Joke all you want... this says something; There's over 200k people in western countries everywhere that are willing to die to make a political statement on someone else's behalf. Oh, I know... you think Mars has nothing to do with... 'that'.
But anyone who's willing to take a one-way trip and never see their family or friends again... is exactly what 'that' is all about.
Yeah, let's send all the evil people to a nice island with a secret base inside a volcano. I see no way this brilliant plan could possibly backfire, no sir. Certainly they wouldn't spend their time and resources plotting and building moon lasers.
These guys are politicians. They ain't ever been accused of bein' smart.
So that's not quite a successful quit yet, but in terms of harm reduction it's looking good so far. Since I can control the strength of the liquid by mixing it myself, I'm working on a very long, gentle taper down.
SINNER! Repent and accept our righteous anti-smoker ways! You're polluting us! You smell bad! People like you are scummy addicts who should be locked away in jail!
Or something. Look... the fact is, the anti-smoker contingent is trying to ban e-cigs and government is trying to tax the hell out of them because they look at it as people 'escaping' their 'public health' tax... so it's a match made in heaven.
What's really telling is that I was sucking on an e-cig in a hospital... and no doctor or nurse said a word. Wanna know why? Because it's not harmful to them or their patients... and it's no worse than a patch. They want people to quit. The jury's still out on whether e-cigs help with that, but they clearly don't hurt... and from a harm reduction standpoint, they're about a hundred times better.
But... no matter. You are a sinner, a scumbag... an addicted fool we need to tax every penny from... for your own good of course!
It's mostly to do with Camoron wanting all UK ISPs to 'think of the children' and opt out of censorship.
Anyone who uses a 'best interests of the children' argument should be immediately shipped to an island populated entirely by other people just like them.
They are invariably the lowest form of scum humanity has to offer, worse even than rapists and murderers... because at least you know where you stand with them, and you know they're evil. "For the children" people are just as evil, but they wrap themselves in robes and go about talking about how holy they are. Put them all on the island, setup cameras, and wait.
I assure you, within a few months... most of them will be dead, because they'll all be trying to one-up each other with dogmatic proclaimations... and invariably when you have a high concentration of such ideology... people start dying. A lot.
Most FOSS contributors don't get C++ at all. The language isn't ready for such low level components yet
Er, wait what? C++ is a superset of C. It includes all the functionality of C, along with an implimentation of OOP. The low level stuff is there. The problem is most FOSS contributors are apparently dinosaurs who never learned how to program in object-oriented fashion. That's not the fault of the language, but rather a reflection on the state of programmer experience and education within the community.
Do not blame the language for the inexperience of the programmer.
This just in: Throwing a ridiculous amount of money into a tiny geographical area may cause the money to remain in that area for longer than the momentary stupidity that brought it there.
Okay.... In other news, "Silicon beach"... the first thing that crossed my mind after hearing that was,... you guys DO know where silicon comes from, right? Sand. So you're basically calling it something like Water Lake.
Only if the drug dealer called an AT&T rep and asked if his plan had roaming charges while he was moving drugs across the border.
He stopped helping that customer after the comment. And the DEA had him under surveillance hoping for something like that to happen... and he knew he was under surveillance, so his not reporting what he already knew was recorded... somehow got him 20 years.
I'm sure then, that you have a ready explanation then for why so many black dudes are in jail, why laws like "stop and frisk" in NY seem to disproportionately target minorities, and other obvious examples of selective enforcement...
All of that is to "uphold social norms", right? And what of the case where the majority is wrong to oppress a minority? By definition, oppression is a social norm... so according to you, laws should never be challenged, oppression should be allowed to continue, because the law is always right.
The reason a human being may show higher galvanic skin sensitivity or increased breathing rates do not map reliably to deception. It's pseudo-science, pure and simple, and is not reliable for what it's supposedly for. The problem with your analogy is that there are only a handful of issues that could cause the idiot light to glow and narrowing down the reason the "low oil" light is lit is straightforward.
The polygraph measures physiological changes which we know to be correlated with anxiety. Anxiety that in the context of a controlled environment found in a polygraph examination, is usually due to a person lying. The science on this is solid. It's not pseudoscience; This is fact. The thing is, limbic-system responses vary wildly from person to person, and so even with all the things a polygraph measures, it is not sufficiently accurate at detecting the reactions of the limbic system.
The entire debate about polygraphs comes down not to whether or not it's pseudoscience or a bunch of other bullshit reasons that everyone else is laboring under for why it was dismissed, but rather that it is simply not accurate enough. That's it. That's all. It does detect lying about 80-93% of the time, which is statistically interesting, but it is not a sufficiently strong correlation to have much confidence in any particular result. That's all. It's not accurate enough. It's scientific. It's based on real science, performed by real scientists. Limbic reactions are real. Emotional reactions can be measured.
They just can't be measured accurately enough to form a basis for eliminating reasonable doubt.
In the first case, calibrated measurements are made in a standard, objectively defined unit by taking advantage of a law of physics. 1 kPa is 1 kPa is 1 kPa.
No, it isn't. It's usually a device that when it reaches a certain threshold, triggers, a simple diaphram, of which manufacturing samples were repeatedly tested so that it reliably triggers near that threshold. It's not calibrated; Look up the definition of that word in science.
In the second, a bunch of graphs are written out based on physiological measurements, then "interpreted" by a supposed polygraph "expert."
So the blood pressure and heart rate measurements a physician takes are "interpreted" by a supposed medical "expert"? No, the measurements being taken are also derived from 'laws of physics'.
There is no objective standard or unit of "lying," and different experts will come up with different interpretations.
No, they're looking for a deviation from a standard mean. What's being measured is objective, and in fact the US military has designed an algorithm to do the work of the "expert" in your case... which they are evaluating right now in Afghanistan, and preliminary results suggest that with a little bit of modification and more samples, can be as good as the expert. So there is no "interpretation", unless a computer algorithm, using bitwise operations, to arrive at a pass/fail result, is somehow a subjective thing for you.
Indeed, the US Supreme Court ruled that unlike DNA or fingerprint evidence, polygraph evidence is nothing more than the opinions of the examiners.
Actually, that's incorrect. In Frye v. United States (1923) they ruled that novel scientific evidence first must have gained general acceptance in its scientific field for criminal cases. The opinions of the examiners was not considered; But rather the general consensus of those within the field of forensic science. This rule stood until 1993, when it was replaced by Federal Rule 703 which states "If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise." A similarly-worded rule exists for military personnel, and exists as Military Rule of Evidence 707. It was then, in a series of cases subsequent, applied to polygraph examinations. But it wasn't until 2001, when Congress passed the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, that polygraphs were formally barred from civil cases. The only remaining legal use for polygraph examinations by the government on US citizens is for government employees.
At no point has the US Supreme Court, or any federal court, ruled that the testimony of an expert interpreting polygraph results was relevant -- they have consistently stated that as the scientific community's consensus is that polygraphs are too unreliable for use in establishing a person's guilt or innocence, they cannot be admissible as material evidence in any civil or criminal proceeding.
The polygraph does record objective units of measurement, just like a breathalyzer. And, just like a breathalyzer, different levels of intoxication affect people with differing physiologies... er, differently. That's kindof the rub of pretty much everything in medicine -- we can objectively measure, say, the number of white blood cells in a culture. We have a much harder time saying why you have an elevate white blood cell count, or what's normal or abnormal for you -- if you look at just about any medical test, you will find there is a considerable range of variation within which a lab result is considered normal; And it is up to "supposed medical experts" to "interpret" the collection of lab results to determine if it is normal, or abnormal, based on clinical experience.
What, precisely do you conut as network neutrality?
I suppose I 'conut' it as; ISPs enabling (1) all content and protocols (2) regardless of source or destination, and (3) without favoring (prioritization) or blocking on either (1) or (2).
Also, do you know if kernel magic exists to do that, or is this just a possiblility which could be, but isn't yet implemented. I may be misunderstanding, but if I have it right, then a userland HTTP proxy could do the job.
The kernel is the wrong place to do it. Depending on the type of throttling or traffic manipulation used, you may or may not need to pre-empt the kernels' IP stack, the ability to craft custom packets, etc., and then some kind of userland library that can intercept regular network i/o... not dissimilar to event interception/dll injection.
The fact of the matter is, every layer of the network can be fucked with, and unfucking it means implimenting a solution at that layer. This unfortunately means any comprehensive solution would likely be monolithic and likely require significant modification of the application... it is not a simple matter of "create proxy, make bacon."
A polygraph is absolutely not a "lie detector" with high false negative and false positive rates. Polygraphy is a pseudo-science and as such has no consistent FNR / FPR when turned to "lie detection."
That isn't an accurate assessment. Lying does often elicit a physiological reaction, which is what the polygraph is designed to detect. However, anxiety about the question also causes a physiological reaction, and differentiating between someone who's nervous because they're lying, and someone who's nervous for some other reason, is a non-trivial matter.
It's like saying the low oil light on your car is "absolutely not an oil detector". Technically, you're right; It's a pressure sensor. But it's measuring pressure in a system that ordinarily should contain only oil, and if the pressure drops that's usually an indicator that there's not enough oil in the system, thus calling it a "low oil" light is accurate because that's what it is most often detecting.
As long as we're talking about Sun Tzu... the rule I find most relevant is Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. In other words, war better start fast and end fast, or it'll cost too damn much. The United States is constantly at war. We can't go more than a few months without CNN running another story: "US Thinking About Bombing Again, Film At 11"... and that's ignoring all of our wars on intangible things like terrorism, drugs, poverty... and the growing notion that the government has declared war on itself as well... the zeal for attacking these intangible things has led to us eating away at ourselves like our law enforcement and judicial branches are having some kind of allergic reaction and bloating up all over the place like they've been stung by bees... attacking itself due to the allergic reaction.
The same thing goes for smoke shops. Go in there and mention pot/weed/etc in any shape, fashion or form, and they'll kick you out right on the spot because the feds have pulled this trick on them quite often. His mistake was in not immediately stopping and ejecting the guy from his lessons.
Well, yeah, except that's not enough these days. Consider the guy that installed car 'hides' (basically hidden compartments) in California. He started with car audio installs, but found installing hides was more lucrative and required the same skills and tools. There weren't any laws specifically making this illegal, but people often used them for illegal activities, particularly smuggling drugs. He would turn people away if he had evidence they were using them for this purpose, but the DEA still caught wind of a high-end car installer, then approached him and put him under surveillance. Again, not because they had proof he was doing anything illegal, but because he was enabling others to do illegal things... they continually asked him to allow them to install surveillance cameras, etc., which he refused (As is his fourth amendment right). After a bit of back and fourth, the DEA decided he was obstructing and colluding with these drug dealers, and put him in jail for twenty years.
There was never any indication he ever serviced a vehicle where anyone had admitted it was used for drugs or illegal activities. The DEA just wanted him gone because he was enabling others to do so. So knowledge that what you're teaching or providing service for isn't proof against the government throwing you in jail.
Let's be clear: If the government wants you, they're gonna get you. The laws aren't there to uphold social norms, they're there to club you over the head and drag you off in a way that seems justifiable to the unwashed masses, should the authorities so choose to do so. You can't simply say "Oh well, if you do this, this, and this, they can't get you!"... Wrong.
If simple fraud is against the law, then why aren't we prosecuting the fraudsters administering the tests?
Well, because it isn't fraud. Fraud is intentional deception, not simply being ineffective or incompetent. If those things were crimes, everyone would be in jail. Now, in this case, the accuracy rates vary from 80-98% by most accounts, with much of the variance down to the competence of the tester. This is still too low for it to be used in say, criminal trials. But many government officials as I said earlier care more about detection than false positive... they're saying as long as you get the needle in the haystack, it's a success... even though you're doing it by burning the haystack. So no, this is not fraudulent... it's merely not scientifically rigorous.
AFAIK, he only taught them how to fool a lie detector, and to lie about knowing how to fool a lie detector, because if you admit that, you are instantly out of the running.
Well, as I mentioned earlier -- the consequences of failing a polygraph can be a career-ending event, and the false positive rate is quite high, even against untrained individuals. With the cost of such an event being so high, and the odds of it happening being non-negligible, such training has obvious economic benefits. There is no need for someone to be a "bad guy" to be able to justify it. In this case, lying is in your best interests, regardless of if you're a terrorist or not -- if you are a terrorist, it's in your best interest to lie for obvious reasons. If you aren't, it's in your best interest because you don't want all that training, knowledge, and years of experience fighting the terrorists to get flushed because of a statistical anomaly.
... like the government scorned when one shows that their "system" is a house of cards.
It isn't a house of cards, it's just not a highly reliable method. Look at it this way... Let's take a series of pass/fail tests, each with a different detection probability. And let's say that the odds of them catching you in round 1 are 65%, then 84%, then 70%. Is the cumulative effect of this higher than 84%? Yes. Each layer adds a little bit, but each layer also has diminishing returns. This is how government looks at security with regards to, say airport scanners, or terrorist watch lists, or polygraph testing. They know that the individual methods by themselves are shit. They're just hoping that with enough layers, enough randomized checks, and everything else, that the final result will be a high detection rate.
This isn't without its drawbacks. As someone who studies statistics can tell you, a test needs to be about 99.9% accurate before the false positive rate is low enough that your system can have any confidence in its catches. The government doesn't care about confidence though -- it's about fear and perception. If they charge a thousand people with terrorism to catch the one guy who is a terrorist, that's a win in their book. They only care about the detection rate; Not the false positive.
That doesn't make it a 'house of cards' though. If all you care about is detection rate, the government's doing a passably sortof okay job... but if you care about the false positive rate, your opinion is going to be, er, considerably lower. Actually, several miles into the ground low. Understanding how the government thinks is the first step towards fixing the problem; Which I think anyone who's looked at the situation will say... it's reducing false positives.
As far as the logic of imprisoning someone who's explaining that one of the tactics in their overall strategy can be easily beaten... I've generally been of the opinion that if you didn't have access to classified materials, and discovered something that threatens national security, merely discussing it should be first amendment protected -- afterall, if you did it, so can the nebulous and undefined enemies of your country. And isn't part of a citizen's job to participate in creating a more effective government? How else can this be accomplished than by a willingness and ability to discuss shortcomings?
The polygraph may be used for national security reasons, but so are hammers, staplers, and cars... that doesn't mean we can arrest and imprison people who use or criticize them either. It's just a tool... and if the tool is as ineffective as this guy suggests, it should stop being used. And in fact, the false positive rate of polygraphs so far outstrips the detection rate, that you'd be stupid not to learn how to beat one if you're serious about a government position. I mean, why would you risk your career on what essentially amounts to a dousing rod or a psychic reading cards?
none of the tricks you proposed would have worked : network was switched, passwords encryted, local machines not trusted, printer maintenance was made internally, crucial technical information was not accessible by non tech-savvy people, and in two of them, offices were locked during lunch breaks. Basic security is easy and cheap, and some people do it well. Some of us take security seriously, and
... And I promise you that I could still get in where you work and own your network all the same. The fact is, the more links in the chain, the weaker the chain is overall. Humans are... human. They make mistakes. They trust. They forget. Even the NSA suggests that you assume your networks and machines are already compromised. That's where you start. Your attitude of "Oh, we're secure! That would neeever work with us" smacks of inexperience in the field of security.
The reason why the military and our intelligence agencies compartmentalize information, restrict everything to 'need to know', etc., is to reduce the number of links in the chain. It's to reduce the attack surface area. They know that if you capture someone and torture them, they will eventually tell you what you want. A pair of pliers and a lack of morality beats your 9 trillion bit encryption every time. Blackmail is effective as well -- you think all those arbitrary hoops they put people through for their security clearance is to test their loyalty? It isn't. It's to make sure that the people themselves don't have any exploitable conditions... no secrets, no financial problems, etc.
Tor is not, and never has been, trusted for high value communications and if you are, you're an idiot. Let me say this again: Tor for high value communications is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and you should be ashamed for suggesting otherwise. Tor does not add security... it adds anonymity and there is a big, huge, massive difference between these two things.
There is NOTHING Tor can do to prevent the site you're visiting through it from being compromised. Nothing it can do to prevent drive-by browsing attacks, injected javascript, or many, many other exploits. Everything that can be done to you on the internet, can be done to you over Tor. The only thing Tor helps you with... is camoflaging your IP address, and it does this imperfectly. An adversary such as a large corporation or government has the resources to pierce such camoflage, and you should proceed accordingly when using Tor.
And you missed the point here; You can crack Tor. Anyone can, with enough resources. There is no complete system that has zero vulnerabilities... Tor, encryption, computers... there will always be a weak link. Always. Always. Always. There is no such thing as 'unhackable'.
I'm not worried about the NSA. I'm not worried about the CIA, the FBI, Iran, Iraq... aliens from Mars; All of them are subject to the same natural laws of security. If the security is more costly to break than the value of what it is being protected, it's good security. The end. It doesn't matter if the attacker is the NSA, or a million trained monkeys.
That was my point. And you missed it. You got lost in the example, and failed to see the larger picture... like so many amateurs before you. Let me be clear: Tor can be cracked. It's been crackable from day one. Everything can be cracked. But as long as the effort required to crack it costs more than the value of what you're protecting, you needn't worry.
Burn this into your skull, and stop being Chicken Little.
Don't forget the part about beating some guy's head into the pavement without checking to see if that guy was in a position to defend himself.
In other news, our foreign policy is based on the same logic. As the old saying goes, boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men (and senators).;)
There wasn't a point beyond the basic security principles outlined earlier. The OP suggested the NSA can spend billions to build data centers for the express purpose of cracking Tor keys. Well, okay... but ignoring the setup costs, the cost of electricity isn't tiny. Is the value of what's being protected worth more than that juice costs?
The NSA wasn't interested in people's gay porn habits before it was encrypted. They were just logging it and storing it. Doing the same thing on the Tor network doesn't change the equation any, it just increases the cost of accessing the data from slightly more than a few pennies to perhaps some several thousand dollars.
Does this mean anything to the average person? No, not really. Just make sure whatever you're communicating is worth less than that. New technology changes the values in the equation... but the equation itself remains unchanged.
CNSFSNP: Complex Non-Solution For Simple Non-Problem
Yes and no. The ability to wirelessly track cars would assist in the recovery of some stolen vehicles. And not having to put a sticker on a plate once a year is a tiny convenience. So this does solve a few problems.
It's just that it creates even larger problems of privacy, not the least of which is that with the ability to wirelessly track cars comes the ability to stalk people. And it could have implications for national security as well -- imagine if a criminal knew the location of every police car, every personal vehicle owned by a law enforcement officer, and had the ability to remotely update the plate to show it was stolen, etc., for harassment purposes or to delay them during criminal activity.
Privacy isn't just a problem for private citizens; Pervasive surveillance also means you can watch the watchers much easier. This isn't always a good thing...
i've lived in NYC since the early 80's and if you were white you were dumb to go to the south bronx or harlem. especially at night.
I would like to point out that in any place that is poverty-stricken, not blending in is a big problem. A black guy wandering around a trailer park will attract just as much trouble from the people that live there. Race by itself isn't what causes this, it's the larger issue of tribalism. For example, if you're wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of skittles and wandering through a gated community... you're also in it in a bad way. People need to be aware of their surroundings and know when they're not 'part of the herd'. Standing out in a crowd attracts attention... usually of the unwanted variety.
if your kid passes the gifted and talented test to get into accelerated kindergarten, the crappy schools will have spots open in their G&T classes because parents don't want their kids going there
Red shirting and a whole lot of other issues make 'gifted and talented' a crap shoot based more on being in the right place and the right time than actually being gifted or talented. People who truly are gifted and talented find public and private education to be a hell hole because it's a one-size-fits-all approach, with a focus on test results and rote memorization over critical thinking, independent thought, and creativity. I can pretty reliably figure out your general intelligence level by asking how bored you were in school, and if you had any friends. If you were very bored and had no friends before college... chances are good you were well above average. Your grades are totally irrelevant in this analysis... I never ask people how good they did in school... I asked what the experience of school was like. It's a much more reliable indicator.
Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome.
What's duplicitous about this? It's advertised as unlimited. We're paying more for less than other countries because they refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, creating an artificial scarcity. All I want is what I've always wanted: Internet at the rated speed that I purchased. If there's bandwidth contention, that's what QoS is for. Caps are an artificial restriction of a resource...
The only duplicity I see is from the ISPs who perpetuate this fraud.
I disagree with your assertion that since you're not a terrorist,
Excuse me, you're putting words in my mouth. I talked about the value of your communications versus the cost of capturing and decoding them as the metric by which the NSA chooses to decrypt or not. I didn't put a restriction about you having to be a terrorist for it to be valuable enough -- I used an example of terrorism as an example of high value communication.
One ISP responded by saying, 'Of course, actually until recently one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies in the US'.
Porn server on a DSL line. Musta been really into spanking and torture.:) Okay, that aside, yeah, there's plenty of ways to fight a cap if you're stuck in a residential area and have no alternatives; ICMP traffic typically isn't counted or capped. If you setup a micro instance in the amazon cloud or elsewhere, and create a VPN that uses ICMP traffic, you can tunnel through that and out into the wonderful world of unlimited bandwidth.
The fact is, tabulating the actual bandwidth used isn't a matter of just adding up the bytes on the wire transmitted or received, and that's because every way of auditing it is different. Some ISPs track it at the border router, some try to limit it during peak periods... take Comcast for instance...
They have this 'burst' thing where the first 5MB of a http or https connection runs at max speed, then throttles. Well, you can use that to your advantage -- just send a reset packet after 5MB is exchanged, and enable http resume. With a few other tweaks to http pipelining and other things, you can easily get triple what your rated line speed is supposed to be... but it requires you setup your own dedicated gateway/firewall/router combo box and some really complicated ipchains and kernel magic.
My point is, extensively test what your ISP does and doesn't throttle, how it throttles, and how it caps. Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome. And when you've figured it out, share it with others. ISPs need to get the message that if they aren't going to support network neutrality, the network is going to rise up and kick them in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all, the rest are telephone sanitizers.
Joke all you want... this says something; There's over 200k people in western countries everywhere that are willing to die to make a political statement on someone else's behalf. Oh, I know... you think Mars has nothing to do with ... 'that'.
But anyone who's willing to take a one-way trip and never see their family or friends again... is exactly what 'that' is all about.
Yeah, let's send all the evil people to a nice island with a secret base inside a volcano. I see no way this brilliant plan could possibly backfire, no sir. Certainly they wouldn't spend their time and resources plotting and building moon lasers.
These guys are politicians. They ain't ever been accused of bein' smart.
So that's not quite a successful quit yet, but in terms of harm reduction it's looking good so far. Since I can control the strength of the liquid by mixing it myself, I'm working on a very long, gentle taper down.
SINNER! Repent and accept our righteous anti-smoker ways! You're polluting us! You smell bad! People like you are scummy addicts who should be locked away in jail!
Or something. Look... the fact is, the anti-smoker contingent is trying to ban e-cigs and government is trying to tax the hell out of them because they look at it as people 'escaping' their 'public health' tax... so it's a match made in heaven.
What's really telling is that I was sucking on an e-cig in a hospital... and no doctor or nurse said a word. Wanna know why? Because it's not harmful to them or their patients... and it's no worse than a patch. They want people to quit. The jury's still out on whether e-cigs help with that, but they clearly don't hurt... and from a harm reduction standpoint, they're about a hundred times better.
But... no matter. You are a sinner, a scumbag... an addicted fool we need to tax every penny from... for your own good of course!
It's mostly to do with Camoron wanting all UK ISPs to 'think of the children' and opt out of censorship.
Anyone who uses a 'best interests of the children' argument should be immediately shipped to an island populated entirely by other people just like them.
They are invariably the lowest form of scum humanity has to offer, worse even than rapists and murderers... because at least you know where you stand with them, and you know they're evil. "For the children" people are just as evil, but they wrap themselves in robes and go about talking about how holy they are. Put them all on the island, setup cameras, and wait.
I assure you, within a few months... most of them will be dead, because they'll all be trying to one-up each other with dogmatic proclaimations... and invariably when you have a high concentration of such ideology... people start dying. A lot.
Most FOSS contributors don't get C++ at all. The language isn't ready for such low level components yet
Er, wait what? C++ is a superset of C. It includes all the functionality of C, along with an implimentation of OOP. The low level stuff is there. The problem is most FOSS contributors are apparently dinosaurs who never learned how to program in object-oriented fashion. That's not the fault of the language, but rather a reflection on the state of programmer experience and education within the community.
Do not blame the language for the inexperience of the programmer.
This just in: Throwing a ridiculous amount of money into a tiny geographical area may cause the money to remain in that area for longer than the momentary stupidity that brought it there.
Okay.... In other news, "Silicon beach"... the first thing that crossed my mind after hearing that was, ... you guys DO know where silicon comes from, right? Sand. So you're basically calling it something like Water Lake.
Where do you stand on QoS?
It should be handled by the customer, not the ISP.
Only if the drug dealer called an AT&T rep and asked if his plan had roaming charges while he was moving drugs across the border.
He stopped helping that customer after the comment. And the DEA had him under surveillance hoping for something like that to happen... and he knew he was under surveillance, so his not reporting what he already knew was recorded... somehow got him 20 years.
Yeah... that seems fair.
"The laws aren't there to uphold social norms"...
That is exactly the reason the laws exist.
I'm sure then, that you have a ready explanation then for why so many black dudes are in jail, why laws like "stop and frisk" in NY seem to disproportionately target minorities, and other obvious examples of selective enforcement...
All of that is to "uphold social norms", right? And what of the case where the majority is wrong to oppress a minority? By definition, oppression is a social norm... so according to you, laws should never be challenged, oppression should be allowed to continue, because the law is always right.
The reason a human being may show higher galvanic skin sensitivity or increased breathing rates do not map reliably to deception. It's pseudo-science, pure and simple, and is not reliable for what it's supposedly for. The problem with your analogy is that there are only a handful of issues that could cause the idiot light to glow and narrowing down the reason the "low oil" light is lit is straightforward.
The polygraph measures physiological changes which we know to be correlated with anxiety. Anxiety that in the context of a controlled environment found in a polygraph examination, is usually due to a person lying. The science on this is solid. It's not pseudoscience; This is fact. The thing is, limbic-system responses vary wildly from person to person, and so even with all the things a polygraph measures, it is not sufficiently accurate at detecting the reactions of the limbic system.
The entire debate about polygraphs comes down not to whether or not it's pseudoscience or a bunch of other bullshit reasons that everyone else is laboring under for why it was dismissed, but rather that it is simply not accurate enough. That's it. That's all. It does detect lying about 80-93% of the time, which is statistically interesting, but it is not a sufficiently strong correlation to have much confidence in any particular result. That's all. It's not accurate enough. It's scientific. It's based on real science, performed by real scientists. Limbic reactions are real. Emotional reactions can be measured.
They just can't be measured accurately enough to form a basis for eliminating reasonable doubt.
In the first case, calibrated measurements are made in a standard, objectively defined unit by taking advantage of a law of physics. 1 kPa is 1 kPa is 1 kPa.
No, it isn't. It's usually a device that when it reaches a certain threshold, triggers, a simple diaphram, of which manufacturing samples were repeatedly tested so that it reliably triggers near that threshold. It's not calibrated; Look up the definition of that word in science.
In the second, a bunch of graphs are written out based on physiological measurements, then "interpreted" by a supposed polygraph "expert."
So the blood pressure and heart rate measurements a physician takes are "interpreted" by a supposed medical "expert"? No, the measurements being taken are also derived from 'laws of physics'.
There is no objective standard or unit of "lying," and different experts will come up with different interpretations.
No, they're looking for a deviation from a standard mean. What's being measured is objective, and in fact the US military has designed an algorithm to do the work of the "expert" in your case... which they are evaluating right now in Afghanistan, and preliminary results suggest that with a little bit of modification and more samples, can be as good as the expert. So there is no "interpretation", unless a computer algorithm, using bitwise operations, to arrive at a pass/fail result, is somehow a subjective thing for you.
Indeed, the US Supreme Court ruled that unlike DNA or fingerprint evidence, polygraph evidence is nothing more than the opinions of the examiners.
Actually, that's incorrect. In Frye v. United States (1923) they ruled that novel scientific evidence first must have gained general acceptance in its scientific field for criminal cases. The opinions of the examiners was not considered; But rather the general consensus of those within the field of forensic science. This rule stood until 1993, when it was replaced by Federal Rule 703 which states "If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise." A similarly-worded rule exists for military personnel, and exists as Military Rule of Evidence 707. It was then, in a series of cases subsequent, applied to polygraph examinations. But it wasn't until 2001, when Congress passed the Employee Polygraph Protection Act, that polygraphs were formally barred from civil cases. The only remaining legal use for polygraph examinations by the government on US citizens is for government employees.
At no point has the US Supreme Court, or any federal court, ruled that the testimony of an expert interpreting polygraph results was relevant -- they have consistently stated that as the scientific community's consensus is that polygraphs are too unreliable for use in establishing a person's guilt or innocence, they cannot be admissible as material evidence in any civil or criminal proceeding.
The polygraph does record objective units of measurement, just like a breathalyzer. And, just like a breathalyzer, different levels of intoxication affect people with differing physiologies... er, differently. That's kindof the rub of pretty much everything in medicine -- we can objectively measure, say, the number of white blood cells in a culture. We have a much harder time saying why you have an elevate white blood cell count, or what's normal or abnormal for you -- if you look at just about any medical test, you will find there is a considerable range of variation within which a lab result is considered normal; And it is up to "supposed medical experts" to "interpret" the collection of lab results to determine if it is normal, or abnormal, based on clinical experience.
And that'
What, precisely do you conut as network neutrality?
I suppose I 'conut' it as; ISPs enabling (1) all content and protocols (2) regardless of source or destination, and (3) without favoring (prioritization) or blocking on either (1) or (2).
Also, do you know if kernel magic exists to do that, or is this just a possiblility which could be, but isn't yet implemented. I may be misunderstanding, but if I have it right, then a userland HTTP proxy could do the job.
The kernel is the wrong place to do it. Depending on the type of throttling or traffic manipulation used, you may or may not need to pre-empt the kernels' IP stack, the ability to craft custom packets, etc., and then some kind of userland library that can intercept regular network i/o... not dissimilar to event interception/dll injection.
The fact of the matter is, every layer of the network can be fucked with, and unfucking it means implimenting a solution at that layer. This unfortunately means any comprehensive solution would likely be monolithic and likely require significant modification of the application... it is not a simple matter of "create proxy, make bacon."
A polygraph is absolutely not a "lie detector" with high false negative and false positive rates. Polygraphy is a pseudo-science and as such has no consistent FNR / FPR when turned to "lie detection."
That isn't an accurate assessment. Lying does often elicit a physiological reaction, which is what the polygraph is designed to detect. However, anxiety about the question also causes a physiological reaction, and differentiating between someone who's nervous because they're lying, and someone who's nervous for some other reason, is a non-trivial matter.
It's like saying the low oil light on your car is "absolutely not an oil detector". Technically, you're right; It's a pressure sensor. But it's measuring pressure in a system that ordinarily should contain only oil, and if the pressure drops that's usually an indicator that there's not enough oil in the system, thus calling it a "low oil" light is accurate because that's what it is most often detecting.
As long as we're talking about Sun Tzu... the rule I find most relevant is Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. In other words, war better start fast and end fast, or it'll cost too damn much. The United States is constantly at war. We can't go more than a few months without CNN running another story: "US Thinking About Bombing Again, Film At 11" ... and that's ignoring all of our wars on intangible things like terrorism, drugs, poverty... and the growing notion that the government has declared war on itself as well... the zeal for attacking these intangible things has led to us eating away at ourselves like our law enforcement and judicial branches are having some kind of allergic reaction and bloating up all over the place like they've been stung by bees... attacking itself due to the allergic reaction.
The same thing goes for smoke shops. Go in there and mention pot/weed/etc in any shape, fashion or form, and they'll kick you out right on the spot because the feds have pulled this trick on them quite often. His mistake was in not immediately stopping and ejecting the guy from his lessons.
Well, yeah, except that's not enough these days. Consider the guy that installed car 'hides' (basically hidden compartments) in California. He started with car audio installs, but found installing hides was more lucrative and required the same skills and tools. There weren't any laws specifically making this illegal, but people often used them for illegal activities, particularly smuggling drugs. He would turn people away if he had evidence they were using them for this purpose, but the DEA still caught wind of a high-end car installer, then approached him and put him under surveillance. Again, not because they had proof he was doing anything illegal, but because he was enabling others to do illegal things... they continually asked him to allow them to install surveillance cameras, etc., which he refused (As is his fourth amendment right). After a bit of back and fourth, the DEA decided he was obstructing and colluding with these drug dealers, and put him in jail for twenty years.
There was never any indication he ever serviced a vehicle where anyone had admitted it was used for drugs or illegal activities. The DEA just wanted him gone because he was enabling others to do so. So knowledge that what you're teaching or providing service for isn't proof against the government throwing you in jail.
Let's be clear: If the government wants you, they're gonna get you. The laws aren't there to uphold social norms, they're there to club you over the head and drag you off in a way that seems justifiable to the unwashed masses, should the authorities so choose to do so. You can't simply say "Oh well, if you do this, this, and this, they can't get you!" ... Wrong.
If simple fraud is against the law, then why aren't we prosecuting the fraudsters administering the tests?
Well, because it isn't fraud. Fraud is intentional deception, not simply being ineffective or incompetent. If those things were crimes, everyone would be in jail. Now, in this case, the accuracy rates vary from 80-98% by most accounts, with much of the variance down to the competence of the tester. This is still too low for it to be used in say, criminal trials. But many government officials as I said earlier care more about detection than false positive... they're saying as long as you get the needle in the haystack, it's a success... even though you're doing it by burning the haystack. So no, this is not fraudulent... it's merely not scientifically rigorous.
AFAIK, he only taught them how to fool a lie detector, and to lie about knowing how to fool a lie detector, because if you admit that, you are instantly out of the running.
Well, as I mentioned earlier -- the consequences of failing a polygraph can be a career-ending event, and the false positive rate is quite high, even against untrained individuals. With the cost of such an event being so high, and the odds of it happening being non-negligible, such training has obvious economic benefits. There is no need for someone to be a "bad guy" to be able to justify it. In this case, lying is in your best interests, regardless of if you're a terrorist or not -- if you are a terrorist, it's in your best interest to lie for obvious reasons. If you aren't, it's in your best interest because you don't want all that training, knowledge, and years of experience fighting the terrorists to get flushed because of a statistical anomaly.
... like the government scorned when one shows that their "system" is a house of cards.
It isn't a house of cards, it's just not a highly reliable method. Look at it this way... Let's take a series of pass/fail tests, each with a different detection probability. And let's say that the odds of them catching you in round 1 are 65%, then 84%, then 70%. Is the cumulative effect of this higher than 84%? Yes. Each layer adds a little bit, but each layer also has diminishing returns. This is how government looks at security with regards to, say airport scanners, or terrorist watch lists, or polygraph testing. They know that the individual methods by themselves are shit. They're just hoping that with enough layers, enough randomized checks, and everything else, that the final result will be a high detection rate.
This isn't without its drawbacks. As someone who studies statistics can tell you, a test needs to be about 99.9% accurate before the false positive rate is low enough that your system can have any confidence in its catches. The government doesn't care about confidence though -- it's about fear and perception. If they charge a thousand people with terrorism to catch the one guy who is a terrorist, that's a win in their book. They only care about the detection rate; Not the false positive.
That doesn't make it a 'house of cards' though. If all you care about is detection rate, the government's doing a passably sortof okay job... but if you care about the false positive rate, your opinion is going to be, er, considerably lower. Actually, several miles into the ground low. Understanding how the government thinks is the first step towards fixing the problem; Which I think anyone who's looked at the situation will say... it's reducing false positives.
As far as the logic of imprisoning someone who's explaining that one of the tactics in their overall strategy can be easily beaten... I've generally been of the opinion that if you didn't have access to classified materials, and discovered something that threatens national security, merely discussing it should be first amendment protected -- afterall, if you did it, so can the nebulous and undefined enemies of your country. And isn't part of a citizen's job to participate in creating a more effective government? How else can this be accomplished than by a willingness and ability to discuss shortcomings?
The polygraph may be used for national security reasons, but so are hammers, staplers, and cars... that doesn't mean we can arrest and imprison people who use or criticize them either. It's just a tool... and if the tool is as ineffective as this guy suggests, it should stop being used. And in fact, the false positive rate of polygraphs so far outstrips the detection rate, that you'd be stupid not to learn how to beat one if you're serious about a government position. I mean, why would you risk your career on what essentially amounts to a dousing rod or a psychic reading cards?
none of the tricks you proposed would have worked : network was switched, passwords encryted, local machines not trusted, printer maintenance was made internally, crucial technical information was not accessible by non tech-savvy people, and in two of them, offices were locked during lunch breaks. Basic security is easy and cheap, and some people do it well. Some of us take security seriously, and
... And I promise you that I could still get in where you work and own your network all the same. The fact is, the more links in the chain, the weaker the chain is overall. Humans are... human. They make mistakes. They trust. They forget. Even the NSA suggests that you assume your networks and machines are already compromised. That's where you start. Your attitude of "Oh, we're secure! That would neeever work with us" smacks of inexperience in the field of security.
The reason why the military and our intelligence agencies compartmentalize information, restrict everything to 'need to know', etc., is to reduce the number of links in the chain. It's to reduce the attack surface area. They know that if you capture someone and torture them, they will eventually tell you what you want. A pair of pliers and a lack of morality beats your 9 trillion bit encryption every time. Blackmail is effective as well -- you think all those arbitrary hoops they put people through for their security clearance is to test their loyalty? It isn't. It's to make sure that the people themselves don't have any exploitable conditions... no secrets, no financial problems, etc.
Tor is not, and never has been, trusted for high value communications and if you are, you're an idiot. Let me say this again: Tor for high value communications is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and you should be ashamed for suggesting otherwise. Tor does not add security... it adds anonymity and there is a big, huge, massive difference between these two things.
There is NOTHING Tor can do to prevent the site you're visiting through it from being compromised. Nothing it can do to prevent drive-by browsing attacks, injected javascript, or many, many other exploits. Everything that can be done to you on the internet, can be done to you over Tor. The only thing Tor helps you with... is camoflaging your IP address, and it does this imperfectly. An adversary such as a large corporation or government has the resources to pierce such camoflage, and you should proceed accordingly when using Tor.
And you missed the point here; You can crack Tor. Anyone can, with enough resources. There is no complete system that has zero vulnerabilities... Tor, encryption, computers... there will always be a weak link. Always. Always. Always. There is no such thing as 'unhackable'.
I'm not worried about the NSA. I'm not worried about the CIA, the FBI, Iran, Iraq... aliens from Mars; All of them are subject to the same natural laws of security. If the security is more costly to break than the value of what it is being protected, it's good security. The end. It doesn't matter if the attacker is the NSA, or a million trained monkeys.
That was my point. And you missed it. You got lost in the example, and failed to see the larger picture... like so many amateurs before you. Let me be clear: Tor can be cracked. It's been crackable from day one. Everything can be cracked. But as long as the effort required to crack it costs more than the value of what you're protecting, you needn't worry.
Burn this into your skull, and stop being Chicken Little.
Don't forget the part about beating some guy's head into the pavement without checking to see if that guy was in a position to defend himself.
In other news, our foreign policy is based on the same logic. As the old saying goes, boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men (and senators). ;)
There wasn't a point beyond the basic security principles outlined earlier. The OP suggested the NSA can spend billions to build data centers for the express purpose of cracking Tor keys. Well, okay... but ignoring the setup costs, the cost of electricity isn't tiny. Is the value of what's being protected worth more than that juice costs?
The NSA wasn't interested in people's gay porn habits before it was encrypted. They were just logging it and storing it. Doing the same thing on the Tor network doesn't change the equation any, it just increases the cost of accessing the data from slightly more than a few pennies to perhaps some several thousand dollars.
Does this mean anything to the average person? No, not really. Just make sure whatever you're communicating is worth less than that. New technology changes the values in the equation... but the equation itself remains unchanged.
Think of it as the Tao of security.
CNSFSNP: Complex Non-Solution For Simple Non-Problem
Yes and no. The ability to wirelessly track cars would assist in the recovery of some stolen vehicles. And not having to put a sticker on a plate once a year is a tiny convenience. So this does solve a few problems.
It's just that it creates even larger problems of privacy, not the least of which is that with the ability to wirelessly track cars comes the ability to stalk people. And it could have implications for national security as well -- imagine if a criminal knew the location of every police car, every personal vehicle owned by a law enforcement officer, and had the ability to remotely update the plate to show it was stolen, etc., for harassment purposes or to delay them during criminal activity.
Privacy isn't just a problem for private citizens; Pervasive surveillance also means you can watch the watchers much easier. This isn't always a good thing...
i've lived in NYC since the early 80's and if you were white you were dumb to go to the south bronx or harlem. especially at night.
I would like to point out that in any place that is poverty-stricken, not blending in is a big problem. A black guy wandering around a trailer park will attract just as much trouble from the people that live there. Race by itself isn't what causes this, it's the larger issue of tribalism. For example, if you're wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of skittles and wandering through a gated community... you're also in it in a bad way. People need to be aware of their surroundings and know when they're not 'part of the herd'. Standing out in a crowd attracts attention... usually of the unwanted variety.
if your kid passes the gifted and talented test to get into accelerated kindergarten, the crappy schools will have spots open in their G&T classes because parents don't want their kids going there
Red shirting and a whole lot of other issues make 'gifted and talented' a crap shoot based more on being in the right place and the right time than actually being gifted or talented. People who truly are gifted and talented find public and private education to be a hell hole because it's a one-size-fits-all approach, with a focus on test results and rote memorization over critical thinking, independent thought, and creativity. I can pretty reliably figure out your general intelligence level by asking how bored you were in school, and if you had any friends. If you were very bored and had no friends before college... chances are good you were well above average. Your grades are totally irrelevant in this analysis... I never ask people how good they did in school... I asked what the experience of school was like. It's a much more reliable indicator.
Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome.
What's duplicitous about this? It's advertised as unlimited. We're paying more for less than other countries because they refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, creating an artificial scarcity. All I want is what I've always wanted: Internet at the rated speed that I purchased. If there's bandwidth contention, that's what QoS is for. Caps are an artificial restriction of a resource...
The only duplicity I see is from the ISPs who perpetuate this fraud.
I disagree with your assertion that since you're not a terrorist,
Excuse me, you're putting words in my mouth. I talked about the value of your communications versus the cost of capturing and decoding them as the metric by which the NSA chooses to decrypt or not. I didn't put a restriction about you having to be a terrorist for it to be valuable enough -- I used an example of terrorism as an example of high value communication.
One ISP responded by saying, 'Of course, actually until recently one of our customers was one of the biggest porn companies in the US'.
Porn server on a DSL line. Musta been really into spanking and torture. :) Okay, that aside, yeah, there's plenty of ways to fight a cap if you're stuck in a residential area and have no alternatives; ICMP traffic typically isn't counted or capped. If you setup a micro instance in the amazon cloud or elsewhere, and create a VPN that uses ICMP traffic, you can tunnel through that and out into the wonderful world of unlimited bandwidth.
The fact is, tabulating the actual bandwidth used isn't a matter of just adding up the bytes on the wire transmitted or received, and that's because every way of auditing it is different. Some ISPs track it at the border router, some try to limit it during peak periods... take Comcast for instance...
They have this 'burst' thing where the first 5MB of a http or https connection runs at max speed, then throttles. Well, you can use that to your advantage -- just send a reset packet after 5MB is exchanged, and enable http resume. With a few other tweaks to http pipelining and other things, you can easily get triple what your rated line speed is supposed to be... but it requires you setup your own dedicated gateway/firewall/router combo box and some really complicated ipchains and kernel magic.
My point is, extensively test what your ISP does and doesn't throttle, how it throttles, and how it caps. Then game the system. It's just another hurdle to be overcome. And when you've figured it out, share it with others. ISPs need to get the message that if they aren't going to support network neutrality, the network is going to rise up and kick them in the ass.