And those that stayed to fight could be correctly described as "militants", no?
The word militant has traditionally meant that the person is part of an organized resistance, not merely stuck in the combat area when the shit hit the fan. We call those people victims or refugees depending on whether they stay or leave.
I'm pretty sure they already hate America. Maybe for good reason, but that's a matter of perspective.
Most of the world hates America, and they have damn good reasons for doing so that aren't about perspective. America has given up caring about collateral damage. Our international ambassador of peace is the Predator drone. "Bringing democracy" has become synonymous with "They're sending in tanks and missiles and shit again." We've unilaterally withdrawn from several key Geneva conventions, we're engaging in mass acts of torture of areas we occupy...
I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what religion you are... if some assholes are rolling tanks down your street, dropping bombs on your neighbors, and shooting friends and family... they are not liberating you, it's not democracy, and you got every reason and right to kick the mother fuckers right in the teeth. And I say that as an American of no particular religion. My home is my castle. The founding fathers started on about that whole business, and I think they might have been onto something there.
We're going about things all wrong. People don't just hate America, America hates itself. It's economically depressed, militarily suicidal... and frankly, if America was my aunt, I'd be asking the state to have them committed post-haste, because they're fucking up every good thing that life ever gave them while screaming "I'm sane! No really! I'm the sanest one here!"
We're going about this whole warfare thing all wrong. Congress, please stop sending us to po-dunk desert countries and pissing off the locals... it's not helping us, and it's not helping them. The only people it's helping are the defense industry, which has massive (and now unlimited!) funds going towards our elected officials, which in turn are inking orders for new tanks That the entire joint chiefs of staff said we don't need, we have no possible need for, in fact, if you give them to us we're just going to park them out in the Nevada desert with the 50,000 other tanks that are sitting out there rusting... that we also don't need, from the last time we said we don't need any more fucking tanks... I mean, guys... when your own military is saying "No thanks, we're full" and we're force feeding them more equipment...
Sit back and take the fucking hint, man. We are seriously messed in the head as a country.
I don't think it's quite as reliably accurate as all that.
2006 just called. It says it was reliably accurate then. We've been able to shoot missiles down with other missiles for quite some time now. Do you really think when we can do that at several times the speed of sound we can't reliably do it at less than it?
How does Sun Tzu suggest winning the hearts and minds of people whose devout faith tells them that anyone who doesn't believe the same way should be killed?
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." -- Sun Tzu
I suppose it applies equally to religions... if you're constantly at war, you weaken yourself to the point you make yourself easy to conquer. And when I say the people, I mean the majority, not the "devout" minority calling the shots. And the majority is going to get tired of being constantly poor, hungry, and underappreciated by the "devout"... war isn't cheap. There is no religion that has lasted long where the majority of its adherents were actively waging war.
And as for DARPA working on "anti-religious extremism technology"... will it also target christian extremists? Will it be able to look past the race and national origin of those it scans? Or will it simply be another technological manifestation of our collective prejudices, which when it's done exterminating the entire human race (fun statistics fact: The number of 'extremists' remains constant no matter how many you kill!), we'll simply throw our arms in the air and say "The computer did it!"... Which is the 21st century equivalent of "It was God's will."
A Christmas tree light timer ??? How does the OP have a job?
You'd be surprised the kind of things that happen in your average large business thanks to HR and bean counters running the show and considering IT a cost center instead of an asset...
I just got done with a contract at a large bank (It's one of the 50 largest companies in the United States)... all their deployments are run off USB drives hung off servers at their retail locations, they have 512kbit backhauls to their corporate locations, run DHCP over the WAN, have no QoS, and I kid you not -- about 5% of the managed switches have been forced to 10mbit half-duplex.
And since they're so security conscious, all the workstations have drives that are encrypted, have antivirus that runs every 4 hours, whether you're using the system or not, a couple other "intrusion detection" apps that also run, sometimes on overlapping schedules, sometimes when trying to patch the operating system... and for the bonus round: An account used for software installation that has full local admin to every workstation... and has a password that's the same as the account name.
-_- Attaching one of those appliance timers to a switch to shut it off at predefined intervals seems so stupidly obvious, but when you realize how stupid the average person is, and then realize that the ones stupider than that work in HR and Accounting, you quickly conclude the same thing the rest of us in this industry have:
Just drink your damn beer and try to drown out the stupid. Thinking about it will only depress you. Trying to do something about it will get you fired. Trust me... there is no faster way to get fired in IT than doing your job well... because you'll get noticed by all the incompetent asshats that HR and Accounting let in, and they'll form an alliance against you to get rid of you. And for the super jaded special bonus round... trying to get shit done will make you realize that the reason you can't get anything done is because everybody has silo'd themselves away with crucial documentation, settings, or knowledge, to assure themselves of continued employment. Start poking around, and they'll feel threatened. When they feel threatened, they'll find some way to go behind your back and make you look bad. Do this enough times and management will consider you an agitator and... ker-chop.
If you love computers at all, for the love of god, don't go into IT. It will shit in your soul.
Yes, it's very brutal, but I still think it's too early to tell whether the drone strikes are a policy that works
When we have technology capable of putting a missile through an attic window, or down a ventilation shaft, the government does have an obligation to limit civilian casualties. This isn't like Dresden, or London during WWII, when bombs were more or less flung out the back door and they hit where they hit... sometimes miles off target. Thus the reason for carpet bombing in the first place -- there was no accuracy: It was Angry Birds with kilotons of ordinance.
But ignoring the technological side of things, thousands (yes, thousands) of years of military history has shown that the key to winning any war is not in having superior technology or weapons, but in winning the hearts and minds of the people. Sun Tzu wrote about this back when the state of the art was long spears and loud screams, and not a damn thing has changed. But you know, fuck Tzu, maybe you need something a little more modern: How about the British/American war of independence? The greatest navy on the planet, best trained military at the time, got its ass handed to it by some upstart guy named Washington whose troops crossed the Potamac river on Christmas while starving to the point they had been eating their own boots only a few days prior. How'd that happen? "SOONER", you say? Okay, the Vietnam war. Now we're the greatest military force on the planet. We get our asses handed to us by a bunch of tunnel-dwelling communists who largely rely on traps made out of sharpened bamboo and guns that are 40 years old. SOONER! Okay, the war in Iraq. Which one? All of them.
So please, don't even try taking the position that making our ambassadors to the world a predator drone is going to end anything but very, very badly for us. Sun Tzu, were he alive right now, would be posting Picard facepalm pics as a reaction to just about every strategic initiative our government has undertaken in the past twenty years. To him, we're push-overs. We are not a threat... all the nukes in the world can't change the simple fact that where we go, we're resented. And it'll be the death of us, perhaps quite literally.
The fight for democracy cannot be won by any technology we now possess. Not drones, not nukes, none of it. There is but one weapon to assure us of victory: People.
'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design,
Most people who program the games are also artists in their own right. Yes, on the Venn Diagram of games, "Good programmer" and "Good artist" is a thin sliver, but this isn't news to anyone -- there's a reason that despite so much money being in entertainment, only a small fraction of games achieve wide-scale success -- you can't force more people into that sweet spot.
That said, the industry would benefit from being able to isolate the programming/engineering aspect of the video part of video games from the creative aspect of its design; But to do that you need tools that are sophisticated, highly adaptable, constantly maintained, robust, and yet capable of being used by a non-programmer. In short, what you need is the gaming equivalent of the Linux Desktop.
The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come for the same reasons the Year of the Artist-friendly Game Development hasn't happened; The outlay of resources, coordination, and project management skills needed to build what would essentially be an operating system for video game design, dwarfs what any amateur community can do; And even professionally, organizing it all under one roof is still prohibitively expensive. It would be on the same scale as the NSA's current data center build project -- it would need hundreds of millions in capital, cooperation from a half-dozen competing industries and technology, and fundamentally goes against the current market paradigm.
Nobody wants this because if it actually succeeded, it would rewrite all the rules of personal computing, and our entire industry. A lot of people would lose a lot of money because they're invested in the current state of affairs... which is keeping supply scarce to keep prices high. Injecting artists who do this for fun, and have plenty of free time and energy to devote to quality games, would utterly destroy the bottom lines of companies like EA Games that depend on locking you in and squeezing every penny out of you in DLC and DRM.
Ah, small footnote: When I say it's literally eating the country, I do mean that. We have tons of people with felonies on their record that can't find work. These are people who could be building bridges, infrastructure, holding real jobs, and making a real contribution. Instead, they're camped out in homeless shelters, under bridges, or dealing drugs. They're hungry, dying, or doing their best to survive at the expense of others. The country is rotting, physically, infrastructurally, architecturally, because of this problem. People are starving, physically, literally, because of this problem. And they're killing each other and themselves over it.
When I say literally, I don't mean it to accent the problem, I mean it really, in reality, in physical actuality, is destroying this country -- both the land and everything physical that's build on it, and the people who live here.
And all your boldface FAIL FAIL FAIL stuff, just goes to show what a smug, ivory tower fuckwhit you are.
False or coerced confessions. Mistaken witnesses. Badly developed forensics. Prejudice. Public pressure to "nail the guy". Perception versus reality. Manufactured evidence. Corrupt police, judges, attorneys, witnesses. People trying to frame others.
The right against self-incrimination, aka the 5th amendment, was intended primarily to protect innocent people who may simply have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Our founding fathers recognized that the Just world hypothesis was a thing even back then -- people are all but too happy to crucify someone based on appearances, and police can easily be motivated by public outrage to nail the wrong guys so as to appear to be responsive and competent to public needs.
But even with the 4th and 5th amendment protections, far too many innocent people wind up in jail. The Innocence Project, which specifically helps people accused of rape, has been using DNA evidence to free people for decades. Something like over 15% of the number of people in jail right now for rape or murder have evidence that doesn't just prove them not guilty, but proves them completely innocent sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere, but because they confessed or there was a mistaken witness, poor forensics, etc., they're now rotting in jail while the real criminal is still out there.
This asshole is trying to solve a human behavior problem with logic. And yes, he's an asshole for trying to do it -- "smug, ivory tower fuckwhit" is spot on, because only someone as incepid and stupidly naive as to believe that only the criminals lie or make mistakes would try this line of thinking.
What's wrong with the 5th amendment is that there isn't enough of it. What's wrong with the 4th amendment is there isn't enough of that either. These things are designed to protect innocent people -- reductions in them mean that more innocent people are going to jail, when there are already too many innocent people in jail. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. Nicaragua? Podunk shit-hole African warlord country? China? Iraq? Iran? Countries that behead and chop off hands? We have them all beat. And whereas China only charges the family for the cost of the bullet... we're charging the families of those who are in prison their homes, livelihood, etc. -- the high cost of our prison system, which disproportionately targets minorities, is literally eating this country from the inside out.
And then we got fuckwits like this wanting to pour gasoline on the fire and thinking they have an educated position on the matter. It's painful to watch stuff like this... he's obviously trying to think... he's just really, really bad at it.
I'm an American. It's expected that we make jokes about other countries that are only sorta funny, but really insulting. If we didn't do it, the British might not have anything to laugh at...
Really guys, I mean, really? The porn in that country consists of a girl showing a little ankle... and your service is named Viber. What did you expect?!
LOL your so funny, cause if the Government wanted to or the phone provider wanted to they couldn't cut of your phone access any other way?
Yeah, lol, so funny... the government doesn't want or need a bunch of different ways to cut off or monitor your access to communications networks. They just need to cut the telegraph wire and they'll be all set. Oh, did I mention it's not the government that is pushing for a kill switch, but the citizens who are sick of watching several hundred dollar devices get stolen and law enforcement's lack of action even when the owner can point to a spot on the map and say the device is within a few feet of the glowing red dot? Sorry... probably shoulda mentioned that.
Theoretically, this should be satisfying and delicious. If you don't consider this exercise superior to drinking an actual beer, you may just not be cut out for pure mathematics --- consider becoming a physicist instead.
You're close. A physicist is the one who brews the beer; An engineer is the one who would drink the beer. Of course, it would only be an approximation to actual beer, in much the same way Budweiser is. And this is why a room full of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers inevitably leads to an article in the police blotter that ends with "...authorities believe liquor may have been involved."
Whats so special about this one - does it have some mathematical relevance?
Yes, it's relevance is that mathematicians don't like empirical evidence that a statement is only 99.9999% accurate; They demand 100%. And in mathematics, you can get 100%.
And just like prime numbers, fermat's last theorem, etc., an enhanced understanding of the relationships laid out by certain formulas can, and often does, lead to an enhanced understanding of the universe -- which for some strange reason, seems to have the quality of being well-described, if not completely described, by the body of knowledge known as mathematics. And by understanding the universe better, we understand ourselves, and can make our lives easier. Creating most of our modern technology requires an understanding of mathematics -- so better math means better technology.
Relevant enough for you, or do I need to resort to a beer analogy?:)
I have simpler explanation that doesn't require a wall of text. They are opening the passenger side, because that is where the glove box is and people typically stash valuables on or under the passengers seat.
Yeah, I'm sure the police have turned to the public because they didn't consider that, and out of all the security footage they have, would be unaccustomed to the typical behavior of car thieves, so when they say something is unusual (like always opening from the passenger door and always wearing a backpack) it's probably some totally obvious reason any anonymous coward sipping on his beer in his mother's basement could crack.
Whereas my answer offers an explanation that wouldn't be obvious to a typical law enforcement officer, provides enough detail for the typical law enforcement officer to follow up on to verify, and a likely profile of the attacker so they can narrow their search. And all before my morning beer in my mother's basement.
Oh, and P.S., if you're trying to catch this crew without the multimillion dollar anti-terrorist equipment or the FCC, you should canvas upscale shopping malls and retail establishments that cater to people who make an excess of $40,000 per year and are aged 45+; Look for lots filled with cars that are 2007 or newer, SUVs, etc. That's the most lucrative target for this type of criminal. Prioritize for surveillance areas with a lot of vehicle traffic, but not a lot of foot traffic. You already know their M.O., and if you're playing by the numbers, you should only have to put about 30 or so places under surveillance. Don't bother putting places already hit under surveillance -- you're dealing with an RF engineer or someone similarly-trained (like an EE), they're going to know enough not to return to the scene of the crime, at least not this early in their 'career'. They may get sloppy, or desperate, later, depending on what the motivation is for these attacks is.
You probably don't know where and when the first attack like this was, but if by some incredible stroke of luck you do, center your search radius on that point. That was the test area. A rig like this would have to be tested, and human nature suggests they'd pick a place not too far from their home to try it out.
You might also want to check for a spike in cable TV, internet, etc., service calls within the same metropolitan areas; It would look not dissimilar to a lightning strike in its pattern, but have a smaller geographical foot print and (obviously) no lightning on the day of the reports. It's very unlikely he used a faraday cage or had the proper equipment to isolate the emissions from other vulnerable devices... he might have even blown out his own cable TV receiver or internet while building it. Creating the equipment to perform an attack like this is relatively straightforward for an RF engineer or EE, but an experienced amateur radio operator or hobbyist could probably also build it; It's just exceedingly unlikely they got it right on the first attempt.
Maybe the car is sentient, hates the current own and wants to be stolen.
That, or the guy carrying the backpack in the video has something big enough in it to need a backpack; like a large coil, battery, and circuit board. People seem to forget that every electronic device is both a radio transmitter and receiver. With a powerful enough transmitter, any signal can be induced in any part of a circuit. Of course, physics also demands that any signal induced would be strongest along parallel wires -- power cables, to be specific.
The reason why they're targetting passenger-side doors is probably because the control logic is in the driver side door, and the doors on the right-hand side would have the longest run of cable between the control board and the door's selenoid. of course, you don't run power cable from one side of the car to the other, you run a signal wire; which depending on what kind of logic gate is on the other side, may only require a tenth to a half volt of voltage across it to trigger.
The equipment to generate a short, broadband pulse at a right angle should be sufficient to induce the required voltage, thus causing the door to unlock. Never attack the crypto system when you can go after the control interface. This is, for all intents and purposes, a side channel attack. It would only work on makes and models of cars that have a sufficiently long run of signal cable running along the longitudal axis of the vehicle. The attacker would need to be within about 5 feet to do this, and to not be obvious the car would need to be equipped with a lock that is along the window-frame or make an audible noise during unlock -- otherwise an attacker would have to visually inspect the interior of the car first, and the suspicious behavior of doing so in a parking lot filled with cars could attract law enforcement.
Anyway, that's my suspicion for what's going on. To detect this, you'd need to be able to detect a sudden increase in broadband EMR, and triangulate its location, and the emission would only last a few milliseconds, if that. The police won't have the resources to find this, but the FCC might if the attacks are happening within a single metropolitan area... or if you had one of those multimillion dollar semitruck rigs with millimeter wave x-ray tech like what they use in airports to scan people (and their backpacks) for the tell-tale metal loop, which would be optimally placed around the circumference of the bag.
Mind you, all of this ignores potential 4th amendment issues, along with all manner of other legal obstacles, including the fact that you'd be irradiating innocent people who are also unaware of your activities while in public. Failing that, you're tasked with swarming an area with officers and detaining anyone with a backpack within a certain radius, that radius being defined as the response time between signal acquisition and having boots on the ground.
As to profiling them, you're probably looking for a van without windows, SUV, or similar vehicle where stolen goods can be dropped off and the attacker picked up quickly and removed from the area... statistically, he'll be within a few blocks. The equipment needed to generate a powerful enough EM pulse would take up most of the backpack and be very bulky -- even with high energy density batteries... it probably wouldn't have enough room to store much in the way of stolen items, necessitating a nearby collection point.
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
It doesn't. Any electrical device can emit RF over a broad range of frequencies. Your computer can radiate anywhere from DC to over 5GHz. Your car, especially if it's an electric hybrid, can radiate large amounts of EMR at lower frequencies (under 20 MHz). And thanks to harmonics, signal reflection, and interaction with the environment, even a device specifically designed to minimize EMR can cause significant interference. And then there's the numerous stories from ham radio people that would setup an antenna scaffolding (which is a very noticable structure in a residential area), and not connect it to anything. They would wait up to a year before actually using it, because invariably every single thing that was already pre-existing in the area would be blamed on it, from poor TV reception to baby monitors fuzzing out, etc. The FCC of course investigates these things, and it's become common practice amongst amateur radio operators to simply lead them around to the back of the house and point out the disconnected (inert) antenna, because it's easier than going through the formal process of discovery, and there's a small chance of a false positive and resulting bankrupcy due to fines if that happens.
It sounds like the problem in Austria is that it's version of 'Part 16' is broken if they're threatening fines over a defective beer fridge. Here in the United States, as long as it's been certified by the FCC, as long as the owner uses it as intended and has not modified it, there is no legal liability that I'm aware of. In this case, such an enforcement action by a mobile phone company would require they prove the owner maliciously is trying to cause interference, or has, through modification or non-intended uses of an otherwise certified device, caused interference, before any fines could be levied. The solution then is for the license holder to work with the owner of the device to come up with a solution.
Or put another way: The mobile phone company would buy this gentleman a new beer fridge, and haul away the old one for disposal. But it sounds like, in Australia at least, even innocent people who bought a device commercially and used it as intended can be caught in a legal snare that could ruin their lives. Stay classy, Australia.
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
It doesn't. Any electrical device can emit RF over a broad range of frequencies. Your computer can radiate anywhere from DC to over 5GHz. Your car, especially if it's an electric hybrid, can radiate large amounts of EMR at lower frequencies (not connect it to anything. They would wait up to a year before actually using it, because invariably every single thing that was already pre-existing in the area would be blamed on it, from poor TV reception to baby monitors fuzzing out, etc. The FCC of course investigates these things, and it's become common practice amongst amateur radio operators to simply lead them around to the back of the house and point out the disconnected (inert) antenna, because it's easier than going through the formal process of discovery, and there's a small chance of a false positive and resulting bankrupcy due to fines if that happens.
It sounds like the problem in Austria is that it's version of 'Part 16' is broken if they're threatening fines over a defective beer fridge. Here in the United States, as long as it's been certified by the FCC, as long as the owner uses it as intended and has not modified it, there is no legal liability that I'm aware of. In this case, such an enforcement action by a mobile phone company would require they prove the owner maliciously is trying to cause interference, or has, through modification or non-intended uses of an otherwise certified device, caused interference, before any fines could be levied. The solution then is for the license holder to work with the owner of the device to come up with a solution.
Or put another way: The mobile phone company would buy this gentleman a new beer fridge, and haul away the old one for disposal. But it sounds like, in Australia at least, even innocent people who bought a device commercially and used it as intended can be caught in a legal snare that could ruin their lives. Stay classy, Australia.
It's not Facebook that they're updating from; It's Twitter. Their Facebook account is linked to Twitter.
Anyway, this isn't the first time the servers have been DDoS'd; This happens about every 4 months or so on average. And unfortunately, they've handled it about as well each time as you're seeing now: They tend not to announce the DDoS until hours after the news is all over the forums that people are experiencing mass disconnects and instability. And once the problem has been identified (late), their response is usually to kill all the servers, remove the BGP routing table entry for their network, and wait it out.
They don't have the capability of weathering DDoS attacks; Though they claim otherwise, history tells another story. It has to do with the fact that their game depends on a cluster architecture that is not adaptable to something like Amazon cloud, or any kind of scalability. I don't really want to get into details here because it gets really technical, but basically it comes down to data syncronization within the cluster requiring very low latency between nodes. And that means you can't locate the nodes off-site, and proxying is only of limited utility.
They tried proxying the front-end for accepting connections and authenticating users, because that's what has been targetted in the past and is one of the few components that can be moved. The current DDoS attack though is generating large numbers of connections that look the same as legitimate connections, so the proxies are allowing them. Rather than just throwing as much bandwidth as they can at the network as in the past, they're now crafting their traffic.
I suspect the reason the attack is being launched now is because in a few days they're releasing a new patch of the game which will change the network protocols used by the client... their hack might not work then, so they probably decided to launch it now before it becomes useless. They are hitting people on the weekend because it's when the most users are on... so it's most likely to be noticed.
Critics called this an invasion of privacy and questioned whether the scanning devices truly lacked the ability to save the images, as the TSA claimed."
It has always had the ability to save such images; The TSA merely claimed that such a 'diagnostic mode' was not available during normal operation. There is no way for you, the passenger, to know if and when it is in such a diagnostic mode, however. So the TSA's claim is technically true.
But since the radiation levels have also not been published, it's also technically true that the radiation levels are safe, in spite of those cancer clusters showing up, because the TSA says they're safe and therefore there is no need to publish the emission limits.
In other words... all you have to go on is their word in both cases. Which, given as many times as their statements haven't been found to be credible, is no assurance at all.
But only if you are trying to move as much mass as possible. I can guarantee that a car wins if your goal is to move a single person.
Actually, I was rather pointing out that cars are a really bad way of moving people -- mass transit trains are superior. But if you're talking about a single person, apparently a car beats a bike on emissions according to this poster...
The problem is that most of our electricity is produced through coal burning plants. That's a very messy form of production, and many of these plants have been grandfathered in and their owners intentionally avoid upgrading them because of the costs of 'greening up' their emissions. Coal plants belch out more radiation every few months than the entire Three Mile Island disaster. They're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, way more than if the equivalent MW was produced through gas or diesel.
That said, even if we all drove electric cars right now, they'd still only soak up a fraction of the total electricity produced. A single aluminum smelting plant would probably soak as much electricity as a small metropolitan area's rush hour traffic... industrial uses for electricity still far outstrip private use; Even in the transportation industry, more fuel is used for semi trucks, trains, etc., than for your personal car.
And if we really want to talk about the "greenest" form of transportation: Diesel turbine locomotives has every other form of transport beat by a landslide. And they've been "hybrid" since the 70s; Most of them are direct-drive electric motors and use turbines and a large bank of batteries to store juice, yet are big enough to use recombinant turbines, which are very efficient in their own right.
The Tesla car can't compete with the locomotive for environmental friendliness. No car can.
Because money laundering operations, like drugs and other black market trade, is one of the ways terrorists fund their activities. That's the short answer. The longer answer is more complicated. The problem with draconian enforcement options like this is it drives things underground. Organized crime got its start in this country due to the Prohibition; By making a popular activity illegal and driving it underground, they forced people to turn to the underground. Cigarettes and other "sin products" are showing similar trends; Where I live, trucks are now arriving from Canada carrying nothing but cartons of cigarettes because the tax rates have become so high that some people have started turning to the black market to purchase them. The historical 'Boston tea party' incident was another such reaction to this -- while the mantra at the time was 'no taxation without representation,' what it was really about was an overly burdensome tax, and people started seeking out alternatives, as well as publicly venting their frustration. File sharing is another example -- the product has become so grossly-overpriced that it has fueled all kinds of technologies dedicated to getting around what could be termed the 'RIAA/MPAA tax'.
I forget the name, but in Macroeconomics, there's a theory that suggests that whenever you raise the tax rate, you get diminishing returns because more people look for ways to avoid the tax. Beyond a certain point, a higher tax rate actually results in less tax collected. To paraphrase a US Supreme Court Justice, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."
But what does all this have to do with Bitcoin and making it legitimate? When you have currencies not controlled by the government like Bitcoin, taxes aren't being collected. Yes, there may also be criminal activity associated with the currency, but that's only because criminal activity is like water -- it seeks the lowest point, the most efficient path. Government creates resistance in market forces for both legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate goods and services alike. In the 60s, numerous grass-roots efforts were made to create alternative currencies, and all of them were aggressively attacked by the FBI and Secret Service, for the same reasons Bitcoin is being hit today. There is an old saying; Don't believe what they tell you, follow the money.
Now, all that said, these government actions have the effect of driving things underground where they can't be tracked. The problem is though that the guy who wants to buy a dime sack of weed is not really a threat to anyone; but the guy who wants to buy shoulder-mounted missiles and bomb components is. But when you drive the hundreds of thousands of people who just want a dime sack underground, it gives the terrorists a place to hide. That's the problem with the black market: When it targets something that's popular, socially acceptable, or whatever, for political reasons rather than as a reflection of the people's will, you create an area for undesireable elements to flourish.
Take file sharing; All of this encryption and peer to peer networking would never have arisen if the government hadn't started punishing grandmas and college kids for doing it. The response was so disproportionate to the harm to society, and it was against commonly-held values by the general public, that it resulted in an immediate creation of a digital underground. And within a few years, the technologies developed to fend off the government found their way into the hands of "cyber" criminals; witness the rise of advanced persistent threats, botnets, and nation-funded espionage and sabotage, much of which uses the same technology created for a much less nefarious purpose: People just wanted to listen to music. Now our power grid, hospitals, dams, and other industrial infrastructure is at risk.
And now we have a real big problem. The government is correct: Bitcoin does attract the criminal element. In large numbers. What they
Yesterday my webcam suddenly turned on, and turned off after several minutes.
Hey, sorry about that. I was trying to get the girl next door that's leeching off your wifi. She's so cute! But when I turned on the webcam, I knew I had the wrong person. Also, dude, put some pants on. Nobody wants to see that.
Oh, and that stuff about Linux having malware? I'm sure you have nothing to worry about. The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come yet (though they say it'll be this summer for sure!), so you're safe. All the malware me and my friends at the Evil League of Evil make for Linux is designed to worm its way into web servers, ftp, etc., to spread malware to Windows boxes. We aren't interested in your personal life. You're a nerd, running Linux. We haven't found a single case of one of you having a life yet. Hell, you don't even have a decent car, man.
oh oh, gotta go, the webcam is up and... oooooh my....
You're Cube Man #3,948 and every day, for 8 hours straight, you watch these TV feeds. It all looks the same. There is no audio. There is nothing interesting happened. Whenever you see someone wash their hands, you push a button.
Pop quiz: How long before you're bored senseless and start making mistakes... or not caring?
Psychology tells us that repetition and boredom leads to mistakes. This system is a band-aid, it does nothing to address the environmental conditions that are causing the behavior -- those are what need to be tweaked. You cannot make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame. Temporary, yes. But it wears off, and you're left with the situation of having to increase the level of abuse repeatedly, creating a vicious cycle that demoralizes people and makes them resentful.
Is that really the psychological state you want a guy whose job it is to cut people open and prescribe them powerful and potentially deadly medications? Come up with something better, people. This kind of social engineering has never been effective. The airline industry licked this problem a long time ago -- they're called checklists, copilots, training, and redesigning the environment and paying close attention to work loads. And the reason all of that was implimented is because the government got sick of corporations cutting corners on safety, training, and creating cultures of fear.
More people now die in hospitals than plane crashes. I think if government regulation of the industry worked to reduce the risk of flight to such a low level that it has become the safest mode of transport, that we can at least make our hospitals achieve half of that success. 30% is pretty damn pathetic, guys.
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And those that stayed to fight could be correctly described as "militants", no?
The word militant has traditionally meant that the person is part of an organized resistance, not merely stuck in the combat area when the shit hit the fan. We call those people victims or refugees depending on whether they stay or leave.
I'm pretty sure they already hate America. Maybe for good reason, but that's a matter of perspective.
Most of the world hates America, and they have damn good reasons for doing so that aren't about perspective. America has given up caring about collateral damage. Our international ambassador of peace is the Predator drone. "Bringing democracy" has become synonymous with "They're sending in tanks and missiles and shit again." We've unilaterally withdrawn from several key Geneva conventions, we're engaging in mass acts of torture of areas we occupy...
I don't give a flying fuck through a rolling doughnut what religion you are... if some assholes are rolling tanks down your street, dropping bombs on your neighbors, and shooting friends and family... they are not liberating you, it's not democracy, and you got every reason and right to kick the mother fuckers right in the teeth. And I say that as an American of no particular religion. My home is my castle. The founding fathers started on about that whole business, and I think they might have been onto something there.
We're going about things all wrong. People don't just hate America, America hates itself. It's economically depressed, militarily suicidal... and frankly, if America was my aunt, I'd be asking the state to have them committed post-haste, because they're fucking up every good thing that life ever gave them while screaming "I'm sane! No really! I'm the sanest one here!"
We're going about this whole warfare thing all wrong. Congress, please stop sending us to po-dunk desert countries and pissing off the locals... it's not helping us, and it's not helping them. The only people it's helping are the defense industry, which has massive (and now unlimited!) funds going towards our elected officials, which in turn are inking orders for new tanks That the entire joint chiefs of staff said we don't need, we have no possible need for, in fact, if you give them to us we're just going to park them out in the Nevada desert with the 50,000 other tanks that are sitting out there rusting... that we also don't need, from the last time we said we don't need any more fucking tanks... I mean, guys... when your own military is saying "No thanks, we're full" and we're force feeding them more equipment...
Sit back and take the fucking hint, man. We are seriously messed in the head as a country.
I don't think it's quite as reliably accurate as all that.
2006 just called. It says it was reliably accurate then. We've been able to shoot missiles down with other missiles for quite some time now. Do you really think when we can do that at several times the speed of sound we can't reliably do it at less than it?
How does Sun Tzu suggest winning the hearts and minds of people whose devout faith tells them that anyone who doesn't believe the same way should be killed?
"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." -- Sun Tzu
I suppose it applies equally to religions... if you're constantly at war, you weaken yourself to the point you make yourself easy to conquer. And when I say the people, I mean the majority, not the "devout" minority calling the shots. And the majority is going to get tired of being constantly poor, hungry, and underappreciated by the "devout"... war isn't cheap. There is no religion that has lasted long where the majority of its adherents were actively waging war.
And as for DARPA working on "anti-religious extremism technology"... will it also target christian extremists? Will it be able to look past the race and national origin of those it scans? Or will it simply be another technological manifestation of our collective prejudices, which when it's done exterminating the entire human race (fun statistics fact: The number of 'extremists' remains constant no matter how many you kill!), we'll simply throw our arms in the air and say "The computer did it!"... Which is the 21st century equivalent of "It was God's will."
A Christmas tree light timer ??? How does the OP have a job?
You'd be surprised the kind of things that happen in your average large business thanks to HR and bean counters running the show and considering IT a cost center instead of an asset...
I just got done with a contract at a large bank (It's one of the 50 largest companies in the United States)... all their deployments are run off USB drives hung off servers at their retail locations, they have 512kbit backhauls to their corporate locations, run DHCP over the WAN, have no QoS, and I kid you not -- about 5% of the managed switches have been forced to 10mbit half-duplex.
And since they're so security conscious, all the workstations have drives that are encrypted, have antivirus that runs every 4 hours, whether you're using the system or not, a couple other "intrusion detection" apps that also run, sometimes on overlapping schedules, sometimes when trying to patch the operating system... and for the bonus round: An account used for software installation that has full local admin to every workstation... and has a password that's the same as the account name.
-_- Attaching one of those appliance timers to a switch to shut it off at predefined intervals seems so stupidly obvious, but when you realize how stupid the average person is, and then realize that the ones stupider than that work in HR and Accounting, you quickly conclude the same thing the rest of us in this industry have:
Just drink your damn beer and try to drown out the stupid. Thinking about it will only depress you. Trying to do something about it will get you fired. Trust me... there is no faster way to get fired in IT than doing your job well... because you'll get noticed by all the incompetent asshats that HR and Accounting let in, and they'll form an alliance against you to get rid of you. And for the super jaded special bonus round... trying to get shit done will make you realize that the reason you can't get anything done is because everybody has silo'd themselves away with crucial documentation, settings, or knowledge, to assure themselves of continued employment. Start poking around, and they'll feel threatened. When they feel threatened, they'll find some way to go behind your back and make you look bad. Do this enough times and management will consider you an agitator and... ker-chop.
If you love computers at all, for the love of god, don't go into IT. It will shit in your soul.
Yes, it's very brutal, but I still think it's too early to tell whether the drone strikes are a policy that works
When we have technology capable of putting a missile through an attic window, or down a ventilation shaft, the government does have an obligation to limit civilian casualties. This isn't like Dresden, or London during WWII, when bombs were more or less flung out the back door and they hit where they hit... sometimes miles off target. Thus the reason for carpet bombing in the first place -- there was no accuracy: It was Angry Birds with kilotons of ordinance.
But ignoring the technological side of things, thousands (yes, thousands) of years of military history has shown that the key to winning any war is not in having superior technology or weapons, but in winning the hearts and minds of the people. Sun Tzu wrote about this back when the state of the art was long spears and loud screams, and not a damn thing has changed. But you know, fuck Tzu, maybe you need something a little more modern: How about the British/American war of independence? The greatest navy on the planet, best trained military at the time, got its ass handed to it by some upstart guy named Washington whose troops crossed the Potamac river on Christmas while starving to the point they had been eating their own boots only a few days prior. How'd that happen? "SOONER", you say? Okay, the Vietnam war. Now we're the greatest military force on the planet. We get our asses handed to us by a bunch of tunnel-dwelling communists who largely rely on traps made out of sharpened bamboo and guns that are 40 years old. SOONER! Okay, the war in Iraq. Which one? All of them.
So please, don't even try taking the position that making our ambassadors to the world a predator drone is going to end anything but very, very badly for us. Sun Tzu, were he alive right now, would be posting Picard facepalm pics as a reaction to just about every strategic initiative our government has undertaken in the past twenty years. To him, we're push-overs. We are not a threat... all the nukes in the world can't change the simple fact that where we go, we're resented. And it'll be the death of us, perhaps quite literally.
The fight for democracy cannot be won by any technology we now possess. Not drones, not nukes, none of it. There is but one weapon to assure us of victory: People.
'I was disappointed with how little input the artists had into the overall game design,
Most people who program the games are also artists in their own right. Yes, on the Venn Diagram of games, "Good programmer" and "Good artist" is a thin sliver, but this isn't news to anyone -- there's a reason that despite so much money being in entertainment, only a small fraction of games achieve wide-scale success -- you can't force more people into that sweet spot.
That said, the industry would benefit from being able to isolate the programming/engineering aspect of the video part of video games from the creative aspect of its design; But to do that you need tools that are sophisticated, highly adaptable, constantly maintained, robust, and yet capable of being used by a non-programmer. In short, what you need is the gaming equivalent of the Linux Desktop.
The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come for the same reasons the Year of the Artist-friendly Game Development hasn't happened; The outlay of resources, coordination, and project management skills needed to build what would essentially be an operating system for video game design, dwarfs what any amateur community can do; And even professionally, organizing it all under one roof is still prohibitively expensive. It would be on the same scale as the NSA's current data center build project -- it would need hundreds of millions in capital, cooperation from a half-dozen competing industries and technology, and fundamentally goes against the current market paradigm.
Nobody wants this because if it actually succeeded, it would rewrite all the rules of personal computing, and our entire industry. A lot of people would lose a lot of money because they're invested in the current state of affairs... which is keeping supply scarce to keep prices high. Injecting artists who do this for fun, and have plenty of free time and energy to devote to quality games, would utterly destroy the bottom lines of companies like EA Games that depend on locking you in and squeezing every penny out of you in DLC and DRM.
Ah, small footnote: When I say it's literally eating the country, I do mean that. We have tons of people with felonies on their record that can't find work. These are people who could be building bridges, infrastructure, holding real jobs, and making a real contribution. Instead, they're camped out in homeless shelters, under bridges, or dealing drugs. They're hungry, dying, or doing their best to survive at the expense of others. The country is rotting, physically, infrastructurally, architecturally, because of this problem. People are starving, physically, literally, because of this problem. And they're killing each other and themselves over it.
When I say literally, I don't mean it to accent the problem, I mean it really, in reality, in physical actuality, is destroying this country -- both the land and everything physical that's build on it, and the people who live here.
And all your boldface FAIL FAIL FAIL stuff, just goes to show what a smug, ivory tower fuckwhit you are.
False or coerced confessions. Mistaken witnesses. Badly developed forensics. Prejudice. Public pressure to "nail the guy". Perception versus reality. Manufactured evidence. Corrupt police, judges, attorneys, witnesses. People trying to frame others.
The right against self-incrimination, aka the 5th amendment, was intended primarily to protect innocent people who may simply have been in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Our founding fathers recognized that the Just world hypothesis was a thing even back then -- people are all but too happy to crucify someone based on appearances, and police can easily be motivated by public outrage to nail the wrong guys so as to appear to be responsive and competent to public needs.
But even with the 4th and 5th amendment protections, far too many innocent people wind up in jail. The Innocence Project, which specifically helps people accused of rape, has been using DNA evidence to free people for decades. Something like over 15% of the number of people in jail right now for rape or murder have evidence that doesn't just prove them not guilty, but proves them completely innocent sitting on a shelf in a warehouse somewhere, but because they confessed or there was a mistaken witness, poor forensics, etc., they're now rotting in jail while the real criminal is still out there.
This asshole is trying to solve a human behavior problem with logic. And yes, he's an asshole for trying to do it -- "smug, ivory tower fuckwhit" is spot on, because only someone as incepid and stupidly naive as to believe that only the criminals lie or make mistakes would try this line of thinking.
What's wrong with the 5th amendment is that there isn't enough of it. What's wrong with the 4th amendment is there isn't enough of that either. These things are designed to protect innocent people -- reductions in them mean that more innocent people are going to jail, when there are already too many innocent people in jail. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country on the planet. Nicaragua? Podunk shit-hole African warlord country? China? Iraq? Iran? Countries that behead and chop off hands? We have them all beat. And whereas China only charges the family for the cost of the bullet... we're charging the families of those who are in prison their homes, livelihood, etc. -- the high cost of our prison system, which disproportionately targets minorities, is literally eating this country from the inside out.
And then we got fuckwits like this wanting to pour gasoline on the fire and thinking they have an educated position on the matter. It's painful to watch stuff like this... he's obviously trying to think... he's just really, really bad at it.
You're an idiot.
I'm an American. It's expected that we make jokes about other countries that are only sorta funny, but really insulting. If we didn't do it, the British might not have anything to laugh at...
Really guys, I mean, really? The porn in that country consists of a girl showing a little ankle... and your service is named Viber. What did you expect?!
LOL your so funny, cause if the Government wanted to or the phone provider wanted to they couldn't cut of your phone access any other way?
Yeah, lol, so funny... the government doesn't want or need a bunch of different ways to cut off or monitor your access to communications networks. They just need to cut the telegraph wire and they'll be all set. Oh, did I mention it's not the government that is pushing for a kill switch, but the citizens who are sick of watching several hundred dollar devices get stolen and law enforcement's lack of action even when the owner can point to a spot on the map and say the device is within a few feet of the glowing red dot? Sorry... probably shoulda mentioned that.
Theoretically, this should be satisfying and delicious. If you don't consider this exercise superior to drinking an actual beer, you may just not be cut out for pure mathematics --- consider becoming a physicist instead.
You're close. A physicist is the one who brews the beer; An engineer is the one who would drink the beer. Of course, it would only be an approximation to actual beer, in much the same way Budweiser is. And this is why a room full of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers inevitably leads to an article in the police blotter that ends with "...authorities believe liquor may have been involved."
Whats so special about this one - does it have some mathematical relevance?
Yes, it's relevance is that mathematicians don't like empirical evidence that a statement is only 99.9999% accurate; They demand 100%. And in mathematics, you can get 100%.
And just like prime numbers, fermat's last theorem, etc., an enhanced understanding of the relationships laid out by certain formulas can, and often does, lead to an enhanced understanding of the universe -- which for some strange reason, seems to have the quality of being well-described, if not completely described, by the body of knowledge known as mathematics. And by understanding the universe better, we understand ourselves, and can make our lives easier. Creating most of our modern technology requires an understanding of mathematics -- so better math means better technology.
Relevant enough for you, or do I need to resort to a beer analogy? :)
I have simpler explanation that doesn't require a wall of text. They are opening the passenger side, because that is where the glove box is and people typically stash valuables on or under the passengers seat.
Yeah, I'm sure the police have turned to the public because they didn't consider that, and out of all the security footage they have, would be unaccustomed to the typical behavior of car thieves, so when they say something is unusual (like always opening from the passenger door and always wearing a backpack) it's probably some totally obvious reason any anonymous coward sipping on his beer in his mother's basement could crack.
Whereas my answer offers an explanation that wouldn't be obvious to a typical law enforcement officer, provides enough detail for the typical law enforcement officer to follow up on to verify, and a likely profile of the attacker so they can narrow their search. And all before my morning beer in my mother's basement.
Oh, and P.S., if you're trying to catch this crew without the multimillion dollar anti-terrorist equipment or the FCC, you should canvas upscale shopping malls and retail establishments that cater to people who make an excess of $40,000 per year and are aged 45+; Look for lots filled with cars that are 2007 or newer, SUVs, etc. That's the most lucrative target for this type of criminal. Prioritize for surveillance areas with a lot of vehicle traffic, but not a lot of foot traffic. You already know their M.O., and if you're playing by the numbers, you should only have to put about 30 or so places under surveillance. Don't bother putting places already hit under surveillance -- you're dealing with an RF engineer or someone similarly-trained (like an EE), they're going to know enough not to return to the scene of the crime, at least not this early in their 'career'. They may get sloppy, or desperate, later, depending on what the motivation is for these attacks is.
You probably don't know where and when the first attack like this was, but if by some incredible stroke of luck you do, center your search radius on that point. That was the test area. A rig like this would have to be tested, and human nature suggests they'd pick a place not too far from their home to try it out.
You might also want to check for a spike in cable TV, internet, etc., service calls within the same metropolitan areas; It would look not dissimilar to a lightning strike in its pattern, but have a smaller geographical foot print and (obviously) no lightning on the day of the reports. It's very unlikely he used a faraday cage or had the proper equipment to isolate the emissions from other vulnerable devices... he might have even blown out his own cable TV receiver or internet while building it. Creating the equipment to perform an attack like this is relatively straightforward for an RF engineer or EE, but an experienced amateur radio operator or hobbyist could probably also build it; It's just exceedingly unlikely they got it right on the first attempt.
Good luck guys.
Maybe the car is sentient, hates the current own and wants to be stolen.
That, or the guy carrying the backpack in the video has something big enough in it to need a backpack; like a large coil, battery, and circuit board. People seem to forget that every electronic device is both a radio transmitter and receiver. With a powerful enough transmitter, any signal can be induced in any part of a circuit. Of course, physics also demands that any signal induced would be strongest along parallel wires -- power cables, to be specific.
The reason why they're targetting passenger-side doors is probably because the control logic is in the driver side door, and the doors on the right-hand side would have the longest run of cable between the control board and the door's selenoid. of course, you don't run power cable from one side of the car to the other, you run a signal wire; which depending on what kind of logic gate is on the other side, may only require a tenth to a half volt of voltage across it to trigger.
The equipment to generate a short, broadband pulse at a right angle should be sufficient to induce the required voltage, thus causing the door to unlock. Never attack the crypto system when you can go after the control interface. This is, for all intents and purposes, a side channel attack. It would only work on makes and models of cars that have a sufficiently long run of signal cable running along the longitudal axis of the vehicle. The attacker would need to be within about 5 feet to do this, and to not be obvious the car would need to be equipped with a lock that is along the window-frame or make an audible noise during unlock -- otherwise an attacker would have to visually inspect the interior of the car first, and the suspicious behavior of doing so in a parking lot filled with cars could attract law enforcement.
Anyway, that's my suspicion for what's going on. To detect this, you'd need to be able to detect a sudden increase in broadband EMR, and triangulate its location, and the emission would only last a few milliseconds, if that. The police won't have the resources to find this, but the FCC might if the attacks are happening within a single metropolitan area... or if you had one of those multimillion dollar semitruck rigs with millimeter wave x-ray tech like what they use in airports to scan people (and their backpacks) for the tell-tale metal loop, which would be optimally placed around the circumference of the bag.
Mind you, all of this ignores potential 4th amendment issues, along with all manner of other legal obstacles, including the fact that you'd be irradiating innocent people who are also unaware of your activities while in public. Failing that, you're tasked with swarming an area with officers and detaining anyone with a backpack within a certain radius, that radius being defined as the response time between signal acquisition and having boots on the ground.
As to profiling them, you're probably looking for a van without windows, SUV, or similar vehicle where stolen goods can be dropped off and the attacker picked up quickly and removed from the area... statistically, he'll be within a few blocks. The equipment needed to generate a powerful enough EM pulse would take up most of the backpack and be very bulky -- even with high energy density batteries... it probably wouldn't have enough room to store much in the way of stolen items, necessitating a nearby collection point.
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
It doesn't. Any electrical device can emit RF over a broad range of frequencies. Your computer can radiate anywhere from DC to over 5GHz. Your car, especially if it's an electric hybrid, can radiate large amounts of EMR at lower frequencies (under 20 MHz). And thanks to harmonics, signal reflection, and interaction with the environment, even a device specifically designed to minimize EMR can cause significant interference. And then there's the numerous stories from ham radio people that would setup an antenna scaffolding (which is a very noticable structure in a residential area), and not connect it to anything. They would wait up to a year before actually using it, because invariably every single thing that was already pre-existing in the area would be blamed on it, from poor TV reception to baby monitors fuzzing out, etc. The FCC of course investigates these things, and it's become common practice amongst amateur radio operators to simply lead them around to the back of the house and point out the disconnected (inert) antenna, because it's easier than going through the formal process of discovery, and there's a small chance of a false positive and resulting bankrupcy due to fines if that happens.
It sounds like the problem in Austria is that it's version of 'Part 16' is broken if they're threatening fines over a defective beer fridge. Here in the United States, as long as it's been certified by the FCC, as long as the owner uses it as intended and has not modified it, there is no legal liability that I'm aware of. In this case, such an enforcement action by a mobile phone company would require they prove the owner maliciously is trying to cause interference, or has, through modification or non-intended uses of an otherwise certified device, caused interference, before any fines could be levied. The solution then is for the license holder to work with the owner of the device to come up with a solution.
Or put another way: The mobile phone company would buy this gentleman a new beer fridge, and haul away the old one for disposal. But it sounds like, in Australia at least, even innocent people who bought a device commercially and used it as intended can be caught in a legal snare that could ruin their lives. Stay classy, Australia.
Irrelevant history aside, what kind of dodgy does a motor have to be to generate enough RF to degrade a cell system in the course of performing relatively modest compression duties for a small refrigerator?
It doesn't. Any electrical device can emit RF over a broad range of frequencies. Your computer can radiate anywhere from DC to over 5GHz. Your car, especially if it's an electric hybrid, can radiate large amounts of EMR at lower frequencies (not connect it to anything. They would wait up to a year before actually using it, because invariably every single thing that was already pre-existing in the area would be blamed on it, from poor TV reception to baby monitors fuzzing out, etc. The FCC of course investigates these things, and it's become common practice amongst amateur radio operators to simply lead them around to the back of the house and point out the disconnected (inert) antenna, because it's easier than going through the formal process of discovery, and there's a small chance of a false positive and resulting bankrupcy due to fines if that happens.
It sounds like the problem in Austria is that it's version of 'Part 16' is broken if they're threatening fines over a defective beer fridge. Here in the United States, as long as it's been certified by the FCC, as long as the owner uses it as intended and has not modified it, there is no legal liability that I'm aware of. In this case, such an enforcement action by a mobile phone company would require they prove the owner maliciously is trying to cause interference, or has, through modification or non-intended uses of an otherwise certified device, caused interference, before any fines could be levied. The solution then is for the license holder to work with the owner of the device to come up with a solution.
Or put another way: The mobile phone company would buy this gentleman a new beer fridge, and haul away the old one for disposal. But it sounds like, in Australia at least, even innocent people who bought a device commercially and used it as intended can be caught in a legal snare that could ruin their lives. Stay classy, Australia.
It's not Facebook that they're updating from; It's Twitter. Their Facebook account is linked to Twitter.
Anyway, this isn't the first time the servers have been DDoS'd; This happens about every 4 months or so on average. And unfortunately, they've handled it about as well each time as you're seeing now: They tend not to announce the DDoS until hours after the news is all over the forums that people are experiencing mass disconnects and instability. And once the problem has been identified (late), their response is usually to kill all the servers, remove the BGP routing table entry for their network, and wait it out.
They don't have the capability of weathering DDoS attacks; Though they claim otherwise, history tells another story. It has to do with the fact that their game depends on a cluster architecture that is not adaptable to something like Amazon cloud, or any kind of scalability. I don't really want to get into details here because it gets really technical, but basically it comes down to data syncronization within the cluster requiring very low latency between nodes. And that means you can't locate the nodes off-site, and proxying is only of limited utility.
They tried proxying the front-end for accepting connections and authenticating users, because that's what has been targetted in the past and is one of the few components that can be moved. The current DDoS attack though is generating large numbers of connections that look the same as legitimate connections, so the proxies are allowing them. Rather than just throwing as much bandwidth as they can at the network as in the past, they're now crafting their traffic.
I suspect the reason the attack is being launched now is because in a few days they're releasing a new patch of the game which will change the network protocols used by the client... their hack might not work then, so they probably decided to launch it now before it becomes useless. They are hitting people on the weekend because it's when the most users are on... so it's most likely to be noticed.
Critics called this an invasion of privacy and questioned whether the scanning devices truly lacked the ability to save the images, as the TSA claimed."
It has always had the ability to save such images; The TSA merely claimed that such a 'diagnostic mode' was not available during normal operation. There is no way for you, the passenger, to know if and when it is in such a diagnostic mode, however. So the TSA's claim is technically true.
But since the radiation levels have also not been published, it's also technically true that the radiation levels are safe, in spite of those cancer clusters showing up, because the TSA says they're safe and therefore there is no need to publish the emission limits.
In other words... all you have to go on is their word in both cases. Which, given as many times as their statements haven't been found to be credible, is no assurance at all.
But only if you are trying to move as much mass as possible. I can guarantee that a car wins if your goal is to move a single person.
Actually, I was rather pointing out that cars are a really bad way of moving people -- mass transit trains are superior. But if you're talking about a single person, apparently a car beats a bike on emissions according to this poster...
The problem is that most of our electricity is produced through coal burning plants. That's a very messy form of production, and many of these plants have been grandfathered in and their owners intentionally avoid upgrading them because of the costs of 'greening up' their emissions. Coal plants belch out more radiation every few months than the entire Three Mile Island disaster. They're pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, way more than if the equivalent MW was produced through gas or diesel.
That said, even if we all drove electric cars right now, they'd still only soak up a fraction of the total electricity produced. A single aluminum smelting plant would probably soak as much electricity as a small metropolitan area's rush hour traffic... industrial uses for electricity still far outstrip private use; Even in the transportation industry, more fuel is used for semi trucks, trains, etc., than for your personal car.
And if we really want to talk about the "greenest" form of transportation: Diesel turbine locomotives has every other form of transport beat by a landslide. And they've been "hybrid" since the 70s; Most of them are direct-drive electric motors and use turbines and a large bank of batteries to store juice, yet are big enough to use recombinant turbines, which are very efficient in their own right.
The Tesla car can't compete with the locomotive for environmental friendliness. No car can.
"why is legitimacy necessary?"
Because money laundering operations, like drugs and other black market trade, is one of the ways terrorists fund their activities. That's the short answer. The longer answer is more complicated. The problem with draconian enforcement options like this is it drives things underground. Organized crime got its start in this country due to the Prohibition; By making a popular activity illegal and driving it underground, they forced people to turn to the underground. Cigarettes and other "sin products" are showing similar trends; Where I live, trucks are now arriving from Canada carrying nothing but cartons of cigarettes because the tax rates have become so high that some people have started turning to the black market to purchase them. The historical 'Boston tea party' incident was another such reaction to this -- while the mantra at the time was 'no taxation without representation,' what it was really about was an overly burdensome tax, and people started seeking out alternatives, as well as publicly venting their frustration. File sharing is another example -- the product has become so grossly-overpriced that it has fueled all kinds of technologies dedicated to getting around what could be termed the 'RIAA/MPAA tax'.
I forget the name, but in Macroeconomics, there's a theory that suggests that whenever you raise the tax rate, you get diminishing returns because more people look for ways to avoid the tax. Beyond a certain point, a higher tax rate actually results in less tax collected. To paraphrase a US Supreme Court Justice, "The power to tax is the power to destroy."
But what does all this have to do with Bitcoin and making it legitimate? When you have currencies not controlled by the government like Bitcoin, taxes aren't being collected. Yes, there may also be criminal activity associated with the currency, but that's only because criminal activity is like water -- it seeks the lowest point, the most efficient path. Government creates resistance in market forces for both legal and illegal, legitimate and illegitimate goods and services alike. In the 60s, numerous grass-roots efforts were made to create alternative currencies, and all of them were aggressively attacked by the FBI and Secret Service, for the same reasons Bitcoin is being hit today. There is an old saying; Don't believe what they tell you, follow the money.
Now, all that said, these government actions have the effect of driving things underground where they can't be tracked. The problem is though that the guy who wants to buy a dime sack of weed is not really a threat to anyone; but the guy who wants to buy shoulder-mounted missiles and bomb components is. But when you drive the hundreds of thousands of people who just want a dime sack underground, it gives the terrorists a place to hide. That's the problem with the black market: When it targets something that's popular, socially acceptable, or whatever, for political reasons rather than as a reflection of the people's will, you create an area for undesireable elements to flourish.
Take file sharing; All of this encryption and peer to peer networking would never have arisen if the government hadn't started punishing grandmas and college kids for doing it. The response was so disproportionate to the harm to society, and it was against commonly-held values by the general public, that it resulted in an immediate creation of a digital underground. And within a few years, the technologies developed to fend off the government found their way into the hands of "cyber" criminals; witness the rise of advanced persistent threats, botnets, and nation-funded espionage and sabotage, much of which uses the same technology created for a much less nefarious purpose: People just wanted to listen to music. Now our power grid, hospitals, dams, and other industrial infrastructure is at risk.
And now we have a real big problem. The government is correct: Bitcoin does attract the criminal element. In large numbers. What they
Yesterday my webcam suddenly turned on, and turned off after several minutes.
Hey, sorry about that. I was trying to get the girl next door that's leeching off your wifi. She's so cute! But when I turned on the webcam, I knew I had the wrong person. Also, dude, put some pants on. Nobody wants to see that.
Oh, and that stuff about Linux having malware? I'm sure you have nothing to worry about. The Year of the Linux Desktop hasn't come yet (though they say it'll be this summer for sure!), so you're safe. All the malware me and my friends at the Evil League of Evil make for Linux is designed to worm its way into web servers, ftp, etc., to spread malware to Windows boxes. We aren't interested in your personal life. You're a nerd, running Linux. We haven't found a single case of one of you having a life yet. Hell, you don't even have a decent car, man.
oh oh, gotta go, the webcam is up and... oooooh my....
You're Cube Man #3,948 and every day, for 8 hours straight, you watch these TV feeds. It all looks the same. There is no audio. There is nothing interesting happened. Whenever you see someone wash their hands, you push a button.
Pop quiz: How long before you're bored senseless and start making mistakes... or not caring?
Psychology tells us that repetition and boredom leads to mistakes. This system is a band-aid, it does nothing to address the environmental conditions that are causing the behavior -- those are what need to be tweaked. You cannot make lasting changes to a person's behavior through threats, manipulation, guilt, and shame. Temporary, yes. But it wears off, and you're left with the situation of having to increase the level of abuse repeatedly, creating a vicious cycle that demoralizes people and makes them resentful.
Is that really the psychological state you want a guy whose job it is to cut people open and prescribe them powerful and potentially deadly medications? Come up with something better, people. This kind of social engineering has never been effective. The airline industry licked this problem a long time ago -- they're called checklists, copilots, training, and redesigning the environment and paying close attention to work loads. And the reason all of that was implimented is because the government got sick of corporations cutting corners on safety, training, and creating cultures of fear.
More people now die in hospitals than plane crashes. I think if government regulation of the industry worked to reduce the risk of flight to such a low level that it has become the safest mode of transport, that we can at least make our hospitals achieve half of that success. 30% is pretty damn pathetic, guys.