The organ theft urban legend has been around for a long time, but organ transplant isn't just something any unethical surgeon can do in the back of a fan. You need to match a donor first, which needs access to a suitable laboratory. Then you need a highly skilled surgeon, and a sterile operating environment, a team of supporting surgeons and nurses, an anesthetist, lots of drugs that are hard to get on the black market (Anasthetic, immunosurpresents, potent antibiotics). Expensive and specialised machines to monitor the recipient*. If organ theft does/could happen, it would have to be an operation so sophisticated and expensive that it could only be the domain of the most powerful of organised crime organisations. The ones who can pay off hospitals to carry out an off-the-books transplant.
*Double that if you intend the donor survive. This part is optional.
Awkward words of similar spelling but quite different meaning do lead to confusion. How'd that mess of a situation come about? I'll have to find an entomologist to ask.
I doubt he ever found any true stenography in there.
A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable. http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf
The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been monitoring the porn use of some unnamed 'radical muslims' in the middle east were planning on using it to blackmail them into silence or destroy their credibility. It's not clear if they actually pulled off the blackmail or discrediting part though, the leaked document is from the planning stage. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25118156
Not from. To. That's how merchants confirm who is paying for what. So you can find out a celebrities bitcoin wallet address and see how much they have in there, and you can see them spend the money... somewhere. But you can't tell who got it, unless they gave it to someone else who published their address.
It'd be easier to tell if they donated to a tip jar though. I can imagine that with easier payments some porn sites might use that business model - come, look at the porn and ads, and if you like it throw a little bitcoin to the address on the bottom of the page.
I'm always amused and annoyed by some anti-porn crusaders talking about how the evil porn companies target children. Why would they do that? They have no credit card to pay with.
I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.
Bitcoin doesn't have an elemental unit as such. Most people now thing in micro-bitcoins, because a single coin is worth too much for everyday use, but that's just an arbitary shift of the decimal point.
The transactions are public, but also hard to follow - most of the wallets are transitory. The path of payment for a typical porn purchase might go something like this: Buyer buys coins from exchange. Coins go from exchange to buyer Buyer spends them on porn, via a one-use payment address. Coins are transferred from there on to an exchange again to get dollars with.
So identifying a coin purchaser would need to know: 1. A coin the purchaser owns at the time. This could be found out by an insider at the coin-for-dollars exchange, or by someone giving coin to a publicly posted address. 2. Confirmation that the one-use payment address is being used to pay for porn. As it's a one-use address, only someone inside the porn distribution company or the exchange could know this. Unless the company mixes all their payments into a single pool prior to dollar-conversion.
So it could be done, but it's not trivial. You'd need someone inside the exchange willing to compromise confidentiality, which is the same thing you'd need to compromise conventional finance.
Plus it'd mean more charges. What's the point of destroying the evidence of one crime with it just lets them charge you with constructing a bomb instead?
I know thermite isn't a bomb. I'm sure they can argue otherwise.
Part of the issue, I think, is that there is no 'truely open' video codec worth using. There are a few truely open video codecs, like Theora and Dirac, but they all suck - the best algorithms are patented.
The iStuff owners are probably more valuable customers too. It's a premium device - people who use them will tend to have above-average disposeable income.
Destroying the drive is awkward. It's too much data to overwrite in time, so you'd need a device that could physically destroy it. An easier way is to just encrypt the drive, and destroy the key upon detecting tampering.
Even those copies are made with a hardware write-blocker - usually a device that sits in the SATA cable or USB connection, blocking any write request packets.
It could be done, but it'd need to be in hardware - a hardened chip that handled the encryption, with the key stored internally and never revealed. Even then a highly skilled attacker might be able to get it out by monitoring power use or some such trick, but it'd be very difficult.
You'd have to look up details, but even 'planing attacks' doesn't indicate the ability to carry them out. A lot of terrorists in this part of the world turned out to be incompetents who don't know how to make a simple bomb. One lot had their non-functioning car bomb towed away for illegal parking. Being attacked by them isn't terrifying, it's insulting.
Slashdot Mirror
The organ theft urban legend has been around for a long time, but organ transplant isn't just something any unethical surgeon can do in the back of a fan. You need to match a donor first, which needs access to a suitable laboratory. Then you need a highly skilled surgeon, and a sterile operating environment, a team of supporting surgeons and nurses, an anesthetist, lots of drugs that are hard to get on the black market (Anasthetic, immunosurpresents, potent antibiotics). Expensive and specialised machines to monitor the recipient*. If organ theft does/could happen, it would have to be an operation so sophisticated and expensive that it could only be the domain of the most powerful of organised crime organisations. The ones who can pay off hospitals to carry out an off-the-books transplant.
*Double that if you intend the donor survive. This part is optional.
Or to diversify and secure - it's risky to be entirely focused on search. More diverse business, less risk.
It's the code that calculates the results from each molecular interaction.
They probably use CPUs rather than GPUs, or if they do use GPUs they'll be using OpenCL or CUDA code rather than the graphics API.
Graphics cards are made provide maximum speed at the expense of quality and flexibility. Not what you want when making a movie.
Awkward words of similar spelling but quite different meaning do lead to confusion. How'd that mess of a situation come about? I'll have to find an entomologist to ask.
http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a1.jpg (NSFW-ish, but with working link)
http://topicalisle.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/3200280414_69cbfa327a (NSFW-ish?)
I doubt he ever found any true stenography in there.
A few experts years ago found an effective way to detect commonly used forms of stenography in jpegs, and tried feeding two images from ebay through the detector, plus another million from usenet. Not a single one had any stenographic information that they could find, and their detector was demonstrated as very reliable.
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/papers/detecting.pdf
The NSA leaks did reveal that they have an interest in porn though: They've been monitoring the porn use of some unnamed 'radical muslims' in the middle east were planning on using it to blackmail them into silence or destroy their credibility. It's not clear if they actually pulled off the blackmail or discrediting part though, the leaked document is from the planning stage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25118156
Not from. To. That's how merchants confirm who is paying for what. So you can find out a celebrities bitcoin wallet address and see how much they have in there, and you can see them spend the money... somewhere. But you can't tell who got it, unless they gave it to someone else who published their address.
It'd be easier to tell if they donated to a tip jar though. I can imagine that with easier payments some porn sites might use that business model - come, look at the porn and ads, and if you like it throw a little bitcoin to the address on the bottom of the page.
That too.
I'm always amused and annoyed by some anti-porn crusaders talking about how the evil porn companies target children. Why would they do that? They have no credit card to pay with.
I suppose if you have a really uncommon and specific fetish, maybe? Or maybe it's a 'support the artists' thing? Show them their work is appreciated, and they'll make more.
Bitcoin doesn't have an elemental unit as such. Most people now thing in micro-bitcoins, because a single coin is worth too much for everyday use, but that's just an arbitary shift of the decimal point.
The transactions are public, but also hard to follow - most of the wallets are transitory. The path of payment for a typical porn purchase might go something like this:
Buyer buys coins from exchange.
Coins go from exchange to buyer
Buyer spends them on porn, via a one-use payment address.
Coins are transferred from there on to an exchange again to get dollars with.
So identifying a coin purchaser would need to know:
1. A coin the purchaser owns at the time. This could be found out by an insider at the coin-for-dollars exchange, or by someone giving coin to a publicly posted address.
2. Confirmation that the one-use payment address is being used to pay for porn. As it's a one-use address, only someone inside the porn distribution company or the exchange could know this. Unless the company mixes all their payments into a single pool prior to dollar-conversion.
So it could be done, but it's not trivial. You'd need someone inside the exchange willing to compromise confidentiality, which is the same thing you'd need to compromise conventional finance.
Partially true. Porn helped, yes, but VHS's longer playing time was an even greater advantage. Together they offset Beta's higher image quality.
Until they find some way to automate the court. Batch warrants, perhaps?
Plus it'd mean more charges. What's the point of destroying the evidence of one crime with it just lets them charge you with constructing a bomb instead?
I know thermite isn't a bomb. I'm sure they can argue otherwise.
What scientist could resist? I picture one in the lab, cackling wildly, "It's alive. IT'S ALIVE!"
Unless that's their plan.
Part of the issue, I think, is that there is no 'truely open' video codec worth using. There are a few truely open video codecs, like Theora and Dirac, but they all suck - the best algorithms are patented.
The iStuff owners are probably more valuable customers too. It's a premium device - people who use them will tend to have above-average disposeable income.
Destroying the drive is awkward. It's too much data to overwrite in time, so you'd need a device that could physically destroy it. An easier way is to just encrypt the drive, and destroy the key upon detecting tampering.
Even those copies are made with a hardware write-blocker - usually a device that sits in the SATA cable or USB connection, blocking any write request packets.
It could be done, but it'd need to be in hardware - a hardened chip that handled the encryption, with the key stored internally and never revealed. Even then a highly skilled attacker might be able to get it out by monitoring power use or some such trick, but it'd be very difficult.
Ten-year max term, rather. Judge is free to sentence to less.
It's a ten-year term, but a good prosecutor could probably get the terms consecutive for each piece of media found.
You'd have to look up details, but even 'planing attacks' doesn't indicate the ability to carry them out. A lot of terrorists in this part of the world turned out to be incompetents who don't know how to make a simple bomb. One lot had their non-functioning car bomb towed away for illegal parking. Being attacked by them isn't terrifying, it's insulting.