I think a lot of that comes down to how you present something. The kid who got punished for making a gun out of his fingers also told the other student "you're dead". Seems like play to me, but in a technical sense you could probably view that as a threat of violence.
If you are like "Hey look at my bomb" then it doesn't matter if it's a suitcase with leds or a cheap nokia phone with a hotdog taped to it. But that doesn't mean anyone taking a hot dog and pay-as-you-go phone to school is making a bomb threat. If he's running round with his clock threatening to blow up the school then that's one thing, but I haven't seen much evidence.
Sure he's playing into paranoia but I don't think that'd be there if he were white.
> Not quite. He was perceived as an Arab with a device that could have been a hoax bomb or a real bomb. Would a White or Latino be treated the same had they brought in a suspicious device?
You mean to tell me that teachers and administrators looked at this, said "well it looks like a bomb to me" and then sat there with him until the police arrived?! If they thought there was even a 1% that this was real bomb then they absolutely should have evacuated the school and brought in the bomb squad.
The plaintiff will make certain claims and the defendant will be pretty much forced to refute them. The plaintiff will claim that "you did this because I'm a Muslim" and as far as I can tell the district has two broad defense arguments.
* We thought this was a credible threat to safety * We treat all incidents like this and any time we aren't satisfied with the safety of an electronic project we call the police
The argument of "you're just doing this because you want to make us look bad" seems unlikely to fly in court.
I'll admit I don't know how big the school district is, but i know i've brought random electronic projects into school from time to time. I'd honestly have expected a good chunk of slashdot would concur with me on that stuff. I wasn't the only person in my school that was bringing in stuff like that and i was in a school district of about 2000 students.
The worst I ever experienced was "put that thing away or i'll confiscate it". If this were happening in my former school district (and i wasn't 20 years out of high school) then you can bet i'd be there pointing out how my experiences differed.
Now that's something I'd argue you should be disciplined for. I assumed he'd stripped the transformer and was running it off the backup battery.
Taking the transformer out of the double insulated case it was designed to be in and plugging it into the wall is potentially dangerous and should be grounds for removing him from class.
But the question still remains. If a white kid was fucking around sticking stuff in a power outlet, would the police be called? Again the school district surely has other examples they can point to.
If everyone is treated the same way for bringing a toy gun to class then it's not discriminatory If everyone is treated the same way for fucking around with their electronics project in class then it's not discriminatory. If everyone is treated the same way for wearing a miniskirt to class then it's not discriminatory.
The onus is on the school district to show that they always act this way.
But when it comes to toy guns the reaction (or overreaction) is at least consistent. I don't think many school districts would have a problem finding an example of when "Brad" took a toy gun to school and showing that his punishment was comparable to "Mohammed".
All the school district really has to do is point to other situations where students have brought in electronic projects and show they were treated similarly. If they can do that then they are surely off the hook.
I've personally taken electronic projects which have 7-seg red leds to school and i once built a circuit which used some kind of oscillator/transformer/rectifier combination to charge a capacitor up to some kind of high voltage so i could shock people with it. I find it hard to believe a school district of this size won't have plenty other examples of that, and all they need to show is a consistent overreaction.
Since when does the quality of his work have anything to do with the discriminatory behavior?
Sure it was a shit science project, but the question is: "would the school district have behaved the same way if he was white?". If they claim they weren't discriminating then they can surely find examples of other students who've been subjected to the same scrutiny for their projects.
I brought things at least that bad to school, and the worst i got was told to not be screwing with them during class.
I believe that he is, but i'm not sure the school has the right to demand to know the religion of students.
Honestly it's likely because he had brownish skin. I wouldn't by surprised if a Christian from the middle east would face much the same discrimination.
I assume there's some desire to make it punitive. He was only treated that way because he was perceived to be a Muslim - I bet the school district can't point to a bunch of other cases where white kids have brought in electronics projects and had the police called. I imagine i'm not alone in the slashdot demographic as someone who brought random electronics to school, yet I never got anywhere close to arrest because of it.
I don't think it matters if the whole thing was orchestrated to show the school district was discriminatory. It appears that they are, and they should have to pay the price of that.
Sure but that would only require 100lbs of annual food waste to feed to insects. I can probably come up with that out of my kitchen without too much trouble. They'll also eat things like decaying leaves & grass which are in plentiful supply right now.
Obviously it's not a perfectly closed system, but you won't need to go buy honeycrisp apples at wholefoods to keep them happy
I don't doubt that there are devices that do that, but my macbook pro draws something like 1-2W while sleeping (assuming it's done charging). I don't think my fridge even draws 20W when it's idling
I do a fair bit of home gardening, but producing say 50 lbs of beans a year takes a fair amount of space and effort. If you can really get that level of production out of a unit that small then it gives gardening a good run for its money. I don't think you could match the reported production here in a condo or apartment if you were to grow plants.
I no longer have the damaged machine, but i'm pretty sure there wasn't a php file available called wp-content/include.php but mod_rewrite ends up catching that and routing the request into the main wordpress scirpt.
Still it's good subterfuge, and my first instinct was to discount it.
Wish I had that post body logged somewhere, would be really interested to see what came in
I had a server hit by this a few weeks ago. Got the same ransom message shown there. I'm fairly sure it didn't require root, in fact it only encrypted files that were writable by www-data and not the handful in/var/www that were owned by root. The README_FOR_DECRYPT.txt file that was left in every directory was also owned by www-data.
I'm not sure what was posted in, but the infection mechanism appears to be this single request
I'm still not really sure how that caused an infection, but i'm guessing it exploited something in the wordpress 404 handler? I don't see any other request from that IP and the server load spiked right after that as the files starting being encrypted.
I thought it was great and would love to do it again. Certainly a lot bumpier than the turbo jet that runs between Hong Kong and Macau - that just felt like a really fast ferry.
Talk about missing the root cause. Ad blockers are only used because publishers have gone so ridiculously over the top in creating annoying, high bandwidth, high cpu-usage ads.
While there are a few alternatives to RSA (though they share some mathematical similarity) i'm not aware of any non-quantum replacement for DH. That obviously makes it a natural candidate for any kind of focussed attack.
I honestly had no idea that most implementations fixed p. It seems obvious in retrospect that this could lead to the creation of a giant LUT
Like who? MIT Is the only school i see that still has a class A
The most obvious people who should be giving them up are
a) HP - who have TWO class As and I believe around 7 employees. b) Apple - have a class A and as far as I know don't run any significant external networking. c) IBM - kinda like apple. they did have a networking business at one point but I believe that's sold to AT&T now d) Halibutron - just why? e) Prudential Insurance - wtf? in what possible world do they need 16 million external addresses?
My personal experiences with Uber when I was in Salt Lake for a convention were terrible. There was so much demand that they were sucking in drivers from other parts of Utah who didn't know the city well. My hotel was on a weird frontage road thing that nav didn't get and every time an uber drive appeared they'd end up circling the hotel and coming in from the other side. Similarly downtown salt lake has two Marriotts (the Downtown Marriott and the City Center Marriott) - I've never had a cab driver mix those up, but I've had an uber driver stubbornly insist that I was at the hotel I wanted despite the nav showing he was a few blocks away.
I did have a couple of excellent uber drivers who'd grown up in the city and had no trouble navigating, but uber does a terrible job of separating those from the crap ones. Their weird arms-length sub-contractor situation really hinders their ability to train drivers and make sure they are up to the right standards. If they are actually required to employ everyone then I think it'll be a hell of a lot better. Frankly I went back to taking regular cabs for every situation but 2am coming back from a bar, it was just easier and more predictable.
Similarly I imagine uber will struggle in places like London where cab services are excellent. The real solution to cities who want rid of uber is to make their own cab services be excellent.
Considering we put our first lander on Mars in 75, the first 50 years of exploration will be up in 2025. I don't think it's too unreasonable to be talking about it now.
I never made a claim about a "phone being only $10 a month". Comcast repeatedly try to sell me one and it's far more expensive than that.
What I said was that $10 a month internet service is good enough to run skype or google voice and can be used as a phone number for things like job applications.
As best I can tell in CO, subsidized phone service is about $21 + taxes and subsidized internet service is $10 + taxes. Obviously if you can't afford a box of mac & cheese then you'll have neither one. However if you could afford phone service then you could free up $11/month to put towards buying a $150 computer.
I'm asking you to defend your position that phone service is a necessity but internet service is a luxury and you resort to pointing out that some of the poor can't afford a single meal. However the poverty line for a family with two kids is around $24k/yr, there are a lot of people who are poor but who can absolutely afford the prices i'm talking of.
> It is mathematically impossible for your 10.00/month broadband cost to be cheaper for a phone, than a standard phone.
As best I can tell a phone line is still >$20/month even with subsidies for low income. I'm not sure how you define mathematical possibility, but I'd certainly hold broadband as much more valuable than pots.
You can use cable just fine with a basic computer from 5 years ago. Sure you won't be streaming high def video, but that's not really the point here. I pretty much give away older computers, but for my convenience I really only do that to people who have craigslist available, which I suppose creates a tough catch-22.
It's not going to be easy. I can pick up a $3k macbook and expect it to work perfectly, but it can absolutely be done. Plus of course once you have the internet you have access to things like craigslist which are really useful when you are broke.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a lot of that comes down to how you present something. The kid who got punished for making a gun out of his fingers also told the other student "you're dead". Seems like play to me, but in a technical sense you could probably view that as a threat of violence.
If you are like "Hey look at my bomb" then it doesn't matter if it's a suitcase with leds or a cheap nokia phone with a hotdog taped to it. But that doesn't mean anyone taking a hot dog and pay-as-you-go phone to school is making a bomb threat. If he's running round with his clock threatening to blow up the school then that's one thing, but I haven't seen much evidence.
Sure he's playing into paranoia but I don't think that'd be there if he were white.
> Not quite. He was perceived as an Arab with a device that could have been a hoax bomb or a real bomb. Would a White or Latino be treated the same had they brought in a suspicious device?
You mean to tell me that teachers and administrators looked at this, said "well it looks like a bomb to me" and then sat there with him until the police arrived?! If they thought there was even a 1% that this was real bomb then they absolutely should have evacuated the school and brought in the bomb squad.
They knew fine well it wasn't a bomb.
Well except this is a civil case.
The plaintiff will make certain claims and the defendant will be pretty much forced to refute them. The plaintiff will claim that "you did this because I'm a Muslim" and as far as I can tell the district has two broad defense arguments.
* We thought this was a credible threat to safety
* We treat all incidents like this and any time we aren't satisfied with the safety of an electronic project we call the police
The argument of "you're just doing this because you want to make us look bad" seems unlikely to fly in court.
I'll admit I don't know how big the school district is, but i know i've brought random electronic projects into school from time to time. I'd honestly have expected a good chunk of slashdot would concur with me on that stuff. I wasn't the only person in my school that was bringing in stuff like that and i was in a school district of about 2000 students.
The worst I ever experienced was "put that thing away or i'll confiscate it". If this were happening in my former school district (and i wasn't 20 years out of high school) then you can bet i'd be there pointing out how my experiences differed.
Now that's something I'd argue you should be disciplined for. I assumed he'd stripped the transformer and was running it off the backup battery.
Taking the transformer out of the double insulated case it was designed to be in and plugging it into the wall is potentially dangerous and should be grounds for removing him from class.
But the question still remains. If a white kid was fucking around sticking stuff in a power outlet, would the police be called? Again the school district surely has other examples they can point to.
Isn't that the very nature of it?
If everyone is treated the same way for bringing a toy gun to class then it's not discriminatory
If everyone is treated the same way for fucking around with their electronics project in class then it's not discriminatory.
If everyone is treated the same way for wearing a miniskirt to class then it's not discriminatory.
The onus is on the school district to show that they always act this way.
But when it comes to toy guns the reaction (or overreaction) is at least consistent. I don't think many school districts would have a problem finding an example of when "Brad" took a toy gun to school and showing that his punishment was comparable to "Mohammed".
All the school district really has to do is point to other situations where students have brought in electronic projects and show they were treated similarly. If they can do that then they are surely off the hook.
I've personally taken electronic projects which have 7-seg red leds to school and i once built a circuit which used some kind of oscillator/transformer/rectifier combination to charge a capacitor up to some kind of high voltage so i could shock people with it. I find it hard to believe a school district of this size won't have plenty other examples of that, and all they need to show is a consistent overreaction.
That's fucked up in its own way, but doesn't seem to be a discriminatory policy
Since when does the quality of his work have anything to do with the discriminatory behavior?
Sure it was a shit science project, but the question is: "would the school district have behaved the same way if he was white?". If they claim they weren't discriminating then they can surely find examples of other students who've been subjected to the same scrutiny for their projects.
I brought things at least that bad to school, and the worst i got was told to not be screwing with them during class.
I believe that he is, but i'm not sure the school has the right to demand to know the religion of students.
Honestly it's likely because he had brownish skin. I wouldn't by surprised if a Christian from the middle east would face much the same discrimination.
I assume there's some desire to make it punitive. He was only treated that way because he was perceived to be a Muslim - I bet the school district can't point to a bunch of other cases where white kids have brought in electronics projects and had the police called. I imagine i'm not alone in the slashdot demographic as someone who brought random electronics to school, yet I never got anywhere close to arrest because of it.
I don't think it matters if the whole thing was orchestrated to show the school district was discriminatory. It appears that they are, and they should have to pay the price of that.
Sure but that would only require 100lbs of annual food waste to feed to insects. I can probably come up with that out of my kitchen without too much trouble. They'll also eat things like decaying leaves & grass which are in plentiful supply right now.
Obviously it's not a perfectly closed system, but you won't need to go buy honeycrisp apples at wholefoods to keep them happy
That'd require drawing 10-20W while in sleep.
I don't doubt that there are devices that do that, but my macbook pro draws something like 1-2W while sleeping (assuming it's done charging). I don't think my fridge even draws 20W when it's idling
I do a fair bit of home gardening, but producing say 50 lbs of beans a year takes a fair amount of space and effort. If you can really get that level of production out of a unit that small then it gives gardening a good run for its money. I don't think you could match the reported production here in a condo or apartment if you were to grow plants.
I no longer have the damaged machine, but i'm pretty sure there wasn't a php file available called wp-content/include.php but mod_rewrite ends up catching that and routing the request into the main wordpress scirpt.
Still it's good subterfuge, and my first instinct was to discount it.
Wish I had that post body logged somewhere, would be really interested to see what came in
I had a server hit by this a few weeks ago. Got the same ransom message shown there. I'm fairly sure it didn't require root, in fact it only encrypted files that were writable by www-data and not the handful in /var/www that were owned by root. The README_FOR_DECRYPT.txt file that was left in every directory was also owned by www-data.
I'm not sure what was posted in, but the infection mechanism appears to be this single request
46.160.xxx.xxx - - [19/Oct/2015:05:14:06 -0400] "POST /wp-content/include.php HTTP/1.0" 404 135395 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:10.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.1"
I'm still not really sure how that caused an infection, but i'm guessing it exploited something in the wordpress 404 handler? I don't see any other request from that IP and the server load spiked right after that as the files starting being encrypted.
I thought it was great and would love to do it again. Certainly a lot bumpier than the turbo jet that runs between Hong Kong and Macau - that just felt like a really fast ferry.
Talk about missing the root cause. Ad blockers are only used because publishers have gone so ridiculously over the top in creating annoying, high bandwidth, high cpu-usage ads.
While there are a few alternatives to RSA (though they share some mathematical similarity) i'm not aware of any non-quantum replacement for DH. That obviously makes it a natural candidate for any kind of focussed attack.
I honestly had no idea that most implementations fixed p. It seems obvious in retrospect that this could lead to the creation of a giant LUT
Like who? MIT Is the only school i see that still has a class A
The most obvious people who should be giving them up are
a) HP - who have TWO class As and I believe around 7 employees.
b) Apple - have a class A and as far as I know don't run any significant external networking.
c) IBM - kinda like apple. they did have a networking business at one point but I believe that's sold to AT&T now
d) Halibutron - just why?
e) Prudential Insurance - wtf? in what possible world do they need 16 million external addresses?
I think it depends a lot on where you are.
My personal experiences with Uber when I was in Salt Lake for a convention were terrible. There was so much demand that they were sucking in drivers from other parts of Utah who didn't know the city well. My hotel was on a weird frontage road thing that nav didn't get and every time an uber drive appeared they'd end up circling the hotel and coming in from the other side. Similarly downtown salt lake has two Marriotts (the Downtown Marriott and the City Center Marriott) - I've never had a cab driver mix those up, but I've had an uber driver stubbornly insist that I was at the hotel I wanted despite the nav showing he was a few blocks away.
I did have a couple of excellent uber drivers who'd grown up in the city and had no trouble navigating, but uber does a terrible job of separating those from the crap ones. Their weird arms-length sub-contractor situation really hinders their ability to train drivers and make sure they are up to the right standards. If they are actually required to employ everyone then I think it'll be a hell of a lot better. Frankly I went back to taking regular cabs for every situation but 2am coming back from a bar, it was just easier and more predictable.
Similarly I imagine uber will struggle in places like London where cab services are excellent. The real solution to cities who want rid of uber is to make their own cab services be excellent.
Considering we put our first lander on Mars in 75, the first 50 years of exploration will be up in 2025. I don't think it's too unreasonable to be talking about it now.
I never made a claim about a "phone being only $10 a month". Comcast repeatedly try to sell me one and it's far more expensive than that.
What I said was that $10 a month internet service is good enough to run skype or google voice and can be used as a phone number for things like job applications.
As best I can tell in CO, subsidized phone service is about $21 + taxes and subsidized internet service is $10 + taxes. Obviously if you can't afford a box of mac & cheese then you'll have neither one. However if you could afford phone service then you could free up $11/month to put towards buying a $150 computer.
I'm asking you to defend your position that phone service is a necessity but internet service is a luxury and you resort to pointing out that some of the poor can't afford a single meal. However the poverty line for a family with two kids is around $24k/yr, there are a lot of people who are poor but who can absolutely afford the prices i'm talking of.
You claimed you yourself had a land line when poor.
I'm not claiming every single poor person can afford a computer, but there are a lot who could benefit from one.
> It is mathematically impossible for your 10.00/month broadband cost to be cheaper for a phone, than a standard phone.
As best I can tell a phone line is still >$20/month even with subsidies for low income. I'm not sure how you define mathematical possibility, but I'd certainly hold broadband as much more valuable than pots.
You can use cable just fine with a basic computer from 5 years ago. Sure you won't be streaming high def video, but that's not really the point here. I pretty much give away older computers, but for my convenience I really only do that to people who have craigslist available, which I suppose creates a tough catch-22.
It's not going to be easy. I can pick up a $3k macbook and expect it to work perfectly, but it can absolutely be done. Plus of course once you have the internet you have access to things like craigslist which are really useful when you are broke.