The journalist who helped Edward Snowden uncover the secret program is leaving the British newspaper for an undisclosed ‘momentous new venture.’
Glenn Greenwald, 46, said the details of this "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity" with significant financial backing will be public soon. "My partnership with the Guardian has been extremely fruitful and fulfilling: I have high regard for the editors and journalists with whom I worked and am incredibly proud of what we achieved," Greenwald said.
Greenwald explained that choosing to leave was not easy but that he was offered an opportunity no journalist could turn down. Greenwald said he will build an "entire journalism unit from the ground up" by hiring writers and editors who share his journalistic values.
I can't find an online link, this is from today's Sunday's paper...
NY Daily News, 10/13/2013, Stephen Rex Brown with News Wire Services
The four laptop computers Edward Snowden traveled with while in Hong Kong and Moscow were merely a distraction and contained no top-secret information, according to an ex-CIA official.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned-critic of the agency, said that Snowden revealed to him during a six-hour meeting in Russia that the information Snowden swiped from the NSA was actually stored on hard drives and thumb drives.
The data was never turned over to Chinese or Russian authorities Snowden said, according to McGovern.
On Wednesday, Snowden met with McGovern and three orther former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement official who have become critics of the government's surveillance apparatus.
Several American politicians and intelligence officials have expressed concern the NSA materials Snowden, 30, downloaded had fallen into the hands of foreign governments keen to understand clandestine American operations abroad.
Snowden lives in a secret location in Russia and is "well-protected", McGovern said.
Hey, if her works got you thinking, that's great. It's the people who feel that anything any writer says must be true, and don't question, those zealots are scary to me. It seems Rand would not accept a viewpoint that did not fall into line with hers. That's what makes her, imo, sad.
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
Sounds to me that she was a sad, drug addicted nut who was overly influenced by her rough childhood, and any nut can write books. Doesn't make them right (see: L.Ron Hubbard).
In a message pasted on the event’s official website, Comic Con demands that nerdy attendees wash themselves and use deodorant after they emerge from their moms’ basements to attend the event.In a message pasted on the event’s official website, Comic Con demands that nerdy attendees wash themselves and use deodorant after they emerge from their moms’ basements to attend the event.
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!”
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!” http://nypost.com/2013/10/10/comic-con-plea-shower/
5 years: How long the National Security Agency keeps “metadata” about all Americans’ domestic and international phone calls without suspicion of wrongdoing
5 years: How long the National Counterterrorism Center can keep and search databases of non-terrorism information about Americans
5 to 20 years: Retention periods for databases that store at least some information from border searches of Americans’ laptops, phones, hard drives, and more
6 years: Time period, beginning with the start of surveillance, that the NSA can keep Americans’ incidentally gathered communications
20 to 30 years: Amount of time the FBI keeps information collected via assessments and National Security Letters, even when it is irrelevant to a current investigation
30 years: Time period that Suspicious Activity Reports with no nexus to terrorism are kept by the FBI
1 Billion and growing: Records in the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse
1,000,000 sq. ft.: Size of National Security Agency’s data center (opening in 2014)
41 billion: Communications records stored by NSA’s XKEYSCORE system every 30 days
The cost of the syrup in a soda is about 5 cents, so considering the soda cost you $2, they're not losing anything by giving you a free refill. It keeps you in the store where you're more likely to buy something else.
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
Musk's bottom line is the accident outside Seattle that caused the Model S sedan and its battery pack to go up in smoke would have been far worse had it been a conventional gasoline-powered car.
"Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse," Musk, who is also CEO of rocket maker SpaceX, writes on Tesla blog.
Just as authorities have reported, he says the Model S struck a "large metal object" as it traveled at highway speeds. It went under the car and struck with a force "on the order of 25 tons." He says the estimate is based on the result: a 3-inch hole through armor plate that compromised the car's battery pack.
But from there, he says everything went as it should. The car's "onboard alert system" directed to the driver to stop and get out. The fire was contained by firewalls within the battery pack. Vents in the pack directed the flames down and away from the vehicle.
The fire department followed the correct procedure in trying to deal with the fire by puncturing holes in a protective plate and shooting water into the pack.
If the same accident had occurred under a conventional car, the thin metal shielding around the gas tank or tubing could have caused gasoline to pool and burn the entire car to the ground.
"In contrast, the combustion energy of our battery pack is only about 10% of the energy contained in a gasoline tank and is divided into 16 modules with firewalls in between. As a consequence, the effective combustion potential is only about 1% that of the fuel in a comparable gasoline sedan," Musk writes.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/10/04/elon-musk-tesla-fire/2924423/
And how much is MS paying you per comment? Man, that was so blatant a shill comment, even I had no problem seeing through it! Why not just have your employer take out an ad on Slashdot same as Android Nexus???
BlackBerry Messenger creator Gary Klassen was quoted by The Mobile Indian as saying BBM would be coming to platforms beyond iOS and Android in the future, too, which has led to speculation that Windows Phone could be next in line. The Canadian smartphone maker also recently showed how BlackBerry 10 software could be extended to desktop environment, including Windows and Mac OS using a mirrored interface, and BBM is one possible application of that tech.
'a company with deep engineering talent but hamstrung by arrogance, indecision, slowness to embrace change, and a lack of internal accountability. From the story: '"The problem wasn't that we stopped listening to customers," said one former RIM insider. "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did." '
Yep, it's definitely Microsoft.
Now I hear some talk of Microsoft buying up Blackberry, be a perfect marriage. Both companies knowing what the customer wants instead of listening to them.
LAW & DISORDER / CIVILIZATION & DISCONTENTS
How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy
RAT user "cutefuzzypuppy" wasn't all that cute.
by Nate Anderson - Sept 27 2013, 7:40pm EDT
INTERNET CRIME
83
RATer's moniker was "cutefuzzypuppy."
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock
The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop's webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle "cutefuzzypuppy," had as many as 150 "slave" computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012.
Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he "was always at his computer," according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50,000 bond.
Anatomy of a RATer
How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year. As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he "suck[ed] at social engineering" and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware.
He also announced his successes. On May 17, 2012, he told the RAT community at hackforums.net, "Recently I infected a person at my school with darkcomet. It was total luck that I got her infected because I suck at social engineering. Anyway, this girl happens to be a model and a really good looking one at that:D. I was hoping I could use her and her facebook account to further spread my darkcomet rat. I want to mass message all her friends on facebook but I have no idea what to message them to get them to download the rat. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated:)."
The "model" in question appears to have been Wolf, whose machine was infected in mid-2012. Abrahams used DarkComet to snap lots of nude photos of Wolf, whom he watched until March 21, 2013. That day, Wolf received a message from Facebook saying that someone was attempting to change her password. Then came a similar message from Twitter—then messages from Tumblr and Yahoo. Suspicious, she checked her profiles; her Twitter account now displayed a "half nude" photo of Wolf.
Thirty minutes later, she received an e-mail from her attacker. He demanded that Wolf either send him "good quality" nude pictures through Snapchat, that she send a video of herself, or that she "go on skype with me and do what I tell you to do for 5 minutes." If she didn't, the attacker pledged to release his many nude photos widely—and he attached a few just to prove how many he had.
Instead, Wolf went to the FBI, and the Bureau's LA cyber squad swung into action. On March 29, the FBI looked at Wolf's laptop and found evidence of both DarkComet and another RAT known as Blackshades, which confirmed how the attacker had taken his photos. But who was he? The IP addresses behind the attacker's e-mails resolved back only to a VPN provider which purposely kept no logs. But the RATs themselves had connected back to the attacker by accessing no-ip.org, a service which allows users to dynamically map their IP address to a domain name (in this case, to cutefuzzypuppy.zapto.org and schedule2013.no-ip.org), thereby allowing the "slaves" to phone home, even when the attacker was using a dynamic IP address from a home Internet account. No-ip.org did keep records, and the FBI obtained them.
Eric Zeman posted his views on the iPhone 5s, I'm pasting his article below...
Eric Zeman | September 28, 2013 09:06 AM
I've spent a week using the Apple iPhone 5s as my primary device. In general, it is a solid effort on Apple's part, but it is not without its faults. Here are some of the strong points and weak points I've observed over the last seven days.
iOS 7 is a bit buggy on the 5s. I've installed iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, an iPad 3, and an iPad Mini. It runs best on the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. On the iPhone 5s, iOS 7 is prone to app crashes. Third-party app crashes aren't too awful, but when native apps such as the Settings Menu and Safari crash, you know something's not right.
The hardware is fine, if unexciting. The 5s is a solid little device. Apple designed it with care and everything about it exudes quality and class. The display is great, even if it is smaller than I'd like, and the small form factor makes it easy to carry around and use.
It's not the best voice phone. I've been testing an AT&T model of the iPhone 5s and am not impressed with its phone calls. I heard lots of interference and the earpiece speaker doesn't get quite loud enough. The speakerphone produces plenty of volume, but it also amplifies the interference. The iPhone is a better voice phone.
The battery hasn't given me any trouble. The first few days were a bit iffy, but that's true of most smartphones. Once the battery cycled through a few charges, it settled into a good rhythm. I routinely got a full day out of it, despite heavy use. It's worth noting, though, that the battery cannot be removed or replaced, so you're stuck with what's sealed in the iPhone 5s.
The camera is great. The new software, combined with the improved sensor, go a long way toward making the iPhone 5s one of the best camera phones available. The camera app is simpler to use and includes more features, such as burst mode and slow-motion video capture, and the results are on par with today's best devices. The improved gallery app is far more powerful when it comes to organizing photos, and some of the editing tools are a welcome addition.
iOS 7 is still inflexible. Apple's simple smartphone/tablet user interface may win usability awards, but it is nowhere near as flexible or customizable as Android or even Windows Phone. The inability to control exactly where apps are positioned is frustrating, and the lack of resizable home screen widgets and apps leaves the OS looking too homogenous. I'd love to see some truly dynamic content on the home screen.
Control Center is convenient. Apple's new dashboard for controlling some of the iPhone 5s's features is a big help. It makes simple tasks such as turning on and off the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios a breeze. I also like the fact that it includes controls for the music player as well as apps like the flashlight, calculator, timer, and camera. This is definitely a time saver, considering that it took several steps to reach many of these controls in previous versions of iOS.
There's plenty to like about the 5s, but at the end of the day it offers only a slightly different experience than last year's iPhone 5. The Touch ID fingerprint sensor is the biggest difference. The camera and processor improvements in the 5s, though very real, aren't all that much better than the iPhone 5. We can only hope that Apple will make significant changes in next year's iPhone 6.
Slashdot Mirror
Glenn Greenwald, journalist who helped break NSA surveillance story, leaves Guardian
The journalist who helped Edward Snowden uncover the secret program is leaving the British newspaper for an undisclosed ‘momentous new venture.’
Glenn Greenwald, 46, said the details of this "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity" with significant financial backing will be public soon. "My partnership with the Guardian has been extremely fruitful and fulfilling: I have high regard for the editors and journalists with whom I worked and am incredibly proud of what we achieved," Greenwald said.
Greenwald explained that choosing to leave was not easy but that he was offered an opportunity no journalist could turn down. Greenwald said he will build an "entire journalism unit from the ground up" by hiring writers and editors who share his journalistic values.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/glenn-greenwald-nsa-surveillance-journalist-leaves-guardian-article-1.1486668
NY Daily News, 10/13/2013, Stephen Rex Brown with News Wire Services
The four laptop computers Edward Snowden traveled with while in Hong Kong and Moscow were merely a distraction and contained no top-secret information, according to an ex-CIA official.
Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned-critic of the agency, said that Snowden revealed to him during a six-hour meeting in Russia that the information Snowden swiped from the NSA was actually stored on hard drives and thumb drives.
The data was never turned over to Chinese or Russian authorities Snowden said, according to McGovern.
On Wednesday, Snowden met with McGovern and three orther former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement official who have become critics of the government's surveillance apparatus.
Several American politicians and intelligence officials have expressed concern the NSA materials Snowden, 30, downloaded had fallen into the hands of foreign governments keen to understand clandestine American operations abroad.
Snowden lives in a secret location in Russia and is "well-protected", McGovern said.
Disable iCloud sync for the iWork apps by going to Settings > iCloud > Documents & Data, and sliding Pages, Keynote, and Numbers to off.
Try to use apps that have been updated to take advantage of iOS 7. Apple has not updated Pages, Keynote, or Numbers. You can tell. Read more: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/iphone-5s-problems/#ixzz2hbat50sJ
In a parallel example, what would you say to "Windows Phone would have taken off if it had one really good at in the app store." ?
If a WindowsPhone came with an app that allowed me to access their entire first XBox catalogue, I could've gotten used to 'live tiles'.
So, if it takes 14 minutes to walk the entire ring, you're never more than a 7 minutes walk away to any other point of the ring.
Hey, if her works got you thinking, that's great. It's the people who feel that anything any writer says must be true, and don't question, those zealots are scary to me. It seems Rand would not accept a viewpoint that did not fall into line with hers. That's what makes her, imo, sad.
:^)
It was hard to read with that. It wasn't like that when you hit "Preview"?
I was going out the door and did it fast, read it when I got back and thought, "WTF?". Of my 50 or so posts here, perhaps 2 have been error free. :^(
Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/11/how_ayn_rand_became_an_american_icon.html
Sounds to me that she was a sad, drug addicted nut who was overly influenced by her rough childhood, and any nut can write books. Doesn't make them right (see: L.Ron Hubbard).
I don't know why that happened happened.
Official site http://www.newyorkcomiccon.com/
PC Mag has another video of BSOD http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425512,00.asp
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!”
Apparently this is such a problem Comic Con listed “shower” as item No. 3 on its event “survival” checklist.
“Things tend to get hot at NYCC with so many fans around and you don’t want to be the stinky one!” the organizers wrote. “Do everyone a favor and shower before and wear clean clothes!” http://nypost.com/2013/10/10/comic-con-plea-shower/
All accents are funny (unless it's your accent, then it's racist).
5 years: How long the National Security Agency keeps “metadata” about all Americans’ domestic and international phone calls without suspicion of wrongdoing
5 years: How long the National Counterterrorism Center can keep and search databases of non-terrorism information about Americans
5 to 20 years: Retention periods for databases that store at least some information from border searches of Americans’ laptops, phones, hard drives, and more
6 years: Time period, beginning with the start of surveillance, that the NSA can keep Americans’ incidentally gathered communications
20 to 30 years: Amount of time the FBI keeps information collected via assessments and National Security Letters, even when it is irrelevant to a current investigation
30 years: Time period that Suspicious Activity Reports with no nexus to terrorism are kept by the FBI
1 Billion and growing: Records in the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse
1,000,000 sq. ft.: Size of National Security Agency’s data center (opening in 2014)
41 billion: Communications records stored by NSA’s XKEYSCORE system every 30 days
Tesla Motors hopes to open Va. dealership http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/tesla-motors-plans-to-open-tysons-corner-dealership/2013/10/08/03547620-3020-11e3-9ccc-2252bdb14df5_story.html Bonus Nikola Tesla link: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131003-nikola-tesla-surprising-facts-statue-museum-science/
The cost of the syrup in a soda is about 5 cents, so considering the soda cost you $2, they're not losing anything by giving you a free refill. It keeps you in the store where you're more likely to buy something else.
Don't mention what the fuck it does or anything.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/09/facebook-suddenly-deletes-social-fixers-facebook-pages/
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
"Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love."
"I want to know God's thoughts; the rest are details."
"The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax."
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
"A person starts to live when he can live outside himself."
"I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice."
"God is subtle but he is not malicious."
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character."
"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
"Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind."
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it."
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
"God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically."
"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking."
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
"The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing."
"Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater."
"Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity."
"If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut."
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe."
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
"In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead."
"Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves."
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!"
"No, this trick won't work...How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?"
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
Musk's bottom line is the accident outside Seattle that caused the Model S sedan and its battery pack to go up in smoke would have been far worse had it been a conventional gasoline-powered car. "Had a conventional gasoline car encountered the same object on the highway, the result could have been far worse," Musk, who is also CEO of rocket maker SpaceX, writes on Tesla blog. Just as authorities have reported, he says the Model S struck a "large metal object" as it traveled at highway speeds. It went under the car and struck with a force "on the order of 25 tons." He says the estimate is based on the result: a 3-inch hole through armor plate that compromised the car's battery pack. But from there, he says everything went as it should. The car's "onboard alert system" directed to the driver to stop and get out. The fire was contained by firewalls within the battery pack. Vents in the pack directed the flames down and away from the vehicle. The fire department followed the correct procedure in trying to deal with the fire by puncturing holes in a protective plate and shooting water into the pack. If the same accident had occurred under a conventional car, the thin metal shielding around the gas tank or tubing could have caused gasoline to pool and burn the entire car to the ground. "In contrast, the combustion energy of our battery pack is only about 10% of the energy contained in a gasoline tank and is divided into 16 modules with firewalls in between. As a consequence, the effective combustion potential is only about 1% that of the fuel in a comparable gasoline sedan," Musk writes. http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/10/04/elon-musk-tesla-fire/2924423/
And how much is MS paying you per comment? Man, that was so blatant a shill comment, even I had no problem seeing through it! Why not just have your employer take out an ad on Slashdot same as Android Nexus???
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/30/blackberry-claims-bbm-is-still-coming-to-android-and-iphone-but-has-given-no-timeline/
'a company with deep engineering talent but hamstrung by arrogance, indecision, slowness to embrace change, and a lack of internal accountability. From the story: '"The problem wasn't that we stopped listening to customers," said one former RIM insider. "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did." '
Yep, it's definitely Microsoft.
Now I hear some talk of Microsoft buying up Blackberry, be a perfect marriage. Both companies knowing what the customer wants instead of listening to them.
Point taken about reposting an article in it's entirety. Thank you for enlightening me.
LAW & DISORDER / CIVILIZATION & DISCONTENTS How the FBI found Miss Teen USA’s webcam spy RAT user "cutefuzzypuppy" wasn't all that cute. by Nate Anderson - Sept 27 2013, 7:40pm EDT INTERNET CRIME 83 RATer's moniker was "cutefuzzypuppy."
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock The sextortionist who snapped nude pictures of Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf through her laptop's webcam has been found and arrested, the FBI revealed yesterday. 19-year old Jared James Abrahams, a California computer science student who went by the online handle "cutefuzzypuppy," had as many as 150 "slave" computers under his control during the height of his webcam spying in 2012.
Watching all of those webcams to see when a young woman changes her clothes takes a serious time commitment, and Abrahams made one; he "was always at his computer," according the FBI complaint against him. Abrahams yesterday turned himself in after the complaint was unsealed, and a federal judge released him on a $50,000 bond.
Anatomy of a RATer
How did Abrahams get his start learning the intricacies of remote administration tools (RATs), the malware used to spy on his victims? Not surprisingly, he was a regular user of hackforums.net, which features a large RAT forum that I profiled earlier this year. As cutefuzzypuppy, Abrahams asked for plenty of help distributing software like DarkComet to victims, since he "suck[ed] at social engineering" and needed to find better ways to spread his spyware.
He also announced his successes. On May 17, 2012, he told the RAT community at hackforums.net, "Recently I infected a person at my school with darkcomet. It was total luck that I got her infected because I suck at social engineering. Anyway, this girl happens to be a model and a really good looking one at that :D. I was hoping I could use her and her facebook account to further spread my darkcomet rat. I want to mass message all her friends on facebook but I have no idea what to message them to get them to download the rat. Any ideas or suggestions would be greatly appreciated :)."
The "model" in question appears to have been Wolf, whose machine was infected in mid-2012. Abrahams used DarkComet to snap lots of nude photos of Wolf, whom he watched until March 21, 2013. That day, Wolf received a message from Facebook saying that someone was attempting to change her password. Then came a similar message from Twitter—then messages from Tumblr and Yahoo. Suspicious, she checked her profiles; her Twitter account now displayed a "half nude" photo of Wolf.
Thirty minutes later, she received an e-mail from her attacker. He demanded that Wolf either send him "good quality" nude pictures through Snapchat, that she send a video of herself, or that she "go on skype with me and do what I tell you to do for 5 minutes." If she didn't, the attacker pledged to release his many nude photos widely—and he attached a few just to prove how many he had.
Instead, Wolf went to the FBI, and the Bureau's LA cyber squad swung into action. On March 29, the FBI looked at Wolf's laptop and found evidence of both DarkComet and another RAT known as Blackshades, which confirmed how the attacker had taken his photos. But who was he? The IP addresses behind the attacker's e-mails resolved back only to a VPN provider which purposely kept no logs. But the RATs themselves had connected back to the attacker by accessing no-ip.org, a service which allows users to dynamically map their IP address to a domain name (in this case, to cutefuzzypuppy.zapto.org and schedule2013.no-ip.org), thereby allowing the "slaves" to phone home, even when the attacker was using a dynamic IP address from a home Internet account. No-ip.org did keep records, and the FBI obtained them.
The records showed that the
Eric Zeman | September 28, 2013 09:06 AM
I've spent a week using the Apple iPhone 5s as my primary device. In general, it is a solid effort on Apple's part, but it is not without its faults. Here are some of the strong points and weak points I've observed over the last seven days.
iOS 7 is a bit buggy on the 5s. I've installed iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, an iPad 3, and an iPad Mini. It runs best on the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini. On the iPhone 5s, iOS 7 is prone to app crashes. Third-party app crashes aren't too awful, but when native apps such as the Settings Menu and Safari crash, you know something's not right.
The hardware is fine, if unexciting. The 5s is a solid little device. Apple designed it with care and everything about it exudes quality and class. The display is great, even if it is smaller than I'd like, and the small form factor makes it easy to carry around and use.
It's not the best voice phone. I've been testing an AT&T model of the iPhone 5s and am not impressed with its phone calls. I heard lots of interference and the earpiece speaker doesn't get quite loud enough. The speakerphone produces plenty of volume, but it also amplifies the interference. The iPhone is a better voice phone.
The battery hasn't given me any trouble. The first few days were a bit iffy, but that's true of most smartphones. Once the battery cycled through a few charges, it settled into a good rhythm. I routinely got a full day out of it, despite heavy use. It's worth noting, though, that the battery cannot be removed or replaced, so you're stuck with what's sealed in the iPhone 5s.
The camera is great. The new software, combined with the improved sensor, go a long way toward making the iPhone 5s one of the best camera phones available. The camera app is simpler to use and includes more features, such as burst mode and slow-motion video capture, and the results are on par with today's best devices. The improved gallery app is far more powerful when it comes to organizing photos, and some of the editing tools are a welcome addition.
iOS 7 is still inflexible. Apple's simple smartphone/tablet user interface may win usability awards, but it is nowhere near as flexible or customizable as Android or even Windows Phone. The inability to control exactly where apps are positioned is frustrating, and the lack of resizable home screen widgets and apps leaves the OS looking too homogenous. I'd love to see some truly dynamic content on the home screen.
Control Center is convenient. Apple's new dashboard for controlling some of the iPhone 5s's features is a big help. It makes simple tasks such as turning on and off the Wi-Fi or Bluetooth radios a breeze. I also like the fact that it includes controls for the music player as well as apps like the flashlight, calculator, timer, and camera. This is definitely a time saver, considering that it took several steps to reach many of these controls in previous versions of iOS.
There's plenty to like about the 5s, but at the end of the day it offers only a slightly different experience than last year's iPhone 5. The Touch ID fingerprint sensor is the biggest difference. The camera and processor improvements in the 5s, though very real, aren't all that much better than the iPhone 5. We can only hope that Apple will make significant changes in next year's iPhone 6.
Link: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/handheld/apple-iphone-5s-my-first-week/240161890