I suppose they could put a big page in the front that only appears on older reader version that says "This document contains the documentation to GarageBand in X languages",... etc etc, but then again, who uses brains in this area.
Or prevent printing if the reader doesn't have "multi-language" capabilities... yay, frustrate the user even more!
Whatever the Chinese system is, it seems to work for the moment (of course 1 Wikileaked cable did mention how the official numbers are all doctored up, and the officials look at other numbers, like amount of electricity consumed in the city, to really see the growth of the middle class), and just look at the Apple factory: the options are: you work in conditions you don't like, or you quit and go hungry. Or you kill yourself, but either way, they'll just replace you with the next farmer's son.
Interestingly I remember reading one article that mentioned how Chinese factories had to offer better working conditions to entice workers, because there were so many companies to work for and so few workers, but maybe this was before The Great World Economic Meltdown(TM).
About the never-ending Clinton-Obama race: I wonder how much of it is media-generated, because an apparently close race means people will keep watching the news, and that means more money for the news broadcasters. Not to mention the billions of dollars the TV and radio companies get for broadcasting "I'm XYZ, and I approve this message.".
It's gotta be a media conspiracy... which is quite fucking disgusting if you think about it, they're broadcasting lies so they can get the billions of dollars from the people who donate to political campaigns believing it will change their country. Come on WikiLeaks, give us the media empires' memoes!
It's also very amusing to see how the Tea Party helped the Dems retain the Senate in 2010, because if the GOP had candidates other than the wicked witch of Delaware and what's her name in Nevada, they would've won the Senate as well as the House.
Will it ever be Palin's time to be president? God I hope not, because it would mean 80% of the country has died, and the remaining 20% are the bottom 20% of the IQ range. Too bad, as you mentioned, the other faction the right wing (the ones you mentioned) have realized this as well, it would have been more amusing if they supported her enthusiastically up to November 2012. But the internal power struggle is interesting, hopefully there'll be 3 candidates to choose from in 2012 (Dem, GOP, Tea), with Palin sucking away the GOP nom's votes.
I wonder what the Koch brothers are planning, will they still fund the Tea Party in 2 years?
In the comments section of that Greenwald post (called "Letters"), many are also asking how authentic the chat logs are: aren't they just text files anybody with Notepad can generate?
I'm also wondering if maybe Lamo and Poulsen, under the orders of Rasch, doctored a "chat conversation" up to get rid of Manning who has been seen as trouble (because of his independent thinking streak). I'm starting to wonder if Manning is the leaker at all, is there any proof of that other than an alleged chat that took place, based on the evidence of a text file?
Maybe they knew they got a leak, and they needed to take down WikiLeaks, and they thought, "we can do this by taking a US soldier, put him in solitary until he loses his mind, and then he'll say whatever we want him to say (like 'Assange coerced me into doing it!'), do we have a monkey we can use for that?"
"How about this troublesome Manning kid?".
Hey, if they can change the story about that girl soldier who was taken peacefully from a hospital into a "we ambushed the enemy stronghold to get her!" piece of news.
Posted not anonymously, hello CIA database! I guess I won't be visiting the US for a long time, maybe when a free country rises up from the ashes of the burnt-down empire.
i.e. summary writer: learn to summarize better! Your first sentence had me so fucking confused. My mind as I read through that mess: "so he's the guy's husband, and he read his wife's email, he finds out his wife is having an affair with the second husband. Second husband? Oh, so do you mean the "hacker" is the first husband, and at the time the article was written, she's married to the guy she's been having an affair with? OK. But then he printed the emails and handed them to the woman's first husband. Wait, what? Isn't the hacker the first husband?"
You could have added ", who is Ciara Walker's third husband," in there to make the whole fucking thing easier to comprehend! I even RTFA to see if that incomprehensible mess was a copy/paste job, but lookie there: "Leon Walker was Clara Walker's third husband."
*mumble mumble kids and stupid American education these days.*
But on a BlackBerry you can permit/deny individual items, whereas on the Android, you can either permit all or deny all (by not installing the app). Which is a useless security model, the user will think "Oh it will steal all my data. But I really want to play this game!".
On the BB you can say "Sure you can keep the screen powered on, but no internet, no location, no reading the calendar and address book."...
But what if it really was hijacked? With all the news about unpatched Windows XP hosts lying around and botnets with millions of nodes, surely someone in "Anonymous" has access to a botnet or two?
Oh well, if it leads to educating the people to patch their computers (yes, their new one), it's one small (large?) plus.
Incidentally, I wonder how many defense contractors are -- using PowerPoint probably -- trying to convince each other and those who would listen and give them money the Gawker database breach was a case of "cyber-terrorism". Since the baddies now have a list of emails, in some case trivial passwords, and their owners probably are password recyclers. (Also to go on another tangent, they can probably run a brute-force dictionary attack in a unique way: hash a string, and see if the hash is in the database, and to which email address it is attached).
Yeah, I'm a bit reluctant to store all my passwords in one place, if someone compromises that database, it's an easy access to ALL my accounts, woo-hoo. I know the encryption is NSA-grade, but what if? (Actually this is a ridiculous question isn't it, if we want to do "what if's", it'd be more likely that a giant website's database be hacked than my own computer.)
Oh well, I think some passwords are already stored for the browser auto-login feature anyway, so that's another place where -- if I'm paranoid -- I'd have to look to remove all traces of them.
I used to have one password for all. Yeah, great idea huh. Then it became, 1 password for the important stuff, and 1 for the throwaways. Later on it was 1 for the really useless crap that I wouldn't care if they got hacked, 1 for the semi-important stuff, 1 for things I want to have secured, and 2 more levels, the last one being for "e-mails and personal profile use" (i.e. Facebook, oh nooo!).
So now I have 5 passwords (well, plus a few single-site ones for e.g. my bank), but I use them inconsistently. Slashdot, for example, is still on the 2nd weakest password. I read that morons were able to hack Twitter, so I used that 2nd weakest password too. And if I want to change them all, what sites am I registered in, and what level should they be in?
It'll be convenient of Palin to forget that RIM is a Canadian company. Or are they the obedient little Labradors anyway (since the UK is the poodle).
Also, Sergey Brin is Russian! Aaaaaa, he's a red commie!!!! But then again, Palin is neighbors with him, with she being able to see his childhood home front her front porch and what not.
For my more serious contribution to this discussion, iPhone security is "trust that the app reviewer catches anything malicious that the developer is trying to do.". Android security is "You are going to install $APP. This app wants access to these features: [read/write SD card, see call status, read/write address book, read/send SMSes, use GPS location]. Do you want to allow all and install?", while BlackBerry security is, "This application wants these features. Choose which of them you want to allow, and which you want to deny."
Or to be more detailed about it, for corporate BlackBerrys the admin can even do the allowing/denying, globally as well as individually for all apps, including denying the permission to the end-users to install all sorts of random apps.
Have a copy of the virgin OS files on disk, and modify the checksum function to check those files instead of the real OS's files. In effect, put the checksum function in its own jail, which I think qualifies as irony.
I think AOL did this once in the AIM protocl to prevent third party clients like Pidgin (or Gaim as it used to be known) from connecting to their network. I forget how Gaim's developer solved it...
Did I word that properly? I meant when the bad guys (e.g. the Chinese government) has used a user-land exploit to queitly jailbreak and install malware on your/the employee's iPhone...
If they had not patched that PDF bug (which, I believe is the case for iPhoneOS 3 and less), the bad guy can just send the iPhone user an e-mail with a PDF attachment, "take a look at this". User clicks the PDF, and boom, the exploit can fake a reboot (show the white Apple) while it downloads and installs itself from the internet. The average user would just think "heh, sucky iPhone/heh that's weird" and not think anything of it...
You're forgetting one part, when a user-land exploit has managed to jailbreak the phone and install malware onto it, essentially being a rogue node inside the corporation's nework. Of course it's only theoretical so far, but an all-in-one spying software that can run undetected in iPhones would fetch quite a sum of money. As for the user-land exploit, that's real: the Spirit jailbreak used a bug in the PDF rendering library that got it all the way into the kernel...
From Fox News to the New York Times, the mass media in the United States is nothing but the public relations wing of the corporatocracy, primarily the military industrial complex. At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit. In America, you grow up thinking you've got a free media, which makes the propaganda doubly effective. If you don't think American media is mere corporate propaganda, ask yourself the following question: have you ever heard a major American news outlet suggest that the country could fund a single-payer health system by cutting military spending?
Yes it's free, and unfortunately it's too free that people can go on TV and blatantly lie to you with no punishment...
All about the bottom line. If Amazon had refused, Fox News, CNN, and all the other government-loving propaganda channels would smear them with so much shit that Amazon would start losing the Sarah Palin-loving "real American" costumer base (didn't her book make it to #1 on Amazon?) and even more than just that customers, since a high percentage of Americans think WikiLeaks is a criminal organisation and Assange should be assassinated without trial, because "We are the United States of America, and when we do it, it's not wrong!".
Hey America, guess who's the new Soviet Union now?
Wouldn't a cleverer system would be, you get to download the 250000 cables at once, but all are encrypted, and they could periodically send out a broadcast of a private key, with each key unlocking a part of the cables (to be able to have control over which individual cables are published when, each cable would be encrypted using a different key). Unfortunately the only medium I know for rapid broadcasting would be Twitter (yeah, facepalm).
A PHP script "read-cables.php" could be set up, that when someone visits the url, it goes on Twitter to check for the existence of newly available key tweets, reads those tweets, and use the keys to decrypt the cable file(s), which should also be identified in the tweet, and store the cable(s) as plain-text...
Of course this would all be subject to DDoS by flooding Twitter with bogus keys, since they'd probably use the hashtag-mechanism to allow for rapid distribution from many Twitterers.
I was looking for a hotel in a $CITY once, so I used the best method I knew: Google it. Looked at a few hotel booking sites, booked a room, all done.
Then I was reading a news website with my ad-blocker disabled, and on the right side of the screen was an ad, "Hotels in $CITY". "What the frakk?", I thought, "how did they read my mind?".
It turns out it was a Google ad, and I was just on Google looking for a hotel in $CITY... so...
Actually, there was enough war-crime going on during the invasion that if they (who?) wanted to nail the War "Commander in Chief" Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld for it, they probably could.
2 words: Waterboarding.
Luckily war crimes don't have a statute of limitations, maybe in 5-10 years Chinese troops will march down whatever Texas city Dumbya is in and send his ass to the Hague.
So the dumb phone user sends an SMS to Twitter's SMS number, that SMS is published as a tweet. How does Twitter know the geo coordinates where the user is currently located?
My idea of the "extension" of the SMS is basically the "911 app" adding plain text at the end of a message that the receiver would have to be intelligent enough to interpret as geo-coordinates (if the 911 system sees some digits that has the ##.#### N, ##.#### W format, it could be designed to interpret that as geo-coordinates).
But you're missing the main point, it is still very difficult for a phone to get signal from GPS satellites, and therefore to geo-locate itself, when it is indoors, it doesn't matter whether that geo-coordinates is meant to be sent as an SMS or to be tweeted, you mentioned Twitter as if they have some magic, alternative way of getting the user's coordinates out of thin air.
I just had an idea, about accurately timestamped and geo-tagged SMSes (the second requirement is more or less impossible at the moment, since GPS lock is hard to get indoors), the 911 dispatch could get a swarm of the SMSes and with a visualization tool see how serious the situation is, and where the SMSes are coming from. (For a rough estimate of location, cell-tower identification would probably be sufficient).
The sonar tech that Bruce Wayne embedded quietly into civilian phones in the Dark Knight is also a neat idea, although with several phones in a room, the sonars would probably confuse each other. How do bats do it, does each bat have a slightly different frequency/"voice"?
I hate the TSA too, but what about underwear bombers? I read an article that said, convincingly, liquid bombs are practically impossible to make in an airplane bathroom, but it looks like packing C4 in your pants isn't impossible. So far people have been lucky that the terrorists are amateurs and they managed to stopped them before they did the deed (the shoe bomber's shoe was too damp because he got delayed and had been wearing the shoes for an extra 24 hours), but in the future? The cockpit door maybe well-bolted, but if the bomb rips the plane in 2, then the terrorists' objectives have been accomplished. Although arguably the government's actions have been doing the terrorists' work very effectively...
And somewhere in a cave, Osama is laughing that the citizens of that "free country" are getting sexually molested, all because he got the US government to react in exactly the way he wanted them to react.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose they could put a big page in the front that only appears on older reader version that says "This document contains the documentation to GarageBand in X languages", ... etc etc, but then again, who uses brains in this area.
Or prevent printing if the reader doesn't have "multi-language" capabilities... yay, frustrate the user even more!
Whatever the Chinese system is, it seems to work for the moment (of course 1 Wikileaked cable did mention how the official numbers are all doctored up, and the officials look at other numbers, like amount of electricity consumed in the city, to really see the growth of the middle class), and just look at the Apple factory: the options are: you work in conditions you don't like, or you quit and go hungry. Or you kill yourself, but either way, they'll just replace you with the next farmer's son.
Interestingly I remember reading one article that mentioned how Chinese factories had to offer better working conditions to entice workers, because there were so many companies to work for and so few workers, but maybe this was before The Great World Economic Meltdown(TM).
About the never-ending Clinton-Obama race: I wonder how much of it is media-generated, because an apparently close race means people will keep watching the news, and that means more money for the news broadcasters. Not to mention the billions of dollars the TV and radio companies get for broadcasting "I'm XYZ, and I approve this message.".
It's gotta be a media conspiracy... which is quite fucking disgusting if you think about it, they're broadcasting lies so they can get the billions of dollars from the people who donate to political campaigns believing it will change their country. Come on WikiLeaks, give us the media empires' memoes!
It's also very amusing to see how the Tea Party helped the Dems retain the Senate in 2010, because if the GOP had candidates other than the wicked witch of Delaware and what's her name in Nevada, they would've won the Senate as well as the House.
Will it ever be Palin's time to be president? God I hope not, because it would mean 80% of the country has died, and the remaining 20% are the bottom 20% of the IQ range. Too bad, as you mentioned, the other faction the right wing (the ones you mentioned) have realized this as well, it would have been more amusing if they supported her enthusiastically up to November 2012. But the internal power struggle is interesting, hopefully there'll be 3 candidates to choose from in 2012 (Dem, GOP, Tea), with Palin sucking away the GOP nom's votes.
I wonder what the Koch brothers are planning, will they still fund the Tea Party in 2 years?
In the comments section of that Greenwald post (called "Letters"), many are also asking how authentic the chat logs are: aren't they just text files anybody with Notepad can generate?
I'm also wondering if maybe Lamo and Poulsen, under the orders of Rasch, doctored a "chat conversation" up to get rid of Manning who has been seen as trouble (because of his independent thinking streak). I'm starting to wonder if Manning is the leaker at all, is there any proof of that other than an alleged chat that took place, based on the evidence of a text file?
Maybe they knew they got a leak, and they needed to take down WikiLeaks, and they thought, "we can do this by taking a US soldier, put him in solitary until he loses his mind, and then he'll say whatever we want him to say (like 'Assange coerced me into doing it!'), do we have a monkey we can use for that?"
"How about this troublesome Manning kid?".
Hey, if they can change the story about that girl soldier who was taken peacefully from a hospital into a "we ambushed the enemy stronghold to get her!" piece of news.
Posted not anonymously, hello CIA database! I guess I won't be visiting the US for a long time, maybe when a free country rises up from the ashes of the burnt-down empire.
i.e. summary writer: learn to summarize better! Your first sentence had me so fucking confused. My mind as I read through that mess: "so he's the guy's husband, and he read his wife's email, he finds out his wife is having an affair with the second husband. Second husband? Oh, so do you mean the "hacker" is the first husband, and at the time the article was written, she's married to the guy she's been having an affair with? OK. But then he printed the emails and handed them to the woman's first husband. Wait, what? Isn't the hacker the first husband?"
You could have added ", who is Ciara Walker's third husband," in there to make the whole fucking thing easier to comprehend! I even RTFA to see if that incomprehensible mess was a copy/paste job, but lookie there: "Leon Walker was Clara Walker's third husband."
*mumble mumble kids and stupid American education these days.*
But on a BlackBerry you can permit/deny individual items, whereas on the Android, you can either permit all or deny all (by not installing the app). Which is a useless security model, the user will think "Oh it will steal all my data. But I really want to play this game!".
On the BB you can say "Sure you can keep the screen powered on, but no internet, no location, no reading the calendar and address book."...
But what if it really was hijacked? With all the news about unpatched Windows XP hosts lying around and botnets with millions of nodes, surely someone in "Anonymous" has access to a botnet or two?
Oh well, if it leads to educating the people to patch their computers (yes, their new one), it's one small (large?) plus.
Incidentally, I wonder how many defense contractors are -- using PowerPoint probably -- trying to convince each other and those who would listen and give them money the Gawker database breach was a case of "cyber-terrorism". Since the baddies now have a list of emails, in some case trivial passwords, and their owners probably are password recyclers. (Also to go on another tangent, they can probably run a brute-force dictionary attack in a unique way: hash a string, and see if the hash is in the database, and to which email address it is attached).
Yeah, I'm a bit reluctant to store all my passwords in one place, if someone compromises that database, it's an easy access to ALL my accounts, woo-hoo. I know the encryption is NSA-grade, but what if? (Actually this is a ridiculous question isn't it, if we want to do "what if's", it'd be more likely that a giant website's database be hacked than my own computer.)
Oh well, I think some passwords are already stored for the browser auto-login feature anyway, so that's another place where -- if I'm paranoid -- I'd have to look to remove all traces of them.
I used to have one password for all. Yeah, great idea huh. Then it became, 1 password for the important stuff, and 1 for the throwaways. Later on it was 1 for the really useless crap that I wouldn't care if they got hacked, 1 for the semi-important stuff, 1 for things I want to have secured, and 2 more levels, the last one being for "e-mails and personal profile use" (i.e. Facebook, oh nooo!).
So now I have 5 passwords (well, plus a few single-site ones for e.g. my bank), but I use them inconsistently. Slashdot, for example, is still on the 2nd weakest password. I read that morons were able to hack Twitter, so I used that 2nd weakest password too. And if I want to change them all, what sites am I registered in, and what level should they be in?
How about reading the address book, calendar, or making internet connections?
Oh, none of those? Hey, some guy in some country just got your contact list!
It'll be convenient of Palin to forget that RIM is a Canadian company. Or are they the obedient little Labradors anyway (since the UK is the poodle).
Also, Sergey Brin is Russian! Aaaaaa, he's a red commie!!!! But then again, Palin is neighbors with him, with she being able to see his childhood home front her front porch and what not.
For my more serious contribution to this discussion, iPhone security is "trust that the app reviewer catches anything malicious that the developer is trying to do.". Android security is "You are going to install $APP. This app wants access to these features: [read/write SD card, see call status, read/write address book, read/send SMSes, use GPS location]. Do you want to allow all and install?", while BlackBerry security is, "This application wants these features. Choose which of them you want to allow, and which you want to deny."
Or to be more detailed about it, for corporate BlackBerrys the admin can even do the allowing/denying, globally as well as individually for all apps, including denying the permission to the end-users to install all sorts of random apps.
So which do you think offers more security?
Have a copy of the virgin OS files on disk, and modify the checksum function to check those files instead of the real OS's files. In effect, put the checksum function in its own jail, which I think qualifies as irony.
I think AOL did this once in the AIM protocl to prevent third party clients like Pidgin (or Gaim as it used to be known) from connecting to their network. I forget how Gaim's developer solved it...
Did I word that properly? I meant when the bad guys (e.g. the Chinese government) has used a user-land exploit to queitly jailbreak and install malware on your/the employee's iPhone...
If they had not patched that PDF bug (which, I believe is the case for iPhoneOS 3 and less), the bad guy can just send the iPhone user an e-mail with a PDF attachment, "take a look at this". User clicks the PDF, and boom, the exploit can fake a reboot (show the white Apple) while it downloads and installs itself from the internet. The average user would just think "heh, sucky iPhone/heh that's weird" and not think anything of it...
You're forgetting one part, when a user-land exploit has managed to jailbreak the phone and install malware onto it, essentially being a rogue node inside the corporation's nework. Of course it's only theoretical so far, but an all-in-one spying software that can run undetected in iPhones would fetch quite a sum of money. As for the user-land exploit, that's real: the Spirit jailbreak used a bug in the PDF rendering library that got it all the way into the kernel...
I loved this quote from http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/11/americathe-grim-truth.html :
Yes it's free, and unfortunately it's too free that people can go on TV and blatantly lie to you with no punishment...
All about the bottom line. If Amazon had refused, Fox News, CNN, and all the other government-loving propaganda channels would smear them with so much shit that Amazon would start losing the Sarah Palin-loving "real American" costumer base (didn't her book make it to #1 on Amazon?) and even more than just that customers, since a high percentage of Americans think WikiLeaks is a criminal organisation and Assange should be assassinated without trial, because "We are the United States of America, and when we do it, it's not wrong!".
Hey America, guess who's the new Soviet Union now?
Wouldn't a cleverer system would be, you get to download the 250000 cables at once, but all are encrypted, and they could periodically send out a broadcast of a private key, with each key unlocking a part of the cables (to be able to have control over which individual cables are published when, each cable would be encrypted using a different key). Unfortunately the only medium I know for rapid broadcasting would be Twitter (yeah, facepalm).
A PHP script "read-cables.php" could be set up, that when someone visits the url, it goes on Twitter to check for the existence of newly available key tweets, reads those tweets, and use the keys to decrypt the cable file(s), which should also be identified in the tweet, and store the cable(s) as plain-text...
Of course this would all be subject to DDoS by flooding Twitter with bogus keys, since they'd probably use the hashtag-mechanism to allow for rapid distribution from many Twitterers.
I was looking for a hotel in a $CITY once, so I used the best method I knew: Google it. Looked at a few hotel booking sites, booked a room, all done.
Then I was reading a news website with my ad-blocker disabled, and on the right side of the screen was an ad, "Hotels in $CITY". "What the frakk?", I thought, "how did they read my mind?".
It turns out it was a Google ad, and I was just on Google looking for a hotel in $CITY... so...
Actually, there was enough war-crime going on during the invasion that if they (who?) wanted to nail the War "Commander in Chief" Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld for it, they probably could.
2 words: Waterboarding.
Luckily war crimes don't have a statute of limitations, maybe in 5-10 years Chinese troops will march down whatever Texas city Dumbya is in and send his ass to the Hague.
So the dumb phone user sends an SMS to Twitter's SMS number, that SMS is published as a tweet. How does Twitter know the geo coordinates where the user is currently located?
My idea of the "extension" of the SMS is basically the "911 app" adding plain text at the end of a message that the receiver would have to be intelligent enough to interpret as geo-coordinates (if the 911 system sees some digits that has the ##.#### N, ##.#### W format, it could be designed to interpret that as geo-coordinates).
But you're missing the main point, it is still very difficult for a phone to get signal from GPS satellites, and therefore to geo-locate itself, when it is indoors, it doesn't matter whether that geo-coordinates is meant to be sent as an SMS or to be tweeted, you mentioned Twitter as if they have some magic, alternative way of getting the user's coordinates out of thin air.
I just had an idea, about accurately timestamped and geo-tagged SMSes (the second requirement is more or less impossible at the moment, since GPS lock is hard to get indoors), the 911 dispatch could get a swarm of the SMSes and with a visualization tool see how serious the situation is, and where the SMSes are coming from. (For a rough estimate of location, cell-tower identification would probably be sufficient).
The sonar tech that Bruce Wayne embedded quietly into civilian phones in the Dark Knight is also a neat idea, although with several phones in a room, the sonars would probably confuse each other. How do bats do it, does each bat have a slightly different frequency/"voice"?
Kinect-on-a-phone anyone?
Wow, nice straight copy and paste job of the blog post there...
I hate the TSA too, but what about underwear bombers? I read an article that said, convincingly, liquid bombs are practically impossible to make in an airplane bathroom, but it looks like packing C4 in your pants isn't impossible. So far people have been lucky that the terrorists are amateurs and they managed to stopped them before they did the deed (the shoe bomber's shoe was too damp because he got delayed and had been wearing the shoes for an extra 24 hours), but in the future? The cockpit door maybe well-bolted, but if the bomb rips the plane in 2, then the terrorists' objectives have been accomplished. Although arguably the government's actions have been doing the terrorists' work very effectively...
And somewhere in a cave, Osama is laughing that the citizens of that "free country" are getting sexually molested, all because he got the US government to react in exactly the way he wanted them to react.