I made the mistake of going in Tesco yesterday at lunchtime and it was jam packed with Christmas shoppers. So I bought a few things and went in the "express", "self service" line. These lines are served by automated systems which I swear have been designed to a) ignore your keypresses b) ignore barcodes, c) throw up random errors d) randomly say "unexpected item in the bagging area" and generally do everything to neither be express nor self service. Tesco presumably because they need half as many people to operate them but god are they frustrating.
I've read of a number of cases where someone has accessed their neighbours police records, medical data etc. and been caught doing so.
Any sane system would log all queries by operator even if the records are not flagged. So they would still be in the system if a suspicion or complain arose concerning the person.
I've never said anything of the quality of the data. What I do know is that if I were a hacker and someone handed me hundreds of thousands of accounts with password hashes that there will be many users in that list who have used the same password on other sites, possibly valuable sites like ebay, paypal, Amazon, banks etc.
I would as a hacker expend the effort to crack as many of those passwords as possible. I might even engage in a little spear phishing with the data, and also plug the same email / password into commerce sites to see what falls out. If I was also a spammer I would plug the same email / password into different forums / blogs and spam away for any successes.
So while at the end of the day Gawker's mistake is not the end of the world for me, it is a risk for anyone on that list who didn't take the necessary precautions.
The point you're missing is that you might use throwaway passwords on forums or blogs, I might use throwaways on formums blogs but some people don't. The password they use is the password they use everywhere.
Not everyone understands the need to use throwaways for some kinds of accounts and use unique passwords for others. I can't say how many people might be affected but it would not surprise me if a significant number of people used the same pwd everywhere. As such cracking a popular site is an attractive and worthwhile proposition.
That aside, even if it was just a throwaway password (as it was for me), and even if it's a pseudo (as it is for me too), I still use the same credentials on equivalent sites. I have 10 years or more on some forums with this alias and therefore I don't take the risk lightly.
The passwords that were decrypted were the easiest passwords in the set for the most part. That's why they were able to decrypt them.
Those passwords were decrypted in 24 hours. I expect the majority of the remaining passwords would fall with a longer attack. It's not hard to envisage that someone slurps up every single hash into memory and begins a brute force attack from 4 chars all the way up until they get bored, striking off every password as they match it to the list. They could even use GPUs to speed things up and run hashes in parallel.
I don't consider my password to be weak but it was only 8 chars and as a throwaway account I used the password for similar services but not banks, online stores etc. An 8 char password might have reside in a 2^40 hash space and I expect a brute force would get it eventually. So I changed the password elsewhere because I could do without the hassle of discovering some spammer is using my account to sell fake watches.
Naturally there WILL be people who use the same password and email address on important accounts. So while it may be an inconvenience to me, it might have more severe consequences for others.
It sounds like you're saying the person was the weakest link for telling a complete stranger the answer to their personal question.
Most sites allow you to choose from more than one question or even write one yourself. If you must choose one, memorise an answer which is deliberately wrong. For example the site asks your mother's maiden name so choose McGonagall, Peshwari, Boondoggle or something memorable but not guessable even to those who know your personal history. If you are allowed to make up a question, make your question obscure and personal, possibly something you have never told someone else or a personal experience.
What's more incredible is that no one noticed this. I've worked in places where you just know there are triggers on certain tables, that queries are logged, that you can and probably would trip alarms of you did something prohibited such as looking up celeb details, or someone's medical records without authorisation.
It beggars belief that any intel officer could do the equivalent to "select * from reports" and nobody batted an eyelid. If he had to search a database, he should be required to enter search criteria. Results should be limited. His search should be logged. Unusual or suspicious searches should flagged for immediate attention. Even the text of the reports could even tagged in obvious and less obvious ways so if they did leak that the culprit could be forensically identified.
So while we can debate about the ethics of what wikileaks is doing, the reality is that the fault for all the leaks lays fairly and squarely at the feet of the US governments sloppy security. If Bradly Manning was doing it then who else was? I wonder if China, Russia, Iran etc. have had to feign surprise at these leaks. Perhaps they've long owned their own copies.
If major dists like Ubuntu move to Wayland (and run X11 over the top much the way OS X does when it needs X11), then all the over the wire remoting will have to radically change anyway.
Screenscaping (VNC) will suck as much as it always did and X11 derived solutions (NX) won't work. Now might be the time to consider how over the wire functionality such as 3d, compositing etc. occurs and plumb it in in a much more coherent and integrated way with Wayland. Really there should be no reason for there to be a separate product to do this anyway on the server side. On the client side I imagine there will be lots of competing products both commercial and open source which would consume the content.
How graphics went over the wire really depends on the capabilities of the server and of the client and the datapipe between them. I expect that OpenGL instructions would form the basis of it, but would there be scope to merge, concatenate, cull instructions over the wire? Would there be scope for the server to perform certain transforms to spare the client the effort? Should the server send all textures, shaders, meshes etc. as is or also provide functionality to simplify them? Perhaps the client has a more powerful GPU than the server. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps the server would have to render most of the screen in some cases or not other. Perhaps the server has too many connections and doesn't have the GPU available to do this. Lots of questions, but it seems like this is all plumbing that should be considered for Wayland.
Obviously things like mouse, clipboard have to be considered too but I expect those issues are largely solved and fairly trivial compared to the graphical bits.
Java the language is usable but its certainly not as terse as it could be. The amount of boiler plate for getters / setters being a typical example, but also things like the lack of closures and the bloat when using anonymous inner classes. The platform is also at serious risk of fragmentation because of the perception that Oracle is not doing enough to push things forward in a timely fashion. Look at the glacial pace of development for Java 7.
If Oracle aren't careful then Groovy or some other JVM language will be perceived as Java++ and the original language will get left in the dust. I wouldn't be surprised with Apache's recent falling out with the JCP that things pick up pace in that department.
I think if banks were 80% liable for all frauds that we might actually see a banking system that took the necessary precautions to prevent scams like this. There must be things that can be done by the receiving bank and the sending bank to reduce the amount of fraud. Phasing out paper cheques would be a good start.
But in the absence of bank regulation, anyone stupid enough to be processing fraudulent cheques is largely to blame for their own misfortunes. While this guy is as much a victim as the bank, it was his own sheer stupidity which initiated the fraud and he should be on the hook for any losses that result.
So, what you're proposing, is a world wide policing effort, which would take insane amounts of money, and co-operation, to catch fleeting moments with groups of people. Also, I wonder how many of them have Dynamic IP's.
Insane amounts of money? Hardly. Visa / Amazon will be supply logs of IP addresses and then someone will sort them by location, ISP, recurrence etc. Then the worst on the list will become priority for investigation. Yes I expect it will involve international cooperation mostly through conference calls and email. And I can't think of a more effective way to attract that cooperation than by attacking major international businesses. Most likely the UK & US will take a lead and then coordinate with other countries as appropriate.
As for "fleeting moments", are you really that naive? If the internet were that anonymous then paedophiles (and paedo networks) wouldn't be routinely caught, p2p users wouldn't be constantly hit by lawsuits, or botnets being infiltrated & shutdown, or individual hackers being caught & convicted. The reality is that even smart people aren't half as smart as they think they are and given a determined investigation (as is likely), some of them will be caught. Look at Bradley Manning who is smart enough to use Tor and SSL to upload diplomatic documents and then stupid enough to give a life confession to some other hacker, all dutifully logged to disk for a grateful FBI.
Do you have any proof/experience/evidence/etc, which suggests that "Anonymous" has an "inner circle.
If you need confirmation of it, then here is a piece from today's Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/16/wikileaks-anonymous-hierarchy-emerges. It confirms virtually exactly what I said and what common sense should tell you. There is always a handful of people in the middle of attacks like this. The group might not be fixed in size and people come and go, but there are always ringleaders. It happens in the real world for things like G7 protests and it happens in the virtual world too.
Well good luck with that defense. An IP address wouldn't be the only evidence they would present if they chose to prosecute. Most likely the IP would be justification for performing a search on your premises, tapping your ISP and holding you for questioning.
Anything's possible. They might not find you. They might suspect you but can't prove it. They might have bigger fish to fry. I guarantee that if you did get prosecuted that you would be shitting bricks and even if you walked away with a slap on the wrist it would still be a traumatic and expensive experience.
Besides this article is talking about Scotland Yard. I don't know about US federal law, but UK's Police and Justice Bill allows for up to 10 years in prison and / or fine for denial of service style attacks. Of course the judge is going to take into account age and other factors so you could walk free after conviction, but if you did, count your blessings. You could probably kiss your career in computers goodbye though as most places wouldn't touch a convicted hacker (or a script kiddie) with a bargepole.
You assume everyone is smart enough to do what you say and does it perfectly. Chances are that in that cloud of anonymous people there are plenty of chat logs and other evidence floating around on PCs that could lead from one person to another, or at least corroborate other evidence. Some people who own those machines might even provide assistance to the police for a lesser sentence.
Just look at what happened with Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo. Manning is smart enough to use Tor & SSL to upload his diplomatic docs, but then he goes and blabs to Lamo over IM who happens to be logging all of his chats. Highly incriminating chats that more or less make his conviction a slam dunk.
After Gawker got hacked I changed my duplicate passwords and made most of them unique or variants on a theme. So all of them stronger and over 10 chars in length. But I got to thinking that probably I should be bothering nearly as much about choosing password variants for throwaways because I'll never remember them all. I think for forums / chat boards it would suffice to just take the domain name (e.g. gawker) and append it to a fairly strong throwaway password shared everywhere. For example say my throwaway password was Ap1N5g=X, then just make the password Ap1N5g=Xgawker. The hostname becomes part of the password. Some simple rules would sort out issues caused by differing password / case issues on some sites.
Most backends will hash the password which means if one DB were stolen, thieves would have to reverse hash my password to stand a chance of guessing the other throwaway passwords. A manual step which might work if someone was targetting me specifically and individually, but my name appears in amongst hundreds of thousands of other names. Besides, working it out lets them have access to some other throwaway accounts, so who cares? At most it puts me out a bit that some spammer starts spamming acai berries or whatever in my name but its not the end of the world.
Individual participation in something like this hasn't existed on a big stage since the Athenians. Is it really shocking that the establishment doesn't seem to grok it? This is something that doesn't clearly fit into the D or R bags so no one really has a damned a clue what exactly to do with it. The party mentality permeates every aspect of their thinking. It's no wonder that they try to label it as just another group.
Not true. Lots of countries have referendums on important issues (e.g. constitutional changes) and most countries including the US have elected officials all the way from local to government level. Switzerland even implements direct democracy where just about every measure in law can be struck out by a referendum. All you need is to gather 50,000 signatures and you can repeal a law through referendum (assuming you win).
Personally I think the Swiss model demonstrates that direct democracy does not necessarily mean a free and open society - Switzerland is notorious for some of the bureaucratic and petty laws it has. But it does demonstrate a working model where virtually anyone can change laws (and even enact them at a local level) if they have enough support.
Regardless, there is a different between participation in the democratic process and what 4chan / Anonymous is doing. They are unaccountable, unnamed mass of people who are performing illegal acts as a form of protest (or more likely just for lulz). It's not the same thing at all.
If Anonymous is made up of random people who care about the issue of the moment, how do you investigate them over time? I can't see how they would all care about the same things, as it's not like Anonymous hires people to do stuff.
You start by collecting log files after each attack and correlating IP addresses. You log the 4chan groups & IRC chats and see if you can identify who is who. You sift through the attacker's IP addresses and see if identify some of the culprits and their ISPs. You install some of the remote control bots on some sample machines and analyse the traffic and its origins. Eventually you have info to go an execute some search warrants and take it from there depending on what you find.
"Anonymous" probably has an inner circle of ring leaders who mostly know what they're doing. A larger circle of volunteers who probably don't and act as proxies / bots for attacks, and then a large number of 1-time / wannabes who get involved on the periphery and then leave. I believe an investigation is bound to identify a lot of people in the outer rings and probably a couple in the centre too. People will rat on each other too for a lesser sentence or a warning.
Proving it is another matter of course, but people who think they're somehow immune from prosecution because they're in a large herd are deluding themselves. At the end of the day if you aided a DDOS attack and it can be proven, you're in deep shit.
While I consider ChromeOS to be pretty redundant as a separate entity to Android it did have support to write native code, or at least apps which thought they were running natively. The native client SDK contains a toolchain to compile C/C++ apps into LLVM bytecode. That might be sufficient to write a user land combination VPN / web proxy / SOCKS server that the browser & apps could be configured to use. Chrome is also a browser so corporates could point it at any web applications they used internally or externally.
The bigger issue for ChromeOS is that it's duplicated effort. I really don't see much benefit for it to exist as a separate thing to Android. The LLVM would be a good thing to include in Android (imagine the fireworks when someone emulates the iOS APIs!), and the Chrome browser might still have a place in netbook versions of the OS. But as a separate entity it seems pretty pointless.
ChromeOS is Google's Kin. It might have seemed like a good idea on its own, but it's sharing the nest with a more viable and more successful sibling. It should have died a long time ago or become part of whatever tablet / netbook profile Google are coming up with for Android. I can't think of many reasons that the chrome app couldn't be running over Android when all is said and down and the Native Client (which is LLVM + APIs) could come too and would probably complement the existing Dalvik framework.
That's always a possibility. A far more likely possibility is that Mr Tapanaris along with many other Anonymous members isn't as computer savvy or as anonymous as they think. I expect Amazon, Visa et al have a nice long list of IPs that were involved in their respective DDOS attacks and that quite a few criminal complaints will fall out of the attack.
It's a self published / vanity book produced on CreateSpace (an Amazon offshoot). The blog suggests that incest books got delisted for falling foul of some broad conditions in the T&C which may upset some free speech advocates but isn't surprising really. Amazon has no obligation to publish books which could be construed as promoting illegal or obscene acts. I don't know if books got removed from actual Kindle devices but I could see that getting Amazon in serious hotwater if true and they had previously undertaken not to do it.
Even XP required more hardware than the original Linux based netbooks and from what I've heard, Windows 7 is still slower and more resource consuming than XP was.
Windows 7 works perfectly fine in netbooks. I have an HP Mini 210 with a 6 cell battery that gets about 7 or 8 hours from a charge. Of course a 6 cell battery sticks out the back and looks really ugly. A 3 cell is neater but cuts times in half. I expect if I were running Ubuntu that performance would be quite similar.
The issue for devices that don't have keyboards or mice is that Windows 7 (and Linux) are virtually useless. You can get away with pen input for some apps but not in general. A virtual keyboard / trackpad would be a necessity and would probably carve out a chunk of the screen.
Therefore I expect if W7 does appear for tablets, that there will be something akin to Windows Media Center - a shell purpose built for tablet operation. When you boot up the device it will launch straight into this shell and that's all you get until you either explicitly drop out to a regular Windows desktop (and use a virtual keyboard) or plug your tablet into a dock. The shell itself would run special apps and could share same APIs and runtimes as Windows Phone 7 so apps designed for WP7 will run on the tablet and vice versa.
I think such a device could be very useful for commuters and so on but I wonder about the battery life and storage. Intel are supposedly trying to compete with ARM, so maybe they can produce a SoC which slashes power consumption without affecting performance too much but I guess I have to wait and see what happens.
I expect based on reports that Windows 7 will acquire something like Windows media center - an app that runs in its own little world with it's own UI and ecosystem of "apps". This layer will be for tablets and will probably the same.NET API as Windows Phone so it can share apps with the phone. So you have the choice of running this tablet friendly layer, or running a more or less vanilla Windows 7.
I can see the arrangement as being very attractive especially if you could turn the tablet into a PC or netbook through a dock of some kind. The downside is that power consumption could be very poor compared to android or iOS and storage could be a huge issue too.
You're the naive one for suggesting they are doing this for any reason except the lulz. There is no activism here, just a bunch of kiddies using wikileaks as a convenient excuse to launch a DDOS attack.
Slashdot Mirror
I made the mistake of going in Tesco yesterday at lunchtime and it was jam packed with Christmas shoppers. So I bought a few things and went in the "express", "self service" line. These lines are served by automated systems which I swear have been designed to a) ignore your keypresses b) ignore barcodes, c) throw up random errors d) randomly say "unexpected item in the bagging area" and generally do everything to neither be express nor self service. Tesco presumably because they need half as many people to operate them but god are they frustrating.
Any sane system would log all queries by operator even if the records are not flagged. So they would still be in the system if a suspicion or complain arose concerning the person.
I would as a hacker expend the effort to crack as many of those passwords as possible. I might even engage in a little spear phishing with the data, and also plug the same email / password into commerce sites to see what falls out. If I was also a spammer I would plug the same email / password into different forums / blogs and spam away for any successes.
So while at the end of the day Gawker's mistake is not the end of the world for me, it is a risk for anyone on that list who didn't take the necessary precautions.
Not everyone understands the need to use throwaways for some kinds of accounts and use unique passwords for others. I can't say how many people might be affected but it would not surprise me if a significant number of people used the same pwd everywhere. As such cracking a popular site is an attractive and worthwhile proposition.
That aside, even if it was just a throwaway password (as it was for me), and even if it's a pseudo (as it is for me too), I still use the same credentials on equivalent sites. I have 10 years or more on some forums with this alias and therefore I don't take the risk lightly.
My money is on "The Hipster"
Those passwords were decrypted in 24 hours. I expect the majority of the remaining passwords would fall with a longer attack. It's not hard to envisage that someone slurps up every single hash into memory and begins a brute force attack from 4 chars all the way up until they get bored, striking off every password as they match it to the list. They could even use GPUs to speed things up and run hashes in parallel.
I don't consider my password to be weak but it was only 8 chars and as a throwaway account I used the password for similar services but not banks, online stores etc. An 8 char password might have reside in a 2^40 hash space and I expect a brute force would get it eventually. So I changed the password elsewhere because I could do without the hassle of discovering some spammer is using my account to sell fake watches.
Naturally there WILL be people who use the same password and email address on important accounts. So while it may be an inconvenience to me, it might have more severe consequences for others.
Most sites allow you to choose from more than one question or even write one yourself. If you must choose one, memorise an answer which is deliberately wrong. For example the site asks your mother's maiden name so choose McGonagall, Peshwari, Boondoggle or something memorable but not guessable even to those who know your personal history. If you are allowed to make up a question, make your question obscure and personal, possibly something you have never told someone else or a personal experience.
It beggars belief that any intel officer could do the equivalent to "select * from reports" and nobody batted an eyelid. If he had to search a database, he should be required to enter search criteria. Results should be limited. His search should be logged. Unusual or suspicious searches should flagged for immediate attention. Even the text of the reports could even tagged in obvious and less obvious ways so if they did leak that the culprit could be forensically identified.
So while we can debate about the ethics of what wikileaks is doing, the reality is that the fault for all the leaks lays fairly and squarely at the feet of the US governments sloppy security. If Bradly Manning was doing it then who else was? I wonder if China, Russia, Iran etc. have had to feign surprise at these leaks. Perhaps they've long owned their own copies.
Screenscaping (VNC) will suck as much as it always did and X11 derived solutions (NX) won't work. Now might be the time to consider how over the wire functionality such as 3d, compositing etc. occurs and plumb it in in a much more coherent and integrated way with Wayland. Really there should be no reason for there to be a separate product to do this anyway on the server side. On the client side I imagine there will be lots of competing products both commercial and open source which would consume the content.
How graphics went over the wire really depends on the capabilities of the server and of the client and the datapipe between them. I expect that OpenGL instructions would form the basis of it, but would there be scope to merge, concatenate, cull instructions over the wire? Would there be scope for the server to perform certain transforms to spare the client the effort? Should the server send all textures, shaders, meshes etc. as is or also provide functionality to simplify them? Perhaps the client has a more powerful GPU than the server. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps the server would have to render most of the screen in some cases or not other. Perhaps the server has too many connections and doesn't have the GPU available to do this. Lots of questions, but it seems like this is all plumbing that should be considered for Wayland.
Obviously things like mouse, clipboard have to be considered too but I expect those issues are largely solved and fairly trivial compared to the graphical bits.
Java the language is usable but its certainly not as terse as it could be. The amount of boiler plate for getters / setters being a typical example, but also things like the lack of closures and the bloat when using anonymous inner classes. The platform is also at serious risk of fragmentation because of the perception that Oracle is not doing enough to push things forward in a timely fashion. Look at the glacial pace of development for Java 7.
If Oracle aren't careful then Groovy or some other JVM language will be perceived as Java++ and the original language will get left in the dust. I wouldn't be surprised with Apache's recent falling out with the JCP that things pick up pace in that department.
But in the absence of bank regulation, anyone stupid enough to be processing fraudulent cheques is largely to blame for their own misfortunes. While this guy is as much a victim as the bank, it was his own sheer stupidity which initiated the fraud and he should be on the hook for any losses that result.
Insane amounts of money? Hardly. Visa / Amazon will be supply logs of IP addresses and then someone will sort them by location, ISP, recurrence etc. Then the worst on the list will become priority for investigation. Yes I expect it will involve international cooperation mostly through conference calls and email. And I can't think of a more effective way to attract that cooperation than by attacking major international businesses. Most likely the UK & US will take a lead and then coordinate with other countries as appropriate.
As for "fleeting moments", are you really that naive? If the internet were that anonymous then paedophiles (and paedo networks) wouldn't be routinely caught, p2p users wouldn't be constantly hit by lawsuits, or botnets being infiltrated & shutdown, or individual hackers being caught & convicted. The reality is that even smart people aren't half as smart as they think they are and given a determined investigation (as is likely), some of them will be caught. Look at Bradley Manning who is smart enough to use Tor and SSL to upload diplomatic documents and then stupid enough to give a life confession to some other hacker, all dutifully logged to disk for a grateful FBI.
Do you have any proof/experience/evidence/etc, which suggests that "Anonymous" has an "inner circle.
If you need confirmation of it, then here is a piece from today's Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/16/wikileaks-anonymous-hierarchy-emerges. It confirms virtually exactly what I said and what common sense should tell you. There is always a handful of people in the middle of attacks like this. The group might not be fixed in size and people come and go, but there are always ringleaders. It happens in the real world for things like G7 protests and it happens in the virtual world too.
Well good luck with that defense. An IP address wouldn't be the only evidence they would present if they chose to prosecute. Most likely the IP would be justification for performing a search on your premises, tapping your ISP and holding you for questioning.
Besides this article is talking about Scotland Yard. I don't know about US federal law, but UK's Police and Justice Bill allows for up to 10 years in prison and / or fine for denial of service style attacks. Of course the judge is going to take into account age and other factors so you could walk free after conviction, but if you did, count your blessings. You could probably kiss your career in computers goodbye though as most places wouldn't touch a convicted hacker (or a script kiddie) with a bargepole.
Just look at what happened with Bradley Manning and Adrian Lamo. Manning is smart enough to use Tor & SSL to upload his diplomatic docs, but then he goes and blabs to Lamo over IM who happens to be logging all of his chats. Highly incriminating chats that more or less make his conviction a slam dunk.
Most backends will hash the password which means if one DB were stolen, thieves would have to reverse hash my password to stand a chance of guessing the other throwaway passwords. A manual step which might work if someone was targetting me specifically and individually, but my name appears in amongst hundreds of thousands of other names. Besides, working it out lets them have access to some other throwaway accounts, so who cares? At most it puts me out a bit that some spammer starts spamming acai berries or whatever in my name but its not the end of the world.
Not true. Lots of countries have referendums on important issues (e.g. constitutional changes) and most countries including the US have elected officials all the way from local to government level. Switzerland even implements direct democracy where just about every measure in law can be struck out by a referendum. All you need is to gather 50,000 signatures and you can repeal a law through referendum (assuming you win).
Personally I think the Swiss model demonstrates that direct democracy does not necessarily mean a free and open society - Switzerland is notorious for some of the bureaucratic and petty laws it has. But it does demonstrate a working model where virtually anyone can change laws (and even enact them at a local level) if they have enough support.
Regardless, there is a different between participation in the democratic process and what 4chan / Anonymous is doing. They are unaccountable, unnamed mass of people who are performing illegal acts as a form of protest (or more likely just for lulz). It's not the same thing at all.
You start by collecting log files after each attack and correlating IP addresses. You log the 4chan groups & IRC chats and see if you can identify who is who. You sift through the attacker's IP addresses and see if identify some of the culprits and their ISPs. You install some of the remote control bots on some sample machines and analyse the traffic and its origins. Eventually you have info to go an execute some search warrants and take it from there depending on what you find.
"Anonymous" probably has an inner circle of ring leaders who mostly know what they're doing. A larger circle of volunteers who probably don't and act as proxies / bots for attacks, and then a large number of 1-time / wannabes who get involved on the periphery and then leave. I believe an investigation is bound to identify a lot of people in the outer rings and probably a couple in the centre too. People will rat on each other too for a lesser sentence or a warning.
Proving it is another matter of course, but people who think they're somehow immune from prosecution because they're in a large herd are deluding themselves. At the end of the day if you aided a DDOS attack and it can be proven, you're in deep shit.
The bigger issue for ChromeOS is that it's duplicated effort. I really don't see much benefit for it to exist as a separate thing to Android. The LLVM would be a good thing to include in Android (imagine the fireworks when someone emulates the iOS APIs!), and the Chrome browser might still have a place in netbook versions of the OS. But as a separate entity it seems pretty pointless.
ChromeOS is Google's Kin. It might have seemed like a good idea on its own, but it's sharing the nest with a more viable and more successful sibling. It should have died a long time ago or become part of whatever tablet / netbook profile Google are coming up with for Android. I can't think of many reasons that the chrome app couldn't be running over Android when all is said and down and the Native Client (which is LLVM + APIs) could come too and would probably complement the existing Dalvik framework.
That's always a possibility. A far more likely possibility is that Mr Tapanaris along with many other Anonymous members isn't as computer savvy or as anonymous as they think. I expect Amazon, Visa et al have a nice long list of IPs that were involved in their respective DDOS attacks and that quite a few criminal complaints will fall out of the attack.
It's a self published / vanity book produced on CreateSpace (an Amazon offshoot). The blog suggests that incest books got delisted for falling foul of some broad conditions in the T&C which may upset some free speech advocates but isn't surprising really. Amazon has no obligation to publish books which could be construed as promoting illegal or obscene acts. I don't know if books got removed from actual Kindle devices but I could see that getting Amazon in serious hotwater if true and they had previously undertaken not to do it.
Windows 7 works perfectly fine in netbooks. I have an HP Mini 210 with a 6 cell battery that gets about 7 or 8 hours from a charge. Of course a 6 cell battery sticks out the back and looks really ugly. A 3 cell is neater but cuts times in half. I expect if I were running Ubuntu that performance would be quite similar.
The issue for devices that don't have keyboards or mice is that Windows 7 (and Linux) are virtually useless. You can get away with pen input for some apps but not in general. A virtual keyboard / trackpad would be a necessity and would probably carve out a chunk of the screen.
Therefore I expect if W7 does appear for tablets, that there will be something akin to Windows Media Center - a shell purpose built for tablet operation. When you boot up the device it will launch straight into this shell and that's all you get until you either explicitly drop out to a regular Windows desktop (and use a virtual keyboard) or plug your tablet into a dock. The shell itself would run special apps and could share same APIs and runtimes as Windows Phone 7 so apps designed for WP7 will run on the tablet and vice versa.
I think such a device could be very useful for commuters and so on but I wonder about the battery life and storage. Intel are supposedly trying to compete with ARM, so maybe they can produce a SoC which slashes power consumption without affecting performance too much but I guess I have to wait and see what happens.
I can see the arrangement as being very attractive especially if you could turn the tablet into a PC or netbook through a dock of some kind. The downside is that power consumption could be very poor compared to android or iOS and storage could be a huge issue too.
You're the naive one for suggesting they are doing this for any reason except the lulz. There is no activism here, just a bunch of kiddies using wikileaks as a convenient excuse to launch a DDOS attack.