In the light of recent developments, if I were to get any of my devices searched at the border of a country (any country) and it wasn't confiscated outright, my default stance now is to treat the device as compromised until I can nuke it from orbit, do a complete re-install of the OS and reload any data from backups.
Also pretty useless, I suspect. I can't imagine that there are all that many places that we might want to go that meet the criteria of both having Uranus' L4 or L5 point on route and not having a more viable alternative refuelling stop available. Maybe that will change if (and it's a very big "if") we discover that the Kuiper belt is a vast resource of valuable minerals and develop the technology to exploit it, but until then it's just an astronomical curiousity that might provide some useful information on what we can expect to find at more accessible trojan points. I think we'll see a Monolith Burger outlet at the Jovian L4/L5 points long before anything from Earth even visits here.
Chances are that the CBL check is just to determine whether the compromised PC is likely to be useful for sending spam or not. If the check comes back with a positive listing, then the PC will simply be used for other things such as launching DDoS attacks, hosting support services and so on. If you want to try and make a PC useless to smart bots, or as near as it can be, in the event of a compromise then robust egress filtering of outbound connections is a far better way to go. As a bonus the logs from your egress filters should also make it much easier to detect when hosts have been compromised so that you can deal with them promptly.
I'll take the UK's non-existant Miranda rights over the "Menezes rights" that got applied the last time an innocent Brazilian national had a front-page run in with the UK's security services.
Depends on the nature of the data and the reason for the safeguarding. The implication they are probably trying to make based on recent events is that Wikileaks has ~400GB of data that was obtained by Edward Snowden, all of which is being widely mirrored as we discuss it, and could become public knowledge via the simple means releasing a password or key file. At the very least, that's potentially a pretty big incentive for the US and its allies not to mess with any attempt at relocation that Edward Snowden or Julian Assange might be about to make.
Of course, the flip side of that is that it's also a pretty big incentive for the enemies of the US to mess with any such relocation attempt in an effort to cause further embarrassment to the US and maybe learn a few interesting things about the US' surveillance programmes into the bargain.
Yup, one of the first things that crossed my mind too. I'm surprised it hasn't happened already, to be honest, given the dubious nature of many of the sites concerned, but it's probably just a matter of time. All they would need to do is randomly insert a few IP addresses of high profile sites into a list of A records for the blocked site, and bonus points for using dynamic updates to change the trojan IPs randomly making it harder to establish what happened. It'll cause a percentage of people who are not blocked and trying to visit the site to get default websites or error pages depending on how many duff A records there are in proportion to legit ones, but that's nothing compared to the PR pain of those trying to run the filters or operators of the collateral damage. I suspect the list of targets would be pretty broad, but good look if you are responsible for running websites for one of the following when someone actually gets around to it:
Political bodies associated with censorship, especially the Conservatives & Lib Dems
Specific politicians associated with censorship, such as Claire Perry
Mainstream media, especially those promoting such ridiculous schemes such as the Daily Mail
ISPs that have rolled over implemented the scheme (How many took it to the High Court again? It was ZERO, wasn't it?)
Assuming that they are not using "ton" as a measure of volume, then take you pick which two out of these three possibilites they mean:
3 US short tons (at ~907kg each), which is ~2721kg
2.7 UK long tons (at ~1016kg each), which is ~2743kg
2.7 metric tonnes (at 1000kg each), which is 2700kg
FWIW, the UK Weights and Measures Act 1985 excludes from use for trade the ton and the term "metric ton" for "tonne" in an attempt to avoid such confusion over ambiguous and incorrect usage of "ton", "tonnes" and "metric tons".
I'm waiting for the big ISPs' lists of people who have opted out of filtering to be leaked and the press to publish a list of MPs who have asked the ISP to let them watch porn through the internet connection that they put on their expenses...:)
And there in lies the problem with any kind of opt-out system when applied to something like this. Were the list to be opt-in and it were to leak then all you'd really be able to say about it is "here's a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, want to try and limit the possibility of porn being downloaded over their Internet connection". What you can't do is draw any real conclusions about those customers of the ISPs lists that are going to be leaked (just give it time) who are not on it because there are far too many reasons why someone might not have bothered to opt in besides wanting to view porn.
However, we have an opt-out system. That is going to mean that when the lists leak the likes of the Daily Mail are going to be pouring all over them, and you can guarantee they are going to have a field day with any celebrities, politicians, and other people that they feel their readership has a "right to know" about they find on the lists. It's clearly the start of a slippery slope into censorship (what will they come for next, do you imagine - something in the name of anti-terrorism, perhaps?), but at least we'll get to see a few celebs and politcos crash and burn on the way, right? I suspect the masses will be too busy sniggering at the misfortunes of those caught out on the leaked lists to worry about protesting until it's far too late.
Seconded on the OCR-A and OCR-B fonts; use of these on quality paper pretty much guarantees no OCR errors on scan back.
Regarding the crypto aspect that kind of depends on your needs. You can get zippable envelopes with tags that cannot be removed without breaking the tag such as these designed for internal email. Put your hardcopy in one of these and add a visual inspection of it to detect tampering to your daily backup routine, and that maybe enough. If you really do need the encryption, then you can apply any crypto you like to the plain text file, then take the resultant binary output and run it though something like UUEncode to render it into regular ASCII printable characters than can then be printed and stored in your firebox. To recover, scan it in, OCR, run it through UUDecode to recover the binary then decrypt as usual.
The USA, however, also spied on other people, many of whom live in allied states, indiscriminately. This undermines the allies' trust.
Absolutely this. Many of those allies supported the US in the latest round of efforts to wrest overall control of the Internet from US government appointed organizations and place it into the hands of bodies under the auspicies of the UN or the ITU. When the next attempt starts, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen really soon to take advantage of the furure over the Snowden and Prism "revelations" (seriously, is anyone surprised this was going on?), I expect at least some of those allies are going to be more reluctant to maintain that support.
It's probably just a matter of time now, so it's time to pick a side... the UN, or the ITU? Not a good choice.
While some of the Nikkors are undeniably better than the Canon equivalents, or don't even have Canon equivalents - like the 14-24mm, the 50mm f/1.4 isn't generally one you'd go out of your way to use via one of the readily available adapters that let you mount Nikkors on Canon bodies. More likely that they just wanted a small lens for the picture so they could show off the fact it was a 50D rather than flaunt the attached lens, and the Nikkor+adapter combination was the best option available.
It can get much worse than that since the algal bloom can also reduce oxygen levels in the water, wiping out a much larger chunk of marine ecosystems than coral and shell fish. Depending on the individual blooms, it could be a good thing and provide a respite from rising CO2, but it might also be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire...
Even for a supposedly bleeding edge distro SystemD was included in Fedora in far too immature a state with too many broken/missing features, IMHO, and that gave it a bad rep. The latest SystemD release in Fedora 19 actually isn't that bad if you give it a chance and take the time to properly grok how it works, it's more complex that the old init script approach, but it's also much more powerful. You pays your money...
Anyway, complaining about SystemD is *sooo* last distro now. The cool kids are moaning about the half-assed and feature-very-much-incomplete FirewallD (from essentially the same people that brought you SystemD) now which seems to be the suffering from the same "included a few 0.x revisions too soon" problems.
Yep, especially since it's quite possibly an honest misunderstanding over the letter vs. the spirit of the law. The guy in question was using a *smartphone*, not any kind of serious broadcast quality camera rig, or even a consumer level camcorder for that matter, so it's entirely possible that the BBC genuinely believed that wasn't covered by the permit requirement. From personal experience I can state that the regulations concerning commercial vs. non-commercial photography are typically a poorly conceived mess with entirely arbitrary rules that are badly outdated by the rapidly advancing pace of camera technology - "mistakes" like this are quite common.
If the Nepali's noses are seriously out of joint then perhaps a small donation to the Sherpas that risk life and limb to bring down all those discarded air bottles and other crap turning Everest into the world's highest landfill would make amends.
It's also teaching them to toe the line and do what is asked of them in class - no more, no less, just like a good little robot. It's teaching that whatever they do, not to push the envelope or try out anything out of curiosity to just see what happens and learning from your mistakes when it doesn't go as expected. In other words exactly the kind of things you have to be aware of in order to experiment and innovate. A good teacher, like those I had fortunately, would have rebuked the girl (and she is still a girl) for messing around in class and then gone over the experiment and the results with the entire class. A felony charge as an adult is way over the top reaction and the spotlight needs to be on those that chose to go down that path, not the student.
Good luck to the US et al with competing with the non-nanny states of the world once this generation of kids is responsible for the bulk of research and setting policies for the education of the following generations.
The IP is held by a US-based hosting company (DimeNOC).
Well, there you go then; they didn't do their homework or were so desperate to save a buck or two they didn't care about their ISP's reputation. If you chose a cheap hosting deal on an ISP with a reputation for hosting spam, botnet controllers and other such sites while exercising an exceeding lax attitude to abuse reports, you can expect to have the odd issue like this. You get what you pay for applies to ISPs too - big surprise!
FWIW, DimeNOC is null routed here too, has been for sometime, and is unlikely to be unblocked anytime soon. No conspiracy required; the only traffic we ever saw coming from their IP space was spam, malicious or both, so dropping it at the border was a no brainer.
There's plenty of software in fairly widespread use already that can use this much power, although whether you class it as "significant" or not probably depends on your field. You do need to think beyond rendering pretty pictures on a screen at high framerates, at which it's obviously going to excel, though. I'm more curious how these cards will stack up for stuff like transcoding production quality video (I can flatten my current card with Sony Vegas), running the numerous @Home type distributed computing apps that support GPUs (lots of people running these), brute forcing encryption/passwords (computer crime/forensics) and other stuff of that nature.
Taking a quick peek at their stock ticker on Google, I don't think the markets have been impressed at all, in fact more the opposite. That they are hyping up such a small feature enhancement as this so badly seems like they are completely out of any ideas to increase revenue and are down to grasping at any straws they can. I guesses at a long slow slide into mediocrity for Facebook in the aftermath of their IPO, and so far I've not seen anything that makes me think they might avoid that fate.
Possibly, but it could also have something to do with Oracle's announcement that Java will be getting regular updates on a two year schedule. Maybe he's just assuming it's going to take a major iteration - from the v8.x series due in September to the next release, v9.x to completely fix this class of flaws.
Near-Earth asteroids would be interesting place for a manned ship to go, but if you RTFA they also talk about de-orbiting malfunctioning satellites and large pieces of debris. Potentially that opens up orbital destinations anywhere from LEO to geostationary and maybe beyond, particularly in the case of larger and more expensive research satellites that might need maintaining.
Re:I've felt like this for years, too
on
Has Lego Sold Out?
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· Score: 1
+1 on this. It was always, and still is, possible to repurpose the speciality bricks if you where creative enough - even such aparent one trick ponies such as the forklift, if you put your mind to it (and maybe the scale of what you were building). If your mindset is that the speciality bricks are no use for general playing around with the bricks, then that's your problem not the toy's. The correct view is that they are encouraging you to be even more creative than you already are, which is the whole point of Legos, is it not?
Military procedures and chain of command with civilian oversight, or just civilians and whatever bureacracy a bunch of politicians with little or no expertise in the area can come up with? That's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it? Besides which, this is the land of the NRA. Their first action on taking a civilian body taking control of the arsenal would probably be to start lobbying for a nuke in every home as the only possible way to ensure the safety of all concerend.
For people that don't have, or ever intend to have, a device that uses Apple's Lightning connector? None at all. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who would love to have a charging station like this that don't even own a single Apple product, depsite the obviously Apple inspired design elements.
As for those who have bought Apple's newer devices, or are considering doing so, it was pretty clear almost from the connector's launch that Apple was going to be heavily restricting access to third party licenses for the connector, at least in the early days. Apart from those who pre-ordered before the restrictions came to light, anyone who gets a device with a Lightning connector either didn't do their homework or decided they were happy with locking themselves into Apple's own products until (or if) that changed.
The EU had, and still has, a tacit agreement with equipment vendors to this end in-place, but it's not legally binding and there is no penalty for not following it. Apple signed it, along with most other mobile device equipment vendors, then reneged on their promise and released the Lightning connector anyway. Apple does not care about the environment, it does not care about standards, it does not care about FRAND licensing of its patents, and it sure as hell doesn't care about its customers. Apple cares about making as much money for its shareholders as possible. Period.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm actually wondering if they fscked up somehow and are trying to set Apple up as a scapegoat. What is stopping them from just pressing ahead with every connector except the Lightning port and simply saying "we'd like to have done that, but Apple didn't let us" if they really want to draw attention to Apple's supposed monopolistic behaviour. It would still have been useful to everyone who doesn't have one of Apple's latest devices and if Apple ever changed their minds then a v2.0 version of the device, or maybe they could just make the connectors modular like some PSU connectors are and enable a potential compatability upgrade later?
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D) Install the NSA's secret backdoors.
In the light of recent developments, if I were to get any of my devices searched at the border of a country (any country) and it wasn't confiscated outright, my default stance now is to treat the device as compromised until I can nuke it from orbit, do a complete re-install of the OS and reload any data from backups.
Also pretty useless, I suspect. I can't imagine that there are all that many places that we might want to go that meet the criteria of both having Uranus' L4 or L5 point on route and not having a more viable alternative refuelling stop available. Maybe that will change if (and it's a very big "if") we discover that the Kuiper belt is a vast resource of valuable minerals and develop the technology to exploit it, but until then it's just an astronomical curiousity that might provide some useful information on what we can expect to find at more accessible trojan points. I think we'll see a Monolith Burger outlet at the Jovian L4/L5 points long before anything from Earth even visits here.
Chances are that the CBL check is just to determine whether the compromised PC is likely to be useful for sending spam or not. If the check comes back with a positive listing, then the PC will simply be used for other things such as launching DDoS attacks, hosting support services and so on. If you want to try and make a PC useless to smart bots, or as near as it can be, in the event of a compromise then robust egress filtering of outbound connections is a far better way to go. As a bonus the logs from your egress filters should also make it much easier to detect when hosts have been compromised so that you can deal with them promptly.
I'll take the UK's non-existant Miranda rights over the "Menezes rights" that got applied the last time an innocent Brazilian national had a front-page run in with the UK's security services.
Depends on the nature of the data and the reason for the safeguarding. The implication they are probably trying to make based on recent events is that Wikileaks has ~400GB of data that was obtained by Edward Snowden, all of which is being widely mirrored as we discuss it, and could become public knowledge via the simple means releasing a password or key file. At the very least, that's potentially a pretty big incentive for the US and its allies not to mess with any attempt at relocation that Edward Snowden or Julian Assange might be about to make.
Of course, the flip side of that is that it's also a pretty big incentive for the enemies of the US to mess with any such relocation attempt in an effort to cause further embarrassment to the US and maybe learn a few interesting things about the US' surveillance programmes into the bargain.
FWIW, the UK Weights and Measures Act 1985 excludes from use for trade the ton and the term "metric ton" for "tonne" in an attempt to avoid such confusion over ambiguous and incorrect usage of "ton", "tonnes" and "metric tons".
And there in lies the problem with any kind of opt-out system when applied to something like this. Were the list to be opt-in and it were to leak then all you'd really be able to say about it is "here's a bunch of people who, for whatever reason, want to try and limit the possibility of porn being downloaded over their Internet connection". What you can't do is draw any real conclusions about those customers of the ISPs lists that are going to be leaked (just give it time) who are not on it because there are far too many reasons why someone might not have bothered to opt in besides wanting to view porn. However, we have an opt-out system. That is going to mean that when the lists leak the likes of the Daily Mail are going to be pouring all over them, and you can guarantee they are going to have a field day with any celebrities, politicians, and other people that they feel their readership has a "right to know" about they find on the lists. It's clearly the start of a slippery slope into censorship (what will they come for next, do you imagine - something in the name of anti-terrorism, perhaps?), but at least we'll get to see a few celebs and politcos crash and burn on the way, right? I suspect the masses will be too busy sniggering at the misfortunes of those caught out on the leaked lists to worry about protesting until it's far too late.
Seconded on the OCR-A and OCR-B fonts; use of these on quality paper pretty much guarantees no OCR errors on scan back. Regarding the crypto aspect that kind of depends on your needs. You can get zippable envelopes with tags that cannot be removed without breaking the tag such as these designed for internal email. Put your hardcopy in one of these and add a visual inspection of it to detect tampering to your daily backup routine, and that maybe enough. If you really do need the encryption, then you can apply any crypto you like to the plain text file, then take the resultant binary output and run it though something like UUEncode to render it into regular ASCII printable characters than can then be printed and stored in your firebox. To recover, scan it in, OCR, run it through UUDecode to recover the binary then decrypt as usual.
Absolutely this. Many of those allies supported the US in the latest round of efforts to wrest overall control of the Internet from US government appointed organizations and place it into the hands of bodies under the auspicies of the UN or the ITU. When the next attempt starts, and I'm pretty sure it's going to happen really soon to take advantage of the furure over the Snowden and Prism "revelations" (seriously, is anyone surprised this was going on?), I expect at least some of those allies are going to be more reluctant to maintain that support.
It's probably just a matter of time now, so it's time to pick a side... the UN, or the ITU? Not a good choice.
While some of the Nikkors are undeniably better than the Canon equivalents, or don't even have Canon equivalents - like the 14-24mm, the 50mm f/1.4 isn't generally one you'd go out of your way to use via one of the readily available adapters that let you mount Nikkors on Canon bodies. More likely that they just wanted a small lens for the picture so they could show off the fact it was a 50D rather than flaunt the attached lens, and the Nikkor+adapter combination was the best option available.
It can get much worse than that since the algal bloom can also reduce oxygen levels in the water, wiping out a much larger chunk of marine ecosystems than coral and shell fish. Depending on the individual blooms, it could be a good thing and provide a respite from rising CO2, but it might also be a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire...
Even for a supposedly bleeding edge distro SystemD was included in Fedora in far too immature a state with too many broken/missing features, IMHO, and that gave it a bad rep. The latest SystemD release in Fedora 19 actually isn't that bad if you give it a chance and take the time to properly grok how it works, it's more complex that the old init script approach, but it's also much more powerful. You pays your money...
Anyway, complaining about SystemD is *sooo* last distro now. The cool kids are moaning about the half-assed and feature-very-much-incomplete FirewallD (from essentially the same people that brought you SystemD) now which seems to be the suffering from the same "included a few 0.x revisions too soon" problems.
Yep, especially since it's quite possibly an honest misunderstanding over the letter vs. the spirit of the law. The guy in question was using a *smartphone*, not any kind of serious broadcast quality camera rig, or even a consumer level camcorder for that matter, so it's entirely possible that the BBC genuinely believed that wasn't covered by the permit requirement. From personal experience I can state that the regulations concerning commercial vs. non-commercial photography are typically a poorly conceived mess with entirely arbitrary rules that are badly outdated by the rapidly advancing pace of camera technology - "mistakes" like this are quite common.
If the Nepali's noses are seriously out of joint then perhaps a small donation to the Sherpas that risk life and limb to bring down all those discarded air bottles and other crap turning Everest into the world's highest landfill would make amends.
It's also teaching them to toe the line and do what is asked of them in class - no more, no less, just like a good little robot. It's teaching that whatever they do, not to push the envelope or try out anything out of curiosity to just see what happens and learning from your mistakes when it doesn't go as expected. In other words exactly the kind of things you have to be aware of in order to experiment and innovate. A good teacher, like those I had fortunately, would have rebuked the girl (and she is still a girl) for messing around in class and then gone over the experiment and the results with the entire class. A felony charge as an adult is way over the top reaction and the spotlight needs to be on those that chose to go down that path, not the student.
Good luck to the US et al with competing with the non-nanny states of the world once this generation of kids is responsible for the bulk of research and setting policies for the education of the following generations.
Well, there you go then; they didn't do their homework or were so desperate to save a buck or two they didn't care about their ISP's reputation. If you chose a cheap hosting deal on an ISP with a reputation for hosting spam, botnet controllers and other such sites while exercising an exceeding lax attitude to abuse reports, you can expect to have the odd issue like this. You get what you pay for applies to ISPs too - big surprise!
FWIW, DimeNOC is null routed here too, has been for sometime, and is unlikely to be unblocked anytime soon. No conspiracy required; the only traffic we ever saw coming from their IP space was spam, malicious or both, so dropping it at the border was a no brainer.
There's plenty of software in fairly widespread use already that can use this much power, although whether you class it as "significant" or not probably depends on your field. You do need to think beyond rendering pretty pictures on a screen at high framerates, at which it's obviously going to excel, though. I'm more curious how these cards will stack up for stuff like transcoding production quality video (I can flatten my current card with Sony Vegas), running the numerous @Home type distributed computing apps that support GPUs (lots of people running these), brute forcing encryption/passwords (computer crime/forensics) and other stuff of that nature.
Taking a quick peek at their stock ticker on Google, I don't think the markets have been impressed at all, in fact more the opposite. That they are hyping up such a small feature enhancement as this so badly seems like they are completely out of any ideas to increase revenue and are down to grasping at any straws they can. I guesses at a long slow slide into mediocrity for Facebook in the aftermath of their IPO, and so far I've not seen anything that makes me think they might avoid that fate.
Possibly, but it could also have something to do with Oracle's announcement that Java will be getting regular updates on a two year schedule. Maybe he's just assuming it's going to take a major iteration - from the v8.x series due in September to the next release, v9.x to completely fix this class of flaws.
Near-Earth asteroids would be interesting place for a manned ship to go, but if you RTFA they also talk about de-orbiting malfunctioning satellites and large pieces of debris. Potentially that opens up orbital destinations anywhere from LEO to geostationary and maybe beyond, particularly in the case of larger and more expensive research satellites that might need maintaining.
+1 on this. It was always, and still is, possible to repurpose the speciality bricks if you where creative enough - even such aparent one trick ponies such as the forklift, if you put your mind to it (and maybe the scale of what you were building). If your mindset is that the speciality bricks are no use for general playing around with the bricks, then that's your problem not the toy's. The correct view is that they are encouraging you to be even more creative than you already are, which is the whole point of Legos, is it not?
Military procedures and chain of command with civilian oversight, or just civilians and whatever bureacracy a bunch of politicians with little or no expertise in the area can come up with? That's kind of a no-brainer, isn't it? Besides which, this is the land of the NRA. Their first action on taking a civilian body taking control of the arsenal would probably be to start lobbying for a nuke in every home as the only possible way to ensure the safety of all concerend.
For people that don't have, or ever intend to have, a device that uses Apple's Lightning connector? None at all. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people out there who would love to have a charging station like this that don't even own a single Apple product, depsite the obviously Apple inspired design elements.
As for those who have bought Apple's newer devices, or are considering doing so, it was pretty clear almost from the connector's launch that Apple was going to be heavily restricting access to third party licenses for the connector, at least in the early days. Apart from those who pre-ordered before the restrictions came to light, anyone who gets a device with a Lightning connector either didn't do their homework or decided they were happy with locking themselves into Apple's own products until (or if) that changed.
The EU had, and still has, a tacit agreement with equipment vendors to this end in-place, but it's not legally binding and there is no penalty for not following it. Apple signed it, along with most other mobile device equipment vendors, then reneged on their promise and released the Lightning connector anyway. Apple does not care about the environment, it does not care about standards, it does not care about FRAND licensing of its patents, and it sure as hell doesn't care about its customers. Apple cares about making as much money for its shareholders as possible. Period.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm actually wondering if they fscked up somehow and are trying to set Apple up as a scapegoat. What is stopping them from just pressing ahead with every connector except the Lightning port and simply saying "we'd like to have done that, but Apple didn't let us" if they really want to draw attention to Apple's supposed monopolistic behaviour. It would still have been useful to everyone who doesn't have one of Apple's latest devices and if Apple ever changed their minds then a v2.0 version of the device, or maybe they could just make the connectors modular like some PSU connectors are and enable a potential compatability upgrade later?
Very odd indeed.