For someone who types with authority about the CIA, you seem not to know much about it. Namely, the CIA does not have "agents", but "officers." They aren't the FBI. You've been watching too many movies.
Don't be an ass. The terms "agent" and "officer" are used for specific duties in both agencies. As to "The Agency", to give you a little background from the legal act at issue, I quote: "The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982."
Although the act is identified as the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982," its short title is the "Covert Agent Identity Protection Act":
"(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies covert agent. Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both. "(b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identity of covert agents as result of having access to classified information. Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identify of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both. "(c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents. Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual's classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both. "(d) Imposition of consecutive sentences. A term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be consecutive to any other sentence of imprisonment."
We actually do not know for sure what her status was as that information has never been released to the public and knowing the history of the employer, likely will not be.
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
You should know that there are many, many companies and organizations hire "consultants". Brewster Jennings is a company that was indeed real, but set up as a cover company who may have in fact hired other folks that were not "cover". I am unaware of any specifics that have been published on this. However, you should also know that there are many other real companies that hire consultants. Companies that deal in construction, or real estate, or defense products, or science can all have "consultants" installed and working as cover for other purposes. Many of these companies can be found as customers of Dun & Bradstreet, but I will tell you that there are legitimate companies and cover companies they do business with and they can both do classified work or neither. My point is that just because someone is listed as an employee of such a company, that really means nothing as to their status or identity as a potential NOC. To paraphrase Freud, "A secretary may in fact just be a secretary."
Don't know how you got modded as insightful since you obviously didn't read the article. Note the comment in the article where it states:
You don't know much about the Agency do you? Do you have any idea how many analysts work there? Do you realize that all analysts are not "agents" working in secret as supposed employees of the State Department? Do you realize that agents working under-cover are often analysts? Determining who is actually a "spook" can be difficult and that is the problem with this case. If Ms. Plame was actually an under-cover operative, then an egregious violation of protocol and law has occurred.
As an aside: You should also know that there are a significant number of employees working for the agency that are doing nothing in the way of classified work.
So the reporter was able to identify her by name and her maiden name. He was also able to dig up information as to where she lives and details regarding their home. What he was unable to do with this search is define what it is Ms. Plame actually did for a living. This information could be dug up via a search of tax records documenting her employer, but even this will not describe responsibilities within that employer. For instance, any W-2s I might have had would say that the listed person was an employee of the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency but they would not say anything about what job was actually performed.
So SCO should try to prove that there *isn't* Unix code in Linux?
Exactly! More precisely, according to their case however, is that they should have tried to prove that there is no SCO specific code in the Linux distributions that companies/individuals are using. When you cannot, despite your best efforts, disprove that theory, then you have reason to reformulate your theory, suspect that a theft might have happened and only then occupy the courts time, taxpayer dollars, and shareholders risk. Of course if your business model is predicated upon making baseless accusations in an effort to boost stock prices to line your own pocket, then that is another matter entirely more suited to a criminal court or moral evaluation. In an ideal world, the legal system should be constructed so as to place the burden of proof on the accuser rather than cause others to have to defend themselves against empty threats.
It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant."
Gee, that sounds familiar. Seems to be a popular strategy in both business and *cough*cough*cough, government these days. Seriously though, this is a model that does appear to have some traction in a variety of fields in that if you press your case hard enough, and you convince enough of the right people, there is ground to be gained from simply sticking to your guns no matter what the reality happens to be. In my business, when you have a theory, you design an experiment to test it and collect data in an attempt to disprove that theory. When the data supports the theory, then you are golden. The way NOT to run business, science (or government) is to come up with a theory (or a desire) and then try to fit the evidence to support what you want. This of course is exactly what has happened with the SCO case, a couple of other business debacles in the news recently and interestingly, in the hunt for WMD in Iraq.
We're not giving away anything, which is why it was suggested that you read. In this case they are simply asking to be able to speed up the process. Still requires a judge, so what freedoms are being given away that I should be upset about?
Apparently you did not read carefully.
From the article: In addition to seeking the rapid-tap technology, the Justice Department filing asks the FCC to require carriers to maintain fine-grained control over their airborne broadband links. This would include the ability to quickly and automatically identify every internet user by name and seat number, remotely cut off a passenger's internet access, cut off all passengers' access without affecting the flight crew's access, or redirect communications to and from the aircraft in the event of a crisis.
Seems to me that rights of privacy are absolutely affected here above and beyond what is currently in law. Anonymity will be impossible under such a system and even encryption will not help with respect to identification. Current laws allow for one level of judicial oversight for groups of people versus individuals. Being able to easily pull out data from one individual within a group with broad judicial approval based on the previously more liberal (not political) legal application erodes your personal freedoms.
As a liberal, yes card carrying I will say that I am in favor of this.
As an American (political party agnostic), I will say this sort of thing concerns me because it invokes a slippery slope problem. Which of course has been happening "liberally" and "conservatively". Be careful of that which you so freely give away. You have fallen into the fear trap and are willing to give away what our Constitution grants you as a US citizen because access to your rights are being marketed away on a basis of fear. Fear sells.
The government is not asking to accumulate reams of data on every flight. The article indicated that they wanted to be able to tap a flight within ten minutes of identifying a suspect passenger.
Yes, I read the article. But as the recent debacle with John Bolton demonstrated, data *are* acquired for a variety of purposes not originally intended as a result of loosened laws on privacy of information.
Currently, we find a bad passenger and its..."proceed to the nearest airport" maybe if we can monitor them it won't always be that.
This of course does nothing but potentially short circuit the "bad passengers" initial intents. It does nothing for the immediate safety of the aircraft or its passengers.
As a followup to this, it could be reasoned that this is exactly why the federal government is continuing to grow and is larger under the Bush administration than ever before (that is a fact and not a troll). Hiring people to go through this data simply means that you have to find/train a specialist to go through the data looking for patterns or specifics and that because of the increasing types of data the government is trying to examine you have to parallelize this process meaning more than one analyst is looking at the same stream of data. This of course means that more people than ever before are getting access to your personal information. This is important because when "the Government" looks at your data, it is actually a person(s) (with all of their interests/foibles) examining your data.
Automating this with computers simply means that you are initially taking the human element out of it, but the data are eventually disseminated to humans. It also means that large amounts of data are being stored in one place increasing the risk of information breach.
OK, so aside from assigning away all of our freedoms and rights to privacy, I have to wonder just how the Dept of Homeland Security plans on assimilating all of the data that they are desperately trying to get legal access to. This is the basic problem behind much of the remote sensing communities ability to surveil targets of interest from airborne/space platforms. Automating much of this surveillance is one of the holy grails of the intelligence community. For instance, I knew a guy who at the peak of the cold war, specialized in runway lengths. All he did was look at remote sensing imagery and examined runway lengths to determine the capacity and capability of aircraft and logistics at differing airbases. It is fairly simple to automate that sort of thing now, but many other aspects of determination of what is important data from what is not important is very difficult to automate.
Stop pretending to be a super spy who just for cover has a shitty post-doc at some lesser US school. I know most Slashdotters have delusions of grandeur, but almost all of them, like yourself, have nothing to back it up. Unfortunately, being able to use whois does not count.
You really have me laughing out loud here. I know its you because I am watching you..... The last time you hit my site you got there from 80.43.109.70.
No, I am not a super spy or pretending to be a super spy. For your information, I am no longer a post-doc, but am a simple research assistant professor, but thanks for reminding me to update my C.V. As far as our institution, the Moran Eye Center, we are one of the largest vision research institutes around. So successful that we are now embarking on completing a second building twice the size of our current one due to the number of researchers and clinicians we have working here now. This is almost unheard of in the vision community, two buildings within a ten year time frame. My work here has revolutionized the study of retinal degenerative diseases and refocused the vision rescue communities work on what is really happening with the biology. I am pretty happy with that and am now applying the same techniques we developed for the study of the retina (based off the remote sensing technologies developed by the NRO (often associated with the CIA) and NASA for satellite imagery) to other systems and the study of metabolomics.
As for my background, I did at one time enlist in the USMC with the idea of flying Harriers, but my vision got just bad enough during organic chemistry that it disqualified me from fast jet status. As an undergraduate, I was recruited by a certain federal TLA, but decided not to take that option on advice from my grandfather who was in fact, in the precursor to the CIA, the OSS. He had other suggestions for me and I went back to school.
You might be surprised at how perceptive the Carter administration was regarding technology related to military hardware and acquisitions. For instance, everybody harps on Carter for canceling the B-1 bomber.....but did you know, that he cancelled it because the B-2 stealth bomber was coming on line. Carter approved the B-2 stealth bomber as a direct replacement for the B-1. There is much more as well you might be interested in. Particularly Carters prescience in issues related to the Middle East and their strategic importance.
So you know nothing about international intelligence or undersea cables, and yet you feel qualified to comment... If you don't understand what you're talking about - don't comment on it.
You should not talk without knowing about people's backgrounds and if you had any balls, you would not post things like that as Anonymous Coward. You might be surprised at the backgrounds of many folks in various careers. How they got there is often a convoluted path.
By the way, even though you are an anonymous coward...... Your IP address is 80.43.97.222. You run Mozilla 5.0 as a browser in X11 on Linux. You run Intel hardware. Your ISP is Tiscali UK Limited out of London England. You are in your mid 20s, unemployed though intelligent and you feel just a little disenfranchised.
P.S. The use of yeah? at the end of sentences is common to those in the south of England, and in particular London. Also common in New Zealand. That helped narrow down the IPs associated with hits on the site. There's more, but I've got work to do.:-)
OK, so what are the odds that the problem with the link is due to a faulty tap by an *unnamed* government? We have been tapping undersea cables now for years and have specifically developed technology for all types of cables including optical cables. Given Pakistan's role in the last few years, I would not be surprised to find a tap on this cable that *perhaps* has leaked or otherwise failed causing an increase in resistance resulting in the power problems. Come on now, this is a prime cable to look at given that India, Dubai and Oman are using the same link. Look for a deployment out of Groton or Bremerton soon....
Re:This is news for nerds?
on
The Neuron Drive
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Indeed. If you want some really geeky art, check this out. For the three wild/biological looking images there, the computational background, chemistry and physics behind their creation are fairly impressive. The first two are of retina, while the third is hippocampus.
Presumably AT&T is going to go deeper into the security game and this is a good move for them. If they want to build credibility, brand this channel with subtlety and simply report the news. But rather than providing this as a service to their existing customers, stream it live to the Internet for everybody's consumption. That will help to build the AT&T brand for security much more so than limiting the audience. The costs cannot be that much more, right?
Interestingly, the page the article is linked on has a signal to noise ratio for this particular article of about.2. In other words, 80% of the page is noise from advertisements versus 20% actual content that we are interested in by clicking on the link which gets me to thinking.....Given that they are modeling it after the CNN model, hopefully this channel will adhere to the model CNN had in the early days. It was "all news, all the time", kind of like MTVs early days where it was "all music, all the time". Right now CNN has degenerated into talk radio like TV with unbelievably biased commentators, and now they are towing the entertainment news line because they are part of Time Warner and their balance of ads versus news has been going down the tubes for years now. For instance, I had CNN on the other morning from about 9:30 to 10:00 and 60% of the airtime was devoted to commercials. It has been said that with the large conglomerate ownership of media these days, that the Watergate scandal would not have come to light. Think about that for a few minutes and see where it takes you. Scary, is it not?
Science has become both too specialized and too skeptical. There is little in the way of grand overview coming from scientists, and far too much by way of dismissal of normal human concerns, such as what to do with our freedom.
Speak for yourself. We are busy working on a revolution which will have import to fields as disparate as cancer research to agronomics to drug development.
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/CMP.html
Where'd that come from?
Science was best represented by the Death Star. And that's about where it's going: to the mechanized service of empire, whether through robotics or cloning, and denial of the romance of the individual, or of the importance of the individual's struggle with character, with the difficulty of finding the truly good courses in life, with not being suckered into the bad merely because of the power and satisfaction available there.
That is an interesting thesis. Work it up. Write it down. However, I suspect that the skeptical and pessimistic one here is you. Many of the scientists I know are passionate about their work and how it will benefit others.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes.
This quote from the article in particular resonated with me. We (scientists) have long been running an uneasy gauntlet between those that want us represent their theological, political or personal beliefs while trying to find truth where it is and for what it represents. Granted, these issues always arise within each one of us, but our training is to make hypothesis and then test them against what resources we can bring to bear. There are those that are not interested in truth and will twist facts and even scientists themselves to represent their perception or will which has always been part of the fascination I had with many of the original stories and sociological background behind the idea of the Jedi. (Disclaimer: The last Star Wars movie I thought was any good was "Empire Strikes Back").
The danger of course in not accepting rigorous scientific study of available facts leads us to confusion and obfuscation of truth which leads to jeopardy of person and country. Unfortunately, we have in the last few years gone quite far down this road through decisions made based upon data twisted to represent a prior beliefs rather than letting the data speak and then drawing conclusions from those data.
There has of course always been a fascination by many folks with power and "shiny things", but if we are to proceed beyond vanity and self obsessed cultivation of what others find attractive or desirable to find truth, we need to cultivate new generations of people interested in seeking the scientific and mathematical explanations of the universe.
The thing that many people are really missing out on with Pages is that it really is a DTP program. Adobe and the other programs that perform page layout should have done something like this years ago. Pages is small, compact, pretty speedy and it handles images like no other word processing program I have ever used.
Now if I could just get End Note to work with Pages, I could drop Word entirely.
The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.
More likely that they'll do the following * Use Open Firmware * Lock it to their custom Northbridge as they usually do
Actually, no. I wrote this last week during WWDC to keep my readers/friends informed as to what the switch will mean. Apple will not be using Open Firmware.
The first sentence in the linked article says "Apple COULD use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip to ensure that only Mac computers can run its OS X operating system, according to a news analysis from Gartner." emphasis mine.
While I do not doubt this will in fact be the case, I would appreciate more accurate reporting on the part of the Slashdot editors to ensure that submitters are not spreading misinformation. In fact, if you click on the Gartner new analysis linked in the vnunet article, you will find no mention of the "security chip" being quoted by this article so we have nested lousy reporting. Yeah, yeah, I must be new here. Ha ha
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware". Apple prides itself on a quality user experience that approaches a luxury product. Everything from the appearance of the fonts to the way consumers interact with the interface needs to remain consistently "high quality" and I am sure Apple will make efforts to preserve this experience.
As well as providing for an OS "lock" on hardware, the implementation of such chips will also allow for stronger security as well as enabling one of the features that Hollywood has been demanding before Internet distribution of movies will be allowed by the studios.
So, part of the problem with this is that it turns many small Internet providers into de facto censorship organizations responsible for the policing and determination of ALL content hosted through them or make them software companies due to this little inclusion in the law:
260 (3) (a) A service provider may comply with Subsection (1) by: 261 (i) providing network-level in-network filtering to prevent receipt of material harmful to minors; 262 or 263 (ii) providing at the time of a consumer's request under Subsection (1), software for{ } 264 contemporaneous installation on the consumer's computer that blocks, in an easy-to-enable and 265 commercially reasonable manner, receipt of material harmful to minors.
The other major problem of course is that if the first course is taken, then Internet providers are legally *obligated* to be searching your computers or files for content in violation of federal law.
Of course this also begs the question of who determines "adult content" which should make one suspicious of motives as this law comes from a state that had a state appointed "porn czar" who was a self avowed virgin. Also, at one of the major Universities in the state, BYU felt that censorship of sculptures by Auguste Rodin was appropriate for the national tour a couple of years ago. Did they consider that "adult content"? What would they think of Internet sites covering sculptures of Michelangelo's David?
The other seriously maddening thing about this is that the little independent book shop just around the corner from me, The Kings English book shop would not be able to put any books on their website other than childrens books.
Shoot, this is one more reason not to have cell phones on airplanes during flight. I worry about the public's lack of concern for science especially given the extreme right wing movements going on right now in the USA, but people do not want to be remotely inconvenienced even if it means screwing science. Perhaps if the appeal can be made to them from a personal sanity perspective. I got a brief taste of how bad cell phones on planes can be last month on a flight that I wrote about it here.
Perhaps if this has to happen the picocell solution might be the way to go, but please let there be phone free zones on aircraft.
Who told you that the xServe uses an Intel CPU? That is simply not true. Apple has never used an Intel CPU for any computer, and I don't believe for a second that they're about to start now.
Slashdot Mirror
For someone who types with authority about the CIA, you seem not to know much about it. Namely, the CIA does not have "agents", but "officers." They aren't the FBI. You've been watching too many movies.
Don't be an ass. The terms "agent" and "officer" are used for specific duties in both agencies. As to "The Agency", to give you a little background from the legal act at issue, I quote: "The Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982."
Although the act is identified as the "Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982," its short title is the "Covert Agent Identity Protection Act":
"(a) Disclosure of information by persons having or having had access to classified information that identifies covert agent. Whoever, having or having had authorized access to classified information that identifies a covert agent, intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
"(b) Disclosure of information by persons who learn identity of covert agents as result of having access to classified information. Whoever, as a result of having authorized access to classified information, learns the identify of a covert agent and intentionally discloses any information identifying such covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such covert agent and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such covert agent's intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
"(c) Disclosure of information by persons in course of pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents. Whoever, in the course of a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents and with reason to believe that such activities would impair or impede the foreign intelligence activities of the United States, discloses any information that identifies an individual as a covert agent to any individual not authorized to receive classified information, knowing that the information disclosed so identifies such individual and that the United States is taking affirmative measures to conceal such individual's classified intelligence relationship to the United States, shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
"(d) Imposition of consecutive sentences. A term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be consecutive to any other sentence of imprisonment."
We actually do not know for sure what her status was as that information has never been released to the public and knowing the history of the employer, likely will not be.
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
You should know that there are many, many companies and organizations hire "consultants". Brewster Jennings is a company that was indeed real, but set up as a cover company who may have in fact hired other folks that were not "cover". I am unaware of any specifics that have been published on this. However, you should also know that there are many other real companies that hire consultants. Companies that deal in construction, or real estate, or defense products, or science can all have "consultants" installed and working as cover for other purposes. Many of these companies can be found as customers of Dun & Bradstreet, but I will tell you that there are legitimate companies and cover companies they do business with and they can both do classified work or neither. My point is that just because someone is listed as an employee of such a company, that really means nothing as to their status or identity as a potential NOC. To paraphrase Freud, "A secretary may in fact just be a secretary."
Don't know how you got modded as insightful since you obviously didn't read the article. Note the comment in the article where it states:
You don't know much about the Agency do you? Do you have any idea how many analysts work there? Do you realize that all analysts are not "agents" working in secret as supposed employees of the State Department? Do you realize that agents working under-cover are often analysts? Determining who is actually a "spook" can be difficult and that is the problem with this case. If Ms. Plame was actually an under-cover operative, then an egregious violation of protocol and law has occurred.
As an aside: You should also know that there are a significant number of employees working for the agency that are doing nothing in the way of classified work.
So the reporter was able to identify her by name and her maiden name. He was also able to dig up information as to where she lives and details regarding their home. What he was unable to do with this search is define what it is Ms. Plame actually did for a living. This information could be dug up via a search of tax records documenting her employer, but even this will not describe responsibilities within that employer. For instance, any W-2s I might have had would say that the listed person was an employee of the State Department or the Central Intelligence Agency but they would not say anything about what job was actually performed.
So SCO should try to prove that there *isn't* Unix code in Linux?
Exactly! More precisely, according to their case however, is that they should have tried to prove that there is no SCO specific code in the Linux distributions that companies/individuals are using. When you cannot, despite your best efforts, disprove that theory, then you have reason to reformulate your theory, suspect that a theft might have happened and only then occupy the courts time, taxpayer dollars, and shareholders risk. Of course if your business model is predicated upon making baseless accusations in an effort to boost stock prices to line your own pocket, then that is another matter entirely more suited to a criminal court or moral evaluation. In an ideal world, the legal system should be constructed so as to place the burden of proof on the accuser rather than cause others to have to defend themselves against empty threats.
It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant."
Gee, that sounds familiar. Seems to be a popular strategy in both business and *cough*cough*cough, government these days. Seriously though, this is a model that does appear to have some traction in a variety of fields in that if you press your case hard enough, and you convince enough of the right people, there is ground to be gained from simply sticking to your guns no matter what the reality happens to be. In my business, when you have a theory, you design an experiment to test it and collect data in an attempt to disprove that theory. When the data supports the theory, then you are golden. The way NOT to run business, science (or government) is to come up with a theory (or a desire) and then try to fit the evidence to support what you want. This of course is exactly what has happened with the SCO case, a couple of other business debacles in the news recently and interestingly, in the hunt for WMD in Iraq.
We're not giving away anything, which is why it was suggested that you read. In this case they are simply asking to be able to speed up the process. Still requires a judge, so what freedoms are being given away that I should be upset about?
Apparently you did not read carefully.
From the article: In addition to seeking the rapid-tap technology, the Justice Department filing asks the FCC to require carriers to maintain fine-grained control over their airborne broadband links. This would include the ability to quickly and automatically identify every internet user by name and seat number, remotely cut off a passenger's internet access, cut off all passengers' access without affecting the flight crew's access, or redirect communications to and from the aircraft in the event of a crisis.
Seems to me that rights of privacy are absolutely affected here above and beyond what is currently in law. Anonymity will be impossible under such a system and even encryption will not help with respect to identification. Current laws allow for one level of judicial oversight for groups of people versus individuals. Being able to easily pull out data from one individual within a group with broad judicial approval based on the previously more liberal (not political) legal application erodes your personal freedoms.
Think about it.
This is why we read.
Wiseguy eh?
As a liberal, yes card carrying I will say that I am in favor of this.
As an American (political party agnostic), I will say this sort of thing concerns me because it invokes a slippery slope problem. Which of course has been happening "liberally" and "conservatively". Be careful of that which you so freely give away. You have fallen into the fear trap and are willing to give away what our Constitution grants you as a US citizen because access to your rights are being marketed away on a basis of fear. Fear sells.
The government is not asking to accumulate reams of data on every flight. The article indicated that they wanted to be able to tap a flight within ten minutes of identifying a suspect passenger.
Yes, I read the article. But as the recent debacle with John Bolton demonstrated, data *are* acquired for a variety of purposes not originally intended as a result of loosened laws on privacy of information.
Currently, we find a bad passenger and its..."proceed to the nearest airport" maybe if we can monitor them it won't always be that.
This of course does nothing but potentially short circuit the "bad passengers" initial intents. It does nothing for the immediate safety of the aircraft or its passengers.
As a followup to this, it could be reasoned that this is exactly why the federal government is continuing to grow and is larger under the Bush administration than ever before (that is a fact and not a troll). Hiring people to go through this data simply means that you have to find/train a specialist to go through the data looking for patterns or specifics and that because of the increasing types of data the government is trying to examine you have to parallelize this process meaning more than one analyst is looking at the same stream of data. This of course means that more people than ever before are getting access to your personal information. This is important because when "the Government" looks at your data, it is actually a person(s) (with all of their interests/foibles) examining your data.
Automating this with computers simply means that you are initially taking the human element out of it, but the data are eventually disseminated to humans. It also means that large amounts of data are being stored in one place increasing the risk of information breach.
OK, so aside from assigning away all of our freedoms and rights to privacy, I have to wonder just how the Dept of Homeland Security plans on assimilating all of the data that they are desperately trying to get legal access to. This is the basic problem behind much of the remote sensing communities ability to surveil targets of interest from airborne/space platforms. Automating much of this surveillance is one of the holy grails of the intelligence community. For instance, I knew a guy who at the peak of the cold war, specialized in runway lengths. All he did was look at remote sensing imagery and examined runway lengths to determine the capacity and capability of aircraft and logistics at differing airbases. It is fairly simple to automate that sort of thing now, but many other aspects of determination of what is important data from what is not important is very difficult to automate.
Stop pretending to be a super spy who just for cover has a shitty post-doc at some lesser US school. I know most Slashdotters have delusions of grandeur, but almost all of them, like yourself, have nothing to back it up. Unfortunately, being able to use whois does not count.
You really have me laughing out loud here. I know its you because I am watching you..... The last time you hit my site you got there from 80.43.109.70.
No, I am not a super spy or pretending to be a super spy. For your information, I am no longer a post-doc, but am a simple research assistant professor, but thanks for reminding me to update my C.V. As far as our institution, the Moran Eye Center, we are one of the largest vision research institutes around. So successful that we are now embarking on completing a second building twice the size of our current one due to the number of researchers and clinicians we have working here now. This is almost unheard of in the vision community, two buildings within a ten year time frame. My work here has revolutionized the study of retinal degenerative diseases and refocused the vision rescue communities work on what is really happening with the biology. I am pretty happy with that and am now applying the same techniques we developed for the study of the retina (based off the remote sensing technologies developed by the NRO (often associated with the CIA) and NASA for satellite imagery) to other systems and the study of metabolomics.
As for my background, I did at one time enlist in the USMC with the idea of flying Harriers, but my vision got just bad enough during organic chemistry that it disqualified me from fast jet status. As an undergraduate, I was recruited by a certain federal TLA, but decided not to take that option on advice from my grandfather who was in fact, in the precursor to the CIA, the OSS. He had other suggestions for me and I went back to school.
You might be surprised at how perceptive the Carter administration was regarding technology related to military hardware and acquisitions. For instance, everybody harps on Carter for canceling the B-1 bomber.....but did you know, that he cancelled it because the B-2 stealth bomber was coming on line. Carter approved the B-2 stealth bomber as a direct replacement for the B-1. There is much more as well you might be interested in. Particularly Carters prescience in issues related to the Middle East and their strategic importance.
So you know nothing about international intelligence or undersea cables, and yet you feel qualified to comment... If you don't understand what you're talking about - don't comment on it.
:-)
You should not talk without knowing about people's backgrounds and if you had any balls, you would not post things like that as Anonymous Coward. You might be surprised at the backgrounds of many folks in various careers. How they got there is often a convoluted path.
By the way, even though you are an anonymous coward...... Your IP address is 80.43.97.222. You run Mozilla 5.0 as a browser in X11 on Linux. You run Intel hardware. Your ISP is Tiscali UK Limited out of London England. You are in your mid 20s, unemployed though intelligent and you feel just a little disenfranchised.
P.S. The use of yeah? at the end of sentences is common to those in the south of England, and in particular London. Also common in New Zealand. That helped narrow down the IPs associated with hits on the site. There's more, but I've got work to do.
Tinfoil hat ON:
OK, so what are the odds that the problem with the link is due to a faulty tap by an *unnamed* government? We have been tapping undersea cables now for years and have specifically developed technology for all types of cables including optical cables. Given Pakistan's role in the last few years, I would not be surprised to find a tap on this cable that *perhaps* has leaked or otherwise failed causing an increase in resistance resulting in the power problems. Come on now, this is a prime cable to look at given that India, Dubai and Oman are using the same link. Look for a deployment out of Groton or Bremerton soon....
Indeed. If you want some really geeky art, check this out. For the three wild/biological looking images there, the computational background, chemistry and physics behind their creation are fairly impressive. The first two are of retina, while the third is hippocampus.
Disclaimer: the images are mine.
Presumably AT&T is going to go deeper into the security game and this is a good move for them. If they want to build credibility, brand this channel with subtlety and simply report the news. But rather than providing this as a service to their existing customers, stream it live to the Internet for everybody's consumption. That will help to build the AT&T brand for security much more so than limiting the audience. The costs cannot be that much more, right?
Interestingly, the page the article is linked on has a signal to noise ratio for this particular article of about
Science has become both too specialized and too skeptical. There is little in the way of grand overview coming from scientists, and far too much by way of dismissal of normal human concerns, such as what to do with our freedom.
Speak for yourself. We are busy working on a revolution which will have import to fields as disparate as cancer research to agronomics to drug development.
http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~marclab/CMP.html
Where'd that come from?
Science was best represented by the Death Star. And that's about where it's going: to the mechanized service of empire, whether through robotics or cloning, and denial of the romance of the individual, or of the importance of the individual's struggle with character, with the difficulty of finding the truly good courses in life, with not being suckered into the bad merely because of the power and satisfaction available there.
That is an interesting thesis. Work it up. Write it down. However, I suspect that the skeptical and pessimistic one here is you. Many of the scientists I know are passionate about their work and how it will benefit others.
Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes.
This quote from the article in particular resonated with me. We (scientists) have long been running an uneasy gauntlet between those that want us represent their theological, political or personal beliefs while trying to find truth where it is and for what it represents. Granted, these issues always arise within each one of us, but our training is to make hypothesis and then test them against what resources we can bring to bear. There are those that are not interested in truth and will twist facts and even scientists themselves to represent their perception or will which has always been part of the fascination I had with many of the original stories and sociological background behind the idea of the Jedi. (Disclaimer: The last Star Wars movie I thought was any good was "Empire Strikes Back").
The danger of course in not accepting rigorous scientific study of available facts leads us to confusion and obfuscation of truth which leads to jeopardy of person and country. Unfortunately, we have in the last few years gone quite far down this road through decisions made based upon data twisted to represent a prior beliefs rather than letting the data speak and then drawing conclusions from those data.
There has of course always been a fascination by many folks with power and "shiny things", but if we are to proceed beyond vanity and self obsessed cultivation of what others find attractive or desirable to find truth, we need to cultivate new generations of people interested in seeking the scientific and mathematical explanations of the universe.
The thing that many people are really missing out on with Pages is that it really is a DTP program. Adobe and the other programs that perform page layout should have done something like this years ago. Pages is small, compact, pretty speedy and it handles images like no other word processing program I have ever used.
Now if I could just get End Note to work with Pages, I could drop Word entirely.
The real question is how many blogs are actively maintained and is there any useful information in those blogs that are maintained? I started "blogging" per se back in 2001 making irregular entries up until February of this year, when I decided to post more regularly. However there is content there that gets an incredible amount of traffic. I get several hundred Google hits/day for everything from specific images to reviews I did for Macintosh specific stuff like CPU upgrades and commentary about the science of vision loss when using Viagra. Surprisingly, there are many search terms where my blog comes up in the first three Google and Yahoo searches, and my site is a very small personal site where I write mostly for friends and family. Friends blogs that cover more specific issues such as venture capital or more common interest subjects garner traffic in the thousands to hundreds of thousands of hits per day. However, there are many blogs with infrequent entries, and low traffic levels that may in fact contain very useful information. The trick (search companies know) is to find that information and rank it according to its usefulness, playing off of the Long Tail Model of Chris Anderson.
More likely that they'll do the following * Use Open Firmware
* Lock it to their custom Northbridge as they usually do
Actually, no. I wrote this last week during WWDC to keep my readers/friends informed as to what the switch will mean. Apple will not be using Open Firmware.
The first sentence in the linked article says "Apple COULD use the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip to ensure that only Mac computers can run its OS X operating system, according to a news analysis from Gartner." emphasis mine.
While I do not doubt this will in fact be the case, I would appreciate more accurate reporting on the part of the Slashdot editors to ensure that submitters are not spreading misinformation. In fact, if you click on the Gartner new analysis linked in the vnunet article, you will find no mention of the "security chip" being quoted by this article so we have nested lousy reporting. Yeah, yeah, I must be new here. Ha ha
Seriously though, this is a reasonable move for Apple to ensure that the look, feel and reliability of the MacOS does not become corrupted for some users who may want to install OS X on "lower quality hardware". Apple prides itself on a quality user experience that approaches a luxury product. Everything from the appearance of the fonts to the way consumers interact with the interface needs to remain consistently "high quality" and I am sure Apple will make efforts to preserve this experience.
As well as providing for an OS "lock" on hardware, the implementation of such chips will also allow for stronger security as well as enabling one of the features that Hollywood has been demanding before Internet distribution of movies will be allowed by the studios.
So, part of the problem with this is that it turns many small Internet providers into de facto censorship organizations responsible for the policing and determination of ALL content hosted through them or make them software companies due to this little inclusion in the law:
260 (3) (a) A service provider may comply with Subsection (1) by:
261 (i) providing network-level in-network filtering to prevent receipt of material harmful to minors;
262 or
263 (ii) providing at the time of a consumer's request under Subsection (1), software for{ }
264 contemporaneous installation on the consumer's computer that blocks, in an easy-to-enable and
265 commercially reasonable manner, receipt of material harmful to minors.
The other major problem of course is that if the first course is taken, then Internet providers are legally *obligated* to be searching your computers or files for content in violation of federal law.
Of course this also begs the question of who determines "adult content" which should make one suspicious of motives as this law comes from a state that had a state appointed "porn czar" who was a self avowed virgin. Also, at one of the major Universities in the state, BYU felt that censorship of sculptures by Auguste Rodin was appropriate for the national tour a couple of years ago. Did they consider that "adult content"? What would they think of Internet sites covering sculptures of Michelangelo's David?
The other seriously maddening thing about this is that the little independent book shop just around the corner from me, The Kings English book shop would not be able to put any books on their website other than childrens books.
Shoot, this is one more reason not to have cell phones on airplanes during flight. I worry about the public's lack of concern for science especially given the extreme right wing movements going on right now in the USA, but people do not want to be remotely inconvenienced even if it means screwing science. Perhaps if the appeal can be made to them from a personal sanity perspective. I got a brief taste of how bad cell phones on planes can be last month on a flight that I wrote about it here.
Perhaps if this has to happen the picocell solution might be the way to go, but please let there be phone free zones on aircraft.
Who told you that the xServe uses an Intel CPU? That is simply not true. Apple has never used an Intel CPU for any computer, and I don't believe for a second that they're about to start now.
You should do your homework.