That looks like some NSA worker used a private USB stick to transfer some of the "internal tools" from his computer to another, forgot about it, stuck it into his computer at home that ran Kaspersky, Kaspersky scanned the stick, the AV heuristics determined the stuff looked kinda fishy, did a closer scan, and eventually sent a copy to Russia. Whether that happened after asking "Hey, dude, something's kinda odd about this file, mind if we analyzed it?" or not is kinda moot now.
And since it would be kinda embarrassing to admit such a blunder and that the NSA, of all agencies, handed their valuable zero days to the Russians... let's rather say those damn Russkies in general and Kaspersky in particular are "hacking" us.
I know only one kind of people who are against internet porn. Those that sell porn and want to eliminate their worst rival. Because you can't really compete with free.
Last week the headhunters started piling up in my inbox. I mean, yes, I usually got the odd "don't you wanna reorient yourself" mail, but we're talking a flood of mails, with headhunters bending over backwards with offers that made me question their sanity.
But if they were mining what's publicly available about me, I can understand it.
You see, the game works both ways. You can dig up anything I put out there about me, but in turn, nothing I put out there about me has to be true. This system assumes that people are actually truthful when they write stuff about themselves. Beats me why this works, but it seems to.
Well, I am not truthful when I write stuff about me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, whatever.
According to my "social media" pages, I'm the hottest potatoe there is right now in security. I rub shoulders with the best and brightest in the field, there are pictures of me hanging out at a bar with some of the key players in the security world (Photoshop is one hell of a program), and it seems i held the keynote at some of the past Black Hats (hey, it ain't my fault if they use my page instead of Black Hat's as a source for their information!). I also complained about the cocktails at the bar there. And that Bruce Schneier can't really tell jokes. You know, spice it up a bit.
None of this is true. Nothing. I know Bruce, of course, I can truthfully answer yes if someone asks "you really know Bruce Schneier?". Of course I do, the whole security world does.
I just highly doubt that he has any clue who I could possibly be...
I would of course never lie to a potential employer. If they actually ask me whether I gave keynotes at Blackhat, whether I am on a first name base with Bruce Schneier, whether I really declined speaking at Def Con because I didn't like their attitude and that it's "too commercial" for my tastes and I got better things to do than give talks at "insignificant petty has-been cons" like my Facebook claims, I will of course tell them the truth.
That my Facebook page, along with the other social media pages, are tools to weed out the stupid and gullible.
Considering that the laws of life, no matter what form that life takes, are universal, I cannot help but agree. If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.
Considering that we barely manage to leave this planet, and even that only for rather brief moments, and that we live on a pretty decent planet compared to what else we have found so far in the galaxy, maybe we shouldn't tell announce it to others that might be technologically advanced enough to consider our planet a really lovely place for a Summer residence, and all they have to do is just getting rid of the vermin first.
Oxygen may be easy to detect, but we have found oxygen also on other planets. And even though it is very rare that there is an abundance of oxygen, even enough to have some left over after everything that could react with it (which is, well, pretty much everything) has, it's far from impossible and as far as I know it's also not easy to determine whether that oxygen is elementary or part of some oxide compound.
But there is one molecule that exists on our planet and only on our planet, and we have not found a single one anywhere else: Chlorophyll. Which is also the foundation of multicellular life on our planet, and since we only know life on this one, it is basically (if we ignore a few methane breathing bacteria) the foundation of any form of higher life.
And it can also be rather easily detected, chlorophyll absorbs light in two rather narrowly defined bands. You find a planet with oxygen that absorbs heavily in the 680-700nm wavelength range? Time to align your large listening dishes!
No. Just no. Sorry, but this simply cannot be the reason.
We are talking about people who buy "smart locks" where they send a signal from their iPhone app to the server of the manufacturer of the lock who then in turn sends a signal to their lock, and who stare at you blankly with a "yes? so?" expression when you explain it to them like this.
Whatever the reason may be for those people to not buy these gadgets, but security or privacy concerns are certainly not the reasons.
It starts way lower usually. With any hint of bad luck, you not only have to review the SSL implementation, you have to review the IP stack implementation. Many off-the-shelf solutions don't apply due to timing or resources limitations. You can for example usually not simply take any USB implementation because the hardware you have available cannot handle USB 2.0 timing constraints. You cannot waste a few MB of ram on a sensible IP stack implementation because that's literally all available ram you have. Buffer over- and underruns as well as out-of-memory conditions that never happen in a remotely sensible setup suddenly become realities because you DO run out of resources. And a lot of easy fixes are simply not available because they require, you guessed it, throwing more resources against the problem.
Something as simple as key sizes suddenly becomes an issue because for the hardware you have available it makes a huge difference if your key is suddenly twice the size, something you don't even notice in normal computing.
And as soon as you as much as touch real time issues as you often do in a car environment, you're really in for a world of hurt and headache.
All this requires that the security guy you hire at least knows of those problems, even if he never had to deal with them himself, or else you get a security report you simply cannot heed due to the limitations you're dealing with. It would be like the mouse asking the owl how to escape the cat and getting the answer "spread your wings and fly away, duh".
People give me the most precious gift of all on Christmas: Time. The time I save by not having to shop for gifts for people who I don't know what to buy because what they need they already buy themselves and what they don't need they also don't want. By not giving me anything, they also absolve me of the obligation to buy anything in return.
That's really thoughtful of them. And it's exactly what I wanted.
If you go back a bit further and watch his music videos, they're actually great. Ever seen "I'd do anything for love" by Meat Loaf? Yes, believe it or not. Director: Michael Bay. Yes, he can actually tell a compelling story in just 5-7 minutes even without any dialogue and with some of that time actually wasted seeing someone singing.
At some point, though, he just noticed that it's easier to make money by blowing shit up.
It's sad. He has shown that he CAN do it. But I can well understand him, why bother trying to cook up a great meal if all your patrons want is just a burger with some fries?
There is no room to slash prices anymore. Competition is so stiff that the margins are already razor thin. In the pre-internet times stores could easily afford slashing 20% because of their 40% profit margins, but today?
Which is GOOD. Instead of being gouged the whole year, you get a better price now all year long.
Who in their right mind would WANT to go buy stuff at the same time everyone else does? Whether that's Black Friday or Christmas in general. If anything, online shopping will do, but I will certainly NOT spend my time in a warehouse around this time of the year.
First, the obvious: It's a surefire way to get sick. And I'm not even talking about the thousands of people who can't be assed to cover their snouts when sneezing or coughing. It's the insane temperature differences that kill me. Outside it's freezing. So you dress appropriately. But shops feel that compelling urge to turn their sales floor into a Finnish sauna. So you're sweating like a pig. Only to go back outside to be frozen solid. Abso-fucking-lutely great for your health.
Then a billion people pushing carts and throwing stuff about. with at least as many tripping hazards in tow called children. But dare to punt one of those little pests out of the way. Loud, obnoxious and, not least for the aforementioned sweating, smelling like a rotten egg sandwich.
And finally, when you think you ALMOST made it to the end, the inevitable line before the cashiers. A million people lined up in front of ONE SINGLE DAMN checkout booth. Staffed with the trainee, of course, so you have plenty of time to decide you absolutely need one of the impulse buy items, accompanied by the sweet sound of whistle buys that throw tantrums because their parents refuse to buy said impulse items.
You really want to know why we are fed up with this? Are you seriously asking?
You know, most movies today are remakes, rehashes or reboots. And they suffer from one fatal flaw: They have to stand against a timeless classic, a masterpiece that has entertained generations before, that people remember fondly and that even draws a lot of viewers whenever a rerun is shown on TV. Why? Because you only make remakes and reboots of successful movies.
This movie, though, will have to stand against this.
And 2 hours of Mario jumping and saying "Itsa me, Mario!" would beat that in story, credibility, faithfulness to the original material, acting and general entertainment.
The idiots yelling "aloha snackbar" before blowing themselves up sure aren't Nobel prize material. But neither are the front line spies. And neither of them have to be.
The mastermind can well be someone behind the lines, training the one executing the attack to use the tool they build. Push this button, push that one and 72 virgins (along with their mom's basement) are yours.
There is a solution to this problem. For every product you make, create a new shell company. That shell company produces and sells the product and pays "royalties" for some patents or licenses or whatever bullshit your beancounters can come up to the parent company, essentially becoming a pass-through for any revenue.
Especially considering that the cost would be high enough to make the airline fail, and being too big to fail as usual we get to foot the bill anyway, so why should the airline be concerned at all?
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like some NSA worker used a private USB stick to transfer some of the "internal tools" from his computer to another, forgot about it, stuck it into his computer at home that ran Kaspersky, Kaspersky scanned the stick, the AV heuristics determined the stuff looked kinda fishy, did a closer scan, and eventually sent a copy to Russia. Whether that happened after asking "Hey, dude, something's kinda odd about this file, mind if we analyzed it?" or not is kinda moot now.
And since it would be kinda embarrassing to admit such a blunder and that the NSA, of all agencies, handed their valuable zero days to the Russians... let's rather say those damn Russkies in general and Kaspersky in particular are "hacking" us.
I know only one kind of people who are against internet porn. Those that sell porn and want to eliminate their worst rival. Because you can't really compete with free.
Neither the Chinese Communist Party nor our parties actually believe people are dumb enough to buy this shit.
But they also know that people can't do jack shit against it.
Last week the headhunters started piling up in my inbox. I mean, yes, I usually got the odd "don't you wanna reorient yourself" mail, but we're talking a flood of mails, with headhunters bending over backwards with offers that made me question their sanity.
But if they were mining what's publicly available about me, I can understand it.
You see, the game works both ways. You can dig up anything I put out there about me, but in turn, nothing I put out there about me has to be true. This system assumes that people are actually truthful when they write stuff about themselves. Beats me why this works, but it seems to.
Well, I am not truthful when I write stuff about me on Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, whatever.
According to my "social media" pages, I'm the hottest potatoe there is right now in security. I rub shoulders with the best and brightest in the field, there are pictures of me hanging out at a bar with some of the key players in the security world (Photoshop is one hell of a program), and it seems i held the keynote at some of the past Black Hats (hey, it ain't my fault if they use my page instead of Black Hat's as a source for their information!). I also complained about the cocktails at the bar there. And that Bruce Schneier can't really tell jokes. You know, spice it up a bit.
None of this is true. Nothing. I know Bruce, of course, I can truthfully answer yes if someone asks "you really know Bruce Schneier?". Of course I do, the whole security world does.
I just highly doubt that he has any clue who I could possibly be...
I would of course never lie to a potential employer. If they actually ask me whether I gave keynotes at Blackhat, whether I am on a first name base with Bruce Schneier, whether I really declined speaking at Def Con because I didn't like their attitude and that it's "too commercial" for my tastes and I got better things to do than give talks at "insignificant petty has-been cons" like my Facebook claims, I will of course tell them the truth.
That my Facebook page, along with the other social media pages, are tools to weed out the stupid and gullible.
They didn't break the law. That doesn't mean that there's nothing wrong with what they did.
The law doesn't define what's right or decent. Only what's legal. Big difference.
But if you really prefer ZigBee based products, here is a pretty neat presentation at a security conference from two years ago.
Lucky for us there is only one such standard. Oh, wait. No, there isn't. There is for example this. Just read the "how it works" section.
And how I know that they have control over the lock? Because else they couldn't do this.
Considering that the laws of life, no matter what form that life takes, are universal, I cannot help but agree. If there is even remotely any kind of competition for resources on a planet, a more advanced, more aggressive species will displace others, and it is likely that the one that prevails is one that is aggressive, xenophobic, competitive and ruthless, at least towards those that don't belong to their own species.
Considering that we barely manage to leave this planet, and even that only for rather brief moments, and that we live on a pretty decent planet compared to what else we have found so far in the galaxy, maybe we shouldn't tell announce it to others that might be technologically advanced enough to consider our planet a really lovely place for a Summer residence, and all they have to do is just getting rid of the vermin first.
Oxygen may be easy to detect, but we have found oxygen also on other planets. And even though it is very rare that there is an abundance of oxygen, even enough to have some left over after everything that could react with it (which is, well, pretty much everything) has, it's far from impossible and as far as I know it's also not easy to determine whether that oxygen is elementary or part of some oxide compound.
But there is one molecule that exists on our planet and only on our planet, and we have not found a single one anywhere else: Chlorophyll. Which is also the foundation of multicellular life on our planet, and since we only know life on this one, it is basically (if we ignore a few methane breathing bacteria) the foundation of any form of higher life.
And it can also be rather easily detected, chlorophyll absorbs light in two rather narrowly defined bands. You find a planet with oxygen that absorbs heavily in the 680-700nm wavelength range? Time to align your large listening dishes!
Oh those are still huge.
No. Just no. Sorry, but this simply cannot be the reason.
We are talking about people who buy "smart locks" where they send a signal from their iPhone app to the server of the manufacturer of the lock who then in turn sends a signal to their lock, and who stare at you blankly with a "yes? so?" expression when you explain it to them like this.
Whatever the reason may be for those people to not buy these gadgets, but security or privacy concerns are certainly not the reasons.
It starts way lower usually. With any hint of bad luck, you not only have to review the SSL implementation, you have to review the IP stack implementation. Many off-the-shelf solutions don't apply due to timing or resources limitations. You can for example usually not simply take any USB implementation because the hardware you have available cannot handle USB 2.0 timing constraints. You cannot waste a few MB of ram on a sensible IP stack implementation because that's literally all available ram you have. Buffer over- and underruns as well as out-of-memory conditions that never happen in a remotely sensible setup suddenly become realities because you DO run out of resources. And a lot of easy fixes are simply not available because they require, you guessed it, throwing more resources against the problem.
Something as simple as key sizes suddenly becomes an issue because for the hardware you have available it makes a huge difference if your key is suddenly twice the size, something you don't even notice in normal computing.
And as soon as you as much as touch real time issues as you often do in a car environment, you're really in for a world of hurt and headache.
All this requires that the security guy you hire at least knows of those problems, even if he never had to deal with them himself, or else you get a security report you simply cannot heed due to the limitations you're dealing with. It would be like the mouse asking the owl how to escape the cat and getting the answer "spread your wings and fly away, duh".
People give me the most precious gift of all on Christmas: Time. The time I save by not having to shop for gifts for people who I don't know what to buy because what they need they already buy themselves and what they don't need they also don't want. By not giving me anything, they also absolve me of the obligation to buy anything in return.
That's really thoughtful of them. And it's exactly what I wanted.
Just look for yourself.
Would you feel safe standing in the same line as these freaks?
Well, duh, how'd you like being called a monkey?
If you go back a bit further and watch his music videos, they're actually great. Ever seen "I'd do anything for love" by Meat Loaf? Yes, believe it or not. Director: Michael Bay. Yes, he can actually tell a compelling story in just 5-7 minutes even without any dialogue and with some of that time actually wasted seeing someone singing.
At some point, though, he just noticed that it's easier to make money by blowing shit up.
It's sad. He has shown that he CAN do it. But I can well understand him, why bother trying to cook up a great meal if all your patrons want is just a burger with some fries?
There is no room to slash prices anymore. Competition is so stiff that the margins are already razor thin. In the pre-internet times stores could easily afford slashing 20% because of their 40% profit margins, but today?
Which is GOOD. Instead of being gouged the whole year, you get a better price now all year long.
It's sensible.
Who in their right mind would WANT to go buy stuff at the same time everyone else does? Whether that's Black Friday or Christmas in general. If anything, online shopping will do, but I will certainly NOT spend my time in a warehouse around this time of the year.
First, the obvious: It's a surefire way to get sick. And I'm not even talking about the thousands of people who can't be assed to cover their snouts when sneezing or coughing. It's the insane temperature differences that kill me. Outside it's freezing. So you dress appropriately. But shops feel that compelling urge to turn their sales floor into a Finnish sauna. So you're sweating like a pig. Only to go back outside to be frozen solid. Abso-fucking-lutely great for your health.
Then a billion people pushing carts and throwing stuff about. with at least as many tripping hazards in tow called children. But dare to punt one of those little pests out of the way. Loud, obnoxious and, not least for the aforementioned sweating, smelling like a rotten egg sandwich.
And finally, when you think you ALMOST made it to the end, the inevitable line before the cashiers. A million people lined up in front of ONE SINGLE DAMN checkout booth. Staffed with the trainee, of course, so you have plenty of time to decide you absolutely need one of the impulse buy items, accompanied by the sweet sound of whistle buys that throw tantrums because their parents refuse to buy said impulse items.
You really want to know why we are fed up with this? Are you seriously asking?
So... basically yet another Final Fantasy movie just without swords that are larger than the characters?
The better question is whether you can make a Jar Jar parody that's even more racist than the original.
You know, most movies today are remakes, rehashes or reboots. And they suffer from one fatal flaw: They have to stand against a timeless classic, a masterpiece that has entertained generations before, that people remember fondly and that even draws a lot of viewers whenever a rerun is shown on TV. Why? Because you only make remakes and reboots of successful movies.
This movie, though, will have to stand against this.
And 2 hours of Mario jumping and saying "Itsa me, Mario!" would beat that in story, credibility, faithfulness to the original material, acting and general entertainment.
It was supposed to be our family moment this week! *sob*
The idiots yelling "aloha snackbar" before blowing themselves up sure aren't Nobel prize material. But neither are the front line spies. And neither of them have to be.
The mastermind can well be someone behind the lines, training the one executing the attack to use the tool they build. Push this button, push that one and 72 virgins (along with their mom's basement) are yours.
There is a solution to this problem. For every product you make, create a new shell company. That shell company produces and sells the product and pays "royalties" for some patents or licenses or whatever bullshit your beancounters can come up to the parent company, essentially becoming a pass-through for any revenue.
If the shit hits the fan, the shell goes poof.
Especially considering that the cost would be high enough to make the airline fail, and being too big to fail as usual we get to foot the bill anyway, so why should the airline be concerned at all?