if anyone ever thought that a military system would not have the ability to be disabled for all but military use they are horribly mistaken. the lives of the service men on the ground and the sucess of a mission is much more important than some businesses using it for navigation.
If anyone ever thought that the US can ever afford to turn off GPS, they are horribly mistaken.
"Businesses using it for navigation" isn't as trivial a thing as it sounds. Those "businesses" are airlines an other air carriers, and "navigation" is actually "getting on the ground without crashing."
GPS systems are already approved for flight in instrument conditions (i.e. zero visibility), including approaches to land. Furthermore, the FAA has announced that it is slowly phasing out its ground-based navigation systems (VORs and NDBs) and replacing it with GPS. While the ground-based systems will probably never be completely gone, GPS is becoming increasingly important for keeping planes on course and out of the trees.
Disabling (or even rendering less effective) civilian GPS systems would mean potentially crashing US civilian aircraft. It'd be like 9/11 all over again, except this time the government would be directly (and verifiably) responsible. No US president would dare authorize such a course of action without some serious advance notice to the nation to avoid disaster.
And if the US is faced with a crisis of such magnitude that that it would put such an operation into effect, it could just as easily add "shoot down N of the Galileo satellites" to the TODO list.
I'd say pour the work into Mozilla first
on
Eazel On The Ropes
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· Score: 5
And here's why: I'm a real fan of Eazel. I think that GNOME needs a bit of work in the UI department, and I think that Eazel has done a wonderful job of making the environment more user-friendly and aesthetically appealing. (heaven forbid on a -nix box! *grin*)
Every time Eazel releases a new version of Nautilus, I gleefully download and install the latest and greatest patch or release hoping to have come across something that I can actually use. Every time, I'm disappointed. Here's why.
It's not Eazel's fault. I believe that their part of the application is pretty solid. From what I've seen, it's that dang Mozilla browser that's embedded that renders the application unusable. Without fail (and I've run it on a myriad of boxen with fairly heterogeneous configurations), within a few hours something will snap and Nautilus will choke, requiring me to switch to a text console and remove it with kill. Considering the fact that I've had similar luck with many of the Mozilla releases, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Eazel and placing the blame on Mozilla instead, though I admit to having never set out to research the phenomenon.
Conclusion: Eazel has a good thing going for them. They're making my favorite desktop more enjoyable. Mozilla also has a good thing going for them. Finally a browser that adhires to the standards set by the W3C. But in my opinion, Mozilla needs far more work than Eazel does, and Eazel can't survive without a bulletproof Mozilla (it's embedded... there's no way around it). Therefore, I say that before we can hope for Eazel to fulfill all our hopes and dreams, we're going to have to finally build a browser that rivals IE in stability.
I don't think such an incident is going to change things much. There's already an infinite number of monkeys writing an infinite number or trojans. By the sheer number of them out there, chances are some are going to be pro-Linux, some pro-BeOS, and some pro-Palm OS. Who cares? No one pays attention to these people anyway.
If anything, I think that the net admins might use this attack as an opportunity to bring to the attention of the suits that run the company the fact that WINDOWS IS NOT SECURE by any strech of the immagination. Linux isn't perfect, but it's many degrees of magnitude more secure/stable than M$ in most catagories.
This incident is nothing but a humorous spit in the ocean, in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone ever thought that the US can ever afford to turn off GPS, they are horribly mistaken.
"Businesses using it for navigation" isn't as trivial a thing as it sounds. Those "businesses" are airlines an other air carriers, and "navigation" is actually "getting on the ground without crashing."
GPS systems are already approved for flight in instrument conditions (i.e. zero visibility), including approaches to land. Furthermore, the FAA has announced that it is slowly phasing out its ground-based navigation systems (VORs and NDBs) and replacing it with GPS. While the ground-based systems will probably never be completely gone, GPS is becoming increasingly important for keeping planes on course and out of the trees.
Disabling (or even rendering less effective) civilian GPS systems would mean potentially crashing US civilian aircraft. It'd be like 9/11 all over again, except this time the government would be directly (and verifiably) responsible. No US president would dare authorize such a course of action without some serious advance notice to the nation to avoid disaster.
And if the US is faced with a crisis of such magnitude that that it would put such an operation into effect, it could just as easily add "shoot down N of the Galileo satellites" to the TODO list.
Every time Eazel releases a new version of Nautilus, I gleefully download and install the latest and greatest patch or release hoping to have come across something that I can actually use. Every time, I'm disappointed. Here's why.
It's not Eazel's fault. I believe that their part of the application is pretty solid. From what I've seen, it's that dang Mozilla browser that's embedded that renders the application unusable. Without fail (and I've run it on a myriad of boxen with fairly heterogeneous configurations), within a few hours something will snap and Nautilus will choke, requiring me to switch to a text console and remove it with kill. Considering the fact that I've had similar luck with many of the Mozilla releases, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to Eazel and placing the blame on Mozilla instead, though I admit to having never set out to research the phenomenon.
Conclusion: Eazel has a good thing going for them. They're making my favorite desktop more enjoyable. Mozilla also has a good thing going for them. Finally a browser that adhires to the standards set by the W3C. But in my opinion, Mozilla needs far more work than Eazel does, and Eazel can't survive without a bulletproof Mozilla (it's embedded... there's no way around it). Therefore, I say that before we can hope for Eazel to fulfill all our hopes and dreams, we're going to have to finally build a browser that rivals IE in stability.
If anything, I think that the net admins might use this attack as an opportunity to bring to the attention of the suits that run the company the fact that WINDOWS IS NOT SECURE by any strech of the immagination. Linux isn't perfect, but it's many degrees of magnitude more secure/stable than M$ in most catagories.
This incident is nothing but a humorous spit in the ocean, in my opinion.