In the future, anything any academic institution or corporation does which is remotely of interest to the FBI and the rest of law enforcement must be surrendered to the FBI.
Those wishing to join the inquisitorial squad for extra credit report to the headmistress' office. Those not wishing to join the inquisitorial squad will be required to submit to questioning.
Congratulations, America, you almost have your own Stasi. You should be proud. Keep defending those freedoms kids, your government needs you.
Only a few years, and children will be turning in their parents for sedition.
Why would your elected representatives give a crap about what you say? You don't make campaign contributions, you just vote for them. The campaign contributions and other legal bribes are what controls the real power.
They know exactly who they work for, and it sure as hell isn't you. They don't care about job creation, they care about corporate profits.
This is why the US government is letting the copyright cartels write significant chunks of treaties like the TPP... the US government is most assuredly doing the bidding of these corporations.
Make no mistake about it, they're not working for you or your interests.
Like it or not, a lot of public opinion polls are paid for by people who want to support a specific point.
Public opinion polls these days are as much PR and marketing as anything else.
Honestly, Pew makes money doing this stuff; honest player or not, they have a vested interest in keeping up the belief that their stuff is honest, unbiased, and accurate.
But I'm entirely willing to believe opinion polls are carefully crafted, or sneakily tweaked, to arrive at the conclusions they've been commissioned to a arrive at.
Sadly, it's verbatim from the source article at the Register. So, blame them.
What should really alarm is this:
The perennial lure of USB as bait works too. The team dropped 18 sticks around hospitals loaded with malware that executed on nursing stations - terminals that are something of a gold mine for attackers because they retain harvestable credentials for nurses and physicians who log in.
From a humble USB stick, the hackers say they busted in to hospital drug dispensary service. That work-in-progress could grant the team the ability to manipulate inventory. "If this medication were then given to a patient, it would likely harm or kill the patient," they say.
So, scattering around random USB sticks will cause hospital staff to go "ooh, shiny" and plug into computers used for medical purposes.
Basically there is a huge problem, likely not limited to hospitals, in which basic security is non-existent, and networks are way out of date and insecure to begin with.
I suspect a lot of corporations would fall for the exact same thing. And that's quite scary.
If you get a search warrant for my property, it allows you to conduct your own fucking search... it sure as shit doesn't compel me to show you around and help you find the stuff you're looking for. A warrant isn't a magical unicorn, it's a right to search. But it doesn't mean the one being searched needs to assist.
You can't have it both ways, either you want secure devices, or you want insecure devices to support the police state.
There is no "mostly secure device except for the police state", technology doesn't work that way, and if one person can exploit it someone else can.
What you want is a society in which the police can demand any and all parties assist in whatever their needs are.
I have no problem with basic computer skills.. I have a problem with calling it computer science, and actually expecting you're going to teach everybody to code.
Basic computer literacy is a fine and dandy thing, but unless they're just using an over-inflated terminology, "computer science" and programming have no relevance for most of these kids.
I am against a technology company being compelled to undermine encryption technology so that the law enforcement can go with their usual scope creep from "just for terrorists", to "just for really bad criminals", to "well, maybe tax evasion", to "ok, how about copyright infringement", and finally "because you aren't allowed to keep secrets from us".
Mark my words, it would be a very short time where every fucking traffic stop, and the cop whips out his handy dandy little phone cracker to check your phone in case you've done anything illegal. You know, just in case they missed something.
Tell you what, you want the bullshit scenario you describe, make the encryption strong, and make it illegal to not unlock the phone for the police... have your fucking thought crime where keeping secrets from the government is illegal.
But don't for a minute pretend this won't go from "this one exceptional circumstance" to "any time we want". Because every other exceptional tool they promised was special and only for extraordinary situations has become used commonly.
Enjoy your fucking police state.
But in a world where law enforcement commits perjury by parallel construction to lie about the evidence they have on you and where it came from... you can't trust them with these tools. Because they use the tools they said would only be used for terrorism, and then it starts to get used for everything else.
If you found my computer encrypted and I said "no, I won't decrypt it for you", do you think you could just get a warrant and have the people who built the encryption just decode it? Or do you think you'd have to crack it yourself or otherwise coerce me into opening it for you?
Decryption which is so easily bypassed is useless, and it will be misused by both the criminals in law enforcement, and the rest of the criminals.
You can't have workable encryption if law enforcement can do an end run around it. And once American law enforcement has it, every other government will demand it.
Land of the free? Home of the brave? How about land of the scared and whiny who have decided that total compliance with a surveillance state is required?
This is a publicity stunt, but Americans should be terrified that it is now considered un-American for a corporation to refuse to assist the government to spy on citizens and bypass protections.
I would at least expect some of the Republicans to be howling about this, but it seems like all sides of American politics have pretty much said "refusal to comply with the government demands to spy on people is wrong, we need more government spying".
Holy crap, guys, really?
Papers please, comrade. You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Ah, but you see... this will give them even more ammunition to say "we're training them, but they're still not qualified to do the job", and then demand even more H1B visas.
Letting code.org drive the show here is basically putting the direction of education in the hands of corporations. That really won't end well. I can imagine a generation of kids getting screwed out of a relevant education, and forced to take subjects they're not interested in to get a high school degree.
That kid who is going to be an electrician or a plumber because he's not so into school? He might not be able to get his high-school diploma if he can't follow along.
Not everybody needs this, and this is entirely for self-serving outcomes of a couple of tech giants who have been allowed to hijack education.
That's a FUD stretch. There's been no suggestion that any telemetry stuff accepts inbound connections.
Sorry, but that is complete and utter bullshit.. or at least, there is an indirect mechanism:
Full is where things get a little dicey, depending on how much you prize your privacy. If your system reports back strange crashes that Microsoft techies can't get their heads around, they can request extra data from your machine, which Windows 10 will hand over under remote control if management approves. This extra information can include some of your files so the engineers can recreate the exact crash in their labs using your data and apps. Microsofties can also run diagnostic tools on your system to gather more evidence. Here's Microsoft's explanation of the process: Before more info is gathered, Microsoft's privacy governance team, including privacy and other subject matter experts, must approve the diagnostics request made by a Microsoft engineer. If the request is approved, Microsoft engineers can use the following capabilities to get the information: Ability to run a limited, pre-approved list of Microsoft certified diagnostic tools, such as msinfo32.exe, powercfg.exe, and dxdiag.exe. Ability to get registry keys. Ability to gather user content, such as documents, if they might have been the trigger for the issue.
If Microsoft engineers can request information about your machine -- like we're meant to believe they're sitting around looking for problems on everybody's machine -- then that either has to be a push to you, or on your next upload you get sent a payload which says "gather the following".
But you'll notice it says "remote control" and provides a mechanism to run programs - which tells me there is now a mechanism to remotely control machines and run software. Like that won't get exploited real quick.
They're using this because Windows 10 is essentially an extended fucking beta where they're building it as they go, and want to measure how much of a shit job they're doing.
And if most versions can't select the Security only policy, what's to say that it won't be long before you can't deselect full?
Sorry, but Microsoft has given themselves the right to do remote administration and data gathering... and for all but the ones which can select Security, they'll do it in such a way that they can personally identify you. Oh, and apparently they'll gather some of your documents as well.
No fucking way we can trust them with this, because as soon as they have the ability to tell your computer to package up some data and send it to them, some asshole in law enforcement is going to demand they misuse it. And don't say they won't, because that's exactly the kind of shit law enforcement and the security agencies are doing. No way they won't show up with an NSL demanding information and forbidding Microsoft from admitting to it.
There needs to be a setting which says "you mayyro.slashdot.orgumstances collect any information as I do not consent to it". If there isn't, Windows 10 is going to cause Microsoft headaches they can't even begin to imagine... starting with any country which has privacy laws that a fucking EULA can't overrule.
Some of what is described should be illegal for them to do. In fact, in some places, I'm pretty sure it is.
And, as I recall... it was a gaping security hole they deprecated.
Then they did the same thing in Vista with gadgets. Also, a gaping security hole they deprecated.
And, I seem to remember they had them in Windows 7. And, again, it was a gaping security hole they deprecated.
Trusting Microsoft hasn't fucked this up again is idiotic.
But, more importantly, putting fucking ads on people's computers pretty much means Microsoft have gone full asshole on this one, and have really decided to fuck over their user base.
Shit like this needs to stop. We don't have our computers to provide Microsoft with fucking ad revenue, we have them to do work and manage our stuff.
I'm really beginning to think I'd be better off running my Windows 8.1 behind my own firewall with all updates turned off -- Windows 10 sounds like a bigger pile of shit every week.
Currently, it uses your keyfob to "authenticate" the request.
LOL, years ago, a friend decided he wanted a remote starter in his Accord.
No word of a lie, the only way the dealer could figure out how to do it was to take one of his physical keys (with some chip thingy) and wire it in under the hood somewhere, and they couldn't get him a replacement, because the chip thingy was expensive and intended to not be counterfeited.
I remember thinking, "if your dealer can't find a better way to do that, why are they advertising this?".
It struck me as one of the worst solutions imaginable, and I always wondered if since the key was now hard-wired into the ignition somewhere, it wouldn't be easier to hotwire it since they'd essentially defeated the security the key was meant to provide. The car now pretty much always said "yes" to the whole "is chip present" thing.
Using the VIN, which is stamped on the windshield and all over the car... that strikes me as being on par with the same level of ineptitude.
No authentication at all except a number printed on the outside of the car and which varies according to known values? Someone has no business writing such things.
Awesome, now when I get really bad service in a restaurant I can leave a 1 Satoshi tip instead of my current penny to say "fuck you" to terrible wait-staff.
Wasn't the whole point of digital currencies to avoid the need for a government to bless (and therefore control) a particularly unit of money?
But, seriously, whoever believed that it would be magically exempted from government attention?
I always thought the whole "yarg, it's digital therefore free from teh government" to be ridiculous. Sure, smear yourself in unicorn poop, it has magical properties.
There was simply never going to be a scenario in which governments went "well, dammit, it's digital and they say it's exempt from us, guess there's nothing we can do".
LOL... "This is awful. If we were lifting the squirrel with a motor, railgun, or electric catapult, with 1.21 gigawatts we could send it screaming upward at ridiculous speeds."
I live in a place with an overabundance of squirrels... and I insist someone does the 1.21 gigawatt squirrel railgun thingy... you know, purely in the name of science.
Slashdot Mirror
In the future, anything any academic institution or corporation does which is remotely of interest to the FBI and the rest of law enforcement must be surrendered to the FBI.
Those wishing to join the inquisitorial squad for extra credit report to the headmistress' office. Those not wishing to join the inquisitorial squad will be required to submit to questioning.
Congratulations, America, you almost have your own Stasi. You should be proud. Keep defending those freedoms kids, your government needs you.
Only a few years, and children will be turning in their parents for sedition.
LOL, really? Skids? What is this, middle school?
Keep is classy, guys. Keep it classy.
Why would your elected representatives give a crap about what you say? You don't make campaign contributions, you just vote for them. The campaign contributions and other legal bribes are what controls the real power.
They know exactly who they work for, and it sure as hell isn't you. They don't care about job creation, they care about corporate profits.
This is why the US government is letting the copyright cartels write significant chunks of treaties like the TPP ... the US government is most assuredly doing the bidding of these corporations.
Make no mistake about it, they're not working for you or your interests.
Or bond ratings agencies.
I suspect most people, except the people who cite those things, have long since assumed they're full of shit and the conclusions are paid for.
Why would you assume it's honest and objective information? Someone has to make money off it.
And if you don't like that, start your own foundation or think tank, and have them publish stuff to your liking.
Sorry, it's all PR and marketing. It sure as hell aint facts or accurate predictons.
Like it or not, a lot of public opinion polls are paid for by people who want to support a specific point.
Public opinion polls these days are as much PR and marketing as anything else.
Honestly, Pew makes money doing this stuff; honest player or not, they have a vested interest in keeping up the belief that their stuff is honest, unbiased, and accurate.
But I'm entirely willing to believe opinion polls are carefully crafted, or sneakily tweaked, to arrive at the conclusions they've been commissioned to a arrive at.
Sadly, it's verbatim from the source article at the Register. So, blame them.
What should really alarm is this:
So, scattering around random USB sticks will cause hospital staff to go "ooh, shiny" and plug into computers used for medical purposes.
Basically there is a huge problem, likely not limited to hospitals, in which basic security is non-existent, and networks are way out of date and insecure to begin with.
I suspect a lot of corporations would fall for the exact same thing. And that's quite scary.
If you get a search warrant for my property, it allows you to conduct your own fucking search ... it sure as shit doesn't compel me to show you around and help you find the stuff you're looking for. A warrant isn't a magical unicorn, it's a right to search. But it doesn't mean the one being searched needs to assist.
You can't have it both ways, either you want secure devices, or you want insecure devices to support the police state.
There is no "mostly secure device except for the police state", technology doesn't work that way, and if one person can exploit it someone else can.
What you want is a society in which the police can demand any and all parties assist in whatever their needs are.
In Soviet America, phone searches you.
I have no problem with basic computer skills .. I have a problem with calling it computer science, and actually expecting you're going to teach everybody to code.
Basic computer literacy is a fine and dandy thing, but unless they're just using an over-inflated terminology, "computer science" and programming have no relevance for most of these kids.
I am against a technology company being compelled to undermine encryption technology so that the law enforcement can go with their usual scope creep from "just for terrorists", to "just for really bad criminals", to "well, maybe tax evasion", to "ok, how about copyright infringement", and finally "because you aren't allowed to keep secrets from us".
Mark my words, it would be a very short time where every fucking traffic stop, and the cop whips out his handy dandy little phone cracker to check your phone in case you've done anything illegal. You know, just in case they missed something.
Tell you what, you want the bullshit scenario you describe, make the encryption strong, and make it illegal to not unlock the phone for the police ... have your fucking thought crime where keeping secrets from the government is illegal.
But don't for a minute pretend this won't go from "this one exceptional circumstance" to "any time we want". Because every other exceptional tool they promised was special and only for extraordinary situations has become used commonly.
Enjoy your fucking police state.
But in a world where law enforcement commits perjury by parallel construction to lie about the evidence they have on you and where it came from ... you can't trust them with these tools. Because they use the tools they said would only be used for terrorism, and then it starts to get used for everything else.
If you found my computer encrypted and I said "no, I won't decrypt it for you", do you think you could just get a warrant and have the people who built the encryption just decode it? Or do you think you'd have to crack it yourself or otherwise coerce me into opening it for you?
Decryption which is so easily bypassed is useless, and it will be misused by both the criminals in law enforcement, and the rest of the criminals.
You can't have workable encryption if law enforcement can do an end run around it. And once American law enforcement has it, every other government will demand it.
Land of the free? Home of the brave? How about land of the scared and whiny who have decided that total compliance with a surveillance state is required?
Pathetic.
This is a publicity stunt, but Americans should be terrified that it is now considered un-American for a corporation to refuse to assist the government to spy on citizens and bypass protections.
I would at least expect some of the Republicans to be howling about this, but it seems like all sides of American politics have pretty much said "refusal to comply with the government demands to spy on people is wrong, we need more government spying".
Holy crap, guys, really?
Papers please, comrade. You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Ah, but you see ... this will give them even more ammunition to say "we're training them, but they're still not qualified to do the job", and then demand even more H1B visas.
Letting code.org drive the show here is basically putting the direction of education in the hands of corporations. That really won't end well. I can imagine a generation of kids getting screwed out of a relevant education, and forced to take subjects they're not interested in to get a high school degree.
That kid who is going to be an electrician or a plumber because he's not so into school? He might not be able to get his high-school diploma if he can't follow along.
Not everybody needs this, and this is entirely for self-serving outcomes of a couple of tech giants who have been allowed to hijack education.
Terrible idea.
Sorry, but that is complete and utter bullshit .. or at least, there is an indirect mechanism:
If Microsoft engineers can request information about your machine -- like we're meant to believe they're sitting around looking for problems on everybody's machine -- then that either has to be a push to you, or on your next upload you get sent a payload which says "gather the following".
But you'll notice it says "remote control" and provides a mechanism to run programs - which tells me there is now a mechanism to remotely control machines and run software. Like that won't get exploited real quick.
They're using this because Windows 10 is essentially an extended fucking beta where they're building it as they go, and want to measure how much of a shit job they're doing.
And if most versions can't select the Security only policy, what's to say that it won't be long before you can't deselect full?
Sorry, but Microsoft has given themselves the right to do remote administration and data gathering ... and for all but the ones which can select Security, they'll do it in such a way that they can personally identify you. Oh, and apparently they'll gather some of your documents as well.
No fucking way we can trust them with this, because as soon as they have the ability to tell your computer to package up some data and send it to them, some asshole in law enforcement is going to demand they misuse it. And don't say they won't, because that's exactly the kind of shit law enforcement and the security agencies are doing. No way they won't show up with an NSL demanding information and forbidding Microsoft from admitting to it.
There needs to be a setting which says "you mayyro.slashdot.orgumstances collect any information as I do not consent to it". If there isn't, Windows 10 is going to cause Microsoft headaches they can't even begin to imagine ... starting with any country which has privacy laws that a fucking EULA can't overrule.
Some of what is described should be illegal for them to do. In fact, in some places, I'm pretty sure it is.
And, as I recall ... it was a gaping security hole they deprecated.
Then they did the same thing in Vista with gadgets. Also, a gaping security hole they deprecated.
And, I seem to remember they had them in Windows 7. And, again, it was a gaping security hole they deprecated.
Trusting Microsoft hasn't fucked this up again is idiotic.
But, more importantly, putting fucking ads on people's computers pretty much means Microsoft have gone full asshole on this one, and have really decided to fuck over their user base.
Shit like this needs to stop. We don't have our computers to provide Microsoft with fucking ad revenue, we have them to do work and manage our stuff.
I'm really beginning to think I'd be better off running my Windows 8.1 behind my own firewall with all updates turned off -- Windows 10 sounds like a bigger pile of shit every week.
LOL, years ago, a friend decided he wanted a remote starter in his Accord.
No word of a lie, the only way the dealer could figure out how to do it was to take one of his physical keys (with some chip thingy) and wire it in under the hood somewhere, and they couldn't get him a replacement, because the chip thingy was expensive and intended to not be counterfeited.
I remember thinking, "if your dealer can't find a better way to do that, why are they advertising this?".
It struck me as one of the worst solutions imaginable, and I always wondered if since the key was now hard-wired into the ignition somewhere, it wouldn't be easier to hotwire it since they'd essentially defeated the security the key was meant to provide. The car now pretty much always said "yes" to the whole "is chip present" thing.
Using the VIN, which is stamped on the windshield and all over the car ... that strikes me as being on par with the same level of ineptitude.
No authentication at all except a number printed on the outside of the car and which varies according to known values? Someone has no business writing such things.
When you see weekly stories about horses getting hacked via a smartphone app with trivial security, do let us know.
If these connected cars have security as bad as this, it's pretty pathetic, if not bordering on criminally incompetent.
The problem is every idiot rushes to the market to say "ZOMG ... teh app", and what they produce is complete and utter crap.
You mean an app used utterly lame security and used something readily available?
Well, I'm totally shocked.
No, wait, the other one where I pretty much expect all of this crap to be broken by design.
Almost without fail, if you can control it from your smartphone, chances are good that someone else can.
No thanks.
Awesome, now when I get really bad service in a restaurant I can leave a 1 Satoshi tip instead of my current penny to say "fuck you" to terrible wait-staff.
Google tells me that, right now, "1 Bitcoin equals 424.75 US Dollar".
So, arguably, Bitcoin is an equally terrible currency as gold.
Does Bitcoin even have pennies?
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
--Bilbo Baggins
My god, it's the network police.
Surprise!!
But, seriously, whoever believed that it would be magically exempted from government attention?
I always thought the whole "yarg, it's digital therefore free from teh government" to be ridiculous. Sure, smear yourself in unicorn poop, it has magical properties.
There was simply never going to be a scenario in which governments went "well, dammit, it's digital and they say it's exempt from us, guess there's nothing we can do".
Anybody who believed that was delusional.
LOL ... "This is awful. If we were lifting the squirrel with a motor, railgun, or electric catapult, with 1.21 gigawatts we could send it screaming upward at ridiculous speeds."
I live in a place with an overabundance of squirrels ... and I insist someone does the 1.21 gigawatt squirrel railgun thingy ... you know, purely in the name of science.
We don't want caveat emptor for this shit, we want companies who are accountable for the security of the products they make.
Do you want to live in a world where security boils down to "too bad, suckers"?
This bullshit of caveat emptor is why we have such shit security on the web in the first place.
More companies need to get their knuckles rapped and have penalties when they do an incompetent job at securing such stuff.
I prefer the camel toe punishment myself.
I've been very naughty.
You made it halfway?