Of course the NSA knows what an act of war is, in cyber terms. They just don't want it defined as such because they themselves are no doubt performing those very acts on perceived threats and allies alike and yes, on American citizens as well.
Pretty bloody easy to define the difference between hacking and act of war. Any hacking attack you can simply divert by cutting the connection is not an act of war. A major electro magnetic pulse generated by a thermonuclear war head is an act of war.
For the idiots at the NSA, permanent damage versus repaired disruption. They just need to ask the buddies at the CIA when it comes to their idea of torture, permanent harm equals torture non permanent harm according to them, based upon them being a bunch of sick psychopath sadists, does not equal torture.
So if you ain't using explosives on digital infrastructure it ain't war. No matter how badly behaved the NSA has been, their acts have not quite crossed the bounds of an act of war. Somehow I guess this will be another example of American exceptionalism and when the US does it, it is not an act of war and when any other country does it, it is an act of war and the US must spend another billion dollars on the US military industrial complex per incident or so the lobbyists say.
So if country XYZ was actively attempting to retarget and launch our nuclear weapons towards our own cities this would not be an act of war just because we could stop it?
In the same way then, would country XYZ firing nuclear weapons at us not be an act of war just because we could (imagine) shoot them out of the sky with laser satellites (or whatever)?
Not sure I'd want this on my own weapon but I could see it being useful for giving / selling firearms to possibly temporary allies that we arm to deal with today's enemy that might become tomorrow's enemy (or just leave the stuff laying around for today's enemy to use).
That depends where the cache goes. If it's at the endpoint, you're right. But this allows the cache to be much closer. In the cell tower. In the office router.
You could watch youtube video on a moving train with this. As soon as one person tries to watch the viral video of the day the train's router will store it, so it'll keep working for all even through tunnels and dropouts.
Assuming that the train's caching device could get it to start with - and even then only until the cache is full and gets overwritten by other material while at the same time you also cache a bunch of material that no one else on the train is interested in.
... it is just not realistic to learn another language to be able to support them...
It is quite common in Europe to speak two or three languages fluently. If there are 2 - 3 engineers who speak 2 - 3 languages fluently then most of the major languages are covered.
By the way, it is often just a stereotype that all people are drunk here or there. Brazil economy grew 2.5% in 2013, it is certainly achieved by hard working people.
I live in Europe and I speak two languages fluently but I still believe it's completely impractical to learn all the languages when supporting a global deployment of systems or network devices. If you had to interface with users, then I would agree - but that isn't the case here.
Anyway, if you read the article the problems they encountered had nothing to do with language: "Unfortunately, this was during Carnival. The local phone company did not answer, and the local employees did not answer their mobile phones. After two days we got someone from the phone company on the line — and they were too drunk to understand us."
Multicast is fine when every reciever wants the same thing at the same time. Good for broadcasting live events. Not very good for things like youtube, where millions of people will want to watch a video but very few of them simutainously, and those that do may want to pause it at any moment and resume playback hours later.
Agreed but improving the caching mechanism isn't going to remove the requirement of distributing the content, be it simultaneous (with mcast) or just in time. Either way the content still needs to be transmitted and either way it will still consume bandwidth and will still have some type of overhead.
So what it really comes down to is:
- how efficient a caching mechanism
- what reduction in overhead
We agree it's more likely to run in parallel - I see it more as an overlay to IP rather than a replacement.
I immediately thought of the 1st episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where 99.9% of their modern military force was rendered inoperable. No. Thank. You.
The best "kill switch" is to kill the idea of leaving a ton of advanced military hardware in the hands of less-than-solid governments in the first place (no matter how much defense contractors want to sell their wares). You'd think we would have learned from Iran and the F-14s we left in Iran in the late 1970s as the Islamic Revolution took place.
Why not have kill switches in anything sold to those less than stable governments, while our own gear remains without kill switches?
a 35% tax on all offshore buys using a credit card
With that kind of tariff how long till all out of country purchases are made with bitcoin?
In which case such purchases would then be considered tax evasion.
Don't forget that you also need to fund the bitcoin account to start with, which is going to leave traces unless you can fund it out of country to start with, especially with governments going after cash for bitcoin exchangers.
Argentina was forced by some creditors to sign agreements giving jurisdiction to US courts because the creditors did not trust Argentinian courts. Argentina bartered their sovereignty on the issue for better credit terms, now they are crying because they are being held to those terms by a court that is not corrupt and subject to their own control.
This whole deal shows the world that: 1. If you're selling bonds and plan on ripping everybody off, do not mess with US courts because they are not scared of your shithole government and they will confiscate your "sovereign" asse(t)s 2. If you're buying bonds from risky countries, do so under a stable jurisdiction like the US otherwise you can be completely screwed by some populist who thinks you're a criminal because you bought what they were voluntarily selling
Not corrupt? What do you call a legal system where, for example, banks who trade with terrorist organizations and drug cartels are allowed to pay (huge) penalties instead of people going to jail?
It looks like this would be more likely to be an overlay to TCP/IP than to replace it, with the idea of 'protected' content distribution being a driver.
Of course, as with any other content distribution mechanism, there will no doubt be ways to copy it once it reaches your living room (or wherever).
I could totally see the two networks running simultaneously. It's completely accurate that TCP/IP sucks for mass content delivery; it's gigantic waste of bandwidth. And for point-to-point interaction this protocol would be massively inefficient.
But why can the two protocols not run on top of the same Layer 2 infrastructure?
Not being able to communicate with people you are hired to support is most certainly your problem. If she had no viable method to do the job, why did she accept it? That makes her pretty stupid from the start.
If you want to talk about practical, it started long before someone mentioned learning the language.
Do you think its okay for someone to claim they are a Java developer without knowing a single bit of Java?
What in the world are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?
Let me help you: "Unfortunately, this was during Carnival. The local phone company did not answer, and the local employees did not answer their mobile phones. After two days we got someone from the phone company on the line — and they were too drunk to understand us."
Then at least she could avoid blaming a carnival, and concentrate more on her linguistic skills. Or hiring Portuguese speaking engineers instead of non technical interpreters to run a computer system in Brazil.
Many people around the world speak English at different levels. Sometimes it is just Globish or an Airport English. But Brazil is an enormous country where people do speak Portuguese. No way around it.
Or maybe the people in Brazil were out partying instead of working. Were you there somehow and you have information that lets you assume that the author is actually incorrect in their statement?
Anyway. I support networks in many countries around the world including Brazil and it is just not realistic to learn another language to be able to support them.
Perhaps if it were my primary or only customer base, maybe. But you have no idea that this is the case with the author.
If you ban [ insert weapon here ] testing then only the countries that don't sign up for or completely disregard the ban will have [ insert weapon here ].
If I recall correctly, this doesn't detect stingray, because stingray looks like any other cell tower.
It seems that stingray is an imsi-catcher so unless there's a way for law enforcement to disable the notification (which I said may be the case in my original post) I think it should work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
The whole idea that there is no actual Russian invasion falls a little flat when there are captured and dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and the official Russian line is that those soldiers, apparently with all of their military equipment and supplies, voluntarily invaded Ukraine on their vacations. You would think that Russia wouldn't want their soldiers taking tanks and artillery on vacation with them, but maybe they just do things a little differently in Russia.
By the way, it's just "Ukraine", not "the Ukraine". I would expect 8 former intelligence officials to know that, or at least be consistent in their so-called "memo".
The only question is - can Putin visualize the worst case scenario at all or has he completely lost his mind?
He's just confident that the west will let him have Ukraine. Unfortunately, I don't think he's wrong. Will be interesting to see if we ever draw a line somewhere and then what we do when he crosses it...
He knows where the line is. It's the border of countries that are already part of Nato and/or the EU. Invading any of those he knows there would be an immediate reaction.
Unfortunately, short of that it seems he'll be able to do what he wants.
Forget about MAD or Deterrence. The only MADness here is Putin. If he does what he says what he will do (and he seems to rarely back down from anything due to his massive ego), most of the First World countries are going to immediately join forces to invade and permanently occupy Russia. This is obviously much harder than it sounds, and with lots of radioactive fallout there will be far more civilian causalities than in any other war ever imagined. The only question is - can Putin visualize the worst case scenario at all or has he completely lost his mind?
No this is not going to happen. Russia would no doubt actually use those nukes before allowing themselves to be taken over.
Short of Putin coming out and saying, "I'm going to bomb Ukraine with nuclear missiles during the next two weeks"... it was about as threatening as a head of state can get.
This is the problem with a closed circle jerk news system.
The threat isn't to use nukes on Ukraine. The threat is to keep the weak leaders of the west from doing anything substantial in the defense of Ukraine.
Not that there seems to be much chance of that at this point. Even the strongest response from NATO is ridiculously weak. A 'spearhead' force of a few thousand soldiers. Yeah. That's going to stop Russia.
The correct answers from the leaders of the west should be exactly as you said - that America (and others) are also nuclear capable.
The balance of power is out of balance and Putin is taking advantage of it to grab a country. If he wants the cold war back then give it back to him. Total economic sanctions and travel restrictions for a start and then seize all Russian held property and funds outside of Russia and we'll see how long his people continue to back his aggression.
Will it be inconvenient for the west? Yes. Is it necessary to stop Putin? It seems to be.
"right on top of" is an American English colloquialism meaning "really close by", usually in terms of a pursuit, but sometimes with stationary objects.
Yep but it could also mean, you know, like "actually on top of".
The fact that these towers are found next to military bases speaks volumes.
The military needs to there own version of everything to make sure things work in times of national crisis, emergency, or security. They need to have their own infrastructure to insure communications. They need to control their communications around bases and know who is saying or doing what. They need to be able to anticipate attacks. Nobody should have any expectation of privacy on or next to a military base.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this.
RTFA and it says the towers were found ON not NEAR the bases.
I also have enough confidence in the military that they have entire books of regulations covering things like radio towers being anywhere near a base.
Looks like Apple has built in detection from IOS 5 (though being Apple it might well have an off switch for legal intercept type applications): http://9to5mac.com/2011/06/07/...
Anyone interested in a halfway decently written adventure story built on the basis of the Whole Yella blowing might look into the Ashfall trilogy: http://www.amazon.com/Ashfall-...
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the NSA knows what an act of war is, in cyber terms. They just don't want it defined as such because they themselves are no doubt performing those very acts on perceived threats and allies alike and yes, on American citizens as well.
Pretty bloody easy to define the difference between hacking and act of war. Any hacking attack you can simply divert by cutting the connection is not an act of war. A major electro magnetic pulse generated by a thermonuclear war head is an act of war.
For the idiots at the NSA, permanent damage versus repaired disruption. They just need to ask the buddies at the CIA when it comes to their idea of torture, permanent harm equals torture non permanent harm according to them, based upon them being a bunch of sick psychopath sadists, does not equal torture.
So if you ain't using explosives on digital infrastructure it ain't war. No matter how badly behaved the NSA has been, their acts have not quite crossed the bounds of an act of war. Somehow I guess this will be another example of American exceptionalism and when the US does it, it is not an act of war and when any other country does it, it is an act of war and the US must spend another billion dollars on the US military industrial complex per incident or so the lobbyists say.
So if country XYZ was actively attempting to retarget and launch our nuclear weapons towards our own cities this would not be an act of war just because we could stop it?
In the same way then, would country XYZ firing nuclear weapons at us not be an act of war just because we could (imagine) shoot them out of the sky with laser satellites (or whatever)?
Not sure I'd want this on my own weapon but I could see it being useful for giving / selling firearms to possibly temporary allies that we arm to deal with today's enemy that might become tomorrow's enemy (or just leave the stuff laying around for today's enemy to use).
Probably Comcast cares because NSA told them they should.
Or maybe they're thinking that content (ie netflix) can be tunneled and bypass whatever controls they have in place.
That depends where the cache goes. If it's at the endpoint, you're right. But this allows the cache to be much closer. In the cell tower. In the office router.
You could watch youtube video on a moving train with this. As soon as one person tries to watch the viral video of the day the train's router will store it, so it'll keep working for all even through tunnels and dropouts.
Assuming that the train's caching device could get it to start with - and even then only until the cache is full and gets overwritten by other material while at the same time you also cache a bunch of material that no one else on the train is interested in.
... it is just not realistic to learn another language to be able to support them ...
It is quite common in Europe to speak two or three languages fluently. If there are 2 - 3 engineers who speak 2 - 3 languages fluently then most of the major languages are covered.
By the way, it is often just a stereotype that all people are drunk here or there. Brazil economy grew 2.5% in 2013, it is certainly achieved by hard working people.
I live in Europe and I speak two languages fluently but I still believe it's completely impractical to learn all the languages when supporting a global deployment of systems or network devices. If you had to interface with users, then I would agree - but that isn't the case here.
Anyway, if you read the article the problems they encountered had nothing to do with language:
"Unfortunately, this was during Carnival. The local phone company did not answer, and the local employees did not answer their mobile phones. After two days we got someone from the phone company on the line — and they were too drunk to understand us."
Multicast is fine when every reciever wants the same thing at the same time. Good for broadcasting live events. Not very good for things like youtube, where millions of people will want to watch a video but very few of them simutainously, and those that do may want to pause it at any moment and resume playback hours later.
Agreed but improving the caching mechanism isn't going to remove the requirement of distributing the content, be it simultaneous (with mcast) or just in time. Either way the content still needs to be transmitted and either way it will still consume bandwidth and will still have some type of overhead.
So what it really comes down to is:
- how efficient a caching mechanism
- what reduction in overhead
We agree it's more likely to run in parallel - I see it more as an overlay to IP rather than a replacement.
I immediately thought of the 1st episode of the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where 99.9% of their modern military force was rendered inoperable. No. Thank. You.
The best "kill switch" is to kill the idea of leaving a ton of advanced military hardware in the hands of less-than-solid governments in the first place (no matter how much defense contractors want to sell their wares). You'd think we would have learned from Iran and the F-14s we left in Iran in the late 1970s as the Islamic Revolution took place.
Why not have kill switches in anything sold to those less than stable governments, while our own gear remains without kill switches?
a 35% tax on all offshore buys using a credit card
With that kind of tariff how long till all out of country purchases are made with bitcoin?
In which case such purchases would then be considered tax evasion.
Don't forget that you also need to fund the bitcoin account to start with, which is going to leave traces unless you can fund it out of country to start with, especially with governments going after cash for bitcoin exchangers.
Argentina was forced by some creditors to sign agreements giving jurisdiction to US courts because the creditors did not trust Argentinian courts. Argentina bartered their sovereignty on the issue for better credit terms, now they are crying because they are being held to those terms by a court that is not corrupt and subject to their own control.
This whole deal shows the world that:
1. If you're selling bonds and plan on ripping everybody off, do not mess with US courts because they are not scared of your shithole government and they will confiscate your "sovereign" asse(t)s
2. If you're buying bonds from risky countries, do so under a stable jurisdiction like the US otherwise you can be completely screwed by some populist who thinks you're a criminal because you bought what they were voluntarily selling
Not corrupt? What do you call a legal system where, for example, banks who trade with terrorist organizations and drug cartels are allowed to pay (huge) penalties instead of people going to jail?
It looks like this would be more likely to be an overlay to TCP/IP than to replace it, with the idea of 'protected' content distribution being a driver.
Of course, as with any other content distribution mechanism, there will no doubt be ways to copy it once it reaches your living room (or wherever).
I could totally see the two networks running simultaneously. It's completely accurate that TCP/IP sucks for mass content delivery; it's gigantic waste of bandwidth. And for point-to-point interaction this protocol would be massively inefficient.
But why can the two protocols not run on top of the same Layer 2 infrastructure?
Or use, you know, like multicast or something...?
Not being able to communicate with people you are hired to support is most certainly your problem. If she had no viable method to do the job, why did she accept it? That makes her pretty stupid from the start.
If you want to talk about practical, it started long before someone mentioned learning the language.
Do you think its okay for someone to claim they are a Java developer without knowing a single bit of Java?
What in the world are you talking about? Did you even bother to read the article?
Let me help you:
"Unfortunately, this was during Carnival. The local phone company did not answer, and the local employees did not answer their mobile phones. After two days we got someone from the phone company on the line — and they were too drunk to understand us."
Where in that is there a language problem?
Then at least she could avoid blaming a carnival, and concentrate more on her linguistic skills. Or hiring Portuguese speaking engineers instead of non technical interpreters to run a computer system in Brazil.
Many people around the world speak English at different levels. Sometimes it is just Globish or an Airport English. But Brazil is an enormous country where people do speak Portuguese. No way around it.
Or maybe the people in Brazil were out partying instead of working. Were you there somehow and you have information that lets you assume that the author is actually incorrect in their statement?
Anyway. I support networks in many countries around the world including Brazil and it is just not realistic to learn another language to be able to support them.
Perhaps if it were my primary or only customer base, maybe. But you have no idea that this is the case with the author.
If you ban [ insert weapon here ] testing then only the countries that don't sign up for or completely disregard the ban will have [ insert weapon here ].
She works with a whole system in Brazil via an non technical interpreter? Did it ever occur to her to learn Portuguese language?
Sure that's practical, along with learning all the languages of all the offices one has to support globally.
If I recall correctly, this doesn't detect stingray, because stingray looks like any other cell tower.
It seems that stingray is an imsi-catcher so unless there's a way for law enforcement to disable the notification (which I said may be the case in my original post) I think it should work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Do you have any more specific info on it?
The whole idea that there is no actual Russian invasion falls a little flat when there are captured and dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine, and the official Russian line is that those soldiers, apparently with all of their military equipment and supplies, voluntarily invaded Ukraine on their vacations. You would think that Russia wouldn't want their soldiers taking tanks and artillery on vacation with them, but maybe they just do things a little differently in Russia.
By the way, it's just "Ukraine", not "the Ukraine". I would expect 8 former intelligence officials to know that, or at least be consistent in their so-called "memo".
It's not actually incorrect to say 'The Ukraine'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
The only question is - can Putin visualize the worst case scenario at all or has he completely lost his mind?
He's just confident that the west will let him have Ukraine. Unfortunately, I don't think he's wrong. Will be interesting to see if we ever draw a line somewhere and then what we do when he crosses it...
He knows where the line is. It's the border of countries that are already part of Nato and/or the EU. Invading any of those he knows there would be an immediate reaction.
Unfortunately, short of that it seems he'll be able to do what he wants.
Forget about MAD or Deterrence. The only MADness here is Putin. If he does what he says what he will do (and he seems to rarely back down from anything due to his massive ego), most of the First World countries are going to immediately join forces to invade and permanently occupy Russia. This is obviously much harder than it sounds, and with lots of radioactive fallout there will be far more civilian causalities than in any other war ever imagined. The only question is - can Putin visualize the worst case scenario at all or has he completely lost his mind?
No this is not going to happen. Russia would no doubt actually use those nukes before allowing themselves to be taken over.
Short of Putin coming out and saying, "I'm going to bomb Ukraine with nuclear missiles during the next two weeks"... it was about as threatening as a head of state can get.
This is the problem with a closed circle jerk news system.
The threat isn't to use nukes on Ukraine. The threat is to keep the weak leaders of the west from doing anything substantial in the defense of Ukraine.
Not that there seems to be much chance of that at this point. Even the strongest response from NATO is ridiculously weak. A 'spearhead' force of a few thousand soldiers. Yeah. That's going to stop Russia.
The correct answers from the leaders of the west should be exactly as you said - that America (and others) are also nuclear capable.
The balance of power is out of balance and Putin is taking advantage of it to grab a country. If he wants the cold war back then give it back to him. Total economic sanctions and travel restrictions for a start and then seize all Russian held property and funds outside of Russia and we'll see how long his people continue to back his aggression.
Will it be inconvenient for the west? Yes. Is it necessary to stop Putin? It seems to be.
"right on top of" is an American English colloquialism meaning "really close by", usually in terms of a pursuit, but sometimes with stationary objects.
Yep but it could also mean, you know, like "actually on top of".
The fact that these towers are found next to military bases speaks volumes.
The military needs to there own version of everything to make sure things work in times of national crisis, emergency, or security. They need to have their own infrastructure to insure communications. They need to control their communications around bases and know who is saying or doing what. They need to be able to anticipate attacks. Nobody should have any expectation of privacy on or next to a military base.
Quite frankly, I'm glad to see this.
RTFA and it says the towers were found ON not NEAR the bases.
I also have enough confidence in the military that they have entire books of regulations covering things like radio towers being anywhere near a base.
Looks like Apple has built in detection from IOS 5 (though being Apple it might well have an off switch for legal intercept type applications):
http://9to5mac.com/2011/06/07/...
And it looks like some developers have gotten together to do something for Android with a project called Android IMSI-Catcher Detector (AIMSICD)
https://secupwn.github.io/Andr...
http://seclists.org/fulldisclo...
Has anyone tried this?
Anyone interested in a halfway decently written adventure story built on the basis of the Whole Yella blowing might look into the Ashfall trilogy:
http://www.amazon.com/Ashfall-...