To believe otherwise goes against our religion, and dis-believers shall be beheaded! - Signed, The current Ayatollah of Iran
Official Correction by a Senior Official of the Ayatollah's Space Commission
The Ayatollah who signed that statement was not in fact "the" current Ayatollah of Iran, as there are actually 31 Ayatollahs of Iran. He was simply a man sporting similarly-patterned headwear. However, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei agrees with and endorses the statement, which makes it as true and internationally-significant as the indisputable fact that Iran has put a monkey into space and returned him safely.
Furthermore, the previous senior official who released the signed statement has been beheaded for his failure to recognize an actual Ayatollah. Interviews for those seeking to succeed that official will take place starting Monday, as the Grand Ayatollah will be occupied watching the Superbowl today. He graciously thanks all of the Iranian citizens who have donated their satellite dishes to make this possible.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised that my city is voluntarily shedding potentially $9.8M in revenue after objectively evaluating a program.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the city's IT dept discovered a security hole that could enable a 15-year-old (possibly working for the Chinese military) to spontaneously switch red lights to green, or allow the light to be green in all directions, causing an accident. Then the legal department pointed out that the city could be held liable for the accident if the red-light cameras provided evidence, and the potential liability was significantly greater than the $9.8M they were making on people who run red lights, but still less than the cost of replacing all the traffic lights in the city.
I'm curious why repeated attacks "by the Chinese" have invoked no response from the government? It seems odd that we have US Companies being attacked on US soil and there's not even a peep about it.
I have three simple answers for you:
When the U.S. military conducts a "cyber" strike on another country, they're not going to tell you. Not even a peep. No one died, no maimed vets missing legs, so no one needs to know. The odds are they were already "at war" with China in "cyberspace" before this happened.
These intrusions are not worth risking a real war.
The U.S. government is just as interested in knowing who reporters are talking to as the Chinese are. Why would they want to stop this when China is pushing the newspapers into the arms of the FBI and NSA?
Disclosure: I am a former Washington Post employee
The Post doesn't seem to officially be divulging details. Sure, they're reporting on it now that the word is out through a former employee's blog citing an unnamed former employee (neither of those people are me) as a source, but the article actually has a Post spokesperson denying one of the claims of the article (that the Post handed over one of its servers to the NSA for study). This isn't the paper contradicting itself – it's what ethics look like in practice at a good newspaper. The paper can report on itself even when the top brass don't want to.
However, in the New York Times story on its own intrusion, it was stated that AT&T "monitors" the company's network and noticed unusual traffic patterns. AT&T alerted athe Times, who asked them to keep an eye on it, and then brought Mandiant in to consult.
Going back to The Post's story, the company's claim that it did not turn over a server to the NSA casts the issue of China hacking U.S. newspapers in a new light... if you read between the lines. Newspapers (especially The Post and The Times) see themselves as a fiercely-independent check on the government. Watergate-era readers would be as appalled at the idea of The Post handing over servers to the NSA as MacWorld attendees were in the 90s at seeing Bill Gates's face on screen during Job's speech. From a PR perspective, it just looks wrong. China might actually do more to harm these papers by getting them to run into the arms of the U.S. government. It's one thing to think China may have found out you're talking to a reporter... Quite another to think both the U.S. and China may later discover you were the anonymous source for a story they didn't want out. It's unlikely that the NSA is rooting around the server looking for political whistleblowers, but the idea of it has a chilling effect on potential sources who think of The Post as the institution that protected Deep Throat's identity for decades, at great risk to itself.
How was my post off-topic when the summary for the discussion ended with this?
Looks like bad things do happen in threes — Twitter's report comes on the heels of disclosures of hacking attacks on the WSJ and NY Times."
Moderation abuse? Or are you going to claim the Chinese hacked your Slashdot account to mod my comment down.
And The Washington Post
on
Twitter #Hacked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
A New York Times story today adds The Washington Post to the list of American news organizations whose newsroom computers were found to be communicating with computers in China on their own.
Here in ermer'ka, we don't have to chew the air because of the EPA.
No chewing required. For the most part we just swallow whatever industries put in the air because of what they put inpoliticians'piggybanks. It goes down easier when you don't have to chew... which is probably why you didn't notice.
In other news, the Confederation of Companies that Rely on Acronyms starting with the letter C (C-CRAC) has revoked the CES's membership for siding with a "D" company that doesn't even understand the value of an acronym over its fellow "C" members. C-SPAN will be carrying live coverage of CNET's appeal.
Most users won't have a need for this much space because they just don't generate or accumulate that many files, given the sandboxed file system. "Open in another app" is a somewhat clunky workaround. But there are definitely professional uses for more space. People who need to load the iPad up with training videos, autocad files, etc. I've recently started using an app called "Scanner Pro" to quickly create PDFs of physical documents that cross my desk every day for later reference, and the more I've become accustomed to storing everything and having it in my pocket (the iPad mini just barely fits in my pocket), the more I've started to wonder about when I'll hit the limit where I'll need to think about what to keep and what to delete. At this rate, probably not for another year, but it would be nice to have years worth of these documents on the iPad ready to be called up.
It's all about strategically timed loss of service to exacerbate tensions.
How would people know to riot if the power is out and they can't access twitter or facebook? When the power goes out, people are more likely to sit and play cards with their family, or go outside and start talking to the next door neighbors they've never met.
If you want to get people worked up, selectively turn people's power back on, turning them against each other. See The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street
What I'd actually be curious to know is how much of North Korea's and Iran's apparent newfound knowledge of spaceflight has come from the privatization of the space industry. I don't claim to have any inside knowledge, but it's interesting that both countries have begun making (or at least announcing) significant advances in space programs a few years after NASA cut back and private companies began popping up. I'm sure the fall of the Soviet Union resulted in an infusion of knowledge. Are unemployed NASA personnel working for Tehran? Are Tehran or Pyongyang sending bright kids to schools in the west, aiming for internships with companies like SpaceX, and then the kids come back with some relatively rudimentary knowledge that they impart ("so it turns out the exhaust goes on the bottom of the rocket"). Given the finances of these two countries, it just doesn't make sense that they're making significant advances right now all on their own.
North Korea announced that it had put a "satellite" into "orbit," accomplishing two goals: artificially inflating national pride and telling the world "we're actually just practicing building rockets that may one day deliver nuclear weapons to your cities." Iran plays the same games with its own people and the world, so it's logical that they had to craft a similar announcement, whether it's true or not. The day North Korea announced the "success" of its satellite, you can bet Ahmadinejad called his advisors and said, "I need a space program milestone announcement ASAP!" Ahmadinejad doesn't want his people, or the world, to think he's not keeping up with poor Kim Jong-un.
In both cases, you have countries that can barely afford to take care of their citizens, yet they are claiming to be building a full-fledged space program. Iran is a far more resource-wealthy country and its GDP is more than 10 times North Korea's, but its economy is sufferingbadly because of the international sanctions for its nuclear program, and the health of its people is suffering even worse. So the only reason they would make such an announcement would be to artificially inflate national pride and try to scare the rest of the world.
Of course, Iran's people are not cut off from news from the outside world as effectively as North Korea's (despite police ripping satellite dishes off rooftops and a plan to unplug the country from the Internet), so this could backfire when the people protest about resources being spent on keeping monkeys breathing in space when there isn't enough air to breathe on the ground in Tehran.
I can say "Fuck You!" 14 times in six seconds. That should be enough to get my point across.
Ah, but you could say it 17.5 times textually in a tweet, which is far more efficient. Oddly enough, I still don't get your point. Repeating yourself does not make it clearer. Are you upset at the poster, Twitter, Vine, or yourself?
Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what.
That's just people thinking they're outsmarting the system by working around it because they're not smart enough to realize why the limit is there. And you're free to decide their shortened URL isn't worth following. I ignore all tweets that contain a shortened URL if they don't adequately describe what they're sending me to. And I ignore all Twitterers (Twitterheads?) who use shortened URLs in every other tweet. People who post or read that stuff deserve what they get -- it's like watching (or appearing on) Jerry Springer. How embarrassing.
There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.
Depends on how you parse it. I would say that there's very little information that can be conveyed in four hours of watching C-SPAN. You'll likely get more out of the 140-character-or-less headline about Congress in The New York Times the next day.
How much time do you have to read a bunch of random posts by your friends/celebrities/companies? Most people have a lot of things competing for their attention, personally and professionally. If the posts are limited in size so you can very quickly scan them all, you're more likely to read them. And the authors of the posts are more likely to make every byte count. Instead of rambling on, they're more likely to reconsider what they actually need to say to get their point across. They distill their messages.
How often does someone send you a link to a video expecting you're going to watch 6 minutes to get 6 seconds of information from somewhere in the middle of it? After about 10 seconds, I close the window and more on to the next thing that needs my attention. If the author is limited to six seconds of video, they're going to make every second count, and you're more likely to actually watch it.
Second 1: Learn HTML and CGI Second 2: Create a service that allows people to post and view super-abbreviated blog posts Second 3: Buy a video service, integrate with your existing service Second 4: Limit videos to six seconds Second 5: ????? Second 6: Profit!
The only way the civilized world is going to limit the cost of dealing with the ultimate war with N. Korea is to prepare S. Korea, with the help other friendly countries, to do a massive surgical strike to take out the entire N. Korean military and its facilities and have S. Korea able and supplied and armed with its own people who can move in to supplie staples and organization to the society.
It's a tempting thought, but it's not going to happen unless a nuclear attack on S. Korea, Japan, or the U.S. is imminent. The people of North Korea may be impoverished, but the country has the fourth-largest active military in the world:
China 2.285M
United States 1.458M
India 1.325M
N. Korea 1.106M
Russia 1.027M
(Everyone else in the world has a military roughly half the size of N. Korea's or smaller. Other members of the security council listed below)
France 0.353M
United Kingdom 0.198M
If you look at military reserve, which would be called up in the event of a strike against N. Korea, you add 8.2M people to the fray. That's nearly 10 million people who have been cut off from the outside world for generations and taught that the world is out to get them and their glorious leaders protect them. A lot of people will die, on both sides, and no one has the stomach for that -- and rightly so. Alternatively, saving our side casualties by using nuclear weapons would be unthinkable. So the people in power (the military) sabre rattle to maintain their grip on the country and to try to force aid from the rest of the world. It's not in their interest to attack us, because we would stop feeding them. But we can't afford to let them get in a position where a nutjob or nervous, clumsy individual accidentally launches a nuclear strike. Our job (as the rest of the world) is to ensure they don't gain the ability to threaten us with nuclear weapons, even if that means cutting back our aid to their poor impoverished citizens who think the aid comes from their leaders and don't know any better.
But don't think for a moment that we're going to send two helicopters full of seals into Pyongyang, dump the glorious leader's body at sea and suddenly N. Korea will become a sunny land of welcoming people with a big rainbow over it. If the military leadership ever fails there, it's going to be chaos, and the people won't want our help.
The real news here is this:
They're taking a confrontational stance with China, which is incredibly dumb, but may be an indication of increasing desperation within N. Korea's leadership. China doesn't see N. Korea as a favorite nephew. It maintains its relationship to assert its power in the region, because it fears that millions of refugees would spill over its border in a crisis, and because it believes it's the only superpower in a position to keep N. Korea on a leash. By being confrontational, N. Korea is threatening China's understanding of their relationship, and telling the world it's willing to bite the hand of everyone who feeds it. It's saying "we're crazy and out of control, so you'd better keep feeding us."
They're acknowledging that their "peaceful space program" was just a cover for ICBM testing. Which we already knew. But telling the world it lied about its peaceful intentions says, "don't trust us, you don't know what we might do." More sabre-rattling, ratcheted up to the point where they're hoping we'll have to give them more aid to stabilize them.
Atari was named for a term in the game "go" in which a stone or group of stones are in danger of being taken by one's opponent and the player has only one option available to avoid this outcome . Kind of like bankruptcy. So it seems that Atari has finally reached a state of Atari.
Slashdot Mirror
To believe otherwise goes against our religion, and dis-believers shall be beheaded! - Signed, The current Ayatollah of Iran
Official Correction by a Senior Official of the Ayatollah's Space Commission
The Ayatollah who signed that statement was not in fact "the" current Ayatollah of Iran, as there are actually 31 Ayatollahs of Iran. He was simply a man sporting similarly-patterned headwear. However, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei agrees with and endorses the statement, which makes it as true and internationally-significant as the indisputable fact that Iran has put a monkey into space and returned him safely.
Furthermore, the previous senior official who released the signed statement has been beheaded for his failure to recognize an actual Ayatollah. Interviews for those seeking to succeed that official will take place starting Monday, as the Grand Ayatollah will be occupied watching the Superbowl today. He graciously thanks all of the Iranian citizens who have donated their satellite dishes to make this possible.
I have to say I'm a bit surprised that my city is voluntarily shedding potentially $9.8M in revenue after objectively evaluating a program.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the city's IT dept discovered a security hole that could enable a 15-year-old (possibly working for the Chinese military) to spontaneously switch red lights to green, or allow the light to be green in all directions, causing an accident. Then the legal department pointed out that the city could be held liable for the accident if the red-light cameras provided evidence, and the potential liability was significantly greater than the $9.8M they were making on people who run red lights, but still less than the cost of replacing all the traffic lights in the city.
The Washington Post is a company that sells propaganda to suckers. They lie for a living. Why should anyone believe them now?
Citation please.
I'm curious why repeated attacks "by the Chinese" have invoked no response from the government? It seems odd that we have US Companies being attacked on US soil and there's not even a peep about it.
I have three simple answers for you:
Disclosure: I am a former Washington Post employee
The Post doesn't seem to officially be divulging details. Sure, they're reporting on it now that the word is out through a former employee's blog citing an unnamed former employee (neither of those people are me) as a source, but the article actually has a Post spokesperson denying one of the claims of the article (that the Post handed over one of its servers to the NSA for study). This isn't the paper contradicting itself – it's what ethics look like in practice at a good newspaper. The paper can report on itself even when the top brass don't want to.
However, in the New York Times story on its own intrusion, it was stated that AT&T "monitors" the company's network and noticed unusual traffic patterns. AT&T alerted athe Times, who asked them to keep an eye on it, and then brought Mandiant in to consult.
Going back to The Post's story, the company's claim that it did not turn over a server to the NSA casts the issue of China hacking U.S. newspapers in a new light... if you read between the lines. Newspapers (especially The Post and The Times) see themselves as a fiercely-independent check on the government. Watergate-era readers would be as appalled at the idea of The Post handing over servers to the NSA as MacWorld attendees were in the 90s at seeing Bill Gates's face on screen during Job's speech. From a PR perspective, it just looks wrong. China might actually do more to harm these papers by getting them to run into the arms of the U.S. government. It's one thing to think China may have found out you're talking to a reporter... Quite another to think both the U.S. and China may later discover you were the anonymous source for a story they didn't want out. It's unlikely that the NSA is rooting around the server looking for political whistleblowers, but the idea of it has a chilling effect on potential sources who think of The Post as the institution that protected Deep Throat's identity for decades, at great risk to itself.
Looks like bad things do happen in threes — Twitter's report comes on the heels of disclosures of hacking attacks on the WSJ and NY Times."
Moderation abuse? Or are you going to claim the Chinese hacked your Slashdot account to mod my comment down.
For those keeping score:
The canned fresh air is a bit of dark humor. The guy selling it is a wealthy philanthropist making a political statement.
Exactly. According to the article, it comes in three flavors:
The Party doesn't like dark humor. I give him about three weeks before he is coincidentally convicted of some sort of crime against the state.
Here in ermer'ka, we don't have to chew the air because of the EPA.
No chewing required. For the most part we just swallow whatever industries put in the air because of what they put in politicians' piggy banks. It goes down easier when you don't have to chew... which is probably why you didn't notice.
In other news, the Confederation of Companies that Rely on Acronyms starting with the letter C (C-CRAC) has revoked the CES's membership for siding with a "D" company that doesn't even understand the value of an acronym over its fellow "C" members. C-SPAN will be carrying live coverage of CNET's appeal.
Apple Increases iPad with Retina Display to 128GB
Most users won't have a need for this much space because they just don't generate or accumulate that many files, given the sandboxed file system. "Open in another app" is a somewhat clunky workaround. But there are definitely professional uses for more space. People who need to load the iPad up with training videos, autocad files, etc. I've recently started using an app called "Scanner Pro" to quickly create PDFs of physical documents that cross my desk every day for later reference, and the more I've become accustomed to storing everything and having it in my pocket (the iPad mini just barely fits in my pocket), the more I've started to wonder about when I'll hit the limit where I'll need to think about what to keep and what to delete. At this rate, probably not for another year, but it would be nice to have years worth of these documents on the iPad ready to be called up.
It's all about strategically timed loss of service to exacerbate tensions.
How would people know to riot if the power is out and they can't access twitter or facebook? When the power goes out, people are more likely to sit and play cards with their family, or go outside and start talking to the next door neighbors they've never met.
If you want to get people worked up, selectively turn people's power back on, turning them against each other. See The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street
What I'd actually be curious to know is how much of North Korea's and Iran's apparent newfound knowledge of spaceflight has come from the privatization of the space industry. I don't claim to have any inside knowledge, but it's interesting that both countries have begun making (or at least announcing) significant advances in space programs a few years after NASA cut back and private companies began popping up. I'm sure the fall of the Soviet Union resulted in an infusion of knowledge. Are unemployed NASA personnel working for Tehran? Are Tehran or Pyongyang sending bright kids to schools in the west, aiming for internships with companies like SpaceX, and then the kids come back with some relatively rudimentary knowledge that they impart ("so it turns out the exhaust goes on the bottom of the rocket"). Given the finances of these two countries, it just doesn't make sense that they're making significant advances right now all on their own.
North Korea announced that it had put a "satellite" into "orbit," accomplishing two goals: artificially inflating national pride and telling the world "we're actually just practicing building rockets that may one day deliver nuclear weapons to your cities." Iran plays the same games with its own people and the world, so it's logical that they had to craft a similar announcement, whether it's true or not. The day North Korea announced the "success" of its satellite, you can bet Ahmadinejad called his advisors and said, "I need a space program milestone announcement ASAP!" Ahmadinejad doesn't want his people, or the world, to think he's not keeping up with poor Kim Jong-un.
In both cases, you have countries that can barely afford to take care of their citizens, yet they are claiming to be building a full-fledged space program. Iran is a far more resource-wealthy country and its GDP is more than 10 times North Korea's, but its economy is suffering badly because of the international sanctions for its nuclear program, and the health of its people is suffering even worse. So the only reason they would make such an announcement would be to artificially inflate national pride and try to scare the rest of the world.
Of course, Iran's people are not cut off from news from the outside world as effectively as North Korea's (despite police ripping satellite dishes off rooftops and a plan to unplug the country from the Internet), so this could backfire when the people protest about resources being spent on keeping monkeys breathing in space when there isn't enough air to breathe on the ground in Tehran.
So much for my plan to pitch Eco-friendly, glare-resistant e-ink traffic lights!
Maybe I can just use an e-ink billboard that says "STOP," "GO," or "GET OUT OF THE INTERSECTION."
I can say "Fuck You!" 14 times in six seconds. That should be enough to get my point across.
Ah, but you could say it 17.5 times textually in a tweet, which is far more efficient. Oddly enough, I still don't get your point. Repeating yourself does not make it clearer. Are you upset at the poster, Twitter, Vine, or yourself?
Except that Twitter is almost never just 140 characters. Rather, it is 10 words of description and then a shortened URL to who-knows-what.
That's just people thinking they're outsmarting the system by working around it because they're not smart enough to realize why the limit is there. And you're free to decide their shortened URL isn't worth following. I ignore all tweets that contain a shortened URL if they don't adequately describe what they're sending me to. And I ignore all Twitterers (Twitterheads?) who use shortened URLs in every other tweet. People who post or read that stuff deserve what they get -- it's like watching (or appearing on) Jerry Springer. How embarrassing.
There's very little meaningful information that can be conveyed via video in 6 seconds.
Depends on how you parse it. I would say that there's very little information that can be conveyed in four hours of watching C-SPAN. You'll likely get more out of the 140-character-or-less headline about Congress in The New York Times the next day.
How much time do you have to read a bunch of random posts by your friends/celebrities/companies? Most people have a lot of things competing for their attention, personally and professionally. If the posts are limited in size so you can very quickly scan them all, you're more likely to read them. And the authors of the posts are more likely to make every byte count. Instead of rambling on, they're more likely to reconsider what they actually need to say to get their point across. They distill their messages.
How often does someone send you a link to a video expecting you're going to watch 6 minutes to get 6 seconds of information from somewhere in the middle of it? After about 10 seconds, I close the window and more on to the next thing that needs my attention. If the author is limited to six seconds of video, they're going to make every second count, and you're more likely to actually watch it.
Second 1: Learn HTML and CGI
Second 2: Create a service that allows people to post and view super-abbreviated blog posts
Second 3: Buy a video service, integrate with your existing service
Second 4: Limit videos to six seconds
Second 5: ?????
Second 6: Profit!
The only way the civilized world is going to limit the cost of dealing with the ultimate war with N. Korea is to prepare S. Korea, with the help other friendly countries, to do a massive surgical strike to take out the entire N. Korean military and its facilities and have S. Korea able and supplied and armed with its own people who can move in to supplie staples and organization to the society.
It's a tempting thought, but it's not going to happen unless a nuclear attack on S. Korea, Japan, or the U.S. is imminent. The people of North Korea may be impoverished, but the country has the fourth-largest active military in the world:
China 2.285M
United States 1.458M
India 1.325M
N. Korea 1.106M
Russia 1.027M
(Everyone else in the world has a military roughly half the size of N. Korea's or smaller. Other members of the security council listed below)
France 0.353M
United Kingdom 0.198M
If you look at military reserve, which would be called up in the event of a strike against N. Korea, you add 8.2M people to the fray. That's nearly 10 million people who have been cut off from the outside world for generations and taught that the world is out to get them and their glorious leaders protect them. A lot of people will die, on both sides, and no one has the stomach for that -- and rightly so. Alternatively, saving our side casualties by using nuclear weapons would be unthinkable. So the people in power (the military) sabre rattle to maintain their grip on the country and to try to force aid from the rest of the world. It's not in their interest to attack us, because we would stop feeding them. But we can't afford to let them get in a position where a nutjob or nervous, clumsy individual accidentally launches a nuclear strike. Our job (as the rest of the world) is to ensure they don't gain the ability to threaten us with nuclear weapons, even if that means cutting back our aid to their poor impoverished citizens who think the aid comes from their leaders and don't know any better.
But don't think for a moment that we're going to send two helicopters full of seals into Pyongyang, dump the glorious leader's body at sea and suddenly N. Korea will become a sunny land of welcoming people with a big rainbow over it. If the military leadership ever fails there, it's going to be chaos, and the people won't want our help.
The real news here is this:
"ET, now only on the Apple iPad"
ET would hate the iPad. Anyone can magically make it do stuff whether their finger glows or not.
Atari was named for a term in the game "go" in which a stone or group of stones are in danger of being taken by one's opponent and the player has only one option available to avoid this outcome . Kind of like bankruptcy. So it seems that Atari has finally reached a state of Atari.
Mega Conz?
Is that supposed to be a reference to the founders as convicts? Or the users becoming future convicts?
He was trying to come up with his personals headline: "Harvard Scientist Seeks Adventurous Woman to Help Create Neanderthal Baby"
Why doesn't anyone take him seriously? Poor guy.
... american corporations and their complaint criminal government have no credibility.
I'd like to file a slashdot-compliant complaint about your misspelling of the word compliant in your complaint.