Did he leak info that uncovered government wrong doing? No. Did he leak info that showed corruption? No. Did he leak info to protect innocent victims from harm? No. Those would all be excellent and justifiable reasons to break his oath and provide information to outside sources.
Yes, but not the only "excellent and justifiable" reasons to leak. For all the money we spend on the 'war on terror', it would be nice to occasionally hear from the front lines what the actual threats are. But we almost never do. We're simply told there are terrorists out there, and we have to spend tons of money and sacrifice our civil liberty, but we're rarely handed evidence to support this. It has to be taken on faith.
Do you feel this is an acceptable state of affairs for a democratic country? The claim of 'national security' has been going on for over a decade now, and it's gotten to the point that we have CNN reporters standing outside commenting and speculating about why police cruisers and military convoys are coming and going out of an area, and the official word is... erm, nothing. We've had to guess so often at what's really going on that it's become a running joke for political satirists.
Not everyone who leaks information deserves protection or is a whistle blower.
No, but neither should the mere act of leaking information invoke charges of treason, decades in prison, etc. The value of the information and the actual harm caused by its release must also be taken into consideration. Here we have a case where the public was never made aware of the leak. Only a few reporters were, who promptly contacted the government and abided their wishes not to publish. The damage to operational security here was minimal. We do not punish people on the "what could have happened" scales, but on the "what did happen" scales of justice.
Yet, when it comes to matters of national security (which is increasingly invoked for everything from senators being stopped for speeding to drug dealers handing out marijuana), we're not being told what's going on, nor is there much evidence that the punishment is at all in keeping with the actual harm caused. This is a problem, and while I'm not disagreeing that this guy should have kept is damn mouth shut, his opening it didn't cause much harm... he should have simply been fired, and perhaps spend a few months to a year at most in jail, or put on probation. Sometimes people are stupid... it doesn't mean they're a continuing threat to society, and that's the only reason we should ever consider imprisonment.
The restitution goes to a kid in one of the pictures he was distributing. Maybe not 100% fair, but there's nothing fair about that situation.
I would be wary of the situation. Firstly, what the courts accept as child pornography can be seriously out of balance with what the average person would consider it as. Parents have been convicted of taking pictures of their children playing in the bathtub to send to family members. Most families have taken pictures of their young children in the nude, and this is not sexual in any way for them. So be very careful taking any charge or conviction of a sexual nature at face value. People have been put on sex offender registries for taking a drunken piss in the bushes. And then there's teenagers having sex; Something I think most of us will admit we did, but that can seriously ruin someone's life due to poorly worded or draconian "for the children" legislation.
I guess my point is... there are plenty of examples where a fine is purely punitive, and there is, in actuality, no victim. Is that the case here? I don't know; It's not like the article provides sufficient detail. And this all ignores the thorny issue of how this 'child porn' charge is claimed to be unrelated, yet turns up over the course of an investigation into leaking of classified information and then makes it into the popular press. It is a suspect situation to say the least. And the entire plea bargaining system is hopelessly corrupt -- they typically trump up the charges so much that you could be looking at 300 years in the electric chair because they've taken a single criminal act and turned it into thirty different felonies.
Most cases don't go to trial, not because the defense has no merit, but because the defense browns its pants due to the enormity of what it's being charged with and decides taking a plea deal that's a tiny fraction of what they're being charged with is reasonable even if they aren't guilty. Any public defender will tell you the legal system is a crap shoot. Sometimes you get justice, but there's a lot of innocent people in jail, victims of racial profiling, or for simply "looking guilty" to the jury. All of these considerations means that what's stated in the press release can safely be assumed to not be enough to form any conclusion about the person's guilt or innocence.
And in cases like this, doubly so because the political pressure is so great; One of the first things they teach you in psychological warfare is to discredit your detractors. If someone leaks government information, you have to destroy their credibility. Nothing kills credibility like an accusation of child porn, rape, etc. You'll notice that many of the people who have been accused of leaking classified information have been later accused of sexual impropriety; This is statistically very improbable.
No, I'm asserting that XBO is performing an operation that HDCP was specifically designed to prevent. If the XBox can decrypt content, it can alter it, with no way for the receiving device to detect this. Now, I'm aware that HDCP is a steaming pile of crap designed solely to screw consumers out of the ability to hook a DVR up to an HDMI output and make legal time-shifted recordings, but that's the intended effect, not the design specification.
If the XBox is ever compromised, then the HDCP chain is broken; It will allow anyone to record HDMI content. And given its advanced graphics processors... it is quite possible that sufficient compression, etc., could allow it to be streamed out to a consumer HDD for later transcoding. In other words, the XBox could be the perfect TiVo if it ever got hacked. Which is the one thing the designers of HDCP wanted to avoid.
And I have yet to see Microsoft create a product that wasn't compromised in under a year.... which means, as far as content producers are concerned (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), this should be DEFCON 1. This is great news for consumers; but it's not obvious why.
Oh, and I'm not asserting that you are wrong; You simply are.
Holy Shit? It's illegal to decrypt protected content, in order to display it? My TV is breaking the law!. And every HDMI compatible TV I've ever seen!
Holy shit, it's Wikipedia to the rescue! SWOOSH! Appearing in a flash of googling, it smashes, it bashes, and it makes a mean soup du AK Marc!
And the main use of HDCP? Wait for it guys... "Encryption of the data sent over DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, GVIF, or UDI interfaces prevents eavesdropping of information and man-in-the-middle attacks."... And what's The XBox doing between your PS4 and your TV? Being.. maybe... in the middle?
Good day, sir. May you continue to be up-modded for being a complete moron, and may the moderator who up-modded you perhaps manage to grow a brain.
Here you are, after plenty of disparaging comments, after almost two years of unrelenting Ubuntu criticism, suggesting that the Linux world still idolizes Ubuntu (the assumption it ever did is a further troll mark)
Straw man anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Please, point out where I said "the linux world still idolizes ubuntu", or those "two years of unrelenting Ubuntu criticism", since I haven't even had this account on slashdot for two years.
Socket accepts plugs it's designed to accept. What's the story?
The story is that the XBox violates the HDCP standard to do this; It has to decrypt protected content, in order to display it. There's three ways they could have done it; Analog conversion somewhere in line, a signed key for a device which essentially does the one thing HDCP was supposed to never allow, or they hacked the protocol / used unpublished knowledge. Either way... When the XBox launches, someone's going to take it apart, and then encrypted HDMI can bend over and kiss it's curvy ass goodbye.
Oh, right... marketing blurb. Right, was supposed to focus on that instead. Sorry slashdot... I forgot you aren't a geek site anymore, just a pile of paid advertisements posing as stories.
But this shows that Apple was less than honest in their claims about pulse detection, and sub-surface tissue detection.
Apple has been less than honest about just about every aspect of their product from design, to production, to sale. But even if iphones are designed by teenagers and young adults in china in super factories that house workers on site, make them work 16 hour days for years on end for pennies, and drive so many to suicide that they have installed suicide nets around every building, people keep buying them because they're trendy. Nobody cares if Apple lies to them, as long as people keep believing that owning Apple products is a status symbol.
fingerprint identification is fundamentally and irredeemably broken. no other authentication method leaves copies of itself all over the place.
Sigh. Biometrics can of course be defeated as long as the sensor is stupidly simple. And big surprise... a mass-produced mobile device built at the absolute lowest cost they can get away with... can be defeated. But biometrics was never meant to replace existing authentication measures, but to augment them. Three factor authentication is still the best way of securing a device, location, etc. One factor authentication like what's demonstrated here... is... well... not very smart.
Groups, really, since it's run blue-vs-red style, with constant scenario preparation and intrusion attempts. The two (anonymized) leaders of the Blue and Red teams talk about the mind-set and skills that it takes to be in their unit, which they point out is not the place for soda and pizza hijinks.
And with that comment, they just admitted how screwed they are. And the irony is, they probably don't realize it, and even if pointed out (as I will now do), they'll steadfastly deny it.
Being good at hacking requires two things. Firstly, the ability to upload into your skullmeats vast amounts of seemingly meaningless information, trusting that later context will give it meaning and purpose. You need to be able to open up a thousand page tomb, and in under a week, hoover-vac that into your brain. This is the primary required ability for you to be good at hacking. Without it, no matter how much of a creative genius you are, you will find yourself quickly outpaced by your peers who can do this. Computers are enormously complex, and networking them adds yet another layer of complexity. Being able to rapidly absorb and retain a working knowledge of these interactions in complex systems is a job requirement.
However, that is only half the equation. The other half is to be able to see all of that, and yet arrive at a different conclusion than all the other guys. You can be a good administrator or technician if you can simply absorb large amounts of data, but you are going to royally suck at hacking if you arrive at the same conclusions they did. Hackers are both walking encyclopedias, and have a funny habit of belching out random facts and then stringing them together in a way that nobody else has, probably without being aware of it. They pull theories together from dozens of different technical disciplines, finding that thermodynamics and heisenburg uncertainty somehow jam really well with why those styrofoam containers of ramen, regardless of the amount of water put in them, invariably overflow in the microwave. And they'll do this while working out some chunk of complex code in their head absent-mindedly.
You cannot achieve this zen-like state of abstract concentration needed to hack while taking what you're doing as seriously as this guy. You can't have a military attitude to what you're doing -- you can't be focused on the risks, on the enemy, on the stakes. You need to be able to take all of that, and forget it. The only thing you need to do, is solve the problem. You need to work that problem, and you need to do it with a style of thinking that... frankly, scares the hell out of people in authority or in the military... because they don't understand how you could care less who you're fighting, as long as you get to fight back in some way that's.... wait for it... Nifty.
Israel... I like you, I really do. So please, reassign this guy to something more in line with his attitude... like ordinance technician. Don't put him in charge of a cyberwarfare unit... that's like putting Martha Stewart in charge of flight operations on a carrier. It's just sooo not playing to their strengths.
Now satire's not quite the same as a joke, to be sure, but your use of the "not a joke" idiom to suggest it's factual shows you're either really stupid (and believe it to be a factual account) or really disingenuous (and are trying to induce others to believe it is a factual account); either way, GTFO my/., ok?
Well, it's not your slashdot. You're an AC. And no, I'm not trying to induce others to believe anything... they probably believe things far weirder than anything I could come up with, so what's the point?:)
But that said, it is well-known that Linux developers tend to be more marxist in their thinking and entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political beliefs. Those genuinely are things that the FBI puts people on watch lists for. And there is a visible minority of programmers that collect guns, go hiking, and engage in other recreational activities viewed with suspicion by the government. It's not a stretch to say that running Linux could score you points on some whack government algorithm; They've done more to people for less.
The problem with dealing with political or religious extremism is that it is very hard to tell the difference between satire and factual accounts because extremist thinking is so very often irrational and aggressive. And people who claim to fight extremists very often fall into the same trap: "If they're willing to do anything for their cause, we have to too!"
So... feel like logging in and finding out what people here really think of your opinions, or is it that you already know and that's why you post as AC?
If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.
As if the user-agent string wouldn't land you on the watchlist. That wasn't a joke by the way. And as far as the results you receive, you probably shouldn't trust those either. But let's set aside your awesome new indy band name Loli: President Bomb and focus on the real issue here: The gullibility of free software consumers. They are exactly as gullible as Windows and Macintosh users, it would seem: They're trusting an abstract organization that is continuing to collect personally-identifiable information, simply because said organization upon being caught doing so, has said "oops! Our bad. We'll anonymize the data now." And these people should know better than to believe such claims.
Perhaps it is a sign of how far Linux has come into the mainstream then: It's become the microbrew of the IT world. All these new distributions, the promise of being trendy, geeky, and cool... and yet, suspiciously lacking in all of the things that made "Free as in freedom, not free as in beer" so appealing to the much smaller community of non-hipsters that was here before. Linux has finally made it to the big time: It's become "hip". And no surprise...Ubuntu, like many other major distributions, sees the chance at monetization and is taking it. Oh, I know... I'll get modbombed again for suggesting that the pure and noble Linux isn't like all the other operating systems out there... but then, wasn't that the goal all along? To create an alternative to closed source? Mission: Accomplished. Too bad success isn't what they thought it would look like.
After thumbing through the dense tomb that you posted, which was moderated +4, Informative, I find no mention of any intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is also three years older than my link, which wasn't in PDF form, and indicated they only had regional launch capability. The document you provided indicated they had only managed to create missiles with a 500 or so mile range. Barely enough to get the nuclear ordinance they've developed far enough up-wind to not eat the radioactive fallout after. China is a big country.
Perhaps a more careful investigation of documentation in the future would be helpful? But given how many times my factual statements have been moderated down in this thread in favor of bullshit exaggeration... it's not surprising. I expect the moderation on this one will serve to further confirm that Slashdot has become the Fox News of the IT world...
Submersible hunter-killer drones lie in wait to defend America's freedom cable and orbital defense platforms defend the space above from communist tyranny. Long live freedom's reign.
Says the guy living in the country with the highest incarceration rate on Earthsource
We're defending something, sure, but I don't think it's freedom.
China had, at last count, almost two thousand nuclear weapons and climbing.
Uhh, try 200-300. And they presently lack an effective delivery mechanism. They're testing one now. They are not a significant threat to the United States at this time. Russia is.
The only country that has thus far been able to check the United States' unmitigated love of bombing people has been Russia. 'Murica wanted to bomb Syria. Russia came in and said "We'll take those chemical weapons off your hands, then 'Murica has no reason to bomb you."... Suddenly, Syria looks rational, Russia looks peaceful, and America looks like the playground bully kicking sand in everyone's faces. Naturally, this didn't go over very well with the war hawks in Congress... but to date, no bombs have dropped.
China needs someone in their corner with nuclear weapons. Either that, or develop their own. America does not play well with others; They only back down and act reasonable when there's a risk of total and immediate thermonuclear destruction of the planet... anything conventional and it's bombs-away! I only wish I were joking. China has already taken the first steps -- realizing that America can't be handled conventionally. They've started developing their economy and cyberwarfare resources at a pace that exceeds America's, and the disparity is growing measurably every few months. It will only be a decade at most before they're left eating the dust of China as it rises to become a global economic superpower.
America is looking at undersea cables and going; If we can delay this a bit somehow... it'll slow 'em down. Their policies towards china have become very much about delaying and frustrating them, because stopping them isn't an option anymore. There's billions of chinese, and only millions of Americans. But stubborn nationalistic pride is keeping both sides from finding a mutually-acceptable middle ground. Unfortunately for America... they're rapidly losing their position at the bargaining table. They may not have a chair in a few more years at the rate China is developing.
And I think that, more than anything, is what is driving behavior like this. Worrying about the Chinese spying on everyone and putting backdoors in telecom equipment is a pretty pitiful excuse when America has been pants'd internationally over the exact same thing recently, and new examples are being made public weekly. And China isn't running around hunting down its ex-pats in Russian airports when its citizens come forward and say what its government is up to. They just stare blankly into the camera and then say "We make you iphone! iPhone good! You want more iphones? Shut up."... and that's the end of it. -_-
I found spinning rust to at least give some clues prior to a crash and burn.
You know, I find this attitude to be both prevalent, and strange for supposed IT experts. Most of your computer doesn't run on "spinning rust". CPUs, memory, motherboards, power supplies... nobody says the lack of noise they make when they die (unless you count the screams of the souls that are released with the smoke) is a problem... but somehow, when it comes to SSDs, the "I can hear it dying" argument comes up. A lot.
I suspect this is a psychological attachment, with a healthy helping of overvaluation of personal experience instead of objective data. The weird part? When you point it out, geeks tend to dismiss it as "Well, they just aren't as good" as though 'goodness' was some kind of objective measure. I find this all the time amongst otherwise perfectly rational IT people: The belief that because the solution isn't perfect, it is therefore wrong, while ignoring the fact that the current solution they're supporting is also not perfect.
But the fact is, SSDs are many multiples faster than regular old "spinning rust" and more reliable. Ask any major manufacturer what their average warranty RMA rate is on their SSDs versus any other manufacturer's RMA rate on regular old "spinning rust". You'll find that SSD manufacturers regularly offer 3 and 5 year warranties. You're lucky to get a 90 day return policy on spinning rust bought off Amazon.
Now, all that said, dig into the data and you will find some new failure conditions that spinning rust doesn't have. For example, sudden power loss can cause a temporary loss of capacity, which will show up as bad sectors, in many SSDs. Very few IT professionals are aware of this; Or the fix: Physically disconnecting it for at least an hour, then wiping it (SATA command, not OS) and restoring the data. Many will RMA a drive claiming 'bad sectors' when there's nothing physically wrong with the drive... it's just buggy firmware.
Everyone points to write-exhaustion; The overly-focused on issue of repeated writes eventually 'wearing out' the drive. But guys... the average cycles here are 3,000 to 5,000 per cell. If you are writing 10GB a day to your drive, then a tiny 80 GB SSD will take 18.7 years before it gives up the ghost; Or about 68.5 TB of data written to the disk. If you opted for a 160GB drive, kick that out to 37.5 years. And that's for it to start showing physical loss of storage capacity.
The problems of SSDs is not electrical. It is not physical. It is entirely software. The firmware on many of these drives is buggy and this is covered up by the SATA / AHCI interfaces, which were designed for spinning rust, and thus have no direct way to signal the myriad of weird firmware glitches.
The electrical/physical part of SSDs is proven tech. It doesn't go bad, not under the usage conditions that the average computer user will put them into. And yes, I know, you don't think of yourself as average... but you are, ok? Even you, Mr. Programmer, Mr. Video Editor, and Mr. Super Linux Power User ZOMFG I Built My Own Raid In Mom's Basement. All of you are the 'average' case. The only time I've heard of mechanical drives being preferred is in usage conditions where data is being constantly written out -- such as a monitoring system like the Large Hadron Supercollider that collects terabytes upon terabytes of data, which is then processed and flushed, many times a day. SSDs would be bad in that environment. But unless you're building your own LHC in the garage... SSDs will work just fine.
That said... I have considered writing to OCZ and Intel and asking them if they could make their SSDs make the same noises as mechanical drives. There's a proven psychological value in this; Just like how your cell phone camera is programmed to emit a shutter snap sound... despite shutters not being around since the 80s. Because there are a lot of people that apparently need reassurances that their computer be making noise in the corner for them to feel good about it's performance and reliability. It may be too soon for geeks to live with silent computers.
As the mirror has to be carefully aligned, this is a time consuming process.
This has already been partially solved using nano mirrors -- basically the rear reflector is a pile of mirrors that each have independent servos. It's nano tech. Like I said... early stages.
Guys, we've been down this road about a million times in physics. Just because a mathematical model simplifies certain calculations, does not mean that the actual underlying physical geometry matches the theoretical model. Mathematicians have been adding extra dimensions to equations and finding they simplify things for years. It doesn't mean we live in a 27 dimension manifold. All direct observations to date point to a 3D universe.
Strawman argument diverting from the statements that you quoted. Your implication that every member of the US Armed forces participated in those acts of torture is disgusting and disturbing.
His implication that the mere act of putting on a uniform is a bar against any member of the armed forces participating in those acts is what is disgusting and disturbing. That is what I was saying. I didn't imply anything. You made a strawman to claim a strawman argument -- by twisting my words. I said some members of the armed forces have done those things, and that's a fact. An undeniable, absolute, resolute fact. You are the one diverting here.
Your delusion that all soldiers sign up to kill people is pure idiocy.
You can call it a delusion, but I don't think those guns, missiles, tanks, bullets, planes, aircraft carriers, etc., are just for show. They are most definately signing up to kill people -- it just happens to be that it may not be "Plan A".
Talk to veterans and find out why they served and you will find almost none signed up to "kill and torture", but rather they signed up and served in order to protect and defend the USA.
That might be what they were told. That isn't what they wound up doing. They didn't get PTSD and wake up screaming because they feel bad about "protect and defend"... they get it because that is not what they were doing. And an awful lot of soldiers are coming home broken... which tells me a lot of what they are doing isn't "protect and defend".
You're like the guy who farts in a room and then says "Who farted?" You think if you pre-emptively blame the other people, nobody will suspect you. Unfortunately, that tactic doesn't work after the age of 5.
Still no side-by-side diff for plain old text files.
Hey now, be fair. It's a lot harder to write a 7 line perl script to run 'diff' and output it to a web browser than to write a complex algorithm to show changes to a 3D model. I mean, have you ever tried coding in Perl? It's like rocket science and stuf--*chokes*
Gaaaakk. Sorry, overdid the snark again. Need to go drink some water to wash out the taste now...
This is exactly the outcome that Diane Feinstein and others of her ilk would visit upon the U.S., given her way.
Excuse me, but what exactly makes you so confident that it isn't already this way? You can't blame "Diane Feinstein" or [insert another name here] for this. The situation would simply breed another person to take their place. Blame Obama! Blame Bush! Blame Canada!
Please. Every government in the world wants things to be sunshine and kittens. It's the basis for all propaganda. We got revisionist history rewriting our high school text books every year. We got angry white fat dudes in suits on Fox News screaming at us about how avoiding war in Syria is somehow a bad thing... because Russia offered a peaceful solution and Syria took them up on it. I mean, how twisted is it that the party that made it's main agenda "making Obama a one term president" is backing him now because he's all like Let's Bomb ALL TEH THINGZ!
With media distortion and control like that patently obvious to anyone who puts on their critical thinking cap, why are we thinking that we're somehow different than the Chinese in this regard? They got propaganda. We got propaganda. And?
Anyone who says they're "pro-" whatever is admitting they've been suckered by pro-paganda. About the only place you don't hear "I'm pro-this-thing" is in science, where people regularly say "Well, the new evidence says I'm wrong. SWEET! To the lab!"... They don't care for being pro-anything except passion for the work. Learn from them.
Wrong! The first rule you learn in the US Army is that you are to uphold the Constitution and defend the citizens. You also learn that you are not to obey orders that are unlawful and therefor illegal.
Uphold the Constitution, Defend the citizens, and lawful orders. That would be the Abu Ghraib iraq prison scandal, the US government putting prisoners in a room with mustard gas to test its effects, and shooting unarmed bystanders trying to help the injured after a botched air strike, respectively.
Wear the Uniform and learn the job before you spout off bullshit propaganda.
I think the work speaks for itself. I don't think I need to participate in the torture and murder of people, or use chemical weapons on them, to arrive at the conclusion that some of the things our military has done has been very shameful. That all said, our military is better than most, but waving the flag and saying we can do no wrong is propaganda, man. We need to move past being "pro-USA" or "pro-Russian" or "pro-chinese" and start being "pro-human", because patriotism is built on the same principles as racism, sexism, fascism, communism, and all the other isms: It is dogma. It is a refusal to admit to mistakes, a belief in your own moral superiority, and those two things combined have written some of the darkest chapters in human history.
As Einstein wrote, and I paraphrase: The pioneers of world peace will be the youth who refuse military service. Yeah, putting on the uniform can be an honorable and necessary thing. You won't hear very many people dissing WWII veterans. But as long as people like you are eager to sign up to go kill foreigners, our leaders have little incentive to find peaceful solutions.
And yet when Bradley Manning makes an eerily similar statement plenty of people are willing to take it as proof positive that he was a bad guy.
The definition of patriotism is believing your country is the best country on Earth simply because you were born in it. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!" So when America says someone's bad, americans believe it, but nobody else does. When the Chinese say someone's bad, the chinese people believe it, but nobody else. And so on, and so on.
Nationalism is hardly a problem confined to America; It blinds people equally the world over. Here's some Russian propaganda about American, and here's some American propaganda about Russians. It's all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Did he leak info that uncovered government wrong doing? No. Did he leak info that showed corruption? No. Did he leak info to protect innocent victims from harm? No. Those would all be excellent and justifiable reasons to break his oath and provide information to outside sources.
Yes, but not the only "excellent and justifiable" reasons to leak. For all the money we spend on the 'war on terror', it would be nice to occasionally hear from the front lines what the actual threats are. But we almost never do. We're simply told there are terrorists out there, and we have to spend tons of money and sacrifice our civil liberty, but we're rarely handed evidence to support this. It has to be taken on faith.
Do you feel this is an acceptable state of affairs for a democratic country? The claim of 'national security' has been going on for over a decade now, and it's gotten to the point that we have CNN reporters standing outside commenting and speculating about why police cruisers and military convoys are coming and going out of an area, and the official word is... erm, nothing. We've had to guess so often at what's really going on that it's become a running joke for political satirists.
Not everyone who leaks information deserves protection or is a whistle blower.
No, but neither should the mere act of leaking information invoke charges of treason, decades in prison, etc. The value of the information and the actual harm caused by its release must also be taken into consideration. Here we have a case where the public was never made aware of the leak. Only a few reporters were, who promptly contacted the government and abided their wishes not to publish. The damage to operational security here was minimal. We do not punish people on the "what could have happened" scales, but on the "what did happen" scales of justice.
Yet, when it comes to matters of national security (which is increasingly invoked for everything from senators being stopped for speeding to drug dealers handing out marijuana), we're not being told what's going on, nor is there much evidence that the punishment is at all in keeping with the actual harm caused. This is a problem, and while I'm not disagreeing that this guy should have kept is damn mouth shut, his opening it didn't cause much harm... he should have simply been fired, and perhaps spend a few months to a year at most in jail, or put on probation. Sometimes people are stupid... it doesn't mean they're a continuing threat to society, and that's the only reason we should ever consider imprisonment.
The restitution goes to a kid in one of the pictures he was distributing. Maybe not 100% fair, but there's nothing fair about that situation.
I would be wary of the situation. Firstly, what the courts accept as child pornography can be seriously out of balance with what the average person would consider it as. Parents have been convicted of taking pictures of their children playing in the bathtub to send to family members. Most families have taken pictures of their young children in the nude, and this is not sexual in any way for them. So be very careful taking any charge or conviction of a sexual nature at face value. People have been put on sex offender registries for taking a drunken piss in the bushes. And then there's teenagers having sex; Something I think most of us will admit we did, but that can seriously ruin someone's life due to poorly worded or draconian "for the children" legislation.
I guess my point is... there are plenty of examples where a fine is purely punitive, and there is, in actuality, no victim. Is that the case here? I don't know; It's not like the article provides sufficient detail. And this all ignores the thorny issue of how this 'child porn' charge is claimed to be unrelated, yet turns up over the course of an investigation into leaking of classified information and then makes it into the popular press. It is a suspect situation to say the least. And the entire plea bargaining system is hopelessly corrupt -- they typically trump up the charges so much that you could be looking at 300 years in the electric chair because they've taken a single criminal act and turned it into thirty different felonies.
Most cases don't go to trial, not because the defense has no merit, but because the defense browns its pants due to the enormity of what it's being charged with and decides taking a plea deal that's a tiny fraction of what they're being charged with is reasonable even if they aren't guilty. Any public defender will tell you the legal system is a crap shoot. Sometimes you get justice, but there's a lot of innocent people in jail, victims of racial profiling, or for simply "looking guilty" to the jury. All of these considerations means that what's stated in the press release can safely be assumed to not be enough to form any conclusion about the person's guilt or innocence.
And in cases like this, doubly so because the political pressure is so great; One of the first things they teach you in psychological warfare is to discredit your detractors. If someone leaks government information, you have to destroy their credibility. Nothing kills credibility like an accusation of child porn, rape, etc. You'll notice that many of the people who have been accused of leaking classified information have been later accused of sexual impropriety; This is statistically very improbable.
You are asserting that XBO is "unauthorized".
No, I'm asserting that XBO is performing an operation that HDCP was specifically designed to prevent. If the XBox can decrypt content, it can alter it, with no way for the receiving device to detect this. Now, I'm aware that HDCP is a steaming pile of crap designed solely to screw consumers out of the ability to hook a DVR up to an HDMI output and make legal time-shifted recordings, but that's the intended effect, not the design specification.
If the XBox is ever compromised, then the HDCP chain is broken; It will allow anyone to record HDMI content. And given its advanced graphics processors... it is quite possible that sufficient compression, etc., could allow it to be streamed out to a consumer HDD for later transcoding. In other words, the XBox could be the perfect TiVo if it ever got hacked. Which is the one thing the designers of HDCP wanted to avoid.
And I have yet to see Microsoft create a product that wasn't compromised in under a year.... which means, as far as content producers are concerned (RIAA, MPAA, etc.), this should be DEFCON 1. This is great news for consumers; but it's not obvious why.
Oh, and I'm not asserting that you are wrong; You simply are.
Holy Shit? It's illegal to decrypt protected content, in order to display it? My TV is breaking the law!. And every HDMI compatible TV I've ever seen!
Holy shit, it's Wikipedia to the rescue! SWOOSH! Appearing in a flash of googling, it smashes, it bashes, and it makes a mean soup du AK Marc!
And the main use of HDCP? Wait for it guys... "Encryption of the data sent over DisplayPort, DVI, HDMI, GVIF, or UDI interfaces prevents eavesdropping of information and man-in-the-middle attacks." ... And what's The XBox doing between your PS4 and your TV? Being.. maybe... in the middle?
Good day, sir. May you continue to be up-modded for being a complete moron, and may the moderator who up-modded you perhaps manage to grow a brain.
Here you are, after plenty of disparaging comments, after almost two years of unrelenting Ubuntu criticism, suggesting that the Linux world still idolizes Ubuntu (the assumption it ever did is a further troll mark)
Straw man anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Please, point out where I said "the linux world still idolizes ubuntu", or those "two years of unrelenting Ubuntu criticism", since I haven't even had this account on slashdot for two years.
Socket accepts plugs it's designed to accept. What's the story?
The story is that the XBox violates the HDCP standard to do this; It has to decrypt protected content, in order to display it. There's three ways they could have done it; Analog conversion somewhere in line, a signed key for a device which essentially does the one thing HDCP was supposed to never allow, or they hacked the protocol / used unpublished knowledge. Either way... When the XBox launches, someone's going to take it apart, and then encrypted HDMI can bend over and kiss it's curvy ass goodbye.
Oh, right... marketing blurb. Right, was supposed to focus on that instead. Sorry slashdot... I forgot you aren't a geek site anymore, just a pile of paid advertisements posing as stories.
But this shows that Apple was less than honest in their claims about pulse detection, and sub-surface tissue detection.
Apple has been less than honest about just about every aspect of their product from design, to production, to sale. But even if iphones are designed by teenagers and young adults in china in super factories that house workers on site, make them work 16 hour days for years on end for pennies, and drive so many to suicide that they have installed suicide nets around every building, people keep buying them because they're trendy. Nobody cares if Apple lies to them, as long as people keep believing that owning Apple products is a status symbol.
fingerprint identification is fundamentally and irredeemably broken. no other authentication method leaves copies of itself all over the place.
Sigh. Biometrics can of course be defeated as long as the sensor is stupidly simple. And big surprise... a mass-produced mobile device built at the absolute lowest cost they can get away with... can be defeated. But biometrics was never meant to replace existing authentication measures, but to augment them. Three factor authentication is still the best way of securing a device, location, etc. One factor authentication like what's demonstrated here... is ... well ... not very smart.
Groups, really, since it's run blue-vs-red style, with constant scenario preparation and intrusion attempts. The two (anonymized) leaders of the Blue and Red teams talk about the mind-set and skills that it takes to be in their unit, which they point out is not the place for soda and pizza hijinks.
And with that comment, they just admitted how screwed they are. And the irony is, they probably don't realize it, and even if pointed out (as I will now do), they'll steadfastly deny it.
Being good at hacking requires two things. Firstly, the ability to upload into your skullmeats vast amounts of seemingly meaningless information, trusting that later context will give it meaning and purpose. You need to be able to open up a thousand page tomb, and in under a week, hoover-vac that into your brain. This is the primary required ability for you to be good at hacking. Without it, no matter how much of a creative genius you are, you will find yourself quickly outpaced by your peers who can do this. Computers are enormously complex, and networking them adds yet another layer of complexity. Being able to rapidly absorb and retain a working knowledge of these interactions in complex systems is a job requirement.
However, that is only half the equation. The other half is to be able to see all of that, and yet arrive at a different conclusion than all the other guys. You can be a good administrator or technician if you can simply absorb large amounts of data, but you are going to royally suck at hacking if you arrive at the same conclusions they did. Hackers are both walking encyclopedias, and have a funny habit of belching out random facts and then stringing them together in a way that nobody else has, probably without being aware of it. They pull theories together from dozens of different technical disciplines, finding that thermodynamics and heisenburg uncertainty somehow jam really well with why those styrofoam containers of ramen, regardless of the amount of water put in them, invariably overflow in the microwave. And they'll do this while working out some chunk of complex code in their head absent-mindedly.
You cannot achieve this zen-like state of abstract concentration needed to hack while taking what you're doing as seriously as this guy. You can't have a military attitude to what you're doing -- you can't be focused on the risks, on the enemy, on the stakes. You need to be able to take all of that, and forget it. The only thing you need to do, is solve the problem. You need to work that problem, and you need to do it with a style of thinking that... frankly, scares the hell out of people in authority or in the military... because they don't understand how you could care less who you're fighting, as long as you get to fight back in some way that's.... wait for it... Nifty.
Israel... I like you, I really do. So please, reassign this guy to something more in line with his attitude... like ordinance technician. Don't put him in charge of a cyberwarfare unit... that's like putting Martha Stewart in charge of flight operations on a carrier. It's just sooo not playing to their strengths.
Now satire's not quite the same as a joke, to be sure, but your use of the "not a joke" idiom to suggest it's factual shows you're either really stupid (and believe it to be a factual account) or really disingenuous (and are trying to induce others to believe it is a factual account); either way, GTFO my /., ok?
Well, it's not your slashdot. You're an AC. And no, I'm not trying to induce others to believe anything... they probably believe things far weirder than anything I could come up with, so what's the point? :)
But that said, it is well-known that Linux developers tend to be more marxist in their thinking and entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political beliefs. Those genuinely are things that the FBI puts people on watch lists for. And there is a visible minority of programmers that collect guns, go hiking, and engage in other recreational activities viewed with suspicion by the government. It's not a stretch to say that running Linux could score you points on some whack government algorithm; They've done more to people for less.
The problem with dealing with political or religious extremism is that it is very hard to tell the difference between satire and factual accounts because extremist thinking is so very often irrational and aggressive. And people who claim to fight extremists very often fall into the same trap: "If they're willing to do anything for their cause, we have to too!"
So... feel like logging in and finding out what people here really think of your opinions, or is it that you already know and that's why you post as AC?
If I search for "loli president bomb" then that's what's going to get me in trouble, not the results I receive.
As if the user-agent string wouldn't land you on the watchlist. That wasn't a joke by the way. And as far as the results you receive, you probably shouldn't trust those either. But let's set aside your awesome new indy band name Loli: President Bomb and focus on the real issue here: The gullibility of free software consumers. They are exactly as gullible as Windows and Macintosh users, it would seem: They're trusting an abstract organization that is continuing to collect personally-identifiable information, simply because said organization upon being caught doing so, has said "oops! Our bad. We'll anonymize the data now." And these people should know better than to believe such claims.
Perhaps it is a sign of how far Linux has come into the mainstream then: It's become the microbrew of the IT world. All these new distributions, the promise of being trendy, geeky, and cool... and yet, suspiciously lacking in all of the things that made "Free as in freedom, not free as in beer" so appealing to the much smaller community of non-hipsters that was here before. Linux has finally made it to the big time: It's become "hip". And no surprise...Ubuntu, like many other major distributions, sees the chance at monetization and is taking it. Oh, I know... I'll get modbombed again for suggesting that the pure and noble Linux isn't like all the other operating systems out there... but then, wasn't that the goal all along? To create an alternative to closed source? Mission: Accomplished. Too bad success isn't what they thought it would look like.
Except for the 65 odd ICBMs.
After thumbing through the dense tomb that you posted, which was moderated +4, Informative, I find no mention of any intercontinental ballistic missiles. It is also three years older than my link, which wasn't in PDF form, and indicated they only had regional launch capability. The document you provided indicated they had only managed to create missiles with a 500 or so mile range. Barely enough to get the nuclear ordinance they've developed far enough up-wind to not eat the radioactive fallout after. China is a big country.
Perhaps a more careful investigation of documentation in the future would be helpful? But given how many times my factual statements have been moderated down in this thread in favor of bullshit exaggeration... it's not surprising. I expect the moderation on this one will serve to further confirm that Slashdot has become the Fox News of the IT world...
Submersible hunter-killer drones lie in wait to defend America's freedom cable and orbital defense platforms defend the space above from communist tyranny. Long live freedom's reign.
Says the guy living in the country with the highest incarceration rate on Earth source
We're defending something, sure, but I don't think it's freedom.
China had, at last count, almost two thousand nuclear weapons and climbing.
Uhh, try 200-300. And they presently lack an effective delivery mechanism. They're testing one now. They are not a significant threat to the United States at this time. Russia is.
I think I speak for many geeks when I say....
KHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!
That is all.
The only country that has thus far been able to check the United States' unmitigated love of bombing people has been Russia. 'Murica wanted to bomb Syria. Russia came in and said "We'll take those chemical weapons off your hands, then 'Murica has no reason to bomb you." ... Suddenly, Syria looks rational, Russia looks peaceful, and America looks like the playground bully kicking sand in everyone's faces. Naturally, this didn't go over very well with the war hawks in Congress... but to date, no bombs have dropped.
China needs someone in their corner with nuclear weapons. Either that, or develop their own. America does not play well with others; They only back down and act reasonable when there's a risk of total and immediate thermonuclear destruction of the planet... anything conventional and it's bombs-away! I only wish I were joking. China has already taken the first steps -- realizing that America can't be handled conventionally. They've started developing their economy and cyberwarfare resources at a pace that exceeds America's, and the disparity is growing measurably every few months. It will only be a decade at most before they're left eating the dust of China as it rises to become a global economic superpower.
America is looking at undersea cables and going; If we can delay this a bit somehow... it'll slow 'em down. Their policies towards china have become very much about delaying and frustrating them, because stopping them isn't an option anymore. There's billions of chinese, and only millions of Americans. But stubborn nationalistic pride is keeping both sides from finding a mutually-acceptable middle ground. Unfortunately for America... they're rapidly losing their position at the bargaining table. They may not have a chair in a few more years at the rate China is developing.
And I think that, more than anything, is what is driving behavior like this. Worrying about the Chinese spying on everyone and putting backdoors in telecom equipment is a pretty pitiful excuse when America has been pants'd internationally over the exact same thing recently, and new examples are being made public weekly. And China isn't running around hunting down its ex-pats in Russian airports when its citizens come forward and say what its government is up to. They just stare blankly into the camera and then say "We make you iphone! iPhone good! You want more iphones? Shut up." ... and that's the end of it. -_-
I found spinning rust to at least give some clues prior to a crash and burn.
You know, I find this attitude to be both prevalent, and strange for supposed IT experts. Most of your computer doesn't run on "spinning rust". CPUs, memory, motherboards, power supplies... nobody says the lack of noise they make when they die (unless you count the screams of the souls that are released with the smoke) is a problem... but somehow, when it comes to SSDs, the "I can hear it dying" argument comes up. A lot.
I suspect this is a psychological attachment, with a healthy helping of overvaluation of personal experience instead of objective data. The weird part? When you point it out, geeks tend to dismiss it as "Well, they just aren't as good" as though 'goodness' was some kind of objective measure. I find this all the time amongst otherwise perfectly rational IT people: The belief that because the solution isn't perfect, it is therefore wrong, while ignoring the fact that the current solution they're supporting is also not perfect.
But the fact is, SSDs are many multiples faster than regular old "spinning rust" and more reliable. Ask any major manufacturer what their average warranty RMA rate is on their SSDs versus any other manufacturer's RMA rate on regular old "spinning rust". You'll find that SSD manufacturers regularly offer 3 and 5 year warranties. You're lucky to get a 90 day return policy on spinning rust bought off Amazon.
Now, all that said, dig into the data and you will find some new failure conditions that spinning rust doesn't have. For example, sudden power loss can cause a temporary loss of capacity, which will show up as bad sectors, in many SSDs. Very few IT professionals are aware of this; Or the fix: Physically disconnecting it for at least an hour, then wiping it (SATA command, not OS) and restoring the data. Many will RMA a drive claiming 'bad sectors' when there's nothing physically wrong with the drive... it's just buggy firmware.
Everyone points to write-exhaustion; The overly-focused on issue of repeated writes eventually 'wearing out' the drive. But guys... the average cycles here are 3,000 to 5,000 per cell. If you are writing 10GB a day to your drive, then a tiny 80 GB SSD will take 18.7 years before it gives up the ghost; Or about 68.5 TB of data written to the disk. If you opted for a 160GB drive, kick that out to 37.5 years. And that's for it to start showing physical loss of storage capacity.
The problems of SSDs is not electrical. It is not physical. It is entirely software. The firmware on many of these drives is buggy and this is covered up by the SATA / AHCI interfaces, which were designed for spinning rust, and thus have no direct way to signal the myriad of weird firmware glitches.
The electrical/physical part of SSDs is proven tech. It doesn't go bad, not under the usage conditions that the average computer user will put them into. And yes, I know, you don't think of yourself as average... but you are, ok? Even you, Mr. Programmer, Mr. Video Editor, and Mr. Super Linux Power User ZOMFG I Built My Own Raid In Mom's Basement. All of you are the 'average' case. The only time I've heard of mechanical drives being preferred is in usage conditions where data is being constantly written out -- such as a monitoring system like the Large Hadron Supercollider that collects terabytes upon terabytes of data, which is then processed and flushed, many times a day. SSDs would be bad in that environment. But unless you're building your own LHC in the garage... SSDs will work just fine.
That said... I have considered writing to OCZ and Intel and asking them if they could make their SSDs make the same noises as mechanical drives. There's a proven psychological value in this; Just like how your cell phone camera is programmed to emit a shutter snap sound... despite shutters not being around since the 80s. Because there are a lot of people that apparently need reassurances that their computer be making noise in the corner for them to feel good about it's performance and reliability. It may be too soon for geeks to live with silent computers.
As the mirror has to be carefully aligned, this is a time consuming process.
This has already been partially solved using nano mirrors -- basically the rear reflector is a pile of mirrors that each have independent servos. It's nano tech. Like I said... early stages.
Guys, we've been down this road about a million times in physics. Just because a mathematical model simplifies certain calculations, does not mean that the actual underlying physical geometry matches the theoretical model. Mathematicians have been adding extra dimensions to equations and finding they simplify things for years. It doesn't mean we live in a 27 dimension manifold. All direct observations to date point to a 3D universe.
Strawman argument diverting from the statements that you quoted. Your implication that every member of the US Armed forces participated in those acts of torture is disgusting and disturbing.
His implication that the mere act of putting on a uniform is a bar against any member of the armed forces participating in those acts is what is disgusting and disturbing. That is what I was saying. I didn't imply anything. You made a strawman to claim a strawman argument -- by twisting my words. I said some members of the armed forces have done those things, and that's a fact. An undeniable, absolute, resolute fact. You are the one diverting here.
Your delusion that all soldiers sign up to kill people is pure idiocy.
You can call it a delusion, but I don't think those guns, missiles, tanks, bullets, planes, aircraft carriers, etc., are just for show. They are most definately signing up to kill people -- it just happens to be that it may not be "Plan A".
Talk to veterans and find out why they served and you will find almost none signed up to "kill and torture", but rather they signed up and served in order to protect and defend the USA.
That might be what they were told. That isn't what they wound up doing. They didn't get PTSD and wake up screaming because they feel bad about "protect and defend"... they get it because that is not what they were doing. And an awful lot of soldiers are coming home broken... which tells me a lot of what they are doing isn't "protect and defend".
You're like the guy who farts in a room and then says "Who farted?" You think if you pre-emptively blame the other people, nobody will suspect you. Unfortunately, that tactic doesn't work after the age of 5.
Still no side-by-side diff for plain old text files.
Hey now, be fair. It's a lot harder to write a 7 line perl script to run 'diff' and output it to a web browser than to write a complex algorithm to show changes to a 3D model. I mean, have you ever tried coding in Perl? It's like rocket science and stuf--*chokes*
Gaaaakk. Sorry, overdid the snark again. Need to go drink some water to wash out the taste now...
This is exactly the outcome that Diane Feinstein and others of her ilk would visit upon the U.S., given her way.
Excuse me, but what exactly makes you so confident that it isn't already this way? You can't blame "Diane Feinstein" or [insert another name here] for this. The situation would simply breed another person to take their place. Blame Obama! Blame Bush! Blame Canada!
Please. Every government in the world wants things to be sunshine and kittens. It's the basis for all propaganda. We got revisionist history rewriting our high school text books every year. We got angry white fat dudes in suits on Fox News screaming at us about how avoiding war in Syria is somehow a bad thing... because Russia offered a peaceful solution and Syria took them up on it. I mean, how twisted is it that the party that made it's main agenda "making Obama a one term president" is backing him now because he's all like Let's Bomb ALL TEH THINGZ!
With media distortion and control like that patently obvious to anyone who puts on their critical thinking cap, why are we thinking that we're somehow different than the Chinese in this regard? They got propaganda. We got propaganda. And?
Anyone who says they're "pro-" whatever is admitting they've been suckered by pro-paganda. About the only place you don't hear "I'm pro-this-thing" is in science, where people regularly say "Well, the new evidence says I'm wrong. SWEET! To the lab!" ... They don't care for being pro-anything except passion for the work. Learn from them.
Wrong! The first rule you learn in the US Army is that you are to uphold the Constitution and defend the citizens. You also learn that you are not to obey orders that are unlawful and therefor illegal.
Uphold the Constitution, Defend the citizens, and lawful orders. That would be the Abu Ghraib iraq prison scandal, the US government putting prisoners in a room with mustard gas to test its effects, and shooting unarmed bystanders trying to help the injured after a botched air strike, respectively.
Wear the Uniform and learn the job before you spout off bullshit propaganda.
I think the work speaks for itself. I don't think I need to participate in the torture and murder of people, or use chemical weapons on them, to arrive at the conclusion that some of the things our military has done has been very shameful. That all said, our military is better than most, but waving the flag and saying we can do no wrong is propaganda, man. We need to move past being "pro-USA" or "pro-Russian" or "pro-chinese" and start being "pro-human", because patriotism is built on the same principles as racism, sexism, fascism, communism, and all the other isms: It is dogma. It is a refusal to admit to mistakes, a belief in your own moral superiority, and those two things combined have written some of the darkest chapters in human history.
As Einstein wrote, and I paraphrase: The pioneers of world peace will be the youth who refuse military service. Yeah, putting on the uniform can be an honorable and necessary thing. You won't hear very many people dissing WWII veterans. But as long as people like you are eager to sign up to go kill foreigners, our leaders have little incentive to find peaceful solutions.
And yet when Bradley Manning makes an eerily similar statement plenty of people are willing to take it as proof positive that he was a bad guy.
The definition of patriotism is believing your country is the best country on Earth simply because you were born in it. Nobody's national anthem starts with "We're Number Two!" So when America says someone's bad, americans believe it, but nobody else does. When the Chinese say someone's bad, the chinese people believe it, but nobody else. And so on, and so on.
Nationalism is hardly a problem confined to America; It blinds people equally the world over. Here's some Russian propaganda about American, and here's some American propaganda about Russians. It's all the same.
Well, I'm on OS X here, and all the controls are in the same place they always were, and they've always worked fine for me.
I'm on Windows... I paid less for things to work fine for me. *shrugs* But hey, if cost is less important to you, you keep rocking that.