I just read the original article, and as a fluent Hebrew speaker, can safely say that it's been grossly misquoted and misinterpreted.
During the generals retirement party, news coverage of both the Stuxnet and the Syrian reactor attack was shown, probably as part of a recent army related events montage. This was no power-point slide titled "recent accomplishments". The conclusion drawn here are akin to claiming that the US was responsible for the recent unrest in Egypt, since news coverage of that even was played at the retirement party of a state secretary...
Israel may have been responsible for these events, but I'd hardly say this "evidence" is conclusive
Flicker is indeed saves full resolution images, but getting them all back in case of hard drive failure is quite an ordeal. It took me over a week, and a python script to do it - I wouldn't recommend it to the faint of heart (see comment below).
Flickr is nice for sharing, but don't relay on it as a backup.
When uploading to photo sharing sites - beware!
I just finished moving my photo collection OUT of the cloud and I have to say, getting my 33,000+ photos BACK from Flickr (which is relatively open, as cloud photo services go) was not an easy task.
Cloud photo storage is plagued by compression and data loss (picasa), by warrantless unrecoverable deletion (Flickr - of a paid account! and obviously - Facebook) and other reliability/survivability problems.
Personally, as an avid photographer, I can't sleep soundly unless my photos are backed up in at least three places, one of the offsite. I accomplish this using a local mirrored drive, and the great cloud backup service - crashplan.
A mirrored drive would be tricky in your case, but you could use a USB hard drive connected to a family member/friends always-on computer. Back up to that using either the crashplan client (which is free for such uses, and works great) or rsync, syncback or any other homebrew solution. Pair that with a cloud backup service, and you should be fine.
Most importantly, never relay on the cloud as your single backup strategy - the internet is full of horror stories of people who THOUGHT they had everything backed up in the cloud... a USB drive sitting at a friends place is much easier to verify.
Here in Israel - red light cameras work just as the OP suggested - they take two pictures - the first showing you entering the intersection while the light is red, and the second - showing you already in the intersection.
I once had to make an emergency stop at a traffic light, and ended up stopping with my front wheels in the intersection. at this point the light turned red, and I was obstructing traffic - so i reversed about a meter to get out of the intersection which triggered the red-light camera. Thanks to the two picture system, I never got a ticket.
God help us if the reactor is going to be run by a windows machine...
That would really put the "of DEATH" in BSOD
With any luck, the reactor is still controlled by custom crafted micro-controllers, or even analog equipment. All the new windows machines should do there is provide a monitoring utility, or at most a control interface.
Subs usually tend to maintain radio silence and acoustic silence under water.
transmitting anything would be like sending out a homing beacon for any submarine hunting vessels that may be about.
For surveillance or phoning home, a sub will usually climb to periscope depth and sneak out a directional antenna.
Underwater "radio" systems are mostly designed for communication with a friendly ship, when climbing to periscope depth would pose a safety risk (collision etc.).
----
and yes, I do realize that the data transmission is acoustic, not electromagnetic.
My point was that as far as espionage is concerend, on a closed system like a submarine - no choice of operating system would give you any measure of added security.
Plus - if I wanted to infiltrate a military computer system, I'd probably use a man in the team whose job is to audit and build the source code of the os/software:)
Arguably, it might be much easier getting an operative into the submarines CREW.
Bottom line:
Regardless of the existence of a backdoor, to access it - you'd have to be in a position that would enable you to get at the data without a backdoor in place.
also, odd are that the UK military actually HAS the windows source code.
- "Our operative finally infiltrated the shipyard, and is trusted by his superiors to preform regular maintenance on all the ships computers"
- "Wonderful, begin data collection immediately!"
- "There is one problem sir"
- "What is it?"
- "The ships computer are all running linux!"
- "OMG were screwed! we could never hack THAT!"
First of all, I find the notion that the UK would send a SUBMARINE to log on to the INTERNET rather silly...
I'm sure their department of defense has internet access... no need to go wifi war-diving:)
That said - and assuming you intended to present the more plausible scenario of hacking into the protected wifi network of the coastal palace of . Connecting surveillance equipment directly to the ships network would be extremely poor practice, not matter what operating system it is running.
Such systems are usually isolated.
As for internal threats - soldiers bringing media onboard from home and such: from my experience in the field, such military systems are usually hardened in a manner that you would need a set of wrenches, the admin password, and some wires and assorted spare hardware in order to plug in something you brought from home. This has yet to stop soldiers from doing so - but in this case the correct approach is disciplinary - since I doubt any security system, on windows or any other os, could stand between a sailor on a six month underwater mission and his porn.
Hopefully they have non networked recreational PCs for that purpose...
Namely a "private session" tab, and history/cookie that preserves selected sites.
Is there a FF plug-in that knows how to do any of this?
Usually I'd be the first to bash M$, but it looks like they're actually in the right direction with this feature.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, 50 billion?
That candy bar must have a lot of calories...
I just read the original article, and as a fluent Hebrew speaker, can safely say that it's been grossly misquoted and misinterpreted.
During the generals retirement party, news coverage of both the Stuxnet and the Syrian reactor attack was shown, probably as part of a recent army related events montage. This was no power-point slide titled "recent accomplishments". The conclusion drawn here are akin to claiming that the US was responsible for the recent unrest in Egypt, since news coverage of that even was played at the retirement party of a state secretary...
Israel may have been responsible for these events, but I'd hardly say this "evidence" is conclusive
Flicker is indeed saves full resolution images, but getting them all back in case of hard drive failure is quite an ordeal. It took me over a week, and a python script to do it - I wouldn't recommend it to the faint of heart (see comment below).
Flickr is nice for sharing, but don't relay on it as a backup.
When uploading to photo sharing sites - beware!
I just finished moving my photo collection OUT of the cloud and I have to say, getting my 33,000+ photos BACK from Flickr (which is relatively open, as cloud photo services go) was not an easy task.
Cloud photo storage is plagued by compression and data loss (picasa), by warrantless unrecoverable deletion (Flickr - of a paid account! and obviously - Facebook) and other reliability/survivability problems.
Personally, as an avid photographer, I can't sleep soundly unless my photos are backed up in at least three places, one of the offsite. I accomplish this using a local mirrored drive, and the great cloud backup service - crashplan.
A mirrored drive would be tricky in your case, but you could use a USB hard drive connected to a family member/friends always-on computer. Back up to that using either the crashplan client (which is free for such uses, and works great) or rsync, syncback or any other homebrew solution. Pair that with a cloud backup service, and you should be fine.
Most importantly, never relay on the cloud as your single backup strategy - the internet is full of horror stories of people who THOUGHT they had everything backed up in the cloud... a USB drive sitting at a friends place is much easier to verify.
Here in Israel - red light cameras work just as the OP suggested - they take two pictures - the first showing you entering the intersection while the light is red, and the second - showing you already in the intersection.
I once had to make an emergency stop at a traffic light, and ended up stopping with my front wheels in the intersection. at this point the light turned red, and I was obstructing traffic - so i reversed about a meter to get out of the intersection which triggered the red-light camera. Thanks to the two picture system, I never got a ticket.
Have you considered Nintendo DS?
I beleive a "conspiracy of one" would be a contradiction in terms, well, at least unless you are the Offspring :)
God help us if the reactor is going to be run by a windows machine...
That would really put the "of DEATH" in BSOD
With any luck, the reactor is still controlled by custom crafted micro-controllers, or even analog equipment. All the new windows machines should do there is provide a monitoring utility, or at most a control interface.
Subs usually tend to maintain radio silence and acoustic silence under water. transmitting anything would be like sending out a homing beacon for any submarine hunting vessels that may be about. For surveillance or phoning home, a sub will usually climb to periscope depth and sneak out a directional antenna. Underwater "radio" systems are mostly designed for communication with a friendly ship, when climbing to periscope depth would pose a safety risk (collision etc.).
----
and yes, I do realize that the data transmission is acoustic, not electromagnetic.
Soon enough the RBN is likely to purchase a cold war surplus nuclear sub, and do just that...
My point was that as far as espionage is concerend, on a closed system like a submarine - no choice of operating system would give you any measure of added security.
:)
Plus - if I wanted to infiltrate a military computer system, I'd probably use a man in the team whose job is to audit and build the source code of the os/software
Arguably, it might be much easier getting an operative into the submarines CREW.
Bottom line: Regardless of the existence of a backdoor, to access it - you'd have to be in a position that would enable you to get at the data without a backdoor in place. also, odd are that the UK military actually HAS the windows source code.
- "Our operative finally infiltrated the shipyard, and is trusted by his superiors to preform regular maintenance on all the ships computers"
- "Wonderful, begin data collection immediately!"
- "There is one problem sir"
- "What is it?"
- "The ships computer are all running linux!"
- "OMG were screwed! we could never hack THAT!"
First of all, I find the notion that the UK would send a SUBMARINE to log on to the INTERNET rather silly... I'm sure their department of defense has internet access... no need to go wifi war-diving :)
That said - and assuming you intended to present the more plausible scenario of hacking into the protected wifi network of the coastal palace of . Connecting surveillance equipment directly to the ships network would be extremely poor practice, not matter what operating system it is running.
Such systems are usually isolated.
As for internal threats - soldiers bringing media onboard from home and such: from my experience in the field, such military systems are usually hardened in a manner that you would need a set of wrenches, the admin password, and some wires and assorted spare hardware in order to plug in something you brought from home. This has yet to stop soldiers from doing so - but in this case the correct approach is disciplinary - since I doubt any security system, on windows or any other os, could stand between a sailor on a six month underwater mission and his porn.
Hopefully they have non networked recreational PCs for that purpose...
And these would be backdoors would be accessed... how? ...underwater wifi?
Namely a "private session" tab, and history/cookie that preserves selected sites. Is there a FF plug-in that knows how to do any of this? Usually I'd be the first to bash M$, but it looks like they're actually in the right direction with this feature.