Depends. If the backhoe has Microsoft stickers, you're probably ok. If the backhoe is the JCB GT sports model (120MPH+), you'll be gone before the press - err, police get there.
And what's the betting the FBI's interest is more in obtaining a copy of the DDoS attack software, rather than prosecuting? They have to sniff around, for the image of the thing, but savage levels of corporate brutality are widespread and Government-led prosecutions are not.
One can hope, but I doubt it. Revision3 might see it as bad publicity, even though they're not the ones who did anything wrong, and they'd risk further massive DDoS attacks in retaliation if they did file a lawsuit. Cases take a long time to come to court, and all MediaDefender needs to do is destroy their solvency before that happens. Dead companies tell no tales.
Plato made some interesting comments on that. Essentially, he argued, democracy is only viable if the population is reasonably intelligent and well-educated. If it is poorly educated or stupid, it is far too easy to manipulate and becomes a dictatorship by proxy. If we follow this line of reasoning, then the second step would be to have a jury pool democracy, but have a first step of massively investing in education, mental health programs, brain-stretching initiatives, and the like, coupled with massively investing in research institutes, schools, universities and research infrastructure. It would also seem advisable to encourage individuals into the fields of blue-sky and early-adopting research, much as the British "Prince of Wales Award for Invention and Innovation" attempts to do in England, albeit on a far smaller scale than you'd actually need.
In mathematical terms, this makes Wikipedia a non-simply-connected space. This has two consequences. Firstly, it makes the topology much harder to describe. Secondly, it means that topologists should have enough research material to write books and papers on the dynamics of Wikispace for years to come.
The six degrees of seperation is an easily-misunderstood concept, making it important that what it is people are looking for is also what people think they are looking for.
The next thing to consider is that Wikipedia is produced by self-selecting contributors who are (necessariy) selective as to what facts (and what references) are to be used, making this a definitely non-random sample using incomplete data out of a population that may have unexpected biases.
What matters, then, is that even under heavily sub-optimal conditions, we are getting the same results as we'd expect from near-perfect data. What also matters is that the incompleteness of the data is not significantly perturbing the distance between any two articles. You would expect it to, but it doesn't.
You're probably right. On the other hand, it could be argued that this case wasted police time and was a direct consequence of anti-social behavour on the part of the scientologists. There are also reports of illegal influence by the branch on London's police service. As such, ASBOs could be issued against the entire branch, as could the barring of any individual from public office who secretly holds membership with it (as per Freemasonry restrictions already in place). Britain has amongst the best civil liberties of any country in the world, but also some of the best ways of abusing those liberties. Harassment by MI5 (who classified members of CND as "Potential Subversives" in the 80s) is entirely legal. Britain's health services are not required to treat self-inflicted conditions which reduce the chances of long-term survival. The list isn't endless, but creative British governments of the past have used existing legislation to cripple and/or destroy organizations they didn't like. Exiling all members of the church to Rockall could be fun, especially as the European Court of Human Rights is only empowered to deal with the rights of humans, not Thetans, allowing the British to completely ignore any EU ruling curtailing action.
Several senior members of the London police service are also said to be members or heavily aligned with it, in addition to any bribes or handouts. This won't reach the scandalous proportions of West Midlands Serious Crime Squad (the entire squad was itself investigated for carying out serious crimes) but frankly I'd regard it as being on a similar level. A corrupt and degenerate police force cannot - and should not - be tolerated in any western nation.
Interestingly, if any action were to take place, it would be because of other secret organizations (Mark Masons, for example) that are within the police. Their influence will have been diluted, and much of the freemason rights to remain secret have been lost over time because of blatant, exposed corruption from other organizations. It would seem in their interests, then, to crush Scientology in London as far as possible. To quote a certain movie, in the end there can be only one. And the older, more reputable organizations would be insane to have that one be a bunch of crazies.
Luddism was founded on the principle that the way technology was being implemented was costing jobs (it actually triggered widespread poverty and a total economic collapse in some areas). It was not a campaign against technology or advances, merely against short-term gains by management at the expense of everyone else. If companies had been willing to use technology to enhance the productivity of individuals and transfer people from redundant, tedious work into more profitable specialty areas, I doubt Ludd or his followers would have raised a finger. They'd probably have invested their efforts into helping.
In this case, people generally eat better and live better, reducing the strain on their immune system by diseases. Instead of working with the health care industry, though, there has been an effort to marginalize it through these sorts of autism accusations. Thus, it is actually the health care industry that is in the same boat Ludd was in, NOT the mainstream individual, and their reaction is little different from Ludd's, opting for ethically unsound retaliation and paranoia.
It doesn't take an 'ultranationalist' in Russia to protest against the destruction of war memorials - Russia lost 30 million people in WWII (that's about 50 times more than USA lost in WWII).
In the battle for Stalingrad, the Russian side was initially fought by DIY militias, where ordinary citizens would leap on tanks and bung Molotov cocktails down the hatches. (Americans who consider an armed citizenry to be useful against an army would be advised to remember that Stalingrad's citizens only won because the streets were too narrow for the tanks to have a chance and because there were more of them.) After the citizens were defeated by the Germans, the Russian army counter-attacked and slaughtered as many Germans as they could. Surrender was not in the dictionary that day.
As a wargamer and (amateur) military historian, I am very familiar with not only this battle but many of the others. The Russians very nearly lost against the Germans, only the terrible winter allowed a late rally, and even that was almost not enough. The Russian air force was badly outclassed (even though the Germans had lost most of theirs attacking Britain) and the Russian government was hghly sympathetic to Nazi aims.
Personally, I see this as an evidence of how easy is to wage electronic 'guerrilla warfare'.
I agree with you, but would point out that there are enough defences that aren't being widely deployed that it is far easier than it has any right to be.
You will also no doubt recall that these were found infected by malware that had been transferred from unclassified networks. What difference does an airwall make when it's being run by an airhead?
What are nations going to do about it? Many networks are spanning-tree, not mesh, and far too many countries have far too few cross-border gateways that are independent. The cyberattack could have been shut down within 5-10 seconds, with minimal loss of connectivity, if the network had been designed correctly. DDoS attacks aren't limited to governments - the DoS attacks that led to changes in TCP/IP to limit/block such attacks were the effort of some cybercriminal-wannabe, and that was mid 90s. Today, we have inline proactive intrusion detection systems, congestion blocking for UDP and unresponsive flows, routing algorithms that eliminate single points of failure, and the such. What excuse does anyone have, today, for being vulnerable to this? People are vaccinated against common deadly diseases, networks are (or should be) innoculated against common (and potentially deadly) cyberattacks.
Estonia I can almost forgive, as they're relatively poor and didn't have much time to go from Soviet-era attitudes to something saner. They should still have done more. What bothers me much more is that the scorecards for US departments make it clear that the US is even less prepared for a cyberwar than even Balkan castoffs.
History tends to suggest economic terrorism is far more effective than any other kind, so it is definitely an area I would consider a likely target in future. As such, the strengthening of security against physical attacks on computer network infrastructure and electronic attacks against either individual computers or the system as a whole should be the number one priority.
SCADA and other such networks for operating industrial equiptment exist in open-source form, so secure reference implementations would seem to be a possibility. I don't know of any effective method of mandating such changes, other than perhaps to have those packages which require Government certifying lose their certification if they use insecure protocols or are otherwise demonstrably vulnerable to known attacks.
They've improved security by dressing up in giant M16 costumes? Well, I suppose that would be an improvement. What depresses me is that the departments listed as C, D and F aren't that much different from what they were last year, the year before that, or any other year they've produced these scores. As much as I like NASA, I believe they have the least excuse of any of them, due to the sheer mass of geeks they have working for them. Maybe there should be a suspension on funding for any department that fails to show good faith in improving/maintaining security.
...to use your example, it would be as if the car company had explicitly laid down hard guarantees that you could ram the car into as many trees as you liked at 70 mph and you would never be hurt, AFTER their own crash-tests had demonstrated that getting hurt was not only possible but very very likely.
Their claim, after all, is not that they were hurt, but that the company selling the product (allegedly) falsified information, concealed evidence of that falsification, and then sold products based on that falsehood. Most nations have lemon laws, but the US is generally not so great in that department, which is why - say - lawsuits against drug companies are possible after serious injury or death, but lawsuits over the suppression of studies which demonstrate injury or death (ie: proving the product is a lemon) simply don't happen. This means that their chances of success are very limited. They have not been subject to the injury claimed, and the selling of bogus products is a normal, everyday practice. I don't agree with that being the case, but the courts are likely to take into account that the consumer has neither a right nor a reasonable expectation of truth or honesty, as things stand.
For the most part, you are correct. In the early drafts, doubly so. However, the Deathstar battle is based on the attack through the Fjord in 633 Squadron, which in turn was based on the true-life attack by the Dambuster Squadron. (At university, my landlord was one of the tailgunners from the Dambusters. I also met several of the pilots who had been involved in the Great Escape, later on.)
Whilst 633 was cheesey in many respects - the book was so much better - the attack was truly spectacular for the time. In the real-life Dambuster raid, make that awe-inspiring with added ohmygod and a side-order of hidebehindthesofa. I'm serious. Those guys were skimming 150 or so feet from the water with flak from either side and in front, trees and mountains surrounding them, enemy fighters bearing down, and they had to drop the bouncing bomb at exactly the right height at exactly the right speed at exactly the right point. If the Force existed, those pilots would have been honorary Jedi by the next morning. As with the Star Wars movie, you had one bomber on an attack run with two other bombers close by running interference.
The next-closest raid in World War 2 would be the Shell Building Raid, when a squadron of Mosquito fighter/bombers were dispatched with concussion bombs to destroy the interrogation and records rooms without damaging the prisoners cells beyond using the concussion to blast open internal doors. Over 90% of the prisoners escaped, if I remember the fact file correctly, making it one of the most successful raids by the RAF in terms of meeting useful objectives. (Unfortunately, one of the Mosquitos slammed into a school, killing a significant number of children.) You can see echos of the second raid in both 633 Squadron and in Star Wars, but it certainly wasn't borrowed from nearly as extensively.
It's not Star Wars, but Battlestar Galactica also borrows heavily from RAF war footage. The attacks on the home worlds and the massive initial space battle (10,000 cylons versus a handful of human pilots) was directly lifted from The Battle of Britain with the sole modification that the British won. Not bad, when you consider that the Germans really did have 10,000+ planes capable of flight at any given time and the RAF had 12 operational squadrons. It would have made for a short movie, though, if Battlestar Galactica had followed the true-life story to the end, as the RAF had virtually reduced the Luftwaffe to non-functional status by the end, even though they were totally shattered themselves.
This is where the epic parts of the stories originate, and it has generally been the epic parts that have carried the rest.
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Depends. If the backhoe has Microsoft stickers, you're probably ok. If the backhoe is the JCB GT sports model (120MPH+), you'll be gone before the press - err, police get there.
...the rulers are vampires and therefore do not reflect at all.
Your argument contains one common fallacy. Corporate executives aren't even remotely normal.
And what's the betting the FBI's interest is more in obtaining a copy of the DDoS attack software, rather than prosecuting? They have to sniff around, for the image of the thing, but savage levels of corporate brutality are widespread and Government-led prosecutions are not.
One can hope, but I doubt it. Revision3 might see it as bad publicity, even though they're not the ones who did anything wrong, and they'd risk further massive DDoS attacks in retaliation if they did file a lawsuit. Cases take a long time to come to court, and all MediaDefender needs to do is destroy their solvency before that happens. Dead companies tell no tales.
Plato made some interesting comments on that. Essentially, he argued, democracy is only viable if the population is reasonably intelligent and well-educated. If it is poorly educated or stupid, it is far too easy to manipulate and becomes a dictatorship by proxy. If we follow this line of reasoning, then the second step would be to have a jury pool democracy, but have a first step of massively investing in education, mental health programs, brain-stretching initiatives, and the like, coupled with massively investing in research institutes, schools, universities and research infrastructure. It would also seem advisable to encourage individuals into the fields of blue-sky and early-adopting research, much as the British "Prince of Wales Award for Invention and Innovation" attempts to do in England, albeit on a far smaller scale than you'd actually need.
And paying for is to buy.
No Warner below us,
Above us, metro wi-fi
Imagine all the artists
Getting paid the full amount.
Imagine there's no IP
Nor music tax for you
Nothng to lawsuit over
And no Sony too
Imagine all the people
Owning what they have
You may say I'm unAmerican .torrent
And your lawyer's just begun
I hope someday you'll
And the world will be as one.
In mathematical terms, this makes Wikipedia a non-simply-connected space. This has two consequences. Firstly, it makes the topology much harder to describe. Secondly, it means that topologists should have enough research material to write books and papers on the dynamics of Wikispace for years to come.
The next thing to consider is that Wikipedia is produced by self-selecting contributors who are (necessariy) selective as to what facts (and what references) are to be used, making this a definitely non-random sample using incomplete data out of a population that may have unexpected biases.
What matters, then, is that even under heavily sub-optimal conditions, we are getting the same results as we'd expect from near-perfect data. What also matters is that the incompleteness of the data is not significantly perturbing the distance between any two articles. You would expect it to, but it doesn't.
You're not the only one with this problem, I fear.
It only takes years because they keep shooting the probes down.
Depends on the speed and point of impact.
You're probably right. On the other hand, it could be argued that this case wasted police time and was a direct consequence of anti-social behavour on the part of the scientologists. There are also reports of illegal influence by the branch on London's police service. As such, ASBOs could be issued against the entire branch, as could the barring of any individual from public office who secretly holds membership with it (as per Freemasonry restrictions already in place). Britain has amongst the best civil liberties of any country in the world, but also some of the best ways of abusing those liberties. Harassment by MI5 (who classified members of CND as "Potential Subversives" in the 80s) is entirely legal. Britain's health services are not required to treat self-inflicted conditions which reduce the chances of long-term survival. The list isn't endless, but creative British governments of the past have used existing legislation to cripple and/or destroy organizations they didn't like. Exiling all members of the church to Rockall could be fun, especially as the European Court of Human Rights is only empowered to deal with the rights of humans, not Thetans, allowing the British to completely ignore any EU ruling curtailing action.
Interestingly, if any action were to take place, it would be because of other secret organizations (Mark Masons, for example) that are within the police. Their influence will have been diluted, and much of the freemason rights to remain secret have been lost over time because of blatant, exposed corruption from other organizations. It would seem in their interests, then, to crush Scientology in London as far as possible. To quote a certain movie, in the end there can be only one. And the older, more reputable organizations would be insane to have that one be a bunch of crazies.
Ah, but could Stalin read?
I'll correct that: the aims the Nazis let the Russians know about, prior to the Blitzkreig manoever.
In this case, people generally eat better and live better, reducing the strain on their immune system by diseases. Instead of working with the health care industry, though, there has been an effort to marginalize it through these sorts of autism accusations. Thus, it is actually the health care industry that is in the same boat Ludd was in, NOT the mainstream individual, and their reaction is little different from Ludd's, opting for ethically unsound retaliation and paranoia.
In the battle for Stalingrad, the Russian side was initially fought by DIY militias, where ordinary citizens would leap on tanks and bung Molotov cocktails down the hatches. (Americans who consider an armed citizenry to be useful against an army would be advised to remember that Stalingrad's citizens only won because the streets were too narrow for the tanks to have a chance and because there were more of them.) After the citizens were defeated by the Germans, the Russian army counter-attacked and slaughtered as many Germans as they could. Surrender was not in the dictionary that day.
As a wargamer and (amateur) military historian, I am very familiar with not only this battle but many of the others. The Russians very nearly lost against the Germans, only the terrible winter allowed a late rally, and even that was almost not enough. The Russian air force was badly outclassed (even though the Germans had lost most of theirs attacking Britain) and the Russian government was hghly sympathetic to Nazi aims.
Personally, I see this as an evidence of how easy is to wage electronic 'guerrilla warfare'.
I agree with you, but would point out that there are enough defences that aren't being widely deployed that it is far easier than it has any right to be.
You will also no doubt recall that these were found infected by malware that had been transferred from unclassified networks. What difference does an airwall make when it's being run by an airhead?
Estonia I can almost forgive, as they're relatively poor and didn't have much time to go from Soviet-era attitudes to something saner. They should still have done more. What bothers me much more is that the scorecards for US departments make it clear that the US is even less prepared for a cyberwar than even Balkan castoffs.
SCADA and other such networks for operating industrial equiptment exist in open-source form, so secure reference implementations would seem to be a possibility. I don't know of any effective method of mandating such changes, other than perhaps to have those packages which require Government certifying lose their certification if they use insecure protocols or are otherwise demonstrably vulnerable to known attacks.
They've improved security by dressing up in giant M16 costumes? Well, I suppose that would be an improvement. What depresses me is that the departments listed as C, D and F aren't that much different from what they were last year, the year before that, or any other year they've produced these scores. As much as I like NASA, I believe they have the least excuse of any of them, due to the sheer mass of geeks they have working for them. Maybe there should be a suspension on funding for any department that fails to show good faith in improving/maintaining security.
Their claim, after all, is not that they were hurt, but that the company selling the product (allegedly) falsified information, concealed evidence of that falsification, and then sold products based on that falsehood. Most nations have lemon laws, but the US is generally not so great in that department, which is why - say - lawsuits against drug companies are possible after serious injury or death, but lawsuits over the suppression of studies which demonstrate injury or death (ie: proving the product is a lemon) simply don't happen. This means that their chances of success are very limited. They have not been subject to the injury claimed, and the selling of bogus products is a normal, everyday practice. I don't agree with that being the case, but the courts are likely to take into account that the consumer has neither a right nor a reasonable expectation of truth or honesty, as things stand.
Their box of lerts were stolen.
Whilst 633 was cheesey in many respects - the book was so much better - the attack was truly spectacular for the time. In the real-life Dambuster raid, make that awe-inspiring with added ohmygod and a side-order of hidebehindthesofa. I'm serious. Those guys were skimming 150 or so feet from the water with flak from either side and in front, trees and mountains surrounding them, enemy fighters bearing down, and they had to drop the bouncing bomb at exactly the right height at exactly the right speed at exactly the right point. If the Force existed, those pilots would have been honorary Jedi by the next morning. As with the Star Wars movie, you had one bomber on an attack run with two other bombers close by running interference.
The next-closest raid in World War 2 would be the Shell Building Raid, when a squadron of Mosquito fighter/bombers were dispatched with concussion bombs to destroy the interrogation and records rooms without damaging the prisoners cells beyond using the concussion to blast open internal doors. Over 90% of the prisoners escaped, if I remember the fact file correctly, making it one of the most successful raids by the RAF in terms of meeting useful objectives. (Unfortunately, one of the Mosquitos slammed into a school, killing a significant number of children.) You can see echos of the second raid in both 633 Squadron and in Star Wars, but it certainly wasn't borrowed from nearly as extensively.
It's not Star Wars, but Battlestar Galactica also borrows heavily from RAF war footage. The attacks on the home worlds and the massive initial space battle (10,000 cylons versus a handful of human pilots) was directly lifted from The Battle of Britain with the sole modification that the British won. Not bad, when you consider that the Germans really did have 10,000+ planes capable of flight at any given time and the RAF had 12 operational squadrons. It would have made for a short movie, though, if Battlestar Galactica had followed the true-life story to the end, as the RAF had virtually reduced the Luftwaffe to non-functional status by the end, even though they were totally shattered themselves.
This is where the epic parts of the stories originate, and it has generally been the epic parts that have carried the rest.