That depends.. on the reason for not wanting to be seen.
If the reason for not being seen is to not cause the enemy to hide and do their evil things elsewhere, then yeah, this is bad..
If the reason for not wanting to be seen is just to avoid putting humans in danger, then it's not necessarily a big issue that they know they're under surveillance.
Get a sufficiently massive number of those drones, and the enemy will feel like they're all being watched at every possible moment.
Which should demoralize and scare the h*** out of them, that their every move is being watched by big brother:)
I wonder... why is it that companies are allowed to cherrypick the court to hear their case anyways?
I think it's an unfair advantage in favor of the prosecution that they somehow get to pick which court will be reviewing their case.
They should have to prove that the "selected court" is the closest one to where their company was headquartered at the time of the alleged abuse.
Or better yet... determine the court that is closest to an equal distance away from the place the defendant and the place the prosecutor were headquartered at.
If that were really the case, they could have arrested her or detained her longer on suspicion of something.
Apparently they thought her laptop had a bomb hidden in it or something.
Shooting a suspected explosive though is probably one of the worst possible things they could do.. they should have had a bomb squad over to disassemble it, and make sure everything was stable before seizing the materials and whisking them away to be investigated more thoroughly.
I'm sure lots of things got blamed on "the quake" that were just coincidental.
How do you prove it was the neighbor's kids baseball that broke the window and not the quake?
Not to mention the X thousand people whose electronic device, such as computer hard drive coincidentally happened to fail sometime the same time of day as the quake.
Or the 100,000 or so people who were startled by ground shaking and dropped something... each claiming $30 or so in damages.
Then they should know enough to have a fall-back. Full-body cast, getting both one's eyes put out sort of things.
Just like the fallbacks that were available in this case (reboot the router to ROMMON, perform a password reset), although downtime is involved, recovery can be done.
Childs' actions cannot prevent fallbacks from being implemented.
Yes, they should have a fall-back. However, in many cases that fallback might involve unpleasant things such as rebooting the device, and performing activities equivalent to a password reset.
Not all biometric systems have something easily compromised such as a 'password' as fallback. Some may in fact have a token, key, or other device. The IT admin may have forgotten or lost the credentials required to do the fallback auth.
After being fired, it's not like corporate security will permit him to look for the token to identify and give to management.
Should it be considered a crime to not have a convenient fallback? Or to have forgotten the 'bypass' password, or lost the token?
If the company's IT operations were so poorly run as to not have policies already in place to ensure multiple people can access critical systems, then that's not the person's fault.
You mean knowingly allowing a crime to be committed? This applies to anyone, but especially people in this guy's position: he was the fucking admin. The guy sounds innocent to me, but not for the reasons you gave.
As far as I know, bad management is not a crime.
Many government entities are quite bureaucratic, and not prone to change security policy based on the opinion of one network admin.
In fact, his own job and reputation might have been in jeopardy, should he have chosen to reveal the passwords to an associate.
They need to allow their successor to access the system. Usually by changing the password to something temporary and giving that away
And if they don't? It's some sort of crime?
And if they're not allowed to touch the system in order to change the password to something temporary?
IT admins' user accounts on enterprise systems may use the same password the person uses on personal systems, like their bank account.
If I found out my admin did this, I'd look for his other gross incompetencies and then sack him on the spot
I realize some might consider this poor practice.
But in fact real people re-use the same password in multiple places.
What if his bank account and company account were the only two places he used the password?
Then IT admin's actually giving himself a very personal reason to want to protect that password especially well.
Don't use a password to login at company computers that you don't consider secure enough to protect your checking account:)
Again, should it be considered an actual crime?
I don't think such professional mistakes should be regarded as criminal.
A crime of tampering implies action with malicious intent to cause harm, which has not been shown to be evident in this case.
What about IT admins who configure systems to use Biometric authentication?
Do they have to cut off their right hand, if a manager asks them?
IT admins' user accounts on enterprise systems may use the same password the person uses on personal systems, like their bank account.
What if the hand scanner includes liveness detection?
Passwords and authentication credentials aren't for managers, they're for technical workers who can actually competently administer the systems they access.
They don't need to be asked to tell passwords. They need to be asked to provide access to such and such person.
And if they're leaving: to surrender that access.
And they need to give a fair amount of time for the person to make sure they are indeed authorized and a proper security procedure is being followed.
Otherwise ANYONE could walk up to you in the company, and claim they are authorized to know the password, and authorized to require you to give them access.
If the company's IT operations were so poorly run as to not have policies already in place to ensure multiple people can access critical systems, then that's not the person's fault.
The government has determined that a human life is worth $293,000
Since he attempted to steal moneys amounting to 1.5x of the value of a human life, he was sentenced to a commensurate jail term for the respective offenses.
Addendum: In case I wasn't clear... one message to the right friend with the right text, and the average person will happilly (accidentally) divulge their login details, e.g. suitable phish attempt will provide your info that they have access to.
That's the trouble with Facebook's "privacy settings"... they're only as good as the security precautions of other people you trust/know personally.
At least not when FB forces you to show your friend list to everyone (or to hide it from everyone, which few people will do, as it prevents even their friends from seeing the person's friends..)
They're opposed to their rights being weakened in any way whatsoever.
They DON'T CARE about anything else.
They DON'T CARE about consumers.
They DON'T CARE about the blind.
It's all about ME ME ME, MY RIGHTS, and nobody else's.
These companies VIGOROUSLY pursue their own rights. These companies vigorously pursue the ELIMINATION of ANYBODY ELSE's rights. They would rather the blind have no reading material at all than be allowed to impinge upon their rights, even in the most trivial of ways; and they will happily contrive even the most far-out absurd theories, in order to prove, they will lose lots of money due to a treaty like this.
Also, Braille is not necessarily the only output... narration ("Audio" book is also possible), see TFA:
Many WIPO nations, most in the industrialized world including England, the United States and Canada, have copyright exemptions that usually allow non-profit companies to market copyrighted works without permission. They scan and digitize books into the so-called universal Daisy format, which includes features like narration and digitized Braille.
The Daisy Corp. Consortium, a Swiss-based international agency, controls formatting worldwide and has some 100 companies under its direction across the globe. The largest catalog rests in the United States, in which three non-profits, including the Library of Congress, host some half million digital titles produced by federal grants and donations.
As it now stands, none of the nations may allow persons outside their borders to access these works, which are usually doled out for little or no charge. The treaty seeks to free up the cross-border sharing of the books for the blind.
“People who oppose copyright exemptions oppose exemptions on principle that there should be no exemptions of copyright law,” says George Kerscher, Daisy’s general secretary. “They should have sole right and discretion to do what they want with their intellectual property. To a great extent, the opposition to the treaty is based on that principle.”
If you receive a more preferable product for a good or service based on your social network status (or on your blog), you have to disclose that, according to the FTC.
You aren't allowed to get a better price based on your influence/following and fail to disclose it.
This type of pricing scheme is dangerous, and might land company executivies in jail, for the attempt to defraud less-influential people with higher pricing.
However, I expect this could backfire... some of the more influential people will certainly say what price they got.
You can't control this type of information. There will be a backlash / disillusionment when other people learn that they are getting a different price.
In fact, the "more influential person" may lose influence, when people discover that.
E.g. Getting the better price can have long-term social costs in how other people in your social network view you.
So, even though the crime of conspiracy requires multiple people working together by definition, your assertion is that a single person can be convicted of conspiracy alone.
That's right.
In fact, one can be convicted of conspiracy, even when the identity of the other conspirators is unknown to prosecutors, and even when the identity is unknown to the person charged.
You could be convicted of conspiracy if you reached an agreement to commit a crime with an Anonymous coward on slashdot.
Also, no overt act is required.. you don't even have to make any action towards committing the crime (necessarily) to be convicted.
Whether or not to indict or lay charges against other conspirators, so they get a trial too, is completely a matter of prosecutor discretion.
For example, if a mayor or other elected official is accused of conspiracy, prosecutors may choose to file charges against only the official.
Each conspirator charged is entitled to their own trial. Each case will go before a court at a time, and the accused will have a chance to defend themselves against the charges of conspiracy.
This is a right protected by the US constitution. You cannot be automatically convicted of a crime based on the proceeding that occured, when someone else was on trial.
The prosecution will show evidence that the person agreed with someone else to commit a crime.
The court will find them guilty or not.
It's quite possible that one person alleged to be conspiring could be acquitted of the charges, and the person they were charged with conspiring against, found guilty.
An alleged conspirator being acquitted also does not necessarily absolve the accused of any charge of guilt.
No, but if you reverse-engineer KFC chicken and determine a recipe that makes something that tastes exactly the same, KFC can't stop you from publishing it.
However, you can definitely be charged and found guilty of conspiring, even if 'other alleged parties' to the conspiracy have not yet been charged, or are still under investigation.
The companies involved will most likely all be overseas companies you don't care much about.
Most of the manufacturers of the TFT screens are overseas.
The companies the average US person has heard of (such as Dell, HP, etc) who sell monitors, are OEMs. That is, the manufacturers (such as the ones who do the price fixing) supply the screen. OEMs design and build an actual monitor using the OEM'd TFT, other OEM'd parts (and parts designed by the OEM), and ship the final product.
The TFT is just one of many components required to build an LCD monitor.
Another manufacturer (very possibly) makes the backlight. And yet another company might make the plastic body.
From TFA, however:
Including today's charges, as a result of this investigation, six companies have pleaded guilty or have agreed to plead guilty and have been sentenced to pay or have agreed to pay criminal fines totaling more than $860 million. Additionally, nine executives have been charged to date in the department's ongoing investigation.
Going out on a limb... DRAM chips, SSDs, Flash memory.
I for one find it odd that old 1gb PC2700 modules are still over $30. And the price seems to be the same no matter which manufacturer you look at.
Meanwhile 8gb compact flash cards, which are oh so more expensive to manufacture than SDRAM, are $30, that is unless you want "true" compact flash which faithfully implements the true IDE standard (I.E. to use them with an IDE-CF adapter, instead of in a digital camera)... those got rebadged as "Industrial CF" and cost like $200.
Slashdot Mirror
That depends.. on the reason for not wanting to be seen.
If the reason for not being seen is to not cause the enemy to hide and do their evil things elsewhere, then yeah, this is bad..
If the reason for not wanting to be seen is just to avoid putting humans in danger, then it's not necessarily a big issue that they know they're under surveillance.
Get a sufficiently massive number of those drones, and the enemy will feel like they're all being watched at every possible moment.
Which should demoralize and scare the h*** out of them, that their every move is being watched by big brother :)
All you have to do to do that is jam the control signal. Then it doesn't get any control inputs, and eventually will crash.
Assuming it is too dumb to avoid crashing on its own.
They can make jamming its control inputs a very difficult task that will draw a lot of attention.
The thing could also be equipped to detect jamming of primary control inputs and switch to some backup method.
Defeating them would be gaining control of the drones (a really scary proposition)
This seems to be an information leak.. something that ought to be fixable by using some sort of encryption.
Or even by making slight changes to the stream format, since SkyGrabber seems to just be off-the-shelf software.
I wonder... why is it that companies are allowed to cherrypick the court to hear their case anyways?
I think it's an unfair advantage in favor of the prosecution that they somehow get to pick which court will be reviewing their case.
They should have to prove that the "selected court" is the closest one to where their company was headquartered at the time of the alleged abuse.
Or better yet... determine the court that is closest to an equal distance away from the place the defendant and the place the prosecutor were headquartered at.
If that were really the case, they could have arrested her or detained her longer on suspicion of something.
Apparently they thought her laptop had a bomb hidden in it or something.
Shooting a suspected explosive though is probably one of the worst possible things they could do.. they should have had a bomb squad over to disassemble it, and make sure everything was stable before seizing the materials and whisking them away to be investigated more thoroughly.
I'm sure lots of things got blamed on "the quake" that were just coincidental.
How do you prove it was the neighbor's kids baseball that broke the window and not the quake?
Not to mention the X thousand people whose electronic device, such as computer hard drive coincidentally happened to fail sometime the same time of day as the quake.
Or the 100,000 or so people who were startled by ground shaking and dropped something... each claiming $30 or so in damages.
Thankfully the prosecution also rests on really shaky ground.
Then they should know enough to have a fall-back. Full-body cast, getting both one's eyes put out sort of things.
Just like the fallbacks that were available in this case (reboot the router to ROMMON, perform a password reset), although downtime is involved, recovery can be done. Childs' actions cannot prevent fallbacks from being implemented.
Yes, they should have a fall-back. However, in many cases that fallback might involve unpleasant things such as rebooting the device, and performing activities equivalent to a password reset. Not all biometric systems have something easily compromised such as a 'password' as fallback. Some may in fact have a token, key, or other device. The IT admin may have forgotten or lost the credentials required to do the fallback auth.
After being fired, it's not like corporate security will permit him to look for the token to identify and give to management.
Should it be considered a crime to not have a convenient fallback? Or to have forgotten the 'bypass' password, or lost the token?
As far as I know, bad management is not a crime. Many government entities are quite bureaucratic, and not prone to change security policy based on the opinion of one network admin.
In fact, his own job and reputation might have been in jeopardy, should he have chosen to reveal the passwords to an associate.
And if they don't? It's some sort of crime?
And if they're not allowed to touch the system in order to change the password to something temporary?
I realize some might consider this poor practice. But in fact real people re-use the same password in multiple places. What if his bank account and company account were the only two places he used the password?
Then IT admin's actually giving himself a very personal reason to want to protect that password especially well.
Don't use a password to login at company computers that you don't consider secure enough to protect your checking account :)
Again, should it be considered an actual crime?
I don't think such professional mistakes should be regarded as criminal.
A crime of tampering implies action with malicious intent to cause harm, which has not been shown to be evident in this case.
What about IT admins who configure systems to use Biometric authentication?
Do they have to cut off their right hand, if a manager asks them?
IT admins' user accounts on enterprise systems may use the same password the person uses on personal systems, like their bank account.
What if the hand scanner includes liveness detection?
Passwords and authentication credentials aren't for managers, they're for technical workers who can actually competently administer the systems they access.
They don't need to be asked to tell passwords. They need to be asked to provide access to such and such person.
And if they're leaving: to surrender that access.
And they need to give a fair amount of time for the person to make sure they are indeed authorized and a proper security procedure is being followed. Otherwise ANYONE could walk up to you in the company, and claim they are authorized to know the password, and authorized to require you to give them access.
If the company's IT operations were so poorly run as to not have policies already in place to ensure multiple people can access critical systems, then that's not the person's fault.
He attempted to steal $440,000
The government has determined that a human life is worth $293,000
Since he attempted to steal moneys amounting to 1.5x of the value of a human life, he was sentenced to a commensurate jail term for the respective offenses.
Addendum: In case I wasn't clear... one message to the right friend with the right text, and the average person will happilly (accidentally) divulge their login details, e.g. suitable phish attempt will provide your info that they have access to.
That's the trouble with Facebook's "privacy settings"... they're only as good as the security precautions of other people you trust/know personally.
At least not when FB forces you to show your friend list to everyone (or to hide it from everyone, which few people will do, as it prevents even their friends from seeing the person's friends..)
Banks won't admit to it, when they have a breach. I doubt Facebook will.
Ah... but you see.. I can see 200 friends in your profile, that might not all have their privacy settings turned up that high.
I just have to find one of them to have a little discrete innocent chat with "Hey, do you know such and such.. bla bla.. bla bla..."
People are almost always a weaker link than technology.
They're opposed to their rights being weakened in any way whatsoever. They DON'T CARE about anything else. They DON'T CARE about consumers. They DON'T CARE about the blind. It's all about ME ME ME, MY RIGHTS, and nobody else's.
These companies VIGOROUSLY pursue their own rights. These companies vigorously pursue the ELIMINATION of ANYBODY ELSE's rights. They would rather the blind have no reading material at all than be allowed to impinge upon their rights, even in the most trivial of ways; and they will happily contrive even the most far-out absurd theories, in order to prove, they will lose lots of money due to a treaty like this.
Also, Braille is not necessarily the only output... narration ("Audio" book is also possible), see TFA:
Godwin'ed. You lose.
Of course the publishers did not, that's a ridiculous accusation/comparison.
If you receive a more preferable product for a good or service based on your social network status (or on your blog), you have to disclose that, according to the FTC.
You aren't allowed to get a better price based on your influence/following and fail to disclose it.
This type of pricing scheme is dangerous, and might land company executivies in jail, for the attempt to defraud less-influential people with higher pricing.
However, I expect this could backfire... some of the more influential people will certainly say what price they got.
You can't control this type of information. There will be a backlash / disillusionment when other people learn that they are getting a different price.
In fact, the "more influential person" may lose influence, when people discover that.
E.g. Getting the better price can have long-term social costs in how other people in your social network view you.
Good Advise vs. "Sell-out"
No, and companies are still manufacturing them. And With the release of Windows Vista, there's still demand for these modules.
There are nearly as many computers in the real world using SDRAM and DDR SDRAM as there are using computers using DDR2 or DDR3.
In much the same way as there are more computers running Windows XP than anything else.
Really? Cool.. James Cooke's estate, will be collecting some massive royalties from MS for use of text written in Loglan :)
So, even though the crime of conspiracy requires multiple people working together by definition, your assertion is that a single person can be convicted of conspiracy alone.
That's right. In fact, one can be convicted of conspiracy, even when the identity of the other conspirators is unknown to prosecutors, and even when the identity is unknown to the person charged.
You could be convicted of conspiracy if you reached an agreement to commit a crime with an Anonymous coward on slashdot. Also, no overt act is required.. you don't even have to make any action towards committing the crime (necessarily) to be convicted.
Whether or not to indict or lay charges against other conspirators, so they get a trial too, is completely a matter of prosecutor discretion.
For example, if a mayor or other elected official is accused of conspiracy, prosecutors may choose to file charges against only the official.
Each conspirator charged is entitled to their own trial. Each case will go before a court at a time, and the accused will have a chance to defend themselves against the charges of conspiracy.
This is a right protected by the US constitution. You cannot be automatically convicted of a crime based on the proceeding that occured, when someone else was on trial.
The prosecution will show evidence that the person agreed with someone else to commit a crime.
The court will find them guilty or not.
It's quite possible that one person alleged to be conspiring could be acquitted of the charges, and the person they were charged with conspiring against, found guilty.
An alleged conspirator being acquitted also does not necessarily absolve the accused of any charge of guilt.
No, but if you reverse-engineer KFC chicken and determine a recipe that makes something that tastes exactly the same, KFC can't stop you from publishing it.
Clearly they misplaced the zeros when determining the fine. $860 million is a small fraction of their ill-gotten gains.
The fine should be $860 billion. And the government can earmark the money to help pay for the bank bailout and stimulus plan in the recent past.
However, you can definitely be charged and found guilty of conspiring, even if 'other alleged parties' to the conspiracy have not yet been charged, or are still under investigation.
The companies involved will most likely all be overseas companies you don't care much about. Most of the manufacturers of the TFT screens are overseas.
The companies the average US person has heard of (such as Dell, HP, etc) who sell monitors, are OEMs. That is, the manufacturers (such as the ones who do the price fixing) supply the screen. OEMs design and build an actual monitor using the OEM'd TFT, other OEM'd parts (and parts designed by the OEM), and ship the final product.
The TFT is just one of many components required to build an LCD monitor. Another manufacturer (very possibly) makes the backlight. And yet another company might make the plastic body.
From TFA, however:
Can you imagine what would happen to prices if they did that?
First of all, in a conspiracy like this... the TFT part might no longer be available.. that would mean nobody could manufacture new monitors.
How do you feel about paying $10000 to get a 12" LCD display, due to all the main manufacturers' TFT screen material being banned?
Going out on a limb... DRAM chips, SSDs, Flash memory.
I for one find it odd that old 1gb PC2700 modules are still over $30. And the price seems to be the same no matter which manufacturer you look at.
Meanwhile 8gb compact flash cards, which are oh so more expensive to manufacture than SDRAM, are $30, that is unless you want "true" compact flash which faithfully implements the true IDE standard (I.E. to use them with an IDE-CF adapter, instead of in a digital camera)... those got rebadged as "Industrial CF" and cost like $200.
"Missile launch" is just a coverup.
Norway's version of "It was just a weather balloon".