There have been 3 or 4 bombs on busses in London in the last 15 years. At least two of those were accidental detonations of bombs destined for somewhere else.
This is also a risk for anyone intending to smuggle a bomb onto a plane. Though the claim here appears to be that the intent was to both assemble bombs and manufacture the explosive on board. It's not as if there are many places people can test methods for assembly and detonation of explosives. The worst case senario, from the terrorists' POV, would be a repeat of Philippine Airlines 434.
And they were British-born with links to Pakistan. Just to make sure you understand what this mean: Pakistan isn't Arab.
There was also mention of some of the arrested having connections with Eritrea or Ethiopia. People from those two countries don't tend to be Arabs either.
There was this story on Slashdot recently. May not apply to passenger aircraft, though...
There isn't often that much difference between passenger aircraft and fright aircraft. Plenty of freighters were originally supplied as passenger carriers later converted to freight only.
A flight crashes, not because a terrorist's bomb goes off, but because a fire breaks out in the baggage compartment due to an overheated lithium ion battery. Although, as I remember, don't the cargo and baggage areas on aircraft have some type of Halon or other fire suppressant system?
The fire suspression system on N904VJ was simply to have the cargo hold sealed. This didn't work because the incorrectly labled oxygen generators fed the fire. One problem with using halon or carbon dioxide as fire supression anywhere within fuselage is that whilst these might put out a fire they can also incapacitate the flight crew.
This requires a phone call to Microsoft's product activation line. Here, if someone asks me a question or the other phone line rings or I hickup, Microsoft's non-human system will often make me start all over again repeating a boring string of numbers. After this, I get informed that the product key can not be validated (Which is the reason I called in the first place) and put on hold again until I finally get a human (if not English) voice. Then I'm asked to repeat the first part of the boring string of numbers before I'm questioned like a murder suspect about why I want to activate Windows. After all this, I am usually provided the clearance code to activate Windows. Total time for this process per client computer is approximately 20 minutes.
That's 20 minutes when you can't do much else. Whereas if you are fixing machines in an repair shop environment you may well be able to work on several at once.
Eventually business sense will overcome the paranoia that brings us DRM, WGA and similar technologies. This awakening has already started in the music industry. It's just a matter of time before MS can convince its shareholders that the experiment isn't working.
Thing is that similar things were tried about 20 years ago. But obviously the lessons wern't learned then. Either it's new people or the same people who somehow think things will work now...
Using OEM licenses on computers other than the one they came with is illegal.
It depends where you are, there is certainly case law in Germany to the effect that the whole OEM/retail distinction has no legal standard. Just becuase Microsoft might claim this dosn't mean anything, suppliers frequently make such claims bogusly. Even outside Germany (possibly the EU) there is the matter of what constitutes a "computer" for the purposes of such a licence, let alone the "grandad's old axe" argument. You'd need to spend a great deal of money (and make some lawyers rich) to prove this statement one way or the other.
I use DriveCrypt for encryption (from securstar.de), and it has the most horrific license system I've ever had the displeasure to use. You have to activate your software and lock it to a computer, then if you want to use it on an alternative computer you have to uninstall it on the first, then enter a "deactivation" code on the website, then finally you can reactivate on the new PC. God forbid you should format one of your computers forgetting to deactive your license first.
How does it cope with malware and hardware failures?
Lets face it: People hate activation, and for a good reason. It doesn't stop piracy. It doesn't really reduce piracy either. All it does it cause perpetual headaches to your legally licensed customers. I work on software products and was partly responsible for redesigning our software registration system, which used to also use online activation. We stripped out the 'activation' element and sales didn't drop at all, however the volume of support traffic that we had to handle due to activation issues (the largest type of support incident by far) dropped to almost nothing.
You will even get situations of customers using cracked/pirate copies even when they are "fully licenced" because of this "security" causing so many problems with using the software.
4 out of 5 of our corporate, OEM-keyed Dell laptops were nailed by WGA. One was preformatted from the factory, the rest we had installed from XP Pro SP2 discs that Dell shipped to us. Since they were Dell discs they never asked for a key. All machines shipped with keys on the stickers of course, so fixing them was a matter of using a reactivation tool, phone support, then change key procedure. Still a hassle and our CEO was frantic since the company recently went public.
Remembering that time is money too... Depends if you mean 4 or 800 laptops:)
We have a VLK here (university) and you can just install XP on any system no problem, and it'll report as legit. They don't check vs number of license to make sure it's an exact count. So you could install it unlicensed on a personal laptop, and it'd report as legit no problems. Now however if they found tons of systems outside of the university cropping up, and saw the key on a serials board, they might invalidate it and issue us a new one.
Even if Microsoft charged nothing for doing this the cost to the university would probably be considerable.
The trouble is, there are too many people (members of my family, in fact) who really believe that Americans should reasonably expect to have no privacy in any aspect of their lives at all, post-9/11, if it can keep a handful of people dying. The only alternative to this position, is that individual privacy is worth American lives.
That is very much a false dicotomy. Giving up privacy may well make no difference to real risks. Indeed given some of the questionable entities the US Government unconditionally trusts there's plenty of reason for it to make things a whole lot less safe...
The problem is that.com isn't just US companies. And having domains by country isn't that useful.
For commercial entities it would actually be very useful. Even if the product they are selling is for download, it would be useful to know if you are giving your credit card details to some business thousands of miles away without useful consumer/data protection laws.
this site has a 19khz and 17khz 3-second clip. The 17 is very easy to hear and would chase me off after awhile and I'm going on 30. I can't hear the 19khz at all, guess I don't have to buy those headphones that go up to 22khz anymore;)
I'm closer to 40 than to 30, yet I could hear the 19k track.
The really scary thing is anyone who can't hear these frequencies could crank this and play 24/7 for free with only a PC and speakers,
Assuming that your speakers can reproduce the frequency of course:)
Demonstrated infrasonic weapon
The U.S. DOD has demonstrated phased arrays of infrasonic emitters. The weapon usually consists of a device that generates sound at about 7 Hz. The output from the device is routed (by pipes) to an array of open emitters, which are usually one wavelength apart. At this frequency, armor and concrete walls and other common building materials vibrate, and therefore provide no defense. The frequency is chosen to be near the resonant frequency of internal organs, causing illness, deafness, and internal injuries.[citation needed] The resulting weapon is the size of a truck, fragile, and has a shorter range than missiles or artillery shells.[citation needed]
A fragile device with a short range is hardly the most practical of weapons.
As a defense to such a weapon, mechanical "diode walls" to convert the oscillating air into a steady flow have been demonstrated. Although not common at this time, they could be mass-produced and would provide an effective countermeasure.[citation needed]
The only need to be good enough to allow someone to sucessfully aim and fire an anti-tank weapon.
Use 2 directional low frequency drivers pointed at his house that would cause him to have a bowel movement.
Apparently the so called "brown note" is a myth...
Use 2 different directional high frequency (ultra sound) drivers pointed at his house from two different places but focused at his mosquito device. One at 38kHz the other at 40kHz. Where the two wave fronts meet there will be a loud interference tone of 2kHz.
Actually you'd only need one signal source. Since his device(s) are already generating one ultrasound frequency. Though you might want to consider using sounds higher than 60kHz so as not to bother any dog owners.
The addition of extra identifying characteristics to the passport system widens the skillset required to accurately produce a forgery. As few people are capable of the full range of these skills, the cost of the forgery increases and thus its value goes down.
You can be reasonably sure that the most dangerous entities have access to these skillsets anyway.
To create a full passport it would therefore be necessary to clone the passport itself, physically alter the appearance of the picture to match yours and ensure all the data is consistent.
Or blackmail/bribe someone who issues passports...
Actually they might be worse that the current breed of closed source.
- When Web Applications shut down you have nothing!
- You dont have code to reverse engineer
- Hell, you don't even have the data with you
- You have no idea what they do with your data!
- Can we depend on their security?
There are also all sorts of legal issues relating to not knowing exactly who has your data or even exactly where it is. e.g. if you are in the EU and store a customer list on a server in North America it's highly unlikely that you havn't very badly broken data protection legislation.
I think that the comment is not that the coder's morals are unimportant, but that _all_ the coders that appear to be available for paid work porting or creating a Linux app expect not only that they will be paid, but that the company will _also_ OSS the code.
The alternative would be that they would be paid considerably more in order to track down and write code to replace easily available OSS code. In addition to whatever work they'd need to do regardless of if the result was intended to be GPL or proprietry. Producing a proprietary, compared with a GPL, program is likely to be much harder work since the coder is unable to use GPL code, libraries, etc. Thus it appears quite fair that they should want more money for more work. (Even more money if you are expecting your "coder" to effectivly act as sub-contractor when it comes to legal advice and licence negotiation.) Assuming the task is reasonable within the timescale required. It might be the case that the only possible solution is a GPL app/port.
If I pay a developer to write an app that will run on Linux, I get to choose whether to release the source or not, not some bloody coder I've hired.
If you insist that your application is going to be proprietary you are likely to find that your pool of potential hirees is smaller and more expensive than if your program is going to be GPL complient.
If it's compiled for Linux, it'll run on Linux. It doesn't matter what Random J Geek's feelings on running closed apps on Linux are.
It will matter a lot if you want to be able to distribute, copies of, Random J Geek's (GPL/GPL derived) software without their permission. In order to get permission you either have to comply with the GPL or negotiate with all of the copyright holders of software which might be used as part of your application. Alternativly you or your coder must track down not GPL software to do the needed tasks (and pay the appropriate licencing fees) or write new code.
Once I've installed it, Linux is MY operating system. I can install what I like on it. I can compile what I like on it.
The moment you start supplying copies to third parties copyright law kicks in. If you havn't taken a lot of care with exactly how you have built your application you could find that its copyright is actually owned by the writer of some library you have linked to; some random application GPL application; etc. Who will take a very dim view of your actions.
Slashdot Mirror
nitro glycerin clear, syrupy, probably odorless, non-volatile, and no matches required
But likely to go bang if handled carelessly.
There have been 3 or 4 bombs on busses in London in the last 15 years. At least two of those were accidental detonations of bombs destined for somewhere else.
This is also a risk for anyone intending to smuggle a bomb onto a plane. Though the claim here appears to be that the intent was to both assemble bombs and manufacture the explosive on board. It's not as if there are many places people can test methods for assembly and detonation of explosives. The worst case senario, from the terrorists' POV, would be a repeat of Philippine Airlines 434.
And they were British-born with links to Pakistan. Just to make sure you understand what this mean: Pakistan isn't Arab.
There was also mention of some of the arrested having connections with Eritrea or Ethiopia. People from those two countries don't tend to be Arabs either.
There was this story on Slashdot recently. May not apply to passenger aircraft, though...
There isn't often that much difference between passenger aircraft and fright aircraft. Plenty of freighters were originally supplied as passenger carriers later converted to freight only.
A flight crashes, not because a terrorist's bomb goes off, but because a fire breaks out in the baggage compartment due to an overheated lithium ion battery. Although, as I remember, don't the cargo and baggage areas on aircraft have some type of Halon or other fire suppressant system?
The fire suspression system on N904VJ was simply to have the cargo hold sealed. This didn't work because the incorrectly labled oxygen generators fed the fire.
One problem with using halon or carbon dioxide as fire supression anywhere within fuselage is that whilst these might put out a fire they can also incapacitate the flight crew.
This requires a phone call to Microsoft's product activation line. Here, if someone asks me a question or the other phone line rings or I hickup, Microsoft's non-human system will often make me start all over again repeating a boring string of numbers. After this, I get informed that the product key can not be validated (Which is the reason I called in the first place) and put on hold again until I finally get a human (if not English) voice. Then I'm asked to repeat the first part of the boring string of numbers before I'm questioned like a murder suspect about why I want to activate Windows. After all this, I am usually provided the clearance code to activate Windows. Total time for this process per client computer is approximately 20 minutes.
That's 20 minutes when you can't do much else. Whereas if you are fixing machines in an repair shop environment you may well be able to work on several at once.
Eventually business sense will overcome the paranoia that brings us DRM, WGA and similar technologies. This awakening has already started in the music industry. It's just a matter of time before MS can convince its shareholders that the experiment isn't working.
Thing is that similar things were tried about 20 years ago. But obviously the lessons wern't learned then.
Either it's new people or the same people who somehow think things will work now...
Using OEM licenses on computers other than the one they came with is illegal.
It depends where you are, there is certainly case law in Germany to the effect that the whole OEM/retail distinction has no legal standard. Just becuase Microsoft might claim this dosn't mean anything, suppliers frequently make such claims bogusly.
Even outside Germany (possibly the EU) there is the matter of what constitutes a "computer" for the purposes of such a licence, let alone the "grandad's old axe" argument. You'd need to spend a great deal of money (and make some lawyers rich) to prove this statement one way or the other.
I use DriveCrypt for encryption (from securstar.de), and it has the most horrific license system I've ever had the displeasure to use. You have to activate your software and lock it to a computer, then if you want to use it on an alternative computer you have to uninstall it on the first, then enter a "deactivation" code on the website, then finally you can reactivate on the new PC. God forbid you should format one of your computers forgetting to deactive your license first.
How does it cope with malware and hardware failures?
Lets face it: People hate activation, and for a good reason. It doesn't stop piracy. It doesn't really reduce piracy either. All it does it cause perpetual headaches to your legally licensed customers. I work on software products and was partly responsible for redesigning our software registration system, which used to also use online activation. We stripped out the 'activation' element and sales didn't drop at all, however the volume of support traffic that we had to handle due to activation issues (the largest type of support incident by far) dropped to almost nothing.
You will even get situations of customers using cracked/pirate copies even when they are "fully licenced" because of this "security" causing so many problems with using the software.
4 out of 5 of our corporate, OEM-keyed Dell laptops were nailed by WGA. One was preformatted from the factory, the rest we had installed from XP Pro SP2 discs that Dell shipped to us. Since they were Dell discs they never asked for a key. All machines shipped with keys on the stickers of course, so fixing them was a matter of using a reactivation tool, phone support, then change key procedure. Still a hassle and our CEO was frantic since the company recently went public.
:)
Remembering that time is money too... Depends if you mean 4 or 800 laptops
We have a VLK here (university) and you can just install XP on any system no problem, and it'll report as legit. They don't check vs number of license to make sure it's an exact count. So you could install it unlicensed on a personal laptop, and it'd report as legit no problems. Now however if they found tons of systems outside of the university cropping up, and saw the key on a serials board, they might invalidate it and issue us a new one.
Even if Microsoft charged nothing for doing this the cost to the university would probably be considerable.
Maybe there's something on their own land that they don't want their own citizens to know about.
Since governments don't appear to believe the "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide" maxim why should anyone else?
The trouble is, there are too many people (members of my family, in fact) who really believe that Americans should reasonably expect to have no privacy in any aspect of their lives at all, post-9/11, if it can keep a handful of people dying. The only alternative to this position, is that individual privacy is worth American lives.
That is very much a false dicotomy. Giving up privacy may well make no difference to real risks. Indeed given some of the questionable entities the US Government unconditionally trusts there's plenty of reason for it to make things a whole lot less safe...
Just about everything in government is classified for one reason or another.
Governments like to have secrets, even if they serve little useful purpose or even arn't that secret.
The current government in Cameroon isn't representative of the country by a long shot.
It might be easier to list those governments which are...
The problem is that .com isn't just US companies. And having domains by country isn't that useful.
For commercial entities it would actually be very useful. Even if the product they are selling is for download, it would be useful to know if you are giving your credit card details to some business thousands of miles away without useful consumer/data protection laws.
Yeah, for the $2000 I'd spend on a laser (albeit a super kick ass one) I can buy lots of pellets for my pellet gun. That'd work, too.
The idea is that using the device as target practice for a 0.3W laser would be less obvious...
this site has a 19khz and 17khz 3-second clip. The 17 is very easy to hear and would chase me off after awhile and I'm going on 30. I can't hear the 19khz at all, guess I don't have to buy those headphones that go up to 22khz anymore ;)
:)
I'm closer to 40 than to 30, yet I could hear the 19k track.
The really scary thing is anyone who can't hear these frequencies could crank this and play 24/7 for free with only a PC and speakers,
Assuming that your speakers can reproduce the frequency of course
When the police prove impotent several times, get a lawyer to file a complaint.
Probably also someone who can take measurements of the sound.
Demonstrated infrasonic weapon
The U.S. DOD has demonstrated phased arrays of infrasonic emitters. The weapon usually consists of a device that generates sound at about 7 Hz. The output from the device is routed (by pipes) to an array of open emitters, which are usually one wavelength apart. At this frequency, armor and concrete walls and other common building materials vibrate, and therefore provide no defense. The frequency is chosen to be near the resonant frequency of internal organs, causing illness, deafness, and internal injuries.[citation needed] The resulting weapon is the size of a truck, fragile, and has a shorter range than missiles or artillery shells.[citation needed]
A fragile device with a short range is hardly the most practical of weapons.
As a defense to such a weapon, mechanical "diode walls" to convert the oscillating air into a steady flow have been demonstrated. Although not common at this time, they could be mass-produced and would provide an effective countermeasure.[citation needed]
The only need to be good enough to allow someone to sucessfully aim and fire an anti-tank weapon.
Use 2 directional low frequency drivers pointed at his house that would cause him to have a bowel movement.
Apparently the so called "brown note" is a myth...
Use 2 different directional high frequency (ultra sound) drivers pointed at his house from two different places but focused at his mosquito device. One at 38kHz the other at 40kHz. Where the two wave fronts meet there will be a loud interference tone of 2kHz.
Actually you'd only need one signal source. Since his device(s) are already generating one ultrasound frequency.
Though you might want to consider using sounds higher than 60kHz so as not to bother any dog owners.
The addition of extra identifying characteristics to the passport system widens the skillset required to accurately produce a forgery. As few people are capable of the full range of these skills, the cost of the forgery increases and thus its value goes down.
You can be reasonably sure that the most dangerous entities have access to these skillsets anyway.
To create a full passport it would therefore be necessary to clone the passport itself, physically alter the appearance of the picture to match yours and ensure all the data is consistent.
Or blackmail/bribe someone who issues passports...
Actually they might be worse that the current breed of closed source.
- When Web Applications shut down you have nothing!
- You dont have code to reverse engineer
- Hell, you don't even have the data with you
- You have no idea what they do with your data!
- Can we depend on their security?
There are also all sorts of legal issues relating to not knowing exactly who has your data or even exactly where it is. e.g. if you are in the EU and store a customer list on a server in North America it's highly unlikely that you havn't very badly broken data protection legislation.
I think that the comment is not that the coder's morals are unimportant, but that _all_ the coders that appear to be available for paid work porting or creating a Linux app expect not only that they will be paid, but that the company will _also_ OSS the code.
The alternative would be that they would be paid considerably more in order to track down and write code to replace easily available OSS code. In addition to whatever work they'd need to do regardless of if the result was intended to be GPL or proprietry. Producing a proprietary, compared with a GPL, program is likely to be much harder work since the coder is unable to use GPL code, libraries, etc. Thus it appears quite fair that they should want more money for more work. (Even more money if you are expecting your "coder" to effectivly act as sub-contractor when it comes to legal advice and licence negotiation.)
Assuming the task is reasonable within the timescale required. It might be the case that the only possible solution is a GPL app/port.
If I pay a developer to write an app that will run on Linux, I get to choose whether to release the source or not, not some bloody coder I've hired.
If you insist that your application is going to be proprietary you are likely to find that your pool of potential hirees is smaller and more expensive than if your program is going to be GPL complient.
If it's compiled for Linux, it'll run on Linux. It doesn't matter what Random J Geek's feelings on running closed apps on Linux are.
It will matter a lot if you want to be able to distribute, copies of, Random J Geek's (GPL/GPL derived) software without their permission. In order to get permission you either have to comply with the GPL or negotiate with all of the copyright holders of software which might be used as part of your application. Alternativly you or your coder must track down not GPL software to do the needed tasks (and pay the appropriate licencing fees) or write new code.
Once I've installed it, Linux is MY operating system. I can install what I like on it. I can compile what I like on it.
The moment you start supplying copies to third parties copyright law kicks in. If you havn't taken a lot of care with exactly how you have built your application you could find that its copyright is actually owned by the writer of some library you have linked to; some random application GPL application; etc. Who will take a very dim view of your actions.