I'm glad the bad guys do this. Most rootkits reuse some very old code that has a subtle effect which I can recognize immediately after I log into a system. I'll login for whatever reason, maybe to see why Apache isn't responding or whatever, and within a couple seconds I can announce "you have a root kit", without even doing anything to explicitly look for one. I hope rootkits keep using that old code forever. It makes them so easy to spot, without even looking for them, if you know what the signal is.
The context of the statement is that somebody submitted changes to the kernel and he denied the request.
Somebody wanted to add "security" code that would kill of a process, or even the whole kernel, if it detected something that might be a security concern. So with the proposed change, programs would crash without warning if this new code detected a possible security problem. Most of what it detects aren't attacks, though, they are just bugs in the software that need to be tweaked to explicitly follow security rules. The new security code should first warn about these bugs rather than crashing the system, Linus said. Quoting him:
So the hardening efforts should instead _start_ from the standpoint of "let's warn about what looks dangerous, and maybe in a _year_ when we've warned for a long time, and we are confident that we've actually caught all the normal cases, _then_ we can start taking more drastic measures".
I believe Redhat 5 (from 2007) had EFI support, and a quick Google search suggests people booted RHEL4 from EFI, but I don't know if that involved any hacks.
That totally depends on shot placement. My brother was shot point blank with a 22 and didn't even go to the doctor. Four or five 22 shots can be acupuncture. Seriously a 7 gauge hypodermic needle is commonly used by doctors and that's.18 inches - almost as big as a.22 round. I think my doctor may have used a 7 gauge (.18) when I had a pneumothorax. A 22 to the chest can bounce right off the rib and need nothing more than a bandage.
On the other hand, if it hits the forehead perpendicular to the skull, so it doesn't glance off sideways, it can certainly kill. A.22 is kinda like a hammer - getting hit with a hammer normally only hurts for a couple minutes, but certainly people have been killed by a hammer attack.
Then again, my friend put a shotgun in his mouth and lived, so you never know.
> I have no intention of building anything of the sort, though. I still haven't even got around to putting a camera gimbal on my dead cat.
Lol
> even.22LR is dangerous with some hot loads and good aim.
Dangerous, certainly. And most people shot with a 9mm or.40 don't die. Those are many times more powerful than a.22LR. I think for a mission like this you'd want much more than "dangerous".
Bullets can kill animals or people in three ways:
Blood loss Hitting the spinal cord (impossible on purpose) or brain Destroying vital organs
Basically almost nobody is going to bleed out if they get prompt medical attention. Hitting the spinal cord is a one-in-a-million shot. So that leaves either destroying vital organs with big, fast powerful bullets, or going for the brain. You can live okay with one lung or half a kidney or whatever, so to be reliably lethal an attacker would need to really shot someone up - a a couple little holes from.22 would hurt, but presumably the idea is to kill them, not hurt them.
You're not a Comcast customer, are you? "Up to" and "no more than" mean the same thing - not likely to happen too often in reality. (Comcast customers have experience with this.)
> Not every task actually benefits from creativity!
Indeed! At my own company, every week somebody is costing us time and money by trying to come up with a creative way to do something rather than looking up how others have done it successfully for decades.
Most recently, we needed to handle many concurrent TCP connections. We wanted to fire off a request, send other requests on other sockets, then come back later and read the responses, asynchronously. This is instead of sending a request, waiting for the response, then sending another request. Developers creatively brainstormed different ways to do this, coming up with mostly very bad solutions. I pointed out that many concurrent TCP connections has been some many times before, sometimes by people much more knowledgeable than us. The Apache web server has multiple different multi-processing modules to choose from, with many sources describing how each works, and the advantages / disadvantages of each.
Last week they were coming up with creative ways to script getting the IP address of a newly launched AWS instance and adding its IP to the whitelist of another security group. I pointed out we're not the first company to want two AWS instances to be able to talk to each other. Perhaps we should check the documentation. Sure enough, AWS security groups allow you to whitelist access from another security group - no need to get the IP at all. Just click the button once, which then allows all instances in the scaling group to access the protected resource.
I've explained to them that there is a well-defined way to represent many-to-many relationships in SQL databases, known-good ways to represent hierarchy, etc. We don't need to creatively invent any of this.
A man cannot carry 1,000 pounds at 25 MPH. In fact, a man can't even take a single step while holding 1,000 pounds.
As discussed above, adding weight to a quad very quickly degrades performance, to the point that to deliver a 1Kg load a potato gun is more effective than a drone.
Next time you link to something to make your point, you might want to read / watch it first. Then you can learn something and avoid looking silly.
The first response in that thread is a video, which I'll discuss in a moment. The second response says:
-- In real word, life or death self defense shootings it is not uncommon for shooters to miss man size targets up to 70% of the time within a few yards distance. --
The next response: -- For a new shooter 7-10 meters. For an average shooter no more than 25 meters. --
The question there is the effective range - the range at which shooting an attacker is likely to stop the attack. Killing them is quite a different matter.
Now let's consider the video in the first reply, which included a Keltec Sub 2000 rifle. That's a rifle I'm quite familiar with, as friends of mine posting on the Keltec site I owned tested it extensively into ballistics gel. Let's just consider the video that you yourself linked to as one of the answers, though. Of the 12 shots fired, from the rifle, shot #8 finally hit part of the target. Two shots hit in the shoulder area or just over the shoulder, so if the target were a man those would have either missed or hurt, but certainly wouldn't have been lethal. One of 12 shots was within the torso, so it might have been lethal, maybe.
> C4 explosive-- > 1) Does not require a heavy pressure vessel to activate
If you figure out WHY high explosives don't need a pressure vessel, you'll be well on your way to understanding the difference between combustion and detonation.
Then you'll be ready to think about what would happen if, instead of a gun having *propellant* powder which combusts to produce gases which propel the bullet, you put C4 in a handgun and had it *detonate*.
Like I said, sure you CAN attach a small pipe bomb to a drone. Basically a hand grenade. Or just throw the same pipe bomb with your hand.
Compare the video you posted (trusting ISIS to present accurate truth, btw) to the Boston Marathon bombing, which used a pressure cooker, a cooking pan from the 1600s. I think you'll find that the 500 year old technology of a metal pot is more effective than a $700 drone. An attacker can also get about 10 or 20 cooking pots for the same price they'd pay for each drone.
Yep, something generally along the lines of that 400 gram grenade is about the sweet spot. (Which is why I said "grenade" in my original post. You could try a shaped charge (and good aim) but at this scale I'm not sure how much difference that makes - you get better yield in one direction, but need to aim, which means adding a gimble for aiming and gust of breeze can wreck your day.
400g plus facial recognition computer is enough to hamper the flight performance of the drone, especially in a breeze, so range is limited, but it could be used. As you said, the drone needs to be within a few meters of the target, and recognize the right time to off, so that's a limitation. The secret service probably isn't going to let a drone within a couple meters of the president, but an attempt to kill a businessman with a drone and grenade might be successful. Of course, you could also just toss the grenade at the same businessman, or tie it to his car door so it goes off when he opens the door.
>An object "Detonates" when the burn rate exceeds the speed of sound
Detonation is a pressure reaction, it is not burning (which is a heat-based reaction). Not even burning "really fast".
The same compound may be able to both burn (combust) and detonate. Burning is always at a rate less than the speed of sound, so if you measure the reaction to be happening faster than the speed of sound, it must be detonating rather than burning (or detonating in addition to detonating - the products of RDX combust in the air after the RDX itself detonates).
FYI you happen to be talking to a guy who makes explosives regularly. I've made high explosives. So please get the basic terminology down before you try to call me stupid. When you don't even grasp the basic concepts, like the difference between detonation and combustion, you make yourself look stupid arguing with those of us who do, and have decades of experience.
Putting aside the fact that no specific number can compare the two since they work in fundamentally different ways, a C4 explosion is intuitively "more dangerous" than a flash powder or black powder explosion. I've made high explosives and made a lot of low explosives, so I wanted to some idea of how "strong" they are in comparison. That's kinda like asking how much stronger Jim Beam whiskey is than solar power, but what I came up with was high explosives such as C4 are very roughly twice as dangerous as low explosives such as Flash powder. That's when both are exploding - it doesn't factor in stability, which varies greatly within each class.
>is many times more powerful per gram than the black powder found inside the black cat mentioned by the grandparent
Firecrackers aren't made with black powder. They are made with flash powder. Basically dark aluminum or magnesium and are potassium perchlorate.
> Apples and oranges sir. Your black cat is not even in the same class as the material
You said in the very next sentence after you made a misleading comparison as if they were the same type. Even within the same class, velocity of detonation is not brisance, and not "explosive force". C4 detonates. Black powder and flash powder combust, so yeah apples and oranges, or apples and weekdays. Saying C4 has "20 times the explosive force" of black powder (or flash powder) is non-sensical - that statement needs work to even achieve the status of "wrong". You may as well have said "steel is 20 times as happy as Tuesday".
> How is that likely? Because you said so? Is there really any evidence that people have any reason to flock to niche-oriented social networks?
Have you ever heard of a company called Facebook? How about Slashdot? The Slashdot effect, or "getting Slashdotted". Do you know why we don't read the articles before commenting? When Facebook had less than 1% the number of users as Myspace, they had nearly 100% of Harvard students. When they had half as many as Myspace, they had 85% of university students. That's how Facebook took on, and beat, the #1 social networking site - by getting a very specific niche, Harvard students, then growing that to university students, then twenty-somethings.
When I started participating on Slashdot (daily), most of the time you couldn't read the linked article because the site would be down from the swarm of other Slashdot users trying to read it at the same time. So many people would "flock to niche-oriented" sites to have conversations that the news-for-nerds niche site (Slashdot) had more users than most sites could handle. When a site was taken down by the sheer number of nerds of Slashdot, that was called "getting Slashdotted".
Btw your story / argument had a couple of conflicting points. You said:
"200 grams of TNT... carry a suitcase to a location, open it and release a swarm of small drones"
To fly around with 200 grams of TNT and deliver it effectively, you're going to need a drone at least the size of a typical hobby drones like the DJI Phantom. That's 20"*20"*8". A "large" suitcase (airline standards) is 30"*19", so that'll hold a "swarm" of exactly one drone. Let's give your attacker an extra large suitcase so he can have a "swarm" of two.
> I have seen what 200 grams of TNT will do to a human body
Ah so you saw the video that purports to represent what could happen if you were holding it in your hand when it went off? The one made with a glove full of hamburger meat (pre-ground)? Yeah it's not recommend to hold it in your hand. Put it a few feet away, perhaps on a flying drone, and see how much difference that makes. I'm no saying it would be totally safe, but it's also not a particularly effective weapon.
> Yes, there are more low tech ways to deliver payloads, but that is not the point.
Yes, there are low tech ways that are cheaper, easier, and more effective. So I hope any bad guys are dumb enough to try to use a drone, thereby rendering their attack less effective.
> Someone could carry a suitcase to a location, open it and release a swarm of small drones and then walk away
Yes, they could have, in a suitcase, four small drones, each carrying a charge enough to be dangerous, but probably not deadly (maybe 100 grams). OR they could have the suit case be full of explosives, tens of thousands of grams of explosives, and skip wasting most of the space with RC toys. A suitcase full of explosives would be a hell of a lot more effective than drones carrying enough explosive to ruin your hand IF the target cooperates by holding onto the weapon while it goes off.
> So I am all for a treaty to ban the use
I don't necessarily disagree, but the "so" part confuses me. Are you suggesting your hypothetical terrorist os going to follow treaties? He IS too dumb to fill the suitcase with explosives, so I guess maybe he'll read up on the Geneva conventions and make sure his terrorism would otherwise be legal, except for the fact that it's terrorism.
We toss bullets, actually complete cartridges in the campfire. They make a fun popping noise when they cook off. A bullet is a ball of lead. A cartridge is a bullet combined with gunpowder, a casing, and a primer, for loading into a gun. A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds. (Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet, and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.)
The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's body and fires at the proper instant. That part is called the marksman. It weighs about 180 pounds.
Above I talked about hobby-sized drones like DJI makes, on the $500-$1000 range. I didn't address the "palm sized" concept in the ridiculous video because palm sized toys have don't have the payload capacity to even cause pain. Those might able to barely carry a "black cat" style fire cracker, the tiny ones that come in a roll of 500 crackers. Those don't hurt much when they go off in your fingers, much less cause any permanent injury (guess how I learned that).
So let's scale up to something that can do some damage. There is a drone that can carry 18,000 pounds of bombs. It's 63 feet long, weighs 40,000 pounds, and costs several million dollars. It was built around 1990 from retired planes. Defense against it is similar to defense against any military plane.
>> Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets.
>> If you can attach a camera to a drone, you can attach a bomb
The cameras used to hobby drones typically weigh 20-100grams. In the US, Fourth of July fireworks sold to the public can weigh 1,000 grams (with 500 grams of explosive inside). So the camera could be replaced with a small firework, which would make the target curious about that popping noise.
1,000 Kg is a decent bomb (1 million grams, or 10,000 times as much as a drone camera).
$500-$1000 quads CAN carry a bit more weight, but at a major reduction in flight time and range, as well as speed and the ability to fly in a stiff breeze. Unladen, a DJI Phantom 3 Professional ($700) can fly for about 23 minutes. Add a 1Kg payload and flight time is less than half that much. At 6MPH it could cover about 1 mile, if there is no breeze at all. With a 5MPH breeze against it, and carrying a 1Kg load would cover a several hundred feet before the battery died.
You're probably better off just throwing the pipe bomb with your hand. Much simpler. If you must go "fancy", a potato gun (plumbing pipe and hairspray) will go just about as far with a 1Kg grenade.
> So, I am still at a loss why Eben Moglen, law teacher at Columbia, would bring this proceeding.
Yeah it seems silly. I don't know why he's doing this, but I do know that there has been bad blood between he and SFC for a couple years now. I also know that people, including really smart people, do really stupid things behind emotion. He may be thinking "I created the Conservancy, heck I came up with the name, and now you guys are doing things I hate. I made the organization, you should do things my way, the way I created the organization to do them!". That would be understandable, but he/they created both SDLC and SFC as separate legal entities from any of the people. Just because Eben created the program doesn't mean they need to do things his way, and this may be his attempt to "take his ball and go home", where the phrase "Software Freedom" is the ball.
It's also entirely possible that Even and/or cooler heads at SFLC don't expect to actually win. This may be either a bargaining chip or simply a strike at SFC. It's certainly a pain in the ass for SFC to deal with, even if they win in the end.
> Not all infringements ever meet that standard and thus must be enforced early.
The first half is delay, so that applies to all cases under discussion. The second part is, to use your words " a valuable business" - so only in cases that matter.
In this particular instance, there are at least three clear grounds on which FSC should win, all related to the same concept - Eben Moglen, Executive Director of SFLC, is the one complaining, but he himself was on the board of SFC when it launched, when it was created with that name in 2006. Eleven years later, it's a bit late for him to decide his own actions were illegally harming his SFLC and sue his own creation over the name he and his friends selected for it. Laches, estoppel, etc.
Separately, trademarks are not allowed to be "merely descriptive". You can trademark "Mustang" and "Cobra" for cars because those words have nothing to do with cars. You can't trademark "Fast" as a car name because it describes the car. "Software Freedom Law Center" sounds pretty descriptive to me, it describes in plain ordinary English exactly what the organization does. SFLC may be foolish to start talking about the validity of trademarks. On the other hand:
conservancy (Merriam Webster) 1 British:a board regulating fisheries and navigation in a river or port 2:an organization or area designated to conserve and protect natural resources
Since SFC neither regulates boats nor protects natural resources, their name may not be merely descriptive, and therefore a stronger trademark than software freedom law center.
A significant fraction of available quadcopters use PX4 or it's relatives, DroneCode and Ardupilot. You can buy one ready to fly, or you can do as many PX4 users do and select your own motors, frame, radio, and controller to make exactly the quad you want.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad the bad guys do this. Most rootkits reuse some very old code that has a subtle effect which I can recognize immediately after I log into a system. I'll login for whatever reason, maybe to see why Apache isn't responding or whatever, and within a couple seconds I can announce "you have a root kit", without even doing anything to explicitly look for one. I hope rootkits keep using that old code forever. It makes them so easy to spot, without even looking for them, if you know what the signal is.
The context of the statement is that somebody submitted changes to the kernel and he denied the request.
Somebody wanted to add "security" code that would kill of a process, or even the whole kernel, if it detected something that might be a security concern. So with the proposed change, programs would crash without warning if this new code detected a possible security problem. Most of what it detects aren't attacks, though, they are just bugs in the software that need to be tweaked to explicitly follow security rules. The new security code should first warn about these bugs rather than crashing the system, Linus said. Quoting him:
So the hardening efforts should instead _start_ from the standpoint of
"let's warn about what looks dangerous, and maybe in a _year_ when
we've warned for a long time, and we are confident that we've actually
caught all the normal cases, _then_ we can start taking more drastic
measures".
I believe Redhat 5 (from 2007) had EFI support, and a quick Google search suggests people booted RHEL4 from EFI, but I don't know if that involved any hacks.
That totally depends on shot placement. My brother was shot point blank with a 22 and didn't even go to the doctor. Four or five 22 shots can be acupuncture. Seriously a 7 gauge hypodermic needle is commonly used by doctors and that's .18 inches - almost as big as a .22 round. I think my doctor may have used a 7 gauge (.18) when I had a pneumothorax. A 22 to the chest can bounce right off the rib and need nothing more than a bandage.
On the other hand, if it hits the forehead perpendicular to the skull, so it doesn't glance off sideways, it can certainly kill. A .22 is kinda like a hammer - getting hit with a hammer normally only hurts for a couple minutes, but certainly people have been killed by a hammer attack.
Then again, my friend put a shotgun in his mouth and lived, so you never know.
> I have no intention of building anything of the sort, though. I still haven't even got around to putting a camera gimbal on my dead cat.
Lol
> even .22LR is dangerous with some hot loads and good aim.
Dangerous, certainly. And most people shot with a 9mm or .40 don't die. Those are many times more powerful than a .22LR. I think for a mission like this you'd want much more than "dangerous".
Bullets can kill animals or people in three ways:
Blood loss
Hitting the spinal cord (impossible on purpose) or brain
Destroying vital organs
Basically almost nobody is going to bleed out if they get prompt medical attention. Hitting the spinal cord is a one-in-a-million shot. So that leaves either destroying vital organs with big, fast powerful bullets, or going for the brain. You can live okay with one lung or half a kidney or whatever, so to be reliably lethal an attacker would need to really shot someone up - a a couple little holes from .22 would hurt, but presumably the idea is to kill them, not hurt them.
You're not a Comcast customer, are you? "Up to" and "no more than" mean the same thing - not likely to happen too often in reality. (Comcast customers have experience with this.)
> Not every task actually benefits from creativity!
Indeed! At my own company, every week somebody is costing us time and money by trying to come up with a creative way to do something rather than looking up how others have done it successfully for decades.
Most recently, we needed to handle many concurrent TCP connections. We wanted to fire off a request, send other requests on other sockets, then come back later and read the responses, asynchronously. This is instead of sending a request, waiting for the response, then sending another request. Developers creatively brainstormed different ways to do this, coming up with mostly very bad solutions. I pointed out that many concurrent TCP connections has been some many times before, sometimes by people much more knowledgeable than us. The Apache web server has multiple different multi-processing modules to choose from, with many sources describing how each works, and the advantages / disadvantages of each.
Last week they were coming up with creative ways to script getting the IP address of a newly launched AWS instance and adding its IP to the whitelist of another security group. I pointed out we're not the first company to want two AWS instances to be able to talk to each other. Perhaps we should check the documentation. Sure enough, AWS security groups allow you to whitelist access from another security group - no need to get the IP at all. Just click the button once, which then allows all instances in the scaling group to access the protected resource.
I've explained to them that there is a well-defined way to represent many-to-many relationships in SQL databases, known-good ways to represent hierarchy, etc. We don't need to creatively invent any of this.
A man can lift.1,000 pounds:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SBFTB7X...
A man can run at 25 MPH:
https://3c1703fe8d.site.intern...
A man cannot carry 1,000 pounds at 25 MPH. In fact, a man can't even take a single step while holding 1,000 pounds.
As discussed above, adding weight to a quad very quickly degrades performance, to the point that to deliver a 1Kg load a potato gun is more effective than a drone.
Next time you link to something to make your point, you might want to read / watch it first. Then you can learn something and avoid looking silly.
The first response in that thread is a video, which I'll discuss in a moment. The second response says:
--
In real word, life or death self defense shootings it is not uncommon for shooters to miss man size targets up to 70% of the time within a few yards distance.
--
The next response:
--
For a new shooter 7-10 meters.
For an average shooter no more than 25 meters.
--
The question there is the effective range - the range at which shooting an attacker is likely to stop the attack. Killing them is quite a different matter.
Now let's consider the video in the first reply, which included a Keltec Sub 2000 rifle. That's a rifle I'm quite familiar with, as friends of mine posting on the Keltec site I owned tested it extensively into ballistics gel. Let's just consider the video that you yourself linked to as one of the answers, though. Of the 12 shots fired, from the rifle, shot #8 finally hit part of the target. Two shots hit in the shoulder area or just over the shoulder, so if the target were a man those would have either missed or hurt, but certainly wouldn't have been lethal. One of 12 shots was within the torso, so it might have been lethal, maybe.
Perhaps it would. I certainly wouldn't want to press one against my forehead.
The summary referred to the tiny drones as carrying "bombs" and that's what I took issue with. That's kinda like calling a .380 pistol round a bomb.
> C4 explosive--
> 1) Does not require a heavy pressure vessel to activate
If you figure out WHY high explosives don't need a pressure vessel, you'll be well on your way to understanding the difference between combustion and detonation.
Then you'll be ready to think about what would happen if, instead of a gun having *propellant* powder which combusts to produce gases which propel the bullet, you put C4 in a handgun and had it *detonate*.
Like I said, sure you CAN attach a small pipe bomb to a drone. Basically a hand grenade. Or just throw the same pipe bomb with your hand.
Compare the video you posted (trusting ISIS to present accurate truth, btw) to the Boston Marathon bombing, which used a pressure cooker, a cooking pan from the 1600s. I think you'll find that the 500 year old technology of a metal pot is more effective than a $700 drone. An attacker can also get about 10 or 20 cooking pots for the same price they'd pay for each drone.
Yep, something generally along the lines of that 400 gram grenade is about the sweet spot. (Which is why I said "grenade" in my original post. You could try a shaped charge (and good aim) but at this scale I'm not sure how much difference that makes - you get better yield in one direction, but need to aim, which means adding a gimble for aiming and gust of breeze can wreck your day.
400g plus facial recognition computer is enough to hamper the flight performance of the drone, especially in a breeze, so range is limited, but it could be used. As you said, the drone needs to be within a few meters of the target, and recognize the right time to off, so that's a limitation. The secret service probably isn't going to let a drone within a couple meters of the president, but an attempt to kill a businessman with a drone and grenade might be successful. Of course, you could also just toss the grenade at the same businessman, or tie it to his car door so it goes off when he opens the door.
>An object "Detonates" when the burn rate exceeds the speed of sound
Detonation is a pressure reaction, it is not burning (which is a heat-based reaction). Not even burning "really fast".
The same compound may be able to both burn (combust) and detonate. Burning is always at a rate less than the speed of sound, so if you measure the reaction to be happening faster than the speed of sound, it must be detonating rather than burning (or detonating in addition to detonating - the products of RDX combust in the air after the RDX itself detonates).
FYI you happen to be talking to a guy who makes explosives regularly. I've made high explosives. So please get the basic terminology down before you try to call me stupid. When you don't even grasp the basic concepts, like the difference between detonation and combustion, you make yourself look stupid arguing with those of us who do, and have decades of experience.
Yeah I started to follow up my post by saying;
Putting aside the fact that no specific number can compare the two since they work in fundamentally different ways, a C4 explosion is intuitively "more dangerous" than a flash powder or black powder explosion. I've made high explosives and made a lot of low explosives, so I wanted to some idea of how "strong" they are in comparison. That's kinda like asking how much stronger Jim Beam whiskey is than solar power, but what I came up with was high explosives such as C4 are very roughly twice as dangerous as low explosives such as Flash powder. That's when both are exploding - it doesn't factor in stability, which varies greatly within each class.
>is many times more powerful per gram than the black powder found inside the black cat mentioned by the grandparent
Firecrackers aren't made with black powder. They are made with flash powder. Basically dark aluminum or magnesium and are potassium perchlorate.
> Apples and oranges sir. Your black cat is not even in the same class as the material
You said in the very next sentence after you made a misleading comparison as if they were the same type. Even within the same class, velocity of detonation is not brisance, and not "explosive force". C4 detonates. Black powder and flash powder combust, so yeah apples and oranges, or apples and weekdays. Saying C4 has "20 times the explosive force" of black powder (or flash powder) is non-sensical - that statement needs work to even achieve the status of "wrong". You may as well have said "steel is 20 times as happy as Tuesday".
Yeah Myspace had 80 million users alright - when Facebook had about half as much. Myspace had 50-60 million when Facebook had ZERO.
These figures show Myspace at 110 million, Facebook at 60 million:
http://www.web-strategist.com/...
> How is that likely? Because you said so? Is there really any evidence that people have any reason to flock to niche-oriented social networks?
Have you ever heard of a company called Facebook? How about Slashdot? The Slashdot effect, or "getting Slashdotted". Do you know why we don't read the articles before commenting? When Facebook had less than 1% the number of users as Myspace, they had nearly 100% of Harvard students. When they had half as many as Myspace, they had 85% of university students. That's how Facebook took on, and beat, the #1 social networking site - by getting a very specific niche, Harvard students, then growing that to university students, then twenty-somethings.
When I started participating on Slashdot (daily), most of the time you couldn't read the linked article because the site would be down from the swarm of other Slashdot users trying to read it at the same time. So many people would "flock to niche-oriented" sites to have conversations that the news-for-nerds niche site (Slashdot) had more users than most sites could handle. When a site was taken down by the sheer number of nerds of Slashdot, that was called "getting Slashdotted".
Btw your story / argument had a couple of conflicting points. You said:
"200 grams of TNT ... carry a suitcase to a location, open it and release a swarm of small drones"
To fly around with 200 grams of TNT and deliver it effectively, you're going to need a drone at least the size of a typical hobby drones like the DJI Phantom. That's 20"*20"*8". A "large" suitcase (airline standards) is 30"*19", so that'll hold a "swarm" of exactly one drone. Let's give your attacker an extra large suitcase so he can have a "swarm" of two.
> Do you have any experience with explosives?
Yes, I do.
> I have seen what 200 grams of TNT will do to a human body
Ah so you saw the video that purports to represent what could happen if you were holding it in your hand when it went off? The one made with a glove full of hamburger meat (pre-ground)? Yeah it's not recommend to hold it in your hand. Put it a few feet away, perhaps on a flying drone, and see how much difference that makes. I'm no saying it would be totally safe, but it's also not a particularly effective weapon.
> Yes, there are more low tech ways to deliver payloads, but that is not the point.
Yes, there are low tech ways that are cheaper, easier, and more effective. So I hope any bad guys are dumb enough to try to use a drone, thereby rendering their attack less effective.
> Someone could carry a suitcase to a location, open it and release a swarm of small drones and then walk away
Yes, they could have, in a suitcase, four small drones, each carrying a charge enough to be dangerous, but probably not deadly (maybe 100 grams). OR they could have the suit case be full of explosives, tens of thousands of grams of explosives, and skip wasting most of the space with RC toys. A suitcase full of explosives would be a hell of a lot more effective than drones carrying enough explosive to ruin your hand IF the target cooperates by holding onto the weapon while it goes off.
> So I am all for a treaty to ban the use
I don't necessarily disagree, but the "so" part confuses me. Are you suggesting your hypothetical terrorist os going to follow treaties? He IS too dumb to fill the suitcase with explosives, so I guess maybe he'll read up on the Geneva conventions and make sure his terrorism would otherwise be legal, except for the fact that it's terrorism.
We toss bullets, actually complete cartridges in the campfire. They make a fun popping noise when they cook off. A bullet is a ball of lead. A cartridge is a bullet combined with gunpowder, a casing, and a primer, for loading into a gun. A gun makes a bullet go fast, and weighs about ten pounds. (Handguns are only effective out to about 20 feet, and even then two or three shots probably won't kill the bad guy.)
The important bit of the system is the part which aims the gun at a vital part of the target's body and fires at the proper instant. That part is called the marksman. It weighs about 180 pounds.
Above I talked about hobby-sized drones like DJI makes, on the $500-$1000 range. I didn't address the "palm sized" concept in the ridiculous video because palm sized toys have don't have the payload capacity to even cause pain. Those might able to barely carry a "black cat" style fire cracker, the tiny ones that come in a roll of 500 crackers. Those don't hurt much when they go off in your fingers, much less cause any permanent injury (guess how I learned that).
So let's scale up to something that can do some damage. There is a drone that can carry 18,000 pounds of bombs. It's 63 feet long, weighs 40,000 pounds, and costs several million dollars. It was built around 1990 from retired planes. Defense against it is similar to defense against any military plane.
>> Armed with explosive charges, the palm-sized quadcopters use real-time data mining and artificial intelligence to find and kill their targets.
>> If you can attach a camera to a drone, you can attach a bomb
The cameras used to hobby drones typically weigh 20-100grams. In the US, Fourth of July fireworks sold to the public can weigh 1,000 grams (with 500 grams of explosive inside). So the camera could be replaced with a small firework, which would make the target curious about that popping noise.
1,000 Kg is a decent bomb (1 million grams, or 10,000 times as much as a drone camera).
$500-$1000 quads CAN carry a bit more weight, but at a major reduction in flight time and range, as well as speed and the ability to fly in a stiff breeze. Unladen, a DJI Phantom 3 Professional ($700) can fly for about 23 minutes. Add a 1Kg payload and flight time is less than half that much. At 6MPH it could cover about 1 mile, if there is no breeze at all. With a 5MPH breeze against it, and carrying a 1Kg load would cover a several hundred feet before the battery died.
You're probably better off just throwing the pipe bomb with your hand. Much simpler. If you must go "fancy", a potato gun (plumbing pipe and hairspray) will go just about as far with a 1Kg grenade.
> So, I am still at a loss why Eben Moglen, law teacher at Columbia, would bring this proceeding.
Yeah it seems silly. I don't know why he's doing this, but I do know that there has been bad blood between he and SFC for a couple years now. I also know that people, including really smart people, do really stupid things behind emotion. He may be thinking "I created the Conservancy, heck I came up with the name, and now you guys are doing things I hate. I made the organization, you should do things my way, the way I created the organization to do them!". That would be understandable, but he/they created both SDLC and SFC as separate legal entities from any of the people. Just because Eben created the program doesn't mean they need to do things his way, and this may be his attempt to "take his ball and go home", where the phrase "Software Freedom" is the ball.
It's also entirely possible that Even and/or cooler heads at SFLC don't expect to actually win. This may be either a bargaining chip or simply a strike at SFC. It's certainly a pain in the ass for SFC to deal with, even if they win in the end.
> Not all infringements ever meet that standard and thus must be enforced early.
The first half is delay, so that applies to all cases under discussion. The second part is, to use your words " a valuable business" - so only in cases that matter.
In this particular instance, there are at least three clear grounds on which FSC should win, all related to the same concept - Eben Moglen, Executive Director of SFLC, is the one complaining, but he himself was on the board of SFC when it launched, when it was created with that name in 2006. Eleven years later, it's a bit late for him to decide his own actions were illegally harming his SFLC and sue his own creation over the name he and his friends selected for it. Laches, estoppel, etc.
Separately, trademarks are not allowed to be "merely descriptive". You can trademark "Mustang" and "Cobra" for cars because those words have nothing to do with cars. You can't trademark "Fast" as a car name because it describes the car. "Software Freedom Law Center" sounds pretty descriptive to me, it describes in plain ordinary English exactly what the organization does. SFLC may be foolish to start talking about the validity of trademarks. On the other hand:
conservancy (Merriam Webster) :a board regulating fisheries and navigation in a river or port :an organization or area designated to conserve and protect natural resources
1 British
2
Since SFC neither regulates boats nor protects natural resources, their name may not be merely descriptive, and therefore a stronger trademark than software freedom law center.
A significant fraction of available quadcopters use PX4 or it's relatives, DroneCode and Ardupilot. You can buy one ready to fly, or you can do as many PX4 users do and select your own motors, frame, radio, and controller to make exactly the quad you want.