I remember reading about MTHEL several years ago. The article I read covered field-test reports from Israel of the then-current mobile tactical high-energy laser. Reported stats at the time included the ability to acquire and engage approximately fifty targets in one second (given today's article, that seems close to the maximum fire capacity of the weapon, meaning a full discharge against 50 discrete elements in one second's time).
The laser was developed by the US; the target acqusition software was developed by Israel. The practical upshot of the joint project is that Israel would get the first deployable units (be they THEL or MTHEL) for use in securing border crossings, checkpoints, and other areas that come under small rocket fire on a regular basis.
I remember there being talk of the next deployment theater being Korea. (I was working at the Pentagon at the time; sometimes folks like to, ah, speculate openly.) The goal would have been to use these tac. lasers to further secure the DMZ, and possibly to help defend Seoul - a fine city that has the unfortunate trait of being well within enemy artillery range due to its proximity to the border.
Japan had expressed an interest, and some thought was given to possible use in Taiwan (though I know that would be deeply offensive to the Chinese and personally feel it would cause more of a political headache than it was worth to us).
Doesn't surprise me to see NG, ever the profiteer, trying to pitch this stuff to US Airports for a modest fee. They are a contracting organization after all.
The reason that students aren't jumping on the DRM-friendly bandwagon, even when it's free, is because DRM tech makes it difficult (or impossible) for people to share music with each other.
When people share something, they're giving you a taste of what it is that they like - they're teaching you about themselves. You learn what makes 'em tick. It's a human bonding experience, a way that people become closer, and a way to find folks like you (if someone's got a very similar collection of music, they may have a similar mind).
DRM prevents this basic human experience from happening.
Before BitTorrent we had Kazaa, before Kazaa we had Napster, before Napster we traded mp3s via FTP servers and by swapping data CDs in person, before mp3s we exchanged burned CDs, before CDs existed we traded custom tapes we'd made, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum.
People enjoy sharing music with each other. I'm surprised the industry execs still haven't understood this important, basic concept - they must really be out of touch with reality these days.
I keep thinking of something like an automated tape library - a vault arrangement with a computer-controlled arm inside that has a barcode scanner mounted on it. Have it catalog all of your books, then just search for the one you want and let the robotic armature retrieve it for you.
Come to think of it, DLT tapes are pretty big; I wonder how hard it'd be to modify a DLT library to accept paperback novels.
I'm happy the ESA is taking a stand against badly written laws that seek to ban or limit video games in various states. Their efforts have been instrumental in overturning several other similar laws.
Even so, I find myself wondering what will happen if action is taken regarding the Family Entertainment Protection Act, a Senate bill sponsored by Senators Clinton and Lieberman. That bill legislates a cash penalty (or community service) to back up enforcement of the ESRB standards. The ESA created the ESRB in 1994, didn't it?
An amusing provision of that bill calls for the Federal Trade Commission to create a watchdog group that oversees the ESRB to ensure that their ratings standard doesn't "slip" (potentially giving that oversight group a way to influence actual ESRB ratings in the future).
The ESA has been good about standing up to state legislatures. Will they stand up to Congress and the ratings board they spawned if that bill makes it out of committee?
Time spent > skill employed Group > individual + Xenophobic nationalism?
Turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so!
I think MMOs have picked up and accurately translated a few Japanese cultural traits. Further, I think Blizzard - often known as a refiner, rather than an innovator - has captured this spirit in full.
Re:Phone number replacement needed
on
Supermarket VOIP
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· Score: 1
It would be nice if people could reach my VOIP line by calling my domain name - just forward it along like another protocol, say. We'd have to spend a few years with this as an optional way of doing business, though; land-line phones don't have a lot of options for calling URLs.
So, you would say it is ok for the Police to come search you house to make sure you have no drugs, stolen goods, kidnapped 3yr olds - anytime they want? Just because you are against druids, stealing and kidnapping doesn't mean that would be a good thing.
No, I wouldn't say that's a good thing - but the rules are different out here. In the US the citizenry is guaranteed a certain measure of privacy and protection from egregious law enforcement by way of the Constitution. We have Amendments that protect against unlawful search and seizure, we have Amendments that guarantee a certain due process, etc.
When you go to a foreign country, these rules do not apply. If you traveled to Spain, your United States civil rights would hold no water. You would be operating under the legal system of the region you were traveling into.
So what on earth makes you think that the rules that govern US law enforcement apply, in any way, to whatever virtual world it is that WoW runs under?
Blizzard built that environment from the ground up. They invested time, money, and countless man hours to make it into something real. They invited players like you to step in and enjoy their creation. Some jackasses feel the need to bend and break the few rules that exist. I feel Blizzard is entitled to end cheating by any means necessary.
It is their product.
As always, if you don't like how they enforce their rules, you are welcome to take your dollars elsewhere. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that you have some right to tell them how to run their show.
I recall a job interview I attended in 1999. The job itself was a pseudo-network-engineer position with heavy client interaction; I would have worked out of a co-location facility and managed equipment for a tiny list of clients. The position was quite junior. This particular job required an MCSE, which I possessed.
My interview was multi-stage, including a technical process. The questions they asked were laughable; "What is TCP/IP" and "What is DNS" and so forth. I pointed out that I was, in fact, an MCSE. They replied "We know - that's why we're asking."
Reads like the old "jump buggies" out of science fiction novels; single point of launch, ballistic trajectory, get anywhere in the world in 45 minutes flat. I used to wonder why people hadn't already tried to implement them as travel could be significantly faster (and possibly cheaper) than keeping an aircraft aloft for the endless hours of a trans-continental flight.
A friend of mine came back from an eight-month backpacking romp through Europe recently. While that sounds like a lot of fun (and is, if you have the time and money to spend on it), it's not the best move for your career when your career is in the ever-changing world of tech. Despite being a talented interface designer, she came back home to find that the software and methods she was using was no longer the standard - new techniques had been developed and better ways of managing content had presented themselves. Basically she came home to find the tech playing field had moved on without her, and was unable to find a job as nice as the one she left.
Solution: retrain! She went out to some temp agencies and farmed her resume around, then taught herself Visio when a client requested it. She spent the last few weeks down in the District building contacts and making money while working on a Post Office project. If you want jobs, you can find jobs - just don't expect people to throw money into your lap as per the bubble-days of the 90s.
For those not in the know, a security clearance is a pre-punched meal-ticket - and you don't have to be in DC or Virginia. If you're able to find work with someone who's willing to sponsor your security clearance process, and you've no particular qualms about working for The Man, take it. A Secret clearance will keep you employed anywhere in the nation. A Top Secret brings a higher salary and even more options to choose from, though laying hands on one is sometimes more a matter of fate than desire.
I didn't know when Star Wars was being released. I hadn't been paying attention. I know, I know - I'm a bad geek.
As it turns out, my lack of observance didn't matter at all - I'm a bit oversaturated on news and so I tend to read CNN fairly frequently throughout the day. I guessed something was up after two seperate articles on Lucas (and THX1138) showed up, followed by three more on Star Wars (quote heavy thanks to interviews with Mark Hamill), all posted on the main page and all within a twenty-four hour period.
I've been swimming in Star Wars news.
While I don't normally consider this a bad thing it's interesting to see how heavily the tail is wagging the rest of the dog, with respect to CNN; I don't know if they're being paid to be a corporate shill, or if their tech department doing website updates has a strong love of this movie -- whatever the case, it's had better coverage than Iraq this week.:)
A few years back a buddy of mine came over to my apartment and plugged into my hub. I wasn't using a router at the time, just a hub with a WAN port for broadband. (I know it sounds terrible, but I keep my system configured according to DISA's security guidelines; sometimes I feel like testing it against real-world attacks. Bit of a masochistic streak.) I was running a locked-down Win2k box; he brought an unsecured Win98 system -- with it's C drive shared. To EVERYONE.
Things were going pretty well, and we left the systems on overnight. When we signed back on in the morning, my machine was fine; his machine had been compromised -- in grand style. We found the following:
- two separate users were connected to it. - Cygwin, which my friend had managed to break and wasn't operational, had been either repaired or reinstalled. - gcc was added. - eight (!) separate viruses were on the system; two had been compiled with the local gcc, from the look of it. - those viruses were being sent out around the net.
The main data on the system was not compromised and while there was a minor virus infection, for the most part things were not touched. I should say, "things were not touched that we could detect" -- they could have taken a full copy of his HD for all I know, not that anything important was on there (it was just a gaming box).
He probably wouldn't have noticed the attack itself except that his processor wasn't all that hot and he was on a 10M/sec network card; between the heavy compiling and the constant sending of virii system performance had dropped noticably.
The fix?
Unplug from the internet, make sure no data on the box is needed, and format it back to the stone age. It isn't like reinstalls take a long time. (Backups are your friends.:) )
You're not "free" to spraypaint the Statue a different color, either. That's also a "restriction" on your "liberty" and possibly an infringement upon your First Amendment rights to free speech and expression.
America has always been the land of the free, with some caveats.
To be fair, the article also doesn't say the prints are NOT being run through the FBI database. It's taken as read that this isn't occuring because there is no overt, explicit mention that it's happening.
Which is curious, as the same article details that these lockers are also in use at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and at Chicago's Union Station. If there were a publicly usable system that I would tie into the NCIC, this would be it - lockers can be used to store explosive devices, after all.
Boy howdy, I'm wondering how this product was designed. While using a fingerprint-based system is entirely convenient and obviates the need for keys and coinage exchange units (and hey, it's tricky to lose a finger!), I start to wonder if there's anything else the equipment is conveniently tied into on the back-end.
One really nice use would be to have chemical detectors and similar rigged up with the lockers to prevent someone from storing a bomb inside them -- and hey, if you find a prohibited item that needs to be turned over to law enforcement, you already have a fingerprint to run against the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC, the same one used for background checks for security clearances and the like).
Seeing as how similar biometric systems are already in place for people with visas entering the country, why not tie it all together into a system that Homeland Defense can monitor? Ooh, I get all tingly thinking about the implications here.
So... anyone have any additional information on the company that did the manufacturing for this system, or any ideas on what the internal architecture is like? Inquiring privacy-minded people want to know. ^^
One of the interesting things about working as a defense contrator is that there is work everywhere in the world at present; doesn't matter where, we've got an investment, and that investment involves computers somewhere along the line. (Yes, even in Kuala Lumpor - even when it's disguised as France.)
Where there are computers there will be admins - there must always be admins - if only for the same reasons that there are doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and others of our ilk. On the whole it's stuff that reasonable people could figure out and generally take care of on their own. Sometimes they'd need a specialist for a particularly hairy problem. However, one of the defining traits of life is that people don't have time to be generalists -- we're a highly specialized society (even if some of those specialties are along the lines of the service industries). Admins exist to take care of what people can't or won't, and in theory to do a better job than they could without training.
This is doubly or triply true for the government and military. More amusing still is if you're doing defense work that requires a clearance. If you can find someone to sponsor you, and if you can pass the investigation (takes a semi boring life, or lots of honesty), by all means do. Most people who go for a clearance won't get one - or will eventually have it revoked.
Law of supply and demand, friends:
High demand + automatically limited supply = higher cost for the goods in question. (i.e., higher salary.)
Get your Top Secret and you've basically written your meal ticket for life; just lay off committing felony crimes and you're probably good to go.:)
heh. If you want to see the TCO for something increase dramatically, all you have to do is provide support for it over a long enough span of time that people feel comfortable in ceasing to learn.
Perhaps one of the reasons that Linux has an inherently low TCO is because the users who have installed it, configured it, compiled it and made it run on their toaster have taken the time to read the docs. They're familiar with the hardware, the apps they run, the OS under the apps they run, and viola -- things run nicely.
But in the Windows world? Everybody has a support line to call for absolutely everything. Almost every product offered has some form or another of support to it, to an extent that the people who are using these systems no longer have to use any mindshare whatsoever to get their stuff working. At your place of business a PC tech is waiting to coddle you. At your home you can call your ISP, call your PC vendor, call your OS manufacturer, call your application developer, call everybody in order to figure out what's wrong with the system. The suggestions they give you to fix it may seem arcane and strange, but if you follow them assiduously you have a 30 to 40% chance of getting things working... and if it doesn't work out, you can always call back 'til you get ahold of someone who really knows what's going on.
Small wonder the TCO is so incredible. I can understand that worms have an impact on this number - hell, I've logged plenty of overtime hours securing machines against the latest potential threat (the Army is rather proactive in locking things down against explotation - with good reason). I've spent countless nights securing our systems against worms that use ports that are not open on our firewall. I've spent hours updating virus signatures and restoring systems lost because a user thought it was a fine idea to open up an encrypted zip file they received from someone they didn't know. I've spent many a fine weekend and holiday at work restoring people's email because they deleted without consideration for the fact that bringing it back takes serious time.
My site would have far lower TCO if the users exercised a small, trifling fraction of their potential intelligence. Am I overestimating the abilities of the average human, here?:(
sigh... *Lots* of things go into TCO. My overtime, paid to fix these kinds of problems, is a significant part of it at the site I work for. End of rant.
If you jab it, it feels hard and your finger won't go in very far. You can pour it slowly, but you can grab a clump of it, almost as if it's a solid. This kind of fluid is called dilatant. It becomes more viscous when agitated or compressed.
The slow blade penetrates the shield!
It's a fine day when life becomes more like Dune.:)
If they want to stay true to the storyline, they'll make a point of ignoring her sex until the very end of the film. It won't make a bit of difference to the fanboys who are already mentally queueing up to see it, but hey, it'd be true to the series.
If the movie ends in an hour and a half, do we get to see Samus in a bikini?;)
"Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account," Google's Gmail says in its privacy and terms of use sections.
snip
"If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted," said Maurice Westerling, co-founder of Bits of Freedom, another privacy interest group, based in the Netherlands.
MS Exchange has settings for the email retention period. If you delete something from your mailbox in Outlook, then empty your Trash folder, it's effectively gone from your view and you've no way to retrieve it. It is however stored in Exchange for as long as the administrators wish to hang onto it (and that "deleted" email is, indeed, backed up and restorable).
If you shift-delete an object out of your Inbox, using that wonderful permanent-kill technique that the tech-savvy thinks protects and anonymizes their email... it's stored for the email retention period listed by the sysadmins, is backed up, and is restorable. It looks very dead to/you/, but not to/us/.
(fyi, the only real way around this is to edit your Outlook client so that you can get the Recover Deleted Items option on every object in your inbox [as opposed to just the Recycle Bin], then habitually view -- and purge -- that information on a schedule that is more frequent than the one used for our backups. That'd work.)
Anyway, the shorter point is, this kind of thing happens. The reason is happens is liability. If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem. If law enforcement comes looking and Google has to say "Oh, sorry - we respect privacy so much that we absolutely and permanently delete all traces of all email the second you touch the delete object!", it will not be a pleasant thing. The investigators will not be happy.
Alternate question; do you really think that your email is permanently gone from Yahoo! and Hotmail?
Do you really think they can't restore to an arbitrary point in time?
Do you think they wouldn't turn that info over to law enforcement in a heartbeat if a court order came down?:)
After reading the responses to these questions, the thing that sticks with me is that there's a definite provision listed for libel and slander that allows someone to take offense to your otherwise Free Speech.
The First Amendment (for those who aren't familiar and insist on going with hearsay instead of knowing their history) reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Shortened, `Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.`
Here's a good site detailing how libel laws work. Two key provisions involved that you should keep in mind:
1) Libel requires that your statements be false. Be careful about carrying forth rumor and hearsay as truth, but know also that just because something is unverified doesn't make it untrue. If you're using that as your rallying cry, though, be prepared to offer up hard evidence for your statements; the burden of proof certainly won't lie with someone claiming defamation.
2) Libel requires that Fault be proved. You must be intentionally malicious or negligent (the latter may be far easier to prove). If you're quoting a reputable source, they'd be guilty of libel - you may only be guilty of foolishness. However, if you're reposting unverified info via your "personal web site" that logs a few hundred thousand visitors each week, don't expect that provision to save you either.
The linked site actually has a good rundown on what constitutes a defense, and what's not a defense - it might help to familiarize yourself with the rules before you opt to post flamebait on your heavily trafficed website (as you are a de facto news source and publisher).
Given the first +5 Informative FUD troll on this thread it's clear we're in full conspiracy theory mode, so let's trot out Echelon again.:)
It's theorized that there exists a gigantic electronic SIGINT monitoring network, known as Echelon, which is operated across the Sort Of Free World by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other allies. The system is supposed to be powerful enough to monitor every phonecall, every email, every satellite communication, and handle *all of it simultaneously*. Pattern matching and keyword analysis are done by computers in realtime. Echelon can also make toast, predict stock market trends, and runs it's own psychic hotline.
On a more serious note, how routine that kind of thing might be requires a more careful analysis of the laws of the United Kingdom, which are not the same as the laws of the United States. I don't know what the rules are over there governing the implicit privacy of information.
If you want a cell phone that can give your location to authorities, buy one with a built-in GPS receiver that transmits your location. There was never any legitimate need to upgrade the infrastructure to allow for tracking any cell user at will.
As far as I was aware, that infrastructure was in place from the very beginning.
In order for a cellphone company to properly give you service, they have to arrange for a series of cell towers over a wide range of space. These towers provide your signal. For uninterrupted service, the service-areas of each tower must overlap to a degree.
In order to bill you properly when you are roaming, the towers must be able to check your location against your home calling areas (for people with plans where this still exists). Which tower you're using at any given time is a matter of record.
If the argument is that they don't have your location down to a 10-meter square block, you might wanna guess again; by watching the way that your phone moves through the spheres of influence each tower generates it becomes mathematically trivial to triangulate your position with a precision that GPS would find envious.
If you're drudging out the `Navy shot down TWA 800` theory I'm tempted to classify you as a troll. Please don't bother frightening Slashdot with your Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt lines about the lack of privacy we now have post 9/11 -- you never had it to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
That does not in any way make their position less heroic.
Salute.
I remember reading about MTHEL several years ago. The article I read covered field-test reports from Israel of the then-current mobile tactical high-energy laser. Reported stats at the time included the ability to acquire and engage approximately fifty targets in one second (given today's article, that seems close to the maximum fire capacity of the weapon, meaning a full discharge against 50 discrete elements in one second's time).
The laser was developed by the US; the target acqusition software was developed by Israel. The practical upshot of the joint project is that Israel would get the first deployable units (be they THEL or MTHEL) for use in securing border crossings, checkpoints, and other areas that come under small rocket fire on a regular basis.
I remember there being talk of the next deployment theater being Korea. (I was working at the Pentagon at the time; sometimes folks like to, ah, speculate openly.) The goal would have been to use these tac. lasers to further secure the DMZ, and possibly to help defend Seoul - a fine city that has the unfortunate trait of being well within enemy artillery range due to its proximity to the border.
Japan had expressed an interest, and some thought was given to possible use in Taiwan (though I know that would be deeply offensive to the Chinese and personally feel it would cause more of a political headache than it was worth to us).
Doesn't surprise me to see NG, ever the profiteer, trying to pitch this stuff to US Airports for a modest fee. They are a contracting organization after all.
The reason that students aren't jumping on the DRM-friendly bandwagon, even when it's free, is because DRM tech makes it difficult (or impossible) for people to share music with each other.
When people share something, they're giving you a taste of what it is that they like - they're teaching you about themselves. You learn what makes 'em tick. It's a human bonding experience, a way that people become closer, and a way to find folks like you (if someone's got a very similar collection of music, they may have a similar mind).
DRM prevents this basic human experience from happening.
Before BitTorrent we had Kazaa,
before Kazaa we had Napster,
before Napster we traded mp3s via FTP servers and by swapping data CDs in person,
before mp3s we exchanged burned CDs,
before CDs existed we traded custom tapes we'd made,
and so on and so forth, ad nauseum.
People enjoy sharing music with each other. I'm surprised the industry execs still haven't understood this important, basic concept - they must really be out of touch with reality these days.
I keep thinking of something like an automated tape library - a vault arrangement with a computer-controlled arm inside that has a barcode scanner mounted on it. Have it catalog all of your books, then just search for the one you want and let the robotic armature retrieve it for you.
Come to think of it, DLT tapes are pretty big; I wonder how hard it'd be to modify a DLT library to accept paperback novels.
I'm happy the ESA is taking a stand against badly written laws that seek to ban or limit video games in various states. Their efforts have been instrumental in overturning several other similar laws.
Even so, I find myself wondering what will happen if action is taken regarding the Family Entertainment Protection Act, a Senate bill sponsored by Senators Clinton and Lieberman. That bill legislates a cash penalty (or community service) to back up enforcement of the ESRB standards. The ESA created the ESRB in 1994, didn't it?
An amusing provision of that bill calls for the Federal Trade Commission to create a watchdog group that oversees the ESRB to ensure that their ratings standard doesn't "slip" (potentially giving that oversight group a way to influence actual ESRB ratings in the future).
The ESA has been good about standing up to state legislatures. Will they stand up to Congress and the ratings board they spawned if that bill makes it out of committee?
Let's see..
Time spent > skill employed
Group > individual
+ Xenophobic nationalism?
Turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so!
I think MMOs have picked up and accurately translated a few Japanese cultural traits. Further, I think Blizzard - often known as a refiner, rather than an innovator - has captured this spirit in full.
It would be nice if people could reach my VOIP line by calling my domain name - just forward it along like another protocol, say. We'd have to spend a few years with this as an optional way of doing business, though; land-line phones don't have a lot of options for calling URLs.
So, you would say it is ok for the Police to come search you house to make sure you have no drugs, stolen goods, kidnapped 3yr olds - anytime they want? Just because you are against druids, stealing and kidnapping doesn't mean that would be a good thing.
No, I wouldn't say that's a good thing - but the rules are different out here. In the US the citizenry is guaranteed a certain measure of privacy and protection from egregious law enforcement by way of the Constitution. We have Amendments that protect against unlawful search and seizure, we have Amendments that guarantee a certain due process, etc.
When you go to a foreign country, these rules do not apply. If you traveled to Spain, your United States civil rights would hold no water. You would be operating under the legal system of the region you were traveling into.
So what on earth makes you think that the rules that govern US law enforcement apply, in any way, to whatever virtual world it is that WoW runs under?
Blizzard built that environment from the ground up. They invested time, money, and countless man hours to make it into something real. They invited players like you to step in and enjoy their creation. Some jackasses feel the need to bend and break the few rules that exist. I feel Blizzard is entitled to end cheating by any means necessary.
It is their product.
As always, if you don't like how they enforce their rules, you are welcome to take your dollars elsewhere. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that you have some right to tell them how to run their show.
I recall a job interview I attended in 1999. The job itself was a pseudo-network-engineer position with heavy client interaction; I would have worked out of a co-location facility and managed equipment for a tiny list of clients. The position was quite junior. This particular job required an MCSE, which I possessed.
My interview was multi-stage, including a technical process. The questions they asked were laughable; "What is TCP/IP" and "What is DNS" and so forth. I pointed out that I was, in fact, an MCSE. They replied "We know - that's why we're asking."
Reads like the old "jump buggies" out of science fiction novels; single point of launch, ballistic trajectory, get anywhere in the world in 45 minutes flat. I used to wonder why people hadn't already tried to implement them as travel could be significantly faster (and possibly cheaper) than keeping an aircraft aloft for the endless hours of a trans-continental flight.
A friend of mine came back from an eight-month backpacking romp through Europe recently. While that sounds like a lot of fun (and is, if you have the time and money to spend on it), it's not the best move for your career when your career is in the ever-changing world of tech. Despite being a talented interface designer, she came back home to find that the software and methods she was using was no longer the standard - new techniques had been developed and better ways of managing content had presented themselves. Basically she came home to find the tech playing field had moved on without her, and was unable to find a job as nice as the one she left.
Solution: retrain! She went out to some temp agencies and farmed her resume around, then taught herself Visio when a client requested it. She spent the last few weeks down in the District building contacts and making money while working on a Post Office project. If you want jobs, you can find jobs - just don't expect people to throw money into your lap as per the bubble-days of the 90s.
For those not in the know, a security clearance is a pre-punched meal-ticket - and you don't have to be in DC or Virginia. If you're able to find work with someone who's willing to sponsor your security clearance process, and you've no particular qualms about working for The Man, take it. A Secret clearance will keep you employed anywhere in the nation. A Top Secret brings a higher salary and even more options to choose from, though laying hands on one is sometimes more a matter of fate than desire.
I didn't know when Star Wars was being released. I hadn't been paying attention. I know, I know - I'm a bad geek.
:)
As it turns out, my lack of observance didn't matter at all - I'm a bit oversaturated on news and so I tend to read CNN fairly frequently throughout the day. I guessed something was up after two seperate articles on Lucas (and THX1138) showed up, followed by three more on Star Wars (quote heavy thanks to interviews with Mark Hamill), all posted on the main page and all within a twenty-four hour period.
I've been swimming in Star Wars news.
While I don't normally consider this a bad thing it's interesting to see how heavily the tail is wagging the rest of the dog, with respect to CNN; I don't know if they're being paid to be a corporate shill, or if their tech department doing website updates has a strong love of this movie -- whatever the case, it's had better coverage than Iraq this week.
Things were going pretty well, and we left the systems on overnight. When we signed back on in the morning, my machine was fine; his machine had been compromised -- in grand style. We found the following:
The main data on the system was not compromised and while there was a minor virus infection, for the most part things were not touched. I should say, "things were not touched that we could detect" -- they could have taken a full copy of his HD for all I know, not that anything important was on there (it was just a gaming box).
He probably wouldn't have noticed the attack itself except that his processor wasn't all that hot and he was on a 10M/sec network card; between the heavy compiling and the constant sending of virii system performance had dropped noticably.
The fix?
Unplug from the internet, make sure no data on the box is needed, and format it back to the stone age. It isn't like reinstalls take a long time. (Backups are your friends.
You're not "free" to spraypaint the Statue a different color, either. That's also a "restriction" on your "liberty" and possibly an infringement upon your First Amendment rights to free speech and expression.
America has always been the land of the free, with some caveats.
To be fair, the article also doesn't say the prints are NOT being run through the FBI database. It's taken as read that this isn't occuring because there is no overt, explicit mention that it's happening.
Which is curious, as the same article details that these lockers are also in use at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and at Chicago's Union Station. If there were a publicly usable system that I would tie into the NCIC, this would be it - lockers can be used to store explosive devices, after all.
Boy howdy, I'm wondering how this product was designed. While using a fingerprint-based system is entirely convenient and obviates the need for keys and coinage exchange units (and hey, it's tricky to lose a finger!), I start to wonder if there's anything else the equipment is conveniently tied into on the back-end.
One really nice use would be to have chemical detectors and similar rigged up with the lockers to prevent someone from storing a bomb inside them -- and hey, if you find a prohibited item that needs to be turned over to law enforcement, you already have a fingerprint to run against the National Crime Information Computer (NCIC, the same one used for background checks for security clearances and the like).
Seeing as how similar biometric systems are already in place for people with visas entering the country, why not tie it all together into a system that Homeland Defense can monitor? Ooh, I get all tingly thinking about the implications here.
So... anyone have any additional information on the company that did the manufacturing for this system, or any ideas on what the internal architecture is like? Inquiring privacy-minded people want to know. ^^
Try the government and/or the military.
:)
No, really; as an independant contractor.
One of the interesting things about working as a defense contrator is that there is work everywhere in the world at present; doesn't matter where, we've got an investment, and that investment involves computers somewhere along the line. (Yes, even in Kuala Lumpor - even when it's disguised as France.)
Where there are computers there will be admins - there must always be admins - if only for the same reasons that there are doctors, lawyers, mechanics, and others of our ilk. On the whole it's stuff that reasonable people could figure out and generally take care of on their own. Sometimes they'd need a specialist for a particularly hairy problem. However, one of the defining traits of life is that people don't have time to be generalists -- we're a highly specialized society (even if some of those specialties are along the lines of the service industries). Admins exist to take care of what people can't or won't, and in theory to do a better job than they could without training.
This is doubly or triply true for the government and military. More amusing still is if you're doing defense work that requires a clearance. If you can find someone to sponsor you, and if you can pass the investigation (takes a semi boring life, or lots of honesty), by all means do. Most people who go for a clearance won't get one - or will eventually have it revoked.
Law of supply and demand, friends:
High demand + automatically limited supply = higher cost for the goods in question. (i.e., higher salary.)
Get your Top Secret and you've basically written your meal ticket for life; just lay off committing felony crimes and you're probably good to go.
heh. If you want to see the TCO for something increase dramatically, all you have to do is provide support for it over a long enough span of time that people feel comfortable in ceasing to learn.
:(
Perhaps one of the reasons that Linux has an inherently low TCO is because the users who have installed it, configured it, compiled it and made it run on their toaster have taken the time to read the docs. They're familiar with the hardware, the apps they run, the OS under the apps they run, and viola -- things run nicely.
But in the Windows world? Everybody has a support line to call for absolutely everything. Almost every product offered has some form or another of support to it, to an extent that the people who are using these systems no longer have to use any mindshare whatsoever to get their stuff working. At your place of business a PC tech is waiting to coddle you. At your home you can call your ISP, call your PC vendor, call your OS manufacturer, call your application developer, call everybody in order to figure out what's wrong with the system. The suggestions they give you to fix it may seem arcane and strange, but if you follow them assiduously you have a 30 to 40% chance of getting things working... and if it doesn't work out, you can always call back 'til you get ahold of someone who really knows what's going on.
Small wonder the TCO is so incredible. I can understand that worms have an impact on this number - hell, I've logged plenty of overtime hours securing machines against the latest potential threat (the Army is rather proactive in locking things down against explotation - with good reason). I've spent countless nights securing our systems against worms that use ports that are not open on our firewall. I've spent hours updating virus signatures and restoring systems lost because a user thought it was a fine idea to open up an encrypted zip file they received from someone they didn't know. I've spent many a fine weekend and holiday at work restoring people's email because they deleted without consideration for the fact that bringing it back takes serious time.
My site would have far lower TCO if the users exercised a small, trifling fraction of their potential intelligence. Am I overestimating the abilities of the average human, here?
sigh... *Lots* of things go into TCO. My overtime, paid to fix these kinds of problems, is a significant part of it at the site I work for. End of rant.
If you jab it, it feels hard and your finger won't go in very far. You can pour it slowly, but you can grab a clump of it, almost as if it's a solid. This kind of fluid is called dilatant. It becomes more viscous when agitated or compressed.
:)
The slow blade penetrates the shield!
It's a fine day when life becomes more like Dune.
The original longer-form of the quote is,
:)
"The meek shall inherit what's left of the Earth after we're done with it."
If they want to stay true to the storyline, they'll make a point of ignoring her sex until the very end of the film. It won't make a bit of difference to the fanboys who are already mentally queueing up to see it, but hey, it'd be true to the series.
;)
If the movie ends in an hour and a half, do we get to see Samus in a bikini?
"Residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account," Google's Gmail says in its privacy and terms of use sections.
/you/, but not to /us/.
:)
/that/ different in Europe?
snip
"If a person deletes an email, he should be confident that email is actually deleted," said Maurice Westerling, co-founder of Bits of Freedom, another privacy interest group, based in the Netherlands.
MS Exchange has settings for the email retention period. If you delete something from your mailbox in Outlook, then empty your Trash folder, it's effectively gone from your view and you've no way to retrieve it. It is however stored in Exchange for as long as the administrators wish to hang onto it (and that "deleted" email is, indeed, backed up and restorable).
If you shift-delete an object out of your Inbox, using that wonderful permanent-kill technique that the tech-savvy thinks protects and anonymizes their email... it's stored for the email retention period listed by the sysadmins, is backed up, and is restorable. It looks very dead to
(fyi, the only real way around this is to edit your Outlook client so that you can get the Recover Deleted Items option on every object in your inbox [as opposed to just the Recycle Bin], then habitually view -- and purge -- that information on a schedule that is more frequent than the one used for our backups. That'd work.)
Anyway, the shorter point is, this kind of thing happens. The reason is happens is liability. If a criminal organization is using Google's GMail system for planning a robbery, or if a terrorist group decides they want to attack rail systems in Europe and wants to do so by using random public terminals to sign into email accounts that someone else hosts, it's a problem. If law enforcement comes looking and Google has to say "Oh, sorry - we respect privacy so much that we absolutely and permanently delete all traces of all email the second you touch the delete object!", it will not be a pleasant thing. The investigators will not be happy.
Alternate question; do you really think that your email is permanently gone from Yahoo! and Hotmail?
Do you really think they can't restore to an arbitrary point in time?
Do you think they wouldn't turn that info over to law enforcement in a heartbeat if a court order came down?
Are the rules
The First Amendment (for those who aren't familiar and insist on going with hearsay instead of knowing their history) reads:
Shortened, `Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.`
Here's a good site detailing how libel laws work. Two key provisions involved that you should keep in mind:
1) Libel requires that your statements be false. Be careful about carrying forth rumor and hearsay as truth, but know also that just because something is unverified doesn't make it untrue. If you're using that as your rallying cry, though, be prepared to offer up hard evidence for your statements; the burden of proof certainly won't lie with someone claiming defamation.
2) Libel requires that Fault be proved.
You must be intentionally malicious or negligent (the latter may be far easier to prove). If you're quoting a reputable source, they'd be guilty of libel - you may only be guilty of foolishness. However, if you're reposting unverified info via your "personal web site" that logs a few hundred thousand visitors each week, don't expect that provision to save you either.
The linked site actually has a good rundown on what constitutes a defense, and what's not a defense - it might help to familiarize yourself with the rules before you opt to post flamebait on your heavily trafficed website (as you are a de facto news source and publisher).
Here's another handy link for y'all - Computer Information Systems Law and System Operator Liability Revisited, dated Sept. 1994. It was written more for the forum/BBS era, but has some useful insights into legality.
Is this kind of thing routine?
:)
Given the first +5 Informative FUD troll on this thread it's clear we're in full conspiracy theory mode, so let's trot out Echelon again.
It's theorized that there exists a gigantic electronic SIGINT monitoring network, known as Echelon, which is operated across the Sort Of Free World by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other allies. The system is supposed to be powerful enough to monitor every phonecall, every email, every satellite communication, and handle *all of it simultaneously*. Pattern matching and keyword analysis are done by computers in realtime. Echelon can also make toast, predict stock market trends, and runs it's own psychic hotline.
On a more serious note, how routine that kind of thing might be requires a more careful analysis of the laws of the United Kingdom, which are not the same as the laws of the United States. I don't know what the rules are over there governing the implicit privacy of information.
If you want a cell phone that can give your location to authorities, buy one with a built-in GPS receiver that transmits your location. There was never any legitimate need to upgrade the infrastructure to allow for tracking any cell user at will.
As far as I was aware, that infrastructure was in place from the very beginning.
In order for a cellphone company to properly give you service, they have to arrange for a series of cell towers over a wide range of space. These towers provide your signal. For uninterrupted service, the service-areas of each tower must overlap to a degree.
In order to bill you properly when you are roaming, the towers must be able to check your location against your home calling areas (for people with plans where this still exists). Which tower you're using at any given time is a matter of record.
If the argument is that they don't have your location down to a 10-meter square block, you might wanna guess again; by watching the way that your phone moves through the spheres of influence each tower generates it becomes mathematically trivial to triangulate your position with a precision that GPS would find envious.
If you're drudging out the `Navy shot down TWA 800` theory I'm tempted to classify you as a troll. Please don't bother frightening Slashdot with your Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt lines about the lack of privacy we now have post 9/11 -- you never had it to begin with.