How much the planet will heat up and what level is even harmful, instead of helpful, is very much up for debate.
Since the next ice age is an inevitability, it's a race to see how much we as a people can prosper and prepare before we are all encased in a thousand years of winter - which is in the end vastly more a danger than even the most extreme warming forecasts.
Until a meteor lands again we won't be seeing any Ice Age. We're returning to the climate that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Had the FBI actually not broken numerous laws I may agree with you. The FBI installing illegal software without the person's knowledge is a bit different from wiretapping. First, the only way for the FBI to have this illegal software would be to create the software which is a criminal act. Alternatively, and more likely, they could have conspired with criminals to acquire the software. (It should be obvious that "criminals" could be agencies within Government(s).)
Wiretapping is legal and has some moral uses. We can correctly state that the person maintains the assumption of innocence while they are being wiretapped. Installing software to spy requires the assumption of guilt, and provides the means for the actors to create evidence.
The loss of ethics and morality in the agency makes them a gestapo, not a public police force. I'm sure that is the intent of this, and literally thousands of other cases within the last several years. It's the Government against the public, until the public takes back the Government.
Just because it isn't wiretapping in the legacy meaning of the word doesn't mean it isn't software based wiretapping. Installing remote software and using a keylogger is the same thing.
The legal system is toothless and corrupt. You are not going to ever prevent "mass surveillance". It's just too easy to do and cover up. We all know it's happening and expanding and resistance is nil. The only option left is to make sure it goes both ways, that we watch over the state the same way they want to watch us. When powerful people and institutions lose their privacy, they might become a bit more cautious on how information is used against a person.
It's basically a wiretap except with software. If they have reason to believe this person was breaking the law you can get a wiretap approved but you need evidence to do so.
On the other hand, why the hell is the FBI bothering with these people?
Because they have nothing better to do. In the last 20 years, crime rates in America have dropped dramatically, yet the FBI budget has doubled. They are over funded and over staffed, and they don't have enough real work to do.
There are two alternative solutions:
1. Criminalize more activities
2. Cut their budget
So far we have been opting for #1.
I'll bet the population has doubled or tripled in 20 years so even if the crime per person has dropped there's just as many criminals out there.
I don't think I've ever seen a "Food not Bombs" bumper sticker on a car with less than 5 stickers.
But I'm not ready to just wave my hands and discount the idea that the FBI considers having lots of bumper stickers to be suspicious, even if the 1st Amendment says they're not supposed to even go there.
How would the 1st amendment have anything to do with the FBI tracking you? Freedom of speech doesn't equal freedom from being monitored. Or Freedom to whatever you please with no one noticing...
What about gamers who need real video cards and a real gaming OS? Because Apple certainly has nothing to be smug about on that front.
Apples and oranges. If you want a gaming rig - buy a PC, (or a console). For almost everything else - buy a Mac. You don't expect a PC to be able to do everything, so why expect a Mac to? It's not about the hardware anyway, it's about the platform that games are designed to run on, (market-share, and all that). Mac has been Intel for a while now, so you can put any graphics card, or any other component, in there that you like. They're all the same architecture.
If all I want to do is play games I'd buy a PS4 for 1/4 the price.
That's kind of funny... because I bought my MBP nearly 3 years ago, and it has outlasted every wintel laptop I have ever owned in both longevity and staying power. It still runs plenty fast, even with newer and (way the hell more bloated) CG suites and especially render engines (Iray, I'm looking at you!)
The thing is built like a tank, doesn't flex, hasn't burned out the CPU thermals (had a Samsung do that), doesn't sprout dead pixels, and instead of spending $1000-$1100 each 12-18 months, I actually saved about $1000 so far on comparative TCO.
But you know - status über alles and all that...;)
There's laptops in the same boat. If you treat them poorly of course they won't last. But when I want to bump my memory up on a Macbook I'm SOL. On a PC laptop there's options. Of course if it's a desktop there's even more options or to replace it at 1/2 the price of a Macbook.
Stop comparing clock rates. The generational differences between processors would make the laptop faster than desktop in your example, even with the slower clock rate.
Most processors are back around 2.0 GHZ again. So 1.4 is what you might see in your phone.
Sounds like this researcher only wants to make headlines. Encrypting your OS and device won't ever protect you from an application that has a security flaw.
Encryption protects a user at the physical level. We all know the saying that if you can get console access you're compromised. Not the case with encryption. Nor is it the case with the imessage app. I'd like to see them break into a phone when they can't unlock it.
I agree it's time for the knee jerk reaction to even mentioning the name of Microsoft to move along. It probably never even should have been around in the first place.
Um, no, knee-jerk reaction is the safest one regarding MS. Only after careful consideration and inspection should you think anything different, and even then, you're likely to be wrong.
MS deserves all its hate, and anyone even remotely thinking otherwise is mistaken. MS moved into the Sony category for me long ago with their incessant failure to make things backwards compatible to kill off still massively in use products, all the way back to Win95. The abusive history is long, they haven't fundamentally changed.
That doesn't take away from the fact that Facebook is right there behind them, or Google perhaps a few steps further back.
What? Take a look at your precious Linux OS or MacOS. They stop supporting previous versions within a year of a new version coming out. 95 was supported for almost 10 years. XP after 15+ years. Microsoft is the *only* company who has ridiculously long support timelines for their products.
FOSS is no longer contested, legally, and all major computing firms (including Microsoft) are now neck-deep in it. MS's bid to kill Linux in the crib failed.
Actually Linux hasn't won. It hasn't made any ground on the desktop in years which is where Windows is king. MacOS has a bigger adoption than Linux now.
So maybe Android shouldn't have abused those software patents just like they abused Java from Oracle. Google isn't know for playing nice so they got what's coming to them.
That's the income Microsoft receives from businesses who buy OS licenses in volume rather than with each individual PC they buy. It gives companies freedom when installing Windows so you don't expose your keys to users.
My own machine downloaded Windows 10, again, over the weekend for no fucking reason.
I've set all manner of registry keys that MS recommends for blocking the update.
I've hidden the updates that give you Windows 10.
I've removed all the updates that give you the Get Windows 10 "app".
I've run GWX Configuration tool.
I've told Windows to NOT give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates.
I've told Windows to download updates but not install them.
If I had the default, Windows 10 would have installed itself.
You're probably flagged for an upgrade after going through the process already. Different situation altogether. I'll bet you also have Windows update set to automatically push "all" updates.
MS hasn't pushed Win 10 to domain-joined machines.
Your 30+ machines are either on a domain, using WSUS instead of Windows Update, or you're lying.
You seem to be vehemently defending MS and denying that any pushing is going on.
Further, you never see Windows 10 as an update in Windows Update. Various updates, in various categories (optional, recommended, important), at various times have installed various versions of the Get Windows 10 "app" since this shit started.
If you're claiming that this never happened to you on 30+ machines, then you haven't used Windows Update on those 30+ machines in the past 6 months or you're a fucking liar.
It doesn't auto-push. These people have clicked the Windows button in the system tray and shown interest. Then they cancel it.
We have over 120k machines on our network. Less than 1/3 use a domain. The "Upgrade to Windows 10" button appeared on nearly every machine but never once has it been forced. We've since pushed the GSX patch after a couple idiots ran the upgrade on encrypted machines resulting in full data loss.
Just because the license permits you to modify/redistribute it however you wish (the definition)...
That is NOT the definition of "Open Source". You can modify OSS, and you can redistribute OSS, but you cannot do it "however you wish". All OSS licenses put restrictions on modification and/or redistribution. Only "public domain" has no restrictions, and while that is Open Source, it is not a license.
While Obama's proposal sounds good, it is actually a step in the wrong direction. Under current policy, much government source code is automatically in the public domain. So if this proposal uses any other OSS license, it will mean more restrictions, not fewer.
It can be open and free to use among government entities without releasing it to the public. It's about re-using and sharing code instead of having each agency or project working in a silo.
Well if they used the same root password on every box they had bigger problems than telnet... All it takes is one box to be compromised and you have a pretty good chance of obtaining the password...
You can crack the hash, on windows boxes you can even pass the hash without cracking it, if you cant crack the hash then you can backdoor the services to capture passwords and wait for someone to log in, and unless the box is completely unused you can probably entice an admin to log in by crashing whatever service the box is supposed to be running... A crashing service doesn't even raise suspicion these days, people are used to software being unreliable and will just restart it or even reboot the whole box.
They haven't allowed anything other than SSH for 5+ years. He probably also sniffed it from the development environment. Everyone had sudo root access on on 100k+ hosts.
How much money has Microsoft pissed away doing stuff like this?
When you count up all the failures and the aborted projects and half-baked shit they've abandoned, it's incredible that this company is still above water.
For example, how many tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work did they lose just by crashing the Fable Legends project? It's mind boggling to me.
Many, many, many games and ideas are scrapped before they become complete products. Obviously the game was not progressing like it should along with failures in the past so they shut it down. It takes about 5 years to bring a good MMO to market and they were still 1-2 years out.
It's more along the lines of Apple doesn't excel at making hardware in servers or environments for enterprise, mission critical applications. Windows and Linux platforms do. Apple is more aimed at the small. app store type stuff while they nickel and dime to profit and overpriced hardware.
You have to admit; they're track record is still a helluva lot better than EA, which has pretty much crushed all my favorite franchises, ever: Maxis, Origin, Westwood, et. al.
EA definitely takes the cake on bad management of companies.
"Journalists" do this because they think the American public is too stupid to use metric so everything needs to be converted to imperial. They Google "how many feet is 100 meters", get 328.084 feet, chop off the decimal (because Americans are too stupid for decimal places too), and report this as the exact distance.
By the way, I use the quotes around the word journalists because people who do this aren't real journalists. Sadly, real journalists are becoming rarer and rarer. Most people who call themselves journalists today just take a press release or AP/Reuters wire story, tweak a few words, and publish it. These "journalists" are like script kiddies who download a program, point it at a website, break in, and declare themselves an uber hacker. They might call themselves something (hacker/journalist), but their lack of actual skills shows that they really aren't what they say they are.
Americans are quite intelligent. We learn both the metric and the old imperial system. We don't dumb our brains down to only learn a system based on 10's. Why did you have to google this number when most Americans can do it in their head?
I think the First Amendment argument is not as strong as the argument against the government forcing a company to build something that it does not normally build. Should the government be able to force Black and Decker to build firearms? Should they be able to force Dupont to manufacture napalm? Now, if these companies WANT to manufacture these goods, that's one thing, but forcing them to do it is quite another.
I am completely against Apple complying but it wouldn't be very tough to do. The problem is if that key ever gets out.
Except that Apple has said one does not exist. If you believe them and their white paper, it seems unlikely that they have a master key. They went to all this trouble for the exact purpose of never having to deal with law enforcement every time someone needed a phone to be unlocked.
Most encryption software has no master key in the first place. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of it. There's a recovery key made when you encrypt the device which is unique to every single device. Apple could provide this key to users to backup. They could also store the key on their servers like corporations do. But that would only open themselves to hacks. Imagine if someone compromised Apple and stole all the decryption keys.
I agree, remove this backdoor garbage from OFFICIAL add-on repositories, but still allow me to install whatever the fuck I want. I'm seriously tired of how arrogant Mozilla developers have become.
I agree. They fuck with Java non-stop which I require for internal applications. Who cares if my Java is out of date when I use one specific browser on one applications. Stop disabling my shit Mozilla.
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How much the planet will heat up and what level is even harmful, instead of helpful, is very much up for debate.
Since the next ice age is an inevitability, it's a race to see how much we as a people can prosper and prepare before we are all encased in a thousand years of winter - which is in the end vastly more a danger than even the most extreme warming forecasts.
Until a meteor lands again we won't be seeing any Ice Age. We're returning to the climate that existed when the dinosaurs roamed the planet.
Had the FBI actually not broken numerous laws I may agree with you. The FBI installing illegal software without the person's knowledge is a bit different from wiretapping. First, the only way for the FBI to have this illegal software would be to create the software which is a criminal act. Alternatively, and more likely, they could have conspired with criminals to acquire the software. (It should be obvious that "criminals" could be agencies within Government(s).)
Wiretapping is legal and has some moral uses. We can correctly state that the person maintains the assumption of innocence while they are being wiretapped. Installing software to spy requires the assumption of guilt, and provides the means for the actors to create evidence.
The loss of ethics and morality in the agency makes them a gestapo, not a public police force. I'm sure that is the intent of this, and literally thousands of other cases within the last several years. It's the Government against the public, until the public takes back the Government.
Just because it isn't wiretapping in the legacy meaning of the word doesn't mean it isn't software based wiretapping. Installing remote software and using a keylogger is the same thing.
The legal system is toothless and corrupt. You are not going to ever prevent "mass surveillance". It's just too easy to do and cover up. We all know it's happening and expanding and resistance is nil. The only option left is to make sure it goes both ways, that we watch over the state the same way they want to watch us. When powerful people and institutions lose their privacy, they might become a bit more cautious on how information is used against a person.
It's basically a wiretap except with software. If they have reason to believe this person was breaking the law you can get a wiretap approved but you need evidence to do so.
On the other hand, why the hell is the FBI bothering with these people?
Because they have nothing better to do. In the last 20 years, crime rates in America have dropped dramatically, yet the FBI budget has doubled. They are over funded and over staffed, and they don't have enough real work to do.
There are two alternative solutions: 1. Criminalize more activities 2. Cut their budget So far we have been opting for #1.
I'll bet the population has doubled or tripled in 20 years so even if the crime per person has dropped there's just as many criminals out there.
I don't think I've ever seen a "Food not Bombs" bumper sticker on a car with less than 5 stickers.
But I'm not ready to just wave my hands and discount the idea that the FBI considers having lots of bumper stickers to be suspicious, even if the 1st Amendment says they're not supposed to even go there.
How would the 1st amendment have anything to do with the FBI tracking you? Freedom of speech doesn't equal freedom from being monitored. Or Freedom to whatever you please with no one noticing...
What about gamers who need real video cards and a real gaming OS? Because Apple certainly has nothing to be smug about on that front.
Apples and oranges. If you want a gaming rig - buy a PC, (or a console). For almost everything else - buy a Mac. You don't expect a PC to be able to do everything, so why expect a Mac to? It's not about the hardware anyway, it's about the platform that games are designed to run on, (market-share, and all that). Mac has been Intel for a while now, so you can put any graphics card, or any other component, in there that you like. They're all the same architecture.
If all I want to do is play games I'd buy a PS4 for 1/4 the price.
That's kind of funny... because I bought my MBP nearly 3 years ago, and it has outlasted every wintel laptop I have ever owned in both longevity and staying power. It still runs plenty fast, even with newer and (way the hell more bloated) CG suites and especially render engines (Iray, I'm looking at you!)
The thing is built like a tank, doesn't flex, hasn't burned out the CPU thermals (had a Samsung do that), doesn't sprout dead pixels, and instead of spending $1000-$1100 each 12-18 months, I actually saved about $1000 so far on comparative TCO.
But you know - status über alles and all that... ;)
There's laptops in the same boat. If you treat them poorly of course they won't last. But when I want to bump my memory up on a Macbook I'm SOL. On a PC laptop there's options. Of course if it's a desktop there's even more options or to replace it at 1/2 the price of a Macbook.
Stop comparing clock rates. The generational differences between processors would make the laptop faster than desktop in your example, even with the slower clock rate.
Most processors are back around 2.0 GHZ again. So 1.4 is what you might see in your phone.
Sounds like this researcher only wants to make headlines. Encrypting your OS and device won't ever protect you from an application that has a security flaw. Encryption protects a user at the physical level. We all know the saying that if you can get console access you're compromised. Not the case with encryption. Nor is it the case with the imessage app. I'd like to see them break into a phone when they can't unlock it.
I agree it's time for the knee jerk reaction to even mentioning the name of Microsoft to move along. It probably never even should have been around in the first place.
Um, no, knee-jerk reaction is the safest one regarding MS. Only after careful consideration and inspection should you think anything different, and even then, you're likely to be wrong.
MS deserves all its hate, and anyone even remotely thinking otherwise is mistaken. MS moved into the Sony category for me long ago with their incessant failure to make things backwards compatible to kill off still massively in use products, all the way back to Win95. The abusive history is long, they haven't fundamentally changed.
That doesn't take away from the fact that Facebook is right there behind them, or Google perhaps a few steps further back.
What? Take a look at your precious Linux OS or MacOS. They stop supporting previous versions within a year of a new version coming out. 95 was supported for almost 10 years. XP after 15+ years. Microsoft is the *only* company who has ridiculously long support timelines for their products.
FOSS is no longer contested, legally, and all major computing firms (including Microsoft) are now neck-deep in it. MS's bid to kill Linux in the crib failed.
Actually Linux hasn't won. It hasn't made any ground on the desktop in years which is where Windows is king. MacOS has a bigger adoption than Linux now.
So maybe Android shouldn't have abused those software patents just like they abused Java from Oracle. Google isn't know for playing nice so they got what's coming to them.
That's the income Microsoft receives from businesses who buy OS licenses in volume rather than with each individual PC they buy. It gives companies freedom when installing Windows so you don't expose your keys to users.
Not bullshit.
My own machine downloaded Windows 10, again, over the weekend for no fucking reason.
I've set all manner of registry keys that MS recommends for blocking the update. I've hidden the updates that give you Windows 10. I've removed all the updates that give you the Get Windows 10 "app". I've run GWX Configuration tool. I've told Windows to NOT give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates. I've told Windows to download updates but not install them.
If I had the default, Windows 10 would have installed itself.
You're probably flagged for an upgrade after going through the process already. Different situation altogether. I'll bet you also have Windows update set to automatically push "all" updates.
MS hasn't pushed Win 10 to domain-joined machines. Your 30+ machines are either on a domain, using WSUS instead of Windows Update, or you're lying.
You seem to be vehemently defending MS and denying that any pushing is going on. Further, you never see Windows 10 as an update in Windows Update. Various updates, in various categories (optional, recommended, important), at various times have installed various versions of the Get Windows 10 "app" since this shit started.
If you're claiming that this never happened to you on 30+ machines, then you haven't used Windows Update on those 30+ machines in the past 6 months or you're a fucking liar.
It doesn't auto-push. These people have clicked the Windows button in the system tray and shown interest. Then they cancel it. We have over 120k machines on our network. Less than 1/3 use a domain. The "Upgrade to Windows 10" button appeared on nearly every machine but never once has it been forced. We've since pushed the GSX patch after a couple idiots ran the upgrade on encrypted machines resulting in full data loss.
Just because the license permits you to modify/redistribute it however you wish (the definition) ...
That is NOT the definition of "Open Source". You can modify OSS, and you can redistribute OSS, but you cannot do it "however you wish". All OSS licenses put restrictions on modification and/or redistribution. Only "public domain" has no restrictions, and while that is Open Source, it is not a license.
While Obama's proposal sounds good, it is actually a step in the wrong direction. Under current policy, much government source code is automatically in the public domain. So if this proposal uses any other OSS license, it will mean more restrictions, not fewer.
It can be open and free to use among government entities without releasing it to the public. It's about re-using and sharing code instead of having each agency or project working in a silo.
Well if they used the same root password on every box they had bigger problems than telnet... All it takes is one box to be compromised and you have a pretty good chance of obtaining the password... You can crack the hash, on windows boxes you can even pass the hash without cracking it, if you cant crack the hash then you can backdoor the services to capture passwords and wait for someone to log in, and unless the box is completely unused you can probably entice an admin to log in by crashing whatever service the box is supposed to be running... A crashing service doesn't even raise suspicion these days, people are used to software being unreliable and will just restart it or even reboot the whole box.
They haven't allowed anything other than SSH for 5+ years. He probably also sniffed it from the development environment. Everyone had sudo root access on on 100k+ hosts.
How much money has Microsoft pissed away doing stuff like this?
When you count up all the failures and the aborted projects and half-baked shit they've abandoned, it's incredible that this company is still above water.
For example, how many tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work did they lose just by crashing the Fable Legends project? It's mind boggling to me.
Many, many, many games and ideas are scrapped before they become complete products. Obviously the game was not progressing like it should along with failures in the past so they shut it down. It takes about 5 years to bring a good MMO to market and they were still 1-2 years out.
It's more along the lines of Apple doesn't excel at making hardware in servers or environments for enterprise, mission critical applications. Windows and Linux platforms do. Apple is more aimed at the small. app store type stuff while they nickel and dime to profit and overpriced hardware.
You have to admit; they're track record is still a helluva lot better than EA, which has pretty much crushed all my favorite franchises, ever: Maxis, Origin, Westwood, et. al.
EA definitely takes the cake on bad management of companies.
"Journalists" do this because they think the American public is too stupid to use metric so everything needs to be converted to imperial. They Google "how many feet is 100 meters", get 328.084 feet, chop off the decimal (because Americans are too stupid for decimal places too), and report this as the exact distance.
By the way, I use the quotes around the word journalists because people who do this aren't real journalists. Sadly, real journalists are becoming rarer and rarer. Most people who call themselves journalists today just take a press release or AP/Reuters wire story, tweak a few words, and publish it. These "journalists" are like script kiddies who download a program, point it at a website, break in, and declare themselves an uber hacker. They might call themselves something (hacker/journalist), but their lack of actual skills shows that they really aren't what they say they are.
Americans are quite intelligent. We learn both the metric and the old imperial system. We don't dumb our brains down to only learn a system based on 10's. Why did you have to google this number when most Americans can do it in their head?
I think the First Amendment argument is not as strong as the argument against the government forcing a company to build something that it does not normally build. Should the government be able to force Black and Decker to build firearms? Should they be able to force Dupont to manufacture napalm? Now, if these companies WANT to manufacture these goods, that's one thing, but forcing them to do it is quite another.
I am completely against Apple complying but it wouldn't be very tough to do. The problem is if that key ever gets out.
Except that Apple has said one does not exist. If you believe them and their white paper, it seems unlikely that they have a master key. They went to all this trouble for the exact purpose of never having to deal with law enforcement every time someone needed a phone to be unlocked.
Most encryption software has no master key in the first place. Otherwise it defeats the purpose of it. There's a recovery key made when you encrypt the device which is unique to every single device. Apple could provide this key to users to backup. They could also store the key on their servers like corporations do. But that would only open themselves to hacks. Imagine if someone compromised Apple and stole all the decryption keys.
"violate" you? come on, you aren't being raped or anything, dial back th froth a little.
You sound like Bill Cosby.
I agree, remove this backdoor garbage from OFFICIAL add-on repositories, but still allow me to install whatever the fuck I want. I'm seriously tired of how arrogant Mozilla developers have become.
I agree. They fuck with Java non-stop which I require for internal applications. Who cares if my Java is out of date when I use one specific browser on one applications. Stop disabling my shit Mozilla.