Times are changing, nowadays you can commit crimes without even going out of your house, real-time encrypted communication with your whole gang.
When has this not been true? Invite a bunch of neighbours over with some balloons tied to the front porch, and a sign up that says "Happy Birthday Son!" Then, sit in the kitchen talking about your plans to blow up some local municipal building, while some co-conspirator dresses as a clown and entertains the kiddies in the front room that you can see through the window from the street. (Ok, so you probably had to leave the house to buy the balloons, but still.)
Police methods and laws need to keep up with the technology and their use by criminals.
Provide evidence to a judge, receive a warrant. That's the process. Period. As technology progresses, the types of evidence you can present to a judge also progress. That right there is now they keep up with the technology.
1. You suspect someone of a crime based on some evidence you obtained legally, either by accident,by witnessing something in a public place, by a witness statement, by a confession, or some other method, but regardless, it's without a warrant, but using a method that's legal to obtain evidence without a warrant. 2. Based on this evidence, you obtain one or more warrants and use them to gather more evidence. 3. If the totality of evidence points to a crime being committed, you arrest and charge the target with a crime.
The problem with the NSA/GCHQ, etc, is that they're not following this pattern. Instead, they're doing this:
1. Perform surveillance on everybody without warrants. 2. If you find anything pointing to a crime committed by an individual, then, well, repeat step 1.
If there is an Internet connected switch on the dedicated SCADA network, then it's not air gapped, by definition. Air gapped means there's no wire running from the Internet side to the protected network. Hence, there is an "air gap" in between the two networks.
In Windows the video driver is installed automatically on the fly. All you get is a couple of seconds a blank screen, and you don't even have to exit the desktop.
Err....no. No, it's not. After you've figured out the video chipset manufacturer, been to their website, found the right driver package, downloaded it, double clicked the installer, agreed to the EULA, and clicked next a few times to copy the files to the hard drive.....then, and only then, is the video driver installed automatically on the fly.
That's like saying you've got a self driving car that gets you from home to work automatically, when it fact, you've got a recent Ford that only has parking assist.
The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.
The problem is the effort is not to reduce the amount, the effort is to send change, however slightly, in a VERY BAD direction.
We already know the Earth will enter a glacial period again. It may even be tending to do so now, we really don't have the understanding of climate to say for sure.
THIS. Somebody, finally, who fucking GETS IT!
On geological time scales, there is no such thing as a stable climate. We WILL enter another ice age, sometime in the next 1000 years or so. When we do, there will be no chance in hell that earth will support its current population. I'd estimate that Earth's population will be reduced to significantly less than a billion, through starvation, disease, and resource violence. That's over 80% (probably 90% by then) of the world's population that will be wiped out, simply because there won't be enough food, water, or non-glacier-covered land for everybody to live. Most of the equatorial regions will be desert, and pretty much everything more than 45 degrees latitude away from the equator will be covered in kilometers thick ice. The Black Plague didn't wipe out anywhere near this percentage, and we consider that to be a huge disaster.
If we can, through man made activity, prevent the next ice age from happening, even if it does cost of a couple of small island countries, the environmental and human cost is astronomically less than the ice age alternative.
The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.
The climate has been in constant flux ever since the earth formed from a cloud of dust. The idea that we somehow must be warming the earth with our activity, simply because it's a touch warmer now than it was in 1860 is the worst kind of arrogance.
Yes, lets fiddle with the environment, these are the same scientist who in the 70's wanted to try and heat the earth because they thought we were all headed to an ice age. Just think if we had let them do that!
We ARE headed into an ice age. Look at the last million years of temperature history of the earth, and you'll see our current warm period is scheduled to end sometime in the next thousand years or so, at the latest.
It's not a question of if we'll get to another ice age, but when. As in, will the people who are alive when the next ice age starts still speak a recognizable version of my language, or will it have changed enough that I wouldn't be able to communicate with them? Yes, we're potentially that close.
What the heck do you consider typical? A Trabant? A subcompact Toyota Yaris is 106 hp. A Nissan Juke, which is smaller than most families can actually use, is 188 hp for the base model, going up to 215 for the upgrade models. A Buick Encore, another tiny SUV, is 138 hp. GMC Terrain, which is actually getting close to the "typical, average" car, is 182 hp for the base model, 301 for the upgraded engine. Any mid size car or minivan that any family actually can use is going to be at least 180-200 hp, and could easily be up in the 300-400 hp range. Hell, my first car, horribly underpowered as it was, was 115 hp, and that was a 1981 model.
If you're that far off with one of your assumptions, so simple to be verified as incorrect with 10 seconds on Google, then why should we consider anything else you say to be accurate?
So basically, they're saying "the land of the free and the home of the brave" should sacrifice our fundamental liberties and allow the government to ignore the constitution to keep us safe. Why don't they just move to North Korea? It has everything they want.
We're all too damned terrified to be brave, so you need to make us non-free, so we can be safe11!!1!11!111eleventy!1!!!
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light. The terrified people the government begging.
Oh, please keep us safe from the big bad meanies Who you keep on saying they all want to kill us.
And the rocket's red glare the bombs bursting in air We've all never seen them but you say ISIS has them.
Which, at least if you're logged in, very quickly gets changed by (I assume) a bit of JavaScript to display the number of new stories, rather than the NFNSTM tagline; if you don't look quickly, or actually check the source manually, you'd never know it was there. Incidentally, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the/. html source. Take a peek sometime.
Well, that's great. Kanye West might be able to run faster than Taylor Swift, too, but he's still an asshole who publicly bitches/walks out/rushes the stage and grabs the mike/ruins their moment when somebody else wins a music award.
If No, then, "Ding, Ding, Ding, ERROR." So sorry, but thanks for playing.
If Yes, then examine minority opinion carefully against data and wisdom of scientific crowds. Probable result will most likely resemble the "No" answer.
So, I guess the medical establishment of a few hundred years ago must have been right when they all were saying to use leeches and bloodletting. After all, they were all saying it, so it must have been right, because they were all experts! And if it was right then, it must still be right now. Off to the swamp with you!
Forests, contrary to popular belief, aren't the huge carbon sinks that they appear to be. The reason for this is that trees eventually die, fall down, and rot, releasing all that carbon they sequestered back into the atmosphere. New growth forests, where all the trees are young enough that there isn't an equilibrium; sure, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But old growth, where trees are continually dying, and being replace by new trees? More or less carbon neutral.
Therefore, chopping those trees down for wood is the best thing to do if you're interested in removing carbon from the atmosphere on a long term basis, as long as new trees are planted to replace the chopped ones. Once I cut a tree to make a dining room table and chair set, that carbon isn't going anywhere, unless my house burns down.
Having said that, I'm among the "deniers" who think the IPCC is overstating the effects of human activity by several orders of magnitude.
For one it can't be hijacked as easily as these ISPs are doing.
...which they're *not* doing. This article is a farce written by someone who can't even configure his email client to use the correct port for submission. He's trying to use port 25 which is only for MX to MX communication and not for submission, he should be using 587 and if he did there would very likely be no problems.
Bell Sympatico in Canada uses port 25 for encrypted client to server connections Port 587 times out. Completely non-standard fuckery, I realize, but it's certainly possible that this guy's ISP does something similarly stupid.
Server 2K3 also uses PPTP, which is known to be broken, and no fix is planned from MS, despite the fact that 2K3 is still supported til next year sometime.
Before looking at the technological failure point I would like to know why that much data is exposed to a vpn connection in such a way that it can be exploited.
Because idiot IT "consultants" generally view the firewall as the only important line of defence. I can't count the number of business I've gone into to clean up a mess, and found the perimeter firewall to be....well...mediocre, and the internal security to be absolutely non-existent. Basically, the assumption is that anything that's on the network is supposed to be there, so you don't set anything up to question it. I've seen databases set up to allow root/sa access to anything, with no password. If I question the IT genius who set it up, the response is usually something like: "Well, that way everybody who needs it has access to it, and the firewall blocks any outside access, so it's secure."
That doesn't narrow things down a lot. Is it an entry level 2011 Fiesta? Or is it a loaded 2011 Mustang GT500? (I would have used the Ford GT as the high end, but they stopped making those in 2006.)
. It takes about six hours to drive from the Aurora center to the Farmington center near Minneapolis, and that's not counting going home and packing for an extended stay.
Drive? Why would they drive that far? It's much quicker to fly.
Well, duuh. All the planes are grounded. How are they supposed to fly?........or was that a big wooosh?
Is it though feasible to set up the the system so those controllers can go home, login to a VPN and have a nation wide system that they can load their area into and continue work?
And then when some Chinese hacker breaks in and redirects every plane in the country to Newark, you'll be bitching about the stupidity of connecting the air traffic control system to the Internet.
For a start, Ubuntu is a high-memory distro, because it tries to be everything to everybody, simple to install and use, and as automated as possible. Blow it away, install Debian 7 with lxde, and you'll run the entire thing in nicely in your 512MB with room to spare.
99% of Windows is exactly the same to the user for Windows 8 vs Windows XP. The only difference is, if you click the start button you get a screen of icons vs. a menu of icons.
Plus, that stupid "PC Settings" screen, with a bunch of toggle switches for options, instead of a real control panel....oh, wait...it DOES have an actual control panel, but the organization of it is completely different than XP, Vista, or 7. And what settings do you find in the Control Panel, and what ones are in PC Settings? Then there's turning it off. Where the heck is the Shut Down option? Oh...it's over here at the opposite side of the screen, completely hidden by the desktop equivalent of "mystery meat navigation." Then there's the whole hideousness of the UI itself, and its flat, Windows-2-esque window chrome. When the graphical elements of your quarter century old OS are more appealing than your latest and greatest, you know you've screwed the pooch. Royally.
That is the reality of wanting an alternative operating system, and is a choice of the people. If you want simplicity as an end user, windows is currently OS of choice, as its specifically built to install itself automatically with all the necessary drivers and settings by OEM.
Errr....you've never actually installed Windows, have you?
Slashdot Mirror
Times are changing, nowadays you can commit crimes without even going out of your house, real-time encrypted communication with your whole gang.
When has this not been true? Invite a bunch of neighbours over with some balloons tied to the front porch, and a sign up that says "Happy Birthday Son!"
Then, sit in the kitchen talking about your plans to blow up some local municipal building, while some co-conspirator dresses as a clown and entertains the kiddies in the front room that you can see through the window from the street. (Ok, so you probably had to leave the house to buy the balloons, but still.)
Police methods and laws need to keep up with the technology and their use by criminals.
Provide evidence to a judge, receive a warrant. That's the process. Period. As technology progresses, the types of evidence you can present to a judge also progress. That right there is now they keep up with the technology.
Evidence != Conviction.
1. You suspect someone of a crime based on some evidence you obtained legally, either by accident,by witnessing something in a public place, by a witness statement, by a confession, or some other method, but regardless, it's without a warrant, but using a method that's legal to obtain evidence without a warrant.
2. Based on this evidence, you obtain one or more warrants and use them to gather more evidence.
3. If the totality of evidence points to a crime being committed, you arrest and charge the target with a crime.
The problem with the NSA/GCHQ, etc, is that they're not following this pattern. Instead, they're doing this:
1. Perform surveillance on everybody without warrants.
2. If you find anything pointing to a crime committed by an individual, then, well, repeat step 1.
If there is an Internet connected switch on the dedicated SCADA network, then it's not air gapped, by definition. Air gapped means there's no wire running from the Internet side to the protected network. Hence, there is an "air gap" in between the two networks.
In Windows the video driver is installed automatically on the fly. All you get is a couple of seconds a blank screen, and you don't even have to exit the desktop.
Err....no. No, it's not. After you've figured out the video chipset manufacturer, been to their website, found the right driver package, downloaded it, double clicked the installer, agreed to the EULA, and clicked next a few times to copy the files to the hard drive.....then, and only then, is the video driver installed automatically on the fly.
That's like saying you've got a self driving car that gets you from home to work automatically, when it fact, you've got a recent Ford that only has parking assist.
The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.
The problem is the effort is not to reduce the amount, the effort is to send change, however slightly, in a VERY BAD direction.
We already know the Earth will enter a glacial period again. It may even be tending to do so now, we really don't have the understanding of climate to say for sure.
THIS. Somebody, finally, who fucking GETS IT!
On geological time scales, there is no such thing as a stable climate. We WILL enter another ice age, sometime in the next 1000 years or so. When we do, there will be no chance in hell that earth will support its current population. I'd estimate that Earth's population will be reduced to significantly less than a billion, through starvation, disease, and resource violence. That's over 80% (probably 90% by then) of the world's population that will be wiped out, simply because there won't be enough food, water, or non-glacier-covered land for everybody to live. Most of the equatorial regions will be desert, and pretty much everything more than 45 degrees latitude away from the equator will be covered in kilometers thick ice.
The Black Plague didn't wipe out anywhere near this percentage, and we consider that to be a huge disaster.
If we can, through man made activity, prevent the next ice age from happening, even if it does cost of a couple of small island countries, the environmental and human cost is astronomically less than the ice age alternative.
The climate is already changing, the goal is to reduce the amount of change.
The climate has been in constant flux ever since the earth formed from a cloud of dust. The idea that we somehow must be warming the earth with our activity, simply because it's a touch warmer now than it was in 1860 is the worst kind of arrogance.
Yes, lets fiddle with the environment, these are the same scientist who in the 70's wanted to try and heat the earth because they thought we were all headed to an ice age. Just think if we had let them do that!
We ARE headed into an ice age. Look at the last million years of temperature history of the earth, and you'll see our current warm period is scheduled to end sometime in the next thousand years or so, at the latest.
It's not a question of if we'll get to another ice age, but when. As in, will the people who are alive when the next ice age starts still speak a recognizable version of my language, or will it have changed enough that I wouldn't be able to communicate with them? Yes, we're potentially that close.
... vs 100HP in your typical automobile,
What the heck do you consider typical? A Trabant?
A subcompact Toyota Yaris is 106 hp. A Nissan Juke, which is smaller than most families can actually use, is 188 hp for the base model, going up to 215 for the upgrade models. A Buick Encore, another tiny SUV, is 138 hp. GMC Terrain, which is actually getting close to the "typical, average" car, is 182 hp for the base model, 301 for the upgraded engine.
Any mid size car or minivan that any family actually can use is going to be at least 180-200 hp, and could easily be up in the 300-400 hp range. Hell, my first car, horribly underpowered as it was, was 115 hp, and that was a 1981 model.
If you're that far off with one of your assumptions, so simple to be verified as incorrect with 10 seconds on Google, then why should we consider anything else you say to be accurate?
You got that *half* right...
From the freaking summary:
"A provision to extend the controversial USA Patriot Act to 2017 was also appended by the House of Representatives."
Which also didn't pass, as it was part of the same bill. Hence, why it was a "pro" that the Patriot Act didn't get extended.
Duuh.
So basically, they're saying "the land of the free and the home of the brave" should sacrifice our fundamental liberties and allow the government to ignore the constitution to keep us safe. Why don't they just move to North Korea? It has everything they want.
We're all too damned terrified to be brave, so you need to make us non-free, so we can be safe11!!1!11!111eleventy!1!!!
Oh, say can you see
by the dawn's early light.
The terrified people
the government begging.
Oh, please keep us safe
from the big bad meanies
Who you keep on saying
they all want to kill us.
And the rocket's red glare
the bombs bursting in air
We've all never seen them
but you say ISIS has them.
etc.etc.etc.
It's in the HTML title of the front page, moron.
Which, at least if you're logged in, very quickly gets changed by (I assume) a bit of JavaScript to display the number of new stories, rather than the NFNSTM tagline; if you don't look quickly, or actually check the source manually, you'd never know it was there. /. html source. Take a peek sometime.
Incidentally, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the
Well, that's great. Kanye West might be able to run faster than Taylor Swift, too, but he's still an asshole who publicly bitches/walks out/rushes the stage and grabs the mike/ruins their moment when somebody else wins a music award.
1) Are you a climate scientist?
If No, then, "Ding, Ding, Ding, ERROR." So sorry, but thanks for playing.
If Yes, then examine minority opinion carefully against data and wisdom of scientific crowds. Probable result will most likely resemble the "No" answer.
So, I guess the medical establishment of a few hundred years ago must have been right when they all were saying to use leeches and bloodletting. After all, they were all saying it, so it must have been right, because they were all experts! And if it was right then, it must still be right now.
Off to the swamp with you!
Forests, contrary to popular belief, aren't the huge carbon sinks that they appear to be.
The reason for this is that trees eventually die, fall down, and rot, releasing all that carbon they sequestered back into the atmosphere. New growth forests, where all the trees are young enough that there isn't an equilibrium; sure, they pull carbon out of the atmosphere. But old growth, where trees are continually dying, and being replace by new trees? More or less carbon neutral.
Therefore, chopping those trees down for wood is the best thing to do if you're interested in removing carbon from the atmosphere on a long term basis, as long as new trees are planted to replace the chopped ones. Once I cut a tree to make a dining room table and chair set, that carbon isn't going anywhere, unless my house burns down.
Having said that, I'm among the "deniers" who think the IPCC is overstating the effects of human activity by several orders of magnitude.
Yet, according to NASA studies, the ocean hasn't warmed recently, either.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=50+million+climate+refugees+2010
For one it can't be hijacked as easily as these ISPs are doing.
...which they're *not* doing. This article is a farce written by someone who can't even configure his email client to use the correct port for submission. He's trying to use port 25 which is only for MX to MX communication and not for submission, he should be using 587 and if he did there would very likely be no problems.
Bell Sympatico in Canada uses port 25 for encrypted client to server connections Port 587 times out. Completely non-standard fuckery, I realize, but it's certainly possible that this guy's ISP does something similarly stupid.
Server 2K3 also uses PPTP, which is known to be broken, and no fix is planned from MS, despite the fact that 2K3 is still supported til next year sometime.
Before looking at the technological failure point I would like to know why that much data is exposed to a vpn connection in such a way that it can be exploited.
Because idiot IT "consultants" generally view the firewall as the only important line of defence. I can't count the number of business I've gone into to clean up a mess, and found the perimeter firewall to be....well...mediocre, and the internal security to be absolutely non-existent. Basically, the assumption is that anything that's on the network is supposed to be there, so you don't set anything up to question it.
I've seen databases set up to allow root/sa access to anything, with no password. If I question the IT genius who set it up, the response is usually something like: "Well, that way everybody who needs it has access to it, and the firewall blocks any outside access, so it's secure."
It's a 2011 Ford.
That doesn't narrow things down a lot. Is it an entry level 2011 Fiesta? Or is it a loaded 2011 Mustang GT500? (I would have used the Ford GT as the high end, but they stopped making those in 2006.)
. It takes about six hours to drive from the Aurora center to the Farmington center near Minneapolis, and that's not counting going home and packing for an extended stay.
Drive? Why would they drive that far? It's much quicker to fly.
Well, duuh. All the planes are grounded. How are they supposed to fly? ..... ...or was that a big wooosh?
Is it though feasible to set up the the system so those controllers can go home, login to a VPN and have a nation wide system that they can load their area into and continue work?
And then when some Chinese hacker breaks in and redirects every plane in the country to Newark, you'll be bitching about the stupidity of connecting the air traffic control system to the Internet.
For a start, Ubuntu is a high-memory distro, because it tries to be everything to everybody, simple to install and use, and as automated as possible.
Blow it away, install Debian 7 with lxde, and you'll run the entire thing in nicely in your 512MB with room to spare.
99% of Windows is exactly the same to the user for Windows 8 vs Windows XP. The only difference is, if you click the start button you get a screen of icons vs. a menu of icons.
Plus, that stupid "PC Settings" screen, with a bunch of toggle switches for options, instead of a real control panel....oh, wait...it DOES have an actual control panel, but the organization of it is completely different than XP, Vista, or 7. And what settings do you find in the Control Panel, and what ones are in PC Settings?
Then there's turning it off. Where the heck is the Shut Down option? Oh...it's over here at the opposite side of the screen, completely hidden by the desktop equivalent of "mystery meat navigation."
Then there's the whole hideousness of the UI itself, and its flat, Windows-2-esque window chrome. When the graphical elements of your quarter century old OS are more appealing than your latest and greatest, you know you've screwed the pooch. Royally.
That is the reality of wanting an alternative operating system, and is a choice of the people. If you want simplicity as an end user, windows is currently OS of choice, as its specifically built to install itself automatically with all the necessary drivers and settings by OEM.
Errr....you've never actually installed Windows, have you?