Not obvious, but the 200 million figure wasn't plucked from thin air. From deep in the article:
The team analysed the isotopes of the elements lead and neodymium to place the age of a sample of a FAN at 4.36 billion years. This figure is significantly younger than earlier estimates of the Moon’s age that range to nearly as old as the age of the solar system itself at 4.567 billion years.
The difference in those figures gives us the number quoted in the summary. So, while this team apparently didn't think the 4.567 billion figure was reasonable, at least their findings suggest the moon is 200 million years younger than somebody previously thought.
Teachers also cannot have a nonwork-related website that allows exclusive access with a current or former student.
I sure hope the text of the law is clearer on this, but sounds like once you've been a student, you can never talk to your teachers one-on-one, even after you've grown up and become a teacher at the same school.
...the company's "remaining award fee" would be reduced by $15 million because of the fuel line problem.
Perhaps not enough to balance the costs of delayed implementation, but not nothing, either. And almost certainly exactly what the contract authors expected. Now, as to whether military contracts like these are structured to properly protect the nation, that's another question. But the US government is obliged to use its monopsony wisely so as to prevent total collapse of the suppliers.
Perhaps this gets mentioned daily when these exposures happen, but I guess I just don't understand why cleartext passwords are being stored server side anyway. I'm no security researcher, but surely one-way hash algorithms and password validation techniques have advanced to the point where exposure of the raw password data can't immediately lead to the original password being compromised? Are the authors of these large scale systems unaware or lazy, or are they actually dealing with a problem that's beyond my comprehension and can't actually be solved with current technologies?
I only dispose of trash in my own personal incinerator and landfill in the backyard. Sure, it's dirty, smelly, time-consuming, inefficient, annoying to my neighbors and family, and has virtually no effect on the global trash situation, but it discourages me from generating trash. At least until I become as numbed to the problem of trash disposal as the professionals I used to pay to do that job.
Seriously, though, if you want to solve a problem that human nature walks us right up to, don't bother experimenting with changing human nature; at best it's a waste of time. Try instead to lure us with something better: invent Mr. Fusion if trash is your bogeyman. For animal suffering, maybe you should look at cheap and tasty artificially replicated meat.
The press release is pretty hard to decipher, but the phrase "Bad guys... using encryption to avoid the HTTPS protocol to bypass filters" makes it appear that the real goal is to block the use of SSL on non-standard ports, so I think the DPI is actually being used to detect SSL, not to open it up and read the encrypted data.
All his neighbors? You mean everyone on the Internet? World's way smaller when your definition of harm (e.g. spam) can be accomplished without leaving home.
I don't have a modem, but I do have a USB-attached multi-function printer/scanner that includes fax capability, which I'm pretty sure a piece of malware could trick into calling any number it wanted (might be difficult to keep it from turning on the annoying speaker as it dials). Which reminds me... I should cancel my plans to get a network-attached version that would be vulnerable to such an attack without having to infect any of the PCs on the network; just breaching the firewall or wireless encryption would be enough.
In thirty years it will all fit in your pocket and cost $19.99.
In 30 years, Alex Trebek will be 100 years old and perhaps replaced by a computer himself. The hard part will be replacing the army or producers and researchers that generate the answer/question pairs, as well as the judges that determine whether a contestant's answer is correct/complete enough. Perhaps 30 years will be long enough for a roomful of computers to do those jobs and we can look forward to a computer generated game pitting computers against each other to compete for Quatloos, running thousands or millions of games an hour. Who'd tune in for that?
DBAs always seem to want root for some reason or other... with apologies to A Few Good Men: SysAdmin: You want the authority? DBA: I think I'm entitled. SysAdmin: You want the authority?! DBA: I want the root! SysAdmin: You can't handle the root!
The garage door opener is labeled as "brilliant" by the article, but frankly I was hoping for something more inspired than networking to a PC-controlled garage door. A real hack would be to modify the firmware so that the cellphone antenna would send the right rolling code directly to the existing radio receiver in the garage door opener. Then there's no need for special "don't accidentally open the garage door if I'm in Japan" type safeties in the software.
As ever, my primary concern is user privacy. There are a variety of controls in place that govern the maintenance and use of call logs that the phone company keeps. None of those laws would apply to logs of phone number lookups. I would expect privacy to eventually settle to about the level (and consistency) you see for library checkout history, but without starting a conversation, it'll just end up as one more bit of data the phone company call sell about you (assuming you have the same company for phone and internet).
In many non-democratic states established in the last half century they call that "counter revolutionary activity." Not something I'm eager to see in the USA.
There's a stream the bad guys would dearly love to tap into.
And giving the information to which governments will guarantee the "bad guys" don't get it? Does no one recognize that all these entities play for keeps and telling them about a vulnerability before anyone else is like throwing a bloodied sheep into a tank full of sharks? The sharks may get scratched up a bit, but they're used to it; the sheep will just get slaughtered.
On the internet, where there's a will there's a way.
If you accept that postulate, I've got a corollary: On the internet, whoever has the strongest will gets his way. The "evade content censorship" goal has no inherent superiority over the "censor content" goal. Whichever goal has the most (or most potent) resources applied can still win out.
Heard once (no reference available) that the subjective experience of a normal modern lifetime is half over by the time you reach 20. So the last 60(?) years seem as long as the first 20. Wonder if it's a linear decay or something more exotic... with only one (admittedly unsubstantiated) data point, it's impossible to know.
Just goes to show that the US generally values the ability to convince people that something is true over the ability to discover that something is true. Time and again we see that marketing, fear mongering, and legal tactics overwhelm reasoned arguments and hard work. Not that I would have the laws simply torn down to get at this devil (see A Man For All Seasons). We must take care in our approach to reform that we don't find ourselves adrift in a worse sea of argument and arbitrary assignment of winners and losers.
The big breakdown in my mind regarding the concession of obvious points is that there is an unknown amount of effort that goes into assessing a point as obvious or non-obvious. If digging deep enough into case law turns an obvious point on its head, it may be a worthwhile search, and I might not want to concede the point unless it some of that research had been done. More often than we would like, common sense and the law are at odds over things that otherwise seem quite simple.
OK, so it's 1/15 the price of steno paper. But with no ability to interact with a computer, I can think of something even cheaper and just as useful for grocery lists, doodling, practicing ABCs, and playing tic-tac-toe: a $3 whiteboard.
Slashdot Mirror
Not obvious, but the 200 million figure wasn't plucked from thin air. From deep in the article:
The difference in those figures gives us the number quoted in the summary. So, while this team apparently didn't think the 4.567 billion figure was reasonable, at least their findings suggest the moon is 200 million years younger than somebody previously thought.
That's SAFACT, Jack!
I sure hope the text of the law is clearer on this, but sounds like once you've been a student, you can never talk to your teachers one-on-one, even after you've grown up and become a teacher at the same school.
From the article:
Perhaps not enough to balance the costs of delayed implementation, but not nothing, either. And almost certainly exactly what the contract authors expected. Now, as to whether military contracts like these are structured to properly protect the nation, that's another question. But the US government is obliged to use its monopsony wisely so as to prevent total collapse of the suppliers.
Perhaps this gets mentioned daily when these exposures happen, but I guess I just don't understand why cleartext passwords are being stored server side anyway. I'm no security researcher, but surely one-way hash algorithms and password validation techniques have advanced to the point where exposure of the raw password data can't immediately lead to the original password being compromised? Are the authors of these large scale systems unaware or lazy, or are they actually dealing with a problem that's beyond my comprehension and can't actually be solved with current technologies?
I only dispose of trash in my own personal incinerator and landfill in the backyard. Sure, it's dirty, smelly, time-consuming, inefficient, annoying to my neighbors and family, and has virtually no effect on the global trash situation, but it discourages me from generating trash. At least until I become as numbed to the problem of trash disposal as the professionals I used to pay to do that job.
Seriously, though, if you want to solve a problem that human nature walks us right up to, don't bother experimenting with changing human nature; at best it's a waste of time. Try instead to lure us with something better: invent Mr. Fusion if trash is your bogeyman. For animal suffering, maybe you should look at cheap and tasty artificially replicated meat.
Had to be said.
The press release is pretty hard to decipher, but the phrase "Bad guys ... using encryption to avoid the HTTPS protocol to bypass filters" makes it appear that the real goal is to block the use of SSL on non-standard ports, so I think the DPI is actually being used to detect SSL, not to open it up and read the encrypted data.
Right there at 1:30. No getting around it.
All his neighbors? You mean everyone on the Internet? World's way smaller when your definition of harm (e.g. spam) can be accomplished without leaving home.
I don't have a modem, but I do have a USB-attached multi-function printer/scanner that includes fax capability, which I'm pretty sure a piece of malware could trick into calling any number it wanted (might be difficult to keep it from turning on the annoying speaker as it dials). Which reminds me... I should cancel my plans to get a network-attached version that would be vulnerable to such an attack without having to infect any of the PCs on the network; just breaching the firewall or wireless encryption would be enough.
In 30 years, Alex Trebek will be 100 years old and perhaps replaced by a computer himself. The hard part will be replacing the army or producers and researchers that generate the answer/question pairs, as well as the judges that determine whether a contestant's answer is correct/complete enough. Perhaps 30 years will be long enough for a roomful of computers to do those jobs and we can look forward to a computer generated game pitting computers against each other to compete for Quatloos, running thousands or millions of games an hour. Who'd tune in for that?
DBAs always seem to want root for some reason or other... with apologies to A Few Good Men:
SysAdmin: You want the authority?
DBA: I think I'm entitled.
SysAdmin: You want the authority?!
DBA: I want the root!
SysAdmin: You can't handle the root!
The garage door opener is labeled as "brilliant" by the article, but frankly I was hoping for something more inspired than networking to a PC-controlled garage door. A real hack would be to modify the firmware so that the cellphone antenna would send the right rolling code directly to the existing radio receiver in the garage door opener. Then there's no need for special "don't accidentally open the garage door if I'm in Japan" type safeties in the software.
As ever, my primary concern is user privacy. There are a variety of controls in place that govern the maintenance and use of call logs that the phone company keeps. None of those laws would apply to logs of phone number lookups. I would expect privacy to eventually settle to about the level (and consistency) you see for library checkout history, but without starting a conversation, it'll just end up as one more bit of data the phone company call sell about you (assuming you have the same company for phone and internet).
Have you got anything without fraud?
Well, there's fraud, egg, sausage, and fraud; that's not got much fraud in it.
I don't want ANY fraud!
In many non-democratic states established in the last half century they call that "counter revolutionary activity." Not something I'm eager to see in the USA.
And giving the information to which governments will guarantee the "bad guys" don't get it? Does no one recognize that all these entities play for keeps and telling them about a vulnerability before anyone else is like throwing a bloodied sheep into a tank full of sharks? The sharks may get scratched up a bit, but they're used to it; the sheep will just get slaughtered.
If you accept that postulate, I've got a corollary: On the internet, whoever has the strongest will gets his way. The "evade content censorship" goal has no inherent superiority over the "censor content" goal. Whichever goal has the most (or most potent) resources applied can still win out.
Heard once (no reference available) that the subjective experience of a normal modern lifetime is half over by the time you reach 20. So the last 60(?) years seem as long as the first 20. Wonder if it's a linear decay or something more exotic... with only one (admittedly unsubstantiated) data point, it's impossible to know.
Next up: no more anonymous voting. As Attorney-General Michael Atkinson might say:
Just goes to show that the US generally values the ability to convince people that something is true over the ability to discover that something is true. Time and again we see that marketing, fear mongering, and legal tactics overwhelm reasoned arguments and hard work. Not that I would have the laws simply torn down to get at this devil (see A Man For All Seasons). We must take care in our approach to reform that we don't find ourselves adrift in a worse sea of argument and arbitrary assignment of winners and losers.
The big breakdown in my mind regarding the concession of obvious points is that there is an unknown amount of effort that goes into assessing a point as obvious or non-obvious. If digging deep enough into case law turns an obvious point on its head, it may be a worthwhile search, and I might not want to concede the point unless it some of that research had been done. More often than we would like, common sense and the law are at odds over things that otherwise seem quite simple.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but buggy software is also human error.
OK, so it's 1/15 the price of steno paper. But with no ability to interact with a computer, I can think of something even cheaper and just as useful for grocery lists, doodling, practicing ABCs, and playing tic-tac-toe: a $3 whiteboard.