It's like a press release about an alleged apple product that may or may not have past the point of "thought experiment". Only this time, it's for Sony. Please tell me you charged them to post this article, otherwise it's just really, really sad...
They think that a single copy of a song is worth over a hundred thousand dollars too. They claim to lose more in revenue each month than the GDP of most countries. All because of those dyyyeaaarrrn pirates. Enron looks positively boring in comparison to the accounting techniques the recording industry uses. None of this is news. About the only people that buy this crap are judges and legislators -- the rest of us are almost universally of the mindset that a bag of potato chips has more value than most of the recording industry's portfolio.
The real reason for the study, revealed: Men don't want to be responsible for the social implications of sexually objectifying women. *shakes head* I'm still waiting for the day a bunch of men get together and research why the average man spends at least two nights a month sleeping somewhere other than his own bed.
90% of people is statistically interesting, but it's not conclusive when we're talking about the whole group. The fact that they're heterosexual doesn't change the statistical realities.
Much easier to find a large group of heterosexual subjects.
Heterosexual male subjects. And the relative "ease" of finding subjects shouldn't be a defense against due diligence. We've done studies on cancer, which accounts for 13% of all human deaths, which is quite a bit lower than 90%.
They are seeking to validate/invalidate a theory that cognitive resources will be dedicated to trying to attract potential reproductive mates.
And homosexuals never want to have families? Their urge to copulate must be due to some other cause simply on the basis that they are homosexual?
A possible reason to exclude homosexuals could be that homosexuals (both their existence and their choices of mate) are more difficult to explain evolutionarily.
Evolution has been producing them since the dawn of time. I think a deeper exploration of the issue (ie, by including them in the study) might help reveal a neurological basis for what appears on the surface to be similar external behaviors.
It would not be uninteresting to see if similar reductions in performance are found in homosexuals recently in the company of those they found attractive. But it might answer a different set of questions.
It doesn't not unwhat? You're trying to sound smart about something you're uneducated about. Let me fix this for you: "It would be damned interesting to see if the same changes in behavior occur with homosexuals as compared to heterosexuals. It would prove that attraction, not sexual orientation, causes a temporary drop in cognitive functioning." It's not answering a different set of questions -- it's answering a set of questions about the entire male population rather than a subset.
Dangerous, thrill seeking behaviour for example: it has been suggested that this might be due to sexual selection (by females) in favour of those males who are particularly strong or resilient.
Yes, but not very bright.
What I would find interesting would be to see if there was any statistically different performance between attached and unattached people "exposed to" attractive people.
If you want an answer to that question, you should chuck your preconceived notions of human behavior and explore all possible explanations. Anything less and you're only endeavoring to rearrange your prejudices and pass it off as thinking.
Is the take home message send your very stylish colleague with great taste in furnishings in to meet the hot sales rep?
No. The take home message would be to promote homosexuals to senior sales positions while the heterosexuals slave away doing administrative and secretarial work, because the homosexual will be focused on the bottom line instead of her other assets. Not the conclusion you were expecting, I suppose. Which is why more research is needed here -- jumping to conclusions hurts everyone.
How exactly could the average performance on tests by homosexual subjects tell us about the 90% heterosexual population??
It doesn't. The claim was about "males", not "heterosexual males". Is this something that's related to sexual orientation? That's an obvious first question I have to these results -- and it's a legitimate question, since a lot of medical literature was done on male college students and its coming out now decades later that the methodologies and procedures that were formed based on those conclusions have to be revised now. For example, women have a substantially different reaction to pain medications -- but it's only recently come to light because the original studies were only done on males aged 18-25. It was assumed based on what was already known about females that their pain tolerances and chemical pathways should be the same as males. Oops.
Without a better understanding of the mechanic that the root cause of this effect is, people shouldn't draw conclusions. Yet, already I see arguments here on slashdot about how it justifies gender segregation in schools and more. They're using what should be exploratory research to create social and medical policy -- and that's dangerous. 90% correlation is statistically "interesting", but hardly conclusive!
Heterosexuals account for roughly 90% of the population, which makes them a reasonable group of test subjects for an experiment.
Healthy people account for roughly 90% of the population... So do normal people... And studying either doesn't tell us a whole lot. -_- Studying the edge cases reveals a lot more about the underlying dynamics of a system than studying its average cases.
Now there is a concrete argument for gender segregation of boys and girls in school....
Right, because the first thing you do when you have two different groups of people in this society is to build a wall between them. Next up, Separate but Equal: It Didn't Work With the Jews, Blacks, Natives, Germans, Japanese, Communists, Gays, Or Any Other Group So Far In History, But By God, It Might Just Work With Girls.
Researchers recruited 40 male heterosexual students and had each one perform a standard memory test.
I have to wonder why the researchers didn't expand this theory to include homosexuals, bisexuals, or asexuals -- before publishing results claiming every man out there can be rendered temporarily stupid by an attractive woman. I smell a rat -- had they done this and the results turned out differently, they'd have to explain why this effect only happens to heterosexual men, or they'd have evidence of a neurological basis for attraction that isn't tied to gender. Neither conclusion would make them popular with the people funding the study. I don't know what this is, but it isn't science -- at least not the kind I grew up with.
Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight.
Didn't we want to be just like all the other democratic countries? The private sector delivers, and now we're bitching about it. Voters -- 'ya just can't please them.
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
I think you're making an apples to oranges comparison. The average american doesn't know much about business. The average american also doesn't own a business that competes in a global marketplace. A business owner that does compete in a global marketplace is aware of these issues, because s/he must. his/her place of birth doesn't change this.
The European Union's economic policies are designed to benefit business owners in Europe, just as the United States' economic policies are designed to benefit business owners here. Where these interests coincide favorably, there is cooperation (intellectual property, globalization, etc.). Where they do not (monopolies, taxation, etc.) there is not cooperation. Both sides state they strive for "fair", "open", and/or "unbiased" markets, but privately they strive to provide a benefit for their members, which sometimes results in "fair", "open", and "unbiased" markets, and sometimes does not.
The issue here is that the EU is motivated by a need for cultural integrity -- whereas their competition (the United States) does not bring a need for cultural integrity to the negotiation table. The end result is that US businesses are paying for the EU member nations' need for cultural integrity as a condition of competition within the European marketplace. Evaluating the correctness of each position is left as an excercise for the reader.
Unlike larger gTLDs like.org, the churn of adding new and deleting old zones in.edu is much lower (due to the fact that there are tight controls on who may register for a delegation). Thus, many of the hassles of adding new DS records and maintenance procedures might be more manageable and help speed DNSSEC's rollout in this branch of the DNS hierarchy.
Right. It's the administrative costs that are keeping it from being deployed. Sex.com sold for $14 million. I'd be willing to guess that the namespace of domains worth > $1,000 is totals several hundred million. Right now, the security to protect the aforementioned virtual properties is like a vault with a screen door out the back. It's a source of great internal amusement to me that in the real world our schools have some of the worst physical security, but soon they'll have some of the best digital security.
What is motivating the story submitter to put so much unwarranted blame at the feet of the EU and DOJ?
Maybe because the story submitter notes an ever-increasing pool of businesses based here in the United States find the EU's practices to be biased, unfair, and anti-competitive, despite the stated purpose of the aforementioned is to prevent those things. Well, that's not actually true anymore, since the phrase "free and undistorted competition" was removed by France during negotiations for the Treaty of Lisbon (basically EU Constitution v2.0). In truth, the EU's economic policy objectives sound more like something out of a fantasy novel -- "One Market to Rule Them All?" I only say it half-jokingly. The European Union never got their constitution ratified, so instead they decided to go for a more modest "treaty": One of the main concessions (and reasons for the lack of ratification by the member states) is because they didn't want companies that were points of national pride (read: monopolies) competing equally -- it would cause them to lose face. But they really, really want to wipe that smug look off those damnable americans what with their "global economic superpower," so they keep making concession after concession. The result looks rather like an angry fruit salad -- a juxtaposition of values, culture, and law that sickens those who look at it too long or too closely.
The fundamental truth of the European Union is this: It's intended to attack the United States' economic dominance. The only thing keeping them from existing on an even footing is the fact that they can't agree on anything! And the Irish-- God bless the Irish. So you get delays like this -- about the only thing the EU can agree on is that americans are a bunch of bastards who don't deserve what they've got (so by god, let's help relieve them of it). Democracy never looked so disorganized.
You seem to be laboring under the idea that speech recognition software really works.
Medical transcription. It works well enough to reduce the workload of those using it. Complete automation isn't the goal -- improved productivity is. for this goal, the software "works".
"The downside for the malware creators is that they would need a lot of time on their hands to go through hours of Skype audio files to find anything of monetary interest."
You seem to be laboring under the idea that using speech recognition software would not occur to these people, or that the cost of transcription would be higher than the benefit received. First, it's already in widespread use in certain industries. Second, some targets are going to yield much better information than others -- you're correct that if you target a 100,000 random skype phone conversations you won't get much. But what if you only targeted people using it between the hours of 9am and 5pm and had job titles and functions associated with financial data?
Suddenly, you've got yourself a viable criminal enterprise.
I'm sorry, but what right do you have to fuck with someone else's data like that?
It's not someone else's data. It's data from one machine which they have no legal control or right to sending data to theirs. If their servers accept and process the data, and no password, key, or other means of repudiating the data is available, there's no ethical quandry. The interface is public and the intent of the interface is to accept data from public (and unvalidated) sources.
This company is not in the wrong, they're just doing something that you don't like.
If you think you're right and I'm wrong, and I think I'm right and you're wrong, who do you think I'm going to choose?:\
It's one thing if they're tracking you without you knowing about it.
Ignoring the fact that this statement is entirely immaterial to the issue at hand...Really? So it would be okay for me to follow you everywhere you go in public, as long as I announced it to you? If I stood outside your door when you went into private areas like your house, and patiently waited until you came out in public again?
However, to go into someone else's system and screw with data...
You have assumed that data is being altered, rather than created. Oops. You're also implying that entry is forced, rather than explicitly allowed.
...when the only thing tying you to it is the fact that you want to play a certain game, that's wrong.
So the "rightness" or "wrongness" of something is dependent on whether a thing is done for pleasure or business?
Do you feel all forms of "vigilante justice" are justified?
That's a loaded question, so I'll equivocate instead: History has demonstrated that when all other forms of redress has been exhausted, "vigilante justice" as you call it, has proven an effective means of promoting social change. so-called "vigilantes" have been educating the general public and IT professionals for decades by uncovering and publishing security flaws, releasing proof-of-concept code, and demonstrating the necessity of validating input before processing it. What you call "vigilantism" is what others would define as a "public service".
Integrity has no need of laws. Too many things are allowed these days because of unjust laws that protect unethical conduct. "No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..." -- Benjamin Constant. I've always advocated doing what you feel in your heart is right; You'll be damned for it anyway. A lot of people here have the sentiment that what this company is doing is wrong -- they need to explore those feelings on a deeper level and then resolve to a course of action. Most likely, they will choose to do nothing (and that is fine). But if they choose that out of fear of punishment then we've become a sorry lot indeed.
...at the moment researchers could not say with confidence 'how much nitrous oxide comes from where.'
That would probably be because it isn't regulated. It's actually legal to own despite its recreational properties. As an oxidizer it has many industrial uses. And like all oxidizers, yes, when it gets into the upper atmosphere Bad Things Happen(tm). We may need better methods of containing it (it is a gas at room temperature, of course) when used in an industrial setting, but that's about the extent of what we can do to contain the problem -- it's a very basic chemical with a wide range of applications, many of which aren't amiable to being changed to using another agent.
So stick by your guns, and just say no. Else nothing will ever change.
Because that's been so successful in the past! So the 1% of the population that's actually computer literate enough to (a) know about this and (b) care won't buy their game. They won't notice. So how about Plan B:
Patch the game or setup firewall rules to block such communications, like via a proxy or some-such.
Or Plan C:
Reverse engineer the protocol, then poison-pill the marketing data.
"Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."
Since when did the age of code become a metric for evaluating its trustworthiness? Code should only be trusted after undergoing in-depth analysis by people with training and experience in information security. Code should also be written with security in mind from the beginning. The story of this kernel bug is simple and goes like this: "I was in a hurry."
The point of bogus queries is to avoid tracking based on behavior, which is of course a matter of concern in this context. It is assumed that your ip address is already hidden.
First, "tracking based on behavior" -- What exactly constitutes behavior? A string of a thousand randomly generated queries, popular or not, mixed in with several queries on how to build bombs is going to be flagged. It isn't generating any real extra work for them to deduce who you are by traffic analysis, because packet sizes, times sent/received, and other data specific to the request is going to correlate with a specific time and place, which means a specific person (in all likelihood).
As to the IP address being "hidden" -- I'm not even sure where to start. Packet-based switching networks (ie. TCP/IP) require a source and destination IP. The ISP knows your IP address. It's often required by law to log all connections to/from each; at the very least the header data, but with the crashing costs of storage, keeping the content as well is a trivial matter. There's no "hiding" your IP address.
All methods of connecting via encrypted tunnels into a "proxy cloud" that I have seen are still vulnerable to basic traffic analysis: As long as you have packet logs for the end-point and source, traffic analysis is a trivial computational task. Translation: I can have confidence that a given computer sent a given query at a given time; Decryption of the data at any point within the cloud or at the source isn't needed -- as long as I have the server logs and a corresponding packet log of the target computer, you're toast.
Steganographic techniques would make the results of such an analysis difficult or impossible if properly implimented, but depend on the cloud architecture reaching critical mass, sending a constant flow of random data between each node, and then rate-limiting. These constrictions mean that the computational resources used to create said security are much, much higher than the current model. This is why they haven't been adopted -- simply put, nobody wants to wait several seconds to a minute for a single webpage to load, and the owners of said cloud don't want to waste bandwidth to manage what they believe is a low-risk attack vector.
Sadly, it's exactly this kind of thinking that may very well get someone killed over there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like a press release about an alleged apple product that may or may not have past the point of "thought experiment". Only this time, it's for Sony. Please tell me you charged them to post this article, otherwise it's just really, really sad...
They think that a single copy of a song is worth over a hundred thousand dollars too. They claim to lose more in revenue each month than the GDP of most countries. All because of those dyyyeaaarrrn pirates. Enron looks positively boring in comparison to the accounting techniques the recording industry uses. None of this is news. About the only people that buy this crap are judges and legislators -- the rest of us are almost universally of the mindset that a bag of potato chips has more value than most of the recording industry's portfolio.
The real reason for the study, revealed: Men don't want to be responsible for the social implications of sexually objectifying women. *shakes head* I'm still waiting for the day a bunch of men get together and research why the average man spends at least two nights a month sleeping somewhere other than his own bed.
> Healthy people account for roughly 90% of the population
Which is why they're used in most studies unless the purpose is to /specifically/ study some illness.
No, they're not. Healthy people are used as the control group.
90% of people are heterosexual.
90% of people is statistically interesting, but it's not conclusive when we're talking about the whole group. The fact that they're heterosexual doesn't change the statistical realities.
Much easier to find a large group of heterosexual subjects.
Heterosexual male subjects. And the relative "ease" of finding subjects shouldn't be a defense against due diligence. We've done studies on cancer, which accounts for 13% of all human deaths, which is quite a bit lower than 90%.
They are seeking to validate/invalidate a theory that cognitive resources will be dedicated to trying to attract potential reproductive mates.
And homosexuals never want to have families? Their urge to copulate must be due to some other cause simply on the basis that they are homosexual?
A possible reason to exclude homosexuals could be that homosexuals (both their existence and their choices of mate) are more difficult to explain evolutionarily.
Evolution has been producing them since the dawn of time. I think a deeper exploration of the issue (ie, by including them in the study) might help reveal a neurological basis for what appears on the surface to be similar external behaviors.
It would not be uninteresting to see if similar reductions in performance are found in homosexuals recently in the company of those they found attractive. But it might answer a different set of questions.
It doesn't not unwhat? You're trying to sound smart about something you're uneducated about. Let me fix this for you: "It would be damned interesting to see if the same changes in behavior occur with homosexuals as compared to heterosexuals. It would prove that attraction, not sexual orientation, causes a temporary drop in cognitive functioning." It's not answering a different set of questions -- it's answering a set of questions about the entire male population rather than a subset.
Dangerous, thrill seeking behaviour for example: it has been suggested that this might be due to sexual selection (by females) in favour of those males who are particularly strong or resilient.
Yes, but not very bright.
What I would find interesting would be to see if there was any statistically different performance between attached and unattached people "exposed to" attractive people.
If you want an answer to that question, you should chuck your preconceived notions of human behavior and explore all possible explanations. Anything less and you're only endeavoring to rearrange your prejudices and pass it off as thinking.
Is the take home message send your very stylish colleague with great taste in furnishings in to meet the hot sales rep?
No. The take home message would be to promote homosexuals to senior sales positions while the heterosexuals slave away doing administrative and secretarial work, because the homosexual will be focused on the bottom line instead of her other assets. Not the conclusion you were expecting, I suppose. Which is why more research is needed here -- jumping to conclusions hurts everyone.
How exactly could the average performance on tests by homosexual subjects tell us about the 90% heterosexual population??
It doesn't. The claim was about "males", not "heterosexual males". Is this something that's related to sexual orientation? That's an obvious first question I have to these results -- and it's a legitimate question, since a lot of medical literature was done on male college students and its coming out now decades later that the methodologies and procedures that were formed based on those conclusions have to be revised now. For example, women have a substantially different reaction to pain medications -- but it's only recently come to light because the original studies were only done on males aged 18-25. It was assumed based on what was already known about females that their pain tolerances and chemical pathways should be the same as males. Oops.
Without a better understanding of the mechanic that the root cause of this effect is, people shouldn't draw conclusions. Yet, already I see arguments here on slashdot about how it justifies gender segregation in schools and more. They're using what should be exploratory research to create social and medical policy -- and that's dangerous. 90% correlation is statistically "interesting", but hardly conclusive!
Heterosexuals account for roughly 90% of the population, which makes them a reasonable group of test subjects for an experiment.
Healthy people account for roughly 90% of the population... So do normal people... And studying either doesn't tell us a whole lot. -_- Studying the edge cases reveals a lot more about the underlying dynamics of a system than studying its average cases.
Now there is a concrete argument for gender segregation of boys and girls in school....
Right, because the first thing you do when you have two different groups of people in this society is to build a wall between them. Next up, Separate but Equal: It Didn't Work With the Jews, Blacks, Natives, Germans, Japanese, Communists, Gays, Or Any Other Group So Far In History, But By God, It Might Just Work With Girls.
Researchers recruited 40 male heterosexual students and had each one perform a standard memory test.
I have to wonder why the researchers didn't expand this theory to include homosexuals, bisexuals, or asexuals -- before publishing results claiming every man out there can be rendered temporarily stupid by an attractive woman. I smell a rat -- had they done this and the results turned out differently, they'd have to explain why this effect only happens to heterosexual men, or they'd have evidence of a neurological basis for attraction that isn't tied to gender. Neither conclusion would make them popular with the people funding the study. I don't know what this is, but it isn't science -- at least not the kind I grew up with.
Our voting system is heading toward a server-centric model with our vote being delivered to us by computers under lock and key far away from public oversight.
Didn't we want to be just like all the other democratic countries? The private sector delivers, and now we're bitching about it. Voters -- 'ya just can't please them.
I'm a Romanian residing in France, I know what I'm talking about.
That explains the attitude...
Americans don't seem to realize what a "global economy" truly entails.
I think you're making an apples to oranges comparison. The average american doesn't know much about business. The average american also doesn't own a business that competes in a global marketplace. A business owner that does compete in a global marketplace is aware of these issues, because s/he must. his/her place of birth doesn't change this.
The European Union's economic policies are designed to benefit business owners in Europe, just as the United States' economic policies are designed to benefit business owners here. Where these interests coincide favorably, there is cooperation (intellectual property, globalization, etc.). Where they do not (monopolies, taxation, etc.) there is not cooperation. Both sides state they strive for "fair", "open", and/or "unbiased" markets, but privately they strive to provide a benefit for their members, which sometimes results in "fair", "open", and "unbiased" markets, and sometimes does not.
The issue here is that the EU is motivated by a need for cultural integrity -- whereas their competition (the United States) does not bring a need for cultural integrity to the negotiation table. The end result is that US businesses are paying for the EU member nations' need for cultural integrity as a condition of competition within the European marketplace. Evaluating the correctness of each position is left as an excercise for the reader.
Unlike larger gTLDs like .org, the churn of adding new and deleting old zones in .edu is much lower (due to the fact that there are tight controls on who may register for a delegation). Thus, many of the hassles of adding new DS records and maintenance procedures might be more manageable and help speed DNSSEC's rollout in this branch of the DNS hierarchy.
Right. It's the administrative costs that are keeping it from being deployed. Sex.com sold for $14 million. I'd be willing to guess that the namespace of domains worth > $1,000 is totals several hundred million. Right now, the security to protect the aforementioned virtual properties is like a vault with a screen door out the back. It's a source of great internal amusement to me that in the real world our schools have some of the worst physical security, but soon they'll have some of the best digital security.
What is motivating the story submitter to put so much unwarranted blame at the feet of the EU and DOJ?
Maybe because the story submitter notes an ever-increasing pool of businesses based here in the United States find the EU's practices to be biased, unfair, and anti-competitive, despite the stated purpose of the aforementioned is to prevent those things. Well, that's not actually true anymore, since the phrase "free and undistorted competition" was removed by France during negotiations for the Treaty of Lisbon (basically EU Constitution v2.0). In truth, the EU's economic policy objectives sound more like something out of a fantasy novel -- "One Market to Rule Them All?" I only say it half-jokingly. The European Union never got their constitution ratified, so instead they decided to go for a more modest "treaty": One of the main concessions (and reasons for the lack of ratification by the member states) is because they didn't want companies that were points of national pride (read: monopolies) competing equally -- it would cause them to lose face. But they really, really want to wipe that smug look off those damnable americans what with their "global economic superpower," so they keep making concession after concession. The result looks rather like an angry fruit salad -- a juxtaposition of values, culture, and law that sickens those who look at it too long or too closely.
The fundamental truth of the European Union is this: It's intended to attack the United States' economic dominance. The only thing keeping them from existing on an even footing is the fact that they can't agree on anything! And the Irish-- God bless the Irish. So you get delays like this -- about the only thing the EU can agree on is that americans are a bunch of bastards who don't deserve what they've got (so by god, let's help relieve them of it). Democracy never looked so disorganized.
You seem to be laboring under the idea that speech recognition software really works.
Medical transcription. It works well enough to reduce the workload of those using it. Complete automation isn't the goal -- improved productivity is. for this goal, the software "works".
"The downside for the malware creators is that they would need a lot of time on their hands to go through hours of Skype audio files to find anything of monetary interest."
You seem to be laboring under the idea that using speech recognition software would not occur to these people, or that the cost of transcription would be higher than the benefit received. First, it's already in widespread use in certain industries. Second, some targets are going to yield much better information than others -- you're correct that if you target a 100,000 random skype phone conversations you won't get much. But what if you only targeted people using it between the hours of 9am and 5pm and had job titles and functions associated with financial data?
Suddenly, you've got yourself a viable criminal enterprise.
That's no stack. A stack has a queue, and a set of operations that can be done on items entering and leaving that queue. Description fail!
I'm sorry, but what right do you have to fuck with someone else's data like that?
It's not someone else's data. It's data from one machine which they have no legal control or right to sending data to theirs. If their servers accept and process the data, and no password, key, or other means of repudiating the data is available, there's no ethical quandry. The interface is public and the intent of the interface is to accept data from public (and unvalidated) sources.
This company is not in the wrong, they're just doing something that you don't like.
If you think you're right and I'm wrong, and I think I'm right and you're wrong, who do you think I'm going to choose? :\
It's one thing if they're tracking you without you knowing about it.
Ignoring the fact that this statement is entirely immaterial to the issue at hand...Really? So it would be okay for me to follow you everywhere you go in public, as long as I announced it to you? If I stood outside your door when you went into private areas like your house, and patiently waited until you came out in public again?
However, to go into someone else's system and screw with data...
You have assumed that data is being altered, rather than created. Oops. You're also implying that entry is forced, rather than explicitly allowed.
...when the only thing tying you to it is the fact that you want to play a certain game, that's wrong.
So the "rightness" or "wrongness" of something is dependent on whether a thing is done for pleasure or business?
Do you feel all forms of "vigilante justice" are justified?
That's a loaded question, so I'll equivocate instead: History has demonstrated that when all other forms of redress has been exhausted, "vigilante justice" as you call it, has proven an effective means of promoting social change. so-called "vigilantes" have been educating the general public and IT professionals for decades by uncovering and publishing security flaws, releasing proof-of-concept code, and demonstrating the necessity of validating input before processing it. What you call "vigilantism" is what others would define as a "public service".
It's regulated. It's not scheduled or listed.
That would be because the DEA doesn't regulate it, so it's under the auspices of the FDA.
End up in jail :\
Integrity has no need of laws. Too many things are allowed these days because of unjust laws that protect unethical conduct. "No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being..." -- Benjamin Constant. I've always advocated doing what you feel in your heart is right; You'll be damned for it anyway. A lot of people here have the sentiment that what this company is doing is wrong -- they need to explore those feelings on a deeper level and then resolve to a course of action. Most likely, they will choose to do nothing (and that is fine). But if they choose that out of fear of punishment then we've become a sorry lot indeed.
...at the moment researchers could not say with confidence 'how much nitrous oxide comes from where.'
That would probably be because it isn't regulated. It's actually legal to own despite its recreational properties. As an oxidizer it has many industrial uses. And like all oxidizers, yes, when it gets into the upper atmosphere Bad Things Happen(tm). We may need better methods of containing it (it is a gas at room temperature, of course) when used in an industrial setting, but that's about the extent of what we can do to contain the problem -- it's a very basic chemical with a wide range of applications, many of which aren't amiable to being changed to using another agent.
So stick by your guns, and just say no. Else nothing will ever change.
Because that's been so successful in the past! So the 1% of the population that's actually computer literate enough to (a) know about this and (b) care won't buy their game. They won't notice. So how about Plan B:
Patch the game or setup firewall rules to block such communications, like via a proxy or some-such.
Or Plan C:
Reverse engineer the protocol, then poison-pill the marketing data.
"Beside being a good educational example this is also a scary proof that very mature code can still be vulnerable in rather unsophisticated ways."
Since when did the age of code become a metric for evaluating its trustworthiness? Code should only be trusted after undergoing in-depth analysis by people with training and experience in information security. Code should also be written with security in mind from the beginning. The story of this kernel bug is simple and goes like this: "I was in a hurry."
The point of bogus queries is to avoid tracking based on behavior, which is of course a matter of concern in this context. It is assumed that your ip address is already hidden.
First, "tracking based on behavior" -- What exactly constitutes behavior? A string of a thousand randomly generated queries, popular or not, mixed in with several queries on how to build bombs is going to be flagged. It isn't generating any real extra work for them to deduce who you are by traffic analysis, because packet sizes, times sent/received, and other data specific to the request is going to correlate with a specific time and place, which means a specific person (in all likelihood).
As to the IP address being "hidden" -- I'm not even sure where to start. Packet-based switching networks (ie. TCP/IP) require a source and destination IP. The ISP knows your IP address. It's often required by law to log all connections to/from each; at the very least the header data, but with the crashing costs of storage, keeping the content as well is a trivial matter. There's no "hiding" your IP address.
All methods of connecting via encrypted tunnels into a "proxy cloud" that I have seen are still vulnerable to basic traffic analysis: As long as you have packet logs for the end-point and source, traffic analysis is a trivial computational task. Translation: I can have confidence that a given computer sent a given query at a given time; Decryption of the data at any point within the cloud or at the source isn't needed -- as long as I have the server logs and a corresponding packet log of the target computer, you're toast.
Steganographic techniques would make the results of such an analysis difficult or impossible if properly implimented, but depend on the cloud architecture reaching critical mass, sending a constant flow of random data between each node, and then rate-limiting. These constrictions mean that the computational resources used to create said security are much, much higher than the current model. This is why they haven't been adopted -- simply put, nobody wants to wait several seconds to a minute for a single webpage to load, and the owners of said cloud don't want to waste bandwidth to manage what they believe is a low-risk attack vector.
Sadly, it's exactly this kind of thinking that may very well get someone killed over there.
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