It means they will take the embassy away from Assange rather than the other way around.
They do not intend to "storm" any embassy (that's an act of war and one odious little twerp isn't worth it). They intend to use the law to remove the embassy from UK soil, without harm or foul, so that the one non-ambassadorial human present (a criminal for skipping bail) can be arrested and face trial. If then necessary, they can let the ambassador has his "new" embassy back on the same spot as the old one.
It does not, in any way, shape or form mean they could just storm the embassy with even a single uninvited police officer or they would have done so a long time ago.
You're talking military incursion. The letter states only a clever legal trick to get the one person they want (a non-ambassadorial person) when the ambassador won't co-operate. Asylum or not, extradition or not, ambassador or not, the concept of sacred embassies and diplomatic documents is not going to be violated. Threatening that is cause for Ecuador to fire weapons, literally. That's nothing close to what the letter contained, which was a legal trick to do what they want using the EXACT letter of the law to their advantage, hurting no-one, violating nowhere and never seeing a single diplomatic document that they're not supposed to see.
Personally, the UK have done EVERYTHING they legally could have for Assange, down to challenging the extradition to the highest courts in the land, offering him bail, and he's given precisely NOTHING back. Now he's forced them into a legal corner where they can either BREACH the EU laws on extradition or not.
The only sensible option ("not") means that , without ambassadorial co-operation, they have to LEGALLY revoke the embassy's/ambassador's status (nothing wrong in UK law or the Vienna convention in that) in order to get to a criminal that the embassy is harbouring (embassies are supposed to abide by the laws of the host country). That's the only option left to them that lets them stay true to their own (and EU, and international) laws that are cast in stone.
Assange is just playing the media. The UK can give the ambassador seven day's notice and then just send a police officer in to calmly arrest Assange anyway and there's nothing the embassy can do about it (Assange is NOT covered by any of the laws involving diplomats or embassies personally). Assange won't be coming out without handcuffs and could, if pressed, find himself in a building that's no longer, legally, an embassy, with nobody else in it to protect him, and no way to escape arrest within the month. That's about the longest he could push it out for. Chances are, this time next week, he'll be before a court explaining why he skipped bail, and then serving a CAST-IRON, GUARANTEED, LEGITIMATE, UNAPPEALABLE prison sentence when he gets out of wherever he ends up.
You like charges of obstructing a police officer, obstructing justice, harbouring a criminal, aiding and abetting, etc. then?
Plus, the police are quite within their right to block access to the street "for public safety", to prevent the escape of someone facing arrest, etc. for any reasonable distance.
Assange is a dick who thinks he can find a loophole to let himself go free. Trouble is, each loophole he finds is smaller and smaller and ends up with him being arrested and deported, with more charges on top (breach of bail, failing to appear, etc.). Add a couple of years in the UK jail system when he does get out of wherever he ends up.
That's an issue for Sweden and/or the EU. They've previously refused too (and the UK still gave Assange three appeals to the highest courts and still he failed to provide legal basis to have the extradition quashed).
He's wanted in Britain for breach of bail, and to comply with EU laws on extradition that the UK are bound by. That's what he is being arrested for, not anything that actually may have happened in Sweden. If we just wanted to give him to Sweden, we'd have done so MONTHS ago when he turned up to a UK police station to answer exactly that charge.
And now, after every appeal possible, if his extradition to Sweden were unlawful, he wouldn't have needed to breach bail, we wouldn't have been able to send him there at all. Under UK/EU law, we are now obliged to hand him to Sweden, even if that means revoking the status of an embassy (which is pretty serious but totally legal).
As it was, the UK police sent the original extradition forms back THREE TIMES because the Swedish authorities failed to dot the i's and cross the t's properly.
The UK have no interest in him. He's just a pain in the arse at the moment and we tried our best to protect him (hell, he'd be in Sweden already if any other country had handled him). Now he's causing an international incident when he still has ZERO chance of leaving the building without being arrested. There is no law, statute or convention that protects him in there, under asylum or not (he has NOT been granted UK asylum, and cannot leave the building to be taken anywhere else that might recognise asylum for him).
All he's done is made the news - again - after breaching US, Swedish and (now) UK law. Until the time he skipped bail, the UK had no axe to grind (and if it did, it could have done a lot worse than it has done so far, all legitimately). Now he's going to be arrested no matter what, but he's playing to the cameras and trying to fabricate an incident where there is none.
The UK *MUST* extradite him or their laws mean nothing. The laws on embassies mean we *CAN* legally revoke embassy status from the building itself. Even the Vienna convention says we can just expel all the diplomats (so long as we don't harm them, etc.) "at any time, and for any reason". If we *MUST* extradite him, by law, and the only way to do that legally is to temporarily dissolve an embassy or expel diplomats, then that's what we have to do. One law is no greater than any other until a conflict exists. There is no conflict, hence there's only one legal path that can (and MUST) be followed. And all legal paths end up with Assange arrested and facing LONGER terms in prison no matter where he ends up or what charges may stick elsewhere. He deliberately and knowingly breached UK bail and will have to stand up in court for that at some point, no matter what.
He also said that the UK threatened to "storm" the embassy in its letter. Have you seen the letter? It says nothing of the sort.
We know how to storm embassies. We have entire special forces teams who had experience of doing just that. It does *not* involve stating an obscure UK law and saying you are "disappointed" in quite a polite, but stern, letter.
The UK has stated it will storm the embassy by force, violating the Vienna Conventions.
1) Where did the UK state that? (i.e. you HAVEN'T read the letter, which was published in the same newspaper linked to above - there is no mention of storming or even entering ANYTHING, ANYWHERE in the entire letter).
2) It doesn't violate the Vienna convention to dissolve the embassy or even expel all the diplomatic staff. Go read it. It's quite clear that the UK can do that "at any time, and for any reason". Assange isn't covered by that, no matter what.
Rather than take Assange out of the embassy, they have threatened (indirectly and politely) to take the embassy away from Assange. Which is perfectly legitimate. Not one person subject to diplomatic special treatment will have any rule of their violated or come to any harm. No breach of the Vienna Convention will occur whatsoever. But equally, at the same time, Assange finds himself sitting in an office, not an embassy, and the police can walk in and arrest him without *anyone's* permission being necessary.
It's just a bit messier than normal, but it's totally, 100% legitimate and any country, at any time, anywhere could do exactly the same too. The Ecuadorian ambassador would not be affected in any way whatsoever, merely expelled as per the law for "persona non grata" in diplomatic positions. But he could have avoided it at any point by saying "Nothing to do with me, come in, officer, and arrest this man if you need to".
He can't be made an official with diplomatic immunity without UK consent. Anything he carries may not be searched if it's Ecuadorian diplomatic communique. But he can still be arrested immediately he walks out the door, messenger, "diplomat" (unofficial without UK consent) or not.
Vienna Convention - "Article 9. The host nation may at any time and for any reason declare a particular member of the diplomatic staff to be persona non grata. The sending state must recall this person within a reasonable period of time, or otherwise this person may lose their diplomatic immunity."
*That*'s what they're really threatening. The ambassador is refusing permission to enter to arrest Assange. If he doesn't give it, they will just make him a "non-diplomat" and send the ambassador home. Then there's no-one to refuse permission to enter, and they can just walk in and arrest Assange. But having to dispel a diplomat because he was harbouring a criminal is a bit extreme when he could have just said "Okay, police, yes, in you come, he's over there" at any point.
"Article 9. The host nation may at any time and for any reason declare a particular member of the diplomatic staff to be persona non grata. The sending state must recall this person within a reasonable period of time, or otherwise this person may lose their diplomatic immunity."
Do this to the ambassador, and then walk into the embassy, which is - AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN - UK soil, and which only the *request* of the ambassador could prevent the police entering (without other legal intervention, that is). No ambassador = nobody to withhold permission (and arguably = no embassy at all) = arrest of ASSANGE is totally 100% legal. Who cares about the ambassador? Nobody wants to arrest him and he's being a pain in the arse anyway, so sending him home is hardly a problem.
But they're trying to avoid that because recalling a diplomat is likely to piss people off even if it's a 100% totally legitimate thing to do "at any time and for any reason".
I think you'll find that's the EXACT incident that resulted in the EXACT law which the British authorities politely pointed at in this supposed "we will storm you" letter (which mentions nothing about storming, entering, revoking immunity or anything else that people think it did just because the Ecuador ambassador said so), which is the EXACT way they intend to not repeat said incident with Assange.
If you google the letter (published in an article in The Guardian newspaper) it mentions a law only. Google that laws and its origins, and it's the incident that you describe.
"You don't storm embassies and revoke diplomatic immunity for two counts of non-consensual intercourse."
Correct. And nothing has done, or threatened, either. Go find the "threat" letter, published in an article for The Guardian newspaper. There is no word "storm" or even discussion of entry to the premises at all. That's all the Ecuador embassy's fabrication.
What they've done is remind the ambassador of his obligation to oblige by UK law which includes, by right, the ability to expel the ambassador (but nothing to do with his immunity, which does not extend to Assange) if that's what it takes to arrest Assange.
Ambassadors should not be harbouring escaped criminals. No matter what goes on in Sweden or anywhere else, breach of bail is a crime, thus Assange is a criminal in the UK by his own right. He can argue about having reasonable cause in court (should he get that far), but you can't hide him knowingly and pretend that's performing a diplomatic function.
"De jure Assange is in Ecuador and not in Great Britain."
No he's not. The Ecuador embassy is UK soil and subject to the rule of UK law. Always has been. Same as every other embassy on the PLANET belonging to the host country. The "on foreign soil" thing is a myth and always has been. There's a code that means it's not polite to walk in and arrest people in there but IT'S STILL POSSIBLE. Always has been. Just because a murderer wanders into an embassy doesn't mean he's "immune". It's up to the diplomat in question as to whether the UK police can enter, but it's also a rule which can be overruled lawfully too.
Diplomatic immunity only covers diplomats. Stop those people being diplomats (which appointment required UK consent first of all) and they lose it. But Assange isn't a diplomat and, without consent, cannot be made into one.
Also, the diplomats aren't the ones who breached UK bail. It's generally considered disrespectful of the law for someone with immunity to break the laws of the host country at all (even if they can, technically, escape immediate prosecution, it's quite a violation of diplomatic protocol).
This technically comes under "harbouring a criminal" laws, not to mention Assange himself breached UK bail (ignore ALL the other crap, which hasn't been tried yet but has been found to be "valid" cause to extradite him - he's still breached UK law that has NOTHING to do with any other country or incident whatsoever).
There's also a BUCKET load of precedent here, and the rule of law says they could have done this weeks ago. They're just treading carefully because it could spark a diplomatic incident. But there's nothing that say that they can't go in and arrest Assange if they want to - under *any* international covenant. They're just trying to get the Ecuador ambassador to hand him over voluntarily because it saves a lot of paperwork, headlines and responsibility.
And the "threat" was never to storm the embassy. You don't do that. That starts (or ends) wars. The "threat" was - in Great British fashion - a politely worded but stern letter saying that they thought the Ecuador ambassador should give it up and reminding him of the rights of the UK in this regard (which is encased in UK law, which he is subject to and required to abide by even if he, personally, can't be prosecuted - and Assange personally is covered by NONE of it). The threat really is "Stop being a dickhead and hand him over, or we'll just send in a police officer and arrest him anyway and cause you a lot of embarrassment". The SAS won't be gearing up to handle an idiot like Assange but apparently it sounds better on the media (strange how Assange plays the media well but loses when he plays the legal game in a "neutral" country).
Go find the article in The Guardian and read what the letter contained. I've seen stronger threats made directly to police officers and soldiers without action being taken. Hell, I've seen stronger threats in the letters pages of The Guardian.
The only international treaty being violated is the one that says that embassies and ambassadors shouldn't break the law of the host country. Other than that, the options are really "expel ambassador" and thus gain approval to enter the premises that way or just walk in and arrest Assange (the ambassador would be powerless to stop it and wouldn't be able to stop the police even with force).
"Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care."
About crackpot conspiracy theories posted on Slashdot in a hideously verbose article (and I'm one of the worst culprits for verbosity)? Damn right.
Now, please go away. If the government want in to my computer, they will get it. Chances are that I detect the attempt but even if I didn't, so what? What precisely do you think will happen that wouldn't have happened without intrusion into my personal computer?
P.S. tampering with boot sectors is a DUMB way to try to take over a computer. First, it won't work if the options for Boot Sector Protection are on. Secondly, it interferes with lots of perfectly innocent programs that people might be using (let's start at things like partition managers and go up to more interesting things like Truecrypt). Third, it's likely to balls up a minority of machines totally (Hell, I just encountered a set of machines whose BIOS checks a very specific sector on any NTFS partition for a Windows-like signature and hangs if you try to boot off anything else - so full-disk encryption is TOTALLY incompatible with that machine until the BIOS is fixed) and thus draw attention to itself.
Fourthly, those who care about people getting into their machines WILL notice. Those who don't, won't. Guess who the governments of the world would be most interested in?
Don't want the government to "find" you? Never let your machine out of your sight, never connect to the Internet, wrap it in a tinfoil hat (which seems oddly appropriate here). If they have physical access to your machine or its components at any point, it's game over. Seriously. Nothing has ever proven defeat of that.
Want to *use* your computer? Do so.
Hell, if they are going to put malware in something, they'll just stick it in an Intel chip. Who's going to see it among billions of transistors, hypervisors, microcode, etc.? Nobody. And it has complete access to anything without any hassle at all.
Please re-align your conspiracy theory and point it at brick walls. How can you be sure your house has brick walls? How do you know they didn't plant a microphone in it? How do you know there's not a thermal camera on the other side? Same thing, just as serious, just as crackpot.
Only if you go by total number of medals won. And seeing as you fielded more athletes then any other competitor except the UK, that's hardly surprising.
Now medals per event (or even number of athletes) entered? That would be a different matter. By that standard China whip your ass (and the UK's, but hell, we lose at everything including sports we invented).
America just has the money to field lots of athletes, some portion of whom will win a medal on an international stage. The proportion isn't the best in the world, it's just the sheer weight of numbers and the money to send them all over and enter them. If China entered more athletes, you'd have had a harder time.
Hell, the UK fielded virtually the same number of athletes as the US, but the total population is one fifth of yours (but, hey, it was the London Olympics). And the UK got 63% as many medals. All that tells me is that, per capita, you get a lot less medals than lots of other places on the planet. Per athlete, you get a lot less medals than some other places on the planet.
If you took an equivalent size population from other places in the world, you'd actually come around about the middle somewhere. If that. By comparison, it's really nothing to shout about.
And, hell, we're now complaining in the UK for putting on quite a poor performance and encouraging more sport in schools, etc. That's how we took the news of the number of medals we got, because we thought it was a bit pants.
Last time I did, it's basically believed to be a vector for detecting infection by simply making a target navigate to a web page that tries to load the font. If it's there, you can tell the PC has the font and (therefore) the infection. If it's not, it just gets substituted and you can tell from the CSS etc. what's happened.
Probably a way for the author to see if their target machine actually ended up getting infected or not.
I think your assumption that it must be "easier" to get the ore out of a monitor than a raw material is probably very false.
Indium in what form? How processed? Combined with what? Integrated into what component? It's used to form electrodes in LCD screens, but does that mean that each pixel has a coating of it three-or-four coatings deep? And only covering that pixel? How many pixels on the screen to deconstruct to get to that? How much per pixel versus much work? What if it's in a form that now requires more energy to separate it (e.g. rust contains iron and oxygen, but you don't see a market for your old rust)? What if it's next to and mixed with other chemicals that you can't filter without health hazards, or where your process has to sacrifice one for the other?
All things that wouldn't affect raw-ore refining (Who cares what happens to the other rock in the ore? Almost certainly indium will be found among heaps of junk that's easily dissolved in acid and then disposed of etc.).
It's also a bit like "uncooking" food. Yeah, my cake has eggs in it. You can try to take the eggs out after I've baked it if you like. The collatoral damage, energy, precision, processing and just sheer time involved mean that it's just not worth it.
Now if we're talking discrete components, e.g. a PCB track made of gold or copper, or a magnet in a hard drive, then you can just extract those components, burn the residue and get some value if the raw material is valuable enough. Like people stealing catalytic converters for their platinum. Who cares about what else is there, the platinum alone is easily extractable and worth the effort.
Just because it says "indium", it doesn't mean "raw indium, in the same format as it was dug out of the earth in." And, as you point out, even extracting from 1ppm is extensive, complicated, elaborate and expensive when you don't CARE about what else is in the rock and you're not paying for the rock. Just multiplying it up by even 250 doesn't mean it's any easier to extract than from the raw ore.
By the same token, extracting gold from seawater should be incredibly easy and profitable. It isn't. Because gold ore is much nicer to handle and extract. Just because it's "1ppm" doesn't even mean it's spread as dust throughout vast rock formation. It might meant just that you have to dig up a mountain to find one block of it in a lump (e.g. diamonds, gold, etc.)
Stupid thing to do. Because if I wanted to discredit another country, the most ingenious way would be to make it LOOK like they had done something, but that left subtle hints that it was them that created it.
Queue years of wrangling to get to the bottom of who exactly created it, while some other (unknown) entity who actually wrote it just walks away without suspicion.
We're talking international cyber-warfare here, aimed at nuclear processing plants. If I was making something like that, item #1 on my list of things to include would be obvious flaws and subtle hints to hint at another world nation being behind it. Hell, I'd deliberately have it written on machines with US codepages and English pathnames, even if the native language didn't translate into ASCII at all. In fact, especially if it didn't.
In the same way, NEVER believe the US when they manage to link "attacks from China" - how the HELL do they know they originated in China at all if they don't know who wrote them? And what idiot WOULDN'T route their attacks on the US via somewhere like China to try to put the blame on someone else (hell, even the spammers have worked that one out!)?
The US *want* me to think that China attacked them, for some reason. I don't know why. And the creators of Flame et al *want* me to think that it's an American-supported venture. Hell, if I was Iranian / Lebonese and clever enough, I'd attack myself just to make the "enemy" look bad and provide reason for "retaliation".
Don't be naive when it comes to international politics and, let's face it, cyberwarfare / spying. Everyone's so quick to point at the NSA etc. when they think their email is being read or their OS backdoored, but nobody thinks that, actually, an *INTELLIGENCE* agency is likely to be much more sneaky than you give them credit for. And that an Iranian intelligence agency, for example, would be just as good as a US one (if not better).
USB 2.0 provides 480Mbps of (theoretical) bandwidth. So unless you go Gigabit all over your network (not unreasonable), you won't beat it with a NAS. Even then, it's only 1-and-a-bit times as fast as USB working flat-out (and the difference being if you have multiple USB busses, you can get multiple drives working at once). And USB 3.0 would beat it again. And 10Gb between the client and a server is an expensive network to deploy still.
Granted, eSATA would probably be faster but there's nothing wrong with USB for such tasks if you *don't* want to provide Gigabit connections everywhere and (presumably) greater-than-gigabit backbones.
Because downloading 3.6Tb to restore from a backup for just one day is pretty ridiculous for someone on a home broadband?
Backup to external servers is ridiculous for anyone without university-sized access to the net. Hell, the school I work for try to back up 10Gb to a remote server each night and it often fails because it took too long (and we're only allowed to do that because we're a school - the limits for even business use on the same connection are about 100Gb a month).
Absent a stupidly fast connection for a home, you have to have a physical copy that you can put somewhere else.
The fact that you *don't* see that, tells me that you probably have far too much hardware and connectivity available to you.
More than that, if you design the system properly it would never be a problem.
Watchdog timers on everything - on the hardware coming up, on the communications with Earth, etc. If you don't get a response from the timers in X seconds/minutes/days, then completely revert to the previous version of the software and try again.
So if you upgrade the software and break the radio, in a day or so of not being able to talk to Earth, the machine should notice and revert back to the previous software. If you break the upgrade completely, the watchdog timers for, e.g. OS-level monitoring, sensor control, radio-to-Earth, etc. will eventually trigger and then you can revert.
And *don't* let it remove a previous version of the software - just keep updates which automatically fall back to prior updates or the original mission software when they fail.
The biggest problem you have is not the software update, it's purely corruption of the hardware, which you can't do much to combat if it happens. But even then, I'd expect the boot sequence to start with something so minimal that it's capable of, say, checking the whole of RAM and avoiding anything that's a bit dodgy (e.g. Linux BadRAM-patch-style) and reverting to *literally* just something that shouts for help from the radio if it can't.
Just treat them like I do. Select any "question" and type another password into the answer box (one that you never give out).
Should it come to a password reset password where you're asked for no, NOBODY will ever guess it and you'll be able to reset your password either automatically (if they allow you to), or via a customer service representative (who will be wondering why your mother's maiden name was AH8hfds86, but who cares?).
Just as secure as anything else and requiring you to give out zero additional personal information, and totally UNABLE to be discovered by someone who happens to know you, for instance (unlike DOB, maiden names, etc.)
Apparently modern tech journalism consists of getting a rumour submitted and then posting it verbatim without checking a single detail with any involved party.
Thanks for the clarification. And hell, you could even read the link you posted as being derogatory of OSI's working methods and still you pointed it out.
The only questions remaining - why didn't the OP check with you, why didn't Slashdot editors check with you, and why hasn't there been an article update already?
Nuclear explosions work differently in space. This nuclear explosion you're on about to nudge things out of the way:
Precisely where is the force going to apply? And the equal and opposite force in the opposing direction, in zero gravity, with no atmosphere, against a 10km wide target? A nuclear explosion is mostly just energy, heat mainly, and in an atmosphere that causes a huge - literally the word for it - explosion of gases that push the physical objects in its path. In space... not so much. Sure, we can "feel" the effect of the sun pushing satellites but it's not much at all.
And even the largest nuclear weapons detonated on Earth left buildings standing and cities intact. Hell, there's still an archway from Nagasaki ground zero still standing.
Just what do you think an "explosion" (lit: rapid expansion of gases that aren't there in space), in a vacuum, in front of a 10km-thick wall of rock is going to do to it rather than just be pushed out of the way as it comes through?
Nuclear explosions, despite being energy-produced, tend to cause so much damage because of the atmosphere and other things they heat up and modify on the way past, shoving other things out of the way and pushing against everything (including whatever they are constrained by). This is why you can fly over them and get fancy pictures - the atmosphere itself limits the force which it would normally push up and spread spherically instead and you get a nice mushroom cloud or (if it's just a bit underground) a slight boom and no visible signs of detonation.
Exploding nuclear weapons in front of an asteriod of, say, 10km is like inflating a hot air balloon in front of a supertanker. It will just get shoved out of the way and pushed back along the asteroids original course.
Just think purely in terms of matter (because the energy won't "slow" the asteroid, only kill things on it like nuclear weapons kill people and leave cities standing) - how much does the nuclear weapon weigh, and what's that going to do if you throw it ALL against the asteroid? E=mc^2, yes, but you're still looking at affecting a HUGE mass itself.
And what's it going to do if you explode it in front of said asteroid, with nothing to constrain it, if the asteroid only takes up, say, 20% of the total spherical area? Most of its energy / mass will go the "easy" way out and not through the 10km asteroid heading towards it at stupid speeds.
And, in the end, all you've done is made a pretty burn mark and slightly warmed and irradiated the front end of an asteroid. Multiply by even 1000 nuclear weapons and you're still not going to do much that will come close to deflecting a huge object like that by hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
A "sufficiently" large number of weapons could even weigh more than the asteroid would, given the losses and speeds involved. And let's not forget - you have to do it with pixel-perfect positioning while you wait for it to come in at thousands of km per hour and all your weapons and shuttles that put them there are trying to manoeuvre within an orbit far outside anything stable or stationary to get into its path and stay there.
Feasibility really is damn near zero, unless you work in Hollywood. And firing nuclear weapons at anything substantial in space is like trying to stop someone from beating you up by putting a bubble-gum-bubble in his path.
And a huge, unmanageable MESS of code. Seriously, 100's of Mb of compiled binary is LUDICROUS for something that draws boxes on a screen.
Sure, executable sizes have grown, but 100's of Mb of CODE is still stupidly large. Data, pish, it's nothing. But, tell me, what *data* does a window manager need to store on every machine it touches? Localised text? Settings keywords? A few Mb of imagery? It's all code. And even the largest games/applications that took years to make aren't 100's of Mb's of binary code.
Slashdot Mirror
It means they will take the embassy away from Assange rather than the other way around.
They do not intend to "storm" any embassy (that's an act of war and one odious little twerp isn't worth it). They intend to use the law to remove the embassy from UK soil, without harm or foul, so that the one non-ambassadorial human present (a criminal for skipping bail) can be arrested and face trial. If then necessary, they can let the ambassador has his "new" embassy back on the same spot as the old one.
It does not, in any way, shape or form mean they could just storm the embassy with even a single uninvited police officer or they would have done so a long time ago.
You're talking military incursion. The letter states only a clever legal trick to get the one person they want (a non-ambassadorial person) when the ambassador won't co-operate. Asylum or not, extradition or not, ambassador or not, the concept of sacred embassies and diplomatic documents is not going to be violated. Threatening that is cause for Ecuador to fire weapons, literally. That's nothing close to what the letter contained, which was a legal trick to do what they want using the EXACT letter of the law to their advantage, hurting no-one, violating nowhere and never seeing a single diplomatic document that they're not supposed to see.
"I think I speak for the majority of Brits"
You don't.
Personally, the UK have done EVERYTHING they legally could have for Assange, down to challenging the extradition to the highest courts in the land, offering him bail, and he's given precisely NOTHING back. Now he's forced them into a legal corner where they can either BREACH the EU laws on extradition or not.
The only sensible option ("not") means that , without ambassadorial co-operation, they have to LEGALLY revoke the embassy's/ambassador's status (nothing wrong in UK law or the Vienna convention in that) in order to get to a criminal that the embassy is harbouring (embassies are supposed to abide by the laws of the host country). That's the only option left to them that lets them stay true to their own (and EU, and international) laws that are cast in stone.
Assange is just playing the media. The UK can give the ambassador seven day's notice and then just send a police officer in to calmly arrest Assange anyway and there's nothing the embassy can do about it (Assange is NOT covered by any of the laws involving diplomats or embassies personally). Assange won't be coming out without handcuffs and could, if pressed, find himself in a building that's no longer, legally, an embassy, with nobody else in it to protect him, and no way to escape arrest within the month. That's about the longest he could push it out for. Chances are, this time next week, he'll be before a court explaining why he skipped bail, and then serving a CAST-IRON, GUARANTEED, LEGITIMATE, UNAPPEALABLE prison sentence when he gets out of wherever he ends up.
You like charges of obstructing a police officer, obstructing justice, harbouring a criminal, aiding and abetting, etc. then?
Plus, the police are quite within their right to block access to the street "for public safety", to prevent the escape of someone facing arrest, etc. for any reasonable distance.
Assange is a dick who thinks he can find a loophole to let himself go free. Trouble is, each loophole he finds is smaller and smaller and ends up with him being arrested and deported, with more charges on top (breach of bail, failing to appear, etc.). Add a couple of years in the UK jail system when he does get out of wherever he ends up.
That's an issue for Sweden and/or the EU. They've previously refused too (and the UK still gave Assange three appeals to the highest courts and still he failed to provide legal basis to have the extradition quashed).
He's wanted in Britain for breach of bail, and to comply with EU laws on extradition that the UK are bound by. That's what he is being arrested for, not anything that actually may have happened in Sweden. If we just wanted to give him to Sweden, we'd have done so MONTHS ago when he turned up to a UK police station to answer exactly that charge.
And now, after every appeal possible, if his extradition to Sweden were unlawful, he wouldn't have needed to breach bail, we wouldn't have been able to send him there at all. Under UK/EU law, we are now obliged to hand him to Sweden, even if that means revoking the status of an embassy (which is pretty serious but totally legal).
As it was, the UK police sent the original extradition forms back THREE TIMES because the Swedish authorities failed to dot the i's and cross the t's properly.
The UK have no interest in him. He's just a pain in the arse at the moment and we tried our best to protect him (hell, he'd be in Sweden already if any other country had handled him). Now he's causing an international incident when he still has ZERO chance of leaving the building without being arrested. There is no law, statute or convention that protects him in there, under asylum or not (he has NOT been granted UK asylum, and cannot leave the building to be taken anywhere else that might recognise asylum for him).
All he's done is made the news - again - after breaching US, Swedish and (now) UK law. Until the time he skipped bail, the UK had no axe to grind (and if it did, it could have done a lot worse than it has done so far, all legitimately). Now he's going to be arrested no matter what, but he's playing to the cameras and trying to fabricate an incident where there is none.
The UK *MUST* extradite him or their laws mean nothing. The laws on embassies mean we *CAN* legally revoke embassy status from the building itself. Even the Vienna convention says we can just expel all the diplomats (so long as we don't harm them, etc.) "at any time, and for any reason". If we *MUST* extradite him, by law, and the only way to do that legally is to temporarily dissolve an embassy or expel diplomats, then that's what we have to do. One law is no greater than any other until a conflict exists. There is no conflict, hence there's only one legal path that can (and MUST) be followed. And all legal paths end up with Assange arrested and facing LONGER terms in prison no matter where he ends up or what charges may stick elsewhere. He deliberately and knowingly breached UK bail and will have to stand up in court for that at some point, no matter what.
He also said that the UK threatened to "storm" the embassy in its letter. Have you seen the letter? It says nothing of the sort.
We know how to storm embassies. We have entire special forces teams who had experience of doing just that. It does *not* involve stating an obscure UK law and saying you are "disappointed" in quite a polite, but stern, letter.
The UK has stated it will storm the embassy by force, violating the Vienna Conventions.
1) Where did the UK state that? (i.e. you HAVEN'T read the letter, which was published in the same newspaper linked to above - there is no mention of storming or even entering ANYTHING, ANYWHERE in the entire letter).
2) It doesn't violate the Vienna convention to dissolve the embassy or even expel all the diplomatic staff. Go read it. It's quite clear that the UK can do that "at any time, and for any reason". Assange isn't covered by that, no matter what.
Rather than take Assange out of the embassy, they have threatened (indirectly and politely) to take the embassy away from Assange. Which is perfectly legitimate. Not one person subject to diplomatic special treatment will have any rule of their violated or come to any harm. No breach of the Vienna Convention will occur whatsoever. But equally, at the same time, Assange finds himself sitting in an office, not an embassy, and the police can walk in and arrest him without *anyone's* permission being necessary.
It's just a bit messier than normal, but it's totally, 100% legitimate and any country, at any time, anywhere could do exactly the same too. The Ecuadorian ambassador would not be affected in any way whatsoever, merely expelled as per the law for "persona non grata" in diplomatic positions. But he could have avoided it at any point by saying "Nothing to do with me, come in, officer, and arrest this man if you need to".
He can't be made an official with diplomatic immunity without UK consent. Anything he carries may not be searched if it's Ecuadorian diplomatic communique. But he can still be arrested immediately he walks out the door, messenger, "diplomat" (unofficial without UK consent) or not.
Vienna Convention - "Article 9. The host nation may at any time and for any reason declare a particular member of the diplomatic staff to be persona non grata. The sending state must recall this person within a reasonable period of time, or otherwise this person may lose their diplomatic immunity."
*That*'s what they're really threatening. The ambassador is refusing permission to enter to arrest Assange. If he doesn't give it, they will just make him a "non-diplomat" and send the ambassador home. Then there's no-one to refuse permission to enter, and they can just walk in and arrest Assange. But having to dispel a diplomat because he was harbouring a criminal is a bit extreme when he could have just said "Okay, police, yes, in you come, he's over there" at any point.
Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations:
"Article 9. The host nation may at any time and for any reason declare a particular member of the diplomatic staff to be persona non grata. The sending state must recall this person within a reasonable period of time, or otherwise this person may lose their diplomatic immunity."
Do this to the ambassador, and then walk into the embassy, which is - AND ALWAYS HAS BEEN - UK soil, and which only the *request* of the ambassador could prevent the police entering (without other legal intervention, that is). No ambassador = nobody to withhold permission (and arguably = no embassy at all) = arrest of ASSANGE is totally 100% legal. Who cares about the ambassador? Nobody wants to arrest him and he's being a pain in the arse anyway, so sending him home is hardly a problem.
But they're trying to avoid that because recalling a diplomat is likely to piss people off even if it's a 100% totally legitimate thing to do "at any time and for any reason".
I think you'll find that's the EXACT incident that resulted in the EXACT law which the British authorities politely pointed at in this supposed "we will storm you" letter (which mentions nothing about storming, entering, revoking immunity or anything else that people think it did just because the Ecuador ambassador said so), which is the EXACT way they intend to not repeat said incident with Assange.
If you google the letter (published in an article in The Guardian newspaper) it mentions a law only. Google that laws and its origins, and it's the incident that you describe.
"You don't storm embassies and revoke diplomatic immunity for two counts of non-consensual intercourse."
Correct. And nothing has done, or threatened, either. Go find the "threat" letter, published in an article for The Guardian newspaper. There is no word "storm" or even discussion of entry to the premises at all. That's all the Ecuador embassy's fabrication.
What they've done is remind the ambassador of his obligation to oblige by UK law which includes, by right, the ability to expel the ambassador (but nothing to do with his immunity, which does not extend to Assange) if that's what it takes to arrest Assange.
Ambassadors should not be harbouring escaped criminals. No matter what goes on in Sweden or anywhere else, breach of bail is a crime, thus Assange is a criminal in the UK by his own right. He can argue about having reasonable cause in court (should he get that far), but you can't hide him knowingly and pretend that's performing a diplomatic function.
"De jure Assange is in Ecuador and not in Great Britain."
No he's not. The Ecuador embassy is UK soil and subject to the rule of UK law. Always has been. Same as every other embassy on the PLANET belonging to the host country. The "on foreign soil" thing is a myth and always has been. There's a code that means it's not polite to walk in and arrest people in there but IT'S STILL POSSIBLE. Always has been. Just because a murderer wanders into an embassy doesn't mean he's "immune". It's up to the diplomat in question as to whether the UK police can enter, but it's also a rule which can be overruled lawfully too.
Diplomatic immunity only covers diplomats. Stop those people being diplomats (which appointment required UK consent first of all) and they lose it. But Assange isn't a diplomat and, without consent, cannot be made into one.
Also, the diplomats aren't the ones who breached UK bail. It's generally considered disrespectful of the law for someone with immunity to break the laws of the host country at all (even if they can, technically, escape immediate prosecution, it's quite a violation of diplomatic protocol).
This technically comes under "harbouring a criminal" laws, not to mention Assange himself breached UK bail (ignore ALL the other crap, which hasn't been tried yet but has been found to be "valid" cause to extradite him - he's still breached UK law that has NOTHING to do with any other country or incident whatsoever).
There's also a BUCKET load of precedent here, and the rule of law says they could have done this weeks ago. They're just treading carefully because it could spark a diplomatic incident. But there's nothing that say that they can't go in and arrest Assange if they want to - under *any* international covenant. They're just trying to get the Ecuador ambassador to hand him over voluntarily because it saves a lot of paperwork, headlines and responsibility.
And the "threat" was never to storm the embassy. You don't do that. That starts (or ends) wars. The "threat" was - in Great British fashion - a politely worded but stern letter saying that they thought the Ecuador ambassador should give it up and reminding him of the rights of the UK in this regard (which is encased in UK law, which he is subject to and required to abide by even if he, personally, can't be prosecuted - and Assange personally is covered by NONE of it). The threat really is "Stop being a dickhead and hand him over, or we'll just send in a police officer and arrest him anyway and cause you a lot of embarrassment". The SAS won't be gearing up to handle an idiot like Assange but apparently it sounds better on the media (strange how Assange plays the media well but loses when he plays the legal game in a "neutral" country).
Go find the article in The Guardian and read what the letter contained. I've seen stronger threats made directly to police officers and soldiers without action being taken. Hell, I've seen stronger threats in the letters pages of The Guardian.
The only international treaty being violated is the one that says that embassies and ambassadors shouldn't break the law of the host country. Other than that, the options are really "expel ambassador" and thus gain approval to enter the premises that way or just walk in and arrest Assange (the ambassador would be powerless to stop it and wouldn't be able to stop the police even with force).
"Nobody Seems To Notice and Nobody Seems To Care."
About crackpot conspiracy theories posted on Slashdot in a hideously verbose article (and I'm one of the worst culprits for verbosity)? Damn right.
Now, please go away. If the government want in to my computer, they will get it. Chances are that I detect the attempt but even if I didn't, so what? What precisely do you think will happen that wouldn't have happened without intrusion into my personal computer?
P.S. tampering with boot sectors is a DUMB way to try to take over a computer. First, it won't work if the options for Boot Sector Protection are on. Secondly, it interferes with lots of perfectly innocent programs that people might be using (let's start at things like partition managers and go up to more interesting things like Truecrypt). Third, it's likely to balls up a minority of machines totally (Hell, I just encountered a set of machines whose BIOS checks a very specific sector on any NTFS partition for a Windows-like signature and hangs if you try to boot off anything else - so full-disk encryption is TOTALLY incompatible with that machine until the BIOS is fixed) and thus draw attention to itself.
Fourthly, those who care about people getting into their machines WILL notice. Those who don't, won't. Guess who the governments of the world would be most interested in?
Don't want the government to "find" you? Never let your machine out of your sight, never connect to the Internet, wrap it in a tinfoil hat (which seems oddly appropriate here). If they have physical access to your machine or its components at any point, it's game over. Seriously. Nothing has ever proven defeat of that.
Want to *use* your computer? Do so.
Hell, if they are going to put malware in something, they'll just stick it in an Intel chip. Who's going to see it among billions of transistors, hypervisors, microcode, etc.? Nobody. And it has complete access to anything without any hassle at all.
Please re-align your conspiracy theory and point it at brick walls. How can you be sure your house has brick walls? How do you know they didn't plant a microphone in it? How do you know there's not a thermal camera on the other side? Same thing, just as serious, just as crackpot.
"Kicked the world's ass"?
Only if you go by total number of medals won. And seeing as you fielded more athletes then any other competitor except the UK, that's hardly surprising.
Now medals per event (or even number of athletes) entered? That would be a different matter. By that standard China whip your ass (and the UK's, but hell, we lose at everything including sports we invented).
America just has the money to field lots of athletes, some portion of whom will win a medal on an international stage. The proportion isn't the best in the world, it's just the sheer weight of numbers and the money to send them all over and enter them. If China entered more athletes, you'd have had a harder time.
Hell, the UK fielded virtually the same number of athletes as the US, but the total population is one fifth of yours (but, hey, it was the London Olympics). And the UK got 63% as many medals. All that tells me is that, per capita, you get a lot less medals than lots of other places on the planet. Per athlete, you get a lot less medals than some other places on the planet.
If you took an equivalent size population from other places in the world, you'd actually come around about the middle somewhere. If that. By comparison, it's really nothing to shout about.
And, hell, we're now complaining in the UK for putting on quite a poor performance and encouraging more sport in schools, etc. That's how we took the news of the number of medals we got, because we thought it was a bit pants.
Google it.
Last time I did, it's basically believed to be a vector for detecting infection by simply making a target navigate to a web page that tries to load the font. If it's there, you can tell the PC has the font and (therefore) the infection. If it's not, it just gets substituted and you can tell from the CSS etc. what's happened.
Probably a way for the author to see if their target machine actually ended up getting infected or not.
I think your assumption that it must be "easier" to get the ore out of a monitor than a raw material is probably very false.
Indium in what form? How processed? Combined with what? Integrated into what component? It's used to form electrodes in LCD screens, but does that mean that each pixel has a coating of it three-or-four coatings deep? And only covering that pixel? How many pixels on the screen to deconstruct to get to that? How much per pixel versus much work? What if it's in a form that now requires more energy to separate it (e.g. rust contains iron and oxygen, but you don't see a market for your old rust)? What if it's next to and mixed with other chemicals that you can't filter without health hazards, or where your process has to sacrifice one for the other?
All things that wouldn't affect raw-ore refining (Who cares what happens to the other rock in the ore? Almost certainly indium will be found among heaps of junk that's easily dissolved in acid and then disposed of etc.).
It's also a bit like "uncooking" food. Yeah, my cake has eggs in it. You can try to take the eggs out after I've baked it if you like. The collatoral damage, energy, precision, processing and just sheer time involved mean that it's just not worth it.
Now if we're talking discrete components, e.g. a PCB track made of gold or copper, or a magnet in a hard drive, then you can just extract those components, burn the residue and get some value if the raw material is valuable enough. Like people stealing catalytic converters for their platinum. Who cares about what else is there, the platinum alone is easily extractable and worth the effort.
Just because it says "indium", it doesn't mean "raw indium, in the same format as it was dug out of the earth in." And, as you point out, even extracting from 1ppm is extensive, complicated, elaborate and expensive when you don't CARE about what else is in the rock and you're not paying for the rock. Just multiplying it up by even 250 doesn't mean it's any easier to extract than from the raw ore.
By the same token, extracting gold from seawater should be incredibly easy and profitable. It isn't. Because gold ore is much nicer to handle and extract. Just because it's "1ppm" doesn't even mean it's spread as dust throughout vast rock formation. It might meant just that you have to dig up a mountain to find one block of it in a lump (e.g. diamonds, gold, etc.)
Stupid thing to do. Because if I wanted to discredit another country, the most ingenious way would be to make it LOOK like they had done something, but that left subtle hints that it was them that created it.
Queue years of wrangling to get to the bottom of who exactly created it, while some other (unknown) entity who actually wrote it just walks away without suspicion.
We're talking international cyber-warfare here, aimed at nuclear processing plants. If I was making something like that, item #1 on my list of things to include would be obvious flaws and subtle hints to hint at another world nation being behind it. Hell, I'd deliberately have it written on machines with US codepages and English pathnames, even if the native language didn't translate into ASCII at all. In fact, especially if it didn't.
In the same way, NEVER believe the US when they manage to link "attacks from China" - how the HELL do they know they originated in China at all if they don't know who wrote them? And what idiot WOULDN'T route their attacks on the US via somewhere like China to try to put the blame on someone else (hell, even the spammers have worked that one out!)?
The US *want* me to think that China attacked them, for some reason. I don't know why. And the creators of Flame et al *want* me to think that it's an American-supported venture. Hell, if I was Iranian / Lebonese and clever enough, I'd attack myself just to make the "enemy" look bad and provide reason for "retaliation".
Don't be naive when it comes to international politics and, let's face it, cyberwarfare / spying. Everyone's so quick to point at the NSA etc. when they think their email is being read or their OS backdoored, but nobody thinks that, actually, an *INTELLIGENCE* agency is likely to be much more sneaky than you give them credit for. And that an Iranian intelligence agency, for example, would be just as good as a US one (if not better).
USB 2.0 provides 480Mbps of (theoretical) bandwidth. So unless you go Gigabit all over your network (not unreasonable), you won't beat it with a NAS. Even then, it's only 1-and-a-bit times as fast as USB working flat-out (and the difference being if you have multiple USB busses, you can get multiple drives working at once). And USB 3.0 would beat it again. And 10Gb between the client and a server is an expensive network to deploy still.
Granted, eSATA would probably be faster but there's nothing wrong with USB for such tasks if you *don't* want to provide Gigabit connections everywhere and (presumably) greater-than-gigabit backbones.
I'm not the OP but:
Because downloading 3.6Tb to restore from a backup for just one day is pretty ridiculous for someone on a home broadband?
Backup to external servers is ridiculous for anyone without university-sized access to the net. Hell, the school I work for try to back up 10Gb to a remote server each night and it often fails because it took too long (and we're only allowed to do that because we're a school - the limits for even business use on the same connection are about 100Gb a month).
Absent a stupidly fast connection for a home, you have to have a physical copy that you can put somewhere else.
The fact that you *don't* see that, tells me that you probably have far too much hardware and connectivity available to you.
More than that, if you design the system properly it would never be a problem.
Watchdog timers on everything - on the hardware coming up, on the communications with Earth, etc. If you don't get a response from the timers in X seconds/minutes/days, then completely revert to the previous version of the software and try again.
So if you upgrade the software and break the radio, in a day or so of not being able to talk to Earth, the machine should notice and revert back to the previous software. If you break the upgrade completely, the watchdog timers for, e.g. OS-level monitoring, sensor control, radio-to-Earth, etc. will eventually trigger and then you can revert.
And *don't* let it remove a previous version of the software - just keep updates which automatically fall back to prior updates or the original mission software when they fail.
The biggest problem you have is not the software update, it's purely corruption of the hardware, which you can't do much to combat if it happens. But even then, I'd expect the boot sequence to start with something so minimal that it's capable of, say, checking the whole of RAM and avoiding anything that's a bit dodgy (e.g. Linux BadRAM-patch-style) and reverting to *literally* just something that shouts for help from the radio if it can't.
Just treat them like I do. Select any "question" and type another password into the answer box (one that you never give out).
Should it come to a password reset password where you're asked for no, NOBODY will ever guess it and you'll be able to reset your password either automatically (if they allow you to), or via a customer service representative (who will be wondering why your mother's maiden name was AH8hfds86, but who cares?).
Just as secure as anything else and requiring you to give out zero additional personal information, and totally UNABLE to be discovered by someone who happens to know you, for instance (unlike DOB, maiden names, etc.)
Apparently modern tech journalism consists of getting a rumour submitted and then posting it verbatim without checking a single detail with any involved party.
Thanks for the clarification. And hell, you could even read the link you posted as being derogatory of OSI's working methods and still you pointed it out.
The only questions remaining - why didn't the OP check with you, why didn't Slashdot editors check with you, and why hasn't there been an article update already?
Nuclear explosions work differently in space. This nuclear explosion you're on about to nudge things out of the way:
Precisely where is the force going to apply? And the equal and opposite force in the opposing direction, in zero gravity, with no atmosphere, against a 10km wide target? A nuclear explosion is mostly just energy, heat mainly, and in an atmosphere that causes a huge - literally the word for it - explosion of gases that push the physical objects in its path. In space... not so much. Sure, we can "feel" the effect of the sun pushing satellites but it's not much at all.
And even the largest nuclear weapons detonated on Earth left buildings standing and cities intact. Hell, there's still an archway from Nagasaki ground zero still standing.
Just what do you think an "explosion" (lit: rapid expansion of gases that aren't there in space), in a vacuum, in front of a 10km-thick wall of rock is going to do to it rather than just be pushed out of the way as it comes through?
Nuclear explosions, despite being energy-produced, tend to cause so much damage because of the atmosphere and other things they heat up and modify on the way past, shoving other things out of the way and pushing against everything (including whatever they are constrained by). This is why you can fly over them and get fancy pictures - the atmosphere itself limits the force which it would normally push up and spread spherically instead and you get a nice mushroom cloud or (if it's just a bit underground) a slight boom and no visible signs of detonation.
Exploding nuclear weapons in front of an asteriod of, say, 10km is like inflating a hot air balloon in front of a supertanker. It will just get shoved out of the way and pushed back along the asteroids original course.
Just think purely in terms of matter (because the energy won't "slow" the asteroid, only kill things on it like nuclear weapons kill people and leave cities standing) - how much does the nuclear weapon weigh, and what's that going to do if you throw it ALL against the asteroid? E=mc^2, yes, but you're still looking at affecting a HUGE mass itself.
And what's it going to do if you explode it in front of said asteroid, with nothing to constrain it, if the asteroid only takes up, say, 20% of the total spherical area? Most of its energy / mass will go the "easy" way out and not through the 10km asteroid heading towards it at stupid speeds.
And, in the end, all you've done is made a pretty burn mark and slightly warmed and irradiated the front end of an asteroid. Multiply by even 1000 nuclear weapons and you're still not going to do much that will come close to deflecting a huge object like that by hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
A "sufficiently" large number of weapons could even weigh more than the asteroid would, given the losses and speeds involved. And let's not forget - you have to do it with pixel-perfect positioning while you wait for it to come in at thousands of km per hour and all your weapons and shuttles that put them there are trying to manoeuvre within an orbit far outside anything stable or stationary to get into its path and stay there.
Feasibility really is damn near zero, unless you work in Hollywood. And firing nuclear weapons at anything substantial in space is like trying to stop someone from beating you up by putting a bubble-gum-bubble in his path.
And a huge, unmanageable MESS of code. Seriously, 100's of Mb of compiled binary is LUDICROUS for something that draws boxes on a screen.
Sure, executable sizes have grown, but 100's of Mb of CODE is still stupidly large. Data, pish, it's nothing. But, tell me, what *data* does a window manager need to store on every machine it touches? Localised text? Settings keywords? A few Mb of imagery? It's all code. And even the largest games/applications that took years to make aren't 100's of Mb's of binary code.
If only people didn't need to have 600Mb just to draw a couple of buttons and widgets on an XServer screen...
Only in a prefix for units. 80m is unit-less, and is thus 80 million.
80M is nothing but a code-number, as far as English is concerned.