Security isn't "worthless", it's simply not 100% perfect.
You're absolutely right in that when you have millions of endpoints installed in untrustworthy clients, you'll have no way to conclusively prove that a specific vehicle wasn't transmitting bogus data. It's not just security, but faults and errors that need to be dealt with. Therefore the system needs redundancies: if a vehicle reports it's coming at you at 100MPH, that should be but one input in a system of data: radar reports from other vehicles could corroborate that kind of info. Did four vehicles just report seeing a car at 100 MPH? Does your own radar corroborate the existence and faithfulness of their prior reports?
You could require "signed" messages from transmitters, but they are only as honest as their inputs and sensors. Ultimately, you can't always solve these problems on the front end. What is required is a system that rapidly responds to reported problems, trusting other reports to a certain degree; but it still needs to keep audit logs on the back end, and there need to be penalties for driving with a system issuing faulty reports.
I use Bayer Rose & Flower Insect Killer (http://www.amazon.com/Bayer-502570B-24-Ounce-Ready-Action/dp/B000BQR01A) specifically because it has imidiclopirid on the label. I'm buying it for controlling pests on indoor plants, and I have no concerns about bee pollination. But yes, when the product is named for its use on roses, it's pretty obvious it's going to be used outdoors and will affect bees.
Knowing that someone could be injured or killed by your actions is all the intent needed.
And maybe I'm just getting too old, but I really don't see the point in suffering violent criminals back into society. It doesn't matter to me if they cause the violence by proxy. It doesn't matter if the SWAT team reactions are over the top or not. It's that they deliberately intended it to happen that counts.
Steal something? Fine, do a few years, don't do it again. Hurt someone else? Go away, and stay gone.
The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the SWAT team pounds down their door are about 2-4%. The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the police don't SWAT their door is much lower. Therefore, SWATting someone is equivalent to a 2-4% attempt of a murder.
At the minimum, that could be prosecuted as a felonious assault with intent to cause grievous bodily injury. Since some of the people who die in SWAT raids are occasionally the cops, this could even be considered an assault on a police officer.
A good prosecutor could stuff this little turd in a very dark cell for a couple of decades, and the world would be much better off as a result.
But why is this Google's problem? It's not their data.
This kind of shit is impossible. You're going to get all kinds of censorship as a result: clams bitching about xenu, etc.
Google should repay the EU in kind by blocking all search results pertaining to a complainant: every document mentioning the person should be removed from all indices returned to EU locations. When they discover just how stupid their ruling was, too bad.
Did it occur to you even once during your rant that for almost all of the prior "thousands of years" the entire population of the planet was less than that of current day Mexico City? Or that starvation was a significant contributing factor to the average human life-span being about 44 years instead of >70?
The planet is approaching its capacity for humans, and our growth rate is already hugely bolstered by factory production means. Revert us to subsistence farming, and guess what kinds of civil unrest you'll see.
Keep in mind that many of the objections you raise can be answered with money. People don't like hot suits? How about for $25/hr? Need more colonies, due to winter conditions? More business for the beekeepers; perhaps migrating them to warmer climes, or keeping them a bit more sheltered over winter. And maybe money can't fix everything: the density of colonies per acre might simply be too low. Doesn't mean we shouldn't consider options.
What I meant by the smoking analogy was that certain interested parties are likely to drag this out in the courts to preserve their business model. Big Tobacco dragged the debate out for four decades before acknowledging that smoking causes cancer. I expect Bayer and the other agribusinesses will attempt to do the same with these pesticides (as they have already fought such battles in the EU.)
I know that everything has side effects, I'm wondering if there alternatives other than a simple ban. Can we live with the consequences of these pesticides?
The study ties neonicotinoids to CCD in a certain percentage of colonies, but it doesn't appear to impact all of them. If we know why it's not 100% fatal, maybe we can use that to our advantage - keep the insecticide while also keeping the bees. Two naive ways that might work are increasing the number of bees and winning through statistics, or breeding resistance into the bees. Smarter people than me can probably come up with a dozen more. I also have no idea if they'd work (what is the maximum density of colonies in a field? How many colonies can apiarists produce in a year?) But I really like the idea of an effective insecticide that doesn't cause harm to the rest of the food chain.
While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Or maybe I just have to buy a 50-year supply of the stuff.
The neonicotinoids have been seen as a great advancement in insecticides because they are toxic to insects, but much less so to mammals. Compare them with chemicals like DDT, which are effective against insects, but kill the higher orders in the food chain that eat them.
The problem with them is that they are extremely effective at disrupting bees - about 1/150 of the dose needed to kill other insects is enough to confuse bees. And the products are advertised as rose and garden insecticides, which are naturally attractive to bees. It only takes a few bees worth of nectar gathering to bring down a colony.
The identifying of an offender is one thing. However, once identified, it can be stored in a database and analyzed.
This is also good and bad. If a crime is discovered after the fact, the database could be searched to narrow down a list of suspects and confirm alibis. Catching actual felons and exonerating the innocent would be a very legitimate use of the data. But if the mayor hears about a meeting of the Anti-Corrupt-Mayor's Coalition, and knows the plates of the leader's car, he can identify other cars that frequently park near the leader, wherever and whenever the leader goes somewhere. Now he knows the identities of the whole group who is opposing him, and he can target them with extra special attention.
It gets worse, in that not everyone identified is necessarily a felon. Is failure to pay property taxes on time a felony? Is a misdemeanor possession of marijuana worthy of a traffic stop? An unpaid parking ticket?
There need to be limits on both the acceptable uses and the storage of the data, and there need to be prosecutions of those abusing the equipment to violate the trust of the public. His Honor, the Corrupt Mayor in the example above, should go to jail. A cop who stops a car for one unpaid parking ticket should be held accountable.
Finally, we have to decide what to do about private companies. Some bounty hunters troll shopping malls in tow trucks, looking for cars with broken leases or who have defaulted on their payments. Is this legit? According to our laws, it is. What about trolling for cars legitimately belonging people who simply owe a bank some money? If your Mercedes is paid for, should I be able to tow it away because you owe $10,000 on your Visa card?
In Japan, the "love hotels" supposedly have someone who will go out to the parking lot and hang black covers over the license plates, so that a spouse driving by won't spot the cheater's car.
Apparently, that's another area where we're falling behind the Japanese.
There's a significant difference between "notify" and "track". The primary purpose of these systems is to identify every license plate, look up any violations, and alert the officer. You won't be flagged in the database if you aren't already in trouble for something else.
Regarding tracking, that's a different problem. Our state has a law that prohibits the police from retaining the data for more than two days. They are not permitted to build up a database of my comings and goings. Two days gives them enough leeway to search for "hot" problems, such as an amber alert, or fleeing felon.
It may not be a technically perfect solution to privacy, and could be subject to abuse, but I think it's a workable compromise.
As they're mounted onto police cars, I doubt that most people are inclined to vandalize them.
These are camera systems that read license plates of every vehicle the cop passes (or that passes the cop). They pop up a note to the officer: "REVOKED LICENSE" "EXPIRED PLATE" "STOLEN VEHICLE", etc. The officer can then decide what course of action to take.
Yes, I was referring specifically to cars where the computer is already in full control of the engine, including starting with a push button. As is TFA.
In a newer engine, the computer controls all aspects of starting and running; timing, spark intensity, fuel quantity, mixture, etc. Holding down the key and cranking is no longer everything needed to start a cranky engine.
Why is it ludicrous? Taco Bell replaced 67% of the "beef" in their tacos with soy proteins, and few people noticed. Sure, there was a lawsuit complaining about the labeling, but people still eat them. If they replaced that with insect derived protein, what would be the real difference? In 40 years, when 20 billion people are hungry, is your Western reaction of "Eeww, bugs, gross!" really important?
That's also one of the things that they're trying to change about cattle and other ruminants. Breed a cow that digests more efficiently, and it'll produce less methane.
But I agree - beef is a very costly food in terms of resources needed to produce it. Now, if we could just breed people to eat hay...
And not only is this a lie they tell themselves to justify their excesses in breaking user compatibility, but it's a lie that's been thoroughly disproven in the marketplace. Microsoft tried it with Windows 8 - there has been nothing but negative response from anyone with a desktop who is trying to use a mouse on a touch interface. Despite having possibly the best core OS Microsoft has ever produced, Windows 8's UI is a screaming failure. 8.1 is proof: they pasted on a clunky, weirdly appearing top bar with a lone "close window [X]" button and proclaimed it mouseable. In their rush to make their desktop an iPhone clone, they forgot that their users don't and can't use iPhones with a mouse.
These outside "UX designers" (and I use that term loosely) have completely misunderstood the source they think they're trying to mimic. Apple never converged desktop and iPhone interfaces. What Apple did brilliantly was to provide common services to both platforms (even though it was done strictly to keep people locked within their walled garden.) But an iPhone interface is nothing like a Mac OS interface, and a Mac OS interface is nothing like an iPhone interface. Why? Because touch, mouse, and keyboard are three completely different human experiences, and they require three completely different approaches to UI; otherwise your users will be uncomfortable in the non-native interface.
Mozilla also fails completely to understand design principles about compatibility. The Open Close principle states that you can always add an interface to a class without penalty, but you must never modify or change an existing interface. This is not a principle that makes a class better (indeed, it often makes a class less clear); it's a principle that ensures the class doesn't do something bad to its existing consumers. It enables safe upgrades. Wanting to change the existing interface is the violation that Mozilla continues to commit with the Rapid Release program. Instead of changing users (who are *guaranteed* to have problems with every change), they should provide the new features as an add-on. Enable them by default or not, doesn't matter, but you DO NOT CHANGE THE EXISTING INTERFACE.
It's a matter of consequences. Anything that Bloomberg does has limited repercussions, and can likely be undone with the stroke of a pen or the finding of a court. The worst he is would accomplish would be the repression of civil rights, or the construction of buildings (local impact only), or even economic disaster (concentrated wealth impoverishing others.) Rights could be restored, a court could take the buildings away from him or, the fed could redistribute his wealth through taxation and policies. Some people will have suffered, but on the whole it's not anything that can't be undone.
Everything the Koch brothers does has a long term negative effect on the planet. We can't undo the environmental damage by writing a law removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or by having a court determine that accumulated mercury particulates in the lakes and streams must leave. Hell, we can't even clean up properly after a small scale disaster, like the Deepwater Horizons or the Exxon Valdeez. But people don't understand this is a problem because they can't see the visible effects instantly. Not only does this mean these guys have less opposition than they should, it also encourages them to do anything they want as long as it remains hidden from short term notice.
So yes, the Kochs are much worse than the Bloombergs and Soroses and Buffets and Gates of the world. We can't fix what they're breaking.
Slashdot Mirror
Security isn't "worthless", it's simply not 100% perfect.
You're absolutely right in that when you have millions of endpoints installed in untrustworthy clients, you'll have no way to conclusively prove that a specific vehicle wasn't transmitting bogus data. It's not just security, but faults and errors that need to be dealt with. Therefore the system needs redundancies: if a vehicle reports it's coming at you at 100MPH, that should be but one input in a system of data: radar reports from other vehicles could corroborate that kind of info. Did four vehicles just report seeing a car at 100 MPH? Does your own radar corroborate the existence and faithfulness of their prior reports?
You could require "signed" messages from transmitters, but they are only as honest as their inputs and sensors. Ultimately, you can't always solve these problems on the front end. What is required is a system that rapidly responds to reported problems, trusting other reports to a certain degree; but it still needs to keep audit logs on the back end, and there need to be penalties for driving with a system issuing faulty reports.
I use Bayer Rose & Flower Insect Killer (http://www.amazon.com/Bayer-502570B-24-Ounce-Ready-Action/dp/B000BQR01A) specifically because it has imidiclopirid on the label. I'm buying it for controlling pests on indoor plants, and I have no concerns about bee pollination. But yes, when the product is named for its use on roses, it's pretty obvious it's going to be used outdoors and will affect bees.
Knowing that someone could be injured or killed by your actions is all the intent needed.
And maybe I'm just getting too old, but I really don't see the point in suffering violent criminals back into society. It doesn't matter to me if they cause the violence by proxy. It doesn't matter if the SWAT team reactions are over the top or not. It's that they deliberately intended it to happen that counts.
Steal something? Fine, do a few years, don't do it again. Hurt someone else? Go away, and stay gone.
http://search.slashdot.org/sto...
The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the SWAT team pounds down their door are about 2-4%. The odds of someone being shot or killed or dying of a heart attack when the police don't SWAT their door is much lower. Therefore, SWATting someone is equivalent to a 2-4% attempt of a murder.
At the minimum, that could be prosecuted as a felonious assault with intent to cause grievous bodily injury. Since some of the people who die in SWAT raids are occasionally the cops, this could even be considered an assault on a police officer.
A good prosecutor could stuff this little turd in a very dark cell for a couple of decades, and the world would be much better off as a result.
But why is this Google's problem? It's not their data.
This kind of shit is impossible. You're going to get all kinds of censorship as a result: clams bitching about xenu, etc.
Google should repay the EU in kind by blocking all search results pertaining to a complainant: every document mentioning the person should be removed from all indices returned to EU locations. When they discover just how stupid their ruling was, too bad.
You missed the part where Slashdot delayed his post. Check the date. He originally wrote it in 1836.
Did it occur to you even once during your rant that for almost all of the prior "thousands of years" the entire population of the planet was less than that of current day Mexico City? Or that starvation was a significant contributing factor to the average human life-span being about 44 years instead of >70?
The planet is approaching its capacity for humans, and our growth rate is already hugely bolstered by factory production means. Revert us to subsistence farming, and guess what kinds of civil unrest you'll see.
Thanks, this is the stuff I don't know.
Keep in mind that many of the objections you raise can be answered with money. People don't like hot suits? How about for $25/hr? Need more colonies, due to winter conditions? More business for the beekeepers; perhaps migrating them to warmer climes, or keeping them a bit more sheltered over winter. And maybe money can't fix everything: the density of colonies per acre might simply be too low. Doesn't mean we shouldn't consider options.
What I meant by the smoking analogy was that certain interested parties are likely to drag this out in the courts to preserve their business model. Big Tobacco dragged the debate out for four decades before acknowledging that smoking causes cancer. I expect Bayer and the other agribusinesses will attempt to do the same with these pesticides (as they have already fought such battles in the EU.)
I know that everything has side effects, I'm wondering if there alternatives other than a simple ban. Can we live with the consequences of these pesticides?
The study ties neonicotinoids to CCD in a certain percentage of colonies, but it doesn't appear to impact all of them. If we know why it's not 100% fatal, maybe we can use that to our advantage - keep the insecticide while also keeping the bees. Two naive ways that might work are increasing the number of bees and winning through statistics, or breeding resistance into the bees. Smarter people than me can probably come up with a dozen more. I also have no idea if they'd work (what is the maximum density of colonies in a field? How many colonies can apiarists produce in a year?) But I really like the idea of an effective insecticide that doesn't cause harm to the rest of the food chain.
While actual evidence would be good, it will likely never be "proven" in the same way that for fifty years, smoking was never "proven" to cause lung cancer.
Imidaclopirid is a really useful insecticide, and I am not at all thrilled that it might be completely banned. It works perfectly in greenhouses and indoors. Perhaps instead of banning it, they could increase the number of beehives by a factor of ten? Or maybe they could breed imidaclopirid-resistant bees?
Or maybe I just have to buy a 50-year supply of the stuff.
The neonicotinoids have been seen as a great advancement in insecticides because they are toxic to insects, but much less so to mammals. Compare them with chemicals like DDT, which are effective against insects, but kill the higher orders in the food chain that eat them.
The problem with them is that they are extremely effective at disrupting bees - about 1/150 of the dose needed to kill other insects is enough to confuse bees. And the products are advertised as rose and garden insecticides, which are naturally attractive to bees. It only takes a few bees worth of nectar gathering to bring down a colony.
Worse, it'll probably ship with Firefox 29.
As far as I know, this is a limit on police only, and not on private parties.
The identifying of an offender is one thing. However, once identified, it can be stored in a database and analyzed.
This is also good and bad. If a crime is discovered after the fact, the database could be searched to narrow down a list of suspects and confirm alibis. Catching actual felons and exonerating the innocent would be a very legitimate use of the data. But if the mayor hears about a meeting of the Anti-Corrupt-Mayor's Coalition, and knows the plates of the leader's car, he can identify other cars that frequently park near the leader, wherever and whenever the leader goes somewhere. Now he knows the identities of the whole group who is opposing him, and he can target them with extra special attention.
It gets worse, in that not everyone identified is necessarily a felon. Is failure to pay property taxes on time a felony? Is a misdemeanor possession of marijuana worthy of a traffic stop? An unpaid parking ticket?
There need to be limits on both the acceptable uses and the storage of the data, and there need to be prosecutions of those abusing the equipment to violate the trust of the public. His Honor, the Corrupt Mayor in the example above, should go to jail. A cop who stops a car for one unpaid parking ticket should be held accountable.
Finally, we have to decide what to do about private companies. Some bounty hunters troll shopping malls in tow trucks, looking for cars with broken leases or who have defaulted on their payments. Is this legit? According to our laws, it is. What about trolling for cars legitimately belonging people who simply owe a bank some money? If your Mercedes is paid for, should I be able to tow it away because you owe $10,000 on your Visa card?
In Japan, the "love hotels" supposedly have someone who will go out to the parking lot and hang black covers over the license plates, so that a spouse driving by won't spot the cheater's car.
Apparently, that's another area where we're falling behind the Japanese.
There's a significant difference between "notify" and "track". The primary purpose of these systems is to identify every license plate, look up any violations, and alert the officer. You won't be flagged in the database if you aren't already in trouble for something else.
Regarding tracking, that's a different problem. Our state has a law that prohibits the police from retaining the data for more than two days. They are not permitted to build up a database of my comings and goings. Two days gives them enough leeway to search for "hot" problems, such as an amber alert, or fleeing felon.
It may not be a technically perfect solution to privacy, and could be subject to abuse, but I think it's a workable compromise.
As they're mounted onto police cars, I doubt that most people are inclined to vandalize them.
These are camera systems that read license plates of every vehicle the cop passes (or that passes the cop). They pop up a note to the officer: "REVOKED LICENSE" "EXPIRED PLATE" "STOLEN VEHICLE", etc. The officer can then decide what course of action to take.
Yes, I was referring specifically to cars where the computer is already in full control of the engine, including starting with a push button. As is TFA.
In a newer engine, the computer controls all aspects of starting and running; timing, spark intensity, fuel quantity, mixture, etc. Holding down the key and cranking is no longer everything needed to start a cranky engine.
Why is it ludicrous? Taco Bell replaced 67% of the "beef" in their tacos with soy proteins, and few people noticed. Sure, there was a lawsuit complaining about the labeling, but people still eat them. If they replaced that with insect derived protein, what would be the real difference? In 40 years, when 20 billion people are hungry, is your Western reaction of "Eeww, bugs, gross!" really important?
That's also one of the things that they're trying to change about cattle and other ruminants. Breed a cow that digests more efficiently, and it'll produce less methane.
But I agree - beef is a very costly food in terms of resources needed to produce it. Now, if we could just breed people to eat hay ...
And not only is this a lie they tell themselves to justify their excesses in breaking user compatibility, but it's a lie that's been thoroughly disproven in the marketplace. Microsoft tried it with Windows 8 - there has been nothing but negative response from anyone with a desktop who is trying to use a mouse on a touch interface. Despite having possibly the best core OS Microsoft has ever produced, Windows 8's UI is a screaming failure. 8.1 is proof: they pasted on a clunky, weirdly appearing top bar with a lone "close window [X]" button and proclaimed it mouseable. In their rush to make their desktop an iPhone clone, they forgot that their users don't and can't use iPhones with a mouse.
These outside "UX designers" (and I use that term loosely) have completely misunderstood the source they think they're trying to mimic. Apple never converged desktop and iPhone interfaces. What Apple did brilliantly was to provide common services to both platforms (even though it was done strictly to keep people locked within their walled garden.) But an iPhone interface is nothing like a Mac OS interface, and a Mac OS interface is nothing like an iPhone interface. Why? Because touch, mouse, and keyboard are three completely different human experiences, and they require three completely different approaches to UI; otherwise your users will be uncomfortable in the non-native interface.
Mozilla also fails completely to understand design principles about compatibility. The Open Close principle states that you can always add an interface to a class without penalty, but you must never modify or change an existing interface. This is not a principle that makes a class better (indeed, it often makes a class less clear); it's a principle that ensures the class doesn't do something bad to its existing consumers. It enables safe upgrades. Wanting to change the existing interface is the violation that Mozilla continues to commit with the Rapid Release program. Instead of changing users (who are *guaranteed* to have problems with every change), they should provide the new features as an add-on. Enable them by default or not, doesn't matter, but you DO NOT CHANGE THE EXISTING INTERFACE.
It's a matter of consequences. Anything that Bloomberg does has limited repercussions, and can likely be undone with the stroke of a pen or the finding of a court. The worst he is would accomplish would be the repression of civil rights, or the construction of buildings (local impact only), or even economic disaster (concentrated wealth impoverishing others.) Rights could be restored, a court could take the buildings away from him or, the fed could redistribute his wealth through taxation and policies. Some people will have suffered, but on the whole it's not anything that can't be undone.
Everything the Koch brothers does has a long term negative effect on the planet. We can't undo the environmental damage by writing a law removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or by having a court determine that accumulated mercury particulates in the lakes and streams must leave. Hell, we can't even clean up properly after a small scale disaster, like the Deepwater Horizons or the Exxon Valdeez. But people don't understand this is a problem because they can't see the visible effects instantly. Not only does this mean these guys have less opposition than they should, it also encourages them to do anything they want as long as it remains hidden from short term notice.
So yes, the Kochs are much worse than the Bloombergs and Soroses and Buffets and Gates of the world. We can't fix what they're breaking.
Great, so now they're automating the job of Royal Food Tasters. More unemployment. We should have Congress pass a law protecting their business model!