More importantly, of the last 7 landing attempts, there were only two failures, (...) So it's looking like reliability of future landings can be expected to be quite a bit better than 50%.
Most importantly, none have flown again and until they do it's expensive garbage recovery. For what it's worth I heard they did engine tests and it looks good, but it's more important they nail the launches than the landings.
Well first comes the nuclear war. Then the nuclear winter. Then the fight by the survivors for a far too small food supply. Starving men are desperate men, we'd hunt all game to extinction, empty the lakes and rivers but with crops failing there would be mass raiding and starvation. Even in the "dark ages" it was far from anarchy, before the dust settles we'd be nothing more than isolated pockets of survivors, struggling to rediscover all the basics of living off the land as ammunition, supplies and stocks of medicine runs out. There's a reason 90%+ used to work in primary industries and almost everyone was illiterate, they were too busy trying to stay alive to learn how to read and write. If there's no time to pass the knowledge, much of it will die.
And here's the kicker: All the easy resources are mostly gone. It's a fundamental fact of capitalism, if there's an ore vein in open day that's easy and cheap to mine so we'll take those first. We're digging deeper and deeper with more and more sophisticated technology but if that collapses it would be very hard to start over. Of course you could still do science and knowledge gathering and maybe someday understand enough to "reboot" with say solar power instead of coal and oil but it would be far from trivial. Not everything has to evolve to survive, we've found species that seem to have cornered their niche and remained mostly the same for millions of years. We could, but I wouldn't assume the second time is easier. I'd think much harder.
What we have so far are allegations of an ex-employee. I have had that before. You have to fire someone for being an insufferable asshole and the next months are spent in a court room.
Well, if I was trying to be an asshole I'd pick claims that were harder to prove one way or the other. I don't doubt that the activities described happened, if they paid it as personal expenses from their executive compensation that's fine from a book keeping perspective. If they were passing off obvious joyrides, personal vacations and services as company expenses it's not. I don't know about the US, but here in Norway our version of the IRS would also be most interested because of the probability of income tax fraud. Not sure what claims the customers would have though, there's no law against running a company into the ground with lavish expenses.
95%+ of American Criminal Law is plea bargaining, and if "innocent until proven guilty" were really a thing, then we would have a revolution before allowing a system like plea bargaining to dominate our justice system. Because plea bargains are basically coercing defendants (Whether innocent or guilty) into pleading guilty with no possibility of trial or appeal, in exchange for not being locked up for years or decades. It's not a punishment for having committed the crime--as a practical matter, it's a punishment for insisting on a trial.
I read a study once about US people convicted of rape prior to the existence of DNA evidence who were later acquitted, a disturbing number of them had at some point before or during the trial plead guilty because they realized the odds were so stacked against them it was better to falsely confess and take the plea bargain. I think for practical purposes there needs to be some kickback for confessing - in Norwegian courts it's typically 10-30% with up to 50% in extreme cases where you've either been helped the police prosecute other criminals or you've basically handed the police the case to lighten your conscience. There's no bargaining for what you're put on trial for, only sentencing.
But in the US I have the impression the DAs have a vast liberty on what they choose to prosecute and not. So basically if you don't play ball they take the "let's throw the book at you and see what sticks" where you might get 50 years in prison instead of 5. It's pretty much an end-run around the whole due process and fair trial. If you don't have equal protection under the law, if the DAs can pick and choose who and what they want to prosecute depending on who the perp is, who the victim is and whether or not you fess up or not that's not how justice should be. Prosecutorial discretion is bad, if the results of actually enforcing the law is bad then it's the lawmakers that need to fix it, not the prosecutors.
Yet another reason to oppose the TPP. What I've never understood about the civil theft thing is what part of the Constitution allows them to steal property from someone without even filing charges, much less a conviction. If they had dragged this guy into a US court and convicted him then I can see them taking his stuff as it would be proven to be ill gotten gains. Instead they just come take it all and then they might or might not try and convict him. I wonder where they get the right to do that?
Actually this is closer to the original use case for civil forfeiture which dates back to common law, which was foreign pirate ships and privateers. Since the owners could not be brought to trial, their ships were put on trial and confiscated. The trouble here is that you have foreign governments that play along, seizing assets in their own country because the US alleges he's done something illegal. Could you imagine the US seizing assets from a US citizen who's never been to Germany which he can't get back unless he goes to Germany to stand trial for selling Nazi memorabilia to a German - a crime under German law - or some such?
The development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch doesn't take more than a month and a half or a maximum of two months, depending if the respective series will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones.
No. One month merge window, ~2 months with weekly RCs. If the kernel releases early the merge window widens so they're on a very stable three month cycle. You'd think an post about the kernel would do a minimum of fact-checking, but no...
Of course, if I am allowed to install software on an "air-gapped" computer, I can make it transfer information by anything on it that makes noise or can be lit or even via power supply. Speakers, various fans, hard drive heads, retractable optical drive tray, locator blue LED, LCD display, even the power draw....I can manipulate all of those. There is no point to these studies, they only belabor the obvious.
Where does the border between obvious and sci-fantasy (enhance, enhance, enhance) go? If my "airgap" server is next to my normal server in the same rack, can they communicate using power draw? Heat cycles, one server heating up the other? Vibration causing HDD read errors? Can I run the cables down the same canal or can you use crosstalk to steal information? Maybe I have an alarm system with motion detection and a microphone to detect movement/noise in my "top secret" room, despite the machine having no speakers could the keys be stolen from HDD noises out that way?
How many people really need to be this paranoid? I'm not sure, it has to be serious military secrets/industrial espionage/core infrastructure to get this level of attention. But I think you need to have researchers working on whether this is actually feasible and how feasible it is, not just hand-waving it. Unless you want to say if they manage to install software we're screwed anyway but defense in depth and many layers of tripwires is better than one thick wall and free roaming on the inside.
When Skynet finally comes on line, this ad-blocking-blocking-blocking-blocking code will form the basis of its immune system.
If they were trying to make a generic solution, maybe. But I imagine this will be a list of hardcoded rules for this one particular site. Not much AI in "if site = facebook.com and server = [ad server] and size = [ad size]" and so on. Worst case they could put an opaque overlay over the ads, let them load as normal using the bandwidth but not actually display. And if they detect that, maybe a browser extension to create really "invisible" layers to ordinary JS. On the other hand, Facebook could have changes queued up to break it. Maybe the goal is just to annoy users often enough they whitelist Facebook, even if it'll start working again soon the constant on and off might be enough to convert most users.
So in other words the people who didn't piss away money before won't take this windfall to explore new career opportunities as a street bum, what a shocker. Not surprised by the example being medical bills either, I know two Americans that are screwed by health problems, one with back problems and the other with heart problems. Both could have surgery and have 20+ more good years, but they've fucked themselves out of health insurance and with pre-existing conditions they're still pariahs. It'll probably cost society more in the long run but nobody wants to carry the burden today. So glad I live in a country with universal healthcare...
Christianity has a New Testament, and a Reformation, is the thing. Theocracies of all stripes have done horrors, but then that's true of most forms of government, and I think is more about government than religion. But if you look at the rules and advice actually contained in scripture, there's a reason that "Old Testament" is slang for harsh and unyielding. And Islam only has an Old Testament, full of "put the infidel to the sword", without the moderating influence of a Scripture 2.0 full of needed patches about how being nice to people is really desirable.
The Bible is rather nice to those who repent and seek forgiveness from their lord and savior, but reality is that we're toned down sin, purgatory, hell and eternal damnation a whole damn lot. As for Christianity and infidels, let me quote you a passage from the New Testament (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9):
He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might
Now I'm sure someone will come up with some creative interpretation that this does somehow not say what it does or doesn't apply anymore in wildly inconsistent fashion. For example the ten commandments are from the Old Testament, if those are still valid why isn't Leviticus 20:13:
If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Or ability to turn Christianity into a US school where everybody gets a participation award and everyone else is cool too hinges on our ability to disregard pretty much everything in scripture that doesn't fit modern life. How about this gem from the New Testament (Ephesians 5:22-24):
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
I could go on all day. Of course nobody really reads or cares about these things anymore except a few sects. For most it's like Jesus loves you, Jesus died for you, Jesus will forgive your sins and open the gates to Paradise. The end. Even in religious circles the trend is towards less and less effort put into church and prayer and so on, if you're not a "bad person" you're good right? Participation awards for everybody...
You are a perfect illustration of the problem Tesla faces. You think you know what an airplane's autopilot does, based solely on the name, but you have no real clue.
To do something on autopilot to mean "without thinking" has been an idiom much longer than Tesla has used it. This is not some kind of unexpected misunderstanding.
Etymology: based on the literal meaning of automatic pilot (a system that flies a plane without human effort)
There are many less boasting terms like adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc. that could have been used and have been used by other car companies. They picked autopilot because it sounds new and revolutionary. He's a perfect illustration of the impression Tesla's marketing division wanted to give, while the execs call it beta (as in, will be self-driving soon we're just knocking out a few bugs) and their legal department provides the disclaimers. And disclaimer are everywhere for legal CYA, like if you read your average EULA the software is not usable for anything. That's not what people really expect, even if that's what it says.
Perhaps if size and price was related like with HDDs... checking my local pricewatch the cheapest $/GB is a 480GB drive leading by a hair over similar 240GB and 960GB models. Above that 2TB/4TB models actually cost marginally more/GB, probably because of less volume. When you can put 1TB in an M.2 format it's obvious you can go a lot bigger with 2.5" or 3.5" disks. Heck, make a 5.25" SSD for the DVD player bay and you'd probably be approaching the petabyte but it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars too.
There's a good reason for this - broadband infrastructure is crazy expensive to build. Some of the incumbents received big government subsidies to build their systems, but those days are gone and new companies can't compete. If they stole customers from the incumbents everyone would go bankrupt because nobody can afford to build these systems and only pick up a fraction of the homes passed as customers. We need to have the government build the infrastructure once, and then lease space on it to any ISP who wants to compete. It's the only way that makes any sense and the only way that will ever allow any form of competition in this space.
I think there's more to it than that, here in Norway we have ex-telco, ex-cable and ex-power companies all competing to roll out fiber first, because it seems to be the last round of vastly superior technology that can steal incumbent areas from their competitors. I just checked the latest national statistics and 679005 / 2042340 or one in three fixed broadband connections are now fiber, up 16.1% since last year. The competition once you have fiber is near zero because there's no incentive to run a second fiber network but in the US it seems most are stuck on much slower connections than that.
Personally I have 150/150 at home, 100/100 at our cabin (both fiber, different providers) and my parents have 30/10 on cable because it's the slowest they offer. If we wanted to we could have 1000/1000, 1000/1000 and 100/30 but at a higher price. All new developments do fiber now and they're retrofitting as much as possible. The copper network is still in business because it's a sunk cost but half the PSTN/ISDN customers have disappeared in the last five years and xDSL is in decline too. They wanted to kill it already next year in 2017 but met heavy resistance so they're keeping it a little longer but they've lost 85% of the subscribers since it peaked. The life support is running out...
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long.
Because everybody else does, it takes two to be social. Which is probably why they haven't done it earlier, annoy a critical mass of users and they might switch to an alternative. I guess they feel confident enough about their position that you might whine and complain but nobody's going to organize a revolt, there's not even an obvious competitor as Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat etc. are all quite different from Facebook.
Contrast with today, where Apple has not refreshed the hardware for some time, and are letting OSX seem to rot in place. Now, the best hardware arguably comes from Microsoft, and people are hard at work making sure Linux runs well on it. Strange times indeed... What's next?
My guess is that Apple is prepping for the day they drop Intel and x86 for their in-house ARM chips, most people have "enough" computing power and the power users Apple don't care about anymore - they've been leaving the server, workstation and corporate markets and offers no options for serious gamers. Pretty much all new features in macOS Sierra is either jointly developed with iOS 10 or coming from iOS like Siri or about integrating better with iOS devices, eventually they're going to be the same thing.
Kind of amazing they haven't figured out how to make their system redundant, distributed, and/or robust. It makes zero sense that a power outage in Atlanta should have any effect on a flight going from Salt Lake City to Seattle. If this was the first time something like this had ever happened I could see them being caught off guard but stuff like this is nothing new and multiple airlines have been affected. You would imagine that having a robust network would be job number 1 for their IT people since one failure like this can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.
Scaling out is easy if you're Facebook or Google and nobody cares about a perfectly consistent truth. If you run transaction processing like airplane tickets people damn well like to know if they got their ticket booked and Delta want to know if they got paid, they want ACID compliance not "eventual consistency" NoSQL. That usually leads to mainframes and 99.99999% uptime systems with redundant power, network links etc. not clusters and distribution. Maybe also a hot failover next to it hooked up by a fat pipe. But if shit hits the fan big time in the data center, it goes down. Doesn't look like it took them *that* long to scramble what I assume is their cold backup online.
The passengers aren't happy but hey sometimes shit happens with planes or crew or airports or whatnot leading to delays and cancellation. I've had a rescheduled flight and night in hotel because KLM got delayed and weren't allowed to liftoff because the destination airport was closing, it sucks but this is a fact of life for airlines. It becomes a big story because it happened to lots of people at once, but over say a year how how big a deal is it really? I'm sure they'll do a post mortem but I'd be surprised if they moved away from a centralized architecture.
That wouldn't actually solve anything because you're still relying on the box you set up to tally the votes it actually got instead of creating its own result. Maybe it's easier to understand all the problems if we examine a hypothetical reverse election fraud. Let's assume that you go to vote for president and you actually vote for Trump. But when the votes are tallied and there's zero votes for Jill Stein in your voting district, you go out and publicly claim "Hey this election is a fraud, I voted for Jill Stein so where's my vote??"
Obviously if they can pick out your vote and say look, here's your vote and you're lying then secret ballots is a lie. So in a paper ballot you'd have people testifying that they've examined the ballot box and it didn't have any hidden compartments to add/remove votes and was empty when they started, that it's been kept locked and under observation from voting started until the votes got counted, that it was properly emptied and all votes counted and here's the stack of cast votes that's been in secure storage for a recount. For bonus points there's possibly video evidence that the chain of custody is unbroken.
While you can never formally prove a negative there would be fairly strong circumstantial evidence that the vote wasn't tampered with and that you're actually mistaken, lying or have mental problems. And while it's possible that there's been some form of irregularity in this one place, it'd take a mass conspiracy to significantly influence the election. There's a reason systematic election fraud in third world countries is pretty obvious from the the outside world, you can't have that many people involved and keep it a real secret.
Compare this to an electronic vote: The box says so. Who says the box is telling the truth? The government and the company who made the voting box. All you need is some kind of condition or trigger to say this is the real election, nobody will know if you swing a few votes now. And the rest of the time, it'll tally exactly what it's supposed to for public demonstrations of how reliable it is. What's the guy who lost by a surprising last minute 4% swing going to say, that the election was rigged? He'll come across as a sore loser and paranoid nut even if that's exactly what happened. And there's no record to prove it anyway.
I'm the one hold-out on Windows 7, all my closest friends have upgraded. They don't see a problem with it, but they also use the cloud and whatnot they don't care that it's all sent to Apple and Google so why Microsoft? I have it on my laptop because I bought it with Win8 and apart from the pages and pages of services I want to turn off or can't turn off it seems to work well enough. Probably heading to Linux when Win7 expires, but I don't expect any big following. I expect I'll need a "Wintendo" box for games though. On the positive side for Linux, my group of friends moved from Skype to Discord for gaming. Looks like Discord has much better support under Linux, now it's only the games...
Then the encryption/decryption part. For a local e-mail client this can work securely and fairly conveniently and transparently, with your keys unlocked when you log in to your computer, just like encrypted hard disks.
And this basically means hardware support. There's no way ordinary user passwords like "luggage12345" will be cryptographically strong, it takes hardware that will give you a limited number of attempts to translate this to a private key. Pure software solutions like Truecrypt or dm-crypt on Linux require you to type a very long and comple key so they're not convenient. And so if you need hardware, they won't be universal and it won't work for webmail. Honestly if you don't view it on a personal trusted device I don't see much point at all. It also doesn't make sense unless you're sure you're communicating with the right person, but giving a full fingerprint is much harder than an email address.
I'm kinda hoping Apple will do it, they could. Not instead of mail, but in addition to. Generate a PGP key locally with no password, encrypt it with AES, upload the file to iCloud and ask the user to write down the key and keep it safe. Locally you'd use the iPhone's authentication and secure enclave to make it transparent. Any new device you want to use you have to either authenticate it from an existing device (get device's public key, send PGP key in encrypted message) or download the AES-encrypted backup from iCloud and enter the AES key. Lose all the devices and your AES key? Tough, generate a new one and start over. If they could build this into phones and tablets and macs and a written down key *maybe* they could keep most people from losing the key.
Because that's really the main problem, people don't want things to be that secure. If I lose my house key, I don't want to be locked out of my house forever. I might have to get a locksmith (or break a window if it's urgent) but it's not like I lose everything permanently. It's much the same reason we keep money in the bank via debit/credit cards and not cash in our wallet, if the wallet gets stolen or lost it's gone. One thing to note as well is the lack of perfect forward security due to the asynchronous nature of email. It's actually better to negotiate a per session key, but then both parties have to be online to negotiate it. It's possible we should just skip the whole "server in the middle" and just keep it to ourselves until we can reach the destination directly.
Actually- surely this is bollocks anyway. If you can determine who's watching iplayer by looking at encrypted packets then surely encryption is broken? Anyone with more experience care to comment?
Yes. You fundamentally don't understand what encryption does, it protect what you're sending, not to who and when. If you SSH to a server, does your ISP see what IP you contacted? Yes. Does it see how much data you transferred and when? Yes, obviously. Same thing about wireless, only it's public for anyone to pick up when you used it and how much. Any normal network will rush to pass on data as quick as it can and you can use that by intentionally staggering. Say you request a 100 kB image from me, I send it as 1kb, pause, 3kb, pause, 5kb, pause, 7kb, pause, 11kb, pause, 13kb, pause, 17kb, pause, 19kb, pause, 23kb, pause, 10kb. Then I watch the packets on your WiFi and it's the same pattern. Coincidence? Pretty quick it won't be.
There are plenty of tools to get rid of their "no fly zones" in the firmware. Honestly it's really stupid that they are doing this, the manufacturer is trying to enforce things? tomorrow GM will release cars that will not go above the speed limit and jam on the brakes when a light turns yellow.
No, they're not trying to enforce anything, they're trying to avoid people accidentally breaking the law. I have a friend with a DJI drone, by default it goes up to the legal limit of 120m but you can easily turn that off, if you have permission or just don't care. They just don't want every doofus to try "gee, how high can this go" and crash with airplanes or helicopters or whatever through plain ignorance because if can go kilometers sideways it could also go straight up. Same thing about these no-fly zones, sure you could pretend everyone would get maps and check for airports and whatnot but seriously. You know they won't, so DJI is telling them "Hey moron, there's an airport here so this is no fly zone. Go fly somewhere else."
At first I wondered why Dow Jones Industrial has to do with drones, but I guess DJI must some manufacturer of remote control quadcopters. Editors please make an effort to spell out abbreviations, please.
I don't even remember what DJI stands for... it's one of those companies like AMD, IBM, BMW, IKEA etc. that are most known under their abbreviations. If you don't know them that's fine, but spelling them out don't really make any sense in any case.
I skimmed most of what you wrote, but if Kim Jong-un just want to "plant" a flag with an impactor the Russians did this in 1959, with a rocket far more primitive and 1/10th the size of Saturn V. Their latest rocket test is roughly the equivalent of a Falcon 1 from 2008, even North Korea can get a rocket in orbit these days so rocket science isn't quite living up to its reputation. Two years later in 2010 the Falcon 9 launched which would actually be overkill for the task, so can North Korea do in ten years what SpaceX did in two? It's not entirely unlikely, they just need to make a bigger rocket with more engines.
In the meantime the uninvited enjoy much greater rewards exploiting the bugs
So? You also make more money selling crack cocaine than burgers at McDonald's, bounties are so white hats can make a living for those who want to be legit security researchers. I really doubt there's many that flip-flop between white hat and black hat depending on who's the highest bidder.
Slashdot Mirror
It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License.
If this is for real, and not just a lame troll, you got lousy advice from your "lawyers".
Obvious troll trying to bring OSS zealots to nerd rage and write long posts to dispute it.
More importantly, of the last 7 landing attempts, there were only two failures, (...) So it's looking like reliability of future landings can be expected to be quite a bit better than 50%.
Most importantly, none have flown again and until they do it's expensive garbage recovery. For what it's worth I heard they did engine tests and it looks good, but it's more important they nail the launches than the landings.
Well first comes the nuclear war. Then the nuclear winter. Then the fight by the survivors for a far too small food supply. Starving men are desperate men, we'd hunt all game to extinction, empty the lakes and rivers but with crops failing there would be mass raiding and starvation. Even in the "dark ages" it was far from anarchy, before the dust settles we'd be nothing more than isolated pockets of survivors, struggling to rediscover all the basics of living off the land as ammunition, supplies and stocks of medicine runs out. There's a reason 90%+ used to work in primary industries and almost everyone was illiterate, they were too busy trying to stay alive to learn how to read and write. If there's no time to pass the knowledge, much of it will die.
And here's the kicker: All the easy resources are mostly gone. It's a fundamental fact of capitalism, if there's an ore vein in open day that's easy and cheap to mine so we'll take those first. We're digging deeper and deeper with more and more sophisticated technology but if that collapses it would be very hard to start over. Of course you could still do science and knowledge gathering and maybe someday understand enough to "reboot" with say solar power instead of coal and oil but it would be far from trivial. Not everything has to evolve to survive, we've found species that seem to have cornered their niche and remained mostly the same for millions of years. We could, but I wouldn't assume the second time is easier. I'd think much harder.
What we have so far are allegations of an ex-employee. I have had that before. You have to fire someone for being an insufferable asshole and the next months are spent in a court room.
Well, if I was trying to be an asshole I'd pick claims that were harder to prove one way or the other. I don't doubt that the activities described happened, if they paid it as personal expenses from their executive compensation that's fine from a book keeping perspective. If they were passing off obvious joyrides, personal vacations and services as company expenses it's not. I don't know about the US, but here in Norway our version of the IRS would also be most interested because of the probability of income tax fraud. Not sure what claims the customers would have though, there's no law against running a company into the ground with lavish expenses.
95%+ of American Criminal Law is plea bargaining, and if "innocent until proven guilty" were really a thing, then we would have a revolution before allowing a system like plea bargaining to dominate our justice system. Because plea bargains are basically coercing defendants (Whether innocent or guilty) into pleading guilty with no possibility of trial or appeal, in exchange for not being locked up for years or decades. It's not a punishment for having committed the crime--as a practical matter, it's a punishment for insisting on a trial.
I read a study once about US people convicted of rape prior to the existence of DNA evidence who were later acquitted, a disturbing number of them had at some point before or during the trial plead guilty because they realized the odds were so stacked against them it was better to falsely confess and take the plea bargain. I think for practical purposes there needs to be some kickback for confessing - in Norwegian courts it's typically 10-30% with up to 50% in extreme cases where you've either been helped the police prosecute other criminals or you've basically handed the police the case to lighten your conscience. There's no bargaining for what you're put on trial for, only sentencing.
But in the US I have the impression the DAs have a vast liberty on what they choose to prosecute and not. So basically if you don't play ball they take the "let's throw the book at you and see what sticks" where you might get 50 years in prison instead of 5. It's pretty much an end-run around the whole due process and fair trial. If you don't have equal protection under the law, if the DAs can pick and choose who and what they want to prosecute depending on who the perp is, who the victim is and whether or not you fess up or not that's not how justice should be. Prosecutorial discretion is bad, if the results of actually enforcing the law is bad then it's the lawmakers that need to fix it, not the prosecutors.
Yet another reason to oppose the TPP. What I've never understood about the civil theft thing is what part of the Constitution allows them to steal property from someone without even filing charges, much less a conviction. If they had dragged this guy into a US court and convicted him then I can see them taking his stuff as it would be proven to be ill gotten gains. Instead they just come take it all and then they might or might not try and convict him. I wonder where they get the right to do that?
Actually this is closer to the original use case for civil forfeiture which dates back to common law, which was foreign pirate ships and privateers. Since the owners could not be brought to trial, their ships were put on trial and confiscated. The trouble here is that you have foreign governments that play along, seizing assets in their own country because the US alleges he's done something illegal. Could you imagine the US seizing assets from a US citizen who's never been to Germany which he can't get back unless he goes to Germany to stand trial for selling Nazi memorabilia to a German - a crime under German law - or some such?
The development cycle of a new Linux kernel branch doesn't take more than a month and a half or a maximum of two months, depending if the respective series will receive seven or eight Release Candidate (RC) milestones.
No. One month merge window, ~2 months with weekly RCs. If the kernel releases early the merge window widens so they're on a very stable three month cycle. You'd think an post about the kernel would do a minimum of fact-checking, but no...
Of course, if I am allowed to install software on an "air-gapped" computer, I can make it transfer information by anything on it that makes noise or can be lit or even via power supply. Speakers, various fans, hard drive heads, retractable optical drive tray, locator blue LED, LCD display, even the power draw....I can manipulate all of those. There is no point to these studies, they only belabor the obvious.
Where does the border between obvious and sci-fantasy (enhance, enhance, enhance) go? If my "airgap" server is next to my normal server in the same rack, can they communicate using power draw? Heat cycles, one server heating up the other? Vibration causing HDD read errors? Can I run the cables down the same canal or can you use crosstalk to steal information? Maybe I have an alarm system with motion detection and a microphone to detect movement/noise in my "top secret" room, despite the machine having no speakers could the keys be stolen from HDD noises out that way?
How many people really need to be this paranoid? I'm not sure, it has to be serious military secrets/industrial espionage/core infrastructure to get this level of attention. But I think you need to have researchers working on whether this is actually feasible and how feasible it is, not just hand-waving it. Unless you want to say if they manage to install software we're screwed anyway but defense in depth and many layers of tripwires is better than one thick wall and free roaming on the inside.
When Skynet finally comes on line, this ad-blocking-blocking-blocking-blocking code will form the basis of its immune system.
If they were trying to make a generic solution, maybe. But I imagine this will be a list of hardcoded rules for this one particular site. Not much AI in "if site = facebook.com and server = [ad server] and size = [ad size]" and so on. Worst case they could put an opaque overlay over the ads, let them load as normal using the bandwidth but not actually display. And if they detect that, maybe a browser extension to create really "invisible" layers to ordinary JS. On the other hand, Facebook could have changes queued up to break it. Maybe the goal is just to annoy users often enough they whitelist Facebook, even if it'll start working again soon the constant on and off might be enough to convert most users.
So in other words the people who didn't piss away money before won't take this windfall to explore new career opportunities as a street bum, what a shocker. Not surprised by the example being medical bills either, I know two Americans that are screwed by health problems, one with back problems and the other with heart problems. Both could have surgery and have 20+ more good years, but they've fucked themselves out of health insurance and with pre-existing conditions they're still pariahs. It'll probably cost society more in the long run but nobody wants to carry the burden today. So glad I live in a country with universal healthcare...
Christianity has a New Testament, and a Reformation, is the thing. Theocracies of all stripes have done horrors, but then that's true of most forms of government, and I think is more about government than religion. But if you look at the rules and advice actually contained in scripture, there's a reason that "Old Testament" is slang for harsh and unyielding. And Islam only has an Old Testament, full of "put the infidel to the sword", without the moderating influence of a Scripture 2.0 full of needed patches about how being nice to people is really desirable.
The Bible is rather nice to those who repent and seek forgiveness from their lord and savior, but reality is that we're toned down sin, purgatory, hell and eternal damnation a whole damn lot. As for Christianity and infidels, let me quote you a passage from the New Testament (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9):
He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might
Now I'm sure someone will come up with some creative interpretation that this does somehow not say what it does or doesn't apply anymore in wildly inconsistent fashion. For example the ten commandments are from the Old Testament, if those are still valid why isn't Leviticus 20:13:
If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
Or ability to turn Christianity into a US school where everybody gets a participation award and everyone else is cool too hinges on our ability to disregard pretty much everything in scripture that doesn't fit modern life. How about this gem from the New Testament (Ephesians 5:22-24):
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
I could go on all day. Of course nobody really reads or cares about these things anymore except a few sects. For most it's like Jesus loves you, Jesus died for you, Jesus will forgive your sins and open the gates to Paradise. The end. Even in religious circles the trend is towards less and less effort put into church and prayer and so on, if you're not a "bad person" you're good right? Participation awards for everybody...
You are a perfect illustration of the problem Tesla faces. You think you know what an airplane's autopilot does, based solely on the name, but you have no real clue.
To do something on autopilot to mean "without thinking" has been an idiom much longer than Tesla has used it. This is not some kind of unexpected misunderstanding.
Etymology: based on the literal meaning of automatic pilot (a system that flies a plane without human effort)
There are many less boasting terms like adaptive cruise control, lane assist etc. that could have been used and have been used by other car companies. They picked autopilot because it sounds new and revolutionary. He's a perfect illustration of the impression Tesla's marketing division wanted to give, while the execs call it beta (as in, will be self-driving soon we're just knocking out a few bugs) and their legal department provides the disclaimers. And disclaimer are everywhere for legal CYA, like if you read your average EULA the software is not usable for anything. That's not what people really expect, even if that's what it says.
The end of spindle drives is nigh
Perhaps if size and price was related like with HDDs... checking my local pricewatch the cheapest $/GB is a 480GB drive leading by a hair over similar 240GB and 960GB models. Above that 2TB/4TB models actually cost marginally more/GB, probably because of less volume. When you can put 1TB in an M.2 format it's obvious you can go a lot bigger with 2.5" or 3.5" disks. Heck, make a 5.25" SSD for the DVD player bay and you'd probably be approaching the petabyte but it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars too.
There's a good reason for this - broadband infrastructure is crazy expensive to build. Some of the incumbents received big government subsidies to build their systems, but those days are gone and new companies can't compete. If they stole customers from the incumbents everyone would go bankrupt because nobody can afford to build these systems and only pick up a fraction of the homes passed as customers. We need to have the government build the infrastructure once, and then lease space on it to any ISP who wants to compete. It's the only way that makes any sense and the only way that will ever allow any form of competition in this space.
I think there's more to it than that, here in Norway we have ex-telco, ex-cable and ex-power companies all competing to roll out fiber first, because it seems to be the last round of vastly superior technology that can steal incumbent areas from their competitors. I just checked the latest national statistics and 679005 / 2042340 or one in three fixed broadband connections are now fiber, up 16.1% since last year. The competition once you have fiber is near zero because there's no incentive to run a second fiber network but in the US it seems most are stuck on much slower connections than that.
Personally I have 150/150 at home, 100/100 at our cabin (both fiber, different providers) and my parents have 30/10 on cable because it's the slowest they offer. If we wanted to we could have 1000/1000, 1000/1000 and 100/30 but at a higher price. All new developments do fiber now and they're retrofitting as much as possible. The copper network is still in business because it's a sunk cost but half the PSTN/ISDN customers have disappeared in the last five years and xDSL is in decline too. They wanted to kill it already next year in 2017 but met heavy resistance so they're keeping it a little longer but they've lost 85% of the subscribers since it peaked. The life support is running out...
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook? Facebook is 100% about selling its users to advertisers. I'm surprised it took them this long.
Because everybody else does, it takes two to be social. Which is probably why they haven't done it earlier, annoy a critical mass of users and they might switch to an alternative. I guess they feel confident enough about their position that you might whine and complain but nobody's going to organize a revolt, there's not even an obvious competitor as Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat etc. are all quite different from Facebook.
Contrast with today, where Apple has not refreshed the hardware for some time, and are letting OSX seem to rot in place. Now, the best hardware arguably comes from Microsoft, and people are hard at work making sure Linux runs well on it. Strange times indeed... What's next?
My guess is that Apple is prepping for the day they drop Intel and x86 for their in-house ARM chips, most people have "enough" computing power and the power users Apple don't care about anymore - they've been leaving the server, workstation and corporate markets and offers no options for serious gamers. Pretty much all new features in macOS Sierra is either jointly developed with iOS 10 or coming from iOS like Siri or about integrating better with iOS devices, eventually they're going to be the same thing.
Kind of amazing they haven't figured out how to make their system redundant, distributed, and/or robust. It makes zero sense that a power outage in Atlanta should have any effect on a flight going from Salt Lake City to Seattle. If this was the first time something like this had ever happened I could see them being caught off guard but stuff like this is nothing new and multiple airlines have been affected. You would imagine that having a robust network would be job number 1 for their IT people since one failure like this can easily cost tens of millions of dollars.
Scaling out is easy if you're Facebook or Google and nobody cares about a perfectly consistent truth. If you run transaction processing like airplane tickets people damn well like to know if they got their ticket booked and Delta want to know if they got paid, they want ACID compliance not "eventual consistency" NoSQL. That usually leads to mainframes and 99.99999% uptime systems with redundant power, network links etc. not clusters and distribution. Maybe also a hot failover next to it hooked up by a fat pipe. But if shit hits the fan big time in the data center, it goes down. Doesn't look like it took them *that* long to scramble what I assume is their cold backup online.
The passengers aren't happy but hey sometimes shit happens with planes or crew or airports or whatnot leading to delays and cancellation. I've had a rescheduled flight and night in hotel because KLM got delayed and weren't allowed to liftoff because the destination airport was closing, it sucks but this is a fact of life for airlines. It becomes a big story because it happened to lots of people at once, but over say a year how how big a deal is it really? I'm sure they'll do a post mortem but I'd be surprised if they moved away from a centralized architecture.
That wouldn't actually solve anything because you're still relying on the box you set up to tally the votes it actually got instead of creating its own result. Maybe it's easier to understand all the problems if we examine a hypothetical reverse election fraud. Let's assume that you go to vote for president and you actually vote for Trump. But when the votes are tallied and there's zero votes for Jill Stein in your voting district, you go out and publicly claim "Hey this election is a fraud, I voted for Jill Stein so where's my vote??"
Obviously if they can pick out your vote and say look, here's your vote and you're lying then secret ballots is a lie. So in a paper ballot you'd have people testifying that they've examined the ballot box and it didn't have any hidden compartments to add/remove votes and was empty when they started, that it's been kept locked and under observation from voting started until the votes got counted, that it was properly emptied and all votes counted and here's the stack of cast votes that's been in secure storage for a recount. For bonus points there's possibly video evidence that the chain of custody is unbroken.
While you can never formally prove a negative there would be fairly strong circumstantial evidence that the vote wasn't tampered with and that you're actually mistaken, lying or have mental problems. And while it's possible that there's been some form of irregularity in this one place, it'd take a mass conspiracy to significantly influence the election. There's a reason systematic election fraud in third world countries is pretty obvious from the the outside world, you can't have that many people involved and keep it a real secret.
Compare this to an electronic vote: The box says so. Who says the box is telling the truth? The government and the company who made the voting box. All you need is some kind of condition or trigger to say this is the real election, nobody will know if you swing a few votes now. And the rest of the time, it'll tally exactly what it's supposed to for public demonstrations of how reliable it is. What's the guy who lost by a surprising last minute 4% swing going to say, that the election was rigged? He'll come across as a sore loser and paranoid nut even if that's exactly what happened. And there's no record to prove it anyway.
I'm the one hold-out on Windows 7, all my closest friends have upgraded. They don't see a problem with it, but they also use the cloud and whatnot they don't care that it's all sent to Apple and Google so why Microsoft? I have it on my laptop because I bought it with Win8 and apart from the pages and pages of services I want to turn off or can't turn off it seems to work well enough. Probably heading to Linux when Win7 expires, but I don't expect any big following. I expect I'll need a "Wintendo" box for games though. On the positive side for Linux, my group of friends moved from Skype to Discord for gaming. Looks like Discord has much better support under Linux, now it's only the games...
Then the encryption/decryption part. For a local e-mail client this can work securely and fairly conveniently and transparently, with your keys unlocked when you log in to your computer, just like encrypted hard disks.
And this basically means hardware support. There's no way ordinary user passwords like "luggage12345" will be cryptographically strong, it takes hardware that will give you a limited number of attempts to translate this to a private key. Pure software solutions like Truecrypt or dm-crypt on Linux require you to type a very long and comple key so they're not convenient. And so if you need hardware, they won't be universal and it won't work for webmail. Honestly if you don't view it on a personal trusted device I don't see much point at all. It also doesn't make sense unless you're sure you're communicating with the right person, but giving a full fingerprint is much harder than an email address.
I'm kinda hoping Apple will do it, they could. Not instead of mail, but in addition to. Generate a PGP key locally with no password, encrypt it with AES, upload the file to iCloud and ask the user to write down the key and keep it safe. Locally you'd use the iPhone's authentication and secure enclave to make it transparent. Any new device you want to use you have to either authenticate it from an existing device (get device's public key, send PGP key in encrypted message) or download the AES-encrypted backup from iCloud and enter the AES key. Lose all the devices and your AES key? Tough, generate a new one and start over. If they could build this into phones and tablets and macs and a written down key *maybe* they could keep most people from losing the key.
Because that's really the main problem, people don't want things to be that secure. If I lose my house key, I don't want to be locked out of my house forever. I might have to get a locksmith (or break a window if it's urgent) but it's not like I lose everything permanently. It's much the same reason we keep money in the bank via debit/credit cards and not cash in our wallet, if the wallet gets stolen or lost it's gone. One thing to note as well is the lack of perfect forward security due to the asynchronous nature of email. It's actually better to negotiate a per session key, but then both parties have to be online to negotiate it. It's possible we should just skip the whole "server in the middle" and just keep it to ourselves until we can reach the destination directly.
Actually- surely this is bollocks anyway. If you can determine who's watching iplayer by looking at encrypted packets then surely encryption is broken? Anyone with more experience care to comment?
Yes. You fundamentally don't understand what encryption does, it protect what you're sending, not to who and when. If you SSH to a server, does your ISP see what IP you contacted? Yes. Does it see how much data you transferred and when? Yes, obviously. Same thing about wireless, only it's public for anyone to pick up when you used it and how much. Any normal network will rush to pass on data as quick as it can and you can use that by intentionally staggering. Say you request a 100 kB image from me, I send it as 1kb, pause, 3kb, pause, 5kb, pause, 7kb, pause, 11kb, pause, 13kb, pause, 17kb, pause, 19kb, pause, 23kb, pause, 10kb. Then I watch the packets on your WiFi and it's the same pattern. Coincidence? Pretty quick it won't be.
There are plenty of tools to get rid of their "no fly zones" in the firmware. Honestly it's really stupid that they are doing this, the manufacturer is trying to enforce things? tomorrow GM will release cars that will not go above the speed limit and jam on the brakes when a light turns yellow.
No, they're not trying to enforce anything, they're trying to avoid people accidentally breaking the law. I have a friend with a DJI drone, by default it goes up to the legal limit of 120m but you can easily turn that off, if you have permission or just don't care. They just don't want every doofus to try "gee, how high can this go" and crash with airplanes or helicopters or whatever through plain ignorance because if can go kilometers sideways it could also go straight up. Same thing about these no-fly zones, sure you could pretend everyone would get maps and check for airports and whatnot but seriously. You know they won't, so DJI is telling them "Hey moron, there's an airport here so this is no fly zone. Go fly somewhere else."
At first I wondered why Dow Jones Industrial has to do with drones, but I guess DJI must some manufacturer of remote control quadcopters. Editors please make an effort to spell out abbreviations, please.
I don't even remember what DJI stands for... it's one of those companies like AMD, IBM, BMW, IKEA etc. that are most known under their abbreviations. If you don't know them that's fine, but spelling them out don't really make any sense in any case.
I skimmed most of what you wrote, but if Kim Jong-un just want to "plant" a flag with an impactor the Russians did this in 1959, with a rocket far more primitive and 1/10th the size of Saturn V. Their latest rocket test is roughly the equivalent of a Falcon 1 from 2008, even North Korea can get a rocket in orbit these days so rocket science isn't quite living up to its reputation. Two years later in 2010 the Falcon 9 launched which would actually be overkill for the task, so can North Korea do in ten years what SpaceX did in two? It's not entirely unlikely, they just need to make a bigger rocket with more engines.
In the meantime the uninvited enjoy much greater rewards exploiting the bugs
So? You also make more money selling crack cocaine than burgers at McDonald's, bounties are so white hats can make a living for those who want to be legit security researchers. I really doubt there's many that flip-flop between white hat and black hat depending on who's the highest bidder.