He's not pricing tickets in BTC, or holding BTC. He's accepting it as a payment METHOD just like Paypal or Visa; it's converted to dollars either shortly after he gets it, or before he even gets it, allowing the payment provider to take the risk of a drop in the hours it takes to convert it.
A couple weeks ago when I bought another car I really tried to justify going electric. I guess I just wanted one because they're different. The reality is, even after significant government subsidies you end with a low-end economy car for the price of a mid-range gas car, after factoring in gas cost.
Maintenance costs are low until you pay $6,000 to replace the battery, which is guaranteed to get worn out. Gas cars have low maintenance for the first 60,000 - 100,000 miles too. Even a cheap Kia comes with a warranty that lasts for five years or 60,000 miles, and a 10-year 100,000-mile powertrain warranty.
Given the battery technology driven by smartphones, ten years from now electric cars might make sense. Right now, no matter how hard I tried to come up with reasons they make sense, they just don't.
I bought some things recently using a similar idea. At a Dallas hospital the vending machines have been replaced by what roughly like standard refrigerated display cases you'd see holding drinks at any convenience store. Chips and such were in a similar-looking case, just not refrigerated.
The customer taps their card or phone to open the case, then takes whatever they want. It detects if you take an item and then put it back. Especially if you wanted more than one item, it was more convenient than a standard vending machine that requires you to choose item A11 by pressing buttons, then wait for wire to turn, hoping the bag of pretzels will drop as intended.
Because there were no visible sensors or other mechanisms, and it was new to me, it was slightly disconcerting the first time, but interesting and convenient.
> We'd be able to intelligently plan and act against large threats, like a plague or a meteor. We can detect disasters - not just imminent ones but long term, plan our colonies around territories with risk.
New Orleans begs to differ.;)
Obviously humans are a very important species at the moment, and probably a "special" species. Also, insects have completely permeated the planet for hundreds of millions of years, so "the rise of the insects" isn't a future event, but a prehistoric one.
This patent relates CPU design, for CPUs used in critical applications involving lots of floating point operations. So by "any company" you mean "AMD and Intel".
> It'll never reach any mass adoption.
Right, neither Intel nor AMD would EVER license any patents for use in their processors (eyeroll).
The issues you raise are exactly why electric and supercar go well together. Even with taxpayers paying half the cost, buying a Nissan Leaf (at half price) doesn't make sense, they are too expensive for what you get. Range, refilling time, etc make electric cars not as practical for everyday use. People don't buy supercars based on price, looking for a good value. Supercars aren't supposed to be practical. Electric is a good fit for supercars.
Maybe in 20 years a lot of things will change and electric will make sense for ordinary daily drivers, but that hasn't happened yet.
Putting out an SUV could be major step toward throwing away the Ferrari brand, the brand image they've carefully built over seventy years.
Or it could be a way to go from selling 8,000 units per year to selling 80,000 or 800,000 while maintaining their brand identity. For the last several years Porsche has been very carefully expanding, continuing to sell cars to the same customers after they have kids, while maintaining their brand and their high gross profit on each vehicle. The Cayenne is an SUV, yet also a Porsche, with over 500HP available. They have a compact SUV, the Macan, with Porsche handling. It *can* be done successfully, but there are so many ways it can go wrong.
Insects eliminate a a much higher percentage of humans than humans do insects. Their "kill ratio" is far higher than any human military. Just from mosquitoes alone, in just one year, there are millions of malaria cases.
> Just wait until the insects get with the program and take over the world.
Number of people: 5,600,000,000 Number of insects: 10,000,000,000,000,000,000
There are roughly 20,000,000,000 times as many insects as people. People have only been on Earth a short time, 300,000 years. Insects have been flying for over a thousand times that - 400 MILLION years. We just figured out flying a hundred years ago. We're a nearly irrelevant blip in their world.
> Apple has been sitting on yuuuuge piles of cash for many years. They could have given bonuses etc. to employees all that time.
They could have, and did - outside the US. Bringing the money into the US and paying bonuses to US employees would have been stupid, though, because the US is the only major country in the world that harshly penalized bringing money in. If Apple brought that money, which they've already paid taxes on, into the US, the US govt would take over a third of it, 35%. It would be stupid for Apple to give $35 billion to the US govt and $65 billion to US employees when they could instead give $100 billion to European employees.
Now that the penalty for bringing money to the US has been greatly reduced, Apple plans to bring in $250 billion, on which they will pay $38 billion additional tax. That will generate roughly another $250 billion in economic activity. (When Apple pays a construction company, the construction company pays construction workers and suppliers, who in turn buy things with the money, so the same money keeps getting spent and taxed over and over until it's all gone to either the government or another country. ) So something like $500 billion added to the economy, and maybe $100 billion of that will get sent to China or wherever buying Chinese goods. $400 billion will be spent and re-spent in the US until it's all absorbed by taxes.
To give you a sense of scale, the federal deficit is a bit over $400 billion. So just this one company, Apple, is bringing in enough money to cover the entire federal deficit for the year. This by using an understanding of basic arithmetic when making policy, rather than operating purely on jealousy.
Obviously, a zero percent income tax rate will result in zero income tax revenue. Just as obviously, a 100% tax rate (the government takes your ENTIRE paycheck) will result in roughly zero tax revenue - most people won't work a job if they don't get to take home a paycheck. Also companies wouldn't have any reason to.pay more than minimum wage - employees don't demand more because they don't get any of it anyway.
So we can see that tax rates too low result in little or no revenue, and we can see that tax rates too high result in little or no revenue. That's obvious even without understanding the basics of economics, without even knowing the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, for example.
If the current tax rate is 80%, that hurts revenue and reducing the tax rate to 70% will increase revenue. If it's at 2%, increasing the rate to 10% will increase revenue. So what we can see, without even reading Chapter 1 of Economics 101 is that anyone who says "increasing tax rates increases revenue" is an idiot, and anyone who says "decreasing tax rates increases revenue" is similarly clueless. There is an optimal rate, not near 100% and not near 0%, that maximizes revenue. Raising rates above the optimal rate hurts revenue, reducing them below the optimal rate reduces revenue.
Also, complex tax laws create "compliance costs". Small businesses file taxes about sixteen times per year - quarterly federal returns, quarterly sales tax returns, quarterly unemployment tax returns, annual business personal property tax returns, etc. There is a real cost to all that, even of the business only owes $1, that's a lot of tax paperwork. (I've filed returns for 12 cents before - the cost / time to fill them out was much greater than 12 cents, so the current situation is a significant net loss for the economy.)
Corporate tax rates follow the same reasoning. If you taxed them at 100%, nobody would invest their savings into starting or growing any companies, since they can't make money. The economy would come to a halt and there would be no revenue (and nearly 100% unemployment). On the other hand, with a 0% corporate tax, you have no revenue from corporate taxes, but higher savings and investment, much better returns from your 401k, lower unemployment, higher wages, etc. So again there is an optimum rate. Too high hurts revenue, and too low hurts revenue. Too high also hurts a lot of other things. Fortunately, corporate taxes have been around for many years, many different rates in many different countries, so economists and policy makers can see how each worked. Based on the data, most countries optimize their revenue by setting corporate tax rates at about half of what the US has had. A few countries have tried very high corporate tax rates. A corporate tax rate of nearly 100%, where the government takes all the profits, is called communism. The USSR tried that. China tried that for a while and reversed course before they ended up like the USSR.
If one of my customers' machines were infected with multiple new zero days, I'd expect to find more information about the infection, and maybe another zero-day or two, by looking in that folder. I'd "tell* the client-side agent to send me the entire folder. I'd be thinking "this customer is going to love me for finding this really nasty infection" and I'd get as much information about it as I could.
I've found a LOT of infected machines, mostly web servers, and I've never had a customer complain that I got too much information for them about what's going on. When I call or email them they want to know "how badly infected is the system? How did the bad guys get in? How long has the infection been there?" They'll hold on the phone anxiously awaiting more answers while I dig through their system, so based on my experience over 20 years I'd expect the customer to want me to dig up as much information as I can.
The big ISPs install fiber where there are a lot of customers (lower cost per customer) and try to sell their triple play packages, internet, phone, and TV, with upgrades like HBO.
Comcast's Triple Play of cable, Internet and digital voice has three tiers based on the features that a customer may want priced at $130, $160, and $200.
If we assume most customers come chose a low tier, or don't get all three services, we can conservatively estimate $125 / month average (some customers get the deluxe sports package and HBO and...). 48 months of service at $125 is $6,000 / household.
So why do munis have so much trouble paying off their capital spend? Munis tend to do put more fiber in less densely populated areas, increasing their capital cost per customer. They may not offer the same service packages, with premium TV channels and such. Instead, they may focus on internet, leaving customers to pay Netflix,is Hulu, Amazon, etc for the content. That reduces their average revenue per customer even if the customer is spending more overall by purchasing content from other companies.
I skimmed through the 350 pages of that book and didn't find a single mention of any tax money whatsoever spent for any private company to build their fiber in any city in US.
I did find a pissed off author who is very creative in his arithmetic. His basic argument is as follows:
Telcos should spend 25% of their revenue on wireline upgrades. (No real justification for that number, just from his ass.) If you ignore Uverse, FiOS, and other major upgrades, the remaining minor upgrades are less than 25% of revenue.
Can you perhaps come up with even one example of any city in the US where privately-owned fiber was installed with tax dollars? Anywhere? You can easily look at the annual reports of all the ISPs and telcos and see the billions of dollars they spent, do you see a single dollar of tax money anywhere?
They only projects I know of that involved tax money were failed municipal projects, where after the city got tired of losing money on a project that wasn't working and it went dark they later sold the dark fiber to a company like Greenlight, who brought it back to life, actually serving customers using what had been a multi-million dollar waste by the city.
What would be your estimate for that number? What do you think is the value difference of a neighborhood has 30 Mbps from Charter for $40 vs one that has 25 Mbps from the city for $35?
It occurs to me my post was a tad negative, a reaction to yet another misleading propaganda piece on Slashdot. I'm not saying that muni can never work, some might work out okay - just be honest about the numbers. Honest numbers might be something like "on average, muni customers pay $10 less and are responsible for $3,000/household in debt used to build the network". If we'd use honest numbers we could have a rational discussion rather than a propaganda war.
Ah, thanks - I hadn't seen that. It certainly makes sense though - someone was trying to be safe by using Kaspersky, and Kaspersky was trying to do their job by taking notice of new malware on their customer's computer.
> and he told them to immediately delete all copies of the files. > Someone perhaps didn't?
I'm not sure I would have deleted *all* copies if I were in that situation.:)
Building a fiber network is expensive - much more expensive than running it for couple years. The first two municipal fiber projects I looked up cost the taxpayers an average of $3,200 per household to build. Whether you want it or not, every resident had to pay to build it and that's the bulk of the cost.
The monthly subscription fees which cover the cost of maintaining it after it's built are a small portion of the cost. Rather than listing a muni such as Lake County as $40/month, if the "study" were intellectually honest they'd list it as "$3,200 up front, plus $40/month". That's the actual cost to residents.
Promoters of these schemes hope that one day subscription revenue might pay back the cost of building the network, but that's never happened yet, to my knowledge.
For *some* projects, bonds are used in such a way that taxpayers will only have to pay the shortfall, the difference between what subscription fees bring in, minus expenses vs the cost to build it and financing costs for that cost. They hope that shortfall might be zero, but often it's thousands of dollars per household.
Most often it's a mixture of bonds, where taxpayers pay the shortfall, and direct tax dollars. For example Lake County was promoted as "financed by bonds, won't cost the taxpayer a dime", but in fact they've spent $15 million in local tax money $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the county, whether they get the service or not, plus state and federal tax dollars.
Chattanooga is probably the biggest "success" hyped by muni fans, and with good reason - it's not losing millions of dollars a year like some are. In fact, it's just started to make payments toward maybe eventually paying back some of the $97 million of taxes used to build the network. That's the big success they point to - so far taxpayers are only out $90 million and it's not getting worse at the moment.
Bringing the thread back on topic, my experience at work shows how Kaspersky would have accidentally "hacked" this material.
For my day job I write software tools which scan networks, checking to see if any computers on the customers' network are vulnerable to any known vulnerabilities. Occasionally the antivirus/anti-malware that is mandated by corporate flags our on tools as likely malware. That makes sense, because our code looks a lot like malware code - we seek out vulnerable hosts, checking each to see if it's actually vulnerable. After that, our system reports to the customer where their vulnerabilities are, but to anti-virus / anti-malware systems our code resembles a threat. Our code also closely resembles some of the NSA code, which was basically malware. Our company has to conform to certain security standards, and those standards require all desktops and laptops to have anti-virus / anti-malware, so we aren't supposed to just disable it, even though it's troublesome when it flags our own files. Right or wrong, bureacracy requires that our systems have this protection.
The anti-malware vendors program their software so that when it detects a new strain of likely malware, it sends a copy back to the vendor so they can learn about the new malware. That's typical so they can provide better service by continually adding new detection for new malware varieties.
If, due to bureacratic fiat or any other reason, anti-malware were installed on an NSA system which had a copy of the NSA kit, I'd expect the anti-malware would detect a few of those tools as being possible malware infecting the system. (It is basically malware, after all). Standard practice would be for the anti-malware system to send samples back to Kaspersky, so they can update and improve their detection. Some low-level analyst at Kaspersky would receive several new zero days all "infecting" one computer. Since there are several and they are new, they'd alert their boss and Kaspersky would/should take a look at this customer system that contains several new zero days. Maybe look at the folder the zero days were in to see if more new threats are there. In the same folder the zero days came from, they'd find the NSA manual on how.yo use them. Suddenly Kaspersky would have the NSA kit without ever doing anything more than doing their job as expected.
The policy that would cause this to happen - without any malice by anyone, would be a rule that "all NSA desktops must have anti-malware installed", combined with choosing Kaspersky, a foreign company, as their vendor.
Using the reading comprehension of Slashdot commenters as a gauge, I'm not a bit surprised that AI (or a child's toy) has better comprehension. Just this morning a guy here said "high explosives... nobody is talking about low explosives" - in a thread about black powder. His own previous post said "explosives like black powder". Far too often, Slashdot commenters don't even comprehend their own posts, much less the article.
Slashdot Mirror
ARM isn't used for serious floating point work. Very much the wrong tool for the job.
He's not pricing tickets in BTC, or holding BTC. He's accepting it as a payment METHOD just like Paypal or Visa; it's converted to dollars either shortly after he gets it, or before he even gets it, allowing the payment provider to take the risk of a drop in the hours it takes to convert it.
A couple weeks ago when I bought another car I really tried to justify going electric. I guess I just wanted one because they're different. The reality is, even after significant government subsidies you end with a low-end economy car for the price of a mid-range gas car, after factoring in gas cost.
Maintenance costs are low until you pay $6,000 to replace the battery, which is guaranteed to get worn out. Gas cars have low maintenance for the first 60,000 - 100,000 miles too. Even a cheap Kia comes with a warranty that lasts for five years or 60,000 miles, and a 10-year 100,000-mile powertrain warranty.
Given the battery technology driven by smartphones, ten years from now electric cars might make sense. Right now, no matter how hard I tried to come up with reasons they make sense, they just don't.
I bought some things recently using a similar idea. At a Dallas hospital the vending machines have been replaced by what roughly like standard refrigerated display cases you'd see holding drinks at any convenience store. Chips and such were in a similar-looking case, just not refrigerated.
The customer taps their card or phone to open the case, then takes whatever they want. It detects if you take an item and then put it back. Especially if you wanted more than one item, it was more convenient than a standard vending machine that requires you to choose item A11 by pressing buttons, then wait for wire to turn, hoping the bag of pretzels will drop as intended.
Because there were no visible sensors or other mechanisms, and it was new to me, it was slightly disconcerting the first time, but interesting and convenient.
> We'd be able to intelligently plan and act against large threats, like a plague or a meteor. We can detect disasters - not just imminent ones but long term, plan our colonies around territories with risk.
New Orleans begs to differ. ;)
Obviously humans are a very important species at the moment, and probably a "special" species. Also, insects have completely permeated the planet for hundreds of millions of years, so "the rise of the insects" isn't a future event, but a prehistoric one.
> any company that chooses to implement it
This patent relates CPU design, for CPUs used in critical applications involving lots of floating point operations. So by "any company" you mean "AMD and Intel".
> It'll never reach any mass adoption.
Right, neither Intel nor AMD would EVER license any patents for use in their processors (eyeroll).
The issues you raise are exactly why electric and supercar go well together. Even with taxpayers paying half the cost, buying a Nissan Leaf (at half price) doesn't make sense, they are too expensive for what you get. Range, refilling time, etc make electric cars not as practical for everyday use. People don't buy supercars based on price, looking for a good value. Supercars aren't supposed to be practical. Electric is a good fit for supercars.
Maybe in 20 years a lot of things will change and electric will make sense for ordinary daily drivers, but that hasn't happened yet.
Putting out an SUV could be major step toward throwing away the Ferrari brand, the brand image they've carefully built over seventy years.
Or it could be a way to go from selling 8,000 units per year to selling 80,000 or 800,000 while maintaining their brand identity. For the last several years Porsche has been very carefully expanding, continuing to sell cars to the same customers after they have kids, while maintaining their brand and their high gross profit on each vehicle. The Cayenne is an SUV, yet also a Porsche, with over 500HP available. They have a compact SUV, the Macan, with Porsche handling. It *can* be done successfully, but there are so many ways it can go wrong.
> we're the species that can eliminate
Insects eliminate a a much higher percentage of humans than humans do insects. Their "kill ratio" is far higher than any human military. Just from mosquitoes alone, in just one year, there are millions of malaria cases.
> Just wait until the insects get with the program and take over the world.
Number of people:
5,600,000,000
Number of insects:
10,000,000,000,000,000,000
There are roughly 20,000,000,000 times as many insects as people. People have only been on Earth a short time, 300,000 years. Insects have been flying for over a thousand times that - 400 MILLION years. We just figured out flying a hundred years ago. We're a nearly irrelevant blip in their world.
In the Senate, it takes 60% (60 votes) to pass a bill, if any "one* Senator decides to stop the bill by filibuster.
The Democrats chose to filibuster and shut down the government unless DACA (immigration amnesty) was attached to the funding resolution.
> Apple has been sitting on yuuuuge piles of cash for many years. They could have given bonuses etc. to employees all that time.
They could have, and did - outside the US. Bringing the money into the US and paying bonuses to US employees would have been stupid, though, because the US is the only major country in the world that harshly penalized bringing money in. If Apple brought that money, which they've already paid taxes on, into the US, the US govt would take over a third of it, 35%. It would be stupid for Apple to give $35 billion to the US govt and $65 billion to US employees when they could instead give $100 billion to European employees.
Now that the penalty for bringing money to the US has been greatly reduced, Apple plans to bring in $250 billion, on which they will pay $38 billion additional tax. That will generate roughly another $250 billion in economic activity. (When Apple pays a construction company, the construction company pays construction workers and suppliers, who in turn buy things with the money, so the same money keeps getting spent and taxed over and over until it's all gone to either the government or another country. ) So something like $500 billion added to the economy, and maybe $100 billion of that will get sent to China or wherever buying Chinese goods. $400 billion will be spent and re-spent in the US until it's all absorbed by taxes.
To give you a sense of scale, the federal deficit is a bit over $400 billion. So just this one company, Apple, is bringing in enough money to cover the entire federal deficit for the year. This by using an understanding of basic arithmetic when making policy, rather than operating purely on jealousy.
Obviously, a zero percent income tax rate will result in zero income tax revenue. Just as obviously, a 100% tax rate (the government takes your ENTIRE paycheck) will result in roughly zero tax revenue - most people won't work a job if they don't get to take home a paycheck. Also companies wouldn't have any reason to.pay more than minimum wage - employees don't demand more because they don't get any of it anyway.
So we can see that tax rates too low result in little or no revenue, and we can see that tax rates too high result in little or no revenue. That's obvious even without understanding the basics of economics, without even knowing the difference between microeconomics and macroeconomics, for example.
If the current tax rate is 80%, that hurts revenue and reducing the tax rate to 70% will increase revenue. If it's at 2%, increasing the rate to 10% will increase revenue. So what we can see, without even reading Chapter 1 of Economics 101 is that anyone who says "increasing tax rates increases revenue" is an idiot, and anyone who says "decreasing tax rates increases revenue" is similarly clueless. There is an optimal rate, not near 100% and not near 0%, that maximizes revenue. Raising rates above the optimal rate hurts revenue, reducing them below the optimal rate reduces revenue.
Also, complex tax laws create "compliance costs". Small businesses file taxes about sixteen times per year - quarterly federal returns, quarterly sales tax returns, quarterly unemployment tax returns, annual business personal property tax returns, etc. There is a real cost to all that, even of the business only owes $1, that's a lot of tax paperwork. (I've filed returns for 12 cents before - the cost / time to fill them out was much greater than 12 cents, so the current situation is a significant net loss for the economy.)
Corporate tax rates follow the same reasoning. If you taxed them at 100%, nobody would invest their savings into starting or growing any companies, since they can't make money. The economy would come to a halt and there would be no revenue (and nearly 100% unemployment). On the other hand, with a 0% corporate tax, you have no revenue from corporate taxes, but higher savings and investment, much better returns from your 401k, lower unemployment, higher wages, etc. So again there is an optimum rate. Too high hurts revenue, and too low hurts revenue. Too high also hurts a lot of other things. Fortunately, corporate taxes have been around for many years, many different rates in many different countries, so economists and policy makers can see how each worked. Based on the data, most countries optimize their revenue by setting corporate tax rates at about half of what the US has had. A few countries have tried very high corporate tax rates. A corporate tax rate of nearly 100%, where the government takes all the profits, is called communism. The USSR tried that. China tried that for a while and reversed course before they ended up like the USSR.
In an eight-shift, yes a cop will drive a lot more than 50 miles.
If one of my customers' machines were infected with multiple new zero days, I'd expect to find more information about the infection, and maybe another zero-day or two, by looking in that folder. I'd "tell* the client-side agent to send me the entire folder. I'd be thinking "this customer is going to love me for finding this really nasty infection" and I'd get as much information about it as I could.
I've found a LOT of infected machines, mostly web servers, and I've never had a customer complain that I got too much information for them about what's going on. When I call or email them they want to know "how badly infected is the system? How did the bad guys get in? How long has the infection been there?" They'll hold on the phone anxiously awaiting more answers while I dig through their system, so based on my experience over 20 years I'd expect the customer to want me to dig up as much information as I can.
The big ISPs install fiber where there are a lot of customers (lower cost per customer) and try to sell their triple play packages, internet, phone, and TV, with upgrades like HBO.
Comcast's Triple Play of cable, Internet and digital voice has three tiers based on the features that a customer may want priced at $130, $160, and $200.
If we assume most customers come chose a low tier, or don't get all three services, we can conservatively estimate $125 / month average (some customers get the deluxe sports package and HBO and ...). 48 months of service at $125 is $6,000 / household.
So why do munis have so much trouble paying off their capital spend? Munis tend to do put more fiber in less densely populated areas, increasing their capital cost per customer. They may not offer the same service packages, with premium TV channels and such. Instead, they may focus on internet, leaving customers to pay Netflix,is Hulu, Amazon, etc for the content. That reduces their average revenue per customer even if the customer is spending more overall by purchasing content from other companies.
You may or may not believe that's true (if so wow you got tricked), but you can't cite a single dollar of tax money ever being spent in such a way.
I skimmed through the 350 pages of that book and didn't find a single mention of any tax money whatsoever spent for any private company to build their fiber in any city in US.
I did find a pissed off author who is very creative in his arithmetic. His basic argument is as follows:
Telcos should spend 25% of their revenue on wireline upgrades. (No real justification for that number, just from his ass.)
If you ignore Uverse, FiOS, and other major upgrades, the remaining minor upgrades are less than 25% of revenue.
Can you perhaps come up with even one example of any city in the US where privately-owned fiber was installed with tax dollars? Anywhere? You can easily look at the annual reports of all the ISPs and telcos and see the billions of dollars they spent, do you see a single dollar of tax money anywhere?
They only projects I know of that involved tax money were failed municipal projects, where after the city got tired of losing money on a project that wasn't working and it went dark they later sold the dark fiber to a company like Greenlight, who brought it back to life, actually serving customers using what had been a multi-million dollar waste by the city.
What would be your estimate for that number? What do you think is the value difference of a neighborhood has 30 Mbps from Charter for $40 vs one that has 25 Mbps from the city for $35?
It occurs to me my post was a tad negative, a reaction to yet another misleading propaganda piece on Slashdot. I'm not saying that muni can never work, some might work out okay - just be honest about the numbers. Honest numbers might be something like "on average, muni customers pay $10 less and are responsible for $3,000/household in debt used to build the network". If we'd use honest numbers we could have a rational discussion rather than a propaganda war.
> Eugene Kaspersky himself said that happened
Ah, thanks - I hadn't seen that. It certainly makes sense though - someone was trying to be safe by using Kaspersky, and Kaspersky was trying to do their job by taking notice of new malware on their customer's computer.
> and he told them to immediately delete all copies of the files.
> Someone perhaps didn't?
I'm not sure I would have deleted *all* copies if I were in that situation. :)
Building a fiber network is expensive - much more expensive than running it for couple years. The first two municipal fiber projects I looked up cost the taxpayers an average of $3,200 per household to build. Whether you want it or not, every resident had to pay to build it and that's the bulk of the cost.
The monthly subscription fees which cover the cost of maintaining it after it's built are a small portion of the cost. Rather than listing a muni such as Lake County as $40/month, if the "study" were intellectually honest they'd list it as "$3,200 up front, plus $40/month". That's the actual cost to residents.
Promoters of these schemes hope that one day subscription revenue might pay back the cost of building the network, but that's never happened yet, to my knowledge.
For *some* projects, bonds are used in such a way that taxpayers will only have to pay the shortfall, the difference between what subscription fees bring in, minus expenses vs the cost to build it and financing costs for that cost. They hope that shortfall might be zero, but often it's thousands of dollars per household.
Most often it's a mixture of bonds, where taxpayers pay the shortfall, and direct tax dollars. For example Lake County was promoted as "financed by bonds, won't cost the taxpayer a dime", but in fact they've spent $15 million in local tax money $1,400 for every man, woman and child in the county, whether they get the service or not, plus state and federal tax dollars.
Chattanooga is probably the biggest "success" hyped by muni fans, and with good reason - it's not losing millions of dollars a year like some are. In fact, it's just started to make payments toward maybe eventually paying back some of the $97 million of taxes used to build the network. That's the big success they point to - so far taxpayers are only out $90 million and it's not getting worse at the moment.
Bringing the thread back on topic, my experience at work shows how Kaspersky would have accidentally "hacked" this material.
For my day job I write software tools which scan networks, checking to see if any computers on the customers' network are vulnerable to any known vulnerabilities. Occasionally the antivirus/anti-malware that is mandated by corporate flags our on tools as likely malware. That makes sense, because our code looks a lot like malware code - we seek out vulnerable hosts, checking each to see if it's actually vulnerable. After that, our system reports to the customer where their vulnerabilities are, but to anti-virus / anti-malware systems our code resembles a threat. Our code also closely resembles some of the NSA code, which was basically malware. Our company has to conform to certain security standards, and those standards require all desktops and laptops to have anti-virus / anti-malware, so we aren't supposed to just disable it, even though it's troublesome when it flags our own files. Right or wrong, bureacracy requires that our systems have this protection.
The anti-malware vendors program their software so that when it detects a new strain of likely malware, it sends a copy back to the vendor so they can learn about the new malware. That's typical so they can provide better service by continually adding new detection for new malware varieties.
If, due to bureacratic fiat or any other reason, anti-malware were installed on an NSA system which had a copy of the NSA kit, I'd expect the anti-malware would detect a few of those tools as being possible malware infecting the system. (It is basically malware, after all). Standard practice would be for the anti-malware system to send samples back to Kaspersky, so they can update and improve their detection. Some low-level analyst at Kaspersky would receive several new zero days all "infecting" one computer. Since there are several and they are new, they'd alert their boss and Kaspersky would/should take a look at this customer system that contains several new zero days. Maybe look at the folder the zero days were in to see if more new threats are there. In the same folder the zero days came from, they'd find the NSA manual on how.yo use them. Suddenly Kaspersky would have the NSA kit without ever doing anything more than doing their job as expected.
The policy that would cause this to happen - without any malice by anyone, would be a rule that "all NSA desktops must have anti-malware installed", combined with choosing Kaspersky, a foreign company, as their vendor.
Using the reading comprehension of Slashdot commenters as a gauge, I'm not a bit surprised that AI (or a child's toy) has better comprehension. Just this morning a guy here said "high explosives ... nobody is talking about low explosives" - in a thread about black powder. His own previous post said "explosives like black powder". Far too often, Slashdot commenters don't even comprehend their own posts, much less the article.