Four in four years, without breakdowns? One was hit by a meteor, one was destroyed by a UFO when you were abducted by aliens, one was sucked into an interdimensional vortex, and one was stolen by Neil Patrick Harris?
I personally am not like that, but I know someone who is. They get a new car (none of them actually new, just new to my friend) every year. Nothing happens to the old cars beyond the fact that they cease to be "new", and something else comes along that's exciting for some reason (e.g. a very nice Jeep, or a classic VW Bus, or whatever strikes his fancy). As he only ever seems to have a vehicle for a year and he keeps very good care of them (they're usually in better shape when he parts with them), he frequently sells them for as much or at least close to as much as he bought them for, it doesn't really cost him much. And he has fun with each new vehicle for whatever reason he got it for. So, cool...
...from a blood transfusion.... So it would seem we already have what the article is talking about.
Really? How often do people get a transfusion of lab-created, genetically engineered blood? If the answer is "never", then I fail to see how we already have what the article is talking about.
Lets cure all natural causes of death through the miracle of modern science.
Then starve to death as the world becomes grossly overpopulated.
Problem: All evidence suggests the opposite. Eliminate all the most egregious morality concerns from a population, and they stop reproducing like rabbits. In the healthiest parts of the first word, population growth is going negative.
So this is, like, vaccination 2.0. Is this a ploy to make vaccination more palatable to the freaks who think vaccines cause autism?
Hah. No. They'll freak out even more about something like this. But it'll improve survivability for the rest of us, enabling natural selection to fix the problem.
Well, yes. Those who object to that are not thinking clearly about what kinds of attacks are possible on a password and what various security measures are meant to prevent. A 20 character password is supposed to slow down brute forcing the hash on the captured password file or the like. It's no more secure than a six character password on a "gun to the head" attack. If someone has physical access to my person, they have access to all my passwords, whether I wrote them down in a little black book I keep with me or not. If I failed to write them down, they need only wave a gun in my general direction and I'll happily write them down for them. Having them already written down simply saves a bit of time and unpleasantness...
...and, confronted with the difficulty of remembering that many random words and their order, people would simply use common text like the preamble to the Constitution, lyrics from their favorite song, etc. Despite how unique we may fancy ourselves, our favorite paragraphs are probably significantly less unpredictable than six random characters.
It can be automated, just not solely in software. You could probably design a device the size of a breadbox that would perform the attack with minimal supervision by a human.
Pop off the case, seal the device onto the chip, press button, then wait. Somebody with a lot of time or a lot of money will do it.
...and someday we'll find out that the NSA has had these breadboxes on their desks since 2006.;)
You didn't answer the question. It was "Exactly how would this attack have been prevented". Nice sidestep, though.
Not actually a sidestep -- the question is flawed. Open-source advocates would say an open solution is better, but they would never make the claim the question implies they do. Attacks like this are impossible to prevent, period. The difference that makes the open solution better is that an open solution lets everyone see how they can be accomplished, and evaluate the dangers appropriately. With a closed-solution, risk assessment is impossible. The same obscurity that supposedly buys you additional security prevents any attempt at accurate risk assessment. The end result is usually that the vendor discounts real risks, and open-source types assume the worst, and the argument simply cannot be settled because it's being conducted in the absence of any facts, which are hidden from all participants.
Eighteen twenty sided dice. 5d6 for smaller projects.
I was going to suggest astrologers and tarot cards. It's not that I think these are terribly accurate, it's just that I think you're delusional if you think something else is. Tell me you put any faith in estimates by (insert your favorite method here) and I'll think you no more rational than someone who tells me their astrological chart makes an April deadline look favorable.:p
You Americans are rather melodramatic about this entire event...have you every tried to consider why?
Not too deeply. It's the kind of question with answers that are immediately self-evident to anyone who's genuinely human. Someone with emotional problems, a sociopath or otherwise abnormal psychology might find it puzzling, but otherwise, no, it's not the kind of question that would even come up for most people. It's part of our species mindset, nationality has nothing to do with it.
Considering Warner Von Braun was describing trips to Mars and moon bases in the 60's (with existing engineering technology) I'm amazed at our sad lack of progress in space exploration
I'm saddened but not amazed. Politically speaking, space exploration is not sexy. Sending people into space is sexy. So we've wasted huge amounts of money on manned space missions, almost none of which involved any actual space exploration, leaving very little left over for actually exploring space. Gotta love Spirit, but Spirit should be one of dozens if not hundreds of little guys out there exploring every rock this side of Neptune, not one of a tiny handful...
Just another example showing that sometimes merely being the best is insufficient.
VHS tapes will survive just as well if you don't play them, thus preventing where and tear. And, contrary to the overused meme, the VHS/Betamax war was won by VHS because VHS was better than Betamax in most ways. The few things Betamax was better at weren't enough to overcome the many ways VHS was better. "Best" is subjective, but it takes an extremely selective presentation of the facts, carefully leaving out all the flaws, to make the idea that Betamax was better sound plausible...
Isn't there some sort of exclusion in the law for copyrighting materials that have major public importance? I'm probably just crazy.
No, you're probably sane, which means you've have great difficulty understanding the thought processes of most people, and utterly perplexed by any kind of examination of laws.;)
Indeed. For various reasons I've managed to move every 3-4 years for most of my life. Every time I move, I throw away half my shit rather than move it, and give away half of what I don't throw away. This habit started after the first time I moved (not counting when I first moved away from home). I loaded a bunch of shit into one of those storage places and paid something like $20/mo to keep it stored. Eventually I realized, after not even bothering to go to the storage place for a few months except to drop off a check, that I was wasting money storing shit I don't even have a use for. Those places are a waste. If you're thinking about renting one ("well, I'm moving someplace smaller but I'll want all this stuff next time I move someplace bigger"), don't. By the time you move to that bigger place, and presumably now making more money to cover it, you'll find that junk in the storage shed isn't so attractive after all. It seemed great when you were downsizing, but now that you're upsizing, you'll be going, "what on earth was I thinking? For the amount I spent storing it, I could have just bought a new (and better one)." Of course, obviously there are extremely high-value items for which this does not apply, but if you go look at what most people have in these storage units, very rarely is there anything that qualifies.
Your assumption appears to be that the Blues Brothers fx team never thought about wind or aerodynamic effects, rather than they were competent and confident and the FAA just made them jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops to arrive at what people in the industry already knew.
Actually, I think the premise here is that it would be really fucking stupid to assume one way or the other. The FAA needs proof, or are you going to argue that because one group of people might have done right without the FAA requiring proof, the FAA should just let anyone do it whether they've put any thought into these effects or not? Or are they just supposed to psychically divine which people will do it responsibly and which won't? Or, even less plausibly, simply take their word for it, since people are basically both competent and honest?
Can I come live in your fantasy world? I'm more than happy to grant that government could be a lot less intrusive and expensive in it, and it would be a great place to live, if it were real...
Robots are good and they can be used successfully, but "boots on the ground" or in this case "boots in space" are also required.
Er, wake up and smell the 21st century? News flash: "boots on the ground" is a concept that's on the way out, even in the military where the phrase originates from. "Boots on the ground" is old and busted, the new hotness is robots fighting your wars for you. If you think they're going to stop with unmanned aircraft, think again.
Certainly they can't do everything, but the number of actual, human-filled boots required for any task is going to decrease dramatically, and as much as is possible, the "boots on the ground" that remain are going to remain on the ground of whatever base they start from, regardless of where in the world their robots are operating.
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business. We're are so far less advanced now than we could be, if only we'd spent the money doing useful things instead.
You're assuming the people implementing the devices are implementing them to improve security. The premise behind calling something "security theatre" is that the people implementing them are doing so to give the impression that they're doing something about security. Whether it actually works or not is not particularly relevant to them, what matters is that people feel safer.
It's not that they're stupid, they're just assuming you're stupid. Since this isn't a bad assumption for a lot of travelers, most of them won't complain about making an exception for children. So, if that makes people happier, then why not?
Again, keep in mind that the whole point of "security theatre" is to make people feel better about traveling. You're continually mixing up security theatre with actual security, which has entirely different, unrelated objectives.
OK, but wouldn't not scanning children with these devices be more of a security theatre than scanning everyone?
No. If the devices actually work, it isn't "security theatre", it's actual security. If it is actual security, then yes, scanning children would be better. But if it's just security theatre, then it's bad enough anyone is being subjected to it, subjecting children as well is just making it worse, not better.
Not saying I agree with this viewpoint, just pointing out there's no contradiction in the parts you're trying to reconcile. If it is just security theatre and nothing more, there's every reason in the world to be outraged about the children's pics.
You're right about everything except the first word, where you imply the person you're responding to isn't also right. Getting people angry with the governments of countries is one of the main aims of terrorists. If you're angry, then yes, the terrorists have won. It's like poking a bear with a stick until it's angry enough to attack. They poke your government to get it to take actions which make it look bad, make more and more people see it as the evil enemy they believe it is, and governments (mine as well as yours) happily do exactly what the terrorists want them to do.
...register with different false data on separate sites
This attack allows for a bit of quasi-de-anonymizing in this case. It doesn't tell you that user "vikingsfan" is real life Eric J. Andersen of Frostbite Falls, MN, but it does tell you that "vikingsfan" on the site is none other than "hockeypuck" on site B, who is also the same person as "moosehead" on site C, etc.
This sounds trivial, but it's of interest to some of us who may not want people on site A to know who we are on site B, when site A is an important social locale for us, even if no one on site A knows our real name (which is probably unimportant to them in any case, it might as well be just another nick...)
Put succinctly, it can expose your alts even if it doesn't expose your RL identity.
Slashdot Mirror
Four in four years, without breakdowns? One was hit by a meteor, one was destroyed by a UFO when you were abducted by aliens, one was sucked into an interdimensional vortex, and one was stolen by Neil Patrick Harris?
I personally am not like that, but I know someone who is. They get a new car (none of them actually new, just new to my friend) every year. Nothing happens to the old cars beyond the fact that they cease to be "new", and something else comes along that's exciting for some reason (e.g. a very nice Jeep, or a classic VW Bus, or whatever strikes his fancy). As he only ever seems to have a vehicle for a year and he keeps very good care of them (they're usually in better shape when he parts with them), he frequently sells them for as much or at least close to as much as he bought them for, it doesn't really cost him much. And he has fun with each new vehicle for whatever reason he got it for. So, cool...
I use Facebook occasionally, especially for playing Lexulous (scrabble clone) with my wife lately.
I love Lexulous. However, I don't even have a Facebook account. It's not required.
When your sister-in-law gets notified about your post on "Who has the Biggest Flickr Rack"... you know web2.0 has problems.
Some might argue your sister-in-law has a right to know you've singled her out for having a big rack. ;)
...from a blood transfusion. ... So it would seem we already have what the article is talking about.
Really? How often do people get a transfusion of lab-created, genetically engineered blood? If the answer is "never", then I fail to see how we already have what the article is talking about.
Lets cure all natural causes of death through the miracle of modern science. Then starve to death as the world becomes grossly overpopulated.
Problem: All evidence suggests the opposite. Eliminate all the most egregious morality concerns from a population, and they stop reproducing like rabbits. In the healthiest parts of the first word, population growth is going negative.
So this is, like, vaccination 2.0. Is this a ploy to make vaccination more palatable to the freaks who think vaccines cause autism?
Hah. No. They'll freak out even more about something like this. But it'll improve survivability for the rest of us, enabling natural selection to fix the problem.
From TFA:
"We are not sure when this will all happen, but there’s a good chance it will, and perhaps the only question is when."
Hmmmmm . . .
Very likely it'll be in a couple decades. I remember reading that back in the 80s.
Oh, wait...
Well, yes. Those who object to that are not thinking clearly about what kinds of attacks are possible on a password and what various security measures are meant to prevent. A 20 character password is supposed to slow down brute forcing the hash on the captured password file or the like. It's no more secure than a six character password on a "gun to the head" attack. If someone has physical access to my person, they have access to all my passwords, whether I wrote them down in a little black book I keep with me or not. If I failed to write them down, they need only wave a gun in my general direction and I'll happily write them down for them. Having them already written down simply saves a bit of time and unpleasantness...
...and, confronted with the difficulty of remembering that many random words and their order, people would simply use common text like the preamble to the Constitution, lyrics from their favorite song, etc. Despite how unique we may fancy ourselves, our favorite paragraphs are probably significantly less unpredictable than six random characters.
It can be automated, just not solely in software. You could probably design a device the size of a breadbox that would perform the attack with minimal supervision by a human.
Pop off the case, seal the device onto the chip, press button, then wait. Somebody with a lot of time or a lot of money will do it.
...and someday we'll find out that the NSA has had these breadboxes on their desks since 2006. ;)
You didn't answer the question. It was "Exactly how would this attack have been prevented". Nice sidestep, though.
Not actually a sidestep -- the question is flawed. Open-source advocates would say an open solution is better, but they would never make the claim the question implies they do. Attacks like this are impossible to prevent, period. The difference that makes the open solution better is that an open solution lets everyone see how they can be accomplished, and evaluate the dangers appropriately. With a closed-solution, risk assessment is impossible. The same obscurity that supposedly buys you additional security prevents any attempt at accurate risk assessment. The end result is usually that the vendor discounts real risks, and open-source types assume the worst, and the argument simply cannot be settled because it's being conducted in the absence of any facts, which are hidden from all participants.
Eighteen twenty sided dice. 5d6 for smaller projects.
I was going to suggest astrologers and tarot cards. It's not that I think these are terribly accurate, it's just that I think you're delusional if you think something else is. Tell me you put any faith in estimates by (insert your favorite method here) and I'll think you no more rational than someone who tells me their astrological chart makes an April deadline look favorable. :p
... a staggering 95% of User Generated Content is either malicious in nature or spam.
Considering 95% of internet users are malicious (see GIFT), it's hardly staggering that 95% of user generated content is malicious too. :p
You Americans are rather melodramatic about this entire event...have you every tried to consider why?
Not too deeply. It's the kind of question with answers that are immediately self-evident to anyone who's genuinely human. Someone with emotional problems, a sociopath or otherwise abnormal psychology might find it puzzling, but otherwise, no, it's not the kind of question that would even come up for most people. It's part of our species mindset, nationality has nothing to do with it.
Considering Warner Von Braun was describing trips to Mars and moon bases in the 60's (with existing engineering technology) I'm amazed at our sad lack of progress in space exploration
I'm saddened but not amazed. Politically speaking, space exploration is not sexy. Sending people into space is sexy. So we've wasted huge amounts of money on manned space missions, almost none of which involved any actual space exploration, leaving very little left over for actually exploring space. Gotta love Spirit, but Spirit should be one of dozens if not hundreds of little guys out there exploring every rock this side of Neptune, not one of a tiny handful...
Just another example showing that sometimes merely being the best is insufficient.
VHS tapes will survive just as well if you don't play them, thus preventing where and tear. And, contrary to the overused meme, the VHS/Betamax war was won by VHS because VHS was better than Betamax in most ways. The few things Betamax was better at weren't enough to overcome the many ways VHS was better. "Best" is subjective, but it takes an extremely selective presentation of the facts, carefully leaving out all the flaws, to make the idea that Betamax was better sound plausible...
Isn't there some sort of exclusion in the law for copyrighting materials that have major public importance? I'm probably just crazy.
No, you're probably sane, which means you've have great difficulty understanding the thought processes of most people, and utterly perplexed by any kind of examination of laws. ;)
Indeed. For various reasons I've managed to move every 3-4 years for most of my life. Every time I move, I throw away half my shit rather than move it, and give away half of what I don't throw away. This habit started after the first time I moved (not counting when I first moved away from home). I loaded a bunch of shit into one of those storage places and paid something like $20/mo to keep it stored. Eventually I realized, after not even bothering to go to the storage place for a few months except to drop off a check, that I was wasting money storing shit I don't even have a use for. Those places are a waste. If you're thinking about renting one ("well, I'm moving someplace smaller but I'll want all this stuff next time I move someplace bigger"), don't. By the time you move to that bigger place, and presumably now making more money to cover it, you'll find that junk in the storage shed isn't so attractive after all. It seemed great when you were downsizing, but now that you're upsizing, you'll be going, "what on earth was I thinking? For the amount I spent storing it, I could have just bought a new (and better one)." Of course, obviously there are extremely high-value items for which this does not apply, but if you go look at what most people have in these storage units, very rarely is there anything that qualifies.
Your assumption appears to be that the Blues Brothers fx team never thought about wind or aerodynamic effects, rather than they were competent and confident and the FAA just made them jump through a bunch of bureaucratic hoops to arrive at what people in the industry already knew.
Actually, I think the premise here is that it would be really fucking stupid to assume one way or the other. The FAA needs proof, or are you going to argue that because one group of people might have done right without the FAA requiring proof, the FAA should just let anyone do it whether they've put any thought into these effects or not? Or are they just supposed to psychically divine which people will do it responsibly and which won't? Or, even less plausibly, simply take their word for it, since people are basically both competent and honest?
Can I come live in your fantasy world? I'm more than happy to grant that government could be a lot less intrusive and expensive in it, and it would be a great place to live, if it were real...
Robots are good and they can be used successfully, but "boots on the ground" or in this case "boots in space" are also required.
Er, wake up and smell the 21st century? News flash: "boots on the ground" is a concept that's on the way out, even in the military where the phrase originates from. "Boots on the ground" is old and busted, the new hotness is robots fighting your wars for you. If you think they're going to stop with unmanned aircraft, think again.
Certainly they can't do everything, but the number of actual, human-filled boots required for any task is going to decrease dramatically, and as much as is possible, the "boots on the ground" that remain are going to remain on the ground of whatever base they start from, regardless of where in the world their robots are operating.
The fact of the matter is, you can do a lot more with robots than with people. One of the things holding back our progress is the stubborn insistence on sending men to do a machine's job, consuming huge amounts of resources and money that could have been spent actually accomplishing things rather than making "Buck Rogers" PR out of serious business. We're are so far less advanced now than we could be, if only we'd spent the money doing useful things instead.
I was trying to figure out how that post got modded "insightful".
Of course I might be wrong, ...
Ah, there we go...
You're assuming the people implementing the devices are implementing them to improve security. The premise behind calling something "security theatre" is that the people implementing them are doing so to give the impression that they're doing something about security. Whether it actually works or not is not particularly relevant to them, what matters is that people feel safer.
It's not that they're stupid, they're just assuming you're stupid. Since this isn't a bad assumption for a lot of travelers, most of them won't complain about making an exception for children. So, if that makes people happier, then why not?
Again, keep in mind that the whole point of "security theatre" is to make people feel better about traveling. You're continually mixing up security theatre with actual security, which has entirely different, unrelated objectives.
OK, but wouldn't not scanning children with these devices be more of a security theatre than scanning everyone?
No. If the devices actually work, it isn't "security theatre", it's actual security. If it is actual security, then yes, scanning children would be better. But if it's just security theatre, then it's bad enough anyone is being subjected to it, subjecting children as well is just making it worse, not better.
Not saying I agree with this viewpoint, just pointing out there's no contradiction in the parts you're trying to reconcile. If it is just security theatre and nothing more, there's every reason in the world to be outraged about the children's pics.
No, the government has won ... Yes I'm angry.
You're right about everything except the first word, where you imply the person you're responding to isn't also right. Getting people angry with the governments of countries is one of the main aims of terrorists. If you're angry, then yes, the terrorists have won. It's like poking a bear with a stick until it's angry enough to attack. They poke your government to get it to take actions which make it look bad, make more and more people see it as the evil enemy they believe it is, and governments (mine as well as yours) happily do exactly what the terrorists want them to do.
...register with different false data on separate sites
This attack allows for a bit of quasi-de-anonymizing in this case. It doesn't tell you that user "vikingsfan" is real life Eric J. Andersen of Frostbite Falls, MN, but it does tell you that "vikingsfan" on the site is none other than "hockeypuck" on site B, who is also the same person as "moosehead" on site C, etc.
This sounds trivial, but it's of interest to some of us who may not want people on site A to know who we are on site B, when site A is an important social locale for us, even if no one on site A knows our real name (which is probably unimportant to them in any case, it might as well be just another nick...)
Put succinctly, it can expose your alts even if it doesn't expose your RL identity.