The US military leads the world in ass-kicking potential. If there is a country you want to not be there any more, they are the people to ask. Everything from precision shells to nuclear bombs. When it comes to occupation though, they are not so capable. They can do it, but they arn't really good at it. Great for making a mess, not so great for picking up the pieces.
If I were a Chinese expert in charge of sabotaging equipment for export, I'd have my trick built into the silicon. A simple little network of gates that listens out for a sequence of a specific 128-bits... and upon recieving them resends on all ports, links the highest volt rail available to all the IO lines and fries everything. Useless for espionage, but in the event of an actual war it'd make for one hell of an alpha strike. Just broadcast the kill-code on whatever radio frequency the enemy uses, or send it in any packet that'll get through to their servers. Watch as even warships grind to a halt - radio picks it up, transmits it over the internal network, and fries everything from the engine control computer to the coffee machine. A packet of death that would go straight through any Chinese-made firewall.
Because you don't *buy* them. You *rent* them. Those boxes are propritary. The only box that'll work on a cable network is the one by the cable company, which is available only for rent, not sale. Things are a little better with sat - the non-branded box will get you the unencrypted channels only, which really means the shopping channel and not much else. If you want channels you can actually watch and that arn't on freeview anyway, you still need to rent the box.
I'm not sure about how it works in the standard US setup, but here in the UK if you want more than basic OTA broadcast reception you'll have a set-top-box - either cable decoder, or sat decoder. That's fine for watching in one room, but how do you watch those channels in another? One way is to rent a second STB, which means lots of money plus pulling new cable through the walls. The other is a TV sender. Takes the STB output, transmits it, reciever in another room gets them and outputs to TV. Only drawback is you can't change the channel remotely, and some will even do that by transmitting the IR signal the other way over radio.
They used to work by just transmitting an analog TV signal that any TV in range could pick up with a loop antenna, but those were banned years ago due to interference issues (And, according to rumor, a few incidents of pornography ending up on the neighbour's TV). The new ones operate up in 2.4GHz band, killing wireless networks.
When it comes to oppression, China are the masters. Any idiot can oppress a country using enough men with guns and some violent intimidation - but the government of China is so good at it, the population celebrates how the government is protecting them. Real experts in the field.
Not all copyright is used for censorship, but it can be used for that purpose. For one well-known example, Disney uses it to ensure that some of it's early works are never seen (legally, anyway) again, as they featured some casual racism that didn't raise an eyebrow at the time but would be seen as unacceptable today. The Church of Scientology is also infamous for using copyright to prevent dissenters and critics from discussing it's books, taking legal action against any opponent of the church who quotes a paragraph. While copyright isn't primarily used as a tool of censorship, it can be used as such.
The digital screens poke up above the level of the control panel. The rest of it is laid out with absolute perfection. This suggests the possibility that the computerised section is a later addition.
Not quite. I run firefox, but no adblock - instead I use the squid proxy and it's blacklist, which I update every time I see some ads slip through. In this case my defences were compromised: I was away from home, using a public wifi hotspot, and thus running proxy-less.
I'm a bit of an expert. Professional IT technician, confident in using all versions of windows, linux and OSX. I code. I've done a bit of cracking myself - nothing major, but I know how exploits work. I'm careful. I don't get dodgy executable code from disreputable sites. I've got a good firewall, a squid proxy configured with a long blacklist of ad-servers.
I still got infected yesterday with the loathed fake-antivirus (The author is actually known, but in Ukraine). Sneaky thing managed to trick me by taking the filename SkypeUpdate.exe - so when it popped up with the permission request from windows, I just thought it was Skype running another update and clicked ok.
Took me twenty minutes to kill the thing. Finding and deleting the executable was easy enough, but it has the niftily evil trick of making itsself the default file association for.exe files... thus making it impossible to run them. In the end I had to use a command prompt to launch firefox and notepad, find a.reg file online that would reset the associations, paste it into notepad and use that to fix the association. I'm still not sure I found all the damage.
It used to be true, back before everyone used a home router that acted as a firewall. I remember a couple of times years back when I installed Windows XP, connected up the cable/ADSL modem to get a service pack in, and the system was infected before the service pack had finished downloading. Back then infection was often via exploting the many explotable services windows runs, which was only possible when there was no firewall (The Windows one wasn't enabled by default back then, and in any case makes exceptions for those exploitable services!). Today, as most users have a firewall even if they don't know what one is, the main vector is the web - either malicious websites, or exploits served up as ad-banners.
Those ardunio fanatics still need analog components. You can't make one of those chips do anything without a power supply, audio output will always require a transistor or two, and no button input is going to do it's thing without a pull-up or pull-down resistor.
They've been going the same way as Radio Shack - shifting away from electronics components and towards consumer electronics. It's just a more profitable market - just about everyone uses appliances, but only a very small niche is interested in electronics as a hobby, and any industrial customer isn't going to be buying retail. They've still got a decent selection online, but it doesn't get pride of place any more. That honor goes to remote control helecopters, digital cameras, external hard drives, disco lights, sat=nav units... just to name the things on the site front-page right now.
I am reminded of the top-secret-classified communications hub in London, the BT Tower. Until it's declassification some years ago, it wasn't on any map. To talk about it was a crime. Merely acknowledging it's existance was considered a threat to national security, due to it's vital importance in operating the countries telephone, television and radio networks.
It's nearly two hundred meters tall and capped by an array of microwave antennas pointing in all directions. It towered over all other structures. There wasn't a person in London who didn't know it was there.
Sounds like hell to program. You start by finding a complex hamiltonian with a ground state describing the solution to your problem, and it gets more math-filled from there. If you want to solve a problem with a quantum computer, you're going to need a quantum physicist to tell it what to do.
But if it doesn't work, it'll only serve as a justification to introduce a tougher form of filtering. It's far easier politically to justify fixing a 'loophole' in an existing law than it is to propose something completly new. DNS blocks first, IP address blocks later.
I do know that it is very embarassing for the police to raid someone and not get a conviction. If they don't find you guilty of whatever they suspected, they'll just search until they find something else. Everyone has broken some law, somewhere, some time. Just a matter of finding it.
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The US military leads the world in ass-kicking potential. If there is a country you want to not be there any more, they are the people to ask. Everything from precision shells to nuclear bombs. When it comes to occupation though, they are not so capable. They can do it, but they arn't really good at it. Great for making a mess, not so great for picking up the pieces.
If I were a Chinese expert in charge of sabotaging equipment for export, I'd have my trick built into the silicon. A simple little network of gates that listens out for a sequence of a specific 128-bits... and upon recieving them resends on all ports, links the highest volt rail available to all the IO lines and fries everything. Useless for espionage, but in the event of an actual war it'd make for one hell of an alpha strike. Just broadcast the kill-code on whatever radio frequency the enemy uses, or send it in any packet that'll get through to their servers. Watch as even warships grind to a halt - radio picks it up, transmits it over the internal network, and fries everything from the engine control computer to the coffee machine. A packet of death that would go straight through any Chinese-made firewall.
Because you don't *buy* them. You *rent* them. Those boxes are propritary. The only box that'll work on a cable network is the one by the cable company, which is available only for rent, not sale. Things are a little better with sat - the non-branded box will get you the unencrypted channels only, which really means the shopping channel and not much else. If you want channels you can actually watch and that arn't on freeview anyway, you still need to rent the box.
I'm not sure about how it works in the standard US setup, but here in the UK if you want more than basic OTA broadcast reception you'll have a set-top-box - either cable decoder, or sat decoder. That's fine for watching in one room, but how do you watch those channels in another? One way is to rent a second STB, which means lots of money plus pulling new cable through the walls. The other is a TV sender. Takes the STB output, transmits it, reciever in another room gets them and outputs to TV. Only drawback is you can't change the channel remotely, and some will even do that by transmitting the IR signal the other way over radio.
They used to work by just transmitting an analog TV signal that any TV in range could pick up with a loop antenna, but those were banned years ago due to interference issues (And, according to rumor, a few incidents of pornography ending up on the neighbour's TV). The new ones operate up in 2.4GHz band, killing wireless networks.
When it comes to oppression, China are the masters. Any idiot can oppress a country using enough men with guns and some violent intimidation - but the government of China is so good at it, the population celebrates how the government is protecting them. Real experts in the field.
Not all copyright is used for censorship, but it can be used for that purpose. For one well-known example, Disney uses it to ensure that some of it's early works are never seen (legally, anyway) again, as they featured some casual racism that didn't raise an eyebrow at the time but would be seen as unacceptable today. The Church of Scientology is also infamous for using copyright to prevent dissenters and critics from discussing it's books, taking legal action against any opponent of the church who quotes a paragraph. While copyright isn't primarily used as a tool of censorship, it can be used as such.
The digital screens poke up above the level of the control panel. The rest of it is laid out with absolute perfection. This suggests the possibility that the computerised section is a later addition.
Besides, you can't use it, legally. The Windows EULA specifically forbids it's use in nuclear control, along with several other things.
The more common workaround is to download the network-deploy version.
Not quite. I run firefox, but no adblock - instead I use the squid proxy and it's blacklist, which I update every time I see some ads slip through. In this case my defences were compromised: I was away from home, using a public wifi hotspot, and thus running proxy-less.
I'm a bit of an expert. Professional IT technician, confident in using all versions of windows, linux and OSX. I code. I've done a bit of cracking myself - nothing major, but I know how exploits work. I'm careful. I don't get dodgy executable code from disreputable sites. I've got a good firewall, a squid proxy configured with a long blacklist of ad-servers.
.exe files... thus making it impossible to run them. In the end I had to use a command prompt to launch firefox and notepad, find a .reg file online that would reset the associations, paste it into notepad and use that to fix the association. I'm still not sure I found all the damage.
I still got infected yesterday with the loathed fake-antivirus (The author is actually known, but in Ukraine). Sneaky thing managed to trick me by taking the filename SkypeUpdate.exe - so when it popped up with the permission request from windows, I just thought it was Skype running another update and clicked ok.
Took me twenty minutes to kill the thing. Finding and deleting the executable was easy enough, but it has the niftily evil trick of making itsself the default file association for
It used to be true, back before everyone used a home router that acted as a firewall. I remember a couple of times years back when I installed Windows XP, connected up the cable/ADSL modem to get a service pack in, and the system was infected before the service pack had finished downloading. Back then infection was often via exploting the many explotable services windows runs, which was only possible when there was no firewall (The Windows one wasn't enabled by default back then, and in any case makes exceptions for those exploitable services!). Today, as most users have a firewall even if they don't know what one is, the main vector is the web - either malicious websites, or exploits served up as ad-banners.
Those ardunio fanatics still need analog components. You can't make one of those chips do anything without a power supply, audio output will always require a transistor or two, and no button input is going to do it's thing without a pull-up or pull-down resistor.
They've been going the same way as Radio Shack - shifting away from electronics components and towards consumer electronics. It's just a more profitable market - just about everyone uses appliances, but only a very small niche is interested in electronics as a hobby, and any industrial customer isn't going to be buying retail. They've still got a decent selection online, but it doesn't get pride of place any more. That honor goes to remote control helecopters, digital cameras, external hard drives, disco lights, sat=nav units... just to name the things on the site front-page right now.
I am reminded of the top-secret-classified communications hub in London, the BT Tower. Until it's declassification some years ago, it wasn't on any map. To talk about it was a crime. Merely acknowledging it's existance was considered a threat to national security, due to it's vital importance in operating the countries telephone, television and radio networks.
It's nearly two hundred meters tall and capped by an array of microwave antennas pointing in all directions. It towered over all other structures. There wasn't a person in London who didn't know it was there.
Sounds like hell to program. You start by finding a complex hamiltonian with a ground state describing the solution to your problem, and it gets more math-filled from there. If you want to solve a problem with a quantum computer, you're going to need a quantum physicist to tell it what to do.
Sorry, replying to parent, not you. The stupid seven are at the link he posted.
I see seven arguments, so let's see...
Stupid, stupid, stupid, not any more, stupid, epic stupid, stupid.
I could write a precise rebuttal of the points, but I'm not going to do that unless I know they will read it - and the page doesn't allow comments.
It only needs one person to put it on blog or forum, and word will spread.
Such a table already exists. It's called a hosts file.
But if it doesn't work, it'll only serve as a justification to introduce a tougher form of filtering. It's far easier politically to justify fixing a 'loophole' in an existing law than it is to propose something completly new. DNS blocks first, IP address blocks later.
Yes. We evolved to run away from it.
It's been a valuable trade good and currency since long before any industrial use.
Arn't all of those things a result of the need to conceal operations from police?
I do know that it is very embarassing for the police to raid someone and not get a conviction. If they don't find you guilty of whatever they suspected, they'll just search until they find something else. Everyone has broken some law, somewhere, some time. Just a matter of finding it.