The way the article is worded, it sounds like Facebook is merely using the Do Not Track header. However, from what I understand, they already honor Do Not Track and are one of the few websites that do. Is this merely teaching their users how to enable DNT, or are they planning some other browser-based solution specifically for Facebook?
The answer is that you need a government that is representative of the people, and has a firm grasp on the entire country. This is what happened in Ukraine, both with the Euromaidan protests that brought down Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Russian militias that are trying to push for independence in Donetsk.
Yanukovych represented the Eastern side of Ukraine, where Russian is the biggest ethnicity. Sure, there are other groups that live there, but they're all minorities to the ethnic Russians. He cared only for those people and his own wallet, so he sided with Russia - which caused the people in Kiev, where the majority are ethinic Ukrainians in favor of Europe, to revolt because they felt disenfranchised.
Now that the pro-Europeans control Kiev, it's the other way around. Crimea may have been an act of aggression by Russia, but the independence movement in Donetsk was not - there are plenty of people there who want to be part of Russia and feel disenfranchised because that's not what the government in Kiev wants, and this causes them to take up arms against the mainline Ukrainian army. This is why you didn't see the Ukrainian army soldiers deserting in Crimea, but did see it frequently in Donetsk.
The same thing happens in the Middle East, but instead of Russians vs. Ukrainians vs. minority ethnic groups, it's Sunnis vs. Shiites.
It matters because many apps ask for blanket permissions they really don't need. Take Poweramp, a music player app, as an example.
When you install Poweramp, it asks for blanket permission to "read and modify files on this device". To me, that doesn't mean anything. Where's it going to be reading from? What's it going to be modifying? What folders is it allowed to modify? I understand why it needs that kind of access (read to read the music/video files, and write because it has to write config files and album art/metadata if you choose to let it download that), but what if I don't want it accessing anything other than the base Android system files it needs to operate, its own app folder, and my music folder?
Sure, it's got thousands of downloads, but since it's closed source, how do I know it's not secretly stealing all of my files and sending them somewhere, or selling my location data (Poweramp doesn't ask for location data AFAIK but it very well could).
This stuff is important and I wish I had better control over it.
With the current console generation giving the manufacturers the ability to do things like force firmware updates when trying to run games or check for updates constantly (WiiConnect24 or Spotpass on the 3DS), and most importantly the ability to update their firmware to remove exploits, it could be argued that today's consoles are the most secure in terms of prevention from hacks that don't rely on inside information.
At the same time, none of the current-gen consoles or handhelds has been widely hacked - there's the Gateway flashcart on the 3DS (which has its own share of problems regarding updates and bricking) and a few assorted exploits with PSN downloads on the Vita that were all removed before they went public, but there really hasn't been any news of hacking progress on the mainline consoles.
Would you say that with all of the security updates and new abilities given to console manufacturers to fix exploits, that the current generation of consoles will never have a "permanent" method of being hacked - hacks that don't rely on things like PSN downloads that are entirely within the manufacturer's control?
I haven't read your book (I will when I get off work) but I'm curious as to how exactly people discover these hacks. I mean, there's some really weird ones out there that make me question how people even thought to do them, such as hacking a PSP battery into service mode in order to load custom firmware or manually opening a PS2's disc tray to bypass the copy protection that only activated when the button to open or close the DVD drive was pressed. I know with the Xbox, there was a software hack (I don't know if it's the same one you found) with save files from certain games, but only specific versions of those games.
So my question is, how do you go about looking for exploits?
Actually, hovering cars as the article describes (hovering a few inches above the ground) would probably reduce accidents by a great deal. Almost every day, I see bits of tire - some from the big sixteen-wheelers but plenty from what are likely regular commuter cars as well - strewn along the side of the highway. Many of them are accompanied by cars parked in the breakdown lane, or crashed into the barriers on the side of the road. Not every blown tire at highway speeds necessarily leads to a crash, but plenty of them do. I'm not saying hovering cars would be perfect, as I'm sure there would be incidents where whatever is making them hover fails, but removing tires would definitely lower accidents.
Where I live, in central Connecticut, all three of the major ISPs (Comcast, Cox, AT&T) have Wi-Fi that rides off the back of routers. I haven't actually tried to use it, since I think they charge some ridiculous fee to connect to it. If it was free, I'd probably give it a go.
Here's my question: how hot can a methane-fuelled fire get? I just had the rather humorous (and possibly disturbing) thought of batteries made of piss heated using farts as fuel. Every man could become part of his own power source.. plus we could harvest all that methane from cow farts that is supposedly contributing to global warming.
So wait, the NSA's argument as to why their program is legal.. is that they're too incompetent to design a system that can follow the law. Shouldn't this be grounds to fire everyone at the NSA for incompetence, if this is the argument they're using?
Uh-huh. Sure. I'll go read it. Yep, I'll definitely remember to do that. Totally won't forget everything you just said the minute I hit the parking lot.. and it's gone. What was I going to do again?
GM didn't name DiGiorgio as the engineer at fault for the situation. When the documents started coming out about the ignition defect during the Congressional inquiries into the matter, DiGiorgio just happened to have his name on a bunch of them and was the guy unlucky enough to have signed off on the defective ignition switch. Had they punished entirely in private, there would no doubt be stories on every major news network demanding to know whether or not Ray DiGiorgio was fired. He was pretty much doomed from the moment those papers got made public.
I don't quite get how this counts as a masquerade of any kind. Anyone who knows anything about net neutrality - Chairman Wheeler included - would know that the ISPs do not want to be reclassified as common carriers. The letter by Sununu and Ford is clearly written by two members of Congress who are deep in the pockets of Big Telecom. At no point does it call Broadband for America a "consumer advocacy group" or suggest that they're consumer advocates in any way. The only mention of consumer advocacy was added by an SF Gate editor to explain where the letter came from. The SF Gate even mentions that both Sununu and Ford are members of Broadband for America. If anything, it looks like the SF Gate didn't do the research and labeled Broadband for America a consumer advocacy group. However, look at how they wrote it:
"Broadband for America, a coalition of 300 Internet consumer advocates, content providers, and engineers."
It sounds to me like whichever editor greenlit that letter for publication had no idea who Broadband for America were, so they went to the organization's website and looked at some of the people who are part of it (BforA has that on their website), then looked up Wikipedia articles for those people. They weren't willing to do the digging for an opinion piece.
It's also pointless because the NSA doesn't care about reading emails - they have no need to. Even with encryption, they can read the headers on the email and the sender/receiver email addresses and link those with real people. They can see who you're communicating with and how often you do so. If they really want to know what you're saying, they have a myriad of options at their disposal:
- Call the FBI (or other nationwide law enforcement agency for those not in the US) and have them raid you and everyone you talk to, either allowing them to obtain the private keys off your PC or by jailing you indefinitely for contempt of court for refusing to hand the keys over.
- Send out NSLs and obtain pen register orders against everyone you talk to, allowing them to read the already-decrypted messages.
- Use any one of their stash of zero-days and backdoors to install a pen register on your computer.
No amount of encryption is going to stop an agency that can send a small army of thugs to your door for any reason or no reason at all.
I bet support for the Xbox One controller would've come out much sooner, had Microsoft not been responsible for horrible controller support on PC games. Most games on Steam that support a controller are hardcoded for the Xbox 360 controller - using anything else requires a hack like MotionInJoy or XPadder. Even the ones that do support non-MS controllers will only display button prompts in terms of the X360 controller. This is, of course, because most games these days are multi-platform with consoles as the lead platform, and usually the PC port is a port of the X360 version.
With the way MS forced the X360 controller on PC, it's no wonder it took them forever to make a compatible driver.
Is this why airports keep hiking ticket prices, even well past what they'd need to pay for increased fuel costs and still make a profit? Or have they found some other way to subsidize maintenance?
The thing is, that wouldn't really help. If they give up spectrum, it'll just be bought out by AT&T or Verizon, either through themselves or through shell corporations. Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
In the article, it says that "AB" was charged with possessing documents showing how to make a bomb. I don't live in the UK, but I know in the US that it's completely legal to possess documents related to bomb-making, so long as no bombs are actually made or used. Hell, there are books in the US that will tell you how to make a nuclear weapon - but good luck getting your hands on any of the materials for it. As far as I'm aware, under the law in the US, I could download a tutorial on how to make a bomb and even draw up plans for a bomb and still not have committed a crime, so long as I don't make one.
Why isn't this the case in the UK? You would think it would be a basic freedom of speech issue - and yes, I'm aware that the UK has no official freedom of speech law, but you would think that simply possessing knowledge could not be ruled illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
The way the article is worded, it sounds like Facebook is merely using the Do Not Track header. However, from what I understand, they already honor Do Not Track and are one of the few websites that do. Is this merely teaching their users how to enable DNT, or are they planning some other browser-based solution specifically for Facebook?
The answer is that you need a government that is representative of the people, and has a firm grasp on the entire country. This is what happened in Ukraine, both with the Euromaidan protests that brought down Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Russian militias that are trying to push for independence in Donetsk.
Yanukovych represented the Eastern side of Ukraine, where Russian is the biggest ethnicity. Sure, there are other groups that live there, but they're all minorities to the ethnic Russians. He cared only for those people and his own wallet, so he sided with Russia - which caused the people in Kiev, where the majority are ethinic Ukrainians in favor of Europe, to revolt because they felt disenfranchised.
Now that the pro-Europeans control Kiev, it's the other way around. Crimea may have been an act of aggression by Russia, but the independence movement in Donetsk was not - there are plenty of people there who want to be part of Russia and feel disenfranchised because that's not what the government in Kiev wants, and this causes them to take up arms against the mainline Ukrainian army. This is why you didn't see the Ukrainian army soldiers deserting in Crimea, but did see it frequently in Donetsk.
The same thing happens in the Middle East, but instead of Russians vs. Ukrainians vs. minority ethnic groups, it's Sunnis vs. Shiites.
It matters because many apps ask for blanket permissions they really don't need. Take Poweramp, a music player app, as an example.
When you install Poweramp, it asks for blanket permission to "read and modify files on this device". To me, that doesn't mean anything. Where's it going to be reading from? What's it going to be modifying? What folders is it allowed to modify? I understand why it needs that kind of access (read to read the music/video files, and write because it has to write config files and album art/metadata if you choose to let it download that), but what if I don't want it accessing anything other than the base Android system files it needs to operate, its own app folder, and my music folder?
Sure, it's got thousands of downloads, but since it's closed source, how do I know it's not secretly stealing all of my files and sending them somewhere, or selling my location data (Poweramp doesn't ask for location data AFAIK but it very well could).
This stuff is important and I wish I had better control over it.
One follow-up question.
With the current console generation giving the manufacturers the ability to do things like force firmware updates when trying to run games or check for updates constantly (WiiConnect24 or Spotpass on the 3DS), and most importantly the ability to update their firmware to remove exploits, it could be argued that today's consoles are the most secure in terms of prevention from hacks that don't rely on inside information.
At the same time, none of the current-gen consoles or handhelds has been widely hacked - there's the Gateway flashcart on the 3DS (which has its own share of problems regarding updates and bricking) and a few assorted exploits with PSN downloads on the Vita that were all removed before they went public, but there really hasn't been any news of hacking progress on the mainline consoles.
Would you say that with all of the security updates and new abilities given to console manufacturers to fix exploits, that the current generation of consoles will never have a "permanent" method of being hacked - hacks that don't rely on things like PSN downloads that are entirely within the manufacturer's control?
I haven't read your book (I will when I get off work) but I'm curious as to how exactly people discover these hacks. I mean, there's some really weird ones out there that make me question how people even thought to do them, such as hacking a PSP battery into service mode in order to load custom firmware or manually opening a PS2's disc tray to bypass the copy protection that only activated when the button to open or close the DVD drive was pressed. I know with the Xbox, there was a software hack (I don't know if it's the same one you found) with save files from certain games, but only specific versions of those games.
So my question is, how do you go about looking for exploits?
So they're only allowing organizations to have 1024 addresses per three years?
I did mean eighteen-wheeler, was my first post this morning pre-coffee.
Actually, hovering cars as the article describes (hovering a few inches above the ground) would probably reduce accidents by a great deal. Almost every day, I see bits of tire - some from the big sixteen-wheelers but plenty from what are likely regular commuter cars as well - strewn along the side of the highway. Many of them are accompanied by cars parked in the breakdown lane, or crashed into the barriers on the side of the road. Not every blown tire at highway speeds necessarily leads to a crash, but plenty of them do. I'm not saying hovering cars would be perfect, as I'm sure there would be incidents where whatever is making them hover fails, but removing tires would definitely lower accidents.
Where I live, in central Connecticut, all three of the major ISPs (Comcast, Cox, AT&T) have Wi-Fi that rides off the back of routers. I haven't actually tried to use it, since I think they charge some ridiculous fee to connect to it. If it was free, I'd probably give it a go.
Here's my question: how hot can a methane-fuelled fire get? I just had the rather humorous (and possibly disturbing) thought of batteries made of piss heated using farts as fuel. Every man could become part of his own power source.. plus we could harvest all that methane from cow farts that is supposedly contributing to global warming.
So wait, the NSA's argument as to why their program is legal.. is that they're too incompetent to design a system that can follow the law. Shouldn't this be grounds to fire everyone at the NSA for incompetence, if this is the argument they're using?
Uh-huh. Sure. I'll go read it. Yep, I'll definitely remember to do that. Totally won't forget everything you just said the minute I hit the parking lot.. and it's gone. What was I going to do again?
GM didn't name DiGiorgio as the engineer at fault for the situation. When the documents started coming out about the ignition defect during the Congressional inquiries into the matter, DiGiorgio just happened to have his name on a bunch of them and was the guy unlucky enough to have signed off on the defective ignition switch. Had they punished entirely in private, there would no doubt be stories on every major news network demanding to know whether or not Ray DiGiorgio was fired. He was pretty much doomed from the moment those papers got made public.
I don't quite get how this counts as a masquerade of any kind. Anyone who knows anything about net neutrality - Chairman Wheeler included - would know that the ISPs do not want to be reclassified as common carriers. The letter by Sununu and Ford is clearly written by two members of Congress who are deep in the pockets of Big Telecom. At no point does it call Broadband for America a "consumer advocacy group" or suggest that they're consumer advocates in any way. The only mention of consumer advocacy was added by an SF Gate editor to explain where the letter came from. The SF Gate even mentions that both Sununu and Ford are members of Broadband for America. If anything, it looks like the SF Gate didn't do the research and labeled Broadband for America a consumer advocacy group. However, look at how they wrote it:
"Broadband for America, a coalition of 300 Internet consumer advocates, content providers, and engineers."
It sounds to me like whichever editor greenlit that letter for publication had no idea who Broadband for America were, so they went to the organization's website and looked at some of the people who are part of it (BforA has that on their website), then looked up Wikipedia articles for those people. They weren't willing to do the digging for an opinion piece.
It's also pointless because the NSA doesn't care about reading emails - they have no need to. Even with encryption, they can read the headers on the email and the sender/receiver email addresses and link those with real people. They can see who you're communicating with and how often you do so. If they really want to know what you're saying, they have a myriad of options at their disposal:
- Call the FBI (or other nationwide law enforcement agency for those not in the US) and have them raid you and everyone you talk to, either allowing them to obtain the private keys off your PC or by jailing you indefinitely for contempt of court for refusing to hand the keys over.
- Send out NSLs and obtain pen register orders against everyone you talk to, allowing them to read the already-decrypted messages.
- Use any one of their stash of zero-days and backdoors to install a pen register on your computer.
No amount of encryption is going to stop an agency that can send a small army of thugs to your door for any reason or no reason at all.
I bet support for the Xbox One controller would've come out much sooner, had Microsoft not been responsible for horrible controller support on PC games. Most games on Steam that support a controller are hardcoded for the Xbox 360 controller - using anything else requires a hack like MotionInJoy or XPadder. Even the ones that do support non-MS controllers will only display button prompts in terms of the X360 controller. This is, of course, because most games these days are multi-platform with consoles as the lead platform, and usually the PC port is a port of the X360 version.
With the way MS forced the X360 controller on PC, it's no wonder it took them forever to make a compatible driver.
Is this why airports keep hiking ticket prices, even well past what they'd need to pay for increased fuel costs and still make a profit? Or have they found some other way to subsidize maintenance?
The thing is, that wouldn't really help. If they give up spectrum, it'll just be bought out by AT&T or Verizon, either through themselves or through shell corporations. Now, if they had to give back both spectrum and exclusive rights to some of their infrastructure so that competitors can come in, that would be a fix that might work.
In the article, it says that "AB" was charged with possessing documents showing how to make a bomb. I don't live in the UK, but I know in the US that it's completely legal to possess documents related to bomb-making, so long as no bombs are actually made or used. Hell, there are books in the US that will tell you how to make a nuclear weapon - but good luck getting your hands on any of the materials for it. As far as I'm aware, under the law in the US, I could download a tutorial on how to make a bomb and even draw up plans for a bomb and still not have committed a crime, so long as I don't make one.
Why isn't this the case in the UK? You would think it would be a basic freedom of speech issue - and yes, I'm aware that the UK has no official freedom of speech law, but you would think that simply possessing knowledge could not be ruled illegal.