I know this is the sort of thing that goes on at black hat conferences, but could this guy potentially get in some sort of legal trouble for demonstrating what he has found?
I would think only if he shows himself, either in pre-recorded video or live, actually performing the hack on a real ATM. At that point, he could be charged under the computer fraud and abuse act. But simply doing a presentation on the topic, with details of the hacks? No, I don't think there's any law, yet, that makes *that* illegal, and any such law would likely be unconstitional in any case (pesky first amendment and all that).
The X11 folks tried to fix that by creating Low-Bandwidth X (LBX), which may be what you're thinking of. It never really took off, both because it didn't really help much and few commercial Unix vendors (remember them?) bothered to implement it.
Nah, he probably just got his acronyms mixed up. My bet is he really meant the Differential X Protocol Compressor, or DXCP for short. DXCP would be the precursor technology that lead to NX.
The earth hasn't been cooling for the last 15 years. 10 out of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the last 15 years (2009 is tied for 2nd place according to NASA). How is that cooling?
Because Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck say it's cooling.
Not sure if it's going to impact crude prices, but the article managed to both overestimate the leak rate by an order of magnitude and horribly exaggerate the size of the reservoir.
Actually, I *think* the article was engaging in a bit of speculation. IIRC, there has been at least one government source (I'm afraid I can't remember the agency) who was concerned that, if they couldn't get the leak sealed off Real Soon Now, there was a good chance further erosion in the pipe could result in a *far* higher outflow rate, possibly an order of magnitude higher, which is where the 50,000 vs 5,000 barrel/day numbers come from.
Worse, the original source for the 5,000 barrel/day number is a scientist who used satellite photos to make that estimation, and he stated that number is definitely on the optimistic side. Furthermore, it's obviously the case that BP has absolutely no reason to be honest about the flow rate, so it's very possible that, even if the worst doesn't happen, the current rate of flow may be significantly higher than the current estimate being bandied about.
So it's not really the author of the article that's the source of that number. And the question is simply this: if the worst happens, how bad could it get? But yeah, it's definitely a scare article, no doubt about that.
Anyway, as for the rest, I agree, hopefully once things calm down, this event will result in some real scrutiny into the industry, as I suspect there's a hell of a lot of corner cutting going on that we just don't know about.
1 mile = 5280 feet, for those who never memorized it, or don't ever work with imeprial units.
Or, for the civilized among us:), according to wikipedia, Deepwater Horizon was drilling below approximately 1500 meters (over a kilometer and a half... wow!) of water before the explosion.
They did. They had a blowout valve in place that was supposed to kill the oil flow. It failed. Not something that has ever happened before and not something that could have been predicted.
We could conduct offshore drilling for the next hundred years and probably not see another failure via this route.
If that's the only failsafe they had, that's a problem.
They were drilling at extraordinary depths, here, and they must've known that, if something catastrophic *did* happen, it would be exceptionally difficult to deal with. But instead of facing that fact and putting additional risk mitigation in place, they just assumed the risks were low enough that it wasn't worth the additional cost.
Really, this is a classic example of where government should be stepping in. In reality, as you say, the chances of something truly catastrophic happening are low enough that the cost of additional risk mitigation simply isn't justifiable from a cost-benefit perspective, and so it's incumbent upon the government to force them to take those additional steps.
They are just going to drop that containment dome over the blow off valve. It is not going to be suspended by the ship.
I thought they were also planning to siphon off the oil... I wouldn't think this dome would be heavy enough to contain the immense pressures inside that well, particularly when combined with the bouyancy of the oil itself.
I'd like to know how this dome is supposed to work in rough seas. The oil is going to be contained within the dome and brought to a surface ship. What happens when that surface ship can't maintain position due to inclement weather? Hurricane season starts in another few weeks....
Probably the same way the original rig, which was a semi-submersible, dynamically positioned platform, was controlled: via a system of computer-controlled engines which maintain the vessel's position over the drill site.
No, the dome isn't even lowered yet. The first leak was sealed using submersibles. Furthermore, it isn't expected that sealing that leak will do much (if anything) to reduce the total outflow.
Or were you hijacking the thread to flog a horse of your own?
I certainly wasn't intending to, though I admittedly started to miss the original point, so let's get back to it... you are absolutely right, even if the Saudi's are massively overestimating their reserves, the amount of oil being spewed out by this well is still miniscule in comparison, and, if the market were really just a simple market and not driven by emotion and speculation, this event should have little effect on crude prices.
I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.
Isn't that kind've implicit? I mean, if the well *had* had an accident like this, it wouldn't be a well anymore...:)
As an aside, as linked elsewhere in the comments, Ixtoc I also contradicts your assertion.
OOC, is there a reason you went through the trouble to set up IPv6, only to turn it back off again? After setting it up at home, I largely haven't thought about it, save that when I hit google, I notice my browser hits a v6 address (I have an extension that shows the server IP in my status bar).
Well, the Saudis (or maybe the Kuwaitis, can't remember at midnight) have already pumped out and sold over sixty billion barrels out of one of those oil fields, so the estimates can't be off by more than a factor of two.
Or, put another way, they either have another 40 billion barrels left, or, you know, none.
I'd say that's a big difference.:)
There are plenty of billion-barrel oil fields in non-OPEC countries anyway. I grew up on top of one in Canada.
Yeah, I live a few hundred clicks from the tarsands. What you neglect to mention is that oil is significantly more expensive to extract and has only become economically viable as the price of oil has creeped up (it's also an ecological nightmare, what with the poorly managed tailings ponds and so forth, but that's a separate issue). And that's really the rule when it comes to oil: we're getting close to the point where the extraction rate of cheap oil will no longer keep up with rising demand. Yes, that makes non-traditional sources viable as prices rise, but it also means that we'll likely experience price shocks as rising demand exceeds rate of extraction (heck, some worry we're already there, but of course the oil producing nations won't admit that, as it's not in their interests).
The Saudi and Kuwaiti fields are estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 billion barrels remaining, each. They started somewhere north of 100. Nothing under 1 billion barrels makes Wikipedias list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_fields.
Yeah, but most observers believe the Saudi's are not accurately reporting their remaining supplies in the hopes of keeping prices lower and demand higher (OPEC was *not* happy with $140/bl oil, as demand destruction started to kick in).
Meh, why not use it anyway? Grab yourself a free tunnel from, say, Hurricane Electric, set up your router (well, assuming it supports 6to4... I use m0n0wall, which works brilliantly), and voila, you should be good to go!
And *that* is one reason why publicly-routable IPs on private networks is a good thing. It makes things like VPNs *far* easier to manage, as you don't have to worry about conflicting private networks.
Huh? That isn't even about Theora. You said it yourself, it's about Ogg, the container, and why it may or may not suck.
Theora is a video codec, and is best compared to MPEG-2 in terms of performance. Compared to H.264, it's obsolete, and that would be the performance limit the OP was referring to. The simple fact is, Theora can't approach H.264 in terms of quality for low-bitrate applications, and guess what? Low-bitrate is the name of the game when it comes to internet video streaming.
That's the key point here. The article is a PR spin to try to make it seem like MS is protecting users. But in reality, it's an artificial limitation....
It's the same with Apple's rejection of Theora
It's also the same with Firefox and their rejection of anything but Theora. The simple fact is, everyone at the HTML5 table is being a total douchebag, and I, as a user, am starting to get a little sick of it.
You have an interesting definition of the word "forced."
You're right, poor choice of words. I should've used the word "driven", as in provided a very strong incentive to encourage the behaviour Mr. Circletimessquare seems to hate so much.
Of course, the alternative is to simply not visit those sites that are particularly obnoxious, and I've done just that in some cases. Unfortunately, when I receive a link from someone, I have no way to evaluate, apriori, if the site is going to spam me with popups, and so an Ad Blocker is, I think, all but a required tool to safely and efficiently browse the web these days.
Eventually when enough content is behind paywalls it will again be profitable to run ad-based sites. Which I don't even think will happen in the first place.
I actually completely agree with your scenario. What I take issue with is this idea that if people block ads, the Internets Will Be Destroyed! It's BS. As you say, we'll likely hit some happy equilibrium where there will be a mix of subscription- and advertiser-supported content, along with the current plethora of free content.
the more people who act like you, the more paywalls we have
So?
we can have all the free content we want, without any need to pay for anything. JUST LET THE FUCKING ADS APPEAR
Then it's not free. I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it with bandwidth, downloading the ads, and pain and aggravation as I'm assaulted by all the horribly obnoxious ways website operators are now using to try and grab my attention away from the content so I focus on the ads.
then it is more likely all content is going to be locked up beyond our reach
"beyond our reach"? Wha? What, you can't pay a subscription for the content you like? What are you, just a cheap asshole?
just do it QUIETLY you fucking moron
Nah. Dibsout. Block ads everyone! Fuck the website operators and their piece of shit ads! Fuck their popups, their popunders, their interstitials and overlays! Fuck 'em all!
is that a coherent enough point for you
At least you seemed to have a point this time. 'course, it'd be better communicated if you tried using capital letters and punctuation, but hey, small steps, right?
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is the sort of thing that goes on at black hat conferences, but could this guy potentially get in some sort of legal trouble for demonstrating what he has found?
I would think only if he shows himself, either in pre-recorded video or live, actually performing the hack on a real ATM. At that point, he could be charged under the computer fraud and abuse act. But simply doing a presentation on the topic, with details of the hacks? No, I don't think there's any law, yet, that makes *that* illegal, and any such law would likely be unconstitional in any case (pesky first amendment and all that).
The X11 folks tried to fix that by creating Low-Bandwidth X (LBX), which may be what you're thinking of. It never really took off, both because it didn't really help much and few commercial Unix vendors (remember them?) bothered to implement it.
Nah, he probably just got his acronyms mixed up. My bet is he really meant the Differential X Protocol Compressor, or DXCP for short. DXCP would be the precursor technology that lead to NX.
The earth hasn't been cooling for the last 15 years. 10 out of the 10 hottest years on record occurred in the last 15 years (2009 is tied for 2nd place according to NASA). How is that cooling?
Because Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck say it's cooling.
Seriously, how is this hard to understand?
Do you have a citation for that? Because if that's true, that's pretty frickin' serious.
Not sure if it's going to impact crude prices, but the article managed to both overestimate the leak rate by an order of magnitude and horribly exaggerate the size of the reservoir.
Actually, I *think* the article was engaging in a bit of speculation. IIRC, there has been at least one government source (I'm afraid I can't remember the agency) who was concerned that, if they couldn't get the leak sealed off Real Soon Now, there was a good chance further erosion in the pipe could result in a *far* higher outflow rate, possibly an order of magnitude higher, which is where the 50,000 vs 5,000 barrel/day numbers come from.
Worse, the original source for the 5,000 barrel/day number is a scientist who used satellite photos to make that estimation, and he stated that number is definitely on the optimistic side. Furthermore, it's obviously the case that BP has absolutely no reason to be honest about the flow rate, so it's very possible that, even if the worst doesn't happen, the current rate of flow may be significantly higher than the current estimate being bandied about.
So it's not really the author of the article that's the source of that number. And the question is simply this: if the worst happens, how bad could it get? But yeah, it's definitely a scare article, no doubt about that.
Anyway, as for the rest, I agree, hopefully once things calm down, this event will result in some real scrutiny into the industry, as I suspect there's a hell of a lot of corner cutting going on that we just don't know about.
1 mile = 5280 feet, for those who never memorized it, or don't ever work with imeprial units.
Or, for the civilized among us :), according to wikipedia, Deepwater Horizon was drilling below approximately 1500 meters (over a kilometer and a half... wow!) of water before the explosion.
They did. They had a blowout valve in place that was supposed to kill the oil flow. It failed. Not something that has ever happened before and not something that could have been predicted.
We could conduct offshore drilling for the next hundred years and probably not see another failure via this route.
If that's the only failsafe they had, that's a problem.
They were drilling at extraordinary depths, here, and they must've known that, if something catastrophic *did* happen, it would be exceptionally difficult to deal with. But instead of facing that fact and putting additional risk mitigation in place, they just assumed the risks were low enough that it wasn't worth the additional cost.
Really, this is a classic example of where government should be stepping in. In reality, as you say, the chances of something truly catastrophic happening are low enough that the cost of additional risk mitigation simply isn't justifiable from a cost-benefit perspective, and so it's incumbent upon the government to force them to take those additional steps.
They are just going to drop that containment dome over the blow off valve. It is not going to be suspended by the ship.
I thought they were also planning to siphon off the oil... I wouldn't think this dome would be heavy enough to contain the immense pressures inside that well, particularly when combined with the bouyancy of the oil itself.
I'd like to know how this dome is supposed to work in rough seas. The oil is going to be contained within the dome and brought to a surface ship. What happens when that surface ship can't maintain position due to inclement weather? Hurricane season starts in another few weeks....
Probably the same way the original rig, which was a semi-submersible, dynamically positioned platform, was controlled: via a system of computer-controlled engines which maintain the vessel's position over the drill site.
No, the dome isn't even lowered yet. The first leak was sealed using submersibles. Furthermore, it isn't expected that sealing that leak will do much (if anything) to reduce the total outflow.
Or were you hijacking the thread to flog a horse of your own?
I certainly wasn't intending to, though I admittedly started to miss the original point, so let's get back to it... you are absolutely right, even if the Saudi's are massively overestimating their reserves, the amount of oil being spewed out by this well is still miniscule in comparison, and, if the market were really just a simple market and not driven by emotion and speculation, this event should have little effect on crude prices.
I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.
Isn't that kind've implicit? I mean, if the well *had* had an accident like this, it wouldn't be a well anymore... :)
As an aside, as linked elsewhere in the comments, Ixtoc I also contradicts your assertion.
OOC, is there a reason you went through the trouble to set up IPv6, only to turn it back off again? After setting it up at home, I largely haven't thought about it, save that when I hit google, I notice my browser hits a v6 address (I have an extension that shows the server IP in my status bar).
Well, the Saudis (or maybe the Kuwaitis, can't remember at midnight) have already pumped out and sold over sixty billion barrels out of one of those oil fields, so the estimates can't be off by more than a factor of two.
Or, put another way, they either have another 40 billion barrels left, or, you know, none.
I'd say that's a big difference. :)
There are plenty of billion-barrel oil fields in non-OPEC countries anyway. I grew up on top of one in Canada.
Yeah, I live a few hundred clicks from the tarsands. What you neglect to mention is that oil is significantly more expensive to extract and has only become economically viable as the price of oil has creeped up (it's also an ecological nightmare, what with the poorly managed tailings ponds and so forth, but that's a separate issue). And that's really the rule when it comes to oil: we're getting close to the point where the extraction rate of cheap oil will no longer keep up with rising demand. Yes, that makes non-traditional sources viable as prices rise, but it also means that we'll likely experience price shocks as rising demand exceeds rate of extraction (heck, some worry we're already there, but of course the oil producing nations won't admit that, as it's not in their interests).
The Saudi and Kuwaiti fields are estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 billion barrels remaining, each. They started somewhere north of 100. Nothing under 1 billion barrels makes Wikipedias list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_fields.
Yeah, but most observers believe the Saudi's are not accurately reporting their remaining supplies in the hopes of keeping prices lower and demand higher (OPEC was *not* happy with $140/bl oil, as demand destruction started to kick in).
Funny? It should be insightful.
Seriously, do you live here, too?
Woohoo! Congrats! You've just delayed the problem by, hmm, let's see... 2 weeks? Maybe a month? Well done!
I'd be using IPv6 if only my ISP supported it.
Meh, why not use it anyway? Grab yourself a free tunnel from, say, Hurricane Electric, set up your router (well, assuming it supports 6to4... I use m0n0wall, which works brilliantly), and voila, you should be good to go!
And *that* is one reason why publicly-routable IPs on private networks is a good thing. It makes things like VPNs *far* easier to manage, as you don't have to worry about conflicting private networks.
And what, pray tell, have you seen of Theora?
Huh? That isn't even about Theora. You said it yourself, it's about Ogg, the container, and why it may or may not suck.
Theora is a video codec, and is best compared to MPEG-2 in terms of performance. Compared to H.264, it's obsolete, and that would be the performance limit the OP was referring to. The simple fact is, Theora can't approach H.264 in terms of quality for low-bitrate applications, and guess what? Low-bitrate is the name of the game when it comes to internet video streaming.
That's the key point here. The article is a PR spin to try to make it seem like MS is protecting users. But in reality, it's an artificial limitation. ...
It's the same with Apple's rejection of Theora
It's also the same with Firefox and their rejection of anything but Theora. The simple fact is, everyone at the HTML5 table is being a total douchebag, and I, as a user, am starting to get a little sick of it.
I know, I know, "'Ubuntu' is an African word meaning 'I'm too stupid for Slackware'"
Funny, I thought it was African for "I used Slackware years ago, but now I have better things to do with my time"...
You have an interesting definition of the word "forced."
You're right, poor choice of words. I should've used the word "driven", as in provided a very strong incentive to encourage the behaviour Mr. Circletimessquare seems to hate so much.
Of course, the alternative is to simply not visit those sites that are particularly obnoxious, and I've done just that in some cases. Unfortunately, when I receive a link from someone, I have no way to evaluate, apriori, if the site is going to spam me with popups, and so an Ad Blocker is, I think, all but a required tool to safely and efficiently browse the web these days.
Eventually when enough content is behind paywalls it will again be profitable to run ad-based sites. Which I don't even think will happen in the first place.
I actually completely agree with your scenario. What I take issue with is this idea that if people block ads, the Internets Will Be Destroyed! It's BS. As you say, we'll likely hit some happy equilibrium where there will be a mix of subscription- and advertiser-supported content, along with the current plethora of free content.
the more people who act like you, the more paywalls we have
So?
we can have all the free content we want, without any need to pay for anything. JUST LET THE FUCKING ADS APPEAR
Then it's not free. I'm paying for it. I'm paying for it with bandwidth, downloading the ads, and pain and aggravation as I'm assaulted by all the horribly obnoxious ways website operators are now using to try and grab my attention away from the content so I focus on the ads.
then it is more likely all content is going to be locked up beyond our reach
"beyond our reach"? Wha? What, you can't pay a subscription for the content you like? What are you, just a cheap asshole?
just do it QUIETLY you fucking moron
Nah. Dibsout. Block ads everyone! Fuck the website operators and their piece of shit ads! Fuck their popups, their popunders, their interstitials and overlays! Fuck 'em all!
is that a coherent enough point for you
At least you seemed to have a point this time. 'course, it'd be better communicated if you tried using capital letters and punctuation, but hey, small steps, right?