I'm just curious why the hardware needs to be open source for you to tinker with it. If you aren't planning on making contributions to the hardware design (which doesn't sound like "tinkering" to me), and if you aren't going to base products on it that you are going to sell or distribute, then I don't see why it needs to be open source.
So if we're not talking about open source hardware, I have enjoyed experimenting with the STM32 Nucleo boards. They're affordable ($11), and at one time were vastly more powerful than Arduino (I don't keep up with who is producing what so maybe that has changed). I developed online using the free mbed IDE ( https://os.mbed.com/accounts/l... ) and open source libraries, and would drag / drop the downloaded image onto the USB drive and it would flash it and start running my software.
This was discussed before. It's most likely highly directional RF (microwaves), which easily penetrate walls, etc, while staying well focused. There are numerous studies where microwaves directed at a person's head will manifest as sounds they can "hear", although it is likely caused by the direct stimulation of the structures in the ear by the radio waves.
So you're saying simple democracy should win. That is the viewpoint that should be enforced upon all. Let me give you a counterexample. In California, the most liberal and leftist state in the country, the majority voted that same sex couples should not be allowed to marry. That was the will of the majority in that state, and similar polls across the entire country showed the majority wanted laws stating marriage was between a man and woman. Many states passed laws to that affect (marriage is defined at the state level, and it is the state's right to create those laws). However, those that control what we see have promoted nothing but the opposite viewpoint, and so you would think, by what you see in the media (news, Facebook, etc) that the minority viewpoint was in fact the majority.
So FB is not a collective hive, as the fundamental framework of that hive is not neutral.
I don't know if FB reported false information, as much as the news media presumed that anything funded by Russia must be pro-Trump. Most news organizations are searching with a microscope for anything tying Russia to Trump, and they tend to get a bit giddy when they think something has been found. According to the article, there isn't much of a smoking gun here, and in fact there may not have been anything illegal as far as the "foreign nationals can't influence elections" laws. In the past these laws were primarily investigated in relation to foreigners providing direct campaign contributions to candidates. The main problem is that laws of this sort must enforceable. If someone offers me a $100 to put a bumper sticker on my vehicle for a specific candidate, how would I be able to determine whether or not those funds came from a foreign national? I purchase ads from Facebook for various projects. How could Facebook know if my ad was attempting to influence an election, and then whether or not my funds (payed for via credit card) had originally come from some foreign government?
These kinds of slashvertisements often backfire, because people come to Slashdot to read the comments, and the comments often point out better alternatives for cheaper.
I also suspect it is a microwave / RF based weapon. It would be extremely difficult to focus sonic energy and have it pass through walls in a building. Sound waves are, after all, vibrations through a physical medium, and every time you transition from one physical medium to another (air to wall, through the things in the wall, back to air, etc), the sound would be diffracted and reflected all over the place.
Because the energy was very highly focused, that pretty much rules out an acoustic device unless the device was right in the room or perhaps embedded in the wall of the room. Due to the number of people affected in various locations, I don't think it is realistic that there would have been so many of these devices in so many places. Plus they would be discovered once an investigation began if they were in the buildings.
There are many studies showing that RF energy with enough power, directed through the brain, will manifest as sound. The energy will also cause various kinds of damage to the structures in the head and brain.
So that really only leaves RF energy as a source that can be focused to that extent ("It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room."), which can pass through walls with little or no refraction / reflection, be operated from some distance away (even outside the building), manifests as sound when the head is directly in the path of the energy, and can cause injuries more than just hearing loss.
It sounds like the attacks were done while people were asleep in bed. If the attacker knew the general layout of the rooms (where the bed was relative to the window) then they could easily direct the weapon to the head area of the bed and leave it for a few minutes, perhaps very slowly sweeping it across that general area. If a light was turned on, then they would probably move to the next target room because they knew they had achieved the desired result.
I commented on this story in the past, and I'll say it again now. It doesn't make any sense that the Cuban government is doing this. They are a dictatorship, and if they didn't want US diplomats there, or didn't want to try and reconnect with the US, then they simply wouldn't do it. For them to try and injure US diplomats makes no sense at all. I believe this is being done by some 3rd party nation to try and cause problems between the US and Cuba. Why? Because they want to maintain the status quo (the US and Cuba not having diplomatic relations) because they stand to gain either financially and / or in regional influence and power. Several South American countries, as well as Russia, come to mind...
From an excerpt from a 2016 article discussing the US restoring some relations with the Cuban Government:
As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, this has occurred with Cuban-Russian relations at their strongest since the demise of the Soviet Union. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has visited Cuba twice since February 2008 while Vladimir Putin visited in July 2014. Meanwhile Raúl Castro has been to Moscow three times in recent years. Can these two relationships really keep improving in parallel?
"percent" and "per cent" aren't the same thing, and this is especially grievous when talking about money. I assume Bitcoin didn't fall 36 bitcoins per US cent, but fell 36 percent.
So they took a sleek consumer device and strapped an aftermarket 3rd party barcode scanner onto it and wondered why the hardware behaved like a big kludge?
The iPhone 8 battery is rumored to perhaps be a s big as 2,700 mAh. Thus assuming no loss in charging, a 2.7 amp 5 volt power supply could charge it in one hour (that is the same amount of power the battery produces in an hour). The 29W power supply produces 5.8 amps at 5 volt (29 / 5 = 5.8). So not counting any loss, the 29W power supply produces enough power to charge the battery to 100% capacity in 28 minutes. So if we assume up to 50% inefficiency during charging, a 29W power supply could still charge the phone to 50% capacity in 30 minutes. If the battery was much larger (like in the plus models), or the charging is less efficient than 50%, a bigger power supply would be needed to charge to 50% in 30 minutes.
Of all possible attack vectors into a system, antivirus software would have to be the most ideal mechanism for taking over or otherwise collecting data. By its very design it must have full reign of the system, read the data of every file accessed by any process, and have the ability to edit and delete any file on the system.
However, the most concerning part is that antivirus software must receive new functionality and data on a practically daily basis to detect and remove newly created malware. An antivirus program can take down its host system at any time by simply receiving a virus definition that causes it to remove or corrupt critical system files. It can also do the same targeting any specific application.
Personally I don't trust ANY antivirus company to wield that sort of power over my system.
This is cold hard irrefutable fact, not internet rumor.
Got any more hard irrefutable facts I'm supposed to blindly believe? Just checking before I make any important decisions. BTW, I'm on the internet, and I'm seeing this claim made on the internet by a totally anonymous person with no actual attribution or sources backing it up, so that kinda, by definition, makes it an "internet rumor".
I've been relaying messages for someone in the Miami-Dade area. She has internet connectivity, but not cellular. Her only method of communicating with her mother is via cellular (call or text), and she doesn't have any other text type gateway apps set up. However, she does normally use Zello which is non-functional for her even though she has data. So I'm not sure if Zello is overloaded there, or if it requires more bandwidth than is currently available. Either way I'm posting this to point out that Zello is not functioning for at least some people in the thick of it, even though they can use FB Messenger and other messaging apps of the sort.
I have a question. Do some of the people buying the lower capacity battery actually receive a lower capacity battery that exactly meets what they are paying for? If that is true then I presume, for reasons of mass manufacture and inventory availability, some people paying for the lower capacity battery receive a higher capacity battery but they cannot access the entire capacity.
Some think a surge in industrial pollution after World War II may have produced more pollutant particles that blocked the Sun's energy and exerted a cooling effect on the oceans. "The pollution reduced a lot of hurricane activity," said Gabriel Vecchi, professor of geosciences at Princeton University's Environmental Institute. Pollution began to wane in the 1980s due to regulations such as the Clean Air Act, allowing more of the Sun's rays to penetrate the ocean and provide warming fuel for storms.
Also note that 5 of 10 of those happened in the few decades prior to WW2. So quite a nice distribution showing that WW2 didn't really affect the biggest hurricanes either way.
Only three of those (not counting Irma) happened in the last half century. My opinion: The same mechanisms that have sporadically caused big hurricanes every 15-20 years is still causing big hurricanes every 15-20 years. But then again I don't have an agenda to push, otherwise the "facts" would be quite different.
This is nothing new. The only difference is modern technology and connectivity makes the reach and impact greater. There have always been propaganda in the form of shortwave radio broadcasts, printed text (leaflets, magazines, books), one on one contact and even television. It's just that in the past a person had to more actively seek out these communications to be exposed to them. Now it is coming through in our more normal day-to-day lives.
The problem is that the bulk of the Western public is naive and takes too many things at face value. There's an innocence, if you will. A big part of that is not having been (too terribly) deceived by government to the point it led to things like mass imprisonment or death.
Misinformation and gullibility is rampant on social media and it needs to be addressed more fundamentally, but unfortunately social media represents one of the truest forms of democracy, and the results shed light on the fact that the "average" person is simply not very intelligent when it comes to certain matters.
For example, the people constantly sharing Facebook posts that say crap like "We ordered too many luxury RVs and they are last year's model so we have to give them away", and all the various permutations thereof ( http://www.snopes.com/luxury-r... ). It really takes a special kind of naivety to share something like that.
The one that is particularly annoying to me at this moment are people sharing pictures of this traffic jam from Rita (Texas, 2005) claiming it is from the Irma hurricane hitting Florida right now (and then it typically includes other stuff like "this is why so many people have to shelter in place and not evacuate"): http://www.hurricanescience.or... That is a much more subtle type of misinformation, but it is still "fake news".
So no, in answer to the question, we don't need government / corporations / etc trying to protect the American people from foreign propaganda. We need to educate the populace in a more general way to identify and filter out manipulative "fake news" and other garbage of the sort.
the exploits that the US SPOOKS want to keep, they keep and they tell the antivir companies NOT to report on.
That doesn't make sense. Exploits and malware are two separate things. Antivirus software does not plug attack vectors in the underlying OS - that's the job of the company that produces the OS. Antivirus finds and removes malware, regardless of, and unconcerned with, how that malware got onto the system.
That's because you're reaching potential FB accounts, not people. There are many, many fake accounts on FB. I know of lots of people who have abandoned accounts and created new ones - either because they lost their password, or were being harassed, or because they just didn't know any better (my dad, who is not a big computer user, created a second account early on when he thought he was just logging in. It's still there, just not being used). As others have said, many people lie about their ages - at first FB would not allow minors to have accounts, so they would simply say they were at least 18. So that age range of demographics has to be quite skewed as well, especially the 18-25 range.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just curious why the hardware needs to be open source for you to tinker with it. If you aren't planning on making contributions to the hardware design (which doesn't sound like "tinkering" to me), and if you aren't going to base products on it that you are going to sell or distribute, then I don't see why it needs to be open source.
So if we're not talking about open source hardware, I have enjoyed experimenting with the STM32 Nucleo boards. They're affordable ($11), and at one time were vastly more powerful than Arduino (I don't keep up with who is producing what so maybe that has changed). I developed online using the free mbed IDE ( https://os.mbed.com/accounts/l... ) and open source libraries, and would drag / drop the downloaded image onto the USB drive and it would flash it and start running my software.
This was discussed before. It's most likely highly directional RF (microwaves), which easily penetrate walls, etc, while staying well focused. There are numerous studies where microwaves directed at a person's head will manifest as sounds they can "hear", although it is likely caused by the direct stimulation of the structures in the ear by the radio waves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups...
So you're saying simple democracy should win. That is the viewpoint that should be enforced upon all. Let me give you a counterexample. In California, the most liberal and leftist state in the country, the majority voted that same sex couples should not be allowed to marry. That was the will of the majority in that state, and similar polls across the entire country showed the majority wanted laws stating marriage was between a man and woman. Many states passed laws to that affect (marriage is defined at the state level, and it is the state's right to create those laws). However, those that control what we see have promoted nothing but the opposite viewpoint, and so you would think, by what you see in the media (news, Facebook, etc) that the minority viewpoint was in fact the majority.
So FB is not a collective hive, as the fundamental framework of that hive is not neutral.
Considering the Dyson hairdryer costs $400, and a Dyson table fan costs $300, I predict the Dyson Car will cost $5 million dollars.
I don't know if FB reported false information, as much as the news media presumed that anything funded by Russia must be pro-Trump. Most news organizations are searching with a microscope for anything tying Russia to Trump, and they tend to get a bit giddy when they think something has been found. According to the article, there isn't much of a smoking gun here, and in fact there may not have been anything illegal as far as the "foreign nationals can't influence elections" laws. In the past these laws were primarily investigated in relation to foreigners providing direct campaign contributions to candidates. The main problem is that laws of this sort must enforceable. If someone offers me a $100 to put a bumper sticker on my vehicle for a specific candidate, how would I be able to determine whether or not those funds came from a foreign national? I purchase ads from Facebook for various projects. How could Facebook know if my ad was attempting to influence an election, and then whether or not my funds (payed for via credit card) had originally come from some foreign government?
Time for a nap. Because my life depends on it.
These kinds of slashvertisements often backfire, because people come to Slashdot to read the comments, and the comments often point out better alternatives for cheaper.
How Flying Seriously Messes With Your Mind and Body
In that case, instead of flying seriously, try flying frivolously.
I bet they've already trademarked that shape / design.
I also suspect it is a microwave / RF based weapon. It would be extremely difficult to focus sonic energy and have it pass through walls in a building. Sound waves are, after all, vibrations through a physical medium, and every time you transition from one physical medium to another (air to wall, through the things in the wall, back to air, etc), the sound would be diffracted and reflected all over the place.
Because the energy was very highly focused, that pretty much rules out an acoustic device unless the device was right in the room or perhaps embedded in the wall of the room. Due to the number of people affected in various locations, I don't think it is realistic that there would have been so many of these devices in so many places. Plus they would be discovered once an investigation began if they were in the buildings.
There are many studies showing that RF energy with enough power, directed through the brain, will manifest as sound. The energy will also cause various kinds of damage to the structures in the head and brain.
So that really only leaves RF energy as a source that can be focused to that extent ("It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room."), which can pass through walls with little or no refraction / reflection, be operated from some distance away (even outside the building), manifests as sound when the head is directly in the path of the energy, and can cause injuries more than just hearing loss.
It sounds like the attacks were done while people were asleep in bed. If the attacker knew the general layout of the rooms (where the bed was relative to the window) then they could easily direct the weapon to the head area of the bed and leave it for a few minutes, perhaps very slowly sweeping it across that general area. If a light was turned on, then they would probably move to the next target room because they knew they had achieved the desired result.
Here's a study going into the specifics of RF energy being perceived as sound:
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups...
I commented on this story in the past, and I'll say it again now. It doesn't make any sense that the Cuban government is doing this. They are a dictatorship, and if they didn't want US diplomats there, or didn't want to try and reconnect with the US, then they simply wouldn't do it. For them to try and injure US diplomats makes no sense at all. I believe this is being done by some 3rd party nation to try and cause problems between the US and Cuba. Why? Because they want to maintain the status quo (the US and Cuba not having diplomatic relations) because they stand to gain either financially and / or in regional influence and power. Several South American countries, as well as Russia, come to mind...
From an excerpt from a 2016 article discussing the US restoring some relations with the Cuban Government:
As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, this has occurred with Cuban-Russian relations at their strongest since the demise of the Soviet Union. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has visited Cuba twice since February 2008 while Vladimir Putin visited in July 2014. Meanwhile Raúl Castro has been to Moscow three times in recent years. Can these two relationships really keep improving in parallel?
http://theconversation.com/cub...
Google Chrome Will No Longer Autoplay Content With Sound In January 2018
But what about February?
"percent" and "per cent" aren't the same thing, and this is especially grievous when talking about money. I assume Bitcoin didn't fall 36 bitcoins per US cent, but fell 36 percent.
So they took a sleek consumer device and strapped an aftermarket 3rd party barcode scanner onto it and wondered why the hardware behaved like a big kludge?
The iPhone 8 battery is rumored to perhaps be a s big as 2,700 mAh. Thus assuming no loss in charging, a 2.7 amp 5 volt power supply could charge it in one hour (that is the same amount of power the battery produces in an hour). The 29W power supply produces 5.8 amps at 5 volt (29 / 5 = 5.8). So not counting any loss, the 29W power supply produces enough power to charge the battery to 100% capacity in 28 minutes. So if we assume up to 50% inefficiency during charging, a 29W power supply could still charge the phone to 50% capacity in 30 minutes. If the battery was much larger (like in the plus models), or the charging is less efficient than 50%, a bigger power supply would be needed to charge to 50% in 30 minutes.
Of all possible attack vectors into a system, antivirus software would have to be the most ideal mechanism for taking over or otherwise collecting data. By its very design it must have full reign of the system, read the data of every file accessed by any process, and have the ability to edit and delete any file on the system.
However, the most concerning part is that antivirus software must receive new functionality and data on a practically daily basis to detect and remove newly created malware. An antivirus program can take down its host system at any time by simply receiving a virus definition that causes it to remove or corrupt critical system files. It can also do the same targeting any specific application.
Personally I don't trust ANY antivirus company to wield that sort of power over my system.
This is cold hard irrefutable fact, not internet rumor.
Got any more hard irrefutable facts I'm supposed to blindly believe? Just checking before I make any important decisions. BTW, I'm on the internet, and I'm seeing this claim made on the internet by a totally anonymous person with no actual attribution or sources backing it up, so that kinda, by definition, makes it an "internet rumor".
I've been relaying messages for someone in the Miami-Dade area. She has internet connectivity, but not cellular. Her only method of communicating with her mother is via cellular (call or text), and she doesn't have any other text type gateway apps set up. However, she does normally use Zello which is non-functional for her even though she has data. So I'm not sure if Zello is overloaded there, or if it requires more bandwidth than is currently available. Either way I'm posting this to point out that Zello is not functioning for at least some people in the thick of it, even though they can use FB Messenger and other messaging apps of the sort.
I have a question. Do some of the people buying the lower capacity battery actually receive a lower capacity battery that exactly meets what they are paying for? If that is true then I presume, for reasons of mass manufacture and inventory availability, some people paying for the lower capacity battery receive a higher capacity battery but they cannot access the entire capacity.
Some think a surge in industrial pollution after World War II may have produced more pollutant particles that blocked the Sun's energy and exerted a cooling effect on the oceans. "The pollution reduced a lot of hurricane activity," said Gabriel Vecchi, professor of geosciences at Princeton University's Environmental Institute. Pollution began to wane in the 1980s due to regulations such as the Clean Air Act, allowing more of the Sun's rays to penetrate the ocean and provide warming fuel for storms.
Also note that 5 of 10 of those happened in the few decades prior to WW2. So quite a nice distribution showing that WW2 didn't really affect the biggest hurricanes either way.
Strongest hurricanes to hit the USA (based on the metric of lowest barometric pressure):
1) Florida (Keys) 1935, 26.35 inches
2) Camille (Miss., Louisiana), 1969, 26.84
3) Katrina (Louisiana, Miss.) 2005, 27.17
4) Andrew (Florida, Louisiana) 1992, 27.23
5) Texas (Indianola), 1886, 27.31
6) Florida (Keys, Texas), 1919, 27.37
7) Florida (Lake Okeechobee), 1928, 27.43
8) Donna (Florida, Eastern Coast), 1960 27.46
9) Florida (Miami, Miss., LA) 1926, 27.46
10) Carla (Texas) 1961, 27.49
Only three of those (not counting Irma) happened in the last half century. My opinion: The same mechanisms that have sporadically caused big hurricanes every 15-20 years is still causing big hurricanes every 15-20 years. But then again I don't have an agenda to push, otherwise the "facts" would be quite different.
This is nothing new. The only difference is modern technology and connectivity makes the reach and impact greater. There have always been propaganda in the form of shortwave radio broadcasts, printed text (leaflets, magazines, books), one on one contact and even television. It's just that in the past a person had to more actively seek out these communications to be exposed to them. Now it is coming through in our more normal day-to-day lives.
The problem is that the bulk of the Western public is naive and takes too many things at face value. There's an innocence, if you will. A big part of that is not having been (too terribly) deceived by government to the point it led to things like mass imprisonment or death.
Misinformation and gullibility is rampant on social media and it needs to be addressed more fundamentally, but unfortunately social media represents one of the truest forms of democracy, and the results shed light on the fact that the "average" person is simply not very intelligent when it comes to certain matters.
For example, the people constantly sharing Facebook posts that say crap like "We ordered too many luxury RVs and they are last year's model so we have to give them away", and all the various permutations thereof ( http://www.snopes.com/luxury-r... ). It really takes a special kind of naivety to share something like that.
The one that is particularly annoying to me at this moment are people sharing pictures of this traffic jam from Rita (Texas, 2005) claiming it is from the Irma hurricane hitting Florida right now (and then it typically includes other stuff like "this is why so many people have to shelter in place and not evacuate"): http://www.hurricanescience.or... That is a much more subtle type of misinformation, but it is still "fake news".
So no, in answer to the question, we don't need government / corporations / etc trying to protect the American people from foreign propaganda. We need to educate the populace in a more general way to identify and filter out manipulative "fake news" and other garbage of the sort.
the exploits that the US SPOOKS want to keep, they keep and they tell the antivir companies NOT to report on.
That doesn't make sense. Exploits and malware are two separate things. Antivirus software does not plug attack vectors in the underlying OS - that's the job of the company that produces the OS. Antivirus finds and removes malware, regardless of, and unconcerned with, how that malware got onto the system.
That's because you're reaching potential FB accounts, not people. There are many, many fake accounts on FB. I know of lots of people who have abandoned accounts and created new ones - either because they lost their password, or were being harassed, or because they just didn't know any better (my dad, who is not a big computer user, created a second account early on when he thought he was just logging in. It's still there, just not being used). As others have said, many people lie about their ages - at first FB would not allow minors to have accounts, so they would simply say they were at least 18. So that age range of demographics has to be quite skewed as well, especially the 18-25 range.
I thought this was going to involve cats in boxes.