considered 'integral' to the system(even if logically speaking they are no more or less important than something non-integral) that fall under certification requirements?
I don't know if it is routine; but I think that it isn't all that uncommon for 3d prints to be used, pre-surgery, by the surgical team to 'rehearse' the planned operation, entry, exit, important blood vessels, etc. Even where it isn't used, if medical imaging equipment that provides a 3d model was used, they'll pull the model up on screen and examine it both for diagnostic purposes and as a planning aid for chopping their way in and making the necessary repairs without too many unpleasant surprises, unnecessary scars, and so on.
While it's cool that this guy took the job on himself, and ended up getting much better results, this story seems to be, at least in part, "How at least one radiologist fucked it up, and the guy who luckily second guessed him."