This sounds like FUD against Tails. A security research firm finds some undisclosed zero-days in Tails, but doesn't describe what they could do - arbitrary code execution? De-anonymization? They then go on to say that they haven't told the Tails maintainers what the vulnerabilities are, but will "in due time", implying they're going to sell them off to the government first. Exodus Intelligence also does a lot of business with the US government, possibly including the NSA.
To me, this sounds like they probably found some minor zero-days and are trying to spread FUD (likely spurred on by their clients in the government) to get people to stop using Tails. After all, we know that the NSA is trying to put people who attempt to download Tails on a watchlist for further scrutiny.
File sharing is so natural that I think my cat is trying to develop a new transfer protocol involving shed cat hair. At least, I assume that's why he rolls around on my pillow and covers it in cat hair.
I would hope that the recording industry worldwide has learned from the example of the MAFIAA, where judges started throwing out their massive fishing-expedition style lawsuits against hundreds of John Does based on the flimsiest of proof. The courts in the United States have made it clear that it is not their job to help the MAFIAA make a profit, and I would hope that judges in the UK rule the same way.
I think it's less mission creep and more the school district not foreseeing what they'd need to do to make their iPad initiative work. I don't know California very well, but the article makes it sound like it's in a pretty low-wealth district: the article itself mentions that many of the parents do not own personal computers or have an internet connection, and the Wikipedia page for the district states that it's 80% Hispanic. The iPads don't seem to be useful if they're not connected, at least not for what the school wants them for (kids being able to do school assignments, parents staying involved in their child's education). The school probably thought they had enough bandwidth to serve all of their students and their families, probably never called in a network admin to see if they could support connecting anyone who lives near the school, and went through with it anyway.
I've never used Chinese input, but I have used Japanese input before via Google IME when I was trying to learn Japanese (I never succeeded but I'm gonna go back to it). I think doing non-Western languages on a computer is a pain no matter how you do it. For instance, instead of having a simple button that toggles hiragana and katakana, you had to highlight the text you wanted to switch to katakana (hiragana was on by default) and press F8 to switch it. I don't think there is a single IME out there that has a simple toggle switch.. at least, none that I know of.
The place it really becomes a problem (and this would be worse for Chinese than Japanese because Chinese is 100% kanji) is when you have a kanji that has an extremely common pronunciation. There are about a hundred different kanji, some of which are surprisingly common in Japanese, that all share one pronunciation (I think it was "fu" but I can't remember anymore) and Google's IME gives you a drop-down list of all of those kanji if you type in the pronunciation.
There is actually a movement in Japan to this day (that started in the Meiji period) to drop kanji from the language entirely and use the hiragana pronunciation instead, and one of the reasons for this is that hundred-kanji pileup.
China has a whole bunch of in-state manufacturers that are backed by their government. I'm sure it's also a lot easier for their government to control what goes on with cell phones, because they either own the providers or have total control over their activities. This almost sounds like a "Everyone's doing it, so should you!" kind of thing to get more people to buy state-controlled phones.
What really disturbs me about this article is how the judge set no limits on how long the police can retain copied emails or how they have to store them. Judging by the way the police act, I wouldn't be surprised if this meant large, permanently-retained NSA style databases of captured emails.
I explained this in a thread yesterday, but there's a good reason (in this case, anyway) for the buzzword-laden speech. The reason is that this is a massive layoff, and Satya Nadella doesn't want to give a single one of those 18,000 employees ammunition to use against the company in a wrongful termination or discrimination suit. At the same time, it's a PR issue - there was a lot of press coverage of these layoffs, and he doesn't want to give anything to the press to use against the company either.
In reality, everyone knows what happened: MS is laying off a bunch of people from Nokia and the mobile division because there was a massive amount of position overlap - this is normal during a merger. They're also laying off a lot of middle managers and some people in the Xbox division - the managers because they're essentially dead weight, and the Xbox people because Nadella has said on the record that he thinks the Xbox division should be eliminated in conjunction with the wishes of some of the people on Microsoft's board of directors. However, if MS ever admitted any of this, they'd look like a big evil corporation swallowing up other businesses for their IPs (which is more or less what they did with Nokia) and firing off all the workers. They have to at least make it look like it's not corporate evil.
The question is, was this really a launcher that the Russians gave the rebels? I looked up the Wikipedia page for the BUK missile system last night, and there was a link on that article to a report from Jane's that said Ukraine had some in their possession from their days as a Soviet satellite state. It makes me wonder if the BUK (being a Soviet-era weapons system dating back to 1979) wasn't just misplaced somewhere - if the National Institutes of Health can misplace 300 vials of deadly diseases and biological weapons, it's not a stretch to think that the Ukrainian military might've had a BUK somewhere and forgotten about it.
To me, this almost sounds like the Twitter messages from the rebels claiming that they captured a BUK were correct - the Russians didn't directly lend the rebels a BUK, but they're helping them cover it up after the fact in order to stop any news coming out that goes against their message of the rebels being poor, oppressed ethnic Russians who need protection from their "home country".
My guess is that it's probably a regulation of some sort. DHS will probably give the samples to the CDC, but I bet there's a regulation saying that the FDA can't give it directly to the CDC.
There are reports that the separatists in Donetsk had captured a BUK Surface-to-Air missile launcher belonging to the Ukrainian military. There are also tweets from a separatist leader claiming that his men shot down a Ukrainian AN-26 in the same area that the 777 went down, several days after making statements that any plane daring to violate rebel-held airspace would be shot down.
It's pretty clear to me that the 777 came too close to rebel territory (there is apparently a commonly-used flight path that goes over that area) and a rebel with an itchy trigger finger fired without confirming that the plane was military and not civilian. Whether the gun was truly captured from the Ukrainians or was given to the rebels by the Russians is another issue altogether.
I can understand very well why the UN might not have done this earlier - the US government would want to quash any positive PR for a man they consider to be a traitor, and I'm sure they can exert enough force on the UN to ensure this happens. I would not be at all surprised if that was why this report hadn't come out until now.
The question is, though, what made them decide to release it?
The way the article describes Pushdo, it sounds a lot like ZeuS - they use practically the same methods of operation (DGA to generate random domain names, fast-flux to stop anyone shutting down the C&C servers) and it seems that like ZeuS, Pushdo started from an initial codebase and was changed multiple times after being shut down.
I think in this case, it's to avoid lawsuits. "Buzzword Bingo" speeches are made specifically to be as vague and neutral as possible so that there's zero chance of a discrimination lawsuit from someone who gets laid off as a result of these job cuts. A friend of mine just recently showed me a good example of why executives do this. His company went through a round of layoffs, and his was one of the jobs that was cut. Rather than simply use CEO-speak and lay him off, they fired him in an attempt to dodge paying him unemployment benefits - they claimed he was sleeping on the job, but none of the statements the managers there gave to the unemployment office matched up. He brought this up in an appeal to the unemployment office, and they awarded him benefits because they saw through the company's BS.
Outside of that, though? I think it's a Jungian thing. The CEOs think that successful CEOs speak in buzzwords all the time, so they form their own CEO persona and start acting like that because they want to be successful as well. What they probably don't realize is that the truly successful CEOs don't actually do that unless it's absolutely necessary and just assume they're doing the right thing by using buzzwords all the time. Whatever gets them promoted, I guess.
I remember the first news stories about this blocking system - how a dentist had his practice's website blocked, supposedly for hosting child pornography, when in reality his website was blocked because it happened to be hosted by a provider who also had a client that may or may not have hosted CP (it was never made clear whether the government ever actually found anything). The whole thing sounded like a witch hunt for things that may not have even been there in the first place in the name of "protecting the children".
The article mentions where 12,500 of the 18,000 jobs to be cut are coming from, but doesn't account for the other 5,500 jobs. There was another article on this a few days ago that mentioned people being cut from marketing teams and people cut from the Xbox division, but I wish the article would go into more detail.
I thought the idea was that Comcast was merging with Time Warner in order to strengthen their cable monopoly. Is Time Warner's ISP a different business than Time Warner's content company or something?
One major issue I can see with this is the sheer number of websites that have arbitrary password restrictions: capitals, special characters, numbers, etc. The worst ones are those that require multiples of each, so that there is no way you can make something easy to remember - and then expect you to come up with another password in two weeks.
Until website operators realize that putting arbitrary restrictions on passwords doesn't help them to be any more memorable (and likely not any more secure), I can't see this method working.
It wasn't just Japan. According to the article, the Japan Meteorological Society did do a study that focused on Japan, but NASA ran a similar study using different methods that got virtually the same results in a completely different part of the world.
I know when Ballmer resigned as CEO, there were members of Microsoft's board calling for them to drop the Xbox division entirely because it wasn't profitable enough. The article mentions that people on the marketing teams for the Xbox are among those being cut, and I'm wondering if this isn't MS taking the first steps to selling off the Xbox division to someone else.
Your post just gave me the terrible, terrible mental image of RMS in an eagle costume attempting to fly so that he can drop a printed-out spec sheet into the fires of Mt. Redmond.
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This sounds like FUD against Tails. A security research firm finds some undisclosed zero-days in Tails, but doesn't describe what they could do - arbitrary code execution? De-anonymization? They then go on to say that they haven't told the Tails maintainers what the vulnerabilities are, but will "in due time", implying they're going to sell them off to the government first. Exodus Intelligence also does a lot of business with the US government, possibly including the NSA.
To me, this sounds like they probably found some minor zero-days and are trying to spread FUD (likely spurred on by their clients in the government) to get people to stop using Tails. After all, we know that the NSA is trying to put people who attempt to download Tails on a watchlist for further scrutiny.
File sharing is so natural that I think my cat is trying to develop a new transfer protocol involving shed cat hair. At least, I assume that's why he rolls around on my pillow and covers it in cat hair.
I would hope that the recording industry worldwide has learned from the example of the MAFIAA, where judges started throwing out their massive fishing-expedition style lawsuits against hundreds of John Does based on the flimsiest of proof. The courts in the United States have made it clear that it is not their job to help the MAFIAA make a profit, and I would hope that judges in the UK rule the same way.
I think it's less mission creep and more the school district not foreseeing what they'd need to do to make their iPad initiative work. I don't know California very well, but the article makes it sound like it's in a pretty low-wealth district: the article itself mentions that many of the parents do not own personal computers or have an internet connection, and the Wikipedia page for the district states that it's 80% Hispanic. The iPads don't seem to be useful if they're not connected, at least not for what the school wants them for (kids being able to do school assignments, parents staying involved in their child's education). The school probably thought they had enough bandwidth to serve all of their students and their families, probably never called in a network admin to see if they could support connecting anyone who lives near the school, and went through with it anyway.
I've never used Chinese input, but I have used Japanese input before via Google IME when I was trying to learn Japanese (I never succeeded but I'm gonna go back to it). I think doing non-Western languages on a computer is a pain no matter how you do it. For instance, instead of having a simple button that toggles hiragana and katakana, you had to highlight the text you wanted to switch to katakana (hiragana was on by default) and press F8 to switch it. I don't think there is a single IME out there that has a simple toggle switch.. at least, none that I know of.
The place it really becomes a problem (and this would be worse for Chinese than Japanese because Chinese is 100% kanji) is when you have a kanji that has an extremely common pronunciation. There are about a hundred different kanji, some of which are surprisingly common in Japanese, that all share one pronunciation (I think it was "fu" but I can't remember anymore) and Google's IME gives you a drop-down list of all of those kanji if you type in the pronunciation.
There is actually a movement in Japan to this day (that started in the Meiji period) to drop kanji from the language entirely and use the hiragana pronunciation instead, and one of the reasons for this is that hundred-kanji pileup.
China has a whole bunch of in-state manufacturers that are backed by their government. I'm sure it's also a lot easier for their government to control what goes on with cell phones, because they either own the providers or have total control over their activities. This almost sounds like a "Everyone's doing it, so should you!" kind of thing to get more people to buy state-controlled phones.
What really disturbs me about this article is how the judge set no limits on how long the police can retain copied emails or how they have to store them. Judging by the way the police act, I wouldn't be surprised if this meant large, permanently-retained NSA style databases of captured emails.
I explained this in a thread yesterday, but there's a good reason (in this case, anyway) for the buzzword-laden speech. The reason is that this is a massive layoff, and Satya Nadella doesn't want to give a single one of those 18,000 employees ammunition to use against the company in a wrongful termination or discrimination suit. At the same time, it's a PR issue - there was a lot of press coverage of these layoffs, and he doesn't want to give anything to the press to use against the company either.
In reality, everyone knows what happened: MS is laying off a bunch of people from Nokia and the mobile division because there was a massive amount of position overlap - this is normal during a merger. They're also laying off a lot of middle managers and some people in the Xbox division - the managers because they're essentially dead weight, and the Xbox people because Nadella has said on the record that he thinks the Xbox division should be eliminated in conjunction with the wishes of some of the people on Microsoft's board of directors. However, if MS ever admitted any of this, they'd look like a big evil corporation swallowing up other businesses for their IPs (which is more or less what they did with Nokia) and firing off all the workers. They have to at least make it look like it's not corporate evil.
We beat them by sending the Japanese prime minister into space to beat him at mahjong.
The question is, was this really a launcher that the Russians gave the rebels? I looked up the Wikipedia page for the BUK missile system last night, and there was a link on that article to a report from Jane's that said Ukraine had some in their possession from their days as a Soviet satellite state. It makes me wonder if the BUK (being a Soviet-era weapons system dating back to 1979) wasn't just misplaced somewhere - if the National Institutes of Health can misplace 300 vials of deadly diseases and biological weapons, it's not a stretch to think that the Ukrainian military might've had a BUK somewhere and forgotten about it.
To me, this almost sounds like the Twitter messages from the rebels claiming that they captured a BUK were correct - the Russians didn't directly lend the rebels a BUK, but they're helping them cover it up after the fact in order to stop any news coming out that goes against their message of the rebels being poor, oppressed ethnic Russians who need protection from their "home country".
My guess is that it's probably a regulation of some sort. DHS will probably give the samples to the CDC, but I bet there's a regulation saying that the FDA can't give it directly to the CDC.
There are reports that the separatists in Donetsk had captured a BUK Surface-to-Air missile launcher belonging to the Ukrainian military. There are also tweets from a separatist leader claiming that his men shot down a Ukrainian AN-26 in the same area that the 777 went down, several days after making statements that any plane daring to violate rebel-held airspace would be shot down.
It's pretty clear to me that the 777 came too close to rebel territory (there is apparently a commonly-used flight path that goes over that area) and a rebel with an itchy trigger finger fired without confirming that the plane was military and not civilian. Whether the gun was truly captured from the Ukrainians or was given to the rebels by the Russians is another issue altogether.
I can understand very well why the UN might not have done this earlier - the US government would want to quash any positive PR for a man they consider to be a traitor, and I'm sure they can exert enough force on the UN to ensure this happens. I would not be at all surprised if that was why this report hadn't come out until now.
The question is, though, what made them decide to release it?
The way the article describes Pushdo, it sounds a lot like ZeuS - they use practically the same methods of operation (DGA to generate random domain names, fast-flux to stop anyone shutting down the C&C servers) and it seems that like ZeuS, Pushdo started from an initial codebase and was changed multiple times after being shut down.
I think in this case, it's to avoid lawsuits. "Buzzword Bingo" speeches are made specifically to be as vague and neutral as possible so that there's zero chance of a discrimination lawsuit from someone who gets laid off as a result of these job cuts. A friend of mine just recently showed me a good example of why executives do this. His company went through a round of layoffs, and his was one of the jobs that was cut. Rather than simply use CEO-speak and lay him off, they fired him in an attempt to dodge paying him unemployment benefits - they claimed he was sleeping on the job, but none of the statements the managers there gave to the unemployment office matched up. He brought this up in an appeal to the unemployment office, and they awarded him benefits because they saw through the company's BS.
Outside of that, though? I think it's a Jungian thing. The CEOs think that successful CEOs speak in buzzwords all the time, so they form their own CEO persona and start acting like that because they want to be successful as well. What they probably don't realize is that the truly successful CEOs don't actually do that unless it's absolutely necessary and just assume they're doing the right thing by using buzzwords all the time. Whatever gets them promoted, I guess.
You forgot the most important question:
Can I use this to make a flying car and/or hoverboard?
I remember the first news stories about this blocking system - how a dentist had his practice's website blocked, supposedly for hosting child pornography, when in reality his website was blocked because it happened to be hosted by a provider who also had a client that may or may not have hosted CP (it was never made clear whether the government ever actually found anything). The whole thing sounded like a witch hunt for things that may not have even been there in the first place in the name of "protecting the children".
The article mentions where 12,500 of the 18,000 jobs to be cut are coming from, but doesn't account for the other 5,500 jobs. There was another article on this a few days ago that mentioned people being cut from marketing teams and people cut from the Xbox division, but I wish the article would go into more detail.
I'm not saying the hole is the impact crater left from an alien landing.. but it was. It was aliens.
As much as everyone has reason to hate Manuel Noriega, I want to see him win this, including punitive damages. Activision is that bad of a company.
I thought the idea was that Comcast was merging with Time Warner in order to strengthen their cable monopoly. Is Time Warner's ISP a different business than Time Warner's content company or something?
One major issue I can see with this is the sheer number of websites that have arbitrary password restrictions: capitals, special characters, numbers, etc. The worst ones are those that require multiples of each, so that there is no way you can make something easy to remember - and then expect you to come up with another password in two weeks.
Until website operators realize that putting arbitrary restrictions on passwords doesn't help them to be any more memorable (and likely not any more secure), I can't see this method working.
It wasn't just Japan. According to the article, the Japan Meteorological Society did do a study that focused on Japan, but NASA ran a similar study using different methods that got virtually the same results in a completely different part of the world.
I know when Ballmer resigned as CEO, there were members of Microsoft's board calling for them to drop the Xbox division entirely because it wasn't profitable enough. The article mentions that people on the marketing teams for the Xbox are among those being cut, and I'm wondering if this isn't MS taking the first steps to selling off the Xbox division to someone else.
Your post just gave me the terrible, terrible mental image of RMS in an eagle costume attempting to fly so that he can drop a printed-out spec sheet into the fires of Mt. Redmond.