Your downplaying of the red-light and speeding cameras but criticism of Google Street View is rather backwards.
Not at all. As I said before, most law-enforcement cameras can only be accessed by law enforcement officials. The general public can't just go to a well-known website and pull up any given red-light camera to see what's going on in that intersection. With Street View anybody on the entire planet from you and me to anybody in the CIA to the leaders of Korea, Iraq, etc. could simply go to google.com and potentially see you scratching your ass nude in your living room if the Google camera cars just so happen to be driving by your house at the right time. There's a huge difference between a small number of authorized people viewing images from red-light cameras and the whole world seeing inside your house because Google's cameras are able to capture that image as they do a drive-by.
1) there's a "report" feature in Street View where you can ask to have images removed. Not a big deal.
Who decides if an image should be removed or not? Who gets to make the request? How can any individual expect to know that Google has a picture of them sunbathing that they'd rather not have made publicly to the entire world, that may show up on sites like www.streetviewfun.com for voyeurs to get a kick out of?
2) they're photos of public places.
And some of those photos show the interior of private houses, private buildings, etc. Again, go to sites like www.streetviewfun.com and you can find some examples. Would you want photos taken through the windows of your home show up on the internet for the whole world to see? What if those photos catch you in a compromising position inside your own house, and you're unaware that Google is making it available to the whole world?
3) there are already countless intersections with cameras set up that capture cars running red lights. there are likewise countless sections of the highway where cameras are set up to photograph speeders. So, don't think the police need Google and MS to help them set precedent for anything.
Huge difference. Those sorts of cameras are for a specific purpose and cover very limited areas. In the case of red light cameras, speed cameras, etc. the law requires you be notified of their existance, which is why there are signs warning you of those cameras before you get to those locations. The results of those sorts of cameras are also usually restricted for the use of the police, so the general public can't just bring up a website to view what they've taken.
There are some things worth getting concerned over. This is not one of them.
Remind yourself of that thought as camera technology improves and you eventually start getting tickets for jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk, littering, etc. in the mail a few weeks after some random camera on top of a police car snaps your picture doing that.
It would be nice if the authors had explained why they thought they had a right to privacy when in public, or whether they believed that Google was taking pictures inside people's houses.
But some of the Street View images CAN in fact see inside houses and other buildings. You'll find just a few examples here. So what do you do about these peoples right to privacy now? Tell them to keep their doors closed and curtains drawn? Just imagine as the technology used to get these pictures improves. You'll probably get to see a lot more detail of the interior of private homes & businesses in future generations of Street View images. Where should it stop?
One picture in 6 mos to a year video surveillance does not make.
True, but it only takes one picture to embarrass somebody, to catch a crime in progress, or to simply show an individual in a location where they're rather it not be known they are. Many people are already aware that Street View captured the results of more than one automobile accidents. How would you like to be immortalized for riding your bike down the street, unaware that Google just snapped a picture of you showing your jeans riding down your backside?
Security cameras like those in ATM's have very limited visibility & range, and most people know they are there. The contents of those tapes also aren't generally available to the public. They most likely would need a court order to obtain. How would you like it if the whole world could simply go to Google and see a photograph of you walking into a motel with a prostitute, leaving a strip club, getting mugged on the side of the street, or caught in the act of accidentally hitting somebody in a crosswalk with your car? It's that kind of publicity that most people are concerned about.
Given that Google, MSN, etc. are doing this I bet it's just a matter of time before police start mounting cameras on their patrol cars as a means to identify illegal behavior that the officers in the car might miss. How would you like to get a ticket in the mail a week after a police car driving by takes a photo of you jaywalking? That's the sort of thing this could eventually lead to, and that's not what most people want.
What if the 'unsuspecting third party' was a geographically distributed server setup like CPAN or sourceforge.net?
CPAN, SourceForge, etc. don't use DNS load balancing like Akamai does. They just use a collection of static mirrors and they randomly pick one or let you pick from a list. Now if you could just type in "download.sourceforge.net" and have it return a download location logically close to you that would be a different situation. But how would you implement this? If there were hundreds of download mirrors around the world, a random subset of which is actually operational at any given time, how would you set up a DNS server to accurately return the IP of the closest mirror to you in roughly the same amount of time as a typical static DNS lookup? That's what makes Akamai's environment unique, is the ability to do this all in real-time, with a dynamic pool of available mirrors to choose from, as well as other rules since some ISP's, etc. only want Akamai to use their local mirrors for their own customers (so that those ISP's dont incur additional network charges by serving to people other than their customers).
A guy hosting images would find others not only presenting those images in a different website, but to add insult to injury, would load those images from _his_ servers? (i.e. they had modified their IMG tags to load images from the unwitting originator.) Now, if the originating servers were clustered and/or geographically distributed, you've got a setup just like Akamai.
Not really. What you describe is basically just offloading static images to an unsuspecting third party. If it's a popular website then that third part webserver will just choke under the load, causing problems for all the people visiting the original site. Akamai uses DNS tricks and other slight of hand to dynamically ensure images & other content are downloaded from servers physically close to you. So even if you and I visit the same website the images I receive will be downloaded from one server (close to me) and the images you receive will be from a different server (close to you). Those servers use some pretty sophisticated caching & content sharing algorithms to ensure the content is available when needed. It's the combination of DNS tricks & caching that is what makes Akamai work, and it's the algorithms involved in all that trickery that they're protecting. Take a look at my post here for a bit more detail.
Ad sites might not fall into this. Akamai is protecting an entire system that involves the dynamic distribution of cached static content through it's servers around the world and the use of DNS tricks to ensure that any user who needs that content gets it from the server closest to him/her. It's much more than just displaying images from another server. The only way an advertiser would run into problems is if they developed their own in-house dynamic caching system for the delivery of their ads. I think most advertisers use a handful of static servers for content delivery unless they rely on CDN companies like Akamai or LimeLight.
What Akamai does is run a global network of servers that serve as a smart cache for the content of their customers data. E*Trade, for example, is a customer of theirs. When you go to www.etrade.com you get the static HTML document from the E*Trade server but the static images are downloaded from an Akamai caching server that's located physically close to you (meaning fewer network hops to you than the actual E*Trade server). By pulling images and other static content from servers physically close to you it not only speeds up your use of their website but it offloads a lot of work from the main E*Trade servers and lowers their network utilization. So the "global hosting system" they refer to is this custom distributed cache that they run on servers located all over the world. I posted a bit more detail about how Akamais network works in this reply.
It's a combination of modified URL's in the static HDML, DNS trickery that causes those URL's to be downloaded from servers physically close to you, and smart caching of that content. It basically provides a way of ensuring that static content like images, which take up a lot of bandwidth compared to HTML documents, is downloaded from servers physically near you and not from the companies primary server. It dramatically speeds up the loading of web pages no matter where the requests come from, and offloads a lot of processing & network utilization from the site serving up the HTML.
I posted more details in a reply here if you want a little more insight into how they do it.
The way Akamai works is it distributes the "heavy duty" content like images, scripts. to its own servers all around the world. It then lets its customers (like E*Trade, to pick one actual example) modify their static HTML content to refer to those images in a special way. For example, the E*Trade home page has the following link in it for one of its images:
The url is specially encoded in such a way that when your local DNS server queries a248.e.akamai.net, the DNS server returns a server located physically near you. So if you're in England a248.e.akamai.net might resolve to an IP located in Londan, but in New York City it would resolve to an IP somewhere in New York. Then when the http request is sent, Akamais servers decode that annoyingly long URL to determine which customer of theirs it is and serve up the correct image. It's actually a fairly complex and fast process. If the server that you're directed to doesn't actually have the image locally then that Akamai server will query another nearby Akamai server. If that server also doesn't have it then it'll actually pull the image down from a master server that E*Trade uploaded the image to.
You can test this out yourself by looking up the IP address of a248.e.akamai.net yourself. Locally you'll get one IP. If you do a google search for dns lookup tools you can submit that domain name to other sites to look it up and you'll get totally different IP's that are physically close to wherever that domain lookup tool runs from.
The bottom line is that it's a prety complex process that involves both the use of DNS to ensure you download large chunks of content from physically near servers as well as some pretty sophisticated caching in the background to make sure static content is delivered rapidly no matter where in the world you are.
I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...
It's still news because the LP offering to buy them is doing so in order to continue the linux litigation that got SCO into this current situation. No surprise, there's a lot of speculation that Microsoft is somehow behind the sudden desire of this LP to acquire SCO and continue the litigation since it helps to continue a FUD campaign that Microsoft would love to see continue.
So while you may end up with a car that can produce -and store- its own hydrogen overnight, you will -never- have a car you can just 'fill up on water'.
And that might just end up being how future cars work. One of the big concerns/problems with hydrogen is transportation and storage. There are companies who have developed solid porous materials that can trap and store large amounts of hydrogen but that doesn't make it any easier to transport. So future cars may have a solid tank of this material and a tank that you fill up with water. To create the hydrogen you plug the car in and/or rely on the power produced by solar panels on the car and regenerative braking. It would certainly solve the whole issue of transport and storage of hydrogen.
Well, let's see. Gasoline doesn't "spontaneously fall apart" inside a combustion engine either. The process is kicked off by a battery that starts the engine spinning. The spinning of the engine turns an alternator that generates an electrical spark that initiates the combustion. And with some models of newer cars, the process of coasting & braking charges up high-capacity batteries within the car. It's called a hybrid.
So stop thinking so narrow-mindedly when it comes to water as a fuel source. With the high efficiency that this company claims it could be a reasonable choice for a hybrid style car. Instead of gas/electric it could be something like water/electric. True you'd probably still have to plug your car into an electrical outlet overnight from time to time, and you could eventually see cars with solar panels on their roofs, but if storing and transporting hydrogen proves too costly and/or too dangerous then a hybrid car like this that uses highly efficient batteries (if you bother to read up on the company they claim their technology may also vastly improve the capacity of these types of batteries) and highly efficient hydrogen generators could prove a decent replacement for gas powered cars.
Not only in the car. If you bothered to comprehend TFA.
You might want to learn to comprehend what people quote. I quoted directly from the article. The quote indicated cars could carry tanks of water instead of hydrogen. You'd have to be pretty stupid to think that couldn't equally apply to a garage.
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
So instead of a tank of pressurized hydrogen gas you have a tank of distilled water in your car and it's broken down into hydrogen on demand. No need to store/transport/etc. hydrogen at all if this is really the case.
Then why wasn't it phrased "All of the 14 suspects arrested" if they didn't want to make it confusing?
The actual sentence from the article is this:
"The 14 suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26, and face charges related to the unauthorized use of computers."
What's confusing about that? 14 suspects were arrested on Wednesday. They were all between the ages of 17 and 26. They all face charges related to unauthorized use of computers. Simply adding "All of" to the beginning of that sentence doesn't change it in any way.
Is it really that much of a mental leap to conclude the other 2 suspects were not between the ages of 17 and 26?
But then the article would have phrased it as something like "14 of the suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26". Since it started off as "The 14 suspects arrested..." means that 14 suspects were arrested and the modifier "are between the ages..." applies to all of those arrested.
If you read it carefully it says that they raided a number of homes on Wednesday and "arrested 16 people in their investigation". It doesn't specifically state that all 16 were arrested on Wednesday, although that's what it implies. It only says "The 14 suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26".
I read this as the investigation led to raids on Wednesday that led to 14 arrests. Two others were likely arrested before those raids but still as a result of the same investigation.
That's not entirely true, and also not entirely helpful. Assume an exploit exists in a seldom used service. A malevolent worm takes advantage of the exploit and infects the system. Upon infecting the system, the worm disables the service that the exploit is in, or otherwise applies a patch to prevent other worms from exploiting it. Microsofts worm wouldn't be able to use that exploit to gain entry and repair the system.
On a similar vein, suppose the worm infects the system and then the user, unaware that the worm is there, applies a patch on their own. The exploit is again patched but the damage is done, and Microsofts worm wouldn't be able to get in.
This also still doesn't address the issue of legality. Many states/countries have laws that would classify this sort of thing as illegal. All it would take is the MS "worm" causing damage to a computer its not authorized to access and MS would be sued to oblivion. Don't think that just because a computer is running Windows that MS has the legal right to do whatever they want to patch that computer. There are computers in various government/military agencies that contain classified information, as well as banks and other financial institutions that require their systems to be tightly locked down and patches applied only under very specific conditions. If those machines were "updated" by an MS worm they could face all sorts of legal problems.
How on earth are antivirus programs supposed to distinguish between "good" and "bad" viruses/worms? Unless this is meant specifically to attack the issue of botnets and repair them I can't see this as actually being useful in any way. If they convince Symantec, Trend Micro, etc. to treat MS worms as legitimate then the virus writers will figure out how those products do this and mirror it to avoid detection. If the anti-virus programs don't then either these fixes will be rejected by everybody who has a virus scanner (not to mention floods of false reports from people thinking MS is releasing infected software). And if they are targeting the botnets then wouldn't this run afoul of various computer hacking/trespassing laws?
I don't see how they can pull this off effectively in any manner.
Slashdot Mirror
Your downplaying of the red-light and speeding cameras but criticism of Google Street View is rather backwards.
Not at all. As I said before, most law-enforcement cameras can only be accessed by law enforcement officials. The general public can't just go to a well-known website and pull up any given red-light camera to see what's going on in that intersection. With Street View anybody on the entire planet from you and me to anybody in the CIA to the leaders of Korea, Iraq, etc. could simply go to google.com and potentially see you scratching your ass nude in your living room if the Google camera cars just so happen to be driving by your house at the right time. There's a huge difference between a small number of authorized people viewing images from red-light cameras and the whole world seeing inside your house because Google's cameras are able to capture that image as they do a drive-by.
1) there's a "report" feature in Street View where you can ask to have images removed. Not a big deal.
Who decides if an image should be removed or not? Who gets to make the request? How can any individual expect to know that Google has a picture of them sunbathing that they'd rather not have made publicly to the entire world, that may show up on sites like www.streetviewfun.com for voyeurs to get a kick out of?
2) they're photos of public places.
And some of those photos show the interior of private houses, private buildings, etc. Again, go to sites like www.streetviewfun.com and you can find some examples. Would you want photos taken through the windows of your home show up on the internet for the whole world to see? What if those photos catch you in a compromising position inside your own house, and you're unaware that Google is making it available to the whole world?
3) there are already countless intersections with cameras set up that capture cars running red lights. there are likewise countless sections of the highway where cameras are set up to photograph speeders. So, don't think the police need Google and MS to help them set precedent for anything.
Huge difference. Those sorts of cameras are for a specific purpose and cover very limited areas. In the case of red light cameras, speed cameras, etc. the law requires you be notified of their existance, which is why there are signs warning you of those cameras before you get to those locations. The results of those sorts of cameras are also usually restricted for the use of the police, so the general public can't just bring up a website to view what they've taken.
There are some things worth getting concerned over. This is not one of them.
Remind yourself of that thought as camera technology improves and you eventually start getting tickets for jaywalking, spitting on the sidewalk, littering, etc. in the mail a few weeks after some random camera on top of a police car snaps your picture doing that.
It would be nice if the authors had explained why they thought they had a right to privacy when in public, or whether they believed that Google was taking pictures inside people's houses.
But some of the Street View images CAN in fact see inside houses and other buildings. You'll find just a few examples here. So what do you do about these peoples right to privacy now? Tell them to keep their doors closed and curtains drawn? Just imagine as the technology used to get these pictures improves. You'll probably get to see a lot more detail of the interior of private homes & businesses in future generations of Street View images. Where should it stop?
One picture in 6 mos to a year video surveillance does not make.
True, but it only takes one picture to embarrass somebody, to catch a crime in progress, or to simply show an individual in a location where they're rather it not be known they are. Many people are already aware that Street View captured the results of more than one automobile accidents. How would you like to be immortalized for riding your bike down the street, unaware that Google just snapped a picture of you showing your jeans riding down your backside?
Security cameras like those in ATM's have very limited visibility & range, and most people know they are there. The contents of those tapes also aren't generally available to the public. They most likely would need a court order to obtain. How would you like it if the whole world could simply go to Google and see a photograph of you walking into a motel with a prostitute, leaving a strip club, getting mugged on the side of the street, or caught in the act of accidentally hitting somebody in a crosswalk with your car? It's that kind of publicity that most people are concerned about.
Given that Google, MSN, etc. are doing this I bet it's just a matter of time before police start mounting cameras on their patrol cars as a means to identify illegal behavior that the officers in the car might miss. How would you like to get a ticket in the mail a week after a police car driving by takes a photo of you jaywalking? That's the sort of thing this could eventually lead to, and that's not what most people want.
I'll still be interested in how well it handles the Acid2 and Acid3 tests.
What if the 'unsuspecting third party' was a geographically distributed server setup like CPAN or sourceforge.net?
CPAN, SourceForge, etc. don't use DNS load balancing like Akamai does. They just use a collection of static mirrors and they randomly pick one or let you pick from a list. Now if you could just type in "download.sourceforge.net" and have it return a download location logically close to you that would be a different situation. But how would you implement this? If there were hundreds of download mirrors around the world, a random subset of which is actually operational at any given time, how would you set up a DNS server to accurately return the IP of the closest mirror to you in roughly the same amount of time as a typical static DNS lookup? That's what makes Akamai's environment unique, is the ability to do this all in real-time, with a dynamic pool of available mirrors to choose from, as well as other rules since some ISP's, etc. only want Akamai to use their local mirrors for their own customers (so that those ISP's dont incur additional network charges by serving to people other than their customers).
A guy hosting images would find others not only presenting those images in a different website, but to add insult to injury, would load those images from _his_ servers? (i.e. they had modified their IMG tags to load images from the unwitting originator.) Now, if the originating servers were clustered and/or geographically distributed, you've got a setup just like Akamai.
Not really. What you describe is basically just offloading static images to an unsuspecting third party. If it's a popular website then that third part webserver will just choke under the load, causing problems for all the people visiting the original site. Akamai uses DNS tricks and other slight of hand to dynamically ensure images & other content are downloaded from servers physically close to you. So even if you and I visit the same website the images I receive will be downloaded from one server (close to me) and the images you receive will be from a different server (close to you). Those servers use some pretty sophisticated caching & content sharing algorithms to ensure the content is available when needed. It's the combination of DNS tricks & caching that is what makes Akamai work, and it's the algorithms involved in all that trickery that they're protecting. Take a look at my post here for a bit more detail.
Ad sites might not fall into this. Akamai is protecting an entire system that involves the dynamic distribution of cached static content through it's servers around the world and the use of DNS tricks to ensure that any user who needs that content gets it from the server closest to him/her. It's much more than just displaying images from another server. The only way an advertiser would run into problems is if they developed their own in-house dynamic caching system for the delivery of their ads. I think most advertisers use a handful of static servers for content delivery unless they rely on CDN companies like Akamai or LimeLight.
What Akamai does is run a global network of servers that serve as a smart cache for the content of their customers data. E*Trade, for example, is a customer of theirs. When you go to www.etrade.com you get the static HTML document from the E*Trade server but the static images are downloaded from an Akamai caching server that's located physically close to you (meaning fewer network hops to you than the actual E*Trade server). By pulling images and other static content from servers physically close to you it not only speeds up your use of their website but it offloads a lot of work from the main E*Trade servers and lowers their network utilization. So the "global hosting system" they refer to is this custom distributed cache that they run on servers located all over the world. I posted a bit more detail about how Akamais network works in this reply.
It's a combination of modified URL's in the static HDML, DNS trickery that causes those URL's to be downloaded from servers physically close to you, and smart caching of that content. It basically provides a way of ensuring that static content like images, which take up a lot of bandwidth compared to HTML documents, is downloaded from servers physically near you and not from the companies primary server. It dramatically speeds up the loading of web pages no matter where the requests come from, and offloads a lot of processing & network utilization from the site serving up the HTML.
I posted more details in a reply here if you want a little more insight into how they do it.
Sorry, but you're not even close.
The way Akamai works is it distributes the "heavy duty" content like images, scripts. to its own servers all around the world. It then lets its customers (like E*Trade, to pick one actual example) modify their static HTML content to refer to those images in a special way. For example, the E*Trade home page has the following link in it for one of its images:
https://a248.e.akamai.net/n/248/1777/20080228.0/www.etrade.com/images/prospect/topGrad.gif
The url is specially encoded in such a way that when your local DNS server queries a248.e.akamai.net, the DNS server returns a server located physically near you. So if you're in England a248.e.akamai.net might resolve to an IP located in Londan, but in New York City it would resolve to an IP somewhere in New York. Then when the http request is sent, Akamais servers decode that annoyingly long URL to determine which customer of theirs it is and serve up the correct image. It's actually a fairly complex and fast process. If the server that you're directed to doesn't actually have the image locally then that Akamai server will query another nearby Akamai server. If that server also doesn't have it then it'll actually pull the image down from a master server that E*Trade uploaded the image to.
You can test this out yourself by looking up the IP address of a248.e.akamai.net yourself. Locally you'll get one IP. If you do a google search for dns lookup tools you can submit that domain name to other sites to look it up and you'll get totally different IP's that are physically close to wherever that domain lookup tool runs from.
The bottom line is that it's a prety complex process that involves both the use of DNS to ensure you download large chunks of content from physically near servers as well as some pretty sophisticated caching in the background to make sure static content is delivered rapidly no matter where in the world you are.
I used to work at Akamai so I have a pretty good firsthand knowledge of how their stuff works. I doubt a lot of their algorithms they use would pass the "obviousness" test...
It's still news because the LP offering to buy them is doing so in order to continue the linux litigation that got SCO into this current situation. No surprise, there's a lot of speculation that Microsoft is somehow behind the sudden desire of this LP to acquire SCO and continue the litigation since it helps to continue a FUD campaign that Microsoft would love to see continue.
So while you may end up with a car that can produce -and store- its own hydrogen overnight, you will -never- have a car you can just 'fill up on water'.
And that might just end up being how future cars work. One of the big concerns/problems with hydrogen is transportation and storage. There are companies who have developed solid porous materials that can trap and store large amounts of hydrogen but that doesn't make it any easier to transport. So future cars may have a solid tank of this material and a tank that you fill up with water. To create the hydrogen you plug the car in and/or rely on the power produced by solar panels on the car and regenerative braking. It would certainly solve the whole issue of transport and storage of hydrogen.
Well, let's see. Gasoline doesn't "spontaneously fall apart" inside a combustion engine either. The process is kicked off by a battery that starts the engine spinning. The spinning of the engine turns an alternator that generates an electrical spark that initiates the combustion. And with some models of newer cars, the process of coasting & braking charges up high-capacity batteries within the car. It's called a hybrid.
So stop thinking so narrow-mindedly when it comes to water as a fuel source. With the high efficiency that this company claims it could be a reasonable choice for a hybrid style car. Instead of gas/electric it could be something like water/electric. True you'd probably still have to plug your car into an electrical outlet overnight from time to time, and you could eventually see cars with solar panels on their roofs, but if storing and transporting hydrogen proves too costly and/or too dangerous then a hybrid car like this that uses highly efficient batteries (if you bother to read up on the company they claim their technology may also vastly improve the capacity of these types of batteries) and highly efficient hydrogen generators could prove a decent replacement for gas powered cars.
Not only in the car. If you bothered to comprehend TFA.
You might want to learn to comprehend what people quote. I quoted directly from the article. The quote indicated cars could carry tanks of water instead of hydrogen. You'd have to be pretty stupid to think that couldn't equally apply to a garage.
Actually they'll have tanks of distilled water in their homes if you bothered to RTFA:
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
RTFA:
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
So instead of a tank of pressurized hydrogen gas you have a tank of distilled water in your car and it's broken down into hydrogen on demand. No need to store/transport/etc. hydrogen at all if this is really the case.
Then why wasn't it phrased "All of the 14 suspects arrested" if they didn't want to make it confusing?
The actual sentence from the article is this:
"The 14 suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26, and face charges related to the unauthorized use of computers."
What's confusing about that? 14 suspects were arrested on Wednesday. They were all between the ages of 17 and 26. They all face charges related to unauthorized use of computers. Simply adding "All of" to the beginning of that sentence doesn't change it in any way.
Is it really that much of a mental leap to conclude the other 2 suspects were not between the ages of 17 and 26?
But then the article would have phrased it as something like "14 of the suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26". Since it started off as "The 14 suspects arrested..." means that 14 suspects were arrested and the modifier "are between the ages..." applies to all of those arrested.
If you read it carefully it says that they raided a number of homes on Wednesday and "arrested 16 people in their investigation". It doesn't specifically state that all 16 were arrested on Wednesday, although that's what it implies. It only says "The 14 suspects arrested Wednesday are between the ages of 17 and 26".
I read this as the investigation led to raids on Wednesday that led to 14 arrests. Two others were likely arrested before those raids but still as a result of the same investigation.
Both.
16 people were arrested.
14 of those 16 were arrested on Wednesday.
That's not entirely true, and also not entirely helpful. Assume an exploit exists in a seldom used service. A malevolent worm takes advantage of the exploit and infects the system. Upon infecting the system, the worm disables the service that the exploit is in, or otherwise applies a patch to prevent other worms from exploiting it. Microsofts worm wouldn't be able to use that exploit to gain entry and repair the system.
On a similar vein, suppose the worm infects the system and then the user, unaware that the worm is there, applies a patch on their own. The exploit is again patched but the damage is done, and Microsofts worm wouldn't be able to get in.
This also still doesn't address the issue of legality. Many states/countries have laws that would classify this sort of thing as illegal. All it would take is the MS "worm" causing damage to a computer its not authorized to access and MS would be sued to oblivion. Don't think that just because a computer is running Windows that MS has the legal right to do whatever they want to patch that computer. There are computers in various government/military agencies that contain classified information, as well as banks and other financial institutions that require their systems to be tightly locked down and patches applied only under very specific conditions. If those machines were "updated" by an MS worm they could face all sorts of legal problems.
How on earth are antivirus programs supposed to distinguish between "good" and "bad" viruses/worms? Unless this is meant specifically to attack the issue of botnets and repair them I can't see this as actually being useful in any way. If they convince Symantec, Trend Micro, etc. to treat MS worms as legitimate then the virus writers will figure out how those products do this and mirror it to avoid detection. If the anti-virus programs don't then either these fixes will be rejected by everybody who has a virus scanner (not to mention floods of false reports from people thinking MS is releasing infected software). And if they are targeting the botnets then wouldn't this run afoul of various computer hacking/trespassing laws?
I don't see how they can pull this off effectively in any manner.
It seems to me that there's no real reason to "shoot down" this satellite, except as a test/demonstration of our ability to shoot down satellites
That, or there's some technology on the satellite that they don't want to risk falling (literally) into the hands of another country.
ROTFLMAO
Great use of references to back up your bluster.