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User: raymorris

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  1. keyboard breaks = computer trashed, ANY compromise on Hacking USB Firmware · · Score: 2

    An obvious problem with requiring the old hid to validate the new one is that a broken keyboard can't be replaced . Many times, there is no mouse (servers, ada, atm, etc) or the keyboard and mouse are one usb plug (wireless keyboard and mouse) . So you have one hid device and when it breaks you have no known hid device.

    > as long as at least one isn't compromised

    A compromised hid can trivially infect the computer. Wait until 3AM when nobody is looking, then echo the keyboard shortcut to open IE and download badusb.exe. Badusb.exe then infects any new USB devices connected. Therefore, this is the opposite of diverse double- if ANY are infected, they'll all get infected.

  2. portability and HID on Hacking USB Firmware · · Score: 1

    Scsi and sata devices aren't typically carried around being connected to different computers, so there's a much lower risk of them spreading an infection. The other interconnects also aren't used for keyboards, so any action by the device can be confirmed or denied by the user, if they have the ability to take those actions at all. For example , there's no sata command an esata drive can issue for "erase the boot drive" or "log the user's keystrokes ". Since a USB device can represent itself as the keyboard, it effectively IS thw user, as far as the rest of the system is concerned. Pop-up a confirmation dialog? The usb "keyboard" can press enter to confirm it's own actions.

  3. only if baby is having sex on Could Maroney Be Prosecuted For Her Own Hacked Pictures? · · Score: 1

    Only if the baby is engaged in "sexual conduct", to include the lewd exhibition of breasts. Lewd meaning it's intended to cause shock or arousal, etc. I copy-pasted only the very first part of the law, the definitions, btw. The rest of the covers what's actually illegal and what the defenses are.

  4. 2008 Mac Pro (cheese grater), 2X quad 2.8 Ghz 16GB on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 2

    It's a 2008 Mac Pro. My employer offered to replace it with a new machine a few months ago, in fact they almost insisted on an "upgrade".
    This 2008 model has two quad core Xeons running at 2.8 Ghz and 16 GB of RAM, and the latest OS (10.9.4), so there's not really much to upgrade. Since they needed to use the money as budgeted, for new computers, I accepted a laptop, a MacBook Pro Retina with 2.7 Ghz Core i7 and 16 GB RAM - the same amount of memory as the 2008 model, but plenty.

  5. Justice Stewart harcore porn re obsecenity, 1964 on Could Maroney Be Prosecuted For Her Own Hacked Pictures? · · Score: 4, Informative

    > I believe it was Ed Meese during the Reagan administration who, when asked how he would define port, answered to the effect of "I can't give you a definition, but I know it when I see it."

    That would be Justice Potter Stewart, in 1964:

              "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced
                  within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so.
                  But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

    In an obscenity case, his opinion was that the first amendment disallowed the state from regulating anything but "hard-core pornography". He said that the movie in question was not hardcore porn, so he did not NEED to define exactly what would be "hard-core pornography". Later cases dd need to try to narrow down the definition, so they did a little bit. The main case, Miller, included an element of "contemporary community standards" in the definition. The government can only ban/restrict stuff that violates community standards at the time, which means Salt Lake can ban stuff that Los Angeles can't - because of the different communities.

  6. It's porn.com. Obscenity vs state child porn on Could Maroney Be Prosecuted For Her Own Hacked Pictures? · · Score: 2

    Mysidia seems to be thinking along the lines of supreme court decisions regarding obscenity. Obscenity is difficult to define and the definition depends on intent - naked pics intended to get the viewer horny vs naked pics in a medical textbook intended to educate. Maroney's lawyers had them removed from a site called porn.com. Porn.com is aptly named - it's a porn site. Naked pictures of an attractive young woman on porn.com are probably there to be used as porn. It's porn.com, after all.

    When children are involved, you don't need definitions that are quite as nuanced because you don't have quite the same first amendment issues. There's nto really any valid reason to film kids doing anything sexual, so the law can be more clear-cut. Here's a sample definition from one state:

    Sec. 43.25. SEXUAL PERFORMANCE BY A CHILD. (a) In this section:
    (1) "Sexual performance" means any performance or part thereof that includes sexual conduct by a child younger than 18 years of age.
    (2) "Sexual conduct" means sexual contact, actual or simulated sexual intercourse, deviate sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality, masturbation, sado-masochistic abuse, or lewd exhibition of the genitals, the anus, or any portion of the female breast below the top of the areola.
    (3) "Performance" means any play, motion picture, photograph, dance, or other visual representation that can be exhibited before an audience of one or more persons.

  7. tell my 2008 Mac . latest for $35 on Lost Opportunity? Windows 10 Has the Same Minimum PC Requirements As Vista · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Somebody forgot to tell my Mac that, because more than six years after purchase it's still running the latest OS. I just ran an update this morning, in fact. I think we spent $35 on an upgrade once.

  8. yum update. Remember the huge DNS DOS? on Xen Cloud Fix Shows the Right Way To Patch Open-Source Flaws · · Score: 1

    > how does it improve the situation of the smaller companies

    By the time the issue becomes public, Red Hat will already have a good update ready for you, so you can just "yum update xen" and you're good to go.

    Contrast this with shellshocker, where after the issue was in the media, Red Hat started trying to figure out how to handle it, and over the next several days they put multiple patches trying to address it in different ways, while upstream bash went in a completely different direction. The bash team is still trying to decide exactly how the underlying issues should be handled on a permanent basis, and we'll all be vulnerable for at least a few more days while they figure that out.

    Do you remember about two years ago when there was that vulnerability that allowed bad actors is _easily_ take down DNS servers? Sending one wrong packet to the wikipedia DNS servers would take down wikipedia. You probably don't remember that, because it didn't get any press. The reason why is that after I discovered it, I contacted the project maintainers and over the next 24 hours a fix was developed. The following day, the fix was applied to high profile targets like Wikipedia. On the third day, packagers including Red Hat and FreeBSD got update packages ready and sent them out for anyone who auto-updates, along with a notice on the mailing list of users. Only after the patched binary was available through standard packages were the details of the attack public. Therefore, few people were affected it t wasn't news.

  9. So robberies more likely to be reported than murde on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > Not him, but my guess would be "more people started to become SURVIVING victims as opposed to DEAD victims"

    The MURDER rate increased by 50%. By definition, the victim of a murder is dead. Any suggestion that the murder rate suddenly changed because people weren't reporting the murders before is silly.

    Does the death of Princess Diana explain the exact same course of events in Australia, in US states tat experienced the same thing at various, etc? Twenty years ago, it would have made sense to argue about this. Everyone had their own predictions about what might happen. Today, many jurisdictions have banned guns, and they all see the same same - an immediate and dramatic increase in violent crime. It's like arguing over whether man will ever set foot on the moon. That would have been a reasonable argument to have in 1940, but we've done it. Repeatedly. We can simply look back and _see_ what the results have consistently been.

  10. Amazing people started reporting the SAME DAY guns on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > You've also glibly disregarded the changes in rate and nature of rape crime reporting - by rate mean the percentage of incidents that get reported.
    > So sorry if your abuse of statistics shows you to be a bigoted twat with an agenda but that's what happened.

    What do you think caused people to start reporting rapes, murders, and other violent crime at precisely the moment when guns were banned?
    The crime rate was relatively steady for several years.
    Guns were banned.
    Crime rates immediately jumped.

    Everyone just decided to start reporting murders that year, whereas previously they just ignored murders and didn't call police?

  11. Re:Earthquakes arent the issue - on Bangladesh Considers Building World's 5th-largest Data Center In Earthquake Zone · · Score: 2

    Lack of adherence to codes? Whatever do you mean?

    https://peters365photos.files....

  12. gosolar, California public utilities commision on Energy Utilities Trying To Stifle Growth of Solar Power · · Score: 1

    > If you were correct that every kilowatt-hour sold by a solar facility has to be "thrown away," or discharged into the ground, then you would also be correct that that's not a sustainable business model

    Very good, let's start from the point where we agree. I think you'd also agree that if they are forced to give something that has a cost of production (evening energy) in exchange for any significant amount of worthless trash, that's not sustainable. In other words, it doesn't matter if it's ALL of the solar energy being thrown away, or some significant percentage. Any energy in excess of what's being sold is worthless, and being forced to pay for something that is worthless is stupid. Agreed? Please let me know if we're on the same point up until this point.

    We can also probably agree that at noon, a solar installation can make a significant amount of power, say around 4kW.
    We can also agree that most people aren't using 4kW at home from 11AM-2PM, when they aren't even at home, they're at work.
    So the solar will be capturing significantly more energy than they are using during those hours. Agreed so far? Please let me know.

    In fact, I'd say that at noon, with nobody home, they are probably using less than 1kW, while producing 4kW, so they are producing four times as much as they use. Sound about right?

    So if most people's solar electric systems were capturing more energy than they are using at the time, that means the same is true in aggregate, correct?
    Most people generating more than they use at noon means that the neighborhood is generating more than it uses at noon. That means that in total, solar would be generating more at noon than is being used at noon. Therefore, some of it needs to be thrown away at noon. Since the system generates 4kW while usage is less than 1 kW, that means that if one 25% of houses have solar, we'd being throwing away electricity, agreed? And the utilities would be forced to pay for electricity that they then have to pay to throw away.

    on GoSolarCalifornia.ca.gov, the California Public Utilities Commission says:
          Most smaller electric customers have simple bidirectional meters-capable of spinning backwards to record energy flowing from their system ...
          the customer has to pay only for the net amount of electricity used from the utility over-and-above the amount of electricity generated by their solar system

    That's a very important point. It's net METERING, not net billing. It's based on the net amount of electricity from a meter that spins backwards, NOT the net amount of dollars. If they produce 40 kWh (at noon) and use 40 kWh (at night), they are billed zero. You might want to re-read those two sentences explaining how the California system works, because that's important.

    You said:
    > If they are selling power at, say, a wholesale rate of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, and buying power at a retail rate of $0.12 per kilowatt-hour

    That would make sense, so that's why the utilities are asking for it to be done that way. That's not how it's done in California, though. As quoted from the California regulators, if your solar system produces 1 kW at noon and you use 1 kW at 6:00 PM, you pay zero.

    If we've gotten to this point, we've agreed that if 25% of houses have solar, they will produce more energy than is being used, so some will be thrown away. The value of noon energy will be close to zero, or even negative since it costs money to run the heavier infrastructure to carry more power to a place that it can be safely burned off without running afoul of California's environmental controls. (Huge electrical arcs produce ozone, noise, and all kinds of other things that scare hippies).

    So once 25% of people participate, the noon energy is practically worthless, but per Ca PUC, utilities have to trade it 1 for 1 for evening electricity, and it costs them money to generate and distribute electricity in the evening. Agreed?

    Of course, RIGHT NOW, 25% of houses don't have solar. I've said repeatedly that it's not a significant problem right now, but would become a real problem if most houses were doing net metering.

  13. Also, time-tested. Bugs are not acceptable. on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > Small Arms tech has languished, mainly due to the ATF having a chilling effect on anything firearms related.
    > I don't think a major change in design has happened since the 50s with the use of composites.

    Also, designs such as the 1911, the most popular firearm recently, are time-tested and known to be very reliable and safe.
    In the rare instance where you actually need to fire your weapon, it absolutely, positively must work. Even more, you're
    holding an explosion in your hand. An "you're holding it wrong" bug is annoying with a smart phone, it is absolutely unacceptable
    when it comes to an explosion in your hand.

  14. as opposed on The "Man In the Moon" Was Created By Mega Volcano · · Score: 0

    TFS starts by saying "Whenever you look up at the near side of the moon you see a man"

    As opposed to when you look up at the far side of the moon and see a vagina?

  15. read your link? on Which Cars Get the Most Traffic Tickets? · · Score: 1

    You said "it's not marketed to younger people. " As evidence, you linked to an article that says:

            this project's mission was to attract a younger buyer to each of the brands.
          By selling an attractive, RWD sports car at a reasonable price, they were hoping to capture the holy grail of Generation Y

  16. and penguins aren't horses. Your point? on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > Nitrocellulose is not black powder.

    And penguins aren't horses. Your point is?

    You're just noting that you can choose to use either black powder or nitrocellulose based powder, or other propellants, in a gun?

  17. Rather missed the point. More rape is actually bad on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 2

    You rather missed the point, and no, my numbers are not wrong. My numbers are accurate, yours are pointless and irrelevant (but useful to mislead).

    When these countries removed the ability of law-abiding citizens to to defend themselves by presenting a gun, far more of them were raped and murdered, often by an attacker with a knife, often by an attacker with a gun. After the ban, the number of attackers with guns dropped a little bit (your statistic), while the number of law-abiding citizens with a gun dropped by 100%, meaning a lot more dead citizens (the statistics I presented).

    If you've been raped and murdered, does it benefit you that you were unarmed and the attacker had a knife?
    Prior to the ban, those people didn't get raped and murdered, because they (like the bad guys) could be armed.

    You're advocating for MORE rape and murder, so long as fewer guns are involved.

    If you ban screaming, you'l have fewer screaming murders.
    If you ban calling 911, you'll have fewer murder victims call 911 while being attacked.
    If you ban guns, you'll have fewer guns used to defend against or commit murders.

    Personally, I'd prefer fewer murders. I don't care how many murders involve screaming, calling 911, or any particular weapon. I want fewer murders, and we know, from clear experience, that as soon as guns were banned the number of murders immediately jumped by 50%.

  18. BRZ vs FR-S, same car, different marketing on Which Cars Get the Most Traffic Tickets? · · Score: 1

    > And a wrx is not cheap, also not for younger people.

    The comparison is between the Subaru BRZ and the Scion FR-S. The BRZ and FR-S are essentially the same car, but with two different marketing campaigns by two different companies. The WRX is unrelated.

    > The Scion ... is not marketed to younger people. Maybe it's marketed to older people who like to drive.

    Quotes from Scion's annual report:
        In North America, Toyota targeted young customers by launching sales of Scion-marque cars across the United States.

        We initiated the Scion project to attract Generation Y customers.

        Premiered nationally during fiscal 2005 to target Generation Y, the Scion project is successfully broadening Toyota’s
        appeal, with first-time customers accounting for roughly 80% of Scion-marque sales.

    Loading Scion.com pops up four promotional icons:
    Social media
    Music and Events
    Car Releases
    College Rebate Promotion

    Are older people or younger people more into social media?
    College - is that mostly for older people or younger people?
    Music and events - same

    The FR-S commercial says it's "epic" as two 20-somethings step out of the car to join their 20-something friends.

    The word "Scion" means "child" or "descendant".

  19. Powder is 9th century tech, easy to make on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > About the only thing left would be strict regulation of primers and maybe gunpowder itself.

    Powder is really easy to make. It is, after all, 9th century technology.
    Primers are a little tedious just because they're small.

  20. Homicides up by 50% in the UK on The $1,200 DIY Gunsmithing Machine · · Score: 1

    > Look at European countries. ... thanks to strict regulation they have relatively few gun homicides

    When the UK banned guns, violent crime and homicide skyrocketed. From 1990-1996, the homicide rate was 11-13 per million. Guns were banned in 1997. From 1998 - 2008, the homicide rate was 12-18. Overall, homicides increased by about 50%. Rape is up over 100% - more than doubled.

    The number of guns used in those rapes and murders dropped once it was guaranteed that the ay law-abiding victim would be unarmed, but there have been a lot more murders, a lot more rapes, and a lot more violent crime overall.

    Sorry if that doesn't match what you guessed might happen, but that's what actually did happen. Australia was similar. We know longer need to debate what the effects of banning guns might be. The UK and Australia tried it, and we can see what the results really are - twice as much violent crime.

  21. Who drives $2,500 used sports cars? Teen boys on Which Cars Get the Most Traffic Tickets? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > TFA was bullshit when I saw the Supra on the list ranked at #4 (and the 3000 GT at #17).
    > They stopped making both of those cars well over 10 years ago

    So they are sporty cars that are ten years old and now worth about $2,500. What kind of driver with $2,500 to spend on a car buys something sporty? Teenage boys, maybe?

    Would teenage boys who drive sports cars be more likely to get tickets that a soccer mom in a minivan?

  22. Scion marketed to, trimmed for younger, less cauti on Which Cars Get the Most Traffic Tickets? · · Score: 2

    The Scion is marketed to younger people and trimmed a bit hotter. The Subaru is marketed to older people and has things like heated seats and automatic climate control.

  23. radar, backscatter , sometimes ultrasound on Arducorder, Next Open Source Science Tricorder-like Device, Nears Completion · · Score: 3

    Check out ground penetrating radar. Also, TSA uses backscatter, which works in a similar way - it doesn't REQUIRE anything to be behind the subject, you get a clearer image if you have a plain background (where plain means uniform reflection of the frequency used). Ultrasound works some some applications, but the image is rather blurry unless you have a very expensive unit.

    I don't know if either is available in an inexpensive, low resolution hobbyist version. I'd bet there are some old units, two generations behind, on ebay. Now I'm off to Google for hobbyist radar .

    A tricorder which combines low-quality short- range radar, backscatter, infrared and ultrasound might be very useful - infrared would see pipes in the wall, maybe the combination of radar and ultrasound would show the studs, etc.

  24. beside the point on Energy Utilities Trying To Stifle Growth of Solar Power · · Score: 1

    Yes, some months they may produce more noon power than they use evening some months they may produce a bit less.
    That only affects HOW MUCH magic free power is required for the scheme to scale. If it's perfectly balanced, resulting in a zero bill, ALL electricity must be magical free electricity, because nobody is paying anything.

    On the other hand, if everyone's excess at noon is equal to half of their usage in other parts of the day, they're only getting half of their energy for free, so only half of it needs to be magic. The instant that the total produced at noon exceeds the amount used at noon, you're throwing noon energy away giving them evening energy in exchange for trash energy that's being thrown away. That's already happening sometimes in California. If you're trading something of value that has a production cost in exchange for trash, that's only sustainable through magic.

  25. that's the definition of net metering on Energy Utilities Trying To Stifle Growth of Solar Power · · Score: 1

    > I haven't heard anyone asking to be provided with "free" energy from the grid during hours when the sun's not shining.

    That's what net metering IS - everyone puts X kWh into the grid at noon, when the sun is bright. They then use X kWh in the evening, when they are st home cooking, watching TV etc. Since their net use is zero, their electric bill is zero - free power 20 hours per day. You can see why the utilities are saying that could cause problems.