How can food in prison be a commodity? Are the prisoners not fed enough?
Is this a real question?
In prison, real currency is not allowed. However, humans are inherently commercial creatures, and consequently a system of barter results in the absence of any kind of hard currency upon which to base trade. What is needed is something with intrinsic value but which is also universally valued by most (if not all) of a population. Food is perfect for this: let's say you want something from another inmate. You may pass on eating a meal, instead giving it to the other guy in exchange for the thing you want. But, if you can go through the line twice, you can have your cake and eat it too.
What resulted was a dramatic drop in both the number and severity of accidents. Instead of trying to calm traffic, separate cars and pedestrians/bikes from each other and provide tons of stop signs and other signage, he did the opposite.
That's because the experiment involves dutch drivers, respectful and highly accustomed to cyclists, and stands in full contrast with the rest of Netherlands. Drivers suddenly see no signs and allot of bicycles on the road so they reduce speed and increase awareness.
Around these parts (eastern Europe) there are barely any good roads, let alone cycling infrastructure and nice "Bridge" signs. A prefect setup for Mondeman's experiment, and I can tell you the result: cycling in Romania is suicidal. The drivers are very aggressive and they adapt to the harsh driving environment by externalizing the risk to more vulnerable vehicles and pedestrians. Education and law enforcement is lacking, cyclists are seen as inferior/poor/blocking the traffic.
The only way to make cycling safe here is to build separate lanes and protect them with concrete or metallic stoppers, so that drivers will not use them for parking or driving.
Actually, no...his initial work was in the Netherlands but if you actually *read* about the research, you'll find that what he discovered was also found to be true in many, many other places. And while the quality of drivers/normal behavior (as matters in China, where a massive percentage of the driving population is about as experienced as a teenage driver in Western countries, with equivalent effects) matters, safety still rises and falls with the way cars and pedestrians/bikes blend together. So if you take the same two traffic layouts, from opposing philosophies, from the Netherlands and drop them into China you will have more accidents in China in both places but still significantly less in the one that follows Monderman's design.
Once upon at time, royalty did not brook criticism. But, it was understood that there was a need for certain uncomfortable truths to be told, lest kings be so totally out of touch with their realm that they, well...end up doing what a lot of royals did anyways. But anyways...the mechanism for this was known as the "Motley Fool," usually a deformed individual or a dwarf that nobody would take seriously. They dressed in fanciful clothing and, well, acted like a fool. But as they did it, they also wove those uncomfortable truths into their humor, thus informing the king in a way that was acceptable to them and thus permitted. This, in fact, is the reason why the website for personal finance, The Motely Fool named themselves thus.
Dig through Clive Robinson's comments on Schneier's blog. He's actually bootstrapped the entire toolchain from handbuilt airgapped electronics and been able to actually show that the result is what was expected.
You are aware that several of the things you say in just those two sentences are beyond the technical ability of most average people, yes? Most people have never heard of "Schneier's blog," for one thing. Bootstrapped? I have to wonder how scared off they'd be at the phrase, "handbuilt airgapped electronics." So, they either have to trust Clive Robinson, or not. TrueCrypt isn't an IDE or a piece of software used to lay out circuit board designs; use of the tool is not solely oriented towards technically-savvy individuals. And so, we get back to the whole trust question since technical skill is required to independently validate that the binaries match the source.
Oh, how many of this story fills out spots on the Public Relations Security Bingo game? I counted four. You have to refresh to get all of the possible options; there are more than fit on any one card:)
Then follow the same steps and compile it yourself. You should come to the same results.
I think you're kind of missing his two points. One, he's joking. But two, he's also serious...yes, that is what someone can do. But will they? Probably not. I'm willing to bet that 80% minimum of those who read TFA will simply accept it as canon and move on with it a fact in their minds that the two do match. And beyond that, they will keep it as a fact in their minds even for future releases, which haven't been validated in this way. So that's really the challenge here.
And even worse, think about all the TrueCrypt users who don't have the technical ability to compile binaries, much less do it in a very specific way? Ultimately, someone has to be trusted, and trust is a web rather than something that flows from a single fountain when it comes to society.
The simple fact is that bicycling (as much as I love it) is horrendously dangerous in urban areas, and the reason is cars (and even worse, SUVs). All these moves to build bike lanes are idiotic and wasteful, because they do absolutely nothing to physically separate bikes from cars, and cars will drive in the bike lanes whenever they want (which is, every time they need to take a right turn, or simply stop paying attention, or get drunk).
If these idiot mayors want to encourage bicycling, they need to build real bike roads, like they have in Copenhagen, where the bikes are the only thing on the road, not cars, and not pedestrians either. That's the only way to do it.
Actually, while this seems intuitively obvious, a lot of research and testing indicates that it's the opposite of what is true. There's a Dutch city planner/traffic engineer by the last name of Monderman who did some fascinating work on the topic, re-engineering a Dutch village in the opposite way. What resulted was a dramatic drop in both the number and severity of accidents...of all forms. Instead of trying to calm traffic, separate cars and pedestrians/bikes from each other and provide tons of stop signs and other signage, he did the opposite. There's a surprisingly enjoyable book called "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do" that I recommend for anyone who drives a lot. I know, a book about traffic...must be insanely boring, right? It's actually quite good, both an entertaining read and full of solid academic rigor. Monderman himself is a riot. He points out, while driving towards a bridge, a sign that says it's a bridge. He asks if anyone really needs a sign to know that they're seeing a bridge. "Treat people like idiots, and they will behave as such," he points out. I agree.
Battelle has made a major mistake here. INL's ICS testing labs (and ICS-CERT) require extremely forward-thinking, highly skilled security professionals with a very narrow subset of specialties. Which are exactly the sorts of people to be raging, rippingly pissed off at reading this. They approached me about a position about 2 months ago; oh, if only they approached me tomorrow. I'd be polite about it, but I would also tell them that there was no way I would consider a position with them, if they truly think that researchers are criminals, even though they would hire such. And if they don't think that researchers are criminals, they have no right to treat them as such.
It should be noted that they are not "connecting" to these devices, just cataloging the ones which announce their own presence. It's pretty fricking passive.
Let's get real. The worst christians is Westboro Baptist Church and what do they do? Protest funerals and tell everyone how gay lovers will burn in hell. Let's try an experiment: Paint Jesus in Feces in a Christian country and see what the worst thing that will happen to you as a result? Next, pain Mohammed in feces and see what will happen to you in a Muslim country. Or even a European one (death threats anyone)?
Oh wait, you were trying to make a lame attempt at equating the two.
WBC is the most vocally odious, but there are many groups that have been much, much worse. Let's start with pretty much the entire white supremacist movement. Aryan Nations considered themselves a (quote) "White Christian Separatist" organization. That's right, these are literally Nazis we're talking about. (How often can someone play the Nazi Card on the Internet while actually stating an objective fact, eh?) Then there are splinter groups like the Louisiana-based "Church of the Sons of Yahweh" (that's "Church," not "delicatessen" or "mosque" or "nearby diner"), and other competing organizations like The Order. Oh, let's keep in mind why the KKK burns crosses...they too identify themselves as a Christian organization.
Now, all of these are fringe groups; I don't mean to infer that this is how most Christians, or even a significant percentage of them, think or act. But they all make the WBC look like internet trolls playing Xbox by comparison. WBC is NOT the worst there is.
Learn some languages and build your own forum. It's not hard and all the skills you'll acquire will look great on a resume.
Right...because everyone who could ever want to use a forum is a web developer, right? And, of course, every one-off forum app will be TOTALLY free from vulnerabilities, of course. Oh, and let's not forget that there's no benefit whatsoever to different forums being somewhat similar in terms of user interaction...so let's just throw that out the door as well.
...if you'd use an armored division of WW2 era tanks to defend your home.
DRM doesn't work very well...in those few situations where it does work, it's an enclosed environment with a massive investment in identity management. The real key to making DRM work is being able to assert who people are...otherwise you can't tell people apart, and thus can't differentiate between who should and should not be allowed to see the content. So it's infeasible for "personal" use, off the bat; if you don't control the environment pretty much entirely (like a company with heavy IP content...one situation where DRM does work, for internal use only) then it's a losing proposition. But at the same time, using DRM to try and foil surveillance? Really? That's idiotic. DRM is not much else more than encryption with a front-end for selective decryption based on identity. It's clear enough that trying to beat the NSA at the crypto game is a tall, tall order, and probably not something which gets any easier if you make it more complex by doing it under the guise of DRM.
Cell phones have been identifiable by RF fingerprinting for many, many years.
Was a common anti-fraud technique in the analog cellular days.
Yes, but RF fingerprinting requires proximity to the cell phone. This is a form of fingerprinting that can be done to large population en masse from pretty much anywhere. This is actually something *very* new.
"Code running on the website in the device’s mobile browser"
So what I'd like to know is this (for all you people out there who write web code for mobile devices): what are the differences between what access different platforms give to those sensors? Obviously Android provides all the access that's needed; the example in the article refers to it working on a Galaxy Nexus. But what about Windows Mobile/IOS/Blackberry? Do they all have APIs to expose that functionality to something running in a browser, given that some of those platforms lack either java or shockwave/flash?
I remember a bunch of douchebags who managed to convince non-technical business leaders that bandwidth could be traded like this. They set up a whole trading market, pumped a bunch of money through it...I even worked for someone who managed to get us in to do a vulnerability assessment of their whole operation.
After we were done, the upper management of this company (the douchebags with the trading capability) came in, and shut down the meeting where we presented our findings...after which, they sacked the IT people who brought us in. Why, you ask? Because the whole thing was a sham, and the upper management was afraid it would get found out. The douchebags were Enron.
The article seems to speak more on crimes against humanity, like killing imaginary civilians.
Yes...but do they plan to have an in-game tribunal, where you get at least a semblance of due process before you are forced to suffer consequences? If you look at actual real warfare over time, you'll notice that the majority of casualties are actually non-combatants. So where do you draw the line? How do you judge, in a video game engine, between a person who merely jumped when a figure came around a corner and a person who deliberately shot a civilian? If you're going to aim for ethical behavior, it has to go both ways and recognize the difference between human error under challenging circumstances and true evil, no?
Well, in CoD games, if you're playing multiplayer (as most players are), then there isn't a way to kill frendlies unless you play "hardcore" mode. In hardcore mode, you get kicked from a match if you kill teammates 3 times.
Yeah, but it sounds like here they want to penalize you for shooting...well, pretty much anyone.
What worries me is that this crosses into a fuzzy situation. If it's multiplayer, then it's consensual; everyone's there, and only a total douchebag would go into multiplayer combat without some understanding that they may not be Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris combined, killing everyone with wild abandon with nary a scratch on them. If it's singleplayer then true ethics are null and void entirely; no harm comes to anyone as a result of the act. Violent crime is not growing as video games have come on the scene, so I'm not buying the "no harm until little Timmy shoots up a bus full of nuns" concept either.
So, it's about the reward system. But what happens when it's not even a person being rewarded for doing something that isn't real to another non-real entity? What if none of it is real, and it's a movie? Should it be illegal for people to watch fictional characters be rewarded for such things? Should Clive Owen be castigated for his role in "Shoot 'Em Up," where he takes matters into his own hands instead of calling 911 nonstop for 2 hours?
This is scarily close to being a free speech issue, in my opinion, and for no reason that anyone can explain to my satisfaction.
If it's anything like my last employer's Syracuse and Albany offices, FiOS availability is very patchwork... a little here, a little there, always available the next block over but not where you need it.
If it's anything like any broadband solution that's ever existed, availability is "very patchwork" at some point, in most places. I remember when DSL was super-exotic; there were two phone exchanges in all of the metropolitan DC area that had it, and I was fortunate enough to be in one of them.
The way FiOS works, it's partially incumbent upon groups like homeowners and condo associations...or apartment building management...to request that Verizon come in and install the local infrastructure for "last mile" delivery. It's not just a situation of them coming up to one home and plugging you in, otherwise. We recently went through this in the condo development where I live, and it was an involved process...but when you want fiber to your home, guess what? You have to have someone install the fiber, which means asking them to do so. Hence the advertising to build up demand.
Could the ad have been a little more up front about this? Sure. But it's not actually silly that they are doing this.
I don't think that there's anything right about this, but it seems to me that InBloom is merely responding to demand. As long as there are a large body of helicopter parents, there will be companies that try to make better helicopters.
>> which kept its Manhattan datacenter running during the storm by creating a makeshift bucket brigade to carry fuel to the building's 17th floor
No fire code violations there, right? I'd love to be an attorney near this one. "So, you burned down the building trying to keep a couple of servers running, when you could have just co-located your equipment in a smarter place (like anyone who knows what they're doing would have done)."
When you're doing things like HFT, colocation in a different geographical area is a non-option. They're eking out every microsecond they can, even going so far as to use microwave for communications when possible instead of fiber simply for the reduced latency. Putting the servers way the hell out somewhere away from Wall Street is not helpful.
Surely you don't think that these companies have large datacenter operations in Manhattan just for the cheap real estate?
The article actually refers to being able to detect the malware; the key here is DMA, or "Direct Memory Access." DMA is in use by a great many things, including FireWire (IEEE 1394), USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt as well as many internal peripherals like graphics cards.
Why, you ask? Simple...for performance. If you think of memory as being like a big warehouse, other methods are like having a guy at the front of it on the other side of that counter...you know, the one with the fencing and a little slot for you to pass him your invoice so he can go get what you came to pick up? You show up, give him the invoice, he looks at it, goes to get exactly the thing you're allowed to take, and brings it to you. This is secure, but also a bottleneck. DMA, on the other hand, is more like having that guy standing at the front door to the warehouse, just making sure you have an invoice at all...then he waves you on through to go get it yourself. Obviously, that has security ramifications.
And that's the real key to this threat...if they've come up with a way to detect attacks like that, they've come up with a way to defend against them coming from more than just malware in a graphics or network card. They've come up with a way to help protect against password-reading via USB 3.0 ports and the like as well. It would also, however, provide more methods for counter-forensics...so its a double-edged sword.
Slashdot Mirror
How can food in prison be a commodity? Are the prisoners not fed enough?
Is this a real question?
In prison, real currency is not allowed. However, humans are inherently commercial creatures, and consequently a system of barter results in the absence of any kind of hard currency upon which to base trade. What is needed is something with intrinsic value but which is also universally valued by most (if not all) of a population. Food is perfect for this: let's say you want something from another inmate. You may pass on eating a meal, instead giving it to the other guy in exchange for the thing you want. But, if you can go through the line twice, you can have your cake and eat it too.
What resulted was a dramatic drop in both the number and severity of accidents. Instead of trying to calm traffic, separate cars and pedestrians/bikes from each other and provide tons of stop signs and other signage, he did the opposite.
That's because the experiment involves dutch drivers, respectful and highly accustomed to cyclists, and stands in full contrast with the rest of Netherlands. Drivers suddenly see no signs and allot of bicycles on the road so they reduce speed and increase awareness.
Around these parts (eastern Europe) there are barely any good roads, let alone cycling infrastructure and nice "Bridge" signs. A prefect setup for Mondeman's experiment, and I can tell you the result: cycling in Romania is suicidal. The drivers are very aggressive and they adapt to the harsh driving environment by externalizing the risk to more vulnerable vehicles and pedestrians. Education and law enforcement is lacking, cyclists are seen as inferior/poor/blocking the traffic.
The only way to make cycling safe here is to build separate lanes and protect them with concrete or metallic stoppers, so that drivers will not use them for parking or driving.
Actually, no...his initial work was in the Netherlands but if you actually *read* about the research, you'll find that what he discovered was also found to be true in many, many other places. And while the quality of drivers/normal behavior (as matters in China, where a massive percentage of the driving population is about as experienced as a teenage driver in Western countries, with equivalent effects) matters, safety still rises and falls with the way cars and pedestrians/bikes blend together. So if you take the same two traffic layouts, from opposing philosophies, from the Netherlands and drop them into China you will have more accidents in China in both places but still significantly less in the one that follows Monderman's design.
One, he's joking. But two, he's also serious.
You just blew my mind.
Once upon at time, royalty did not brook criticism. But, it was understood that there was a need for certain uncomfortable truths to be told, lest kings be so totally out of touch with their realm that they, well...end up doing what a lot of royals did anyways. But anyways...the mechanism for this was known as the "Motley Fool," usually a deformed individual or a dwarf that nobody would take seriously. They dressed in fanciful clothing and, well, acted like a fool. But as they did it, they also wove those uncomfortable truths into their humor, thus informing the king in a way that was acceptable to them and thus permitted. This, in fact, is the reason why the website for personal finance, The Motely Fool named themselves thus.
Dig through Clive Robinson's comments on Schneier's blog. He's actually bootstrapped the entire toolchain from handbuilt airgapped electronics and been able to actually show that the result is what was expected.
You are aware that several of the things you say in just those two sentences are beyond the technical ability of most average people, yes? Most people have never heard of "Schneier's blog," for one thing. Bootstrapped? I have to wonder how scared off they'd be at the phrase, "handbuilt airgapped electronics." So, they either have to trust Clive Robinson, or not. TrueCrypt isn't an IDE or a piece of software used to lay out circuit board designs; use of the tool is not solely oriented towards technically-savvy individuals. And so, we get back to the whole trust question since technical skill is required to independently validate that the binaries match the source.
Oh, how many of this story fills out spots on the Public Relations Security Bingo game? I counted four. You have to refresh to get all of the possible options; there are more than fit on any one card :)
Then follow the same steps and compile it yourself. You should come to the same results.
I think you're kind of missing his two points. One, he's joking. But two, he's also serious...yes, that is what someone can do. But will they? Probably not. I'm willing to bet that 80% minimum of those who read TFA will simply accept it as canon and move on with it a fact in their minds that the two do match. And beyond that, they will keep it as a fact in their minds even for future releases, which haven't been validated in this way. So that's really the challenge here.
And even worse, think about all the TrueCrypt users who don't have the technical ability to compile binaries, much less do it in a very specific way? Ultimately, someone has to be trusted, and trust is a web rather than something that flows from a single fountain when it comes to society.
The simple fact is that bicycling (as much as I love it) is horrendously dangerous in urban areas, and the reason is cars (and even worse, SUVs). All these moves to build bike lanes are idiotic and wasteful, because they do absolutely nothing to physically separate bikes from cars, and cars will drive in the bike lanes whenever they want (which is, every time they need to take a right turn, or simply stop paying attention, or get drunk).
If these idiot mayors want to encourage bicycling, they need to build real bike roads, like they have in Copenhagen, where the bikes are the only thing on the road, not cars, and not pedestrians either. That's the only way to do it.
Actually, while this seems intuitively obvious, a lot of research and testing indicates that it's the opposite of what is true. There's a Dutch city planner/traffic engineer by the last name of Monderman who did some fascinating work on the topic, re-engineering a Dutch village in the opposite way. What resulted was a dramatic drop in both the number and severity of accidents...of all forms. Instead of trying to calm traffic, separate cars and pedestrians/bikes from each other and provide tons of stop signs and other signage, he did the opposite. There's a surprisingly enjoyable book called "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do" that I recommend for anyone who drives a lot. I know, a book about traffic...must be insanely boring, right? It's actually quite good, both an entertaining read and full of solid academic rigor. Monderman himself is a riot. He points out, while driving towards a bridge, a sign that says it's a bridge. He asks if anyone really needs a sign to know that they're seeing a bridge. "Treat people like idiots, and they will behave as such," he points out. I agree.
...I always thought that the explanation for the phenomenon was, "The guy you're drinking with is a fucking douchebag."
Battelle has made a major mistake here. INL's ICS testing labs (and ICS-CERT) require extremely forward-thinking, highly skilled security professionals with a very narrow subset of specialties. Which are exactly the sorts of people to be raging, rippingly pissed off at reading this. They approached me about a position about 2 months ago; oh, if only they approached me tomorrow. I'd be polite about it, but I would also tell them that there was no way I would consider a position with them, if they truly think that researchers are criminals, even though they would hire such. And if they don't think that researchers are criminals, they have no right to treat them as such.
It should be noted that they are not "connecting" to these devices, just cataloging the ones which announce their own presence. It's pretty fricking passive.
Let's get real. The worst christians is Westboro Baptist Church and what do they do? Protest funerals and tell everyone how gay lovers will burn in hell. Let's try an experiment: Paint Jesus in Feces in a Christian country and see what the worst thing that will happen to you as a result? Next, pain Mohammed in feces and see what will happen to you in a Muslim country. Or even a European one (death threats anyone)?
Oh wait, you were trying to make a lame attempt at equating the two.
WBC is the most vocally odious, but there are many groups that have been much, much worse. Let's start with pretty much the entire white supremacist movement. Aryan Nations considered themselves a (quote) "White Christian Separatist" organization. That's right, these are literally Nazis we're talking about. (How often can someone play the Nazi Card on the Internet while actually stating an objective fact, eh?) Then there are splinter groups like the Louisiana-based "Church of the Sons of Yahweh" (that's "Church," not "delicatessen" or "mosque" or "nearby diner"), and other competing organizations like The Order. Oh, let's keep in mind why the KKK burns crosses...they too identify themselves as a Christian organization.
Now, all of these are fringe groups; I don't mean to infer that this is how most Christians, or even a significant percentage of them, think or act. But they all make the WBC look like internet trolls playing Xbox by comparison. WBC is NOT the worst there is.
But every time someone tries to read the writings, they get a different interpretation.
Good point...hey! That gives me an idea!
LET'S BUILD A PRNG BASED ON THE SACRED WRITINGS!
(oh, wait...no, that won't work. A lot of what people say based on their interpretations of the sacred writings is actually quite predictable...damn!)
Is it possible to mod an entire Slashdot article as "Flamebait?"
Learn some languages and build your own forum. It's not hard and all the skills you'll acquire will look great on a resume.
Right...because everyone who could ever want to use a forum is a web developer, right? And, of course, every one-off forum app will be TOTALLY free from vulnerabilities, of course. Oh, and let's not forget that there's no benefit whatsoever to different forums being somewhat similar in terms of user interaction...so let's just throw that out the door as well.
Seriously?
...I thought the main point of the "open source is more secure" argument was that this process supposedly happened on its own, organically?
...if you'd use an armored division of WW2 era tanks to defend your home.
DRM doesn't work very well...in those few situations where it does work, it's an enclosed environment with a massive investment in identity management. The real key to making DRM work is being able to assert who people are...otherwise you can't tell people apart, and thus can't differentiate between who should and should not be allowed to see the content. So it's infeasible for "personal" use, off the bat; if you don't control the environment pretty much entirely (like a company with heavy IP content...one situation where DRM does work, for internal use only) then it's a losing proposition. But at the same time, using DRM to try and foil surveillance? Really? That's idiotic. DRM is not much else more than encryption with a front-end for selective decryption based on identity. It's clear enough that trying to beat the NSA at the crypto game is a tall, tall order, and probably not something which gets any easier if you make it more complex by doing it under the guise of DRM.
Cell phones have been identifiable by RF fingerprinting for many, many years.
Was a common anti-fraud technique in the analog cellular days.
Yes, but RF fingerprinting requires proximity to the cell phone. This is a form of fingerprinting that can be done to large population en masse from pretty much anywhere. This is actually something *very* new.
"Code running on the website in the device’s mobile browser"
So what I'd like to know is this (for all you people out there who write web code for mobile devices): what are the differences between what access different platforms give to those sensors? Obviously Android provides all the access that's needed; the example in the article refers to it working on a Galaxy Nexus. But what about Windows Mobile/IOS/Blackberry? Do they all have APIs to expose that functionality to something running in a browser, given that some of those platforms lack either java or shockwave/flash?
I remember a bunch of douchebags who managed to convince non-technical business leaders that bandwidth could be traded like this. They set up a whole trading market, pumped a bunch of money through it...I even worked for someone who managed to get us in to do a vulnerability assessment of their whole operation.
After we were done, the upper management of this company (the douchebags with the trading capability) came in, and shut down the meeting where we presented our findings...after which, they sacked the IT people who brought us in. Why, you ask? Because the whole thing was a sham, and the upper management was afraid it would get found out. The douchebags were Enron.
This sounds very similar to me.
The article seems to speak more on crimes against humanity, like killing imaginary civilians.
Yes...but do they plan to have an in-game tribunal, where you get at least a semblance of due process before you are forced to suffer consequences? If you look at actual real warfare over time, you'll notice that the majority of casualties are actually non-combatants. So where do you draw the line? How do you judge, in a video game engine, between a person who merely jumped when a figure came around a corner and a person who deliberately shot a civilian? If you're going to aim for ethical behavior, it has to go both ways and recognize the difference between human error under challenging circumstances and true evil, no?
Well, in CoD games, if you're playing multiplayer (as most players are), then there isn't a way to kill frendlies unless you play "hardcore" mode. In hardcore mode, you get kicked from a match if you kill teammates 3 times.
Yeah, but it sounds like here they want to penalize you for shooting...well, pretty much anyone.
What worries me is that this crosses into a fuzzy situation. If it's multiplayer, then it's consensual; everyone's there, and only a total douchebag would go into multiplayer combat without some understanding that they may not be Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris combined, killing everyone with wild abandon with nary a scratch on them. If it's singleplayer then true ethics are null and void entirely; no harm comes to anyone as a result of the act. Violent crime is not growing as video games have come on the scene, so I'm not buying the "no harm until little Timmy shoots up a bus full of nuns" concept either.
So, it's about the reward system. But what happens when it's not even a person being rewarded for doing something that isn't real to another non-real entity? What if none of it is real, and it's a movie? Should it be illegal for people to watch fictional characters be rewarded for such things? Should Clive Owen be castigated for his role in "Shoot 'Em Up," where he takes matters into his own hands instead of calling 911 nonstop for 2 hours?
This is scarily close to being a free speech issue, in my opinion, and for no reason that anyone can explain to my satisfaction.
If it's anything like my last employer's Syracuse and Albany offices, FiOS availability is very patchwork... a little here, a little there, always available the next block over but not where you need it.
If it's anything like any broadband solution that's ever existed, availability is "very patchwork" at some point, in most places. I remember when DSL was super-exotic; there were two phone exchanges in all of the metropolitan DC area that had it, and I was fortunate enough to be in one of them.
The way FiOS works, it's partially incumbent upon groups like homeowners and condo associations...or apartment building management...to request that Verizon come in and install the local infrastructure for "last mile" delivery. It's not just a situation of them coming up to one home and plugging you in, otherwise. We recently went through this in the condo development where I live, and it was an involved process...but when you want fiber to your home, guess what? You have to have someone install the fiber, which means asking them to do so. Hence the advertising to build up demand.
Could the ad have been a little more up front about this? Sure. But it's not actually silly that they are doing this.
I don't think that there's anything right about this, but it seems to me that InBloom is merely responding to demand. As long as there are a large body of helicopter parents, there will be companies that try to make better helicopters.
>> which kept its Manhattan datacenter running during the storm by creating a makeshift bucket brigade to carry fuel to the building's 17th floor
No fire code violations there, right? I'd love to be an attorney near this one. "So, you burned down the building trying to keep a couple of servers running, when you could have just co-located your equipment in a smarter place (like anyone who knows what they're doing would have done)."
When you're doing things like HFT, colocation in a different geographical area is a non-option. They're eking out every microsecond they can, even going so far as to use microwave for communications when possible instead of fiber simply for the reduced latency. Putting the servers way the hell out somewhere away from Wall Street is not helpful.
Surely you don't think that these companies have large datacenter operations in Manhattan just for the cheap real estate?
The article actually refers to being able to detect the malware; the key here is DMA, or "Direct Memory Access." DMA is in use by a great many things, including FireWire (IEEE 1394), USB 3.0, and Thunderbolt as well as many internal peripherals like graphics cards.
Why, you ask? Simple...for performance. If you think of memory as being like a big warehouse, other methods are like having a guy at the front of it on the other side of that counter...you know, the one with the fencing and a little slot for you to pass him your invoice so he can go get what you came to pick up? You show up, give him the invoice, he looks at it, goes to get exactly the thing you're allowed to take, and brings it to you. This is secure, but also a bottleneck. DMA, on the other hand, is more like having that guy standing at the front door to the warehouse, just making sure you have an invoice at all...then he waves you on through to go get it yourself. Obviously, that has security ramifications.
And that's the real key to this threat...if they've come up with a way to detect attacks like that, they've come up with a way to defend against them coming from more than just malware in a graphics or network card. They've come up with a way to help protect against password-reading via USB 3.0 ports and the like as well. It would also, however, provide more methods for counter-forensics...so its a double-edged sword.