You're right. Someone saw something that looked like a DVD, and treated it like a DVD. The fools. (The warning on the disc was, apparently, the entirely clear and obvious phrase "NO APPLE SLOT IN DRIVE" in the bottom corner of the label. You did look at the article, right?)
The "warning" was actually less than the size of a postage stamp. It's also entirely possible for someone to remove the disk from the sleave without looking at the back. Did the actual disk have such a warning on it?
Tomorrow I'm going to leave a platter of poisoned brownies in the lunchroom at work, along with a big sign saying "BROWNIES". It's all on the up-and-up as long as I leave a "NO MOUTH FOOD" label in the bottom corner of the sign, right?
You'd probably want to put your warning on the back of the sign and ensure it is no larger than 10x20mm
Looking for copyrighted material is one thing. Grabbing anything which could be a public key is another.
Even looking for copyrighted material (at least properly) is difficult. As opposed to the usual highly unreliable method of regex matching of file names.
There is not much that AT&T can do about encryption. Support they do try to block or ban traffic which looks suspicious, well people will just respond by making the traffic look less suspicious.
Or make everything look "suspicious" then sue...
Suppose they try to decrypt? Then people will use better encryption schemes that they'll have a harder and harder time until it's impossible to decrypt it all.BR> IIRC this is already the case.
How will they deal with packet encryption? What if a hardware device were to literally encrypt every single packet with a different key of 128bit length, on each end?
This dosn't have to be hardware based. The main problem is one of key managment specifically ensuring that the far end knows which key to use for which packet, even if some packets don't make it.
As has been pointed out, Novell isn't a creditor: they didn't loan SCO any money, but instead SCO kept Novell's money and used it to pay lawyers and salaries.
Until Novell get there money (or at least the court works out how much it is) it's unknown if SCO is still viable or not.
Lots of countries have physical id cards that are nearly impossible to forge. Many of those have no electronic components at all, are fully human readable, and are excellent from a privacy point of view.
In which case the other likelyhood is infiltration of wherever these are issued or bribary/blackmail of those already working there. A more likely reason for a low level of id cards being forged is that (unlike those proposed in the US and UK) they are "low value".
Identity tells you a great deal about intent. Countries like Israel, for example, base much of their airline security on deriving intent from identity, and their airlines seem to be doing pretty well.
Israel is in a state of war where the sides can reasonably easily identified by ethnic origin. It's also the case that part of El Al's security involves interviewing people by a highly trained interviewer, something which has very little to do with checking IDs.
A analogy is taking a known safe drug and modifying it slightly to be more effective.
You'd be quite confident that it would also be safe because its based on a known safe drug but you'd run tests just to be sure.
When it comes to biochemistry tiny differences can have very great effects. You don't even have to alter chemical formulas, if the compound in question contains one or more chiral carbon atoms.
Current GM is about the same as running a computer program, then copying a section of bytes from one place in the exe to another and see what happens.
Except you can't be sure exactly where the your code will end up or even how many copies of it will end up in the target executable. Then your testing may well not be exhaustive.
DNA is just more robust than computer code.
It's more that organisms tend to have mechanisms to repair damaged DNA. Whereas computers have no ability to repair (or even identify) damaged code.
What's to say some variant of a protein created in a GM crop won't trigger massive alergic reactions in a very small proportion of the population.
Maybe these people know what they are allergic to. The problem with GM food being not labled at all (let alone with the details of exactly how it has been modified) is that they may think something is safe to eat when it isn't.
The lack of restraint on GM food is ridiculous. Is anyone surprised the FDA allows
cloned food if they allow GM food?
Most likely cloned food would be both. Since it's far easier and cheaper to breed animals naturally. Just that you don't know what meiosis might do to GM cells.
What would you say, by the way, if we were trading this information with Iran, Russia, China and/or Nigeria? Same difference?
When you consider that there exist "webs of trust" between governments together with all sorts of spying activities it might be better to ask "who arn't they trading this information with". Most people don't even know who their own government trusts.
but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program
Maybe educating people to avoid "sexual predators online" would also educate them to identify all forms of "con artists". The latter would probably not be welcomed by many politicans.
You know what else makes this whole thing rediculous? How many kids have you heard of being attacked by so-called 'predators' they came in contact with through MySpace? By contrast, how many kids have been molested by people they know and trust
It has always been the case that a big fuss has been made about "stranger danger" even though strangers actually make up a tiny proportion of all kinds of child abuse
- in real life? Teachers seem to be one of the biggest risks these days - especially when it comes to female teachers and under-aged (male) students.
A major issue here would be sexism, specifically that many people just cannot believe that girls and women can be sex offenders at all.
I can't help but notice that the safety measures they've come up do all of nothing to combat what appear to be more common vectors of predatory involvement.
That would be difficult considering that the highest risk comes from parents...
Patrick Smith of the New York Times points out just how pointless the TSA searches have become. Why for example do they confiscate tubes of toothpaste or shampoo bottles potentially containing explosive materials, only to throw them out in the trash unchecked? Why do cleaners and garbage workers handle these supposedly dangerous contraband unprotected? The ban on fluids itself flies in the face of scientific opinion: "The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction."
Especially if you can buy bottles of liquid at shops after the "security check". What appears to be ignored is that a bottle (especially one full of water) makes a quite effective club. (A glass bottle being likely to be transformed into a knife after being used as a club...)
I think the opposite is true. This TSA site is needed at all because right now it's hard to prove that you're not on the list of bad guys. If you carry biometrically secure identification and have a unique identifier, that becomes much easier.
Thing is that outside of fiction such things simply do not exist. Any actual ID card scheme will at best be only as secure as current systems.
A lot of the intrusions into our civil liberties and the lack of privacy are a result of not having good identifiers.
Actually what you need to know is intent knowing identity isn't actually of much use.
In any case, the private sector is already going this route anyway with identification like the Clear card.
Thus you can be sure that all future airline terrorists are likely to have one of these:)
If that's what it takes. Remember the FBI under Hoover? Did all kinds of abusive stuff, until it finally reached the point where Congress had to rein them in and enact strict controls on their behavior, mainly because Congress itself was threatened by Hoover's activities. Hell, the bastard had dirt on all of them. However, many of those restrictions on law enforcement were undone with the Patriot Act, CALEA and other poorly-designed laws designed to strip civil liberties from us. I have the feeling that we're going to have to suffer through yet another cycle of government abuse (worse this time) until the pendulum swings back and some controls get put back in place.
A very fundermental problem is the idea that increasing official power (and reducing "civil liberties") somehow increases security. Something which never appears to have actually happened in recorded history. Indeed it appears more likely that giving law enforcement too much power is that they are too busy harrassing innocent people to have much time for dealing with criminals. With a real risk of establishing a positive feedback loop. Especially since law enforcement always claims to need more power and the idea that reducing law enforcement powers might actually result in them doing a better job is just too radical for many people.
Even if we had fusion, I don't think it would generate that much helium, would it? I don't have time to do the math, but that's the whole point of fusion, right, that it generates massive amounts of energy (potentially) from relatively little fuel.
There is plenty of Helium production going on, just that it's spread thinly over the entire planet.
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
Except that if you were to use Duterium/Tritium fusion you wind up with Helium-5 which is the least stable isotope of Helium. If the aim were production of Helium then Duterium only fusion would be the best process.
However, private citizens/groups aren't allowed to skirt the laws by printing a statement to that effect in a handbook, similar to the manner in which EULA tend not to hold up in court, even though "the customer agreed to it".
Any such statements are subject to the "law of the land".
If the contract for your job states "we can fire you for any reason", and you're fired on the grounds of race or gender, the company would most likely be found guilty in a wrongful termination lawsuit.
This would be a fairly simple case the document says "we can do X" where there's a statute which says "nobody can do X". It other situations someone might need make a convincing argument to a judge regarding the applicability of statute or case law...
Even with a private school, if they don't follow their written judicial procedures to the letter, they'll often lose. Schools like to tell students and their parents not to retain lawyers during internal judicial / discipline proceedings, saying it makes the process "adversarial". They're trying to kick you out or impose some other sanction. It's hard to imagine it getting any more adversarial than that.
It's also not unknown for these kind of "kangaroo courts" to be used when a real court (either civil or criminal) would be more appropriate.
I find it very strange that universities can be treated differently from other services. You pay for a service, and if you are kicked out for no valid reason you should be able to get some money. After all, you have to pay another university + you will lose income because you will finish your education later.
In many places you can sue for considerably more than you may have paid them. Since the law allows for the likes of "consequential losses", "loss of bargin", etc. The general principle being that it's the responsibility of the party breaching a contract to accept all the consequences of their actions.
This is not "online surveillance going too far". It's "Some universities employ complete morons who can't even read.
Assuming whatever made the match is actually human. This looks more like the sort of thing some sort of "bot" would flag. It's more a matter of "comprehend" rather than "read". Even very stupid humans can realise that a word can have completly different meanings. e.g. is a book entitled "Famous people I have Shot" the biography of contract killer or a press photographer?
Slashdot Mirror
If the system's not on the internet until the bad actor deliberately makes a link for the purpose of sabotage, it is then only sabotage.
It it was that trivial for someone to hook it up to the Internet then the system design was probably bad in the first place.
It depends if you consider Turkey as European.
No, since the majority of the country is in Asia.
You're right. Someone saw something that looked like a DVD, and treated it like a DVD. The fools. (The warning on the disc was, apparently, the entirely clear and obvious phrase "NO APPLE SLOT IN DRIVE" in the bottom corner of the label. You did look at the article, right?)
The "warning" was actually less than the size of a postage stamp. It's also entirely possible for someone to remove the disk from the sleave without looking at the back. Did the actual disk have such a warning on it?
Tomorrow I'm going to leave a platter of poisoned brownies in the lunchroom at work, along with a big sign saying "BROWNIES". It's all on the up-and-up as long as I leave a "NO MOUTH FOOD" label in the bottom corner of the sign, right?
You'd probably want to put your warning on the back of the sign and ensure it is no larger than 10x20mm
Looking for copyrighted material is one thing. Grabbing anything which could be a public key is another.
Even looking for copyrighted material (at least properly) is difficult. As opposed to the usual highly unreliable method of regex matching of file names.
There is not much that AT&T can do about encryption. Support they do try to block or ban traffic which looks suspicious, well people will just respond by making the traffic look less suspicious.
Or make everything look "suspicious" then sue...
Suppose they try to decrypt? Then people will use better encryption schemes that they'll have a harder and harder time until it's impossible to decrypt it all.BR>
IIRC this is already the case.
How will they deal with packet encryption? What if a hardware device were to literally encrypt every single packet with a different key of 128bit length, on each end?
This dosn't have to be hardware based. The main problem is one of key managment specifically ensuring that the far end knows which key to use for which packet, even if some packets don't make it.
As has been pointed out, Novell isn't a creditor: they didn't loan SCO any money, but instead SCO kept Novell's money and used it to pay lawyers and salaries.
Until Novell get there money (or at least the court works out how much it is) it's unknown if SCO is still viable or not.
The law firm is a partnership, but SCO is not: SCO is probably a limited liability corporation, which would limit any investors' liability.
Thing is that the executives may be liable if they enguaged in illegal acts. That they might also be shareholders isn't going to stop this happening.
Lots of countries have physical id cards that are nearly impossible to forge. Many of those have no electronic components at all, are fully human readable, and are excellent from a privacy point of view.
In which case the other likelyhood is infiltration of wherever these are issued or bribary/blackmail of those already working there. A more likely reason for a low level of id cards being forged is that (unlike those proposed in the US and UK) they are "low value".
Identity tells you a great deal about intent. Countries like Israel, for example, base much of their airline security on deriving intent from identity, and their airlines seem to be doing pretty well.
Israel is in a state of war where the sides can reasonably easily identified by ethnic origin. It's also the case that part of El Al's security involves interviewing people by a highly trained interviewer, something which has very little to do with checking IDs.
A analogy is taking a known safe drug and modifying it slightly to be more effective. You'd be quite confident that it would also be safe because its based on a known safe drug but you'd run tests just to be sure.
When it comes to biochemistry tiny differences can have very great effects. You don't even have to alter chemical formulas, if the compound in question contains one or more chiral carbon atoms.
Current GM is about the same as running a computer program, then copying a section of bytes from one place in the exe to another and see what happens.
Except you can't be sure exactly where the your code will end up or even how many copies of it will end up in the target executable. Then your testing may well not be exhaustive.
DNA is just more robust than computer code.
It's more that organisms tend to have mechanisms to repair damaged DNA. Whereas computers have no ability to repair (or even identify) damaged code.
What's to say some variant of a protein created in a GM crop won't trigger massive alergic reactions in a very small proportion of the population.
Maybe these people know what they are allergic to. The problem with GM food being not labled at all (let alone with the details of exactly how it has been modified) is that they may think something is safe to eat when it isn't.
The lack of restraint on GM food is ridiculous. Is anyone surprised the FDA allows cloned food if they allow GM food?
Most likely cloned food would be both. Since it's far easier and cheaper to breed animals naturally. Just that you don't know what meiosis might do to GM cells.
What would you say, by the way, if we were trading this information with Iran, Russia, China and/or Nigeria? Same difference?
When you consider that there exist "webs of trust" between governments together with all sorts of spying activities it might be better to ask "who arn't they trading this information with". Most people don't even know who their own government trusts.
but if this were really about protecting our children, it would be an educational program
Maybe educating people to avoid "sexual predators online" would also educate them to identify all forms of "con artists". The latter would probably not be welcomed by many politicans.
You know what else makes this whole thing rediculous? How many kids have you heard of being attacked by so-called 'predators' they came in contact with through MySpace? By contrast, how many kids have been molested by people they know and trust
It has always been the case that a big fuss has been made about "stranger danger" even though strangers actually make up a tiny proportion of all kinds of child abuse
- in real life? Teachers seem to be one of the biggest risks these days - especially when it comes to female teachers and under-aged (male) students.
A major issue here would be sexism, specifically that many people just cannot believe that girls and women can be sex offenders at all.
I can't help but notice that the safety measures they've come up do all of nothing to combat what appear to be more common vectors of predatory involvement.
That would be difficult considering that the highest risk comes from parents...
With a half-zillion free email providers out there, blocking a kid's email address will last all of two minutes.
:) It depends on parents actually knowing all the email addresses their children might have.
If that long
Which just meant that all their overseas users lived in Beverly Hills, 90210.
The most obvious. Though no doubt some people looked up the address of a random US company...
Patrick Smith of the New York Times points out just how pointless the TSA searches have become. Why for example do they confiscate tubes of toothpaste or shampoo bottles potentially containing explosive materials, only to throw them out in the trash unchecked? Why do cleaners and garbage workers handle these supposedly dangerous contraband unprotected? The ban on fluids itself flies in the face of scientific opinion: "The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction."
Especially if you can buy bottles of liquid at shops after the "security check".
What appears to be ignored is that a bottle (especially one full of water) makes a quite effective club. (A glass bottle being likely to be transformed into a knife after being used as a club...)
I think the opposite is true. This TSA site is needed at all because right now it's hard to prove that you're not on the list of bad guys. If you carry biometrically secure identification and have a unique identifier, that becomes much easier.
:)
Thing is that outside of fiction such things simply do not exist. Any actual ID card scheme will at best be only as secure as current systems.
A lot of the intrusions into our civil liberties and the lack of privacy are a result of not having good identifiers.
Actually what you need to know is intent knowing identity isn't actually of much use.
In any case, the private sector is already going this route anyway with identification like the Clear card.
Thus you can be sure that all future airline terrorists are likely to have one of these
If that's what it takes. Remember the FBI under Hoover? Did all kinds of abusive stuff, until it finally reached the point where Congress had to rein them in and enact strict controls on their behavior, mainly because Congress itself was threatened by Hoover's activities. Hell, the bastard had dirt on all of them. However, many of those restrictions on law enforcement were undone with the Patriot Act, CALEA and other poorly-designed laws designed to strip civil liberties from us. I have the feeling that we're going to have to suffer through yet another cycle of government abuse (worse this time) until the pendulum swings back and some controls get put back in place.
A very fundermental problem is the idea that increasing official power (and reducing "civil liberties") somehow increases security. Something which never appears to have actually happened in recorded history. Indeed it appears more likely that giving law enforcement too much power is that they are too busy harrassing innocent people to have much time for dealing with criminals. With a real risk of establishing a positive feedback loop. Especially since law enforcement always claims to need more power and the idea that reducing law enforcement powers might actually result in them doing a better job is just too radical for many people.
Even if we had fusion, I don't think it would generate that much helium, would it? I don't have time to do the math, but that's the whole point of fusion, right, that it generates massive amounts of energy (potentially) from relatively little fuel.
There is plenty of Helium production going on, just that it's spread thinly over the entire planet.
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
Except that if you were to use Duterium/Tritium fusion you wind up with Helium-5 which is the least stable isotope of Helium. If the aim were production of Helium then Duterium only fusion would be the best process.
However, private citizens/groups aren't allowed to skirt the laws by printing a statement to that effect in a handbook, similar to the manner in which EULA tend not to hold up in court, even though "the customer agreed to it".
Any such statements are subject to the "law of the land".
If the contract for your job states "we can fire you for any reason", and you're fired on the grounds of race or gender, the company would most likely be found guilty in a wrongful termination lawsuit.
This would be a fairly simple case the document says "we can do X" where there's a statute which says "nobody can do X". It other situations someone might need make a convincing argument to a judge regarding the applicability of statute or case law...
Even with a private school, if they don't follow their written judicial procedures to the letter, they'll often lose. Schools like to tell students and their parents not to retain lawyers during internal judicial / discipline proceedings, saying it makes the process "adversarial". They're trying to kick you out or impose some other sanction. It's hard to imagine it getting any more adversarial than that.
It's also not unknown for these kind of "kangaroo courts" to be used when a real court (either civil or criminal) would be more appropriate.
I find it very strange that universities can be treated differently from other services. You pay for a service, and if you are kicked out for no valid reason you should be able to get some money. After all, you have to pay another university + you will lose income because you will finish your education later.
In many places you can sue for considerably more than you may have paid them. Since the law allows for the likes of "consequential losses", "loss of bargin", etc. The general principle being that it's the responsibility of the party breaching a contract to accept all the consequences of their actions.
This is not "online surveillance going too far". It's "Some universities employ complete morons who can't even read.
Assuming whatever made the match is actually human. This looks more like the sort of thing some sort of "bot" would flag. It's more a matter of "comprehend" rather than "read". Even very stupid humans can realise that a word can have completly different meanings. e.g. is a book entitled "Famous people I have Shot" the biography of contract killer or a press photographer?