I think it was inspired a lot by the London riots - a few days of fights and looting with no really apparent cause. What started as a minor police incident somehow lead to three days of chaos in the streets. It scared a lot of people simply for being so inexplicable and unexpected.
You need to adjust the time scale a bit - the drama showed the near-collapse of civilisation taking a matter of days.
And here come spoilers:
- One of the things I liked was the show of futility at the end. One of the characters, desperate for food and water for his child, resorts to looting a shop. He films and inventories everything, intending to repay once the crisis is over. Instead he finds another survivor huddling inside, one even more desperate and terrified than he is, who immediately goes into a confused panic and beats him to death - not because this unexpected lurker is trying to steal food himself, but because he is startled, paranoid and on a hair-trigger after the few days of hell he has just endured. The final shot of the scene is of the attacker's face as he realizes what he just did.
- The survival enthusiast, a prepper who treats the whole event with glee that his precautions were proven worthwhile, starts out by stockpiling water and checking food reserves - confident that he is ready. The drama here comes not from the survival efforts he takes, but how his family handle them. He's been irritating them for years with his 'freakish' behavior of keeping stockpiles, asking to move to the country and insisting on teaching them how to purify dirty water, and now he has a chance to shine. But far from becoming the hero he envisioned, his wife craves normalcy so much she can't stand his infuriating cheerfulness and efforts to help. She rejects all of his advice out of hand, tearing the family apart as all rationality is lost - even accusing him of poisoning their daughter with his home-sterilized water, and just shouting over him he explains he hasn't even opened that bottle yet. That's a family fight done well: There are two sides to the argument, and each one is incapable of even understanding why the other is upset.
This isn't a drama about the power cut. That's just a device. This is a drama about urban populations in crisis conditions, and it would be valid no matter what the crisis is - power cut, flooding, riots, collapse of government, even prolonged heavy snow. It's a story of human nature as sociary crumbles: Desperate, often irrational, the facade of morality gradually giving way to the simple instinctive need to protect one's self and one's family no matter the cost to others.
Installing backdoors would be too easily detected, eventually. But if I were running a secretive national spy agency, I'd have the border patrol grab any certificate files, credentials or VPN keys as a matter of routine to go into the big database. Never know when they might come in handy.
If anyone objects, claim it's to fight terrorism or child porn.
One of the things the parties do cooperate in is making sure that no third party ever gets influential enough to threaten the duopoly at the federal level. They keep campaign spending high to maintain a financial barrier entry, and make sure that there is no media coverage for competitors by shunning any media organisation that acknowledges third parties or independents exist.
That, or it's a mobile phone base station. They are sometimes disguised as trees or signs in order to avoid scaring suggestible locals who worry the radiation will give them cancer.
The spy antennas are the ones hidden inside spherical covers to 'protect them from the weather,' with the incidental effect of making it impossible to observe what type of antenna it is or where it points.
Depends on district. There's a lot of variation. Some areas the police are truly serving the public, others they a de facto mafia enriching themselves through theft and extortion.
The hundreds wouldn't know about it. They produce their CPU quite innocently. Only the three-man espionage team needs to know about it, and the manager who lets them make a few modifications to the design during the process of turning schematics into mask.
I disagree with 1, because with an exploit like that any software can become your backdoor. eg: You want to hack a mail server. You take a look at it with a quick profile and determine it's (hypothetically) a Windows 2003 server running Exchange. It's a big company, so you can be confident this is a 64-bit OS. So you craft your attack email: The trigger sequence, followed by a payload. You know this is running Windows 64-bit, so you can pick a payload accordingly. It'll run with the permissions of the first process to access the data: The network card driver. So all you need is a payload designed to run as Windows 64-bit 2003 kernel mode code, with the function of obtaining and executing the real malware that gives you control.
But it wouldn't work from a business perspective. Google can't run their mail system for free - they have to pay for it somehow. They do that by statistical targeting of advertisements based in part on automated analysis of the emails.
Eventually businesses have to comply with government demands, as refusal to do so results in either official action (Executives being jailed for obstruction of justice) or unofficial sanctions (made-up charges of tax evasion for minor paperwork errors, overly destructive raids ceasing hundreds of servers while investigating something suitably scandalous like child porn).
Google has put up a lot more resistance than most companies would or have.
Mineral oil has its own issues - long-term it damages capacitors. Water doesn't seem too impractical: Use those mini GPU blocks on the cracker chips. Each rack gets it's own pump and heat exchanger at the top, and hot/cold manifold pipes to plug the cracker boxes in to. Then each rack in turn hooks in to the big coolant pipes leading up to the fans on the roof, cunningly disguised as air conditioning machines. From the outside, it could look just like a warehouse.
Can do a lot with automated search. Beyond that, were I in their place, I'd focus on metadata analysis for targetting. Ie, if I detect that you have been twice in email contact with a subversive organisation*, then I'd know you were potentially a person of interest and pass your archived emails for the last three years through to a human to skim.
*Think less terrorists and more protest groups. OWS or Tea Party, doesn't matter which side, they are making some politicians life difficult.
Specifically the leaks indicate - and this is based largely on speculation - that they have some sort of central database. That means they can collect keys opportunistically (Trojans, interception of cleartext communications containing the key like VM migrations, cracking via advanced mathematics, old-fashioned espionage, secret court orders, backdoors, etc) whenever they get a chance. So when they need to decrypt a communication, there's a chance the key is already in the database - even if they only obtained it years previously and didn't realise at the time it could be useful.
The use of all that power isn't to brute force directly. It's to render possible other attacks that can reduce the key space, like side-channel attacks or known weaknesses in the RNG.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it was inspired a lot by the London riots - a few days of fights and looting with no really apparent cause. What started as a minor police incident somehow lead to three days of chaos in the streets. It scared a lot of people simply for being so inexplicable and unexpected.
Capers, cous-cous and dog food.
It was difficult to follow the fight, as it was shot in 'extreme shakeycam' form from the mobile phone POV. I probably misinterpreted the outcome.
What happened to Generator Man's wife? She seemed to disappear, probably around the point I left the room to make a cup of national-grid-heated tea.
Perot solved the spending problem by throwing his own wealth into the campaign - no-one not a billionaire could hope to do what he did.
In the show, mobile phones worked initially as towers switched to backup batteries. They lost signal during day two as those batteries emptied.
Our humour is different from your humor.
A lot of it is based around deliberate understatement and irony.
You need to adjust the time scale a bit - the drama showed the near-collapse of civilisation taking a matter of days.
And here come spoilers:
- One of the things I liked was the show of futility at the end. One of the characters, desperate for food and water for his child, resorts to looting a shop. He films and inventories everything, intending to repay once the crisis is over. Instead he finds another survivor huddling inside, one even more desperate and terrified than he is, who immediately goes into a confused panic and beats him to death - not because this unexpected lurker is trying to steal food himself, but because he is startled, paranoid and on a hair-trigger after the few days of hell he has just endured. The final shot of the scene is of the attacker's face as he realizes what he just did.
- The survival enthusiast, a prepper who treats the whole event with glee that his precautions were proven worthwhile, starts out by stockpiling water and checking food reserves - confident that he is ready. The drama here comes not from the survival efforts he takes, but how his family handle them. He's been irritating them for years with his 'freakish' behavior of keeping stockpiles, asking to move to the country and insisting on teaching them how to purify dirty water, and now he has a chance to shine. But far from becoming the hero he envisioned, his wife craves normalcy so much she can't stand his infuriating cheerfulness and efforts to help. She rejects all of his advice out of hand, tearing the family apart as all rationality is lost - even accusing him of poisoning their daughter with his home-sterilized water, and just shouting over him he explains he hasn't even opened that bottle yet. That's a family fight done well: There are two sides to the argument, and each one is incapable of even understanding why the other is upset.
This isn't a drama about the power cut. That's just a device. This is a drama about urban populations in crisis conditions, and it would be valid no matter what the crisis is - power cut, flooding, riots, collapse of government, even prolonged heavy snow. It's a story of human nature as sociary crumbles: Desperate, often irrational, the facade of morality gradually giving way to the simple instinctive need to protect one's self and one's family no matter the cost to others.
Installing backdoors would be too easily detected, eventually. But if I were running a secretive national spy agency, I'd have the border patrol grab any certificate files, credentials or VPN keys as a matter of routine to go into the big database. Never know when they might come in handy.
If anyone objects, claim it's to fight terrorism or child porn.
One of the things the parties do cooperate in is making sure that no third party ever gets influential enough to threaten the duopoly at the federal level. They keep campaign spending high to maintain a financial barrier entry, and make sure that there is no media coverage for competitors by shunning any media organisation that acknowledges third parties or independents exist.
That, or it's a mobile phone base station. They are sometimes disguised as trees or signs in order to avoid scaring suggestible locals who worry the radiation will give them cancer.
The spy antennas are the ones hidden inside spherical covers to 'protect them from the weather,' with the incidental effect of making it impossible to observe what type of antenna it is or where it points.
Depends on district. There's a lot of variation. Some areas the police are truly serving the public, others they a de facto mafia enriching themselves through theft and extortion.
But there's no way to communicate back - the network card doesn't even know the default gateway, so it can't send data out.
Because custom crypto-specialised cracker chips would be many orders of magnitude faster than general-purpose CPUs.
No. Network card still has to write the frames into a buffer cleartext somewhere.
Easily misleading summaries, then.
The hundreds wouldn't know about it. They produce their CPU quite innocently. Only the three-man espionage team needs to know about it, and the manager who lets them make a few modifications to the design during the process of turning schematics into mask.
I disagree with 1, because with an exploit like that any software can become your backdoor.
eg: You want to hack a mail server. You take a look at it with a quick profile and determine it's (hypothetically) a Windows 2003 server running Exchange. It's a big company, so you can be confident this is a 64-bit OS. So you craft your attack email: The trigger sequence, followed by a payload. You know this is running Windows 64-bit, so you can pick a payload accordingly. It'll run with the permissions of the first process to access the data: The network card driver. So all you need is a payload designed to run as Windows 64-bit 2003 kernel mode code, with the function of obtaining and executing the real malware that gives you control.
But it wouldn't work from a business perspective. Google can't run their mail system for free - they have to pay for it somehow. They do that by statistical targeting of advertisements based in part on automated analysis of the emails.
Eventually businesses have to comply with government demands, as refusal to do so results in either official action (Executives being jailed for obstruction of justice) or unofficial sanctions (made-up charges of tax evasion for minor paperwork errors, overly destructive raids ceasing hundreds of servers while investigating something suitably scandalous like child porn).
Google has put up a lot more resistance than most companies would or have.
Vulnerable to deliberately misleading bill titles.
Mineral oil has its own issues - long-term it damages capacitors. Water doesn't seem too impractical: Use those mini GPU blocks on the cracker chips. Each rack gets it's own pump and heat exchanger at the top, and hot/cold manifold pipes to plug the cracker boxes in to. Then each rack in turn hooks in to the big coolant pipes leading up to the fans on the roof, cunningly disguised as air conditioning machines. From the outside, it could look just like a warehouse.
Can do a lot with automated search. Beyond that, were I in their place, I'd focus on metadata analysis for targetting. Ie, if I detect that you have been twice in email contact with a subversive organisation*, then I'd know you were potentially a person of interest and pass your archived emails for the last three years through to a human to skim.
*Think less terrorists and more protest groups. OWS or Tea Party, doesn't matter which side, they are making some politicians life difficult.
Specifically the leaks indicate - and this is based largely on speculation - that they have some sort of central database. That means they can collect keys opportunistically (Trojans, interception of cleartext communications containing the key like VM migrations, cracking via advanced mathematics, old-fashioned espionage, secret court orders, backdoors, etc) whenever they get a chance. So when they need to decrypt a communication, there's a chance the key is already in the database - even if they only obtained it years previously and didn't realise at the time it could be useful.
The use of all that power isn't to brute force directly. It's to render possible other attacks that can reduce the key space, like side-channel attacks or known weaknesses in the RNG.
Correction: Only some Atom chips have AESNI. Not all models. That's an issue with netbooks, where processor speed can easily become a bottleneck.