Here's the statement from the US DoJ. "Conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer" (SIPRNet) and a bit about helping/encouraging Manning to undertake the same, apparently. The usual boilerplate about "innocent until proven guilty" is in there, of course, but also the maximum sentence they are pushing for, which seems like a rather light five years before any time off for good behaviour and other considerations.
That's not to say they won't add extra charges (or arrange an "accident", if that's your view) between now and any potential trial, but that's still considerably less than I would have expected as a starting point given all the FUD from Assange and his supporters, especially given the charges and potential sentences in prior hacking cases like Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, or the on-going case of Marcus Hutchins. Conspiring rather than actually doing makes quite a difference, it seems.
AFAICT, he's been arrested twice today (so far at least). The Met initially arrested him in the Embassy for skipping bail, then they arrested him again in response to the suspiciously quick receipt of the US' extradition request - I know they supposedly had a prosecution file on him ready to go, but it was barely an hour! There was some talk of the Swedes re-opening their cases too, so if they're as far in the loop as the US seems to have been they'll be making any extradition requests shortly and he might be getting arrested for a third time before the day is out.
"Hacking" is an interesting angle though (I was expecting at least some kind of espionage rap on the sheet, but maybe that's in there too?); pretty sure there are no US states with a death penalty for hacking so it's going to be hard to fight extradition on those grounds, but asperger's and similar mental issues have successfully been used to avoid extradition to the US on hacking charges before, so I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about Assange's supposed mental state in the next few months, assuming his ego will allow his lawyers to make the claim anyway.
Not the most informed statement from the UN there, or from Snowden for parroting it. Yes, he would have been arrested had he done so, but Assange could have left the embassy at any time; he was there of his own volition having skipped bail, which is *a crime in its own right* in the UK legal system, and that's what the UK initially arrested him for this morning. That's an important distinction, because the UN is basically saying that Assange should be above sovereign UK law in the matter of skipping bail because reasons. Motivations for seeking asylum aside, he basically went from being a suspect for rape and assault to actual wanted felon all by himself, and at the very least there's a case to be made there.
I'll grant there are differing - and potentially quite valid - opinions on the motivation behind the Swedish cases and the US' extradition request (for which he's now also been arrested), but the UK's charges are about as black and white as they come.
We're probably going to find out in the next few days whether the US has a good reason for extradition or not, because the extradition request has already been formally made to UK authorities. You can probably forget the "not a US citizen" angle though, because there are multiple high-profile instances of the UK extraditing people to the US when they are a citizen of some other nation over the last few years alone and, other than re-issue his passport recently just in case he was evicted from the embassy, Australia doesn't seem to have done a thing to help him since his legal issues began.
The only question now is will the UK send him to Sweden first (apparently they are planning on re-opening the rape case) so they can wash their hands of any potential issues with the US' more draconian sentencing and let the Swedes deal with that legal quagmire instead, or just rubber stamp the paperwork and have him on a transatlantic flight ASAP.
Apparently, the US does think they have something they can extradite him for, because he's now been arrested under the extradition act on behalf of US authorities. The Swedes seem to be planning on re-opening their assualt charges as well, so there's a potential he'll be making a detour to Scandinavia before crossing the Atlantic, which might not be all that unlikely if the objective is about keeping him bottled up as long as possible. Given he's now a proven flight risk I suspect his chances of bail while all this drags on through the appeals courts (which has taken years in other high profile cases) are pretty slim, so even if he ultimately prevails and avoids extradition it's likely to be quite some time before he's getting out of custody.
In the scheme of things, the maximum penalties for skipping bail are not that high in the UK (a few years in jail and a fine), although I guess the CPS could also throw in a few extra bits and pieces like wasting police time for the overt police presence that the Met maintained outside the embassy if they really wanted to. My guess is that the CPS will want to move on this quickly to show that justice has been done, so if the judge makes allowances for his voluntary "house arrest" he could potentially get a fine and be free and clear (if somewhat poorer) within weeks. If the US really is interested in extradition, I they're almost certainly aware of that possibility and will get the necessary paperwork filed PDQ so he doesn't get a chance to flee.
Or not, in which case we'll no doubt get Assange and Wikileaks spokespeople going nuts about how he's about to be black-bagged...
There are photos and video of him apparently being carried/escorted out of the embassy by British police, so it seems more likely the Ecudoreans had just had enough and decided to let them come in and arrest him.
Mirai doesn't really target PCs; it's main focus is embedded systems, especially routers and (obviously) IoT devices in both consumer and industrial spaces, so I guess the authors are mostly trying to expand their attack space. They've already added a whole bunch of additional vendors and device types since the original version, so I guess this is just the next stage down the long tail of being able to attack as much as possible. My understanding is the Mirai code is very modular and fairly easy to add new exploits, so maybe the effort of doing so was trivial enough that someone just decided to add the extra modules and see how effective they are?
Alternatively, there's definitely a lot of interest from state-sponsored and ransomware-pushing APTs in targetting infrastructure/industy so maybe that's the motivation for the new processor additions, rather than consumer space devices? Once you've pwned a device, if you can also brick it at the flip of a software switch the potential for the next major cyberattack or WannaCry against another entity is definitely something those groups would be interested in, and infrastructure and industry are going to be much higher profile and/or more lucrative than a random consumer.
People asked for All La Carte TV... now they can get it. Let's see if they enjoy it as much as they thought they would.
People can get "something" a la carte, but I don't think that "something" is quite what they wanted. The preferred a la carte approach was meant to be that you go to single provider (whether that's cable like Comcast, or online like Netflix doesn't matter), tick all the channels/shows on their menu that you want to subscribe to (or pay as you go per movie/episode, again, doesn't matter) and you have everything you want. One supplier, one bill, all the shows you want, and - most importantly - none of the ones you don't just because they happen to be part of a bundle. As a bonus, if that could be without having to endure any more ads than strictly necessary to keep the shows in production as well, so much the better.
I don't see this fragmentation is going to last. It's death by a thousand financial cuts; there's no way I'm going to subscribe to a service for a single show; I'll get that from torrents, and I suspect I'll not be alone once more people realise how much it's costing them for all their various subscriptions. That's going to make it very difficult for smaller providers with only a few shows so I expect cross-licensing to start appearing soon enabling the larger players like Netflix or Amazon Prime to provide shows for people that don't want any of the CSI shows but do want the new Trek, for instance. Better for CBS to have a slightly smaller slice of the pie than no slice at all because enough a viewers decided they'll just torrent the one CBS show they want.
Some of the largest wind farms too. They have eight of the world's ten largest onshore facilities, including all of the top five. Sure, China still uses a LOT of coal, but they're also provisioning renewable power far, far, faster than anyone else.
Wait, it uses a custom plugin to do the heavy lifting? How is that any different from being a standalone Skype client with a browser based wrapper providing the GUI like many of those old IE-based apps used to work? From the initial announcement I was at least assuming they'd actually reimplemented Skype using WebRTC and JavaScript but somehow managed to use some non-standard W3C stuff that's only supported by Chrome and Edge, but this is an ever greater level of lame, half-baked, and fundamentally broken solution. (Yeah, yeah, it's Microsoft - "to be expected" and all that...)
Almost universally, they're bottom feeders in the spam world. They purport to take email lists from customers and filter out the defunct ones, which they basically do by a combination of looking for accepted RCPT TOs when connecting to a mail server, or actually sending an email and seeing which addresses get bounced. This is something that any legit operation with a proper sign up process and using legimate mail service providers should be easily capable of handling automatically because they'd know every email on the list was valid from a confirmed opt-in and could remove any that repeatedly give an SMTP 5xx (hard fail) on delivery attempts (with some wiggle room for misconfigured servers/full mailboxes giving 5xx hard fails instead of 4xx transient fails). It's also a neat email address harvesting method for spammers; set up a verification service, wait for people (mostly other spammers) to send you their mailing lists for list washing, add them to your own lists, and then spam away and/or re-sell them on the dark web to other spammers.
As an aside, I have quite a number of these services hard-coded to 5xx regardless of the validity of the email they are testing in my mail server config. So far I've not noticed any legit mailing list I've actually signed up to stop working as a result, but I have noticed a fairly significant drop in the amount of spam I'm getting, which seems like a pretty good indication of who their primary customers are as well.
Yes, but that's more a function (or lack thereof) of the Android appliance vendor, no? Google, for their part, does seem somewhat better than some of the Android OEMs in this regard, especially in the IoT sector where many of the devices seem to become abandonware almost as soon as they hit the virtual shelves, as they're stock enough to let you install a few more major updates even after official support stops. I can be a real crapshoot if you try shoving Oreo or Pie on someone else's hardware that hasn't been updated for a few versions, but the Pixels etc. will generally take it without too much fuss (YMMV on performance though). Google have also been working on moving more of the code out of the vendor specific patches and into apps they can update through the store (e.g. the various "Play Services"), reducing the reliance on OEM updates for security fixes, so they've clearly realised there is an issue and trying to improve matters.
Neither Apple or Google is perfect, of course. But, with a few exceptions, I also tend to find that Android's peripheral services, etc. are at least slightly better than Apple's versions, and often significantly so - Maps, anyone?
It seems unlikely a server would be running a password manager app though.
No, but it's much more likely that a compromised PC with a password manager installed might be used to remotely log into that server and provide the attacker with a means to obtain the server's password. This provides another avenue of attack to obtain a server password, albeit perhaps not the easiest one to get the same results, but the more attack vectors there are the more likely it is that one will succeed, and it only takes one...
There are varying degrees of "completely fucked", but yes, if you are being successfully attacked using this method then you are already in a pretty bad place, although it's possible that a lucky attacker might obtain enough info to pivot the attack onto an entirely separate system you happen to have a password for. Going from one PC being compromised to your entire network being compromised is definitely a step up in the level of "completely fucked".
Of course, if the malware has already been able to intercept the master password to your password DB, then they'll likely have sent the DB file and the password back to a C&C server anyway, so it's very much game over at that point.
I had the same first thought, but there are a LOT of emoji. That means you could have multiple emoji refering to the same character of the plain text and randomly choose between them, and you'd also still be able to use more complicated cypher methods than plain substitution to foil simple statistical analysis. You could also substitute short strings of characters (which is what emoji ultimately are in ASCII) of course, e.g. the character "A" in your plain text might be replaced by "FOO", "BAR", and numerous of other options for a given point in the encryption process, so there's nothing particularly special about emoji in that regard.
I think it would probably be a more computationally expensive task to brute force than a cypher with the same character set for input and output on a 1:1 basis, but probably still not as expensive as methods like public key, or any other proven math-based cypher techniques.
Sure, there's always going to be some disruption with this kind of thing, and if Amazon were proposing to put a distribution centre there that would almost certainly help with the creating jobs and driving the local economy (assuming a decent number of manual labour jobs rather than extensive automation, anyway). That wasn't the plan though, was it? The intention was for a second HQ which, as I noted, requires a lot of skilled labour of the kind that isn't generally found living in $15k/year neighbourhoods. Sure, that labour would have wanted support; I'm pretty sure there would be more opportunities further down the food chain (food services, cleaning, etc.), but once the already excessive NYC housing prices inevitably start to climb even higher how long do you think they're going to be able to say above the waterline, even if they did get an Amazon dividend of a few extra $k/year in their paycheck?
Maybe because Amazon wants two classes of workers. The cheap-as-peanuts ones to stuff product into packing boxes and mail them out, and the more expensive ones that help run the company, run services like EC2, and all the other "good stuff" that generally requires a higher education. Care to guess which type they need in a HQ? Do you think they're going to be employing a significant number of those from a community with an average income of $15k?
Realistically, NYC was going to get their jobs, but they were also going to all the ballooning housing prices and other issues that are plagueing places like San Francisco, Seattle, and all the other tech boom towns. That's what the root of the protests were about; sticking up for the current residents who were probably going to end up being priced out of their own neighbourhoods and trying to provide them with some safeguards.
That said, as far as the "blame" is concerned, while de Blasio does have a point, you can't really say it's entirely Amazon's fault either. It *is* their ball and money, and I'm pretty sure that Bezos is well aware of the PR issues Google is having with this kind of thing on the west coast, why would they want to invest in NYC if they are pretty much guaranteed the same kind of situation when they do? At least, not without further sweeteners perhaps?
Sarcasm aside, I think Twitter's proposal is the right one here given the way shitstorms have been kicked off by social media posts. Yes, you should be able to "correct the record" for honest errors, etc., but equally people need to be able to see the original unedited post where it's already triggered responses and the correction might alter the tone of those responses. Being able to say one thing, provoke a response, then subtly edit the original to make the initial repliers look like jerks is definitely not the way to go - you might as well roll out the red carpet and put a mat at the end with "Trolls Welcome" on it. I dare say someone could leverage it into a libel suit under the right circumstances as well (whether they'd prevail or not is another matter entirely).
It does sound like it. I'm also curious to see whether China's latest attempt to go the other way and produce a Hollywood-style live-action sci-fi blockbuster is going to pan out in the west. Initial impressions of "The Wandering Earth", an adaptation of a novel by Cixin Liu, seem a lot more favourable than their previous efforts, so it's looking promising, and it took in $443m within China in less than 10 days, apparently, although it's only got a fairly limited international release so far. Anything that breaks the stale same-old-rehashed-crap-with-better-FX movies Hollywood keeps pumping out is fine by me, even if it is badly dubbed and/or subtitled.
It's also the things that seems to have got a lot of people tied up in knots over sexualisation, etc. so it's good it's not as bad as first made out. To be fair to Cameron, she's supposed to be an anime character where big eyes are the norm and also not entirely human so in context a deliberate giveaway like that vs. an actual human might be something her creators might do. It's a tough call; faithful to the original visual material and avoids any petty boycotts by fans who were expecting a faithful reproduction of her look, but I suspect he knew going in that it was going to get at least some flack. I wonder how much of the decision ultimately came down to weighing up the odds on profit vs. politically correct though - especially given that even bad PR on the PC angle is still PR, right?
As to why the name "Alita" was actually chosen, a quick Google provides a pretty good clue:
Alita (Ah-lee-tah) is a common name in Spain. Derived from the latin "elite," meaning special. A variation of the name is Elita, (EE-lee-tah) or (El-lee-tah). The English meaning is "Winged". Alternatively the French meaning is "Noble" or "Chosen One".
So, "elite", "special", "noble", and "chosen one", which form a much more blatant literary connection to the arc of the eponymous character in the film than a tenuous and almost certainly entirely coincidental reversal of letters to a mispelling of a historical figure.
You need to read up on how insurance works, viz. probability of payouts - e.g., how actuarial tables work for life insurance. If they get their math right then this is no different from any other insurance scheme, the only winner will be the insurer.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the statement from the US DoJ. "Conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified U.S. government computer" (SIPRNet) and a bit about helping/encouraging Manning to undertake the same, apparently. The usual boilerplate about "innocent until proven guilty" is in there, of course, but also the maximum sentence they are pushing for, which seems like a rather light five years before any time off for good behaviour and other considerations.
That's not to say they won't add extra charges (or arrange an "accident", if that's your view) between now and any potential trial, but that's still considerably less than I would have expected as a starting point given all the FUD from Assange and his supporters, especially given the charges and potential sentences in prior hacking cases like Gary McKinnon and Lauri Love, or the on-going case of Marcus Hutchins. Conspiring rather than actually doing makes quite a difference, it seems.
AFAICT, he's been arrested twice today (so far at least). The Met initially arrested him in the Embassy for skipping bail, then they arrested him again in response to the suspiciously quick receipt of the US' extradition request - I know they supposedly had a prosecution file on him ready to go, but it was barely an hour! There was some talk of the Swedes re-opening their cases too, so if they're as far in the loop as the US seems to have been they'll be making any extradition requests shortly and he might be getting arrested for a third time before the day is out.
"Hacking" is an interesting angle though (I was expecting at least some kind of espionage rap on the sheet, but maybe that's in there too?); pretty sure there are no US states with a death penalty for hacking so it's going to be hard to fight extradition on those grounds, but asperger's and similar mental issues have successfully been used to avoid extradition to the US on hacking charges before, so I expect we'll be hearing a lot more about Assange's supposed mental state in the next few months, assuming his ego will allow his lawyers to make the claim anyway.
Not the most informed statement from the UN there, or from Snowden for parroting it. Yes, he would have been arrested had he done so, but Assange could have left the embassy at any time; he was there of his own volition having skipped bail, which is *a crime in its own right* in the UK legal system, and that's what the UK initially arrested him for this morning. That's an important distinction, because the UN is basically saying that Assange should be above sovereign UK law in the matter of skipping bail because reasons. Motivations for seeking asylum aside, he basically went from being a suspect for rape and assault to actual wanted felon all by himself, and at the very least there's a case to be made there.
I'll grant there are differing - and potentially quite valid - opinions on the motivation behind the Swedish cases and the US' extradition request (for which he's now also been arrested), but the UK's charges are about as black and white as they come.
We're probably going to find out in the next few days whether the US has a good reason for extradition or not, because the extradition request has already been formally made to UK authorities. You can probably forget the "not a US citizen" angle though, because there are multiple high-profile instances of the UK extraditing people to the US when they are a citizen of some other nation over the last few years alone and, other than re-issue his passport recently just in case he was evicted from the embassy, Australia doesn't seem to have done a thing to help him since his legal issues began.
The only question now is will the UK send him to Sweden first (apparently they are planning on re-opening the rape case) so they can wash their hands of any potential issues with the US' more draconian sentencing and let the Swedes deal with that legal quagmire instead, or just rubber stamp the paperwork and have him on a transatlantic flight ASAP.
Apparently, the US does think they have something they can extradite him for, because he's now been arrested under the extradition act on behalf of US authorities. The Swedes seem to be planning on re-opening their assualt charges as well, so there's a potential he'll be making a detour to Scandinavia before crossing the Atlantic, which might not be all that unlikely if the objective is about keeping him bottled up as long as possible. Given he's now a proven flight risk I suspect his chances of bail while all this drags on through the appeals courts (which has taken years in other high profile cases) are pretty slim, so even if he ultimately prevails and avoids extradition it's likely to be quite some time before he's getting out of custody.
In the scheme of things, the maximum penalties for skipping bail are not that high in the UK (a few years in jail and a fine), although I guess the CPS could also throw in a few extra bits and pieces like wasting police time for the overt police presence that the Met maintained outside the embassy if they really wanted to. My guess is that the CPS will want to move on this quickly to show that justice has been done, so if the judge makes allowances for his voluntary "house arrest" he could potentially get a fine and be free and clear (if somewhat poorer) within weeks. If the US really is interested in extradition, I they're almost certainly aware of that possibility and will get the necessary paperwork filed PDQ so he doesn't get a chance to flee.
Or not, in which case we'll no doubt get Assange and Wikileaks spokespeople going nuts about how he's about to be black-bagged...
There are photos and video of him apparently being carried/escorted out of the embassy by British police, so it seems more likely the Ecudoreans had just had enough and decided to let them come in and arrest him.
Mirai doesn't really target PCs; it's main focus is embedded systems, especially routers and (obviously) IoT devices in both consumer and industrial spaces, so I guess the authors are mostly trying to expand their attack space. They've already added a whole bunch of additional vendors and device types since the original version, so I guess this is just the next stage down the long tail of being able to attack as much as possible. My understanding is the Mirai code is very modular and fairly easy to add new exploits, so maybe the effort of doing so was trivial enough that someone just decided to add the extra modules and see how effective they are?
Alternatively, there's definitely a lot of interest from state-sponsored and ransomware-pushing APTs in targetting infrastructure/industy so maybe that's the motivation for the new processor additions, rather than consumer space devices? Once you've pwned a device, if you can also brick it at the flip of a software switch the potential for the next major cyberattack or WannaCry against another entity is definitely something those groups would be interested in, and infrastructure and industry are going to be much higher profile and/or more lucrative than a random consumer.
People can get "something" a la carte, but I don't think that "something" is quite what they wanted. The preferred a la carte approach was meant to be that you go to single provider (whether that's cable like Comcast, or online like Netflix doesn't matter), tick all the channels/shows on their menu that you want to subscribe to (or pay as you go per movie/episode, again, doesn't matter) and you have everything you want. One supplier, one bill, all the shows you want, and - most importantly - none of the ones you don't just because they happen to be part of a bundle. As a bonus, if that could be without having to endure any more ads than strictly necessary to keep the shows in production as well, so much the better.
I don't see this fragmentation is going to last. It's death by a thousand financial cuts; there's no way I'm going to subscribe to a service for a single show; I'll get that from torrents, and I suspect I'll not be alone once more people realise how much it's costing them for all their various subscriptions. That's going to make it very difficult for smaller providers with only a few shows so I expect cross-licensing to start appearing soon enabling the larger players like Netflix or Amazon Prime to provide shows for people that don't want any of the CSI shows but do want the new Trek, for instance. Better for CBS to have a slightly smaller slice of the pie than no slice at all because enough a viewers decided they'll just torrent the one CBS show they want.
Some of the largest wind farms too. They have eight of the world's ten largest onshore facilities, including all of the top five. Sure, China still uses a LOT of coal, but they're also provisioning renewable power far, far, faster than anyone else.
Wait, it uses a custom plugin to do the heavy lifting? How is that any different from being a standalone Skype client with a browser based wrapper providing the GUI like many of those old IE-based apps used to work? From the initial announcement I was at least assuming they'd actually reimplemented Skype using WebRTC and JavaScript but somehow managed to use some non-standard W3C stuff that's only supported by Chrome and Edge, but this is an ever greater level of lame, half-baked, and fundamentally broken solution. (Yeah, yeah, it's Microsoft - "to be expected" and all that...)
Almost universally, they're bottom feeders in the spam world. They purport to take email lists from customers and filter out the defunct ones, which they basically do by a combination of looking for accepted RCPT TOs when connecting to a mail server, or actually sending an email and seeing which addresses get bounced. This is something that any legit operation with a proper sign up process and using legimate mail service providers should be easily capable of handling automatically because they'd know every email on the list was valid from a confirmed opt-in and could remove any that repeatedly give an SMTP 5xx (hard fail) on delivery attempts (with some wiggle room for misconfigured servers/full mailboxes giving 5xx hard fails instead of 4xx transient fails). It's also a neat email address harvesting method for spammers; set up a verification service, wait for people (mostly other spammers) to send you their mailing lists for list washing, add them to your own lists, and then spam away and/or re-sell them on the dark web to other spammers.
As an aside, I have quite a number of these services hard-coded to 5xx regardless of the validity of the email they are testing in my mail server config. So far I've not noticed any legit mailing list I've actually signed up to stop working as a result, but I have noticed a fairly significant drop in the amount of spam I'm getting, which seems like a pretty good indication of who their primary customers are as well.
Yes, but that's more a function (or lack thereof) of the Android appliance vendor, no? Google, for their part, does seem somewhat better than some of the Android OEMs in this regard, especially in the IoT sector where many of the devices seem to become abandonware almost as soon as they hit the virtual shelves, as they're stock enough to let you install a few more major updates even after official support stops. I can be a real crapshoot if you try shoving Oreo or Pie on someone else's hardware that hasn't been updated for a few versions, but the Pixels etc. will generally take it without too much fuss (YMMV on performance though). Google have also been working on moving more of the code out of the vendor specific patches and into apps they can update through the store (e.g. the various "Play Services"), reducing the reliance on OEM updates for security fixes, so they've clearly realised there is an issue and trying to improve matters.
Neither Apple or Google is perfect, of course. But, with a few exceptions, I also tend to find that Android's peripheral services, etc. are at least slightly better than Apple's versions, and often significantly so - Maps, anyone?
No, but it's much more likely that a compromised PC with a password manager installed might be used to remotely log into that server and provide the attacker with a means to obtain the server's password. This provides another avenue of attack to obtain a server password, albeit perhaps not the easiest one to get the same results, but the more attack vectors there are the more likely it is that one will succeed, and it only takes one...
There are varying degrees of "completely fucked", but yes, if you are being successfully attacked using this method then you are already in a pretty bad place, although it's possible that a lucky attacker might obtain enough info to pivot the attack onto an entirely separate system you happen to have a password for. Going from one PC being compromised to your entire network being compromised is definitely a step up in the level of "completely fucked".
Of course, if the malware has already been able to intercept the master password to your password DB, then they'll likely have sent the DB file and the password back to a C&C server anyway, so it's very much game over at that point.
I had the same first thought, but there are a LOT of emoji. That means you could have multiple emoji refering to the same character of the plain text and randomly choose between them, and you'd also still be able to use more complicated cypher methods than plain substitution to foil simple statistical analysis. You could also substitute short strings of characters (which is what emoji ultimately are in ASCII) of course, e.g. the character "A" in your plain text might be replaced by "FOO", "BAR", and numerous of other options for a given point in the encryption process, so there's nothing particularly special about emoji in that regard.
I think it would probably be a more computationally expensive task to brute force than a cypher with the same character set for input and output on a 1:1 basis, but probably still not as expensive as methods like public key, or any other proven math-based cypher techniques.
We had a Slashdot discussion about it back then as well. Better dupe than never, I guess...
Sure, there's always going to be some disruption with this kind of thing, and if Amazon were proposing to put a distribution centre there that would almost certainly help with the creating jobs and driving the local economy (assuming a decent number of manual labour jobs rather than extensive automation, anyway). That wasn't the plan though, was it? The intention was for a second HQ which, as I noted, requires a lot of skilled labour of the kind that isn't generally found living in $15k/year neighbourhoods. Sure, that labour would have wanted support; I'm pretty sure there would be more opportunities further down the food chain (food services, cleaning, etc.), but once the already excessive NYC housing prices inevitably start to climb even higher how long do you think they're going to be able to say above the waterline, even if they did get an Amazon dividend of a few extra $k/year in their paycheck?
Maybe because Amazon wants two classes of workers. The cheap-as-peanuts ones to stuff product into packing boxes and mail them out, and the more expensive ones that help run the company, run services like EC2, and all the other "good stuff" that generally requires a higher education. Care to guess which type they need in a HQ? Do you think they're going to be employing a significant number of those from a community with an average income of $15k?
Realistically, NYC was going to get their jobs, but they were also going to all the ballooning housing prices and other issues that are plagueing places like San Francisco, Seattle, and all the other tech boom towns. That's what the root of the protests were about; sticking up for the current residents who were probably going to end up being priced out of their own neighbourhoods and trying to provide them with some safeguards.
That said, as far as the "blame" is concerned, while de Blasio does have a point, you can't really say it's entirely Amazon's fault either. It *is* their ball and money, and I'm pretty sure that Bezos is well aware of the PR issues Google is having with this kind of thing on the west coast, why would they want to invest in NYC if they are pretty much guaranteed the same kind of situation when they do? At least, not without further sweeteners perhaps?
Yeah, who'd want to do that?
Sarcasm aside, I think Twitter's proposal is the right one here given the way shitstorms have been kicked off by social media posts. Yes, you should be able to "correct the record" for honest errors, etc., but equally people need to be able to see the original unedited post where it's already triggered responses and the correction might alter the tone of those responses. Being able to say one thing, provoke a response, then subtly edit the original to make the initial repliers look like jerks is definitely not the way to go - you might as well roll out the red carpet and put a mat at the end with "Trolls Welcome" on it. I dare say someone could leverage it into a libel suit under the right circumstances as well (whether they'd prevail or not is another matter entirely).
It does sound like it. I'm also curious to see whether China's latest attempt to go the other way and produce a Hollywood-style live-action sci-fi blockbuster is going to pan out in the west. Initial impressions of "The Wandering Earth", an adaptation of a novel by Cixin Liu, seem a lot more favourable than their previous efforts, so it's looking promising, and it took in $443m within China in less than 10 days, apparently, although it's only got a fairly limited international release so far. Anything that breaks the stale same-old-rehashed-crap-with-better-FX movies Hollywood keeps pumping out is fine by me, even if it is badly dubbed and/or subtitled.
It's also the things that seems to have got a lot of people tied up in knots over sexualisation, etc. so it's good it's not as bad as first made out. To be fair to Cameron, she's supposed to be an anime character where big eyes are the norm and also not entirely human so in context a deliberate giveaway like that vs. an actual human might be something her creators might do. It's a tough call; faithful to the original visual material and avoids any petty boycotts by fans who were expecting a faithful reproduction of her look, but I suspect he knew going in that it was going to get at least some flack. I wonder how much of the decision ultimately came down to weighing up the odds on profit vs. politically correct though - especially given that even bad PR on the PC angle is still PR, right?
Yep, you're right; brainfart on my part. Point still stands though.
As to why the name "Alita" was actually chosen, a quick Google provides a pretty good clue:
So, "elite", "special", "noble", and "chosen one", which form a much more blatant literary connection to the arc of the eponymous character in the film than a tenuous and almost certainly entirely coincidental reversal of letters to a mispelling of a historical figure.
You need to read up on how insurance works, viz. probability of payouts - e.g., how actuarial tables work for life insurance. If they get their math right then this is no different from any other insurance scheme, the only winner will be the insurer.