Call me a skeptic but that sounds a little far-fetched. Figuring out exactly where a printer was going to be sent within the Iraqi government would be very difficut. Making sure that the printer got plugged into a system that also had access to the military command & control systems would also be a stretch. Then there's also timing - you wouldn't want the virus/worm/trojan to trigger too early or it could be detected & removed. But it would also need enough time to do its job effectively, which would be very difficult to calculate ahead of time unless you knew EXACTLY what systems to target, how to get into them, etc. Either you would have to determine the date/time to start the war far enough ahead of time to put together the bogus printer, ship it to Iraq, and let them install it, or the printer would have to be regularly checking with the outside world for a message to trigger the payload. The first approach would again be unreasonable. The second would depend on this system having access to the outside world and this behavior could be detected. Besides, what happens if the printer or the computer it's connected to happened to be powered off at the appropriate time?
Personally I'm more inclined ot believe the story told by a former member of the British SAS in the book Bravo Two Zero. It describes how SAS teams were sent into Iraq in the days before the war started. Their mission was to identify and destroy communications lines. The Iraqi's realized that radio could be intercepted so they relied on land-lines quite a bit. So destroy the land-lines and your command & control infrastructure is screwed.
Well TFA also said that there's an unconfirmed report that members of this group infiltrated Serbia and hacked into a radar system there to generate phony signals during the NATO attacks back in the 1990's. So it sounds like these are script kiddies on steroids - US Army Rangers with notebooks loaded with all the latest hax0r t00lz.
Being that caltech is so much better than MIT you would think that they could find a good spell checker...
Not to mention the most basic knowledge of geography:
...taking baths in the Boston River
There is no river named the "Boston River" anywhere near Boston or Cambridge. In fact I don't think there's a "Boston River" anywhere in the state of Massachusetts. But then I guess this is to be expected from people whose only knowledge of geography is the urban sprawl of the Los Angeles area - they've probably never even seen a real river. Heck, they probably even refer to the Pacific Ocean as Lake California or something like that...
I don't agree. Spam is theft, pure and simple. It also can, and does, cause significant damage to ISP's, corporations, etc. As an admin who has been on the receiving end of huge floods of spam I know what a nightmare it can be. It can cause long mail outages, which can have a detrimental effect on a companies operations. It can saturate network links, which can result in higher costs for the users of that link. I haven't heard of any recent cases but there are companies that have been forced out of business because of the actions of spammers. (the whole flowers.com incident comes to mind)
In other words, the theft and damage caused by spammers can be huge. It may be spread out in tiny pieces over the accounts & servers of millions of individuals and companies, but it adds up to a huge amount.
If somebody stole $10,000,000 by hacking into a single bank should they be sent to jail any more or less than somebody who steals $1.00 from 10,000,000 unwitting internet users? What about the second, third, or 500th spammer? At what point will it take you to decide you don't want to keep paying $1.00 to each spammer that comes along?
Restricting any sort of speach online is a really just one step...
If it wasn't for your creative spelling I would have probably called you a spam apologist (or even a spammer) after reading your first line.
There are easy technical solutions.
Either you're ignorant or you really ARE a spam apologist. Do you really think internet bandwidth is free? Who do you think pays for it? A number of years back I recall a statement from AOL that indicated something like 25% of the cost of their subscriptions was solely due to the cost of managing the spam that their systems get flooded with. I don't know about you, but I think a LOT of internet users would love to get 25% discounts on their monthly bills. And just how well do you think your filters will work when most mail servers are so clogged with spam that they can't even deliver the 0.00001% of e-mail that's legitimit?
And that's what REALLY pissed me off when I worked for a company in Boston that got bought by a company in Arizona!;-) We'd just get used to the fact that a meeting scheduled for 12:00 our time meant 9:00 their time and then suddenly 12:00 our time became 10:00 their time...
And then on an unusually humid day, as you're walking past this DC infrastructure, you witness first hand why the power company uses AC.
If it gets that humid inside one of these types of datacenters then all that DC current is the least of your problems. It means that so many of the HVAC's have died that the ambient temperature is well above acceptable levels and servers are probably frying in their own heat.
Converting to DC can help a lot in big datacenters if you have a lot of hardware. UPS's run exclusively off DC. (remember, they're basically just chains of car batteries daisy-chained together) The datacenters lose power & generate heat in the conversion from AC to DC and back to AC. They're always happy to avoid that second step if possible. And if you happen to have hardware located in a datacenter where telcos have equipment you're likely to find a huge DC infrastructure already in place since a lot of telco equipment runs on DC.
Personally I think BOTH the power & the cooling needs to be addressed. I've worked in datacenters where cabinets are filled with 30+ 1U servers. Not only is it a royal pain in the ass to deal with all the power cabling for 30 individual servers but the heat blowing out the back of those cabinets is enough to melt the polar ice caps...
I've also worked on blade servers like IBM's BladeCenter. Their next generation of blades will require even more power than it currently does. Trying to convince a datacenter to run 4 208 volt feeds to handle just a pair of BladeCenters (28 blades) is like pulling teeth. They can't comprehend that much power in such a small footprint. A rack full of BladeCenters could easily require 8 208 volt feeds, whereas a rack full of 1U's may only need 3 or 4 110 volt feeds.
JibJab v. Ludlow - a music publisher that challenged JibJab's right to parody, claiming they owned the copyright to "This Land is Your Land".
In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
QAM support was added to the HD-3000 DVB drivers recently. There's a thread about it in their supoprt forum. Unfortunately their site is agonizingly slow right now (/. effect?) otherwise I'd post a link to it.
A number of groups like the EFF, American Library Association, etc. are all challenging the broadcast flag in court. With a bit of luck it's implementation will be delayed or even stopped.
Here in Massachusetts the powers-that-be routinely go after people who live in the state but register their cars out of state, usually up in New Hampshire. Mass. has some strict regulations about auto insurance, but NH doesn't require insurance at all. So some people who live near the border with NH register their cars in NH. It also saves on state excise taxes. Of course once or twice a year the local news carries stories of how the police troll the neighborhoods looking for cars with NH license plates parked in MA driveways so that they can give out tickets (if the same car is seen there multiple days). I can see a similar huge upswell of out-of-state registrations in CA if this draconian Big Brother law is passed.
I use luggable PC's over 10 years ago. (IBM PS/2 Model 80, I think) Talk about a royal pain in the ass lugging it through airports. Great excercise but a nightmare to get through security. I can only imagine what it'd be like these days.
If I took some chips out of the casino, rendered the RFID tags useless with a magnet (or whatever it takes), then went back and requested payment, would they refuse to pay?
I can potentially imagine the big stink that would arise if RFID tags stopped working in valid chips for some reason. Suppose you were playing blackjack and won a ton of money, went straight to the cashier, and they refused to pay because the RFID tags weren't responding. I can imagine lawsuits would spring up pretty darned quickly.
In fact the only lighthouse in the United States that is still manned and maintained by the government (the United States Coast Guard) is Boston Harbor Light. It was the first lighthouse in the nation, which is why the government has agreed to keep it manned while all the others maintained by the USCG are automated.
Microsoft has always managed to get the highly talented people that they want. 20 years ago when I was fresh out of college I worked at a company in the Boston area that had a highly talented engineer working for them. Microsoft decided they wanted this guy. He turned down all sorts of offers for huge amounts of money, mainly because he & his wife were both from the New England area, they had young kids, and the kids grandparents were all in the New England area.
Microsoft wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. They kept offering him more and more money. When they realized why he kept saying no then they sweetened the offer with a number of first class airplane tickets EACH YEAR for a number of years so that his entire family could come back to Boston to visit family multiple times each year. They also tossed in a pretty nice sailboat as a signing bonus since he was also an avid sailor. He finally broke down & said yes. From what I understand he was one of the key architects for Excel and/or some of the other Office products.
Question - how does your buddy know that the SEO was responsible for the higher ranking? Seems to me the site could have moved up in the rankings on its own once Google did a more thorough analysis of the site content, changes to the sites content, mention of the URL elsewhere, etc. All things you don't necessarially need an SEO to do for you.
Is that cable providers could start supporting PC based hardware like the pcHDTV high-def video cards. Right now these things only really work with antennas because most cable companies scramble their channels and you need the decoder box to unscramble them. Well if you could plug a CableCard into a pcHDTV-like device then you'd be able to use it with your cable tv instead of just an antenna.
I don't know if it'll aid it but it certianly won't defeat it. When you launch your favorite P2P app. to pull down the latest (B|H)ollywood hit you'll just need to make sure you're downloading the non-DRM pirate version, the DRM-cracked version, or the DRM-enabled version depending on what your preference is.
What gets me is this doesn't even sound like it should fit under the FCC's perview, as it is not a broadcast matter of any sort.
Oh, but you're wrong! It's most definitely a broadcast matter! There's the ever so slight possibility that digital broadcasts could be written to DVD+/-R's so it most certianly does fall under the FCC's perview.
Once the FCC has DRM'd DVD's it'll target paper as the next medium to be DRM'd. After all, it's concieveably possible that somebody will start printing out uuencoded bytestreams from OTA broadcasts so that others can scan them into their computers illegally. The FCC can't allow such illegal activities to happen, so all blank paper in the future will have to have built-in DRM controls.
Look for people walking around with pizza boxes tucked under their arms... That's what'll end up happening after people get tired of carrying their laptop around like it's a pizza.
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Call me a skeptic but that sounds a little far-fetched. Figuring out exactly where a printer was going to be sent within the Iraqi government would be very difficut. Making sure that the printer got plugged into a system that also had access to the military command & control systems would also be a stretch. Then there's also timing - you wouldn't want the virus/worm/trojan to trigger too early or it could be detected & removed. But it would also need enough time to do its job effectively, which would be very difficult to calculate ahead of time unless you knew EXACTLY what systems to target, how to get into them, etc. Either you would have to determine the date/time to start the war far enough ahead of time to put together the bogus printer, ship it to Iraq, and let them install it, or the printer would have to be regularly checking with the outside world for a message to trigger the payload. The first approach would again be unreasonable. The second would depend on this system having access to the outside world and this behavior could be detected. Besides, what happens if the printer or the computer it's connected to happened to be powered off at the appropriate time?
Personally I'm more inclined ot believe the story told by a former member of the British SAS in the book Bravo Two Zero. It describes how SAS teams were sent into Iraq in the days before the war started. Their mission was to identify and destroy communications lines. The Iraqi's realized that radio could be intercepted so they relied on land-lines quite a bit. So destroy the land-lines and your command & control infrastructure is screwed.
Well TFA also said that there's an unconfirmed report that members of this group infiltrated Serbia and hacked into a radar system there to generate phony signals during the NATO attacks back in the 1990's. So it sounds like these are script kiddies on steroids - US Army Rangers with notebooks loaded with all the latest hax0r t00lz.
Yeah, products like lawsuits from the MPAA & RIAA. And services like defense lawyers...
Being that caltech is so much better than MIT you would think that they could find a good spell checker...
...taking baths in the Boston River
Not to mention the most basic knowledge of geography:
There is no river named the "Boston River" anywhere near Boston or Cambridge. In fact I don't think there's a "Boston River" anywhere in the state of Massachusetts. But then I guess this is to be expected from people whose only knowledge of geography is the urban sprawl of the Los Angeles area - they've probably never even seen a real river. Heck, they probably even refer to the Pacific Ocean as Lake California or something like that...
I don't agree. Spam is theft, pure and simple. It also can, and does, cause significant damage to ISP's, corporations, etc. As an admin who has been on the receiving end of huge floods of spam I know what a nightmare it can be. It can cause long mail outages, which can have a detrimental effect on a companies operations. It can saturate network links, which can result in higher costs for the users of that link. I haven't heard of any recent cases but there are companies that have been forced out of business because of the actions of spammers. (the whole flowers.com incident comes to mind)
In other words, the theft and damage caused by spammers can be huge. It may be spread out in tiny pieces over the accounts & servers of millions of individuals and companies, but it adds up to a huge amount.
If somebody stole $10,000,000 by hacking into a single bank should they be sent to jail any more or less than somebody who steals $1.00 from 10,000,000 unwitting internet users? What about the second, third, or 500th spammer? At what point will it take you to decide you don't want to keep paying $1.00 to each spammer that comes along?
Restricting any sort of speach online is a really just one step...
If it wasn't for your creative spelling I would have probably called you a spam apologist (or even a spammer) after reading your first line.
There are easy technical solutions.
Either you're ignorant or you really ARE a spam apologist. Do you really think internet bandwidth is free? Who do you think pays for it? A number of years back I recall a statement from AOL that indicated something like 25% of the cost of their subscriptions was solely due to the cost of managing the spam that their systems get flooded with. I don't know about you, but I think a LOT of internet users would love to get 25% discounts on their monthly bills. And just how well do you think your filters will work when most mail servers are so clogged with spam that they can't even deliver the 0.00001% of e-mail that's legitimit?
More like they should ask Akamai since Yahoo relies on Akamai for its content delivery.
And that's what REALLY pissed me off when I worked for a company in Boston that got bought by a company in Arizona! ;-) We'd just get used to the fact that a meeting scheduled for 12:00 our time meant 9:00 their time and then suddenly 12:00 our time became 10:00 their time...
I'd be very happy doing away with DST altogether!
And then on an unusually humid day, as you're walking past this DC infrastructure, you witness first hand why the power company uses AC.
If it gets that humid inside one of these types of datacenters then all that DC current is the least of your problems. It means that so many of the HVAC's have died that the ambient temperature is well above acceptable levels and servers are probably frying in their own heat.
Converting to DC can help a lot in big datacenters if you have a lot of hardware. UPS's run exclusively off DC. (remember, they're basically just chains of car batteries daisy-chained together) The datacenters lose power & generate heat in the conversion from AC to DC and back to AC. They're always happy to avoid that second step if possible. And if you happen to have hardware located in a datacenter where telcos have equipment you're likely to find a huge DC infrastructure already in place since a lot of telco equipment runs on DC.
Personally I think BOTH the power & the cooling needs to be addressed. I've worked in datacenters where cabinets are filled with 30+ 1U servers. Not only is it a royal pain in the ass to deal with all the power cabling for 30 individual servers but the heat blowing out the back of those cabinets is enough to melt the polar ice caps...
I've also worked on blade servers like IBM's BladeCenter. Their next generation of blades will require even more power than it currently does. Trying to convince a datacenter to run 4 208 volt feeds to handle just a pair of BladeCenters (28 blades) is like pulling teeth. They can't comprehend that much power in such a small footprint. A rack full of BladeCenters could easily require 8 208 volt feeds, whereas a rack full of 1U's may only need 3 or 4 110 volt feeds.
In the Lexmark case they only apparently filed amicus briefs. In the DVD-CCA one they funded and coordinated the defense. In the last one they filed a complaint against the company that was threatening JibJab.
There's plenty more listed on the EFF's own web site if you had bothered to look it up.
Shall I continue?
Here's the link to their QAM support announcement.
QAM support was added to the HD-3000 DVB drivers recently. There's a thread about it in their supoprt forum. Unfortunately their site is agonizingly slow right now (/. effect?) otherwise I'd post a link to it.
A number of groups like the EFF, American Library Association, etc. are all challenging the broadcast flag in court. With a bit of luck it's implementation will be delayed or even stopped.
Here in Massachusetts the powers-that-be routinely go after people who live in the state but register their cars out of state, usually up in New Hampshire. Mass. has some strict regulations about auto insurance, but NH doesn't require insurance at all. So some people who live near the border with NH register their cars in NH. It also saves on state excise taxes. Of course once or twice a year the local news carries stories of how the police troll the neighborhoods looking for cars with NH license plates parked in MA driveways so that they can give out tickets (if the same car is seen there multiple days). I can see a similar huge upswell of out-of-state registrations in CA if this draconian Big Brother law is passed.
As I said, "I think". So I was wrong. It was the model 70, which was unofficially known as the PS/2 "luggable".
I use luggable PC's over 10 years ago. (IBM PS/2 Model 80, I think) Talk about a royal pain in the ass lugging it through airports. Great excercise but a nightmare to get through security. I can only imagine what it'd be like these days.
If I took some chips out of the casino, rendered the RFID tags useless with a magnet (or whatever it takes), then went back and requested payment, would they refuse to pay?
I can potentially imagine the big stink that would arise if RFID tags stopped working in valid chips for some reason. Suppose you were playing blackjack and won a ton of money, went straight to the cashier, and they refused to pay because the RFID tags weren't responding. I can imagine lawsuits would spring up pretty darned quickly.
In fact the only lighthouse in the United States that is still manned and maintained by the government (the United States Coast Guard) is Boston Harbor Light. It was the first lighthouse in the nation, which is why the government has agreed to keep it manned while all the others maintained by the USCG are automated.
Microsoft has always managed to get the highly talented people that they want. 20 years ago when I was fresh out of college I worked at a company in the Boston area that had a highly talented engineer working for them. Microsoft decided they wanted this guy. He turned down all sorts of offers for huge amounts of money, mainly because he & his wife were both from the New England area, they had young kids, and the kids grandparents were all in the New England area.
Microsoft wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. They kept offering him more and more money. When they realized why he kept saying no then they sweetened the offer with a number of first class airplane tickets EACH YEAR for a number of years so that his entire family could come back to Boston to visit family multiple times each year. They also tossed in a pretty nice sailboat as a signing bonus since he was also an avid sailor. He finally broke down & said yes. From what I understand he was one of the key architects for Excel and/or some of the other Office products.
Question - how does your buddy know that the SEO was responsible for the higher ranking? Seems to me the site could have moved up in the rankings on its own once Google did a more thorough analysis of the site content, changes to the sites content, mention of the URL elsewhere, etc. All things you don't necessarially need an SEO to do for you.
Is that cable providers could start supporting PC based hardware like the pcHDTV high-def video cards. Right now these things only really work with antennas because most cable companies scramble their channels and you need the decoder box to unscramble them. Well if you could plug a CableCard into a pcHDTV-like device then you'd be able to use it with your cable tv instead of just an antenna.
I don't know if it'll aid it but it certianly won't defeat it. When you launch your favorite P2P app. to pull down the latest (B|H)ollywood hit you'll just need to make sure you're downloading the non-DRM pirate version, the DRM-cracked version, or the DRM-enabled version depending on what your preference is.
What gets me is this doesn't even sound like it should fit under the FCC's perview, as it is not a broadcast matter of any sort.
Oh, but you're wrong! It's most definitely a broadcast matter! There's the ever so slight possibility that digital broadcasts could be written to DVD+/-R's so it most certianly does fall under the FCC's perview.
Once the FCC has DRM'd DVD's it'll target paper as the next medium to be DRM'd. After all, it's concieveably possible that somebody will start printing out uuencoded bytestreams from OTA broadcasts so that others can scan them into their computers illegally. The FCC can't allow such illegal activities to happen, so all blank paper in the future will have to have built-in DRM controls.
Look for people walking around with pizza boxes tucked under their arms... That's what'll end up happening after people get tired of carrying their laptop around like it's a pizza.