An open-source developer calls an open-source driver "tainted crap", and recommend a commercial alternative instead. Obviously, Oracle has something to do with that, but I'm a bit curious: are there any good open-source (or even free) virtualization software, aside from VirtualBox? Or might it be an area where FOSS just doesn't work very well (there are a few, IMHO).
Gee, that sounds cheap. And all for a "crown"...Hell of a financial justification there...especially considering by the time they upgrade the last rack of blades, someone else will have plans for a bigger, faster one.
Welcome to the wonderful world of technological progress, brought to you today by the Law of Moore!
But seriously, RFID isn't secure against dedicated attackers. The fact that this vulnerability was known way back when the cards were first made leads me to suspect that they didn't create protection against it then so that they could sell their newer cards now, and save a few bucks at the time. Conveniently, the newer cards are even backwards compatible. Cynical? Maybe, but after recent compromises in the security industry (Sony, DigiNotar), nothing would surprise me. Least of all a company selling a defective-by-design security card to make some extra money.
Hmmm, so.50 caliber BMG rifles and everything on this list is legal (sort of), yet 60 year-old Korean-war era rifles aren't? Has anyone in the Obama administration studied logic? Or for that matter, have any kind of common sense at all? These things are far less dangerous that dozens of weapons I can legally buy in nearly any gun store. "They clearly were used as military guns..." oh FFS, so were muskets, you wanna make those illegal too?
Social networks tend to accumulate momentum, and fairly slowly. Facebook has a ton of it right now, and Google+ has very little. It's not just in number of users, but in the habits of those users. People are used to Facebook. It'll probably take a year or so for Google+ to start taking off. And you don't really "lose" users, once signed up people always have the option of returning, especially with most of those people already having Gmail accounts.
Also, many people were probably scared off by all the FUD surrounding the pseudonym issue. Once people calm down over that, usage will most likely rise. In any case, we won't know if G+ will succeed or not for at least a year, I would say. Anyone who thought Facebook would be abandoned overnight really needs to learn how the Internet works. It is fickle, yes, but it also has huge inertia, because of the number of people involved.
When the President is re-elected, it will be because he's still far more charismatic and interesting than any current Republican contenders. I don't like his politics but I like him more than Romney, Perry, et al.
Are you honestly saying that the Presidential campaign is nothing but a popularity contest which has nothing to do with the merit of their respective political views or actions? I am... totally not shocked, actually. The presidential campaign has become more or less just a popularity contest. Although I'm pretty sure that increasing his appeal to voters is precisely the point of this campaign.
Which is somewhat sad. The only reason data mining like this is useful is if you intend to modify your political basis towards what is popular. In other words, you aren't electing someone based on what their views are, you elect them based on what they think your views are. Frankly, I would rather politicians actually just came out and said what their views are... but apparently, that can't happen anymore. No, politicians will now be elected based on how well they can adapt themselves to what Internet commentators say. That seems to me to be the point of Obama's campaign tools, anyways. Unfortunately, this does not make for good presidential candidates. Good presidents tend to know themselves what needs to be done and do what they think is right, not what the masses think. Because honestly? The masses are idiots, no matter how intelligent they may be individually.
I suspect the equipment was for forgery purposes as they also found things like blank credit cards, and I'm guessing you can't get credit-card writers off the shelf. Actually, lemme check... no, doesn't look like Amazon sells any, just the readers. After finding out Amazon sells uranium, I really wouldn't be shocked.
I agree that renting a jet is kind of stupid. I'm more surprised that, with 111 people involved, they only stole $13 million. Seems like a lot, but it's only about $117,000 per person, which considering the risk is pretty low reward. Most crime is, though, I guess.
The Million Monkeys project went viral, but not in the cool, apocalyptic way. The Million Monkeys project went viral starting on October 25, 2011 and went into full swing on October 26, 2011
It's amazing what a few million time-traveling monkeys can do.
Schools are high security facilities now, haven't you heard? Some schools have better security than many prisons, and that attitude is only spreading. Bars on doors and windows, metal detectors, locker searches, I think some schools will even have strip searches on occasion (I remember hearing about just such a story on/. a while back).
In 7 at least you can go to "Resource Monitor" under the task manager Performance pane, and windows has a detailed breakdown of the way it is using Ram (Hardware Reserved/ In Use / Modified / Standby (i.e. cache) / Free). The last two add to be "available". It also shows how much on-disk cache you are using. Interestingly, 8 isn't using all my memory for pre-fetching any more (it was when i upgraded from 2GB to 6GB).
HBSS isn't an antivirus program, it is a network security suite that has virus scanners as an optional component (looking at Wikipedia) and is the security system I mentioned in my post. They may or may not have had antivirus software running on the individual computers. My guess is they didn't, but TFA doesn't say and I might be wrong. Generally, antivirus shouldn't have been needed on the computers, and would drain resources and/or may cause technical problems, which is why I say they probably didn't. Or the virus might not be in their signatures, which would explain the infection.
This seems possible (it was actually what I was thinking might be happening when I saw the headline), but it would be challenging, to say the least. The computers that control the drones are air-gapped from the Internet, meaning you couldn't control the system in real time, unless you could gain direct control over the drone itself (which might also be possible, but I hope not). Far more likely, you could mess up the drones, by for instance making them crash, but then we just stop flying them and rebuild our systems.
And this is assuming they can get the technical information required to influence the drones and not just load up a game of solitary. Something like Stuxnet takes a lot of work and access to equipment and technical manuals. So, someone like the Chinese or Russians could possibly do it, if we ever go to war, but I doubt very much the Afghans or others we are actually using the drones on have the ability to pull something like that off. And in full-scale war (such as against the Chinese) drones won't be nearly as effective. They're pretty easy to shoot down. So while obviously the US needs to beef up it's security, I doubt this problem will effect their ability to control the drones.
Much worse IMO is how many of the drones send video feed to ground soldiers unencrypted. And yes, the terrorists did intercept it. Absolute mind-fuckingly stupid. People who made the decision not to encrypt that should never be allowed near a weapon design again. I realize it adds technical difficulty... but you deal with that, you don't do really really stupid shit like that.
When they say the drones were infected, what they mean is that the computers controlling the drones (located in the US and which are, apparently, running Windows...) were infected with a keylogger, probably spread through flash drives. Whether this actually compromises security at all is unknown (keyloggers generally assume you are connected to the Internet, which these computers aren't.) They don't have much security on the drone computers because they aren't hooked up to the Internet, and they would (apparently) rather educate their users than bother with antivirus, for whatever reason (although they do have a security system on the network which detected the virus. I would imagine it also should have stopped the virus).
The thing is: profiling works, to some degree. People who are nervous often are hiding something. Every police officer will profile the people around them, and they should. That is how they reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. There are lots of people out there, and since you can't really be expected to casually see the criminals in the act, you need to profile them in order to pick out people who are likely to commit crimes. The TSA is actually an example of what happens when you don't: you end up strip searching 90 year old ladies taking away their walkers (profiling works in the other direction too.)
Of course they can always peg you for some minor crime: they always could. An automated system doesn't change that. The trick is to look for people who are about to commit a major crime, and catch them in the act (but preferably before committing a major crime.) Police officers will (on the whole: some are just assholes) look to do this too. Since you can't prove they were, say, about to commit murder, waiting until you can (such as when they pull out the knife) is better than booking them for some random crime they'll get a tiny slap on the wrist for. And a minority-report style precrime conviction system won't happen, at least for a while (but we'll see I guess).
With that said, the chances of this system actually working properly are just about 0%. If it did, it could potentially be useful. The potential for abuse isn't really any higher than with police officers now, since they'll be the ones to actually the arresting anyways.
Yes. The lowest common denominator represents the largest amount of cash. For music this is hardly a problem, it is pretty cheap and easy to record your own album and get it out there.
For a movie, however, the budget required to satisfy consumers in the US is pretty high, which makes indie titles more or less a no go. Not to mention marketing or actually getting it into theaters. Unfortunately, the investment required also means studios don't want to innovate: they want to go with a tried and true formula that is guaranteed to make them lots of money. What we need is more good directors who are wealthy/ powerful enough to create whatever projects they want. In other words, more Christopher Nolan's or Joss Whedon's: people with resources and connections and the will to innovate. Even they often get shut down, but they can get pretty far.
Probably this. However, I do wonder if perhaps the magnetization of the joists isn't a cause, but rather an effect of whatever is messing with their equipment. No one seems to have even considered this possibility (although I do admit I have no real idea what would cause something like that.) Maybe they live next to a transformer or something?
More likely, their drives are probably just failing over time. It looks like this contractor was rather cheap (there are a lot of other problems with the house as well, apparently), and that could easily cause problems with their phone lines, and improper electrical wiring could cause both the magnetized joists and CRT fluctuations. So, it seems likely they are blaming one thing for what is a multitude of factors. People do this all the time, especially when they don't want to admit they messed up in choosing a cheap-ass contractor.
Slashdot commentators would complain if safety-rail makers funded a PSA about not leaning over safety rails. Milk is good for you (well, unless you're lactose intolerant) and so are flu shots (although the latter are far less important for individuals, herd immunity against the flu is very valuable). Corporations sponsoring PSAs about things that are good for you does not show that government is an arm of the corporations... nor in fact is that even true. If it really was, you would know it.
What is true, and has been for about 200 years now, is that many politicians are in the pockets of corporations / the mafia / private interests. Actually, you can make that 2000 years. Ancient Rome (the Republic) was run largely by the rich (partially by design, I should point out). In point of fact, so was the early US, to some degree (again, partly by design: the rich tend to be better educated and are far more likely to know what the hell is actually going on. For proof of this: just browse Internet comments for a few seconds. The average person is politically uneducated, and I actually include myself in that.)
So many decisions of governments are based on what corporation want, and this is not entirely a bad thing. Corporations are, after all, what employs just about everyone, and produces just about every single thing you own (even very large parts of Linux were designed by corporations). Obviously, it goes over the line quite a lot, and corruption is pretty rampant, but again, nothing new there, it has been that way in every government in history and will be for the rest of time. Calling government an arm of the corporations? Also goes over the line.
Well, considering that I was wondering if you could do precisely this (and if not, why the hell not) with the Llano, I don't think this will be considered "leaking" any information. Well, that and they demoed a scaling programming language for using multiple GPUs several months ago, which is basically a similar idea. AMD could make massive inroads on Intel if they can get such a system working well.
I can always tell which political side proposes something in the summary by looking at the comments. If it was done by Republicans, there are a good 100+ comments lambasting them as pro-corporate anti-freedom bigots. If Democrats did it, no one mentions their party affiliation. Also, the Republican stories tend to get a lot more comments. As if Democrats are all intelligent, freedom-lovers and anyone who isn't can't be a Democrat.
The truth tends to be that most politicians, whatever they say, tend to seek to extend the power of the government, since that gives those who run it (i.e. them) more power (or money from lobbyists, money being a kind of power). This is why we have a Constitution, to prevent them from going beyond a certain point. Unfortunately, the US Constitution tends to get completely ignored these days, or bypassed by reading in new "powers" that really aren't there and never were.
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An open-source developer calls an open-source driver "tainted crap", and recommend a commercial alternative instead. Obviously, Oracle has something to do with that, but I'm a bit curious: are there any good open-source (or even free) virtualization software, aside from VirtualBox? Or might it be an area where FOSS just doesn't work very well (there are a few, IMHO).
Gee, that sounds cheap. And all for a "crown"...Hell of a financial justification there...especially considering by the time they upgrade the last rack of blades, someone else will have plans for a bigger, faster one.
Welcome to the wonderful world of technological progress, brought to you today by the Law of Moore!
Kraken is a common way to refer to giant cephalapods, distinguishing them from non-giant ones easily.
But seriously, RFID isn't secure against dedicated attackers. The fact that this vulnerability was known way back when the cards were first made leads me to suspect that they didn't create protection against it then so that they could sell their newer cards now, and save a few bucks at the time. Conveniently, the newer cards are even backwards compatible. Cynical? Maybe, but after recent compromises in the security industry (Sony, DigiNotar), nothing would surprise me. Least of all a company selling a defective-by-design security card to make some extra money.
Of course I'm posting anonymous because you know the Slashdot moderators, say anything not derogatory toward W and they basically froth at the mouth.
I'm pretty sure most of them start out frothing.
Hmmm, so .50 caliber BMG rifles and everything on this list is legal (sort of), yet 60 year-old Korean-war era rifles aren't? Has anyone in the Obama administration studied logic? Or for that matter, have any kind of common sense at all? These things are far less dangerous that dozens of weapons I can legally buy in nearly any gun store. "They clearly were used as military guns..." oh FFS, so were muskets, you wanna make those illegal too?
Sadly, they probably would.
Social networks tend to accumulate momentum, and fairly slowly. Facebook has a ton of it right now, and Google+ has very little. It's not just in number of users, but in the habits of those users. People are used to Facebook. It'll probably take a year or so for Google+ to start taking off. And you don't really "lose" users, once signed up people always have the option of returning, especially with most of those people already having Gmail accounts.
Also, many people were probably scared off by all the FUD surrounding the pseudonym issue. Once people calm down over that, usage will most likely rise. In any case, we won't know if G+ will succeed or not for at least a year, I would say. Anyone who thought Facebook would be abandoned overnight really needs to learn how the Internet works. It is fickle, yes, but it also has huge inertia, because of the number of people involved.
When the President is re-elected, it will be because he's still far more charismatic and interesting than any current Republican contenders. I don't like his politics but I like him more than Romney, Perry, et al.
Are you honestly saying that the Presidential campaign is nothing but a popularity contest which has nothing to do with the merit of their respective political views or actions? I am... totally not shocked, actually. The presidential campaign has become more or less just a popularity contest. Although I'm pretty sure that increasing his appeal to voters is precisely the point of this campaign.
Which is somewhat sad. The only reason data mining like this is useful is if you intend to modify your political basis towards what is popular. In other words, you aren't electing someone based on what their views are, you elect them based on what they think your views are. Frankly, I would rather politicians actually just came out and said what their views are... but apparently, that can't happen anymore. No, politicians will now be elected based on how well they can adapt themselves to what Internet commentators say. That seems to me to be the point of Obama's campaign tools, anyways. Unfortunately, this does not make for good presidential candidates. Good presidents tend to know themselves what needs to be done and do what they think is right, not what the masses think. Because honestly? The masses are idiots, no matter how intelligent they may be individually.
I suspect the equipment was for forgery purposes as they also found things like blank credit cards, and I'm guessing you can't get credit-card writers off the shelf. Actually, lemme check... no, doesn't look like Amazon sells any, just the readers. After finding out Amazon sells uranium, I really wouldn't be shocked.
I agree that renting a jet is kind of stupid. I'm more surprised that, with 111 people involved, they only stole $13 million. Seems like a lot, but it's only about $117,000 per person, which considering the risk is pretty low reward. Most crime is, though, I guess.
The Million Monkeys project went viral, but not in the cool, apocalyptic way. The Million Monkeys project went viral starting on October 25, 2011 and went into full swing on October 26, 2011
It's amazing what a few million time-traveling monkeys can do.
Schools are high security facilities now, haven't you heard? Some schools have better security than many prisons, and that attitude is only spreading. Bars on doors and windows, metal detectors, locker searches, I think some schools will even have strip searches on occasion (I remember hearing about just such a story on /. a while back).
In 7 at least you can go to "Resource Monitor" under the task manager Performance pane, and windows has a detailed breakdown of the way it is using Ram (Hardware Reserved/ In Use / Modified / Standby (i.e. cache) / Free). The last two add to be "available". It also shows how much on-disk cache you are using. Interestingly, 8 isn't using all my memory for pre-fetching any more (it was when i upgraded from 2GB to 6GB).
HBSS isn't an antivirus program, it is a network security suite that has virus scanners as an optional component (looking at Wikipedia) and is the security system I mentioned in my post. They may or may not have had antivirus software running on the individual computers. My guess is they didn't, but TFA doesn't say and I might be wrong. Generally, antivirus shouldn't have been needed on the computers, and would drain resources and/or may cause technical problems, which is why I say they probably didn't. Or the virus might not be in their signatures, which would explain the infection.
This seems possible (it was actually what I was thinking might be happening when I saw the headline), but it would be challenging, to say the least. The computers that control the drones are air-gapped from the Internet, meaning you couldn't control the system in real time, unless you could gain direct control over the drone itself (which might also be possible, but I hope not). Far more likely, you could mess up the drones, by for instance making them crash, but then we just stop flying them and rebuild our systems.
And this is assuming they can get the technical information required to influence the drones and not just load up a game of solitary. Something like Stuxnet takes a lot of work and access to equipment and technical manuals. So, someone like the Chinese or Russians could possibly do it, if we ever go to war, but I doubt very much the Afghans or others we are actually using the drones on have the ability to pull something like that off. And in full-scale war (such as against the Chinese) drones won't be nearly as effective. They're pretty easy to shoot down. So while obviously the US needs to beef up it's security, I doubt this problem will effect their ability to control the drones.
Much worse IMO is how many of the drones send video feed to ground soldiers unencrypted. And yes, the terrorists did intercept it. Absolute mind-fuckingly stupid. People who made the decision not to encrypt that should never be allowed near a weapon design again. I realize it adds technical difficulty... but you deal with that, you don't do really really stupid shit like that.
Ah, the famous quantum claim. "It was working fine before everyone else started looking at it!" Usually preceded by a "Hey guys, check this out!"
When they say the drones were infected, what they mean is that the computers controlling the drones (located in the US and which are, apparently, running Windows...) were infected with a keylogger, probably spread through flash drives. Whether this actually compromises security at all is unknown (keyloggers generally assume you are connected to the Internet, which these computers aren't.) They don't have much security on the drone computers because they aren't hooked up to the Internet, and they would (apparently) rather educate their users than bother with antivirus, for whatever reason (although they do have a security system on the network which detected the virus. I would imagine it also should have stopped the virus).
The thing is: profiling works, to some degree. People who are nervous often are hiding something. Every police officer will profile the people around them, and they should. That is how they reduce the signal-to-noise ratio. There are lots of people out there, and since you can't really be expected to casually see the criminals in the act, you need to profile them in order to pick out people who are likely to commit crimes. The TSA is actually an example of what happens when you don't: you end up strip searching 90 year old ladies taking away their walkers (profiling works in the other direction too.)
Of course they can always peg you for some minor crime: they always could. An automated system doesn't change that. The trick is to look for people who are about to commit a major crime, and catch them in the act (but preferably before committing a major crime.) Police officers will (on the whole: some are just assholes) look to do this too. Since you can't prove they were, say, about to commit murder, waiting until you can (such as when they pull out the knife) is better than booking them for some random crime they'll get a tiny slap on the wrist for. And a minority-report style precrime conviction system won't happen, at least for a while (but we'll see I guess).
With that said, the chances of this system actually working properly are just about 0%. If it did, it could potentially be useful. The potential for abuse isn't really any higher than with police officers now, since they'll be the ones to actually the arresting anyways.
Hmm, TFA is wrong too, but maybe they meant it debuts on Netflix.
Yes. The lowest common denominator represents the largest amount of cash. For music this is hardly a problem, it is pretty cheap and easy to record your own album and get it out there.
For a movie, however, the budget required to satisfy consumers in the US is pretty high, which makes indie titles more or less a no go. Not to mention marketing or actually getting it into theaters. Unfortunately, the investment required also means studios don't want to innovate: they want to go with a tried and true formula that is guaranteed to make them lots of money. What we need is more good directors who are wealthy/ powerful enough to create whatever projects they want. In other words, more Christopher Nolan's or Joss Whedon's: people with resources and connections and the will to innovate. Even they often get shut down, but they can get pretty far.
Probably this. However, I do wonder if perhaps the magnetization of the joists isn't a cause, but rather an effect of whatever is messing with their equipment. No one seems to have even considered this possibility (although I do admit I have no real idea what would cause something like that.) Maybe they live next to a transformer or something?
More likely, their drives are probably just failing over time. It looks like this contractor was rather cheap (there are a lot of other problems with the house as well, apparently), and that could easily cause problems with their phone lines, and improper electrical wiring could cause both the magnetized joists and CRT fluctuations. So, it seems likely they are blaming one thing for what is a multitude of factors. People do this all the time, especially when they don't want to admit they messed up in choosing a cheap-ass contractor.
Holy crap that's a lot of money!
On a completely unrelated note: does anyone know if Microsoft is hiring?
Looks like someone is trying to curry favor with the mods.
Slashdot commentators would complain if safety-rail makers funded a PSA about not leaning over safety rails. Milk is good for you (well, unless you're lactose intolerant) and so are flu shots (although the latter are far less important for individuals, herd immunity against the flu is very valuable). Corporations sponsoring PSAs about things that are good for you does not show that government is an arm of the corporations... nor in fact is that even true. If it really was, you would know it.
What is true, and has been for about 200 years now, is that many politicians are in the pockets of corporations / the mafia / private interests. Actually, you can make that 2000 years. Ancient Rome (the Republic) was run largely by the rich (partially by design, I should point out). In point of fact, so was the early US, to some degree (again, partly by design: the rich tend to be better educated and are far more likely to know what the hell is actually going on. For proof of this: just browse Internet comments for a few seconds. The average person is politically uneducated, and I actually include myself in that.)
So many decisions of governments are based on what corporation want, and this is not entirely a bad thing. Corporations are, after all, what employs just about everyone, and produces just about every single thing you own (even very large parts of Linux were designed by corporations). Obviously, it goes over the line quite a lot, and corruption is pretty rampant, but again, nothing new there, it has been that way in every government in history and will be for the rest of time. Calling government an arm of the corporations? Also goes over the line.
Well, considering that I was wondering if you could do precisely this (and if not, why the hell not) with the Llano, I don't think this will be considered "leaking" any information. Well, that and they demoed a scaling programming language for using multiple GPUs several months ago, which is basically a similar idea. AMD could make massive inroads on Intel if they can get such a system working well.
I can always tell which political side proposes something in the summary by looking at the comments. If it was done by Republicans, there are a good 100+ comments lambasting them as pro-corporate anti-freedom bigots. If Democrats did it, no one mentions their party affiliation. Also, the Republican stories tend to get a lot more comments. As if Democrats are all intelligent, freedom-lovers and anyone who isn't can't be a Democrat.
The truth tends to be that most politicians, whatever they say, tend to seek to extend the power of the government, since that gives those who run it (i.e. them) more power (or money from lobbyists, money being a kind of power). This is why we have a Constitution, to prevent them from going beyond a certain point. Unfortunately, the US Constitution tends to get completely ignored these days, or bypassed by reading in new "powers" that really aren't there and never were.