So because it's a computer it's unable to distribute copyrighted materials? Now that is some pretty twisted logic right there.
And what the hell does a "clean operating system" mean?
From the Google translation of the French article:
"Windows 7 will not be affected by the fee for private copying, which by definition is adopted touch pads "provided with an operating system for mobile devices or a clean operating system".
Granted, I haven't seen all the videos this pilot made, but from what I have seen and read so far it sounds like what this pilot was pointing out was things that were already publicly known. Things like airport ground crews having access to restricted areas without themselves having to go through screening, no TSA agents searching them or anything they carry prior to having access to aircraft, etc. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence could have figured out what this pilot documented by just sitting at an airport and watching for a little while, or by getting chummy with airport employees at a nearby bar and asking a few basic questions.
And I certainly don't think this pilot was the first one to point out these flaws. It just sounds to me like the TSA is trying to make a scapegoat out of him.
What I do is create passwords based on street addresses that I am familiar with. For example, one password is based on the address where I lived as a child. I seriously doubt anybody outside my family would even know what the address is so it's pretty secure.
Suppose you have an address like 123 Main Street, Jonesville, NY. Just take the key pieces along with some punctuation and a pattern of upper/lower case letters and you can quickly come up with a password like 123ms,J.NY
Change around the punctuation, capitalization, etc. and you've got a fairly easy to memorize mnemonic.
When I've worked in for companies whose equipment is housed in commercial datacenters, most of them required three factor authentication to gain access:
something you know (a password)
something you are (biometrics)
something you have (a key, security token, etc)
To gain entry into the last datacenter I worked at I needed a cardkey to get through the first door (something I have). I then had to have my hand scanned at the entrance to a man-trap (something I am). Once inside the man-trap with the door closed I again had to scan my hand and then enter a PIN onto a keybad (something I know). Only then did I have access to the datacenter floor.
Doing two of these on the web should be fairly easy. Companies like eBay & Paypal have tested RSA SecurID fobs as a security token, but in this day and age where so many people have smartphones then using it to generate security keys should be very easy. I already have a Verisign app on my iPhone that generates a random key every 60 seconds like SecurID does. Unfortunately not very many websites support it. I wish more would. And I have no idea how something like biometrics could be applied to the web...
My profile will tell advertisers to leave me the f*ck alone. I don't want all their crap. I don't want them tracking me. I won't buy the crap they push on me. They're wasting their time and money by trying to track me and advertise to me.
Besides, if an international airline flight originates abroad and lands in the US, then the TSA forces the originating airport to jump through all sorts of security theater hoops. Back in 2004 I flew to New Zealand & Australia. My flight back was from Brisbane to San Diego. At the Brisbane airport the flight departed from the very last gate in one of the concourses. I got there a couple hours early due to the timing of my connecting flight, so I went to the gate, sat down, and started reading a book. About 2 hours before the flight a group of about 5 security agents showed up and had everybody leave the departure area - moving to the next-to-last gate in the concourse. Once our departure area was vacant they roped it off, put on rubber gloves, and started searching the entire area. They searched under the seats in the departure lounge, inside the trash bins, around the gate agents desk, etc. Once they had swept the gate area all but one went on board the aircraft and I assume did a fulls sweep of it as well. After that was done they allowed passengers back into the waiting area, but they screened our passports as we returned. I asked one of the screeners what this was all about, and they told me that it was solely because the destination of the flight was inside the USA and therefore USA regulations required the additional screening.
Anybody with even a tiny bit of intelligence could see how useless all this security theater was. If I was a terrorist and wanted to hide a bomb in the airport I'd simply hide it in the waiting area of the next gate and detonate it when the security sweep is going on since all the passengers would now be in that waiting area. Or if I was going to smuggle weapons or anything else on board the plane then I'd have them hidden elsewhere in the concourse for me to pick them up. Unless the screeners search the ENTIRE concourse then a sweep of just one departure lounge is a complete waste. But it was a requirement forced on them by the USA.
I seriously doubt too many parents will let their children get traumatized like this when they realize what a TSA pat-down of a small child will likely result in.
I think I'll start manufacturing a line of undergarments that have metal threads woven into them with sayings like "I do not consent to invasive searches", "TSA scanners are a violation of my 4th Amendment rights", etc.
I wonder what the TSA response would be if they started seeing people wearing underwear, etc. that effectively blocked the scanners from seeing ones "naughty bits" and possibly also included slogans like these?
It's only a "gross violation" if you are forced to do it. There is an opt-out.
Yeah, and in some cases opting out means being ejected from the airport without being allowed to board your flight, and even threats of $10,000 civilian fines. Here are just a few recent reported incidents:
Sorry, but if even a pilot can't opt out of going through the scanners then either something is severely broken in the system or the whole opt-out argument is complete bunk.
I used to have a Motorola quad-band GSM phone on AT&T. I unlocked it so I could bring it to Australia and New Zealand when I went there a few years ago. Worked absolutely fine for me. I still keep the phone handy for if/when I travel abroad in the future.
that would probably be the last step before self awareness, and we all know how that will go.
Why is it that I just got an image from the second Transformers stuck in my head where that stupid little robot starts dry humping Megan Fox's leg like a dog?
How about the FBI throws you in jail for destruction of government property, obstruction, and any other charges they decide to toss your way (rightfully or not)? Is the amount of time spent sitting in a cell, the money lost in lawyers fees, and the hassle of going to court really worth it?
I'll just cut and paste a comment I made about this on another site:
How many years have they been predicting this, and how many times have those predictions failed to come true? I used to say that I won't believe this until Verizon or Apple themselves announce it. I'm now at the point where I won't believe it until I'm actually holding a Verizon iPhone in my hand, and even then I'll be dubious.
At least Ballmer will allow multitasking and a more or less open development platform.
Since when was Windows an open development platform? Try writing a decent Windows app using gcc and not making use of frameworks like.Net, MFC, etc. The vast majority of Windows development is done using Visual Studio which pretty much ties you into using a proprietary framework. Not that Apple is any better...
I'm betting that the tablet will be running the exact same bloated Windows OS that is meant for PC's. Ballmer still wants to see the same Windows start menu, etc. on every single device no matter how big or small. He should learn a lesson from Apple with the iPhone & iPad. What makes them so popular is that Apple did NOT take the Mac OS-X GUI and try to shoehorn it on a smaller device. The smaller screens necessitated a much simpler and more user friendly interface. Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
Actually a much more nasty approach would be to make the worm intelligent enough to analyze its surroundings and send them to the controller. Then the controller modifies its payload to direct the attack more precisely. So the worm does a network scan, finds some documents or emails to send back to the controller, etc. The controller sees from those documents that the worm has infected systems in a hydroelectric dam that uses a monitoring & control system from ACME corp. The controller modifies that copy of the worm to search the network for various ACME systems. Once the worm identifies the specific details of the ACME systems the controller modifies the worm again to initiate some sort of attack against them. Another copy of the worm is found to be in a bank, so that copy is modified to scramble all the bank records on command, etc.
Any modern-day reactor should have an out-of-band method of SCRAMing that doesn't rely on computer control of any sort. A common approach is to have control rods held physically over the nuclear fuel by electromagnets. If power is cut to the electromagnets for any reason then gravity drops them into place and the reaction ceases. If monitoring systems don't automatically cut power to the SCRAM system then it would just take a worker pushing a button. Heck, they may even have fuses located around the reactor that would melt in the presences of excessive heat or the presence of radiation, causing power to the magnets to be cut. So the likelihood of a computer worm causing a meltdown is highly unlikely unless the Iranians are stupid enough to disable the SCRAM system.
In other words, the HDCP hardware decryptor is more powerful than the main CPU.
Um. No. Not at all. CPU's are highly generalized computational engines. A CPU's instruction set contains every instruction needed to perform every operation by a computer, including I/O to peripheral busses, etc. A GPU is a highly specialized processor designed to complement a CPU and offload graphics-specific computations that requires a large number of high speed mathematical computations. It's only purpose is to take data from the CPU and render it quickly for a display. The functionality of a GPU can be implemented in a CPU, although with a huge degradation in performance. The functionality of a CPU can not be implemented in a GPU.
In summary: 1. A CPU is the brain of the computer and the GPU is only meant to complement it. 2. GPU's are specialized and cannot replace the function of a CPU. 3. CPU's can perform the functions of a GPU but at a much slower speed.
Every HDCP device should be slapped with a huge carbon and recycling tax -- with an extra punitive rate, since the waste is introduced intentionally.
What a crock. Thanks to technologies like CUDA you can write your own programs that leverage the GPU's in your existing video cards. It's likely only a matter of time before you start to see GPU-based implementations of this code, which means the nVidia or ATI card in your existing PC could easily decrypt HDCP content in real-time. So are you willing to pay excessive taxes for the video card in your PC? When implemented in existing DVI & HDMI chipsets, HDCP really doesn't require all that much more physical overhead, certainly not enough to justify an absurd carbon tax. Highly specialized hardware like that is significantly more efficient than even the GPU in your PC.
How many times has man transplanted a wild animal or plant from one place to another to try to eradicate a pest? How many times has it succeeded?
Earlier this year my SO and I went to St. John, USVI for vacation. We learned how they had a major rat problem on the island back in the 1800's. Some enterprising individual decided to introduce a bunch of mongoose (mongeese?) to the island to eradicate the rats. The only problem is that the rats are nocturnal and mongoose aren't, so they just ended up with a rat problem at night and a mongoose problem during the day...
Encryption used for things like DVD's, Blu-Ray, HDPC, etc. suffer from two major weaknesses:
1. As ledow pointed out, you need to provide a decryption method and a key to the end user in order for them to view the content. With unencrypted content and a decryption key, it's possible to reverse-engineer the encryption. Given enough samples (eg. dozens of Blu-Ray movies each with different keys) the process becomes easier.
2. The encryption must be weak enough so that the content can be decrypted in real-time. You've got to be able to decrypt roughly 2K of data for every frame displayed. At 30 frames a second that would mean being able to decrypt 60K of data per second. Your average Blu-Ray DVD player doesn't have a high end multi-core CPU in it to aid in decryption, so it requires an algorithm that's relatively light weight and fast.
Slashdot Mirror
So because it's a computer it's unable to distribute copyrighted materials? Now that is some pretty twisted logic right there.
And what the hell does a "clean operating system" mean?
From the Google translation of the French article:
"Windows 7 will not be affected by the fee for private copying, which by definition is adopted touch pads "provided with an operating system for mobile devices or a clean operating system".
Sorry for my ignorance regarding this tablet, but what OS is it planning to come with?
Granted, I haven't seen all the videos this pilot made, but from what I have seen and read so far it sounds like what this pilot was pointing out was things that were already publicly known. Things like airport ground crews having access to restricted areas without themselves having to go through screening, no TSA agents searching them or anything they carry prior to having access to aircraft, etc. Anybody with an ounce of intelligence could have figured out what this pilot documented by just sitting at an airport and watching for a little while, or by getting chummy with airport employees at a nearby bar and asking a few basic questions.
And I certainly don't think this pilot was the first one to point out these flaws. It just sounds to me like the TSA is trying to make a scapegoat out of him.
What I do is create passwords based on street addresses that I am familiar with. For example, one password is based on the address where I lived as a child. I seriously doubt anybody outside my family would even know what the address is so it's pretty secure.
Suppose you have an address like 123 Main Street, Jonesville, NY. Just take the key pieces along with some punctuation and a pattern of upper/lower case letters and you can quickly come up with a password like 123ms,J.NY
Change around the punctuation, capitalization, etc. and you've got a fairly easy to memorize mnemonic.
To gain entry into the last datacenter I worked at I needed a cardkey to get through the first door (something I have). I then had to have my hand scanned at the entrance to a man-trap (something I am). Once inside the man-trap with the door closed I again had to scan my hand and then enter a PIN onto a keybad (something I know). Only then did I have access to the datacenter floor.
Doing two of these on the web should be fairly easy. Companies like eBay & Paypal have tested RSA SecurID fobs as a security token, but in this day and age where so many people have smartphones then using it to generate security keys should be very easy. I already have a Verisign app on my iPhone that generates a random key every 60 seconds like SecurID does. Unfortunately not very many websites support it. I wish more would. And I have no idea how something like biometrics could be applied to the web...
Wow. That's a pretty major design flaw.
My profile will tell advertisers to leave me the f*ck alone. I don't want all their crap. I don't want them tracking me. I won't buy the crap they push on me. They're wasting their time and money by trying to track me and advertise to me.
Now the real trick would be to have spiky metal underwear
Could chastity belts end up making a comeback?
That's because Georgia is GA, not GE.
The Europeans don't do this. They don't even allow the scanners!
Actually the Europeans do allow scanners, and claim that 95% of passengers approve of them:
Manchester Airport body scanners in all three terminals
Besides, if an international airline flight originates abroad and lands in the US, then the TSA forces the originating airport to jump through all sorts of security theater hoops. Back in 2004 I flew to New Zealand & Australia. My flight back was from Brisbane to San Diego. At the Brisbane airport the flight departed from the very last gate in one of the concourses. I got there a couple hours early due to the timing of my connecting flight, so I went to the gate, sat down, and started reading a book. About 2 hours before the flight a group of about 5 security agents showed up and had everybody leave the departure area - moving to the next-to-last gate in the concourse. Once our departure area was vacant they roped it off, put on rubber gloves, and started searching the entire area. They searched under the seats in the departure lounge, inside the trash bins, around the gate agents desk, etc. Once they had swept the gate area all but one went on board the aircraft and I assume did a fulls sweep of it as well. After that was done they allowed passengers back into the waiting area, but they screened our passports as we returned. I asked one of the screeners what this was all about, and they told me that it was solely because the destination of the flight was inside the USA and therefore USA regulations required the additional screening.
Anybody with even a tiny bit of intelligence could see how useless all this security theater was. If I was a terrorist and wanted to hide a bomb in the airport I'd simply hide it in the waiting area of the next gate and detonate it when the security sweep is going on since all the passengers would now be in that waiting area. Or if I was going to smuggle weapons or anything else on board the plane then I'd have them hidden elsewhere in the concourse for me to pick them up. Unless the screeners search the ENTIRE concourse then a sweep of just one departure lounge is a complete waste. But it was a requirement forced on them by the USA.
Children are allowed and encouraged to cry.
You mean sort of like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TCHSGvNwRY
I seriously doubt too many parents will let their children get traumatized like this when they realize what a TSA pat-down of a small child will likely result in.
I think I'll start manufacturing a line of undergarments that have metal threads woven into them with sayings like "I do not consent to invasive searches", "TSA scanners are a violation of my 4th Amendment rights", etc.
I wonder what the TSA response would be if they started seeing people wearing underwear, etc. that effectively blocked the scanners from seeing ones "naughty bits" and possibly also included slogans like these?
It's only a "gross violation" if you are forced to do it. There is an opt-out.
Yeah, and in some cases opting out means being ejected from the airport without being allowed to board your flight, and even threats of $10,000 civilian fines. Here are just a few recent reported incidents:
TSA encounter at SAN
Woman Says She Was Cuffed And Booted From Airport For Questioning Body Scanners
Pregnant Traveler: TSA Screeners Bullied Me Into Full-Body Scan
Even pilots are being ejected from airports for refusing to submit to the scanners:
Pilot who refused body scan at Memphis International blasts TSA security
Sorry, but if even a pilot can't opt out of going through the scanners then either something is severely broken in the system or the whole opt-out argument is complete bunk.
I used to have a Motorola quad-band GSM phone on AT&T. I unlocked it so I could bring it to Australia and New Zealand when I went there a few years ago. Worked absolutely fine for me. I still keep the phone handy for if/when I travel abroad in the future.
that would probably be the last step before self awareness, and we all know how that will go.
Why is it that I just got an image from the second Transformers stuck in my head where that stupid little robot starts dry humping Megan Fox's leg like a dog?
How about the FBI throws you in jail for destruction of government property, obstruction, and any other charges they decide to toss your way (rightfully or not)? Is the amount of time spent sitting in a cell, the money lost in lawyers fees, and the hassle of going to court really worth it?
I'll just cut and paste a comment I made about this on another site:
More like...
"Where do you want to go today? Wherever Apple and Google were last month!"
At least Ballmer will allow multitasking and a more or less open development platform.
Since when was Windows an open development platform? Try writing a decent Windows app using gcc and not making use of frameworks like .Net, MFC, etc. The vast majority of Windows development is done using Visual Studio which pretty much ties you into using a proprietary framework. Not that Apple is any better...
I'm betting that the tablet will be running the exact same bloated Windows OS that is meant for PC's. Ballmer still wants to see the same Windows start menu, etc. on every single device no matter how big or small. He should learn a lesson from Apple with the iPhone & iPad. What makes them so popular is that Apple did NOT take the Mac OS-X GUI and try to shoehorn it on a smaller device. The smaller screens necessitated a much simpler and more user friendly interface. Until Ballmer accepts this and lets Microsoft develop a new UI paradigm for portable devices they're doomed to failure over and over again.
Actually a much more nasty approach would be to make the worm intelligent enough to analyze its surroundings and send them to the controller. Then the controller modifies its payload to direct the attack more precisely. So the worm does a network scan, finds some documents or emails to send back to the controller, etc. The controller sees from those documents that the worm has infected systems in a hydroelectric dam that uses a monitoring & control system from ACME corp. The controller modifies that copy of the worm to search the network for various ACME systems. Once the worm identifies the specific details of the ACME systems the controller modifies the worm again to initiate some sort of attack against them. Another copy of the worm is found to be in a bank, so that copy is modified to scramble all the bank records on command, etc.
Any modern-day reactor should have an out-of-band method of SCRAMing that doesn't rely on computer control of any sort. A common approach is to have control rods held physically over the nuclear fuel by electromagnets. If power is cut to the electromagnets for any reason then gravity drops them into place and the reaction ceases. If monitoring systems don't automatically cut power to the SCRAM system then it would just take a worker pushing a button. Heck, they may even have fuses located around the reactor that would melt in the presences of excessive heat or the presence of radiation, causing power to the magnets to be cut. So the likelihood of a computer worm causing a meltdown is highly unlikely unless the Iranians are stupid enough to disable the SCRAM system.
In other words, the HDCP hardware decryptor is more powerful than the main CPU.
Um. No. Not at all. CPU's are highly generalized computational engines. A CPU's instruction set contains every instruction needed to perform every operation by a computer, including I/O to peripheral busses, etc. A GPU is a highly specialized processor designed to complement a CPU and offload graphics-specific computations that requires a large number of high speed mathematical computations. It's only purpose is to take data from the CPU and render it quickly for a display. The functionality of a GPU can be implemented in a CPU, although with a huge degradation in performance. The functionality of a CPU can not be implemented in a GPU.
In summary:
1. A CPU is the brain of the computer and the GPU is only meant to complement it.
2. GPU's are specialized and cannot replace the function of a CPU.
3. CPU's can perform the functions of a GPU but at a much slower speed.
Every HDCP device should be slapped with a huge carbon and recycling tax -- with an extra punitive rate, since the waste is introduced intentionally.
What a crock. Thanks to technologies like CUDA you can write your own programs that leverage the GPU's in your existing video cards. It's likely only a matter of time before you start to see GPU-based implementations of this code, which means the nVidia or ATI card in your existing PC could easily decrypt HDCP content in real-time. So are you willing to pay excessive taxes for the video card in your PC? When implemented in existing DVI & HDMI chipsets, HDCP really doesn't require all that much more physical overhead, certainly not enough to justify an absurd carbon tax. Highly specialized hardware like that is significantly more efficient than even the GPU in your PC.
How many times has man transplanted a wild animal or plant from one place to another to try to eradicate a pest? How many times has it succeeded?
Earlier this year my SO and I went to St. John, USVI for vacation. We learned how they had a major rat problem on the island back in the 1800's. Some enterprising individual decided to introduce a bunch of mongoose (mongeese?) to the island to eradicate the rats. The only problem is that the rats are nocturnal and mongoose aren't, so they just ended up with a rat problem at night and a mongoose problem during the day...
Encryption used for things like DVD's, Blu-Ray, HDPC, etc. suffer from two major weaknesses:
1. As ledow pointed out, you need to provide a decryption method and a key to the end user in order for them to view the content. With unencrypted content and a decryption key, it's possible to reverse-engineer the encryption. Given enough samples (eg. dozens of Blu-Ray movies each with different keys) the process becomes easier.
2. The encryption must be weak enough so that the content can be decrypted in real-time. You've got to be able to decrypt roughly 2K of data for every frame displayed. At 30 frames a second that would mean being able to decrypt 60K of data per second. Your average Blu-Ray DVD player doesn't have a high end multi-core CPU in it to aid in decryption, so it requires an algorithm that's relatively light weight and fast.