I agree that the older iPods were better designed than the modern ones (however, I didn't own one then.) The click-wheel was intuitive -- it physically turned, so you knew that moving it would do something. The first time I held a newer gen iPod, I cursed at it for 10 minutes before someone pointed out to me that you have to drag your finger along this white circle, instead of trying to click the buttons that were printed on it. WTF? I was very surprised that Apple stopped producing an intuitive interface, since usability is their hallmark.
And the older iPods acted as disc drives, just as you would expect from a portable firewire cabinet containing a portable disc drive. Modern iPods lock the user from accessing the file system so you can no longer use the machines to copy music. They've really gone downhill in terms of usability and function.
But there's still no question that the iPod was one of the defining gadgets of the 00s.
Head to http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/, they have a lot of similar plans for DIY parabolas. In general, the trick is to to aim a flashlight at the parabola, and mount the transceiver at the focal point of the reflected light. If you have a "spider skimmer" type tool or any other mesh basket instead of a solid pan, line the basket with reflective aluminum foil, then you can use the flashlight trick. Voila, you now have a directional antenna.
It'll likely perform as well as a "proper booster", assuming you can find one.
I'm not sure about your math because I can't tell if you overstated the case by 3, so I'll do it again here, showing my work. (Remember, of the R/Y/G lamps, only one signal is lit at a time.) 3 lamps * 4 directions * $0.08 per kilowatt hour *.001 watts/kilowatt * 24 hours * 365 days = $8.41 per intersection per year per watt rating of the bulb. If you have standard 116W incandescents, that's $976 per year. If you install 20W LEDs, that's $168 per year. The difference is $808 per year per intersection in savings. That's a lot.
OK, your $900/year estimate was very close to my $976/year, which is good. And the savings are even more in favor of LEDs as the electric rates go up.
But don't forget that LEDs are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, although they last 10 years instead of one. The cost of one incandescent bulb is $3.75. One LED lamp is $100, $132, or $170, depending on if you're buying red, yellow or green. So the cost per intersection for LEDs is $402 * 3 lanes * 4 directions / 10 year life, or $482/year. The cost of incandescent bulbs is $11.25 * 3 lanes * 4 directions, or $135/year. The difference is $347 per year. That narrows the savings of LEDs from $808 to $461 per year.
$461 per year is still way more than my estimated cost of $100 per trip. And it's definitely worth it for cities to swap out the old. But a previous poster claimed I vastly understated the case for maintenance, saying he heard it was $900 (not $100) per trip. If that's true, maintenance savings are still way more than the savings obtained by switching to LEDs.
How does the cost of potential lost human lives figure into this equation? I mean, due to them not working, the wrecks increase...possibly risking life and limb of taxpayers.
Human lives have a value assigned to them by the Department of Transportation. Last I heard it was $5,800,000 per year. That meant that if some hazardous road condition caused someone to die, they would change it if it cost less than $5.8M to do so. And it adds: if four people went off a cliff in one accident, and six people went off the same cliff in a different accident in the same year, they would put up guard rails, or rebuild the road, or whatever improvements it takes, up to $58 million.
By that logic, the city of Oswego, where the victim died due to the snow-covered LED signal, would spend money to swap bulbs or add heaters or spray cooking oil on lights or whatever it takes, up to $5.8 million.
It may sound cold and unfeeling to put a dollar figure on a human life, but it has to be done. Considering that a set of stoplights at a single intersection can cost over $750,000 to buy and install, cities have to spend their money wisely. Just because the neighbors ask for a stoplight because the cars go too fast doesn't mean the city has the money to give them one. But if someone should actually get injured or killed, it obviously needs to affect their priority for spending. It's just how it's done.
And that completely negates the cost savings of the LED lamps. LEDs are "touted" as green, but the real savings to the towns comes from not having to replace burned out light bulbs every year. Figure it costs about $100 to send a maintenance truck to an intersection and do an hour's worth of work. It doesn't matter if you're replacing lightbulbs or spraying cooking oil, it still costs you $100 to put that truck out there. If incandescent bulbs need to be replaced every year, and LEDs need to be replaced only every 10 years, you've saved $900 over the cost of incandescents. It's only an extra benefit to the city if they save $100 on electricity by going LED, but it's not the primary driver.
However, by going LED, they can play up the "greenness" to sell the conversion to the public. Saving maintenance costs is just not as "sexy" as being environmentally conscious, and makes it sound more like you're cutting jobs than "doing good".
Read her words carefully. Nothing she said was an actual lie. If this had been done in the US, you bet the GSM association would have been pressing for charges under the DMCA or some other ill-conceived law. Not understanding full disclosure might only mean she's stupid, and not necessarily a liar. (In her defense, the full disclosure principle is is actually quite tricky to fully understand. You have to make some hard assumptions about your own frailty to accept it.)
And the stuff you would have her say would cost her industry money. Admitting that their protocols weren't secure would be to invite lawsuits. Whether those lawsuits would have merit or not, they would be expensive to defend against. Promises that her industry is hastening to implement a new technology are promises to spend a lot of money, money that she might not be authorized to promise.
They also count on us being collectively stupid and forgetful. If and when they do trot out their new security standard, you can bet there will be no mention of this incident being the driving force behind the upgrade, or anything other than "Look at the huge piles of money we invested because we respect your right to privacy! By the way, you'll be seeing a new 'Privacy surcharge' on your next cell bill."
Don't forget, they still see this as a problem that can be swept back under the rug and its detractors dismissed as paranoid or crackpots. In that scenario, she's just the broom. They also apparently don't worry about the concepts of opening Pandora's box, letting the genie out of the bottle, or even the Streisand Effect.
If Ms. Cranton doesn't even know the argument for full disclosure, why is she the person speaking on behalf of the GSM Association?
Because she is a mouthpiece paid to denigrate anyone who tarnishes their stellar corporate reputations. It's her job to paint him as a criminal, diverting your attention away from their failed product.
Literally, her words had no deeper meaning than "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!" But that might be enough to rally some friendly corporate support for trying to pull the curtain shut again.
Re:And this is a nearly unsolveable problem.
on
GSM Decryption Published
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I have never understood why systems like GSM, Wifi, or whatever didn't or don't use well known crypto algorithms (and already implemented in hardware even).
Because 22 years ago when it was developed, the processing power and electrical power requirements required for DES to keep pace with a voice stream with automatic error recovery and no more than about 100 milliseconds of delay would likely have been prohibitively expensive for a device intended for the mass market. In addition, the U.S. government's ITAR/EAR restrictions would have made it almost impossible to import or export such devices into or out of the country, and ignoring the U.S. cell phone market could have meant financial ruin for the cell phone makers.
A5/1 probably got laughed at by the NSA wonks, who said, "Sure, let them import it."
And for those who would point out it's a European standard that doesn't care about American laws, the French have placed far more restrictions on encryption than the U.S. government ever has. Strong encryption would have cut both of those markets out.
There are two different meanings of obscurity in use in computing these days: one is a standard based on a secret that can be theoretically reverse-engineered; and the other is the non-standard implementation of a standard.
The first, which is what GSM was, is really a "secret algorithm" approach. People call it "obscure" because it could be reverse engineered, but it really was based on keeping a secret from the people who all shared it. It violated Kerckhoff's principle which means it could be exposed, and now it has been. But it took 3.5 billion people 22 years to figure it out, which means that it was a pretty effective secret. That sounds a lot more effective than just plain "obscurity."
Useful obscurity is all about misdirection. It's an opaque curtain, or a mirror, or a fog; it's not an armored wall. Simply configuring your web server to report its identity as IIS when it's really running Apache won't confuse the humans viewing your pages, but it could make an automated attack fail that's based on attacking Apache servers. Changing default port numbers, or default security settings, or reported version numbers, or really shifting anything from the default to a place where it won't be expected by an automated attack is highly effective at keeping the port scanners and script kiddies at bay.
Consider the attack vectors on the internet. Bots and automated scanners make up the vast majority of threats out there. You can't swing a null modem without hitting some zombie that's probing your web server looking for default PHP weaknesses. Obscurity lets you dodge these clumsy attacks for free, and lets you focus your resources on other measures to more effectively improve your security -- IDPs, monitors, etc.
When used properly, obscurity is a wonderful tool that can make your life much easier. It doesn't provide security by itself, but adds another layer that does make you "more secure" overall by removing you from the first waves of automated attacks, giving you time to patch your systems.
the neural connection would have to be much much more complicated (and thus less permutable) than what is involved with ducks bonding to people.
Not necessarily./. recently had a story about an amputee chimp who was wired through a neural interface to a robotic arm, and was able to operate it. Obviously this was not evolutionary, and the arm motions were not wired to specific nerves, yet his neurons adapted to the new interface to operate the arm.
That implies that neurons can adapt to use whatever they are connected with. So talking to a horse's neural connector might simply be a matter of practice. Assuming that most creatures would interact in a common way (perhaps via social conditioning and learned practice) it's not impossible to believe that it really is as easy as linking and riding.
And if the horses or pegasuses or trees or whatever exchange mutual benefits with the smurfs, they would have evolutionary reasons to continue to interface with them. "Hey, here's that smurf who brings me the food" may translate to a relationship that makes the horse stronger and more attractive to mates.
Or maybe it's just that horses and trees and smurfs all evolutionarily retained their TreetherNet connections for their immediate species, but smurfs were clever enough to figure out that the interfaces will adapt themselves to talk to anything.
First, I'm going to acknowledge that we're arguing the 2009 equivalent of Trek-lore. It's made up, so anything I argue is simply rationalization, and not based on "facts".
With that disclaimer out of the way, there are analogues on planet Earth. Vertebrates all use a common sex mechanism. Presumably, males of most vertebrate species receive some kind of stimulus or reward for performing. Inter-species coupling is sometimes possible within limits, although the product of the unions generally isn't viable. But in general, the mechanics of most vertebrates are equivalent, if not always compatible.
On the flip side, I'm going to use orchids as an example from the plant kingdom. Pollinators and plant species may develop a symbiotic relationship to where a plant becomes highly adapted to a single species of pollinator (Charles Darwin famously hypothesized that a highly specialized but yet-undiscovered pollinator was responsible for pollinating Angraecum sesquipedale.) But many of plants can breed not just inter-specially, but inter-generically. That means the genetics for pollination can often be the same, even though the plants are related only at a very high level. And even cross-phylum hybridization is possible among just about any eukaryotes through genetic engineering.
So my point is that the mechanisms for life on Earth are still very much related. Evolutionarily, the different genus and species split off epochs ago, but they all still work together. So is it so hard to believe that the smurfy equivalent of raw neurons hidden in a braided tentacle couldn't trigger neurons from someone else's tentacle, or even that of a tree, especially when both parties continue to benefit from the coupling?
What would be much harder to believe is that a virus hasn't evolved in that environment that would have transmitted itself planet-wide through their TreetherNet.
Agreed. The film was not anti-technology. I thought it was anti-ugly. The local "technology" of plugging into trees and animals was a lot like USB.
Yes. Now, do you think that these capabilities evolved naturally? Or that the entire planet was something designed? I mean, what evolutionary pressure could possibly drive an animal to having a built-in "make me your mind-slave" link?
That's easy. The sex drive. It's already pretty close. Some people will already do anything their partner asks, and that's just for the promise of future sex.
Couple that with a neural interface, and every guy I know is a goner.
It has been said that in general Americans hate science intensely and distrust scientists but love technology - hence the evolution, vaccination and climate change fiascos going on in the USA when it is accepted elsewhere. Is that the view you have or am I just looking at things far too simplisticly?
Oh, no, you've nailed it squarely on the head. Ignorance is easy -- just stop doing hard stuff like going to school, and there you are -- ignorant. Those who follow that path usually end up working hard in low paying jobs, resentful of the intellectuals who have "easy" high paying jobs. And they pass this prejudice to their ignorant children, who are in no position to understand why their mom and dad work hard but make no money, but dad's boss, the MBA, makes lots of money for doing "nothing". Thus we have an entire class of self-selected, auto-perpetuating, anti-intellectuals. The problem is that it takes logic to understand the problem, and it takes an education to understand the logic required to understand the problem. Catch 22.
The thing about the large pool of uneducated people is that they still have the right to vote. And being uneducated, they're much easier to manipulate with advertising and sloganeering -- yet their votes count equal to those of educated people.
As a result, politicians figured out centuries ago that a pro-science platform can never get enough votes to win: there is a limited set of people with the education required to understand a scientific point, and half of those will disagree with your other political positions. So they instead pander to the uneducated people with patriotic slogans and religion, which easily locks up a good half of the voters for cheap. A science-based platform would only alienate them. For example, George Bush hid his Yale education and east coast privileged upbringing as best as he could, and donned a cowboy hat and a Texas ranch in order to get votes from the anti-intellectuals. It obviously works.
Those of us who have educations certainly don't help the situation any when we dismiss their uneducated opinions; but it's impossible to have a discussion when the political opponents trot out their slogans and promote ignorance instead of debating facts. We can't even restore intelligent dialog in this kind of environment. (I guess that's been the curse of politics since forever.)
It is funny to see these fake anti-intellectuals outed. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show (a comedic take on the news) recently skewered a far-right-wing TV show host, Gretchen Carlson, who attempts to identify herself with the "dumb soccer mom" crowd. In a recent show she said something like "Now I don't know what an ignoramus is, so I googled it, and found it meant an ignorant lawyer or uneducated person." She also claimed not to know what a "czar" was, so she had to google that word too. Jon pointed out that she graduated from Stanford with honors, and questioned whether someone that well-educated could possibly not know what an ignoramus or czar is. (Sadly, the dumb soccer moms don't have the education required to appreciate The Daily Show, so his efforts are usually wasted anyway.)
I think for TFA's purposes the differences in permissions won't be much of an issue. He is building a media storage library for home use. This is likely to be a small set of users, all with common permissions.
I'm not saying your points aren't valid, just that they may not apply in this case.
The thing the banks really don't talk about is that losses from in-house embezzlers far exceed losses form outside agents.
Really? Have you recent facts to back that claim up? It may have been true in the 1950s, but is it still true in today's world, where a hacker can gain essentially "insider" authority?
And of course we won't speak of the enormous losses caused by management greed and stupidity.
There's an assertion I don't have to ask you to back up, as it's been pretty well covered in the press. But there's a lot of greed and stupidity going around, and some of it comes from the shareholders, Congress, lawyers, etc. It's not just limited to management.
The reporter was trying to link a bunch of separate things together.
1. Black Energy conducted a DDoS against Citibank, but did not steal tens of millions of dollars from them.
2. Last year, Citi lost tens of millions of dollars from skimmers attached to ATMs.
3. The hacker Cr4sh is the author of Black Energy, but there is no evidence he was involved in the attack on Citi.
There is nothing relating these three incidents other than the wishes of an aggressive reporter wanting to build some kind of story against City; *perhaps* he's trying to pump up a case to make it appear they are risking bailout money. But at least when I type this kind of crap I'm labeling it for what it is: PURE SPECULATION.
About four years ago AT&T customer service sucked donkey balls, and that included the AT&T store staff. They sat around waiting for the same screens as the 1-800-AT&T-DUH people, and it also took them 20 minutes of dicking around just to bring up your account to handle a question. But in the last year or two, though, the in-store people been very responsive and fast, and I haven't needed to use the customer service line at all.
I think part of their past problems were the merger with Cingular and the former AT&T Wireless, and that their systems never were properly integrated. But they seem to have fixed some of those problems.
As far as coverage goes, well, I don't leave my 3G city limits very often, so it's OK for what I need. I'm sure a road warrior would see it very differently.
As far as lockdown goes, I'd place AT&T somewhere between Verizon (phuckin' phone prison) and T-Mobile (please just send us money, we don't care what you do with the phones.) You can buy an unlocked GSM phone from just about anywhere and it'll work fine on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks with no restrictions. But AT&T and Apple sure as hell worked together to lock down the iPhone. There's a purchase I'm regretting.
It's a ridiculous "skill", anyway, and unbalances game play.
America's Army made this work pretty well. They have a "medic" specialty, and while his primary job is still that of a soldier, the medic's secondary function is to stop a "yellow" wound from becoming "red", and a "red" wound from becoming fatal. But both the casualty and the medic have to stand still for the duration of the bandaging process, and unless you're out of sight you're likely to get shot.
And nobody in A.A. is a tank. Getting hit repeatedly means getting dead faster.
For a better swords and sorcery system, maybe they should move to a system based on shields, cavalry, infantry, and artillery.
It's obviously a multi-million dollar industry just from outward appearances. If you do some simplistic guesswork, you'll come up with big numbers fast. Assume a spammer sells 10,000 "contacts" for $10.00. (just a guess that makes the math easy, I think the real rate is $40-$60/10k.) That'd be a million dollars a day at this volume.
And that's just the money the spammers get for sending it. It doesn't consider the products or services being sold.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the older iPods were better designed than the modern ones (however, I didn't own one then.) The click-wheel was intuitive -- it physically turned, so you knew that moving it would do something. The first time I held a newer gen iPod, I cursed at it for 10 minutes before someone pointed out to me that you have to drag your finger along this white circle, instead of trying to click the buttons that were printed on it. WTF? I was very surprised that Apple stopped producing an intuitive interface, since usability is their hallmark.
And the older iPods acted as disc drives, just as you would expect from a portable firewire cabinet containing a portable disc drive. Modern iPods lock the user from accessing the file system so you can no longer use the machines to copy music. They've really gone downhill in terms of usability and function.
But there's still no question that the iPod was one of the defining gadgets of the 00s.
Head to http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/, they have a lot of similar plans for DIY parabolas. In general, the trick is to to aim a flashlight at the parabola, and mount the transceiver at the focal point of the reflected light. If you have a "spider skimmer" type tool or any other mesh basket instead of a solid pan, line the basket with reflective aluminum foil, then you can use the flashlight trick. Voila, you now have a directional antenna.
It'll likely perform as well as a "proper booster", assuming you can find one.
What, no towel? Every hoopy frood carries a towel.
I'm not sure about your math because I can't tell if you overstated the case by 3, so I'll do it again here, showing my work. (Remember, of the R/Y/G lamps, only one signal is lit at a time.) 3 lamps * 4 directions * $0.08 per kilowatt hour * .001 watts/kilowatt * 24 hours * 365 days = $8.41 per intersection per year per watt rating of the bulb. If you have standard 116W incandescents, that's $976 per year. If you install 20W LEDs, that's $168 per year. The difference is $808 per year per intersection in savings. That's a lot.
OK, your $900/year estimate was very close to my $976/year, which is good. And the savings are even more in favor of LEDs as the electric rates go up.
But don't forget that LEDs are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, although they last 10 years instead of one. The cost of one incandescent bulb is $3.75. One LED lamp is $100, $132, or $170, depending on if you're buying red, yellow or green. So the cost per intersection for LEDs is $402 * 3 lanes * 4 directions / 10 year life, or $482/year. The cost of incandescent bulbs is $11.25 * 3 lanes * 4 directions, or $135/year. The difference is $347 per year. That narrows the savings of LEDs from $808 to $461 per year.
$461 per year is still way more than my estimated cost of $100 per trip. And it's definitely worth it for cities to swap out the old. But a previous poster claimed I vastly understated the case for maintenance, saying he heard it was $900 (not $100) per trip. If that's true, maintenance savings are still way more than the savings obtained by switching to LEDs.
How does the cost of potential lost human lives figure into this equation? I mean, due to them not working, the wrecks increase...possibly risking life and limb of taxpayers.
Human lives have a value assigned to them by the Department of Transportation. Last I heard it was $5,800,000 per year. That meant that if some hazardous road condition caused someone to die, they would change it if it cost less than $5.8M to do so. And it adds: if four people went off a cliff in one accident, and six people went off the same cliff in a different accident in the same year, they would put up guard rails, or rebuild the road, or whatever improvements it takes, up to $58 million.
By that logic, the city of Oswego, where the victim died due to the snow-covered LED signal, would spend money to swap bulbs or add heaters or spray cooking oil on lights or whatever it takes, up to $5.8 million.
It may sound cold and unfeeling to put a dollar figure on a human life, but it has to be done. Considering that a set of stoplights at a single intersection can cost over $750,000 to buy and install, cities have to spend their money wisely. Just because the neighbors ask for a stoplight because the cars go too fast doesn't mean the city has the money to give them one. But if someone should actually get injured or killed, it obviously needs to affect their priority for spending. It's just how it's done.
And that completely negates the cost savings of the LED lamps. LEDs are "touted" as green, but the real savings to the towns comes from not having to replace burned out light bulbs every year. Figure it costs about $100 to send a maintenance truck to an intersection and do an hour's worth of work. It doesn't matter if you're replacing lightbulbs or spraying cooking oil, it still costs you $100 to put that truck out there. If incandescent bulbs need to be replaced every year, and LEDs need to be replaced only every 10 years, you've saved $900 over the cost of incandescents. It's only an extra benefit to the city if they save $100 on electricity by going LED, but it's not the primary driver.
However, by going LED, they can play up the "greenness" to sell the conversion to the public. Saving maintenance costs is just not as "sexy" as being environmentally conscious, and makes it sound more like you're cutting jobs than "doing good".
I meant virus as in herpes or SARS or rabies, not virus as in WindowsAntiVirusPro.
Read her words carefully. Nothing she said was an actual lie. If this had been done in the US, you bet the GSM association would have been pressing for charges under the DMCA or some other ill-conceived law. Not understanding full disclosure might only mean she's stupid, and not necessarily a liar. (In her defense, the full disclosure principle is is actually quite tricky to fully understand. You have to make some hard assumptions about your own frailty to accept it.)
And the stuff you would have her say would cost her industry money. Admitting that their protocols weren't secure would be to invite lawsuits. Whether those lawsuits would have merit or not, they would be expensive to defend against. Promises that her industry is hastening to implement a new technology are promises to spend a lot of money, money that she might not be authorized to promise.
They also count on us being collectively stupid and forgetful. If and when they do trot out their new security standard, you can bet there will be no mention of this incident being the driving force behind the upgrade, or anything other than "Look at the huge piles of money we invested because we respect your right to privacy! By the way, you'll be seeing a new 'Privacy surcharge' on your next cell bill."
Don't forget, they still see this as a problem that can be swept back under the rug and its detractors dismissed as paranoid or crackpots. In that scenario, she's just the broom. They also apparently don't worry about the concepts of opening Pandora's box, letting the genie out of the bottle, or even the Streisand Effect.
If Ms. Cranton doesn't even know the argument for full disclosure, why is she the person speaking on behalf of the GSM Association?
Because she is a mouthpiece paid to denigrate anyone who tarnishes their stellar corporate reputations. It's her job to paint him as a criminal, diverting your attention away from their failed product.
Literally, her words had no deeper meaning than "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!!" But that might be enough to rally some friendly corporate support for trying to pull the curtain shut again.
I have never understood why systems like GSM, Wifi, or whatever didn't or don't use well known crypto algorithms (and already implemented in hardware even).
Because 22 years ago when it was developed, the processing power and electrical power requirements required for DES to keep pace with a voice stream with automatic error recovery and no more than about 100 milliseconds of delay would likely have been prohibitively expensive for a device intended for the mass market. In addition, the U.S. government's ITAR/EAR restrictions would have made it almost impossible to import or export such devices into or out of the country, and ignoring the U.S. cell phone market could have meant financial ruin for the cell phone makers.
A5/1 probably got laughed at by the NSA wonks, who said, "Sure, let them import it."
And for those who would point out it's a European standard that doesn't care about American laws, the French have placed far more restrictions on encryption than the U.S. government ever has. Strong encryption would have cut both of those markets out.
Obscurity has a unfairly bad rap.
There are two different meanings of obscurity in use in computing these days: one is a standard based on a secret that can be theoretically reverse-engineered; and the other is the non-standard implementation of a standard.
The first, which is what GSM was, is really a "secret algorithm" approach. People call it "obscure" because it could be reverse engineered, but it really was based on keeping a secret from the people who all shared it. It violated Kerckhoff's principle which means it could be exposed, and now it has been. But it took 3.5 billion people 22 years to figure it out, which means that it was a pretty effective secret. That sounds a lot more effective than just plain "obscurity."
Useful obscurity is all about misdirection. It's an opaque curtain, or a mirror, or a fog; it's not an armored wall. Simply configuring your web server to report its identity as IIS when it's really running Apache won't confuse the humans viewing your pages, but it could make an automated attack fail that's based on attacking Apache servers. Changing default port numbers, or default security settings, or reported version numbers, or really shifting anything from the default to a place where it won't be expected by an automated attack is highly effective at keeping the port scanners and script kiddies at bay.
Consider the attack vectors on the internet. Bots and automated scanners make up the vast majority of threats out there. You can't swing a null modem without hitting some zombie that's probing your web server looking for default PHP weaknesses. Obscurity lets you dodge these clumsy attacks for free, and lets you focus your resources on other measures to more effectively improve your security -- IDPs, monitors, etc.
When used properly, obscurity is a wonderful tool that can make your life much easier. It doesn't provide security by itself, but adds another layer that does make you "more secure" overall by removing you from the first waves of automated attacks, giving you time to patch your systems.
the neural connection would have to be much much more complicated (and thus less permutable) than what is involved with ducks bonding to people.
Not necessarily. /. recently had a story about an amputee chimp who was wired through a neural interface to a robotic arm, and was able to operate it. Obviously this was not evolutionary, and the arm motions were not wired to specific nerves, yet his neurons adapted to the new interface to operate the arm.
That implies that neurons can adapt to use whatever they are connected with. So talking to a horse's neural connector might simply be a matter of practice. Assuming that most creatures would interact in a common way (perhaps via social conditioning and learned practice) it's not impossible to believe that it really is as easy as linking and riding.
And if the horses or pegasuses or trees or whatever exchange mutual benefits with the smurfs, they would have evolutionary reasons to continue to interface with them. "Hey, here's that smurf who brings me the food" may translate to a relationship that makes the horse stronger and more attractive to mates.
Or maybe it's just that horses and trees and smurfs all evolutionarily retained their TreetherNet connections for their immediate species, but smurfs were clever enough to figure out that the interfaces will adapt themselves to talk to anything.
First, I'm going to acknowledge that we're arguing the 2009 equivalent of Trek-lore. It's made up, so anything I argue is simply rationalization, and not based on "facts".
With that disclaimer out of the way, there are analogues on planet Earth. Vertebrates all use a common sex mechanism. Presumably, males of most vertebrate species receive some kind of stimulus or reward for performing. Inter-species coupling is sometimes possible within limits, although the product of the unions generally isn't viable. But in general, the mechanics of most vertebrates are equivalent, if not always compatible.
On the flip side, I'm going to use orchids as an example from the plant kingdom. Pollinators and plant species may develop a symbiotic relationship to where a plant becomes highly adapted to a single species of pollinator (Charles Darwin famously hypothesized that a highly specialized but yet-undiscovered pollinator was responsible for pollinating Angraecum sesquipedale.) But many of plants can breed not just inter-specially, but inter-generically. That means the genetics for pollination can often be the same, even though the plants are related only at a very high level. And even cross-phylum hybridization is possible among just about any eukaryotes through genetic engineering.
So my point is that the mechanisms for life on Earth are still very much related. Evolutionarily, the different genus and species split off epochs ago, but they all still work together. So is it so hard to believe that the smurfy equivalent of raw neurons hidden in a braided tentacle couldn't trigger neurons from someone else's tentacle, or even that of a tree, especially when both parties continue to benefit from the coupling?
What would be much harder to believe is that a virus hasn't evolved in that environment that would have transmitted itself planet-wide through their TreetherNet.
Yes. Now, do you think that these capabilities evolved naturally? Or that the entire planet was something designed? I mean, what evolutionary pressure could possibly drive an animal to having a built-in "make me your mind-slave" link?
That's easy. The sex drive. It's already pretty close. Some people will already do anything their partner asks, and that's just for the promise of future sex.
Couple that with a neural interface, and every guy I know is a goner.
It has been said that in general Americans hate science intensely and distrust scientists but love technology - hence the evolution, vaccination and climate change fiascos going on in the USA when it is accepted elsewhere.
Is that the view you have or am I just looking at things far too simplisticly?
Oh, no, you've nailed it squarely on the head. Ignorance is easy -- just stop doing hard stuff like going to school, and there you are -- ignorant. Those who follow that path usually end up working hard in low paying jobs, resentful of the intellectuals who have "easy" high paying jobs. And they pass this prejudice to their ignorant children, who are in no position to understand why their mom and dad work hard but make no money, but dad's boss, the MBA, makes lots of money for doing "nothing". Thus we have an entire class of self-selected, auto-perpetuating, anti-intellectuals. The problem is that it takes logic to understand the problem, and it takes an education to understand the logic required to understand the problem. Catch 22.
The thing about the large pool of uneducated people is that they still have the right to vote. And being uneducated, they're much easier to manipulate with advertising and sloganeering -- yet their votes count equal to those of educated people.
As a result, politicians figured out centuries ago that a pro-science platform can never get enough votes to win: there is a limited set of people with the education required to understand a scientific point, and half of those will disagree with your other political positions. So they instead pander to the uneducated people with patriotic slogans and religion, which easily locks up a good half of the voters for cheap. A science-based platform would only alienate them. For example, George Bush hid his Yale education and east coast privileged upbringing as best as he could, and donned a cowboy hat and a Texas ranch in order to get votes from the anti-intellectuals. It obviously works.
Those of us who have educations certainly don't help the situation any when we dismiss their uneducated opinions; but it's impossible to have a discussion when the political opponents trot out their slogans and promote ignorance instead of debating facts. We can't even restore intelligent dialog in this kind of environment. (I guess that's been the curse of politics since forever.)
It is funny to see these fake anti-intellectuals outed. Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show (a comedic take on the news) recently skewered a far-right-wing TV show host, Gretchen Carlson, who attempts to identify herself with the "dumb soccer mom" crowd. In a recent show she said something like "Now I don't know what an ignoramus is, so I googled it, and found it meant an ignorant lawyer or uneducated person." She also claimed not to know what a "czar" was, so she had to google that word too. Jon pointed out that she graduated from Stanford with honors, and questioned whether someone that well-educated could possibly not know what an ignoramus or czar is. (Sadly, the dumb soccer moms don't have the education required to appreciate The Daily Show, so his efforts are usually wasted anyway.)
Right, we'd spend our time on engadget instead.
Oh, wait...
I think for TFA's purposes the differences in permissions won't be much of an issue. He is building a media storage library for home use. This is likely to be a small set of users, all with common permissions.
I'm not saying your points aren't valid, just that they may not apply in this case.
Read further down the article. He acknowledges that people have already corrected him on these points, leaving him further impressed with the movie.
The thing the banks really don't talk about is that losses from in-house embezzlers far exceed losses form outside agents.
Really? Have you recent facts to back that claim up? It may have been true in the 1950s, but is it still true in today's world, where a hacker can gain essentially "insider" authority?
And of course we won't speak of the enormous losses caused by management greed and stupidity.
There's an assertion I don't have to ask you to back up, as it's been pretty well covered in the press. But there's a lot of greed and stupidity going around, and some of it comes from the shareholders, Congress, lawyers, etc. It's not just limited to management.
The reporter was trying to link a bunch of separate things together.
1. Black Energy conducted a DDoS against Citibank, but did not steal tens of millions of dollars from them.
2. Last year, Citi lost tens of millions of dollars from skimmers attached to ATMs.
3. The hacker Cr4sh is the author of Black Energy, but there is no evidence he was involved in the attack on Citi.
There is nothing relating these three incidents other than the wishes of an aggressive reporter wanting to build some kind of story against City; *perhaps* he's trying to pump up a case to make it appear they are risking bailout money. But at least when I type this kind of crap I'm labeling it for what it is: PURE SPECULATION.
Actually, the iPhone lets you change your search provider in the configuration settings.
Yeah, I can set the check mark next to either Google or Yahoo. Now there's real "Freedom of Choice."
About four years ago AT&T customer service sucked donkey balls, and that included the AT&T store staff. They sat around waiting for the same screens as the 1-800-AT&T-DUH people, and it also took them 20 minutes of dicking around just to bring up your account to handle a question. But in the last year or two, though, the in-store people been very responsive and fast, and I haven't needed to use the customer service line at all.
I think part of their past problems were the merger with Cingular and the former AT&T Wireless, and that their systems never were properly integrated. But they seem to have fixed some of those problems.
As far as coverage goes, well, I don't leave my 3G city limits very often, so it's OK for what I need. I'm sure a road warrior would see it very differently.
As far as lockdown goes, I'd place AT&T somewhere between Verizon (phuckin' phone prison) and T-Mobile (please just send us money, we don't care what you do with the phones.) You can buy an unlocked GSM phone from just about anywhere and it'll work fine on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks with no restrictions. But AT&T and Apple sure as hell worked together to lock down the iPhone. There's a purchase I'm regretting.
It's a ridiculous "skill", anyway, and unbalances game play.
America's Army made this work pretty well. They have a "medic" specialty, and while his primary job is still that of a soldier, the medic's secondary function is to stop a "yellow" wound from becoming "red", and a "red" wound from becoming fatal. But both the casualty and the medic have to stand still for the duration of the bandaging process, and unless you're out of sight you're likely to get shot.
And nobody in A.A. is a tank. Getting hit repeatedly means getting dead faster.
For a better swords and sorcery system, maybe they should move to a system based on shields, cavalry, infantry, and artillery.
It's obviously a multi-million dollar industry just from outward appearances. If you do some simplistic guesswork, you'll come up with big numbers fast. Assume a spammer sells 10,000 "contacts" for $10.00. (just a guess that makes the math easy, I think the real rate is $40-$60/10k.) That'd be a million dollars a day at this volume.
And that's just the money the spammers get for sending it. It doesn't consider the products or services being sold.
It's a world record slashdotting.