The A-10 is a CAS plane, and it was very much designed for use against "an adversary with an actual air defense system" aka the Soviet Union, who had the most extensive air defense system in the world at the time it was designed. There was no need to redesign or replace it, because it was never intended to penetrate that air defense network - it's a front line ground attack plane, not a deep strike bomber. It's certainly expected to take a lot of fire, whether from mobile AAA or from SAMs, but that's partly why it's so armored and survivable.
Ironically, one of the laws from the early congresses was about requiring every military aged male to purchase and maintain a rifle, for the purpose of national defense. Can you imagine how many heads would explode on both sides of the political aisle if something like that were put forward now?
Depends how someone got them. If you manage to clean-room reverse engineer the formula for Coca-cola, then you're legally in the clear (at least as it currently stands). If however you steal that formula, then it's understandable that perhaps different rules should apply.
The tricky thing, from what it sounds like to me at a glance, is the ex parte bit, as the law professors cite above. To use the Coca-cola example, the question becomes what redress does Pepsi have if Coca-cola accuses them of stealing the formula and asks the government to seize all Pepsi shipments (or vice versa).
My guess is that this is likely aimed mostly at China, though I have to wonder if Microsoft doesn't have certain competitors in mind.
Note, of course, that none of that means the concept can't or won't be abused - just to try and clarify some of the general differences in the concept. (Also, Not a Lawyer, etc.)
Trade secrets are a little different than patents or copyrights. A trade secret is something like the full list of KFC's original 11 herbs and spices, or the formula for transparent aluminum.
To give an example of the difference between patents, copyright, and trade secrets, etc, let's consider Coca-cola:
The Coca-cola name and logo are trademarks.
If Coca-cola were to come up with a new method of putting carbonation in soft drinks, they might file a patent for that process.
If Coca-cola came up with song as an advertising jingle, they would own the copyright to that song.
And the (secret) formula for Coca-cola is a trade secret.
But if you play the WiFi signals backwards while playing D&D over the internet, it clearly spells out satanic messages. My friends used to play until their youth pastor showed them that the signals contained hexadecimal (clearly a satanic term, linked to hexagrams) messages containing words like Dead, Feed, and Beef, among all the numbers, which included at least one instance that clearly read AC132516, which seems innocuous until you realize that 1+3+2=6 and 5+1 =6, so it really reads AC666 or Anti-Christ 666!
It's actually similar to the way they treat regular allergies. By starting with a minute dose, and slowly increasing it over time, they help the patient build up a tolerance to whatever substance they're allergic to (pollen, grass, animal dander, etc). It's usually administered by a shot though, at a particular point in the arm, in case of an adverse reaction - swelling on your arm is a lot less dangerous than internal swelling of your throat.
Not that it matters of course, since he'd be selling snake oil to delusional people, but...
Correct - but lots of (delusional) people who believe they have Wi-Fi or other Electromagnetic spectrum allergies have flocked there as a result, regardless of the real reason for it.
My guess is no - much as you'd expect to sign an NDA covering anything you found in a commercial penetration test/vulnerability scan etc, the Government would likely mark the results as Protected Critical Infrastructure Information, which is not subject to FOIA, though it's not considered "classified" in the traditional sense. I believe the idea is that without that protection, and reassurance that their competitors won't be FOIA'ing it, nevermind regulatory agencies, the companies would never let DHS look at their stuff in the first place, and that it's better to be able to try and improve the security than not.
Oh, but dealing with misbehaving dice is part of the fun of being a gamer.
I remember one wargames tournament where one of the players got so fed up, he walked outside and threw his dice into the river next to the convention hotel.
But the best has to be one of my friends in college, who would place all of his other dice in a semi circle around the offending die, before he poured lighter fluid on it and melted it down "as an example to the others".
One of the problems that the US-CERT/ICS-CERT/etc folks at DHS had (aside from the fact that they were/are forced to be part of DHS) was that while they could tell various Federal agencies that their systems had more holes than swiss cheese, what they didn't have was the authority to tell other federal agencies that they had to fix it, or else. I believe there's been a push to try and fix that problem, though I'm not aware of how far it's come, and it certainly wasn't in time for OPM.
I used to work there, in fact (at least until I found something in the private sector that was better for my sanity/soul/salary*). While I'm not familiar with anything to do with OPM in specific, that sort of scenario popped up all the time. It works much the same in the private sector, in that you can be the best pentester in the world, but if the customer you ran it for doesn't intend to spend the money fixing the holes you pointed out, or drags their feet in doing so, they're still going to get owned despite your best efforts.
As to whether DHS is competent - I knew a lot of really good people (and some less so) when I was there. I know many that went on to work at better jobs doing more interesting things in the private sector, for better pay, so the best of the best aren't going to stick around, but that doesn't mean there aren't competent people there. ICS-CERT (the group focused on critical infrastructure/control systems/etc) in particular always seemed pretty competent to me, and are probably about as different from the usual impression of DHS as you'd expect. To give an example, they showed up at Defcon this past year with an awesome hands-on setup, including an entire mock plant setup with all the controllers that people were free to plug in to and go nuts. (Granted, they never mentioned the fact that they were DHS, but then, would you?)
So certainly I wouldn't expect DHS to be outdoing the best of the best when it comes to penetration testing, but for that municipal water plant in West Nowhere, Texas, that doesn't have the money to hire the best, it's a much better solution than just not doing anything.
We're never going to be able to completely put the genie back in the bottle short of throwing away all of our phones and computers. The communications, the data, it's out there. Furthermore, just like there are times we want the FBI/Police etc to get a wiretap, there are times we'd want them to be able to monitor someone. That's never been the concern - it's always been about accountability and oversight.
The government, be it FBI/DOJ or NSA/CIA/etc, shouldn't have the power to freely go demanding, let alone collect and store, all of this stuff without some kind of external oversight, just like they've been prevented from freely coming into your house and going through your personal papers. If they really have cause to do so, they can go to a judge and get a warrant. That won't prevent every abuse, sure, but it at least provides a paper trail and accountability for later, as well as the means to challenge that original action if the FBI/etc goes overboard.
This. I've never understood why everyone wants the phones to keep getting lighter and thinner, with things like a glass back, only to then have to put them in a giant bulky plastic case to protect them, entirely defeating the purpose. People (mostly tech journalists) complained about how the Samsung S3/S4 felt with its plastic back, but you could actually get away without putting it in a case, which seems to be true of fewer and fewer phones these days (certainly not the iPhones or the S6).
It strikes me somewhat as the discovery of the planets, including Neptune, and the theoretical, but ultimately nonexistent, planet Vulcan.
The planet Neptune was identified not by visual observation, but by mathematical calculation based on errors in the predicted orbit of Uranus. Something was causing changes in the orbit Uranus should have taken according to the Newtonian model, and what was missing was another planet. They then were able to predict where it would be, and later observations by telescope confirmed that.
Thus when Mercury's orbit could not be accurately matched to the Newtonian model, one of those same 19th century astronomers theorized that there must be another planet between Mercury and the Sun, which was dubbed "Vulcan," that would account for the missing aspects of the equation. It was only much later that Einstein's theory of relativity correctly and accurately accounted for the inconsistencies without any hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun.
All of this isn't to say that "Dark Matter" is wrong or inaccurate, more just to illustrate how things operate with a known scientific model. If you have a missing variable, it may mean that there's something else you're not seeing through other means involved, or it may mean your model is wrong. The way you test that though is to come up with, and test/observe for, those things.
Is there really any reason to buy a "Smart" TV, versus a standalone display?
Even things like this aside, it seems like the TV equivalent of having an "all in one" model for your desktop, where you're pretty much stuck with replacing the whole thing if you want to do anything more than swap a hard drive or such. It also seems like buying a separate device, whether you're using a Roku or AppleTV or XBoxOne/PS4, and then hooking it to a giant monitor, is by far the better option.
Oh, I'm pretty sure he does use it for work (even if not in a critical capacity), he just doesn't realize it because he takes it for granted. He thinks it's something frivolous for entertainment, and equates it to TV/Video Game privileges for his kid. He probably wouldn't understand just how huge of an impact it would have on his and his family's lives if it was suddenly cut off due to spurious copyright claims - or even non-spurious.
Let's say his kid has been torrenting movies - what happens then? Apparently he seems to think that the entire household should be immediately cut off, or that maybe **AA lawyers ought to be able to directly extort money from him claiming that he has been torrenting porn or such.
Turkey doesn't like ISIS - but Turkey hates the Kurds more, and views them as the real/long-term enemy or problem. Turkey is certainly not sympatico with the US (nevermind Russia) on taking out ISIS, especially not if the Kurds in Iraq are empowered by it.
In a way, it's very similar to the situation in Afghanistan with respect to the attitude and interests of Pakistan. Their interests are not our own, and they don't consider the Taliban to be the "real problem" in the region. Granted, Turkey is not supporting ISIS the way some elements in Pakistan prop up the Taliban/AQ, but they're certainly in no rush to bring ISIS down.
First, I don't work at Sony, nor did I in the past.
I do know that they ramped up and hired a bunch of people to build a CIRT after the PSN hack. The rumor that I heard was that those guys wound up in the wonderful situation of a CIRT, working for Corporate (Big Sony) that is responsible for everything, but doesn't have the power to necessarily tell the individual subsidiaries (like Sony Pictures) what to do, let alone do something like threaten to cut off network access unless issues are addressed.
So you could well wind up with a shitshow where one subsidiary is running a flat network, has executives who don't care, and tell IT to just "make it work" all the while cutting costs to the bone (that part about having Bain come in, in TFA, especially)? Yeah, I could easily envision that as having been the case, especially since I don't believe the hack affected anyone else in Sony, only the Sony Pictures unit. Not saying that's how it went, but I would not be surprised in the slightest.
Slashdot Mirror
""It's like a $148 million garbage disposal for money."
That's not entirely accurate. It's more like a giant funnel for directing that money to the corporate profits of Lockheed-Martin.
The A-10 is a CAS plane, and it was very much designed for use against "an adversary with an actual air defense system" aka the Soviet Union, who had the most extensive air defense system in the world at the time it was designed. There was no need to redesign or replace it, because it was never intended to penetrate that air defense network - it's a front line ground attack plane, not a deep strike bomber. It's certainly expected to take a lot of fire, whether from mobile AAA or from SAMs, but that's partly why it's so armored and survivable.
Only if you want it to come with the special FBI Party Van add-on package.
Ironically, one of the laws from the early congresses was about requiring every military aged male to purchase and maintain a rifle, for the purpose of national defense. Can you imagine how many heads would explode on both sides of the political aisle if something like that were put forward now?
Depends how someone got them. If you manage to clean-room reverse engineer the formula for Coca-cola, then you're legally in the clear (at least as it currently stands). If however you steal that formula, then it's understandable that perhaps different rules should apply.
The tricky thing, from what it sounds like to me at a glance, is the ex parte bit, as the law professors cite above. To use the Coca-cola example, the question becomes what redress does Pepsi have if Coca-cola accuses them of stealing the formula and asks the government to seize all Pepsi shipments (or vice versa).
My guess is that this is likely aimed mostly at China, though I have to wonder if Microsoft doesn't have certain competitors in mind.
Note, of course, that none of that means the concept can't or won't be abused - just to try and clarify some of the general differences in the concept. (Also, Not a Lawyer, etc.)
Trade secrets are a little different than patents or copyrights. A trade secret is something like the full list of KFC's original 11 herbs and spices, or the formula for transparent aluminum. To give an example of the difference between patents, copyright, and trade secrets, etc, let's consider Coca-cola:
The Coca-cola name and logo are trademarks.
If Coca-cola were to come up with a new method of putting carbonation in soft drinks, they might file a patent for that process.
If Coca-cola came up with song as an advertising jingle, they would own the copyright to that song.
And the (secret) formula for Coca-cola is a trade secret.
I thought that was called K Street.
Perhaps they make distinctions between professional and amateur league corruption?
But if you play the WiFi signals backwards while playing D&D over the internet, it clearly spells out satanic messages. My friends used to play until their youth pastor showed them that the signals contained hexadecimal (clearly a satanic term, linked to hexagrams) messages containing words like Dead, Feed, and Beef, among all the numbers, which included at least one instance that clearly read AC132516, which seems innocuous until you realize that 1+3+2=6 and 5+1 =6, so it really reads AC666 or Anti-Christ 666!
(/sarc)
It's actually similar to the way they treat regular allergies. By starting with a minute dose, and slowly increasing it over time, they help the patient build up a tolerance to whatever substance they're allergic to (pollen, grass, animal dander, etc). It's usually administered by a shot though, at a particular point in the arm, in case of an adverse reaction - swelling on your arm is a lot less dangerous than internal swelling of your throat.
Not that it matters of course, since he'd be selling snake oil to delusional people, but...
Correct - but lots of (delusional) people who believe they have Wi-Fi or other Electromagnetic spectrum allergies have flocked there as a result, regardless of the real reason for it.
My guess is no - much as you'd expect to sign an NDA covering anything you found in a commercial penetration test/vulnerability scan etc, the Government would likely mark the results as Protected Critical Infrastructure Information, which is not subject to FOIA, though it's not considered "classified" in the traditional sense. I believe the idea is that without that protection, and reassurance that their competitors won't be FOIA'ing it, nevermind regulatory agencies, the companies would never let DHS look at their stuff in the first place, and that it's better to be able to try and improve the security than not.
Oh, but dealing with misbehaving dice is part of the fun of being a gamer.
I remember one wargames tournament where one of the players got so fed up, he walked outside and threw his dice into the river next to the convention hotel.
But the best has to be one of my friends in college, who would place all of his other dice in a semi circle around the offending die, before he poured lighter fluid on it and melted it down "as an example to the others".
One of the problems that the US-CERT/ICS-CERT/etc folks at DHS had (aside from the fact that they were/are forced to be part of DHS) was that while they could tell various Federal agencies that their systems had more holes than swiss cheese, what they didn't have was the authority to tell other federal agencies that they had to fix it, or else. I believe there's been a push to try and fix that problem, though I'm not aware of how far it's come, and it certainly wasn't in time for OPM.
I used to work there, in fact (at least until I found something in the private sector that was better for my sanity/soul/salary*). While I'm not familiar with anything to do with OPM in specific, that sort of scenario popped up all the time. It works much the same in the private sector, in that you can be the best pentester in the world, but if the customer you ran it for doesn't intend to spend the money fixing the holes you pointed out, or drags their feet in doing so, they're still going to get owned despite your best efforts.
As to whether DHS is competent - I knew a lot of really good people (and some less so) when I was there. I know many that went on to work at better jobs doing more interesting things in the private sector, for better pay, so the best of the best aren't going to stick around, but that doesn't mean there aren't competent people there. ICS-CERT (the group focused on critical infrastructure/control systems/etc) in particular always seemed pretty competent to me, and are probably about as different from the usual impression of DHS as you'd expect. To give an example, they showed up at Defcon this past year with an awesome hands-on setup, including an entire mock plant setup with all the controllers that people were free to plug in to and go nuts. (Granted, they never mentioned the fact that they were DHS, but then, would you?)
So certainly I wouldn't expect DHS to be outdoing the best of the best when it comes to penetration testing, but for that municipal water plant in West Nowhere, Texas, that doesn't have the money to hire the best, it's a much better solution than just not doing anything.
This is it exactly.
We're never going to be able to completely put the genie back in the bottle short of throwing away all of our phones and computers. The communications, the data, it's out there. Furthermore, just like there are times we want the FBI/Police etc to get a wiretap, there are times we'd want them to be able to monitor someone. That's never been the concern - it's always been about accountability and oversight.
The government, be it FBI/DOJ or NSA/CIA/etc, shouldn't have the power to freely go demanding, let alone collect and store, all of this stuff without some kind of external oversight, just like they've been prevented from freely coming into your house and going through your personal papers. If they really have cause to do so, they can go to a judge and get a warrant. That won't prevent every abuse, sure, but it at least provides a paper trail and accountability for later, as well as the means to challenge that original action if the FBI/etc goes overboard.
This. I've never understood why everyone wants the phones to keep getting lighter and thinner, with things like a glass back, only to then have to put them in a giant bulky plastic case to protect them, entirely defeating the purpose. People (mostly tech journalists) complained about how the Samsung S3/S4 felt with its plastic back, but you could actually get away without putting it in a case, which seems to be true of fewer and fewer phones these days (certainly not the iPhones or the S6).
Since when have any of those people really cared about what the Constitution says?
It strikes me somewhat as the discovery of the planets, including Neptune, and the theoretical, but ultimately nonexistent, planet Vulcan.
The planet Neptune was identified not by visual observation, but by mathematical calculation based on errors in the predicted orbit of Uranus. Something was causing changes in the orbit Uranus should have taken according to the Newtonian model, and what was missing was another planet. They then were able to predict where it would be, and later observations by telescope confirmed that.
Thus when Mercury's orbit could not be accurately matched to the Newtonian model, one of those same 19th century astronomers theorized that there must be another planet between Mercury and the Sun, which was dubbed "Vulcan," that would account for the missing aspects of the equation. It was only much later that Einstein's theory of relativity correctly and accurately accounted for the inconsistencies without any hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun.
All of this isn't to say that "Dark Matter" is wrong or inaccurate, more just to illustrate how things operate with a known scientific model. If you have a missing variable, it may mean that there's something else you're not seeing through other means involved, or it may mean your model is wrong. The way you test that though is to come up with, and test/observe for, those things.
Is there really any reason to buy a "Smart" TV, versus a standalone display?
Even things like this aside, it seems like the TV equivalent of having an "all in one" model for your desktop, where you're pretty much stuck with replacing the whole thing if you want to do anything more than swap a hard drive or such. It also seems like buying a separate device, whether you're using a Roku or AppleTV or XBoxOne/PS4, and then hooking it to a giant monitor, is by far the better option.
Oh, I'm pretty sure he does use it for work (even if not in a critical capacity), he just doesn't realize it because he takes it for granted. He thinks it's something frivolous for entertainment, and equates it to TV/Video Game privileges for his kid. He probably wouldn't understand just how huge of an impact it would have on his and his family's lives if it was suddenly cut off due to spurious copyright claims - or even non-spurious.
Let's say his kid has been torrenting movies - what happens then? Apparently he seems to think that the entire household should be immediately cut off, or that maybe **AA lawyers ought to be able to directly extort money from him claiming that he has been torrenting porn or such.
I wonder just how much he'd be able to do if he suddenly found himself with no internet access, thanks to accusations of piracy.
No, if you want to bring down a jet, everyone knows you should install Windows on it.
Turkey doesn't like ISIS - but Turkey hates the Kurds more, and views them as the real/long-term enemy or problem. Turkey is certainly not sympatico with the US (nevermind Russia) on taking out ISIS, especially not if the Kurds in Iraq are empowered by it.
In a way, it's very similar to the situation in Afghanistan with respect to the attitude and interests of Pakistan. Their interests are not our own, and they don't consider the Taliban to be the "real problem" in the region. Granted, Turkey is not supporting ISIS the way some elements in Pakistan prop up the Taliban/AQ, but they're certainly in no rush to bring ISIS down.
First, I don't work at Sony, nor did I in the past.
I do know that they ramped up and hired a bunch of people to build a CIRT after the PSN hack. The rumor that I heard was that those guys wound up in the wonderful situation of a CIRT, working for Corporate (Big Sony) that is responsible for everything, but doesn't have the power to necessarily tell the individual subsidiaries (like Sony Pictures) what to do, let alone do something like threaten to cut off network access unless issues are addressed.
So you could well wind up with a shitshow where one subsidiary is running a flat network, has executives who don't care, and tell IT to just "make it work" all the while cutting costs to the bone (that part about having Bain come in, in TFA, especially)? Yeah, I could easily envision that as having been the case, especially since I don't believe the hack affected anyone else in Sony, only the Sony Pictures unit. Not saying that's how it went, but I would not be surprised in the slightest.