It's not just one system. Every Federal Court gets to run its own PACER system and customize it. When people think of an independent judiciary, the think the courts are independent from the Executive Branch and Congress. They're also independent from each other. Every US District, Bankruptcy, Appeals and special Court gets to run its own PACER system. An appeals court can overturn a ruling but they can't tell a lower court which email system to use. It's not funded by any budget passed by Congress, including the networks that support them all. The ten-cents-per-page price came from the cost of photostats (a/k/a Xerox copies) that lawyers were used to paying. Most of the funds in PACER come from a few companies (Lexus/Nexus & Westaw?) that ingest EVERYTHING and index it and provide a value-added service (like usability) for more money. (Like Accuweather getting all its data from NWS...) If you want PACER to be free, the federal courts are going to need a lot more money. If you're ever in federal court, you'll take a plea because federal lawyers are expensive and the US Atty's office has unlimited funding. Also: never drive drunk on a federal parkway or any other federal highway. (or anywhere else for that matter, but it's more expensive on federal roads.) I've used PACER on my own, never paying more than a few bucks a quarter -- most times zero bucks. But it would be cool to ingest everything into elastic or something and be able to search it and find patterns. Imagine if you could find the patterns of prosecution by local US attorneys. Only a few rich firms get to index and freely search everything, and they're all for the status quo.
Actually, they're only disabling "write" capability on the thumb drives, so they'll still be able to get viruses from reading them. Didn't they learn anything from Buckshot Yankee? How about no flash drives or portable media? How about not bypassing controls? Although I do feel bad for the Pentagon. They've created a "secure" network with 3 million users. It takes just one schmuck to make it insecure.
The guy in the story is taking advantage of the fact that the authorities (who we're paying for via tax dollars) will do absolutely nothing for months and months until more and more complaints pile up. Most police reports are now online so that crime victims don't waste officers' time reporting crimes. The victim in the story reported the crime to numerous authorities, who responded by doing nothing for a long time. Likewise, the bank did nothing.
It would be cool if Google did something about it, but it's not their problem. Our tax dollars pay the salaries of those who are supposed to protect us. It's a fairly simple case of fraud, harassment, and threat of violence.
If you ever thought the your bank would protect you in case of fraud or identity theft, they won't. The only thing the banks protect is their own money. Maybe you've noticed the news about mortgage fraud? Not many convictions there, either.
On the upside, though, they did manage to catch Bernie Madoff eventually....
Asterisk 1.8 has support for Google's unique protocol for voice. The result: Free calls anywhere in the US from any device or other PBX you've connected to your Asterisk box. All you need is to have compiled jabber and gtalk into your Asterisk build. Free calls in and out. FreeSwitch also supports Google Voice trunks. Google Voice is still having issues now and then, though, so it's not yet ready for prime time. I suspect that's why they're not rolling it out faster. You can connect any SIP or IAX client, wireless or not, to your Asterisk/FreeSwitch box.
Actually, no, you can't depend on fingerprints for identification in many crime cases. Anyone who's read Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book is familiar with a number of cases in which police said fingerprints are a match when they are not. When police say fingerprints match, it's often only a four or five-point match, which really isn't a match at all. Other departments require an eight-point match or greater. What's a "match" in one jurisdiction isn't even close in another. No one's ever proven that two people don't have the same fingerprints, either. Likewise, investigators also say the MD5 hash of a file is its "fingerprint" without ever informing jury of how many collisions there are with MD5 or the algorithm's obsolescence.
I replaced my home landline with an Asterisk box running on a Supermicro Atom D510 mboard, specifically PBX in a flash, which is the Cliffs' notes version of FreePBX. FreePBX is based on Asterisk, but provides a spiffy web interface for configuration that's more advanced and free-er than the others. That said, you'll still need to be comfortable at the command line on Linux and a text editor such as vi.
With Asterisk, you can do voicemail, have your voicemail emailed to you, have multiple boxes, pay $1.50 per month for a phone number plus $.01/minute for calls with a SIP provider such as Vitelity. You can have conference calls (you'll need to pay $10/channel for g729 if you want to scale at all on home bandwidth, though.)
You can have ring groups, different extensions, etc. I have one for emergency late-night network issues, which only those with the secret extension can access to wake me up.
There's an unlimited number of stupid tricks you can do, but you'll need to learn the difference between trunks, routes, and dial plans. That said, it's pretty cool. But then you'll want to buy Aastra SIP phones, which come with open-source phone applications, so it will cost you more. If you want to light up your in-house phone lines, it's $200 for an FXS card. If you want to use an existing landline as a trunk, it's $200 for an FXO card. (Double check which is which before you buy because I can never remember which is which.)
The best part about running your own PBX is that (1) you can send telemarketers to voicemail hell and (2) it's trivial to fake callerID, which helps with (1).
10. Place it on your ex-girlfriend's car.
9. Place it on a train.
8. Place it on a freighter carrying electronics to be recycled in China.
7 Place it in your carry-on luggage and watch the fun at airport security.
6. Dial 911 and tell them you've found a bomb on your car. Invite TV news crews to come watch the fun.
5. Give it to your local ACLU and tell them to make the FBI prove it's theirs before handing it back.
4. Pretend you don't know it's there, and drive to as many Tea Party events as possible.
3. Build an autonomous flying drone capable of carrying it and program it to fly around in circles all day.
2. Hack its logic to input arbitrary coordinates and make virtual visits to places you've always wanted to see.
1. Pretend it's not there and go on a tour of the most patriotic American landmarks to demonstrate your loyalty to the United States.
Thisis another yellowcake tale -- ginned up to scare Congress into giving DoD the Internet "kill switch" in case of "national emergency" -- like Wikileaks. Most of this is in response to the less-than-credible story in Foreign Affairs: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66552/william-j-lynn-iii/defending-a-new-domain.
Now our own government wishes they could do what China and Iran can -- shut down the Internet at will when there's something on there that they don't like. Does the military even read the Constitution they swear to uphold?
pfSense is great, but it does not scale to the level of Cisco Security Manager, which is enterprise ($$$) software to manage all the devices you already bought ($$$) from Cisco and paid more to support ($$$). CSM tracks changes and does workflow, too. I use both pfSense and Cisco almost every day. While CSM saves a lot of time, knowing how to configure which policies to share and how to share them is still complex and requires some thought. Cisco has a checkbox that will either limit all your user VPN tunnels to 256 kbps (e.g.) total or 256 kbps per tunnel. The wording isn't clear and I can never remember which one it is. If your users start complaining that VPN is really slow, it's probably the wrong setting.
Basic firewalling is not complex. Defense-in-depth and creating compartmentalized networks for each layer in each application in your worldwide network gets complex no matter what tools you use. The trouble with unified threat management is that no single vendor is going to catch everything.
The single most effective thing you can do to secure your networks is to start by denying all ports inbound AND outbound. Then open up only those ports required for your business. Use an authenticated proxy for client web traffic, and your users don't have to connect the Internet directly any more.
Ridiculous amount of safeguards? While permissive action links (requiring codes for launch) were created and deployed at the urging of Defense Secretary McNamara after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Air Force kept the codes set to all zeros until President Carter found out about it. That was over ten years later. The Air Force kept the codes at all zeros so they could launch without presidential authority. Source: http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm. To quote, "And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO." So, when you say ridiculous amount of safeguards, I'm not buying it without verification.
Clearly, it's not safe for pregnant women. It's not even ethical to test on pregnant women, so they'll never be safe for pregnant women. And there are studies that indicate they're not safe. To quote from the UK's Topix:
"...according to a US study from Los Alamos National Laboratory, THz waves create resonant effects that may interfere with DNA replication.
A 2008 study from Israel came to similar conclusions. In the journal Radiation Research, the researchers note that low power density of THz radiation prompts instability in DNA. They write: "These findings, if verified, may suggest that such exposure may result in an increased risk of cancer."
So once again, a new technology is being embraced without adequate safety testing. Does the full-body scan harm children? Is it safe for pregnant women? What about frequent flyers? What about cancer patients?
Anon is correct. CallerID between telco does not support name. All you enter on your side is the number. The telco charges for the number-to-name entry, so if the name is incorrect, it's incorrect in the telco's database. Also, every time you see an 800 number in caller ID entry, it's false. You can't dial out on 800 lines. Whoever it is calling with 800 on their caller ID is actually calling from some other circuit.
Now when you update politicians' Wikipedia entries, you can link to the speech where they say one thing and then link to the speech where they say the opposite. You'll also be able to link to the FEC data that shows the corporations spending money to change the position. It's definitely a step forward.
Why, yes, there have been studies on chips and cancers. You can read about it in mainstream media like, oh, the Washington Post -- "There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York." But hey, that's just some wacky oncologist talk.
If you didn't have a good accountant help you set up the company, you should hire one pronto. If you're just now searching around for free software because you haven't been keeping appropriate accounting records, you're going to have some really late nights before tax time. There's a reason everyone uses Quickbooks -- it's cheap and it works. We just sent our QB files over to our accountant and he filled out a return for us. You also need to set up your ledger. This is much less about software than it is about legal requirements, accounting, taxes, and deadlines. The integrations that nearly everyone does for Quickbooks ($200 or free online), from payroll to shopping carts, make it almost a no-brainer. But it's not free.
I ran a small business for four years. Accounting, billing, and record-keeping was a big pain in the rear. I'm a tech who likes to do tech things and solve problems. After four years of hiring, firing, paying, billing, filing, etc. I went back to being a regular employee at a big company. I even have health insurance now. And remember, all that accounting is not billable to your clients. (I also had a 15% discount to anyone who paid fast.)
Seriously, don't mess around trying to figure out every tax rule on your own. Hire a professional. For $500, it's the cheapest way to have some piece of mind in case you get audited, which is far more likely in your status. Even intro to accounting is a two-semester course. If you can't afford it, remember -- most businesses don't make it past their first two years.
This isn't new.
This happened in the US. NORAD's COBOL code was written so that US radar would go down when Soviet fighters entered a particular radar zone. Fortunately, an airplane hit the airspace and NORAD went dark. The investigation revealed a malicious COBOL programmer paid by the Soviets. I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it's in one of the references in Ross's Security Engineering book.
The new FTC rules aren't exclusive to bloggers. They cover celebrities, too. You can read the proposed rule changes on the FTC's site here:
http://www2.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm and in detail here: http://www2.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf .
Saying "results not typical" won't make it legal any more. Also, ads will need to disclose sponsored "independent research," e.g. "we paid this doctor $10k to help us sell this garbage."
Finally, maybe Slashdot stories could include links to the primary source?
Well there is proof that the TSA did something just as inane in a different case, because the person being questioned recorded his interrogation. The ACLU is using the tape for the lawsuit against the TSA. Listen to it here: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/39922res20090618.html
Unless you have a tape of your encounters, the judge will assume the cops/TSA/whatever never lie.
If you remember, the most expensive bottle of wine in the world was fake. Ben Wallace wrote a great book about how the world's top oenophiles were taken by a charlatan. I'm sure the same thing can happen with Scotch. The labs used the same dating techniques described here.
Verizon and ATT offer SIP trunks already, but they don't push them because they're cheaper than TDM ports. Plenty of other VOIP providers like Aretta and Vitelity also offer them. With G729 over IAX2, though, you can get even more calls down a single T1. Is this news just because Skype is doing it?
IT staff at the White House are actually career staff (not political appointees) at the Executive Office of the President. Their infrastructure is run mostly by contractors with five-year contracts assigned by the previous administration. (You can find vacancies there on http://www.usajobs.com/ if you search "Executive Office of the President.")
To get an email address there, you have to actually be employed at EOP (White House is a part of EOP) and fill out the requisite paperwork.
Using non-government emails for official government business a violation of the Presidential Records Act. It's been illegal for quite some time, and Obama criticized Bush for doing it.
There's also nothing to prevent me from using wh.whatever@gmail.com and sending fake orders out.
Signal strength is NOT the only issue. The US digital TV standard, 8VSB, is particularly sensitive to multipath interference. On plain old TV, multipath (radio signals bouncing off everything) led to ghosting in your tv image. In 8VSB, it means you don't get a successful decode. To quote from the FCC field test of 8VSB:
"The field test data also indicate that indoor reception of DTV signals is more challenging. Indoor service availability ranged from 75-100 percent in cities with a small to moderate percentage of obstructed sites and from 31-40 percent in markets with a large percentage of obstructed sites."
Given the rapid orbital decay of objects below approximately 200 km, the commonly accepted definition for LEO is between 200 - 2000 km. Put a second-gen Keyhole 7.5km up, and its resolution will be revolutionary, too. So it looks like the resolution is off by factor of at least 26.
You could put it on an airplane, though. But then again, you can already fly a Cessna at 2000' above a city for a lot less than that new camera will cost. Some city police departments and local news organizations have started using helicopters, and the cameras on these have an even greater resolution. They're even able to broadcast the images onto television.
Maybe slashdot should stop printing press releases word-for-word and maybe evaluate the numbers behind the numbers, even if they can't evaluate the science.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just one system. Every Federal Court gets to run its own PACER system and customize it. When people think of an independent judiciary, the think the courts are independent from the Executive Branch and Congress. They're also independent from each other. Every US District, Bankruptcy, Appeals and special Court gets to run its own PACER system. An appeals court can overturn a ruling but they can't tell a lower court which email system to use. It's not funded by any budget passed by Congress, including the networks that support them all. The ten-cents-per-page price came from the cost of photostats (a/k/a Xerox copies) that lawyers were used to paying. Most of the funds in PACER come from a few companies (Lexus/Nexus & Westaw?) that ingest EVERYTHING and index it and provide a value-added service (like usability) for more money. (Like Accuweather getting all its data from NWS...) If you want PACER to be free, the federal courts are going to need a lot more money. If you're ever in federal court, you'll take a plea because federal lawyers are expensive and the US Atty's office has unlimited funding. Also: never drive drunk on a federal parkway or any other federal highway. (or anywhere else for that matter, but it's more expensive on federal roads.) I've used PACER on my own, never paying more than a few bucks a quarter -- most times zero bucks. But it would be cool to ingest everything into elastic or something and be able to search it and find patterns. Imagine if you could find the patterns of prosecution by local US attorneys. Only a few rich firms get to index and freely search everything, and they're all for the status quo.
Actually, they're only disabling "write" capability on the thumb drives, so they'll still be able to get viruses from reading them. Didn't they learn anything from Buckshot Yankee? How about no flash drives or portable media? How about not bypassing controls? Although I do feel bad for the Pentagon. They've created a "secure" network with 3 million users. It takes just one schmuck to make it insecure.
The guy in the story is taking advantage of the fact that the authorities (who we're paying for via tax dollars) will do absolutely nothing for months and months until more and more complaints pile up. Most police reports are now online so that crime victims don't waste officers' time reporting crimes. The victim in the story reported the crime to numerous authorities, who responded by doing nothing for a long time. Likewise, the bank did nothing. It would be cool if Google did something about it, but it's not their problem. Our tax dollars pay the salaries of those who are supposed to protect us. It's a fairly simple case of fraud, harassment, and threat of violence. If you ever thought the your bank would protect you in case of fraud or identity theft, they won't. The only thing the banks protect is their own money. Maybe you've noticed the news about mortgage fraud? Not many convictions there, either. On the upside, though, they did manage to catch Bernie Madoff eventually....
Asterisk 1.8 has support for Google's unique protocol for voice. The result: Free calls anywhere in the US from any device or other PBX you've connected to your Asterisk box. All you need is to have compiled jabber and gtalk into your Asterisk build. Free calls in and out. FreeSwitch also supports Google Voice trunks. Google Voice is still having issues now and then, though, so it's not yet ready for prime time. I suspect that's why they're not rolling it out faster. You can connect any SIP or IAX client, wireless or not, to your Asterisk/FreeSwitch box.
Actually, no, you can't depend on fingerprints for identification in many crime cases. Anyone who's read Ross Anderson's Security Engineering book is familiar with a number of cases in which police said fingerprints are a match when they are not. When police say fingerprints match, it's often only a four or five-point match, which really isn't a match at all. Other departments require an eight-point match or greater. What's a "match" in one jurisdiction isn't even close in another. No one's ever proven that two people don't have the same fingerprints, either. Likewise, investigators also say the MD5 hash of a file is its "fingerprint" without ever informing jury of how many collisions there are with MD5 or the algorithm's obsolescence.
I replaced my home landline with an Asterisk box running on a Supermicro Atom D510 mboard, specifically PBX in a flash, which is the Cliffs' notes version of FreePBX. FreePBX is based on Asterisk, but provides a spiffy web interface for configuration that's more advanced and free-er than the others. That said, you'll still need to be comfortable at the command line on Linux and a text editor such as vi.
With Asterisk, you can do voicemail, have your voicemail emailed to you, have multiple boxes, pay $1.50 per month for a phone number plus $.01/minute for calls with a SIP provider such as Vitelity. You can have conference calls (you'll need to pay $10/channel for g729 if you want to scale at all on home bandwidth, though.)
You can have ring groups, different extensions, etc. I have one for emergency late-night network issues, which only those with the secret extension can access to wake me up.
There's an unlimited number of stupid tricks you can do, but you'll need to learn the difference between trunks, routes, and dial plans. That said, it's pretty cool. But then you'll want to buy Aastra SIP phones, which come with open-source phone applications, so it will cost you more. If you want to light up your in-house phone lines, it's $200 for an FXS card. If you want to use an existing landline as a trunk, it's $200 for an FXO card. (Double check which is which before you buy because I can never remember which is which.)
The best part about running your own PBX is that (1) you can send telemarketers to voicemail hell and (2) it's trivial to fake callerID, which helps with (1).
10. Place it on your ex-girlfriend's car.
9. Place it on a train.
8. Place it on a freighter carrying electronics to be recycled in China.
7 Place it in your carry-on luggage and watch the fun at airport security.
6. Dial 911 and tell them you've found a bomb on your car. Invite TV news crews to come watch the fun.
5. Give it to your local ACLU and tell them to make the FBI prove it's theirs before handing it back.
4. Pretend you don't know it's there, and drive to as many Tea Party events as possible.
3. Build an autonomous flying drone capable of carrying it and program it to fly around in circles all day.
2. Hack its logic to input arbitrary coordinates and make virtual visits to places you've always wanted to see.
1. Pretend it's not there and go on a tour of the most patriotic American landmarks to demonstrate your loyalty to the United States.
Thisis another yellowcake tale -- ginned up to scare Congress into giving DoD the Internet "kill switch" in case of "national emergency" -- like Wikileaks. Most of this is in response to the less-than-credible story in Foreign Affairs: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66552/william-j-lynn-iii/defending-a-new-domain. Now our own government wishes they could do what China and Iran can -- shut down the Internet at will when there's something on there that they don't like. Does the military even read the Constitution they swear to uphold?
pfSense is great, but it does not scale to the level of Cisco Security Manager, which is enterprise ($$$) software to manage all the devices you already bought ($$$) from Cisco and paid more to support ($$$). CSM tracks changes and does workflow, too. I use both pfSense and Cisco almost every day. While CSM saves a lot of time, knowing how to configure which policies to share and how to share them is still complex and requires some thought. Cisco has a checkbox that will either limit all your user VPN tunnels to 256 kbps (e.g.) total or 256 kbps per tunnel. The wording isn't clear and I can never remember which one it is. If your users start complaining that VPN is really slow, it's probably the wrong setting.
Basic firewalling is not complex. Defense-in-depth and creating compartmentalized networks for each layer in each application in your worldwide network gets complex no matter what tools you use. The trouble with unified threat management is that no single vendor is going to catch everything.
The single most effective thing you can do to secure your networks is to start by denying all ports inbound AND outbound. Then open up only those ports required for your business. Use an authenticated proxy for client web traffic, and your users don't have to connect the Internet directly any more.
Ridiculous amount of safeguards? While permissive action links (requiring codes for launch) were created and deployed at the urging of Defense Secretary McNamara after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Air Force kept the codes set to all zeros until President Carter found out about it. That was over ten years later. The Air Force kept the codes at all zeros so they could launch without presidential authority. Source: http://www.cdi.org/blair/permissive-action-links.cfm. To quote, "And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO." So, when you say ridiculous amount of safeguards, I'm not buying it without verification.
Clearly, it's not safe for pregnant women. It's not even ethical to test on pregnant women, so they'll never be safe for pregnant women. And there are studies that indicate they're not safe. To quote from the UK's Topix: "...according to a US study from Los Alamos National Laboratory, THz waves create resonant effects that may interfere with DNA replication. A 2008 study from Israel came to similar conclusions. In the journal Radiation Research, the researchers note that low power density of THz radiation prompts instability in DNA. They write: "These findings, if verified, may suggest that such exposure may result in an increased risk of cancer." So once again, a new technology is being embraced without adequate safety testing. Does the full-body scan harm children? Is it safe for pregnant women? What about frequent flyers? What about cancer patients?
Anon is correct. CallerID between telco does not support name. All you enter on your side is the number. The telco charges for the number-to-name entry, so if the name is incorrect, it's incorrect in the telco's database. Also, every time you see an 800 number in caller ID entry, it's false. You can't dial out on 800 lines. Whoever it is calling with 800 on their caller ID is actually calling from some other circuit.
Now when you update politicians' Wikipedia entries, you can link to the speech where they say one thing and then link to the speech where they say the opposite. You'll also be able to link to the FEC data that shows the corporations spending money to change the position. It's definitely a step forward.
Why, yes, there have been studies on chips and cancers. You can read about it in mainstream media like, oh, the Washington Post -- "There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York." But hey, that's just some wacky oncologist talk.
If you didn't have a good accountant help you set up the company, you should hire one pronto. If you're just now searching around for free software because you haven't been keeping appropriate accounting records, you're going to have some really late nights before tax time. There's a reason everyone uses Quickbooks -- it's cheap and it works. We just sent our QB files over to our accountant and he filled out a return for us. You also need to set up your ledger. This is much less about software than it is about legal requirements, accounting, taxes, and deadlines. The integrations that nearly everyone does for Quickbooks ($200 or free online), from payroll to shopping carts, make it almost a no-brainer. But it's not free. I ran a small business for four years. Accounting, billing, and record-keeping was a big pain in the rear. I'm a tech who likes to do tech things and solve problems. After four years of hiring, firing, paying, billing, filing, etc. I went back to being a regular employee at a big company. I even have health insurance now. And remember, all that accounting is not billable to your clients. (I also had a 15% discount to anyone who paid fast.) Seriously, don't mess around trying to figure out every tax rule on your own. Hire a professional. For $500, it's the cheapest way to have some piece of mind in case you get audited, which is far more likely in your status. Even intro to accounting is a two-semester course. If you can't afford it, remember -- most businesses don't make it past their first two years.
Instead of sending fake video, just feed porn. That will keep them occupied for a while.
This isn't new. This happened in the US. NORAD's COBOL code was written so that US radar would go down when Soviet fighters entered a particular radar zone. Fortunately, an airplane hit the airspace and NORAD went dark. The investigation revealed a malicious COBOL programmer paid by the Soviets. I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it's in one of the references in Ross's Security Engineering book.
The new FTC rules aren't exclusive to bloggers. They cover celebrities, too. You can read the proposed rule changes on the FTC's site here: http://www2.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm and in detail here: http://www2.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf . Saying "results not typical" won't make it legal any more. Also, ads will need to disclose sponsored "independent research," e.g. "we paid this doctor $10k to help us sell this garbage." Finally, maybe Slashdot stories could include links to the primary source?
Well there is proof that the TSA did something just as inane in a different case, because the person being questioned recorded his interrogation. The ACLU is using the tape for the lawsuit against the TSA. Listen to it here: http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/39922res20090618.html Unless you have a tape of your encounters, the judge will assume the cops/TSA/whatever never lie.
If you remember, the most expensive bottle of wine in the world was fake. Ben Wallace wrote a great book about how the world's top oenophiles were taken by a charlatan. I'm sure the same thing can happen with Scotch. The labs used the same dating techniques described here.
Verizon and ATT offer SIP trunks already, but they don't push them because they're cheaper than TDM ports. Plenty of other VOIP providers like Aretta and Vitelity also offer them. With G729 over IAX2, though, you can get even more calls down a single T1. Is this news just because Skype is doing it?
IT staff at the White House are actually career staff (not political appointees) at the Executive Office of the President. Their infrastructure is run mostly by contractors with five-year contracts assigned by the previous administration. (You can find vacancies there on http://www.usajobs.com/ if you search "Executive Office of the President.") To get an email address there, you have to actually be employed at EOP (White House is a part of EOP) and fill out the requisite paperwork. Using non-government emails for official government business a violation of the Presidential Records Act. It's been illegal for quite some time, and Obama criticized Bush for doing it. There's also nothing to prevent me from using wh.whatever@gmail.com and sending fake orders out.
( http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/reports/dtvreprt.pdf ") New technology was supposed to improve indoor reception, but it hasn't, and there's going to be a whole lot of people that can't get DTV over the air next February. Just a minor technical detail from your government.
Given the rapid orbital decay of objects below approximately 200 km, the commonly accepted definition for LEO is between 200 - 2000 km. Put a second-gen Keyhole 7.5km up, and its resolution will be revolutionary, too. So it looks like the resolution is off by factor of at least 26.
You could put it on an airplane, though. But then again, you can already fly a Cessna at 2000' above a city for a lot less than that new camera will cost. Some city police departments and local news organizations have started using helicopters, and the cameras on these have an even greater resolution. They're even able to broadcast the images onto television.
Maybe slashdot should stop printing press releases word-for-word and maybe evaluate the numbers behind the numbers, even if they can't evaluate the science.
The gloves come off!