Yeah it's perfectly obvious that US military technology is shit. Although there are a couple of minor aspects of this characterization that are hard to prove. During the 1st Iraq war the Iraqis had the best air defense system that Russia and or France was capable of producing and it took only a few days to annihilate it. That's not even counting the F-117 squadron flying to downtown Baghdad undetected while the air defense system was operational. Russia might have been holding some of their tech back but they are famous for using 3rd party conflicts to evaluate their military technology in action. They did this in 1973 with their SAM systems and they also did the same thing back before WW2 during the conflict in Spain. Germany was also using that conflict to evaluate their tech. The recent NATO ops in Libya were a cluster fuck until the US used their assets to take down the Libyan air defense system when it became obvious the other NATO forces couldn't do the job.
The EU countries are in NATO to take advantage of the US military power. And outside of England I have seen no sign of any European country learning from the past.
The 2nd Amendment already provides the means to confront most of the BS in your "Wah Wah Wah..." rant. The idea of technology being unconstitutional is just as stupid as those claiming opensource software is a human right. Firearm technology developed 200+ years ago that can infringe on your rights just as effectively as technology capable of looking through walls. It's not the technology it's the people using the technology. Your argument boils down to stopping all technological advances just because someone might use it for a bad reason.
The military prowess of the EU collective make the Arabs look like military strategic geniuses when it comes to executing large scale nation state offensive or defensive measures. By the time the EU collective could come to a consensus on how to fight a war it would already be over. France proved that during WW2. The French military and it's citizens were not cowards or afraid to defend their country. They were betrayed by their "political classes". France was dealing with Communist, Progressives, Liberals, Fascists (Vichy), representational democracy, Monarchist, and Anarchists political factions and while they were busy fighting amongst themselves to come up with a plan Hitler was already touring the Eiffel Tower. That same level of political in-fighting still exist today. Outside of England and possibly France the majority of European militaries have relied for so long on the US for defense they have become useless. The may have some of the best technology but that is only a very small part of in conducting a successful military action. Without the ability to effectively cooperate with one another their militarises are 2nd rate at best. And by the way the EU has been working on the Galileo GPS project for the past 15+ years and it will most likely take them another 10 years to actually make it usable in any coordinated manner once it reaches orbit.
If any agency like the CIA or NSA takes an interest in a persons e-mail communications the justice system will not be in the loop until enough evidence is found to initiate court proceedings against any suspects. When that happens the defence can challenge the legality of how the information was collected and usually stand a good chance of preventing the use of the information collected in this matter in a prosecution. Most of the current subpoenas related to the Wiki leak investigation only ask for the routing information and not the actual content. For investigations of this sort a warrant is needed for access to even the header information. Those complaining about the government asking for this information never recognize the simple fact that it is the governments responsibility to investigate how the Wikileaks situation occurred. The simple fact is that the info released to Wiki-leaks was a criminal act that requires investigation.
Iran wouldn't be relying on the private sector for anything. The Iranian government would spare no expense to achieve this type of propaganda victory. And think of the tech the US and USSR used for the first orbital attempts and compare that tech against the technology available today off the shelf. The average low end PC provides more computing power than anything NASA had in the early years of their space projects. This includes both the vehicle and ground based control systems.
The definition of war is killing and destroying your opponents in the most efficient way possible. The tendency to constantly fret over civilian casualties does nothing but prolong the conflict and create an ambiguous ending. This is especially true today when combatants use civilians as human shields as a standard policy. Without all of the international bleating about civilian casualties during Israel's attack on Hamas (whose troops where using hospitals, schools, and neighborhoods as their base of operations) there would be no Hamas or any other Jihadist military group in that area to worry about today. If Bush had finished the first Iraq war by destroying anything and anyone who got in the way to Baghdad there would have been no need for a 2nd Iraq war.
The danger is not Iran or any other country obtaining nuclear weapons. The danger is the countries like Iran who would either willingly provide or lose control of them to non-state actors. Plus the hard part of building long range nuclear ICBMs is the miniaturization involved in creating warheads small enough to be used with a long range missile delivery system.
?Why do we still allow our correspondence to be transmitted in plain text?
Because the encryption technology currently available to the average user is pretty much useless if the NSA or other government agency takes an interest in your e-mail. This doesn't mean a user shouldn't use encryption but believing it is 100% effective is misleading.
It's hard to understand how Iran or any other country with the same level of technology have trouble reverse-engineering and producing systems that were first built in the 60's. Iran like all the other 2nd or 3rd tier countries when it comes to developing technology have more than enough scientists and engineers (most of whom were educated in the West) capable of working on this type of technology.
I think the "Hackers" have did their part in associating "Hackers" with criminals. And don't worry too much people probably think you are a wierdo no matter what subject you are talking about.
While there is a lot to criticize about the US government their administration of the DNS servers has been pretty solid. Maybe you would like to transfer control to the UN? Most of those fuckwits need their aides to show them how to access their e-mail and Twitter setup and do not have the slightest understanding of what the DNS actually does.
:There has been no charging of barricades in the Occupy Wall Street movement"
"Charging the barricades" is just a figure of speech although it does happen now and then. The real problem with the ongoing protests in not only the US but in other international countries contain factions who primary goal is to initiate violence amongst the protester to goad the authorities into a physical response. It doesn't take a large number of people to inject violence into an otherwise civil protest. Actions such as this create a negative picture of what is really going on and the original focus of the protest gets lost in the ensuing chaos. Mass protests serve a purpose in focusing the public's attention on the issues being protested but once that attention is achieved it should be followed up by groups or individuals putting forward suggestions for solving the actual problems they are protesting against. Without this followup the protest really accomplishes nothing. The so called "Arab Spring" is one real life example of what happens when a protest movement with valid issues succeeds in removing a government but have no plan to fill the leadership vacuum. This leads to the protesters forming their own factions which cause even more chaos that makes the government they got rid of look like shining examples of democracy and good government.
All I have seen is a bunch of complaints about anything and everything an not one single realistic strategy or game plan to serve as an alternative to the current situation. Without a realistic , viable, non-extremist, and common sense driven alternative there will never be any helpful changes. Charging the barricades without thinking about the future will just lead to anarchy and destruction until the entire system is destroyed. Massive deaths with civil infrastructure demolished and rendered useless. The survivors will turn to more violence to insure their survival and civil law and administration will be nothing but a memory. So by all means make a big deal about the weak protests going on. They have taken on all aspects of a Mob with a room temperature IQ level that decreases in proportion to the number of people in the Mob. Compared to the protests in the 60's and 70's the protests today look like fuzzy love fests.
I'm still waiting on someone to explain why there are so many billionaires in China, Russia, and all the other countries around the world decrying the evils of capitalism while promoting half assed economic systems that are supposed to bring economic justice the the average proles who spend their lives with their hand out instead of actually contributing something to society. The sad fact is that the planet is over populated and growing more so every day. Human life might be considered sacred but the last time I looked the human species was not in any danger of going extinct. Worldwide population control is the only thing that will improve the quality of life. Since the chance of that happening is nil I guess we will just fall back to the true and tried method of population control using war. The trick this time will be trying to preserve a viable ecosystem after the war is over that will support the survivors.
China requires foreign companies wanting to set up in their market to enter into a formal partnership with the government (ie. the government basically gets a % of the company), pay higher tax rates than Chinese companies, and basically sign away all patent rights for any technology made or used in the company. Of course they have the right to do anything they want in regard to their policies but they shouldn't be surprised when they get turned down by another country for whatever reason. China might not be on the US friends list but countries don't have "freinds" they have "interests" when it comes to profitable trade opportunities.
The concept of "Human Rights and Freedoms" has existed well before the advent of computers. Sure you could use software to build a database of dissidents, trouble makers, and other undesirables to make the next pogrom more efficient but it's the software user not the software itself capable of threatening your rights. I can't see where an Open Source versus Closed Source database system would make a bit of difference in a situation like this. And there are a lot of software choices available today and you are certainly free to write your own if you feel like it.
I am wondering how an outage of this magnitude could have happened. Surely they have fail overs and backups for just this kind of situation and none of them have provided the failure? ? If the outage was caused by the software ecosystem update and not the hardware side of things don't they have the ability to roll back to the previous release. If it is a hardware issue they tend to be easier to identify the cause of the problem and fixed. The real mystery is how this problem was able to defeat the redundancy architecture.
The average user does not have access to either the algorithms, mathematical skills, or the other resources required to analyze and crack today's advanced encryption methodologies in a realistic time frame. And I wasn't talking about people having access to a RSA token to log-in. The RSA security breach a few months ago was only possible because someone was able to steal the necessary information. Without that information the chances of them breaking compromising the encryption would be low. I used the term "IT Specialist" to include those who are not only mathematicians but also those who can actually implement the mathematicians work. Maybe next time I will use terminology that can be understood by those with a room temperature IQ.
"This idea basically says Uncle Sam doesn't have any folks trolling the dark side of the Internet yet"
I seriously doubt this is the case. The US would have no problem returning the favor. Like China the US government security agencies avoid publicizing their accomplishments and vulnerabilities to avoid disclosing their capabilities.
The US was as much to blame for the fate of the Liberty as Israel was and Israel was in a fucking shooting war at the time. US military incompetence was on display during that time period for all to see. If they had assets in the area they should have made a better attempt at protecting them. Outside of the US nuclear forces the rest of the US military were worthless. I'm not talking about the soldiers and sailors who actually did the fighting and dying but the entire Military and Pentagon leadership should have been court marshaled for their incompetence in the late 60's and 70's from Vietnam to the cluster fuck Iranian rescue debacle.
How about you just use some common sense if you have access to any. If you need someone to explain child pornography to you it would just be a waste of time to continue the discussion.
You are still underestimating the governments computing resources. The NSA is capable of collecting millions of Internet intercepts per hour which creates databases the size of the Library of Congress database every three hours. Needless to say, the NSA has tremendous storage and processing capacity. One of the original programs that became public during the fight over AT&T and the other major TeleCom vendors providing warrant less access to their backbone was when the chief NSA engineer who created the key algorithms enabling this type of data capture and processing filed a complaint and ultimately resigned because he felt the NSA lied to him. He was told his work would not be used to monitor US domestic data traffic and he even built in a mechanism to prevent this but the NSA had another engineer remove this restriction without his knowledge.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah it's perfectly obvious that US military technology is shit. Although there are a couple of minor aspects of this characterization that are hard to prove. During the 1st Iraq war the Iraqis had the best air defense system that Russia and or France was capable of producing and it took only a few days to annihilate it. That's not even counting the F-117 squadron flying to downtown Baghdad undetected while the air defense system was operational. Russia might have been holding some of their tech back but they are famous for using 3rd party conflicts to evaluate their military technology in action. They did this in 1973 with their SAM systems and they also did the same thing back before WW2 during the conflict in Spain. Germany was also using that conflict to evaluate their tech. The recent NATO ops in Libya were a cluster fuck until the US used their assets to take down the Libyan air defense system when it became obvious the other NATO forces couldn't do the job.
The EU countries are in NATO to take advantage of the US military power. And outside of England I have seen no sign of any European country learning from the past.
The 2nd Amendment already provides the means to confront most of the BS in your "Wah Wah Wah..." rant. The idea of technology being unconstitutional is just as stupid as those claiming opensource software is a human right. Firearm technology developed 200+ years ago that can infringe on your rights just as effectively as technology capable of looking through walls. It's not the technology it's the people using the technology. Your argument boils down to stopping all technological advances just because someone might use it for a bad reason.
The military prowess of the EU collective make the Arabs look like military strategic geniuses when it comes to executing large scale nation state offensive or defensive measures. By the time the EU collective could come to a consensus on how to fight a war it would already be over. France proved that during WW2. The French military and it's citizens were not cowards or afraid to defend their country. They were betrayed by their "political classes". France was dealing with Communist, Progressives, Liberals, Fascists (Vichy), representational democracy, Monarchist, and Anarchists political factions and while they were busy fighting amongst themselves to come up with a plan Hitler was already touring the Eiffel Tower. That same level of political in-fighting still exist today. Outside of England and possibly France the majority of European militaries have relied for so long on the US for defense they have become useless. The may have some of the best technology but that is only a very small part of in conducting a successful military action. Without the ability to effectively cooperate with one another their militarises are 2nd rate at best. And by the way the EU has been working on the Galileo GPS project for the past 15+ years and it will most likely take them another 10 years to actually make it usable in any coordinated manner once it reaches orbit.
If any agency like the CIA or NSA takes an interest in a persons e-mail communications the justice system will not be in the loop until enough evidence is found to initiate court proceedings against any suspects. When that happens the defence can challenge the legality of how the information was collected and usually stand a good chance of preventing the use of the information collected in this matter in a prosecution. Most of the current subpoenas related to the Wiki leak investigation only ask for the routing information and not the actual content. For investigations of this sort a warrant is needed for access to even the header information. Those complaining about the government asking for this information never recognize the simple fact that it is the governments responsibility to investigate how the Wikileaks situation occurred. The simple fact is that the info released to Wiki-leaks was a criminal act that requires investigation.
Iran wouldn't be relying on the private sector for anything. The Iranian government would spare no expense to achieve this type of propaganda victory. And think of the tech the US and USSR used for the first orbital attempts and compare that tech against the technology available today off the shelf. The average low end PC provides more computing power than anything NASA had in the early years of their space projects. This includes both the vehicle and ground based control systems.
The definition of war is killing and destroying your opponents in the most efficient way possible. The tendency to constantly fret over civilian casualties does nothing but prolong the conflict and create an ambiguous ending. This is especially true today when combatants use civilians as human shields as a standard policy. Without all of the international bleating about civilian casualties during Israel's attack on Hamas (whose troops where using hospitals, schools, and neighborhoods as their base of operations) there would be no Hamas or any other Jihadist military group in that area to worry about today. If Bush had finished the first Iraq war by destroying anything and anyone who got in the way to Baghdad there would have been no need for a 2nd Iraq war.
The danger is not Iran or any other country obtaining nuclear weapons. The danger is the countries like Iran who would either willingly provide or lose control of them to non-state actors. Plus the hard part of building long range nuclear ICBMs is the miniaturization involved in creating warheads small enough to be used with a long range missile delivery system.
?Why do we still allow our correspondence to be transmitted in plain text? Because the encryption technology currently available to the average user is pretty much useless if the NSA or other government agency takes an interest in your e-mail. This doesn't mean a user shouldn't use encryption but believing it is 100% effective is misleading.
It's hard to understand how Iran or any other country with the same level of technology have trouble reverse-engineering and producing systems that were first built in the 60's. Iran like all the other 2nd or 3rd tier countries when it comes to developing technology have more than enough scientists and engineers (most of whom were educated in the West) capable of working on this type of technology.
I think the "Hackers" have did their part in associating "Hackers" with criminals. And don't worry too much people probably think you are a wierdo no matter what subject you are talking about.
Yeah they really dropped the ball with Kinect. Hardly anybody wants to use that.
While there is a lot to criticize about the US government their administration of the DNS servers has been pretty solid. Maybe you would like to transfer control to the UN? Most of those fuckwits need their aides to show them how to access their e-mail and Twitter setup and do not have the slightest understanding of what the DNS actually does.
:There has been no charging of barricades in the Occupy Wall Street movement" "Charging the barricades" is just a figure of speech although it does happen now and then. The real problem with the ongoing protests in not only the US but in other international countries contain factions who primary goal is to initiate violence amongst the protester to goad the authorities into a physical response. It doesn't take a large number of people to inject violence into an otherwise civil protest. Actions such as this create a negative picture of what is really going on and the original focus of the protest gets lost in the ensuing chaos. Mass protests serve a purpose in focusing the public's attention on the issues being protested but once that attention is achieved it should be followed up by groups or individuals putting forward suggestions for solving the actual problems they are protesting against. Without this followup the protest really accomplishes nothing. The so called "Arab Spring" is one real life example of what happens when a protest movement with valid issues succeeds in removing a government but have no plan to fill the leadership vacuum. This leads to the protesters forming their own factions which cause even more chaos that makes the government they got rid of look like shining examples of democracy and good government.
All I have seen is a bunch of complaints about anything and everything an not one single realistic strategy or game plan to serve as an alternative to the current situation. Without a realistic , viable, non-extremist, and common sense driven alternative there will never be any helpful changes. Charging the barricades without thinking about the future will just lead to anarchy and destruction until the entire system is destroyed. Massive deaths with civil infrastructure demolished and rendered useless. The survivors will turn to more violence to insure their survival and civil law and administration will be nothing but a memory. So by all means make a big deal about the weak protests going on. They have taken on all aspects of a Mob with a room temperature IQ level that decreases in proportion to the number of people in the Mob. Compared to the protests in the 60's and 70's the protests today look like fuzzy love fests.
I'm still waiting on someone to explain why there are so many billionaires in China, Russia, and all the other countries around the world decrying the evils of capitalism while promoting half assed economic systems that are supposed to bring economic justice the the average proles who spend their lives with their hand out instead of actually contributing something to society. The sad fact is that the planet is over populated and growing more so every day. Human life might be considered sacred but the last time I looked the human species was not in any danger of going extinct. Worldwide population control is the only thing that will improve the quality of life. Since the chance of that happening is nil I guess we will just fall back to the true and tried method of population control using war. The trick this time will be trying to preserve a viable ecosystem after the war is over that will support the survivors.
China requires foreign companies wanting to set up in their market to enter into a formal partnership with the government (ie. the government basically gets a % of the company), pay higher tax rates than Chinese companies, and basically sign away all patent rights for any technology made or used in the company. Of course they have the right to do anything they want in regard to their policies but they shouldn't be surprised when they get turned down by another country for whatever reason. China might not be on the US friends list but countries don't have "freinds" they have "interests" when it comes to profitable trade opportunities.
The concept of "Human Rights and Freedoms" has existed well before the advent of computers. Sure you could use software to build a database of dissidents, trouble makers, and other undesirables to make the next pogrom more efficient but it's the software user not the software itself capable of threatening your rights. I can't see where an Open Source versus Closed Source database system would make a bit of difference in a situation like this. And there are a lot of software choices available today and you are certainly free to write your own if you feel like it.
I am wondering how an outage of this magnitude could have happened. Surely they have fail overs and backups for just this kind of situation and none of them have provided the failure? ? If the outage was caused by the software ecosystem update and not the hardware side of things don't they have the ability to roll back to the previous release. If it is a hardware issue they tend to be easier to identify the cause of the problem and fixed. The real mystery is how this problem was able to defeat the redundancy architecture.
The average user does not have access to either the algorithms, mathematical skills, or the other resources required to analyze and crack today's advanced encryption methodologies in a realistic time frame. And I wasn't talking about people having access to a RSA token to log-in. The RSA security breach a few months ago was only possible because someone was able to steal the necessary information. Without that information the chances of them breaking compromising the encryption would be low. I used the term "IT Specialist" to include those who are not only mathematicians but also those who can actually implement the mathematicians work. Maybe next time I will use terminology that can be understood by those with a room temperature IQ.
So have I with level 2 SCIF classification.
"This idea basically says Uncle Sam doesn't have any folks trolling the dark side of the Internet yet" I seriously doubt this is the case. The US would have no problem returning the favor. Like China the US government security agencies avoid publicizing their accomplishments and vulnerabilities to avoid disclosing their capabilities.
The US was as much to blame for the fate of the Liberty as Israel was and Israel was in a fucking shooting war at the time. US military incompetence was on display during that time period for all to see. If they had assets in the area they should have made a better attempt at protecting them. Outside of the US nuclear forces the rest of the US military were worthless. I'm not talking about the soldiers and sailors who actually did the fighting and dying but the entire Military and Pentagon leadership should have been court marshaled for their incompetence in the late 60's and 70's from Vietnam to the cluster fuck Iranian rescue debacle.
How about you just use some common sense if you have access to any. If you need someone to explain child pornography to you it would just be a waste of time to continue the discussion.
You are still underestimating the governments computing resources. The NSA is capable of collecting millions of Internet intercepts per hour which creates databases the size of the Library of Congress database every three hours. Needless to say, the NSA has tremendous storage and processing capacity. One of the original programs that became public during the fight over AT&T and the other major TeleCom vendors providing warrant less access to their backbone was when the chief NSA engineer who created the key algorithms enabling this type of data capture and processing filed a complaint and ultimately resigned because he felt the NSA lied to him. He was told his work would not be used to monitor US domestic data traffic and he even built in a mechanism to prevent this but the NSA had another engineer remove this restriction without his knowledge.