Your analogy is a bit off. It would be more accurate if the dirt road was the only access to the postal depo, and the county deliberately withholds an obviously-needed road upgrade in order to extort money from the mail office.
Huge tracts of empty land and unexploited resources, after disposing of the former occupents. Isolation from European politics allowing for rapid expansion. A market-driven economy may have been a big help, but it's certainly not the only factor in play.
BitTorrent by nature is difficult to make effectively anonymous. There are some networks that are designed for it (Freenet, for example) but anonymous access translates into a need to send everything via convoluted and indirect paths, which translates to a performance loss: Anonymous p2p is going to be slower at getting your downloads, and have more overhead. You can also consider the possibility of friend-to-friend p2p, like Retroshare, which only shares with those you trust - but for this to work well you need to know a few good friends who are also enthusiastic pirates.
But also be legally dubious - the first thing their lawyers would do is warn that the Tor operators might sue for libel, and the second thing the lawyers would do is warn that they could face angry law enforcement asking why they are teaching viewers how to thwart a criminal investigation. Both are highly unlikely to lead to any serious legal difficulty, but why chance it?
Different parts of government are frequently working at cross-purposes. The military is certainly involved in media ventures with the private sector - there's no secret to a lot of it, you can view a proudly displayed list of recently supported productions at http://www.airforcehollywood.a... - and that's just the air force. If your movie or series makes the US look good, and especially the US military, you can contact them and they'll help with production costs - even lend you some genuine military hardware. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the intelligence agencies too have an 'entertainment liaison' - either openly, or a secret one that studios need to sign an NDA to talk with.
If you compromise a drive firmware, what do you do with it? There's nothing much you can do to get data out, but one speculation is it could be used for a remotely triggerable DoS attack: If the drive detects a key phrase (likely a 128- or 192-bit sequence) written, it locks up or self-erases. Easy enough to, say, put the sequence into a URL so a web-server will log it, or send it to an email server. The ability to trigger such would be a powerful first-strike attack in any major conflict, and a good way to cover up a more conventional infiltration: Fake a drive failure to destroy evidence. There's no evidence any drive has ever been made like this, but with governments now getting involved in this 'cyber war' business such exotic threats are increasingly a concern. It's not beyond plausability that a government might lean on a hard drive manufacturer to include such a remote-destruct feature - remember that the NSA leaks have already revealed an NSA practice of intercepting network hardware en route to high value targets so they can install backdoors before it arrives.
You're jumping to conclusions. The strong-arm-government theory is certainly plausible - it explains the outright weird exit of the developers, as if they wanted to signal something was going on but were under legal threat. That doesn't have to mean the NSA though: The developers might not be in the US, and there are plenty of other governments who might also exert pressure to subvert a project like truecrypt. Most of them, even. They are probably in an English-speaking country, so it might have been the work of the UK, Australia or Canada, all of whome have joint operations with the US as well as domestic internet-monitoring agencies. Even if it was the US, it might not have been the NSA: It may well have been another agency, or even some low-level investigator working on a specific case who exceeded his authority and resorted to threats and intimidation after finding a truecrypt drive blocking progress in whatever case he was assigned to.
I've noticed that every single IP address has at least one segment >255. Perhaps it's a legal thing - their lawyers tell them not to show any address that might be in use by a real entity, and using invalid IPs is their equivilent of a 555 area code?
CSI and spinoffs all have the forensics team work as a one-department law enforcement squad. They go to the scene, interview the suspects, draw conclusions, and eventually chase down and arrest the perpetrator. It's just a storytelling constraint: It would be a lot less exciting if the CSI's job were more realistic. They go to a scene, spend a few hours poking around, then write up a report and hand it over to the detective? Who wants to watch that? It's a much better story if you have a small group of core characters who are intimately involved in the case from start to end.
Cyber doesn't hack servers: They simply don't mention any concept of a warrant. If they want to look up someone's phone records they quickly search their government database and pull up whatever information they need. Same for tracking a cellphone. Warrants are never even mentioned, so they don't need to resort to bypassing them. It's simply assumed that as the cyber specialist squad they are allowed access to anything computery in an instant.
In episode one the team detects a vulnerability in a cloud-based baby-monitor and immediately shuts down the service, probably ruining the company.
TV is about as close to a tough moral dilemma as most people get. Remember back during the Iraq torture scandal how often comparisons were drawn to the show 24, in which the protagonist tortures a terrorist to force him to reveal the location of a bomb? Something like that, anyway. It was the go-to example for the pro-torture faction.
Attempt landing on a river? If it works, your pilot is a hero. If it doesn't, and he crashes into the adjacent school? Well, he was just trying a desperate attempt to save lives that went tragically wrong. If the decision to consider rivers as emergency landing sites is made in advance, could the airline be held liable for an extra deaths that result from the risky landing?
It's not a technical issue, it's a policy issue: A computer will conclude 'no runways within range, you are all going to die.' A human can conclude 'Screw the procedures, I'm going to try a high-risk controlled crash into a river and hope for the best. No other options.'
They promise it - just not publically. This sort of thing goes on out of the spotlight, based on unwritten understandings that if pork flows one way, campaign contributions will go the other.
Claire Perry? Yes, I know of her. One of those moralising types who is always demanding the government ban something. She was one of the big names pushing for mandatory on-by-default porn filters for all UK internet connections.
Anything produced by the US government is public domain. It's written into their copyright law: The government cannot create anything with a copyright restriction. Whatever it produces is for the public good, not for profit.
There are loopholes, though. This only applies to things directly produced by government - it doesn't apply to contractors working on behalf of the government, anything they produce is still restricted by copyright. It also doesn't require the government release things for free - there are some situations where they have 'public domain' material, but it's only available to those who pay an access fee and agree not to redistribute it to others.
Worse than 1: Some of the companies that hold patents for Kinect also make professional motion capture camera rigs for special effects and research use. They have always been concerned that the Kinect consumer tech might be 'good enough' for some professionals - if you can buy a kinect and spend a few extra hours messing around, why buy a $12,000 motion capture studio system? There's probably a clause somewhere in the license that says Microsoft may not make a Kinect that can be easily adapted for low-end professional use as a studio motion capture system.
1) Finest quality tobacco, from pipes. 2) Why would they? It's a tabloid-bait proposal. Implementing it is a problem for the future, they know they can water it down heavily. 3) We already passed a law banning 'extreme' porn that has to have an explicit exemption for BBFC rated movies, otherise half the horror films from Hollywood would be banned. 4) POM sites would be easier targets: They need a payment system, which means they can be tracked and payment easily blocked. Porn sites are often ad-funded. 5) Probably ignore that entirely, too much trouble. 7) Because this isn't about people wanting to protect their children, it's about people wanting to protect society from the porn bogeyman. 8) Filtering effectively is almost impossibly. Remember that if you block 99% of porn sites, the porn-seeker need only go through on average one hundred search results to find something accessible. Can do that in a few minutes.
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Your analogy is a bit off. It would be more accurate if the dirt road was the only access to the postal depo, and the county deliberately withholds an obviously-needed road upgrade in order to extort money from the mail office.
"Why was the United States so successful?"
Huge tracts of empty land and unexploited resources, after disposing of the former occupents. Isolation from European politics allowing for rapid expansion. A market-driven economy may have been a big help, but it's certainly not the only factor in play.
"(which, contrary to popular claim, libertarians should be for as long as they are sensible and fair and needed)"
But then they wouldn't be libertarians. A rejection of regulation is one of the defining points of the faction.
BitTorrent by nature is difficult to make effectively anonymous. There are some networks that are designed for it (Freenet, for example) but anonymous access translates into a need to send everything via convoluted and indirect paths, which translates to a performance loss: Anonymous p2p is going to be slower at getting your downloads, and have more overhead. You can also consider the possibility of friend-to-friend p2p, like Retroshare, which only shares with those you trust - but for this to work well you need to know a few good friends who are also enthusiastic pirates.
But also be legally dubious - the first thing their lawyers would do is warn that the Tor operators might sue for libel, and the second thing the lawyers would do is warn that they could face angry law enforcement asking why they are teaching viewers how to thwart a criminal investigation. Both are highly unlikely to lead to any serious legal difficulty, but why chance it?
Different parts of government are frequently working at cross-purposes. The military is certainly involved in media ventures with the private sector - there's no secret to a lot of it, you can view a proudly displayed list of recently supported productions at http://www.airforcehollywood.a... - and that's just the air force. If your movie or series makes the US look good, and especially the US military, you can contact them and they'll help with production costs - even lend you some genuine military hardware. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the intelligence agencies too have an 'entertainment liaison' - either openly, or a secret one that studios need to sign an NDA to talk with.
If you compromise a drive firmware, what do you do with it? There's nothing much you can do to get data out, but one speculation is it could be used for a remotely triggerable DoS attack: If the drive detects a key phrase (likely a 128- or 192-bit sequence) written, it locks up or self-erases. Easy enough to, say, put the sequence into a URL so a web-server will log it, or send it to an email server. The ability to trigger such would be a powerful first-strike attack in any major conflict, and a good way to cover up a more conventional infiltration: Fake a drive failure to destroy evidence. There's no evidence any drive has ever been made like this, but with governments now getting involved in this 'cyber war' business such exotic threats are increasingly a concern. It's not beyond plausability that a government might lean on a hard drive manufacturer to include such a remote-destruct feature - remember that the NSA leaks have already revealed an NSA practice of intercepting network hardware en route to high value targets so they can install backdoors before it arrives.
You're jumping to conclusions. The strong-arm-government theory is certainly plausible - it explains the outright weird exit of the developers, as if they wanted to signal something was going on but were under legal threat. That doesn't have to mean the NSA though: The developers might not be in the US, and there are plenty of other governments who might also exert pressure to subvert a project like truecrypt. Most of them, even. They are probably in an English-speaking country, so it might have been the work of the UK, Australia or Canada, all of whome have joint operations with the US as well as domestic internet-monitoring agencies. Even if it was the US, it might not have been the NSA: It may well have been another agency, or even some low-level investigator working on a specific case who exceeded his authority and resorted to threats and intimidation after finding a truecrypt drive blocking progress in whatever case he was assigned to.
Just look for the red code.
I've noticed that every single IP address has at least one segment >255. Perhaps it's a legal thing - their lawyers tell them not to show any address that might be in use by a real entity, and using invalid IPs is their equivilent of a 555 area code?
CSI and spinoffs all have the forensics team work as a one-department law enforcement squad. They go to the scene, interview the suspects, draw conclusions, and eventually chase down and arrest the perpetrator. It's just a storytelling constraint: It would be a lot less exciting if the CSI's job were more realistic. They go to a scene, spend a few hours poking around, then write up a report and hand it over to the detective? Who wants to watch that? It's a much better story if you have a small group of core characters who are intimately involved in the case from start to end.
It veers into so-bad-it's-good. You need a few friends to yell at the TV with.
Cyber doesn't hack servers: They simply don't mention any concept of a warrant. If they want to look up someone's phone records they quickly search their government database and pull up whatever information they need. Same for tracking a cellphone. Warrants are never even mentioned, so they don't need to resort to bypassing them. It's simply assumed that as the cyber specialist squad they are allowed access to anything computery in an instant.
In episode one the team detects a vulnerability in a cloud-based baby-monitor and immediately shuts down the service, probably ruining the company.
TV is about as close to a tough moral dilemma as most people get. Remember back during the Iraq torture scandal how often comparisons were drawn to the show 24, in which the protagonist tortures a terrorist to force him to reveal the location of a bomb? Something like that, anyway. It was the go-to example for the pro-torture faction.
And liability.
Attempt landing on a river? If it works, your pilot is a hero. If it doesn't, and he crashes into the adjacent school? Well, he was just trying a desperate attempt to save lives that went tragically wrong. If the decision to consider rivers as emergency landing sites is made in advance, could the airline be held liable for an extra deaths that result from the risky landing?
It's not a technical issue, it's a policy issue: A computer will conclude 'no runways within range, you are all going to die.' A human can conclude 'Screw the procedures, I'm going to try a high-risk controlled crash into a river and hope for the best. No other options.'
They promise it - just not publically. This sort of thing goes on out of the spotlight, based on unwritten understandings that if pork flows one way, campaign contributions will go the other.
How big a nuke? This is Russia, they probably still have a second Tsar Bomba sitting in a silo somewhere.
"In fact, I think this is recommended by most driving instructors."
But does anyone listen?
In this field, patents are possibly more important. There are just so many of them, h264 needed a consortium to make cross-licensing deals possible.
Claire Perry? Yes, I know of her. One of those moralising types who is always demanding the government ban something. She was one of the big names pushing for mandatory on-by-default porn filters for all UK internet connections.
Anything produced by the US government is public domain. It's written into their copyright law: The government cannot create anything with a copyright restriction. Whatever it produces is for the public good, not for profit.
There are loopholes, though. This only applies to things directly produced by government - it doesn't apply to contractors working on behalf of the government, anything they produce is still restricted by copyright. It also doesn't require the government release things for free - there are some situations where they have 'public domain' material, but it's only available to those who pay an access fee and agree not to redistribute it to others.
Worse than 1: Some of the companies that hold patents for Kinect also make professional motion capture camera rigs for special effects and research use. They have always been concerned that the Kinect consumer tech might be 'good enough' for some professionals - if you can buy a kinect and spend a few extra hours messing around, why buy a $12,000 motion capture studio system? There's probably a clause somewhere in the license that says Microsoft may not make a Kinect that can be easily adapted for low-end professional use as a studio motion capture system.
1) Finest quality tobacco, from pipes.
2) Why would they? It's a tabloid-bait proposal. Implementing it is a problem for the future, they know they can water it down heavily.
3) We already passed a law banning 'extreme' porn that has to have an explicit exemption for BBFC rated movies, otherise half the horror films from Hollywood would be banned.
4) POM sites would be easier targets: They need a payment system, which means they can be tracked and payment easily blocked. Porn sites are often ad-funded.
5) Probably ignore that entirely, too much trouble.
7) Because this isn't about people wanting to protect their children, it's about people wanting to protect society from the porn bogeyman.
8) Filtering effectively is almost impossibly. Remember that if you block 99% of porn sites, the porn-seeker need only go through on average one hundred search results to find something accessible. Can do that in a few minutes.
The kid at school with the 8GB memory stick full of porn is going to be in some demand.
I think we just report it more when someone does get caught.