There are legitimate reasons for towers moving around. The cellular service might temporarily bring in a tower-on-a-truck to support a large event, such as a state fair. They might also use a portable tower to temporarily stand in for a non-functioning tower. Those may be uncommon scenarios, but they're still likely more common than a Stingray.
Also, consider that a Stingray lies about the signal strength it's receiving from your mobile phone. In order to monitor as much as possible, it baits your mobile phone with a tempting report of "hey, I get perfectly clear reception from you - even if you're using minimum transmit power. Therefore, you can run on very low battery power, and so you should have no need to switch away to another tower." So that might be a usable telltale: a new tower that reports perfect reception of your phone, even when your own reception of the tower is of poor quality.
So if you're doing some naughty stuff, and notice some new cell towers suddenly pop up around your house, yeah, you might want to think twice.
The original wiretap laws passed in 1968 were clear in that it was the use of devices to intercept a conversation with a "reasonable expectation of privacy" that was a violation, not simply owning them.
The current laws banning cell phone receivers were not created from logic. The laws were created in a poorly-thought-out reaction to some incident involving a VIP; I think some reporter recorded some congressman's cordless phone chat with his mistress, and published it. The wiretap laws passed in 1968 were very clear in that they protected wire based communications, but they did not include radio based communications, and so the reporter went unpunished.
This was another case where the average Joe Sixpack long had the ability to buy an off-the-shelf scanner, but he frequently demonstrated that he lacked the ethics required to prevent himself from using it to violate the law. There were other problems, too, where organized criminals would operate a scanner to listen for police responses to their activities. (At least that was the published story - we don't know how widespread this problem actually was.)
So Congress, applying all their legendary skills at doing the right thing, went to the dark side and banned the equipment, instead of strengthening the illegality of the act. A law was passed making possession of an unauthorized receiver illegal. Joe Sixpack didn't like being told no, so he began buying certain brands of scanners that had "blocking diodes" that could be easily clipped from the circuit. The FCC banned those as well, in 1997.
It's very much like the gun debate, but radios aren't protected by the second Amendment.
Can you build one yourself? Of course. Can you buy one from another country and use it here? Of course. But both of those acts take time, knowledge, and effort, and Joe Sixpack doesn't like to be bothered. So the law takes advantage of people's propensity towards laziness and self-doubt about their skills.
I don't think we need to go that far. If pesticides are truly the problem, it should be evident in fewer cases of CCD in regions that are mostly covered in organic farms. They might need to restrict local homeowner uses on flowers and gardens, just for a test. Plus, there is no evidence that removing one cause is sufficient to recover the populations. Mites could still be a significant factor.
Ummm...no. The current instance of Colony Collapse Disorder is a marked difference in bee colony behavior that began in about 2007-2008. The dieoffs are far larger than anything seen before.
Current theories are that neonicitinoids were introduced at about the same time that CCD began devastating bee colonies. Neonicitinoids, such as imidicloprin, are some of the latest and safest insecticides on the market, with very little harmful effects on mammals. But they have one huge drawback: it has been recently learned that they are extremely lethal to bees - up to 150X more lethal to bees than to other insects. They are neurotoxins. Even sub-lethal doses cause visible confusion in the bees, resulting in "incorrect" dances that the bees use to tell other bees about nearby sources of food.
The principles of safety and privacy do not require an accident before hand to be recognized.
Actually, most safety and security activities are the direct result of an attack or accident. For example, traffic signals are usually erected at unsafe intersections only after a certain number of severe accidents. Sony didn't encrypt their users' passwords in their database, even though hacking of it has been a very real possibility for many years (and I'm only presuming they've encrypted it since the leak.) The world (except for Israel) didn't get truly strong airline security until after the September 11th attacks.
It's biomechanics, not sexism. If you accept that women wear bras, it's in a perfect position to take an EKG reading. Men don't ordinarily wear a form-fitting piece of clothing in the same place.
If you want the same benefits for a man's physiology, think about the many chest-strap heart-rate monitors in the marketplace today. Can they comfortably carry the same amount of electronics and batteries? No. So in your world where this is "sexist", does that mean women should be denied this tool because it isn't equally available to both genders?
This device is no more or less sexist than the clothing that already exists.
Not everyone is able to contribute freely to the common good. Some folks need a paycheck. This allows for either to coexist. And Mozilla Foundation benefits either way by having an increased demand, regardless of the proprietary/free leanings of most people.
And how many ordinary companies making a routine purchase of seemingly ordinary keyboards test them in labs for key loggers?
Commercial keyloggers (including devices like black market skimmers) can use GPRS cards, they can scout for open WiFi access points and transmit their payload once a day at 2:00 AM, or they can sit on a whole file waiting for a harvester to show up and retrieve the data via Bluetooth, 900 mHz, or some other wireless technology. The retrieval patterns are designed to evade detection.
The only people investigating this stuff today are forensic investigators hired by people who are already victims, and independent security firms with nothing better to do.
2% is still a big problem. When you are trying to hack in, you don't care much which account lets you in the door. Get in first, then escalate your privileges.
2% means if I try these top ten bad passwords on about 50 accounts, I'll probably get a strike. If an account is locked out after three tries, then i can try the top three out on about 200 accounts, and might still have success.
I was wondering about that, too. Maybe they'll have the drone autonomously fly to the target's address, then have a human pilot land it on the doorstep, guiding it via GPRS, 4G, or something similar.
Disposal at sea and open pit burning (both of which were practiced by the British and the Soviets) are now prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention. So they won't be dropping barrels of anything over the sides of the ship, or simply pouring the weapons into a fire. They have to be broken down carefully so that what remains is much less dangerous than what they started with.
The weapons are mostly organic compounds, so the bulk of the waste is hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Some weapons have used arsenic, chlorine, fluorine, phosphorous, and other elements. Initially they were disposed of by single stage incineration, but that produced smoke that was toxic in its own right. Modern disposal techniques use multiple stages of heat, filtration, oxidation, electrolysis, or even detonation of the weapons. Bleach is an effective oxidizer, but gives off chlorine. Hydrogen peroxide and high temperature steam will also break down many of the compounds. Sarin [2-(fluoromethyl phosphoryl)oxypropane], which the Syrians are accused of using in this war, can be broken down by a low temperature burn, followed by a scrubbing process, followed by a second high temperature burn. Any solid materials remaining after the scrubbing and filtration processes are then buried.
A UK firm was having great success using electrolysis of silver nitrate in a nitric acid solution, which was very effective at breaking up and oxidizing the compounds, but they have ceased that research. The French are building a detonation chamber, where the entire warhead is placed in a blast chamber and detonated. The high pressures and temperatures perform an initial breakdown of the agents that destroys most of the chemicals, and the remaining chemicals are treated through an incineration and filtration process. One advantage is that it destroys both the chemical weapon and the explosive, meaning they don't have to have a separate hazardous process to handle the high explosives (which might be in a less-than-safe state of stability.)
Destroying the Poisons of War, by the Royal Society of Chemistry, is an interesting read on the history of the topic.
And the U.S. Army, who is in the process of decommissioning their Utah disposal facility at Tooele, has been drilling test holes in their disposal plant and sampling the soil beneath. So far, they have found no traces of any of the weapons they had been destroying. This plant was originally commissioned in the 1970s, so the engineering, the chemistry, and the processes have proven highly successful at safely destroying the US stockpiles over the long term. They know how to do it.
The Tooele base in Utah successfully destroyed over 13000 tons of nerve and blister agents over the last few decades, without causing any problems to the environment or the people involved. They take this with the seriousness it deserves.
TFA (and I emphasize the 'F') is titled "Sea hosting 100-million year old species..."
It is filled with misinformation and hyperbole. And it fails to account for the largest environmental hazard posed by these weapons: their being stolen and used by a third party, or the disposal plant being attacked, causing the uncontrolled release of the toxins. The navy can operate safely in the sea, much safer than anyone can operate a land based plant anywhere on the globe.
The entire article is a troll. Nobody's talking about dumping the chemical weapons into the sea. They're going to move the chemicals to a U.S. Navy ship where they'll be neutralized by incineration. By cooking them hot enough, the molecular bonds will break and all they'll be left with are the constituent elements.
Despite the scary suppositions about performing this task over the sea ("what if there's a leak???"), it's actually far safer for the world if the U.S. Navy disposes of them right there in the middle of the Med. If they wanted to dispose of them on land, they'd have a couple of challenges -- the first of which is finding a stable country willing to accept a chemical weapons processing plant. Guarding the lines hauling the weapons to the processing site would be an ongoing problem. And securing the site against local attacks is another. One thing the U.S. Navy can do very very well is guarantee the security of one of their naval ships at sea. The chemicals will have a much safer journey to neutralization than anywhere else.
Eliminating repeated digits and sequences can significantly reduce the search space. A security policy that requires a 4-digit PIN with no repeats or sequential digits eliminates about 35% of the possible PINs.
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There are legitimate reasons for towers moving around. The cellular service might temporarily bring in a tower-on-a-truck to support a large event, such as a state fair. They might also use a portable tower to temporarily stand in for a non-functioning tower. Those may be uncommon scenarios, but they're still likely more common than a Stingray.
Also, consider that a Stingray lies about the signal strength it's receiving from your mobile phone. In order to monitor as much as possible, it baits your mobile phone with a tempting report of "hey, I get perfectly clear reception from you - even if you're using minimum transmit power. Therefore, you can run on very low battery power, and so you should have no need to switch away to another tower." So that might be a usable telltale: a new tower that reports perfect reception of your phone, even when your own reception of the tower is of poor quality.
So if you're doing some naughty stuff, and notice some new cell towers suddenly pop up around your house, yeah, you might want to think twice.
The original wiretap laws passed in 1968 were clear in that it was the use of devices to intercept a conversation with a "reasonable expectation of privacy" that was a violation, not simply owning them.
The current laws banning cell phone receivers were not created from logic. The laws were created in a poorly-thought-out reaction to some incident involving a VIP; I think some reporter recorded some congressman's cordless phone chat with his mistress, and published it. The wiretap laws passed in 1968 were very clear in that they protected wire based communications, but they did not include radio based communications, and so the reporter went unpunished.
This was another case where the average Joe Sixpack long had the ability to buy an off-the-shelf scanner, but he frequently demonstrated that he lacked the ethics required to prevent himself from using it to violate the law. There were other problems, too, where organized criminals would operate a scanner to listen for police responses to their activities. (At least that was the published story - we don't know how widespread this problem actually was.)
So Congress, applying all their legendary skills at doing the right thing, went to the dark side and banned the equipment, instead of strengthening the illegality of the act. A law was passed making possession of an unauthorized receiver illegal. Joe Sixpack didn't like being told no, so he began buying certain brands of scanners that had "blocking diodes" that could be easily clipped from the circuit. The FCC banned those as well, in 1997.
It's very much like the gun debate, but radios aren't protected by the second Amendment.
Can you build one yourself? Of course. Can you buy one from another country and use it here? Of course. But both of those acts take time, knowledge, and effort, and Joe Sixpack doesn't like to be bothered. So the law takes advantage of people's propensity towards laziness and self-doubt about their skills.
I don't think we need to go that far. If pesticides are truly the problem, it should be evident in fewer cases of CCD in regions that are mostly covered in organic farms. They might need to restrict local homeowner uses on flowers and gardens, just for a test. Plus, there is no evidence that removing one cause is sufficient to recover the populations. Mites could still be a significant factor.
I agree that it's far from proven. Pesticides, however, are still likely to be significant contributors.
Ummm...no. The current instance of Colony Collapse Disorder is a marked difference in bee colony behavior that began in about 2007-2008. The dieoffs are far larger than anything seen before.
Current theories are that neonicitinoids were introduced at about the same time that CCD began devastating bee colonies. Neonicitinoids, such as imidicloprin, are some of the latest and safest insecticides on the market, with very little harmful effects on mammals. But they have one huge drawback: it has been recently learned that they are extremely lethal to bees - up to 150X more lethal to bees than to other insects. They are neurotoxins. Even sub-lethal doses cause visible confusion in the bees, resulting in "incorrect" dances that the bees use to tell other bees about nearby sources of food.
Returning to topic, these are exactly the kinds of people I wouldn't want to accidentally hire.
My dog eats its own poop.
Not a ringing endorsement for the dog food metaphor.
The principles of safety and privacy do not require an accident before hand to be recognized.
Actually, most safety and security activities are the direct result of an attack or accident. For example, traffic signals are usually erected at unsafe intersections only after a certain number of severe accidents. Sony didn't encrypt their users' passwords in their database, even though hacking of it has been a very real possibility for many years (and I'm only presuming they've encrypted it since the leak.) The world (except for Israel) didn't get truly strong airline security until after the September 11th attacks.
It's biomechanics, not sexism. If you accept that women wear bras, it's in a perfect position to take an EKG reading. Men don't ordinarily wear a form-fitting piece of clothing in the same place.
If you want the same benefits for a man's physiology, think about the many chest-strap heart-rate monitors in the marketplace today. Can they comfortably carry the same amount of electronics and batteries? No. So in your world where this is "sexist", does that mean women should be denied this tool because it isn't equally available to both genders?
This device is no more or less sexist than the clothing that already exists.
I rue the day Paul became an improvement.
Not everyone is able to contribute freely to the common good. Some folks need a paycheck. This allows for either to coexist. And Mozilla Foundation benefits either way by having an increased demand, regardless of the proprietary/free leanings of most people.
Good move, Mozilla.
What, you want it returned to Syria? They didn't order it from China on alibaba.com, you know.
That, and his use of "instagramming".
I seriously misunderestimated him.
Actually, a few hundred PIN pads with built-in skimmers and GPRS modules were distributed around Europe a few years ago.
And how many ordinary companies making a routine purchase of seemingly ordinary keyboards test them in labs for key loggers?
Commercial keyloggers (including devices like black market skimmers) can use GPRS cards, they can scout for open WiFi access points and transmit their payload once a day at 2:00 AM, or they can sit on a whole file waiting for a harvester to show up and retrieve the data via Bluetooth, 900 mHz, or some other wireless technology. The retrieval patterns are designed to evade detection.
The only people investigating this stuff today are forensic investigators hired by people who are already victims, and independent security firms with nothing better to do.
2% is still a big problem. When you are trying to hack in, you don't care much which account lets you in the door. Get in first, then escalate your privileges.
2% means if I try these top ten bad passwords on about 50 accounts, I'll probably get a strike. If an account is locked out after three tries, then i can try the top three out on about 200 accounts, and might still have success.
Strontium Bad?
I was wondering about that, too. Maybe they'll have the drone autonomously fly to the target's address, then have a human pilot land it on the doorstep, guiding it via GPRS, 4G, or something similar.
A security vulnerability implies that at some level, there had to have been the faintest vague attempt at being secure.
He exploited a vulnerability, to be sure, but he seems uncomfortable calling it a security vulnerability.
Disposal at sea and open pit burning (both of which were practiced by the British and the Soviets) are now prohibited by the Chemical Weapons Convention. So they won't be dropping barrels of anything over the sides of the ship, or simply pouring the weapons into a fire. They have to be broken down carefully so that what remains is much less dangerous than what they started with.
The weapons are mostly organic compounds, so the bulk of the waste is hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Some weapons have used arsenic, chlorine, fluorine, phosphorous, and other elements. Initially they were disposed of by single stage incineration, but that produced smoke that was toxic in its own right. Modern disposal techniques use multiple stages of heat, filtration, oxidation, electrolysis, or even detonation of the weapons. Bleach is an effective oxidizer, but gives off chlorine. Hydrogen peroxide and high temperature steam will also break down many of the compounds. Sarin [2-(fluoromethyl phosphoryl)oxypropane], which the Syrians are accused of using in this war, can be broken down by a low temperature burn, followed by a scrubbing process, followed by a second high temperature burn. Any solid materials remaining after the scrubbing and filtration processes are then buried.
A UK firm was having great success using electrolysis of silver nitrate in a nitric acid solution, which was very effective at breaking up and oxidizing the compounds, but they have ceased that research. The French are building a detonation chamber, where the entire warhead is placed in a blast chamber and detonated. The high pressures and temperatures perform an initial breakdown of the agents that destroys most of the chemicals, and the remaining chemicals are treated through an incineration and filtration process. One advantage is that it destroys both the chemical weapon and the explosive, meaning they don't have to have a separate hazardous process to handle the high explosives (which might be in a less-than-safe state of stability.)
Destroying the Poisons of War, by the Royal Society of Chemistry, is an interesting read on the history of the topic.
And the U.S. Army, who is in the process of decommissioning their Utah disposal facility at Tooele, has been drilling test holes in their disposal plant and sampling the soil beneath. So far, they have found no traces of any of the weapons they had been destroying. This plant was originally commissioned in the 1970s, so the engineering, the chemistry, and the processes have proven highly successful at safely destroying the US stockpiles over the long term. They know how to do it.
The Tooele base in Utah successfully destroyed over 13000 tons of nerve and blister agents over the last few decades, without causing any problems to the environment or the people involved. They take this with the seriousness it deserves.
TFA (and I emphasize the 'F') is titled "Sea hosting 100-million year old species..."
It is filled with misinformation and hyperbole. And it fails to account for the largest environmental hazard posed by these weapons: their being stolen and used by a third party, or the disposal plant being attacked, causing the uncontrolled release of the toxins. The navy can operate safely in the sea, much safer than anyone can operate a land based plant anywhere on the globe.
The entire article is a troll. Nobody's talking about dumping the chemical weapons into the sea. They're going to move the chemicals to a U.S. Navy ship where they'll be neutralized by incineration. By cooking them hot enough, the molecular bonds will break and all they'll be left with are the constituent elements.
Despite the scary suppositions about performing this task over the sea ("what if there's a leak???"), it's actually far safer for the world if the U.S. Navy disposes of them right there in the middle of the Med. If they wanted to dispose of them on land, they'd have a couple of challenges -- the first of which is finding a stable country willing to accept a chemical weapons processing plant. Guarding the lines hauling the weapons to the processing site would be an ongoing problem. And securing the site against local attacks is another. One thing the U.S. Navy can do very very well is guarantee the security of one of their naval ships at sea. The chemicals will have a much safer journey to neutralization than anywhere else.
You mean like CV dazzle makeup?
It might be popular in Ibiza clubs, but I don't see it walking down Main Street, Anytown, USA.
Eliminating repeated digits and sequences can significantly reduce the search space. A security policy that requires a 4-digit PIN with no repeats or sequential digits eliminates about 35% of the possible PINs.