If this is happening at the ISP level using deep packet inspection and a magic hash table, won't my exclusive use of encryption in BitTorrent be invisible to it?
There was an NPR story on All Things Considered about this very concept: Get your work done, and the rest doesn't matter...except the cow-orkers and superiors will hate you for it even if it works.
It was a couple of years ago and I can't find it just now, but it was from the standpoint of a part-time middle manager.
That said: You're Rackspace, no? As part of my business-building off-time today (I already rescued an important system by transplanting a surface-mount SATA connector from one drive to another, which I guess counts as "work" since it saved a customer from grief and data loss, and gets them back online within hours instead of days or weeks...but that's all I got done), I've got to ask (and I might as well ask publicly): Do you have any use for a wiremonkey with clean installation, troubleshooting, and repair skills, and/or a higher-level system admin who thinks without a box, but who is stuck in Ohio?
I need more problems to solve, because once I solve them, they cease to be problems, and I only get paid if things are broken. I keep working myself out of work, and that is frustrating (though awesome and useful in the greater scheme of things). [The pseudonymous email above works fine.]
And if you're worried about shooting through the walls with an AR-15 you can always use hollow point bullets.
Have you ever fired an AR-15 into something other than paper? Even with the cheapest Russian ammo (with a tiny little hole to make it a "hollow point"), a couple of layers of drywall means very little to the person standing on the other side of the wall.
If you think otherwise, please feel free to prove it: Build a wall, stand on one side of it, and have someone fire a.223 hollow point through it. (Or on second thought, don't.)
Using a shotgun is a double edge sword. The good part is that is doesn't shoot through walls so you're not going to hit anyone in other rooms.
Again. Have you ever fired a shotgun into something other than paper? Even my little.410 makes surprisingly neat holes through 1/2" OSB at 20 feet with bird shot, nevermind the 3" 9-pellet #4 buck that I keep for home defense. With a full choke and in-home distances (at least in my home), those nine copper-plated lead balls are going to be moving darn near one right after another, making holes for the next one as they go.
But that's also a bad part, if the bad guy has a gun and is shooting at you through the wall, you can't return fire with a shotgun.
Why on Earth would I try to shoot someone through a wall, even if they are shooting "at" me? So I can waste as much ammo as they are? Is it a game to see who who can reload quickest before the next round of blind fire?
Seems better to get down fast, close to the same wall they're shooting at (they can't hear you move anymore, and are unlikely to be firing toward the floor), aim chest-level at the doorway, and wait for the next move.
Double barrel and single shot shotguns lack a pump, so there's no way to "warn" the bad guy that you might be sending a cloud of buckshot at him.
Why on Earth would I try to warn someone that I've got a gun?
I mean, really: If I want to scare someone away (assuming the 100lb Doberman hasn't already done so), I'll use my voice: "Get. THE FUCK. OUT OF HERE." If they persist, it is time for the next move. Demonstrating that I have a gun is as counterproductive as a "warning" shot: At this point, whatever I do (which may include surrender) is going to be both quick and quiet.
All I have to do to fire my shotgun, right now (or any other time) is slide the safety off and squeeze.
Warning someone that I have a gun is the same as showing your hand in a card game: If you want to win (ie: survive), don't. (Some states might vary as to the legality of this, but mine is A-OK with shooting and killing unwelcome intruders without warning, whether they're armed and/or physically threatening or just perusing my collection of antique dictionaries in the most passive of ways.)
This all said: I generally agree with the rest of your comment. My SxS.410 is limited in use for this application -- a semiautomatic shotgun with a shorter barrel might be better...though the SxS can't jam and I'll -always- get at least two shots out of it.:)
And it's the only gun I own. I'll use it if I have to, and I feel that I'm in better control of my property and the safety of my family with it than I was without it.
You've at least reminded me that I need to go out and do some shooting, and practice reloading, and practice shooting from unusual positions. I'm comfortable with the gun, my aim is good (I just think of billiards), and I'm calm when unwanted strangers appear (a confused drunk guy once wandered into my living room one night while we were watching TV, and this didn't even give me a start), but I can always be better prepared to work with what I've got.
Are you suggesting that the US introduce civil search warrants? Or that companies should have free access to this private data without a warrant? Or perhaps that copyright infringement should follow criminal procedure in ALL cases?
Perhaps he's merely suggesting that it ought to be impossible, given the rules that already exist.
Yes, but the dude I was responding to seemed mostly concerned with the schedule that they keep, and I was just espousing that it's similar to my own.;)
That said: Golden parachutes suck. While I'm OK with the concept of severance pay, I'm not OK with it being a sufficient sum to sustain someone forever.
Golden parachutes breed contempt, while in no way encouraging anyone to actually do a good job.
It ain't right: "Gosh, the worst I could do here is tank the whole company, and then I can move to Hawaii, buy an already-successful bar on the beach, and spend the rest of my life just doing as I please being a drunken socialite."
Yeah but if I get my week's worth of work completed by noon Monday I cannot take off the reset of the week with pay. If only I could, my life would be fantastic.
I can do that, and I am by no means wealthy..
One difference between what you're doing and what I'm doing: I work for myself (though I generally just have a few clients), doing field work based in my home (I do own my own service truck), and I am paid by the job.
You're paid by the hour or are otherwise expected to hold a desk down. I set my own hours (sometimes in the middle of the night just because I feel like it), whereas you have outside expectations of when you will show up and leave.
If there is no work to be done, I have abundant free time and no income. If you have no work to be done, you still have to sit at a desk and pretend to be busy and still collect your check at the end of the week.
In other words: Unlike a regular hourly employee (or many salaried employees) I am directly compensated for my efficiency, and directly penalized I get things wrong or when they take longer than I'd like. I can work as fast as I want to and get paid the same amount for it as if I worked slow.
It's risky because the paycheck is not steady, but it is stable in that there will never be any reason for a client to stop hiring me (I will not fuck over my clients). And, yes, it is fantastic: I'd sooner live in a box in the ghetto than work a tightly-regimented work week again.
Lately things have been slower than I'd like, so I'm using some of that free time to shore up some sideline business ideas that I have. This is going well (profit!), so far.
So, yeah: I'm the CEO of my own little empire. Whether I survive or burn is entirely up to me.
If you think you can stomach the risk, I dare say there's nothing stopping you but yourself.
And I've also got to say: It's quite nice to go for a long walk in the woods on a free Tuesday afternoon and not worry about a single goddamn money-related thing at all. No worrying about vacation days, no comp time, no stretching projects out to make the mortgage while still looking busy, no office politics about who is and who is not spending enough time holding down a desk, zero animosity for downtime or uptime, and no worries about layoffs since I'm not an employee anyway (if things get slow, I get no money -- but when they pick back up, it doesn't matter to them because I'm right here waiting).
In fact, that sounds like a good idea. I've got some work to finish up Thursday afternoon, but after that I'm caught up. Perhaps Friday I'll go for a drive in a random direction and explore a forest that I haven't seen before. Might even pitch a tent and stay there for a few days or until something else comes up. Why not?
Well, as far as stealing Wi-Fi? Nah... as far as that problem is concerned, I'd leave a throttled open access point, label it "guest" and call it a day.
This. I recently wrenched my router (using a build of Tomato) into having a rate-limited, free/open SSID named "Free. Be nice." on its own VLAN.
It works well. Folks use it from time to time.
I give them enough bandwidth to do browsing and maybe some low-res Youtube, with their own QoS class that puts their use in the backseat to my own. (Torrents would not be fun through this pipe, and that's OK with me.)
I log HTTP requests on that SSID and nothing nefarious has ever appeared (and the logs themselves are stored in RAM, and expire after a few days). If things ever start looking fishy or abusive, it's gone.
Without knowing anything at all about SCADA except that it is a thing (or group of things) that exists:
Real, solid 1-way data connections are entirely possible. As a basic and slow example, RS-232 with only TXD and ground connected will only allow data to go in one direction.
What would be great is if an SSD controller was smart enough to know which blocks haven't been touched in ages, and move the oldest data to blocks that are reaching their rewrite limit.
Yes, that would be great. But it's time-consuming, and every shuffle potentially uses another write. (I say "potentially" because with some cleverness, it could sometimes be combined with a partial write of something else that would be happening anyway.)
What would be even greater is if the relationship between an SSD controller and an operating system were such that this could be handled intelligently.
Some large, common sets of data are inherently very static (such as an MP3 collection) and might as well be stored on blocks that are reaching their rewrite limit from day 1.
A geek might even specify that such directories are handled this way automatically, eliminating the need for anything to guess about it.
Same with an audio/video guy doing nondestructive work: The source files for a current project don't change during editing/mixdown/whatever, but they do get read a whole lot during the process before they are eventually archived and subsequently deleted. There's no reason to use fresh blocks for this role, though a verify-after-write pass might be good for live recording.
Meanwhile, there can be a whole lot of intermediate data that gets frequently written, and it might be best to level that out across the rest of the drive.
And after that, the final render can also be put on old blocks: It might only need written once, but even if it gets overwritten a few times these re-writes will always happen sequentially (which is perhaps ideal from the standpoint of wear). Handling this smartly increases the wear on these blocks by exactly 1 per iteration, instead of some arbitrary number.
Just being able to tell the system to do these things, in advance, would be wonderful.
And yes, the process I describe is a bit tweaky from an end-user perspective, but well within the grasp of just about anyone reading this. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, it's their problem that their hardware will be slower and wear out sooner.;)
Step two: Go for a walk in the woods. Find a quiet place, sit down on the ground next to a friendly tree or rock, and just be. (If unsuccessful, repeat (starting with step one) until you get it right.)
Step three: You're an adult. You'll figure it out.
By "most" I guess you mean "every ISP I've never had."
Even with dialup, I was keeping the same dynamic IP address for weeks at a time by virtue of simply staying connected. ISDN worked even better. Time Warner cable, better yet. And now I've got a bog-standard VDSL pipe from AT&T, which (for any normal residential purpose) doesn't change often enough to care about.
That said, I've seen issues with ADSL back when Ameritech was still a thing, where they'd reset the connections once every night, but that was more than a decade ago.
But with connection rate limiting, you're done. There is nothing more to adjust. Legitimate people legitimately getting their password wrong will still be allowed in within relatively short order, the zombies are mitigated, and there is no further administration required.
Surely your time and sanity is worth more than perhaps a few kilobytes of unwanted traffic.
Good advice, but a day seems mighty short: My own "dynamic" IP address has changed only a few times in the 4 or 5 years that I've had this particular ISP. The address survives disruption, widespread power outage, and lengthy periods of time.
It's stable enough to use for a few personal things that don't grok DNS for whatever reason, and perfectly fine for everything else with DDNS and a short TTL.
Better advice: Lengthy expiration (a month or two, perhaps), and a fallback to a machine capable of fixing the unlikely issue you describe. This machine only accepts SSH connections with both a strong key AND a lengthy passphrase. In the off-chance your own killfile bites you (what, 1 out of 32 bits?), just log into that box and fix it.
Or, you know: Ignore it. With connection limiting, there's no good reason to care about the zombies out there that are randomly guessing. They won't make it in before you're dead and buried, as long as all of the passwords are good. So what if it clogs up the logs? (You have grep, right?)
And quite obviously: If anyone is relying on non-standard ports for security, they're already doing it wrong. TFA changes nothing if they are already doing it right (for whatever definition "right" might be in any one person's own context).
This is made worse by a phone system that doesn't insert the code if you try to call back the number on caller ID unless you punch some extra buttons.
Ew. What phone system is this? I had this working on our old Altigen system, and I'm sure I could make it work on our "more recent" Comdial (which may or may not be more recent, depending on whether you're counting manufacturing date or initial design date).
Please let me know so I can avoid it or research it more properly in the future: The callback button (whatever it is called) should always work, no matter how that call arrived (internal, POTS, PRI, h.323, SIP, whatever).
Once they have critical mass of infrastructure in place, they can charge a very small licensing fee to other EV manufacturers for the interface technology and set the major standard for the next couple decades while practically printing money along the way.
Selling licenses and giving away (supercharge stations are free) electricity indefinitely != "printing money."
I think the point was that the handbrake can be a useful implement for things other than for parking and emergency stopping.
Especially with front-drive cars in the winter: Handbrake maneuvers (with one or both feet working the foot pedals -- including the throttle) can get the car to move in ways which would be impossible otherwise -- especially when there isn't enough room (or time) for other methods of inducing oversteer.
No, the techniques are not obvious to someone not unfamiliar with the art, which apparently includes you (which is OK). But applying the handbrake should not be interpreted to be anything but what it is: An instruction by the driver to apply simple, mechanical braking to the rear wheels.
Meanwhile, a dedicated OFF switch would indeed be useful. Make it as prominent as the hazard lights of any modern German car while operating in the simplest fashion (no computer interaction is required to kill spark or fuel) and this runaway car problem will cease to exist.
Uses less gas to stay in gear and shut off fuel to the engine. This is because it doesn't merely shut off fuel to the engine, it also opens all the valves.
Can you elaborate on this engine which is capable of opening all of the valves?
Yes. On a 4L30E and 4L60E, I can shift to neutral whenever I feel like. Reverse is locked out (or at least SHOULD be), but that's both different and something that I'm unwilling to test.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is this:
If this is happening at the ISP level using deep packet inspection and a magic hash table, won't my exclusive use of encryption in BitTorrent be invisible to it?
Is every single thing you do with a network connection between the device in front of you and the Internet?
I do all sorts of stuff with my home network.
There was an NPR story on All Things Considered about this very concept: Get your work done, and the rest doesn't matter...except the cow-orkers and superiors will hate you for it even if it works.
It was a couple of years ago and I can't find it just now, but it was from the standpoint of a part-time middle manager.
That said: You're Rackspace, no? As part of my business-building off-time today (I already rescued an important system by transplanting a surface-mount SATA connector from one drive to another, which I guess counts as "work" since it saved a customer from grief and data loss, and gets them back online within hours instead of days or weeks...but that's all I got done), I've got to ask (and I might as well ask publicly): Do you have any use for a wiremonkey with clean installation, troubleshooting, and repair skills, and/or a higher-level system admin who thinks without a box, but who is stuck in Ohio?
I need more problems to solve, because once I solve them, they cease to be problems, and I only get paid if things are broken. I keep working myself out of work, and that is frustrating (though awesome and useful in the greater scheme of things). [The pseudonymous email above works fine.]
Have you ever fired an AR-15 into something other than paper? Even with the cheapest Russian ammo (with a tiny little hole to make it a "hollow point"), a couple of layers of drywall means very little to the person standing on the other side of the wall.
If you think otherwise, please feel free to prove it: Build a wall, stand on one side of it, and have someone fire a .223 hollow point through it. (Or on second thought, don't.)
Again. Have you ever fired a shotgun into something other than paper? Even my little .410 makes surprisingly neat holes through 1/2" OSB at 20 feet with bird shot, nevermind the 3" 9-pellet #4 buck that I keep for home defense. With a full choke and in-home distances (at least in my home), those nine copper-plated lead balls are going to be moving darn near one right after another, making holes for the next one as they go.
Why on Earth would I try to shoot someone through a wall, even if they are shooting "at" me? So I can waste as much ammo as they are? Is it a game to see who who can reload quickest before the next round of blind fire?
Seems better to get down fast, close to the same wall they're shooting at (they can't hear you move anymore, and are unlikely to be firing toward the floor), aim chest-level at the doorway, and wait for the next move.
Why on Earth would I try to warn someone that I've got a gun?
I mean, really: If I want to scare someone away (assuming the 100lb Doberman hasn't already done so), I'll use my voice: "Get. THE FUCK. OUT OF HERE." If they persist, it is time for the next move. Demonstrating that I have a gun is as counterproductive as a "warning" shot: At this point, whatever I do (which may include surrender) is going to be both quick and quiet.
All I have to do to fire my shotgun, right now (or any other time) is slide the safety off and squeeze.
Warning someone that I have a gun is the same as showing your hand in a card game: If you want to win (ie: survive), don't. (Some states might vary as to the legality of this, but mine is A-OK with shooting and killing unwelcome intruders without warning, whether they're armed and/or physically threatening or just perusing my collection of antique dictionaries in the most passive of ways.)
This all said: I generally agree with the rest of your comment. My SxS .410 is limited in use for this application -- a semiautomatic shotgun with a shorter barrel might be better...though the SxS can't jam and I'll -always- get at least two shots out of it. :)
And it's the only gun I own. I'll use it if I have to, and I feel that I'm in better control of my property and the safety of my family with it than I was without it.
You've at least reminded me that I need to go out and do some shooting, and practice reloading, and practice shooting from unusual positions. I'm comfortable with the gun, my aim is good (I just think of billiards), and I'm calm when unwanted strangers appear (a confused drunk guy once wandered into my living room one night while we were watching TV, and this didn't even give me a start), but I can always be better prepared to work with what I've got.
Cheers.
Perhaps he's merely suggesting that it ought to be impossible, given the rules that already exist.
Yes, but the dude I was responding to seemed mostly concerned with the schedule that they keep, and I was just espousing that it's similar to my own. ;)
That said: Golden parachutes suck. While I'm OK with the concept of severance pay, I'm not OK with it being a sufficient sum to sustain someone forever.
Golden parachutes breed contempt, while in no way encouraging anyone to actually do a good job.
It ain't right: "Gosh, the worst I could do here is tank the whole company, and then I can move to Hawaii, buy an already-successful bar on the beach, and spend the rest of my life just doing as I please being a drunken socialite."
I can do that, and I am by no means wealthy..
One difference between what you're doing and what I'm doing: I work for myself (though I generally just have a few clients), doing field work based in my home (I do own my own service truck), and I am paid by the job.
You're paid by the hour or are otherwise expected to hold a desk down. I set my own hours (sometimes in the middle of the night just because I feel like it), whereas you have outside expectations of when you will show up and leave.
If there is no work to be done, I have abundant free time and no income. If you have no work to be done, you still have to sit at a desk and pretend to be busy and still collect your check at the end of the week.
In other words: Unlike a regular hourly employee (or many salaried employees) I am directly compensated for my efficiency, and directly penalized I get things wrong or when they take longer than I'd like. I can work as fast as I want to and get paid the same amount for it as if I worked slow.
It's risky because the paycheck is not steady, but it is stable in that there will never be any reason for a client to stop hiring me (I will not fuck over my clients). And, yes, it is fantastic: I'd sooner live in a box in the ghetto than work a tightly-regimented work week again.
Lately things have been slower than I'd like, so I'm using some of that free time to shore up some sideline business ideas that I have. This is going well (profit!), so far.
So, yeah: I'm the CEO of my own little empire. Whether I survive or burn is entirely up to me.
If you think you can stomach the risk, I dare say there's nothing stopping you but yourself.
And I've also got to say: It's quite nice to go for a long walk in the woods on a free Tuesday afternoon and not worry about a single goddamn money-related thing at all. No worrying about vacation days, no comp time, no stretching projects out to make the mortgage while still looking busy, no office politics about who is and who is not spending enough time holding down a desk, zero animosity for downtime or uptime, and no worries about layoffs since I'm not an employee anyway (if things get slow, I get no money -- but when they pick back up, it doesn't matter to them because I'm right here waiting).
In fact, that sounds like a good idea. I've got some work to finish up Thursday afternoon, but after that I'm caught up. Perhaps Friday I'll go for a drive in a random direction and explore a forest that I haven't seen before. Might even pitch a tent and stay there for a few days or until something else comes up. Why not?
This. I recently wrenched my router (using a build of Tomato) into having a rate-limited, free/open SSID named "Free. Be nice." on its own VLAN.
It works well. Folks use it from time to time.
I give them enough bandwidth to do browsing and maybe some low-res Youtube, with their own QoS class that puts their use in the backseat to my own. (Torrents would not be fun through this pipe, and that's OK with me.)
I log HTTP requests on that SSID and nothing nefarious has ever appeared (and the logs themselves are stored in RAM, and expire after a few days). If things ever start looking fishy or abusive, it's gone.
Without knowing anything at all about SCADA except that it is a thing (or group of things) that exists:
Real, solid 1-way data connections are entirely possible. As a basic and slow example, RS-232 with only TXD and ground connected will only allow data to go in one direction.
Yes, that would be great. But it's time-consuming, and every shuffle potentially uses another write. (I say "potentially" because with some cleverness, it could sometimes be combined with a partial write of something else that would be happening anyway.)
What would be even greater is if the relationship between an SSD controller and an operating system were such that this could be handled intelligently.
Some large, common sets of data are inherently very static (such as an MP3 collection) and might as well be stored on blocks that are reaching their rewrite limit from day 1.
A geek might even specify that such directories are handled this way automatically, eliminating the need for anything to guess about it.
Same with an audio/video guy doing nondestructive work: The source files for a current project don't change during editing/mixdown/whatever, but they do get read a whole lot during the process before they are eventually archived and subsequently deleted. There's no reason to use fresh blocks for this role, though a verify-after-write pass might be good for live recording.
Meanwhile, there can be a whole lot of intermediate data that gets frequently written, and it might be best to level that out across the rest of the drive.
And after that, the final render can also be put on old blocks: It might only need written once, but even if it gets overwritten a few times these re-writes will always happen sequentially (which is perhaps ideal from the standpoint of wear). Handling this smartly increases the wear on these blocks by exactly 1 per iteration, instead of some arbitrary number.
Just being able to tell the system to do these things, in advance, would be wonderful.
And yes, the process I describe is a bit tweaky from an end-user perspective, but well within the grasp of just about anyone reading this. If the rest of the world doesn't get it, it's their problem that their hardware will be slower and wear out sooner. ;)
Yes.
Step one: Slow down.
Step two: Go for a walk in the woods. Find a quiet place, sit down on the ground next to a friendly tree or rock, and just be. (If unsuccessful, repeat (starting with step one) until you get it right.)
Step three: You're an adult. You'll figure it out.
The rumor mill is saying that something might happen, and the question is about the possible consequences of this thing that may or may not occur.
This is too many layers of speculation to be useful for anything.
Please call me when someone knows something about anything. Thanks.
That's not exactly how ATMs started. In the beginning, banks paid people to use them.
Everywhere I shop, meat is either vacuum-packed or there are rolls of thin plastic bags above the meat cooler, or both.
I put the styrofoam-tray meat into one of these plastic bags. If it leaks a bit in transit, it's pretty well limited to only contaminating itself.
I'd bitch at the phone guys, then. They're doing their job poorly.
It can automatically insert the 8. It can also insert (or not) a 1 for long distance when needed.
By "most" I guess you mean "every ISP I've never had."
Even with dialup, I was keeping the same dynamic IP address for weeks at a time by virtue of simply staying connected. ISDN worked even better. Time Warner cable, better yet. And now I've got a bog-standard VDSL pipe from AT&T, which (for any normal residential purpose) doesn't change often enough to care about.
That said, I've seen issues with ADSL back when Ameritech was still a thing, where they'd reset the connections once every night, but that was more than a decade ago.
Who still behaves this way? Please name names.
But with connection rate limiting, you're done. There is nothing more to adjust. Legitimate people legitimately getting their password wrong will still be allowed in within relatively short order, the zombies are mitigated, and there is no further administration required.
Surely your time and sanity is worth more than perhaps a few kilobytes of unwanted traffic.
Good advice, but a day seems mighty short: My own "dynamic" IP address has changed only a few times in the 4 or 5 years that I've had this particular ISP. The address survives disruption, widespread power outage, and lengthy periods of time.
It's stable enough to use for a few personal things that don't grok DNS for whatever reason, and perfectly fine for everything else with DDNS and a short TTL.
Better advice: Lengthy expiration (a month or two, perhaps), and a fallback to a machine capable of fixing the unlikely issue you describe. This machine only accepts SSH connections with both a strong key AND a lengthy passphrase. In the off-chance your own killfile bites you (what, 1 out of 32 bits?), just log into that box and fix it.
Or, you know: Ignore it. With connection limiting, there's no good reason to care about the zombies out there that are randomly guessing. They won't make it in before you're dead and buried, as long as all of the passwords are good. So what if it clogs up the logs? (You have grep, right?)
And quite obviously: If anyone is relying on non-standard ports for security, they're already doing it wrong. TFA changes nothing if they are already doing it right (for whatever definition "right" might be in any one person's own context).
Ew. What phone system is this? I had this working on our old Altigen system, and I'm sure I could make it work on our "more recent" Comdial (which may or may not be more recent, depending on whether you're counting manufacturing date or initial design date).
Please let me know so I can avoid it or research it more properly in the future: The callback button (whatever it is called) should always work, no matter how that call arrived (internal, POTS, PRI, h.323, SIP, whatever).
I stopped getting hangovers when I started taking Celexa for depression: Poof, gone.
It has done wonders for my alcohol intake.
Selling licenses and giving away (supercharge stations are free) electricity indefinitely != "printing money."
But what if you can't? Did you read anything in TFA or in the comments?
I think the point was that the handbrake can be a useful implement for things other than for parking and emergency stopping.
Especially with front-drive cars in the winter: Handbrake maneuvers (with one or both feet working the foot pedals -- including the throttle) can get the car to move in ways which would be impossible otherwise -- especially when there isn't enough room (or time) for other methods of inducing oversteer.
No, the techniques are not obvious to someone not unfamiliar with the art, which apparently includes you (which is OK). But applying the handbrake should not be interpreted to be anything but what it is: An instruction by the driver to apply simple, mechanical braking to the rear wheels.
Meanwhile, a dedicated OFF switch would indeed be useful. Make it as prominent as the hazard lights of any modern German car while operating in the simplest fashion (no computer interaction is required to kill spark or fuel) and this runaway car problem will cease to exist.
Can you elaborate on this engine which is capable of opening all of the valves?
Yes. On a 4L30E and 4L60E, I can shift to neutral whenever I feel like. Reverse is locked out (or at least SHOULD be), but that's both different and something that I'm unwilling to test.