Really? GPU's are being used more and more for more than just graphics processing. Many interesting parallel processing problems are being off loaded to GPU's where they are number crunching on hundreds of cores much faster than can be done on your main CPU. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html for one such set of libraries for Nvidia cards.
So WHO CARES if you cannot see the difference in what gets displayed. There is a LOT more going on.
Where it is technically possible to transfer data between computers using audio signals (Ham radio operators do this all the time on HF), there is certainly not an opening for a virus to infect some other machine using just audio signals. Certainly there is no way to do this when a machine is booting, unless you have already put the necessary code in the BIOS to initialize the audio hardware, enable it, and start listening or playing audio. Not going to happen.
My guess is that the person making the report either is making this up, or spread the virus himself though thumb drives, optical media he recorded himself or through previous infections of the boot sector of his hard drives. Sort of like the guy I knew who kept moving the disk pack from drive to drive when it wouldn't boot from the previous one. Problem was the first one had a head crash and he ruined 4 drives by putting a bad pack into them... Sometimes what you *think* is happening isn't really what's going on.
So.... I'm going to have to see (uh... hear) it myself or I'm calling this myth busted.
First, Cell towers are built with directional antennas pointed DOWN towards the ground. They are intended to only cover a small area of real estate and the antennas they use are designed to direct most of the transmit and receive sensitivity to this area. Urban cells are usually fairly small and use very directional antennas pointed down, while rural cell cites can be miles across and use antennas with wider patterns which are pointed out more, but still down. When you are in a commercial airplane, you are going to be above the coverage volume of your average cell tower pretty quick, or you are going to be a LONG way away from the tower out on the horizon. Cell phones and towers just don't work at those distances. So, you might get signal near the ground, at cruse it's unlikely you will see anything.
Second.. On 9/11 the calls where from a service known as Airfone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone. This used similar technology as cell phones to handle airborne phone calls. Only in this case the cell towers serviced a volume of airspace but they didn't use the same spectrum as consumer cell phone service so your cell phone doesn't work.
China has a pretty good set of firewalls, even though they are more for controlling data accessed by their people, than keep others out..
But.. More to the point. The USA has the capacity because we have developed said capacity over many decades of working on the technology. We built it, so we use it? Is it OUR fault that others don't protect their information as well as they could? It is decidedly easier to *protect* information than it is to obtain information that's protected, so is it our fault you don't protect it well enough? Encrypt it better, don't transmit it over public networks, keep better physical control of your stuff... So, for instance, if you don't want somebody to take your picture of you in your skivvies, stay out of the front yard until fully dressed. Or if you don't want your identity stolen, don't put it in an E-mail that's not encrypted.
So I disagree that "Everybody does it" is a canard. It is a valid reason to do monitoring. That way you may find out about your enemies capacity to monitor you, know what he's up to, what his contingency plans are, who makes the decisions and most importantly how he expects you to act. It's about being able to control the situation without having to resort to overwhelming force where you put lots of people into harms way. Which is WHY we've spent trillions of dollars on this capacity, why we should keep spending on it and why we should keep using it.
In war, you need to have every advantage you can, and take advantage of every opportunity to gain an advantage when possible.
Whatever Snowden did to bottle up his stolen cache of documents, it has apparently kept the entire US security apparatus at bay.
"US Security apparatus At bay"? How so?
As I see it, they have stopped him from having access to any additional materials to leak, effectively confined him to living in Russian hands and although additional documents are trickling out, his time in the limelight is almost over. As I see it, he is alive today only because the US security apparatus decided to let him live for now, and the Russians are only going to be interested in him for as long as they can keep documents trickling out that they haven't yet seen.
Where Snowden did control part of this whole fiasco at the start, he is in large part just a pawn now, has been since he left Hong Kong. I don't see any way for him to become relevant again, which is probably why he's still alive. The Russians may or may not keep him. If they don't, he will likely be captured and returned to the US for trial. If they do decide to keep him, it's only because it would be another jab at the US and might serve to get NSA funding reigned in some. The Russians do give a flying flip about privacy, monitoring phone calls or other things the NSA might do, they just want to make the NSA/CIA as least capable as they can and Snowden gives them a little bit of leverage.
The real question is would Snowden's capture and trial or the grant of his asylum claim serve their purposes the best. You can bet he'll be in US hands within hours if they want the trial. In the mean time, they just wait and watch the NSA get defunded.
How you see it depends on what side of the firewall you are on.
Generally, I figure that everybody that's thinking about the social and political world is going to be involved in collecting as much information as they can. They'd be stupid not too. If there is information you don't want others to know then it is YOUR responsibility to protect your information. If somebody manages to get such information from you, it's your fault.
That the NSA monitors world leaders phone calls should come as no surprise to anybody (foreign or domestic). We have done this sort of thing for centuries and have grown quite good at intercepting and deciphering communications of all sorts. Other countries are doing the same thing and many of them are quite capable of gathering information too. Some of these countries are friendly some are not. So, if you don't want your information compromised? Hide it better.
This is not to say anything about how STUPID it is to get caught spying on your friends. Never, ever, get caught spying on your friends should be in the top 10 most important rules of foreign relations. Not that you don't do it sometimes, but that you DON'T get caught doing it, ever. Also, figure that your friends are spying on you too and take the steps necessary to protect yourself and deal with it. So when you boil down all the common sense here, it means that spying on friends happens from time to time, but it should be rare. It should also NEVER be discovered.
So, he's going to be able to get into the cool clubs, pay for the beautiful women's drinks, take them to the ballet and then to McDonald's for a whole wheat bun Big Mac on a Tech Support Technician's pay?
I don't think so... Unless tech support pays a LOT more there than it does here, only the trip to McDonald's will be happening, and I'm guessing he will be without an escort.
Just not all that true. The same Russians that denied extradition of Snowden from the transit lounge at the Moscow airport are not likely to agree to have him arrested and sent to the USA for tax evasion.
I was hoping he was going to have to learn the Russian phrase for "Would you like fries with that comrade?" Not that tech support isn't punishment too, it just pays better.
His English is likely pretty good, so maybe phone support would be a good gig for him.
De-regulation basically is carte blanche to screw over your customers and not be accountable to anybody.
Not exactly true. If you deregulate an industry, you also make it easier for new businesses to popup and thrive which where not possible before. Assuming your regulations didn't create a single monolithic company that provides an essential service, when you remove regulations the capitalist forces will drive efficiency and competition will drive prices down.
So... What REALLY is the effect of deregulation? Better, more efficient delivery at reduced prices with more companies competing for your business.
Is ANYTHING in NYC cheap? Just about everything runs at huge mark up in NYC for some reason or another. Internet access is no exception.
Outside of urban areas, the infrastructure costs for internet access is much higher, but INSIDE urban areas, the costs of labor, taxes, licenses, access fees all drive up the prices.
In crude ways we've been able to do this for decades. I've seen video a guy who was unable to move from the chest down climb stairs using his own legs. It was from back in the 80's. Wasn't capable of any kind of fine motor control and it would be easy to knock him over, but between the braces and the electrodes that where implanted it worked. I guess they are able to move up the circuit to the spine and implant electrodes there? So? How's this help very much?
Now if you can transfer signals from above the damaged spine to below, THAT would be something to see.
Until you personally have inspected the source code for everything down to the BIOS and microcode in your hardware there will always be a chance there is a backdoor.
BUT, it all depends on how far away you go with your trust. Don't trust the application? Build from source. Don't trust the build chain? Build it from source. Don't trust your OS? Build it from source using your built compiler... On and on, until you have literally built everything yourself. The good news is that the farther you get away from the application, the less likely there will be a issue with trusting so the lower risk it becomes. But if you simply MUST then you are going to be building a lot of stuff.
As I understand the companies position on this... You are about correct. They had specific software that they would install so that they could track, find and recover laptops from folks who where not paying for them or had stolen them. This is unlikely a problem if it is spelled out in the contract and ONLY used when the contract says it would be used. However, some of the company's franchisees, and/or their employees apparently found out that the software could do other things at other times and started to do use the software to collect information and photos for their personal enjoyment.
So, they installed the software, but I figure that it was used for unintended purposes. They intended good, but they needed to control access to the tracking software a bit better.. Or perhaps they should have used different software that was a bit less capable...
I have watched some HD content that showed details that I found to be distracting and preferred lower resolutions. Of course this was about the material being played. I also find compression artifacts to be annoying too. So, there are good reasons for lower resolutions.
The government department that contracted this company for the site, are they allowed to use any criteria other than the contract bid amount to decide who to go with? Are they required to go with the lowest bidder, or are they allowed to look at the company history when deciding who to hire?
As I understand this specific contract... It was a sole sorce (not issued by lowest bid) contract.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? GPU's are being used more and more for more than just graphics processing. Many interesting parallel processing problems are being off loaded to GPU's where they are number crunching on hundreds of cores much faster than can be done on your main CPU. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html for one such set of libraries for Nvidia cards.
So WHO CARES if you cannot see the difference in what gets displayed. There is a LOT more going on.
Price?
This is bogus.
Where it is technically possible to transfer data between computers using audio signals (Ham radio operators do this all the time on HF), there is certainly not an opening for a virus to infect some other machine using just audio signals. Certainly there is no way to do this when a machine is booting, unless you have already put the necessary code in the BIOS to initialize the audio hardware, enable it, and start listening or playing audio. Not going to happen.
My guess is that the person making the report either is making this up, or spread the virus himself though thumb drives, optical media he recorded himself or through previous infections of the boot sector of his hard drives. Sort of like the guy I knew who kept moving the disk pack from drive to drive when it wouldn't boot from the previous one. Problem was the first one had a head crash and he ruined 4 drives by putting a bad pack into them... Sometimes what you *think* is happening isn't really what's going on.
So.... I'm going to have to see (uh... hear) it myself or I'm calling this myth busted.
The victim who doesn't do what they should to protect themselves is stupid. But we are not talking about victims of crime here.
There is a difference between what a government does and what an individual does, morally and ethically.
You grab somebody off the street when they don't want to go with you and it's kidnapping, but the government can put folks in jail and hold them.
You force somebody to pay you and seize their assets when they don't and it's stealing, but the government collects taxes.
You kill somebody on purpose and it's murder, but it's capital punishment when the government does it.
You set off a bomb in a city and kill folks, you are a terrorist, but if you are in the military dropping bombs on orders you are a solider.
First, Cell towers are built with directional antennas pointed DOWN towards the ground. They are intended to only cover a small area of real estate and the antennas they use are designed to direct most of the transmit and receive sensitivity to this area. Urban cells are usually fairly small and use very directional antennas pointed down, while rural cell cites can be miles across and use antennas with wider patterns which are pointed out more, but still down. When you are in a commercial airplane, you are going to be above the coverage volume of your average cell tower pretty quick, or you are going to be a LONG way away from the tower out on the horizon. Cell phones and towers just don't work at those distances. So, you might get signal near the ground, at cruse it's unlikely you will see anything.
Second.. On 9/11 the calls where from a service known as Airfone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airfone. This used similar technology as cell phones to handle airborne phone calls. Only in this case the cell towers serviced a volume of airspace but they didn't use the same spectrum as consumer cell phone service so your cell phone doesn't work.
China has a pretty good set of firewalls, even though they are more for controlling data accessed by their people, than keep others out..
But.. More to the point. The USA has the capacity because we have developed said capacity over many decades of working on the technology. We built it, so we use it? Is it OUR fault that others don't protect their information as well as they could? It is decidedly easier to *protect* information than it is to obtain information that's protected, so is it our fault you don't protect it well enough? Encrypt it better, don't transmit it over public networks, keep better physical control of your stuff... So, for instance, if you don't want somebody to take your picture of you in your skivvies, stay out of the front yard until fully dressed. Or if you don't want your identity stolen, don't put it in an E-mail that's not encrypted.
So I disagree that "Everybody does it" is a canard. It is a valid reason to do monitoring. That way you may find out about your enemies capacity to monitor you, know what he's up to, what his contingency plans are, who makes the decisions and most importantly how he expects you to act. It's about being able to control the situation without having to resort to overwhelming force where you put lots of people into harms way. Which is WHY we've spent trillions of dollars on this capacity, why we should keep spending on it and why we should keep using it.
In war, you need to have every advantage you can, and take advantage of every opportunity to gain an advantage when possible.
Whatever Snowden did to bottle up his stolen cache of documents, it has apparently kept the entire US security apparatus at bay.
"US Security apparatus At bay"? How so?
As I see it, they have stopped him from having access to any additional materials to leak, effectively confined him to living in Russian hands and although additional documents are trickling out, his time in the limelight is almost over. As I see it, he is alive today only because the US security apparatus decided to let him live for now, and the Russians are only going to be interested in him for as long as they can keep documents trickling out that they haven't yet seen.
Where Snowden did control part of this whole fiasco at the start, he is in large part just a pawn now, has been since he left Hong Kong. I don't see any way for him to become relevant again, which is probably why he's still alive. The Russians may or may not keep him. If they don't, he will likely be captured and returned to the US for trial. If they do decide to keep him, it's only because it would be another jab at the US and might serve to get NSA funding reigned in some. The Russians do give a flying flip about privacy, monitoring phone calls or other things the NSA might do, they just want to make the NSA/CIA as least capable as they can and Snowden gives them a little bit of leverage.
The real question is would Snowden's capture and trial or the grant of his asylum claim serve their purposes the best. You can bet he'll be in US hands within hours if they want the trial. In the mean time, they just wait and watch the NSA get defunded.
How you see it depends on what side of the firewall you are on.
Generally, I figure that everybody that's thinking about the social and political world is going to be involved in collecting as much information as they can. They'd be stupid not too. If there is information you don't want others to know then it is YOUR responsibility to protect your information. If somebody manages to get such information from you, it's your fault.
That the NSA monitors world leaders phone calls should come as no surprise to anybody (foreign or domestic). We have done this sort of thing for centuries and have grown quite good at intercepting and deciphering communications of all sorts. Other countries are doing the same thing and many of them are quite capable of gathering information too. Some of these countries are friendly some are not. So, if you don't want your information compromised? Hide it better.
This is not to say anything about how STUPID it is to get caught spying on your friends. Never, ever, get caught spying on your friends should be in the top 10 most important rules of foreign relations. Not that you don't do it sometimes, but that you DON'T get caught doing it, ever. Also, figure that your friends are spying on you too and take the steps necessary to protect yourself and deal with it. So when you boil down all the common sense here, it means that spying on friends happens from time to time, but it should be rare. It should also NEVER be discovered.
So, he's going to be able to get into the cool clubs, pay for the beautiful women's drinks, take them to the ballet and then to McDonald's for a whole wheat bun Big Mac on a Tech Support Technician's pay?
I don't think so... Unless tech support pays a LOT more there than it does here, only the trip to McDonald's will be happening, and I'm guessing he will be without an escort.
Just not all that true. The same Russians that denied extradition of Snowden from the transit lounge at the Moscow airport are not likely to agree to have him arrested and sent to the USA for tax evasion.
I was hoping he was going to have to learn the Russian phrase for "Would you like fries with that comrade?" Not that tech support isn't punishment too, it just pays better.
His English is likely pretty good, so maybe phone support would be a good gig for him.
I was wrong.. TALK is cheap in NYC...
You plan would kill a lot of THOR exit nodes and make seeding a torrent expensive too.... Hmmmm.. Interesting idea..
De-regulation basically is carte blanche to screw over your customers and not be accountable to anybody.
Not exactly true. If you deregulate an industry, you also make it easier for new businesses to popup and thrive which where not possible before. Assuming your regulations didn't create a single monolithic company that provides an essential service, when you remove regulations the capitalist forces will drive efficiency and competition will drive prices down.
So... What REALLY is the effect of deregulation? Better, more efficient delivery at reduced prices with more companies competing for your business.
That's what happened when the airline industry was deregulated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_Deregulation_Act
Is ANYTHING in NYC cheap? Just about everything runs at huge mark up in NYC for some reason or another. Internet access is no exception.
Outside of urban areas, the infrastructure costs for internet access is much higher, but INSIDE urban areas, the costs of labor, taxes, licenses, access fees all drive up the prices.
From what I read, these ice formations only form at the equator. So....
Don't land at the equator. Problem solved..
In crude ways we've been able to do this for decades. I've seen video a guy who was unable to move from the chest down climb stairs using his own legs. It was from back in the 80's. Wasn't capable of any kind of fine motor control and it would be easy to knock him over, but between the braces and the electrodes that where implanted it worked. I guess they are able to move up the circuit to the spine and implant electrodes there? So? How's this help very much?
Now if you can transfer signals from above the damaged spine to below, THAT would be something to see.
Try reading the source perhaps? Some code is amazingly readable, even when you don't understand the language.
Until you personally have inspected the source code for everything down to the BIOS and microcode in your hardware there will always be a chance there is a backdoor.
BUT, it all depends on how far away you go with your trust. Don't trust the application? Build from source. Don't trust the build chain? Build it from source. Don't trust your OS? Build it from source using your built compiler... On and on, until you have literally built everything yourself. The good news is that the farther you get away from the application, the less likely there will be a issue with trusting so the lower risk it becomes. But if you simply MUST then you are going to be building a lot of stuff.
As I understand the companies position on this... You are about correct. They had specific software that they would install so that they could track, find and recover laptops from folks who where not paying for them or had stolen them. This is unlikely a problem if it is spelled out in the contract and ONLY used when the contract says it would be used. However, some of the company's franchisees, and/or their employees apparently found out that the software could do other things at other times and started to do use the software to collect information and photos for their personal enjoyment.
So, they installed the software, but I figure that it was used for unintended purposes. They intended good, but they needed to control access to the tracking software a bit better.. Or perhaps they should have used different software that was a bit less capable...
I have watched some HD content that showed details that I found to be distracting and preferred lower resolutions. Of course this was about the material being played. I also find compression artifacts to be annoying too. So, there are good reasons for lower resolutions.
Sometimes more is just more, it's not better.
LOL.. The ACA in its final form...
True. I don't think that way unless I make myself...
I'm sure the specs where horribly written either way... (Actually, I KNOW the spec was horribly written. Who wants to *read* the law anyway?)
Here's hoping it was not a "Cost Plus" contract but "Firm Fixed Price" but I have a *really* bad feeling that was not the case.
The government department that contracted this company for the site, are they allowed to use any criteria other than the contract bid amount to decide who to go with? Are they required to go with the lowest bidder, or are they allowed to look at the company history when deciding who to hire?
As I understand this specific contract... It was a sole sorce (not issued by lowest bid) contract.