Next month, an IM worm will install not just a browser, but an entire operating system. It will be Linux, but it will be setup to give the worm owner complete remote ops. It will have basic mail, IM , web browsing and word processing all via the usual open source tools, and will be made to look something like Windows. And 90% of the people who wake up to find this new OS running on their system will simply use it.
You KNOW they will. That's the level of what we're talking about.
For one thing people have become accustomed to random stuff showing up on updates and upgrades. The remore operatior will simply launch a splashscreen that says "A gift from Microsoft for your loyalty!" and people will go nuts. For another thing, there is a good deal of evidence accumulated over the many years of this malware war that the users who are keeping malware authors in business are total noobs. Many are developmentally disabled, or are children, or are computer phobes who avert their eyes when the machines "does something odd". Some are simply dumb as cabbages. They click "yeah sure, pwn me" on every dialog box because they are functioning as part of the attached peripherals a NOT an intelligent user.
No, I'm not bitter. I'm not being sarcastic. I've woken to the reality. This is our world, and we white hats are just a liitle slow on the uptake is all. What this suggests about computer ownership (like maybe you need an operator's license, as required with radio broadcasting, if you are going to traffic in the public sphere) is probably the next frontier of the discussion, that's all.
How about 50 months? Not to diss anybody, but anyone who's talking 50 years out on computer platforms sounds like an old philosopher combing his beard. And if he can do it, so can I.
50 years out: The biggest technology security issue will be kidnap and forced slavery. People with expensive cybermods will regularly have their arms ripped off during drive-by "arm snatches". And those with neuralmods will regularly lose their heads to thieves working out of chopshops, or be bodily kidnapped, removed to remote locations, and hooked into local nets to provide undocumented processing power to organized crime syndicates who, due to NSA backdooring of mainstream commercial platforms, need to set up "bloodmarket" wetware computers to run their illegal casinos and submarket financial networks/scams. Those with really valuable information in their brains will have their very souls stripped out one memory at a time, a process than can take months, until they are completely downloaded and left an emaciated corpse. Meanwhile, most communitcations, including voice transmission in air, will be actively tapped either by governments or corporations and often both, and regulary edited on-the-fly to alter it's meaning in subtle ways before arrival. Thus there will be companies who offer communications services where the amount of such editing can be reduced to as little as 5% of meaning by multi-path transmission and quantum encryption. Likewise, electronic paper will be found to have a bug/feature where anyone nearby can get an exact copy of what you are writing, while you write it, just by tuning into the nanovoltage molecular transition events during the raster scanning process, a la TEMPEST of old.
So there you go. It's all totally wrong of course and the reality of 50 years out is sure to be stranger still. One thing is for certain, we've come a long way from "Moth in Panel F relay #70".
Gould & Fisk tried the same thing with the gold market. At which point, fundamental flaws in the gold standard and the Greenback became rather obvious.
Maybe we'll have the same corrections this time but without the economic collapse. Did I just suggest we've learned anything from the past? Very sorry, I'll stop now.
Some posters are replying with "maintain your own servers and don't make backups." Well guess what's going to happen next: Not keeping backups will be seen by law enforcement and the courts as "furtive behavior" and the act of NOT making backups might (will?) be recognized as intent to avoid capture. So disconnect the tape drives if you care to, but keep a watch out for some clueless lawmaker to propose a law that criminalizes you for NOT bothering to save something THEY think is evidence in YOUR future trial for acts of treason or lawlessness that YOU are someday going to commit.
It might seem unrelated, but we haven't found any sign of intelligent life signals from our SETI efforts. There are many technical reason why that might (or even should) be the case, but it has lately ocurred to me that one reason we don't hear from them might be because about the time they become advanced enough to start generating intelligent signals via physical phenomenon like electromagnetic radiation, they then stumble upon "something" that takes them out. These days, we imagine that to be muclear weapons, which could certainly evaporate an advanced civilization if they got out of hand. But imagine for a moment that warfare is unique to primates (we do hope) and imagine further that civilizations discover nuclear weapons and, like the Chinese apparently did with blackpowder, use them safely for entertainment. What might happen then is a bit more troubling: they go on to play with nuclear processes until the faithful day when they discover something -- a reaction of some kind or a new form of matter -- that simply cannot be contained. And in a flash it devours them. If it is easy to stumble upon, and gives no warning regarding what will happen next, then it becomes a technological trap that no advancing civilization can get past.
I heard it said once that if we ever discover a signal from deep space that suggests an extraterrestrial origin, it will be utterly profound and life altering to be certain, but that NOT finding a signal is equally as profound. I'd go on to suggest that NOT finding a signal is a signal in itself, and a warning: There is something lurking in the actions of the physical universe, buried in it's forms and processes, that will when you hit it just right take you out. And that you run into it sometime shortly after you discover electricity.
IIRC, the US and Europe ended up getting the biggest share of the IPv4 address space, and this hasn't helped Asian countries much when it comes to growing their Internet presence. I don't know how well IPv6 has taken off there (poorly if things in the US are any indication) so I wonder if one of the goals of the Chinese project is to eventually route their own Class A blocks along with TLDs? If they did that then they would be 100% on their own, as the rest of the 'Net would have to cut them off to avoid packet collisions. Heck, they'd have to set up border mail proxies just to share email with the West... which would give them a lot of filtering/monitoring options too... I bet that is really attractive to them right now.
Most people I know (including a lot of the office folk where I work) use their Mac or Windows PC 99% of the time for Internet related activities like email and web browsing, and increasingly for streaming media like Internet radio and iTunes. Some do compose text intended for print and when they do could get by with Wordpad or TextEdit for basic font control and text formatting. Excel is still an important tool for some, but fewer all the time, usually just the bean counters now. PowerPoint is simply abused. Anything more complex than an RTF file could be handled online by someone like 37signals.com.
In short: 99% of computer users could get by with a basic machine running the basic installed apps saving to broadly available file formats (RTF, TXT, HTM etc) so long as they have broadband. And they don't even know this because nobody pointed it out.
An interesting experiment would be to pull them off the M$ Office Koolaid and watch how they cope. After the initial world-is-ending tears and rending of garments, I suspect most wouldn't miss a step.
Since nobody in their right mind will bother certifying old equipment for resell, what this law does is push all that old stuff off-shore really fast. Most will go to China is my guess.
Now, this undercuts a market in Japan for old stuff, and that market may or may not have been important in the first place. But the law *will* create a few more sales for electronics companies. I suppose Ebay and the others are a bit put off since used electronics might be a big part of their sales... but I don't know that for sure.
Unless someone can show that reselling of fairly old equipment is a huge industry in Japan, I don't see how this is a big deal.
The only way Apple would put Windows on their boxen would be if Apple were getting entirely OUT of the PC business to focus on iPod, iPhone, iDildo etc. And of course that might happen. PCs are getting un-sexy, in fact are beginning to disappear entirely from peoples' thinking. These days a converstaion about something one your PC is more likely about something on the Internet you FOUND via your PC. Taken a step further, what happens when all your apps and data are belong to Google? Or 37signals, or some other combination of service providers? At some point your "PC" became a dumb connection to the Internet, maybe rented like a digital cable box, and the notion that it was "personal" or yours in any true sense just went away. Would Apple/Dell/Gateway/EtcBoxShop even *have* a business model for PC sales in that environment?
Frankly, I think that what's far more likely to happen is that Microsoft brings on the Linux kernal (or maybe Mach or even OSX) to power their real winner, the Office suite and email, on thin appliances over the Internet. They'll market it as the "xOffice" or something froofroo and will utterly fail to mention the OS under it.
Or double-speak. It's hard to tell them apart if done correctly.
It would be trivially easy for the Chinese leadership to appraoch Google, Y! et al and say "Just serve up the same search results as you do in any other country. We won't throw anyone in jail or kick your servers out of the country if you do. We welcome the internal discussion this would provoke because we want to support free speech."
Let's see if in fact they do that. Nothing short of that exact approach is likely going to cut it.
Agreed, in principle. But one could as easily argue that Islam had it's zenith in the 12th century and is now in some kind of decline. Growing in numbers certainly, but more because of high birth rates in poor Islamic countries than because of any kind of cultural brilliance.
The leaders of modern Islam speak of the Muslims being "humiliated". That's a loaded word, and you can point to any modern issue and say it humiliates the muslims. I guess the World Trade Center humiliated the muslims. Or, just as likely, the slow slide of their culture from world leadership to "the religion of choice of the poor" has been humiliating. That I would buy.
Though this does make one wonder if we ought to be doing more for the poor nations of the world.
I think what you meant to say was "There are no other examples of modern religions that currently preach those parts of their ancient teachings that promote violence against other cultures or religions" because the ancient Hebrews certainly did that, and the Catholics went after the Protestants and heretics in a big way at one time. Not to mention the Witches and Jews.
But you know what, they got over it didn't they? The Arab Muslims have lived in isolation so long they are just now waking up to the realization that there are other types of people in the world (a realization that the Turks, for example, grappled with centuries ago). I think that all these monotheisms suffer from a good dose of xenophobia, and it takes them a while to sort of figure out that they are wrong about a few cherished beliefs before they can... you know... live with anyone not like themselves.
There have been shadowy glimpses of this "other economy" for a while, in the bot army cottage industry and the various rackets where popular sites are threatened with black-out if they don't pay for "protection". But all that is just the warmup to the big show.
Organized crime has found the internet, and they seem to like what they see. It's just like one huge, dark alley lined with endless smoke-filled lounges. Lots of seamy places to meet up. Anonimity if you want it. Under-the-table dealings. Faceless bosses and eager young turks with itchy trigger fingers.
There was a time once when firefighters worked not for the government, but for insurance companies, and they would respond to protect structures covered by their employers or would freelance in expectation of payment by the insuror. The problem was that due to profit movites the fire "companies" were not averse to dirty tricks when a fire was set in order to get the "job", and are rumored to have even set a few themselves. The modern fire fighting ethic evolved only after firefighters became government employees charged with protecting everyone.
I don't think Symantec is doing anything to create viruses. But let's be honest; if they *wanted* to, how hard would it be to enter an anonymous chat room, hook up with a blackhat coder in Russia, mail him US$2k in small bills, and have something nasty on the 'net in 24 hours? Not hard at all. Nitpick the details all you want, they would stand to make so much money selling "protection" afterwards that the details of the initial transaction would be trivial.
I think everyone is aware that Symantec and their ilk have little finacial interest in seeing virus and worms disappear, and every interest in seeing them continue. It's just a fact. They only get paid when things break, unless we put them on as government workers like police or firefighters. That's not a proposal, just an observation. Though the NSA *did* develop SELinux... so maybe there's something to it.
The US Dept of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies advising them to be on the lookout for groups of susicious characters operating backhoes. Intelligence analysts say there is a high probability of a terrorist attack against our network infrastructure in the coming months, the preferred method being excavation of cables, according to unnamed sources. A man was arrested in Montana while attending classes to operate a backhoe and has been under investigation the same sources reveal.
... Taiwan and mainland residents are clamoring for transgenic pig/tiger. A near riot was narrowly averted in Shanghai's meet processing district when several thousand middle-aged men fell out of line at the butchers and mobbed the counters, demanding their share of "aphrodisiac pork". Restaurants across both countries cannot serve enough of the much-sought food ingredient, thought by millions to contain valuable proteins from tigers that will stimulate male function, much as ground tiger penis used to be prized before the tigers became largely extinct. The Chinese government is stepping up breeding programs for trans-pork to help cope with demand. According to Agriculture Minister Du Qinglin,'The government has an obligation to provide products that enhance the quality of life of all Chinese people, and the new transgenic farm animals are intended to meet demand for foods that offer perceived advantages over their plain counterparts.'"
Mod it funny if you want to... but I'm not trying to be funny. There is no technical or practical limit to this madness once started.
That whole "micro" and "soft" thing? I hear that now they have pills for that.
While I appreciate your point, Bill's biggest problem probably isn't envy as much as frustration that his company still hasn't become a recognized world power. MS might indeed operate on a par with the Standard Oil of the previous century, but apparently that level of play isn't enough to ensure global hegemony. Standard Oil had its head handed to it, and even mighty IBM still has to obey civil and criminal law. Is there no route to immortality these days other than to die on a cross?
I suspect that people like Bill Gates thought that riding the technology wave would bring them fabulous, even mythical, levels of personal influence more on a par with the kinds of old than modern CEOs. It must be hard to account for how Google and Linux can get more press than Bill Gates, in his thinking, given that he basically invented the playing field, in his thinking.
...the FCC, like their telco hosts, are doomed to extinction. Consumer protection remains a priority, but currently the FCC doesn't provide even that. Face it, centralized communications facilities are dying, so will their regulators. We might be in for a wild time ('consumer beware' will take on a whole new emphasis) but these dinosaur at least are history.
Nicely put. There is an exchange between Alice and HumptyDumpty that gets at this exactly:
Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less. Alice: The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things. Humpty Dumpty: The question is: which is to be master - that's all.
The hardware and IOS vulns may not be entirely new, but the *interest* in them probably is. We've gone from recreational hacking that produced interesting viruses to organized crime looking at ways to make money. When the mob gets involved, you can bet they'll take any route they can, all the time.
IMO hardware vulns are best used to extort businesses, and are no good for terrorism. The DOS, which used to be seen as a tool for revenge, is now used as a tool for extortion. Being able to shut down some business' router, and keep it down, is in the end far more effective than trying to build a small army of bots to packet flood the same router. Master Sun Tzu reminds us: "Therefore those who win every battle are not skillful... those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all."
Slashdot Mirror
Next month, an IM worm will install not just a browser, but an entire operating system. It will be Linux, but it will be setup to give the worm owner complete remote ops. It will have basic mail, IM , web browsing and word processing all via the usual open source tools, and will be made to look something like Windows. And 90% of the people who wake up to find this new OS running on their system will simply use it.
You KNOW they will. That's the level of what we're talking about.
For one thing people have become accustomed to random stuff showing up on updates and upgrades. The remore operatior will simply launch a splashscreen that says "A gift from Microsoft for your loyalty!" and people will go nuts. For another thing, there is a good deal of evidence accumulated over the many years of this malware war that the users who are keeping malware authors in business are total noobs. Many are developmentally disabled, or are children, or are computer phobes who avert their eyes when the machines "does something odd". Some are simply dumb as cabbages. They click "yeah sure, pwn me" on every dialog box because they are functioning as part of the attached peripherals a NOT an intelligent user.
No, I'm not bitter. I'm not being sarcastic. I've woken to the reality. This is our world, and we white hats are just a liitle slow on the uptake is all. What this suggests about computer ownership (like maybe you need an operator's license, as required with radio broadcasting, if you are going to traffic in the public sphere) is probably the next frontier of the discussion, that's all.
I read it. Every damned word. Sensible as a dictionary. Hang in there.
How about 50 months? Not to diss anybody, but anyone who's talking 50 years out on computer platforms sounds like an old philosopher combing his beard. And if he can do it, so can I.
50 years out: The biggest technology security issue will be kidnap and forced slavery. People with expensive cybermods will regularly have their arms ripped off during drive-by "arm snatches". And those with neuralmods will regularly lose their heads to thieves working out of chopshops, or be bodily kidnapped, removed to remote locations, and hooked into local nets to provide undocumented processing power to organized crime syndicates who, due to NSA backdooring of mainstream commercial platforms, need to set up "bloodmarket" wetware computers to run their illegal casinos and submarket financial networks/scams. Those with really valuable information in their brains will have their very souls stripped out one memory at a time, a process than can take months, until they are completely downloaded and left an emaciated corpse. Meanwhile, most communitcations, including voice transmission in air, will be actively tapped either by governments or corporations and often both, and regulary edited on-the-fly to alter it's meaning in subtle ways before arrival. Thus there will be companies who offer communications services where the amount of such editing can be reduced to as little as 5% of meaning by multi-path transmission and quantum encryption. Likewise, electronic paper will be found to have a bug/feature where anyone nearby can get an exact copy of what you are writing, while you write it, just by tuning into the nanovoltage molecular transition events during the raster scanning process, a la TEMPEST of old.
So there you go. It's all totally wrong of course and the reality of 50 years out is sure to be stranger still. One thing is for certain, we've come a long way from "Moth in Panel F relay #70".
Gould & Fisk tried the same thing with the gold market. At which point, fundamental flaws in the gold standard and the Greenback became rather obvious.
Maybe we'll have the same corrections this time but without the economic collapse. Did I just suggest we've learned anything from the past? Very sorry, I'll stop now.
The first was called Spinner, but the second was called Crusher. Is that because "Fuchikoma" was already taken? My ghost is whispering to me...
Obey your Noodly Master!
Some posters are replying with "maintain your own servers and don't make backups." Well guess what's going to happen next: Not keeping backups will be seen by law enforcement and the courts as "furtive behavior" and the act of NOT making backups might (will?) be recognized as intent to avoid capture. So disconnect the tape drives if you care to, but keep a watch out for some clueless lawmaker to propose a law that criminalizes you for NOT bothering to save something THEY think is evidence in YOUR future trial for acts of treason or lawlessness that YOU are someday going to commit.
So long as they don't call the game "Magrathea" they'll be fine. And, who did they get to do the fiords?
It might seem unrelated, but we haven't found any sign of intelligent life signals from our SETI efforts. There are many technical reason why that might (or even should) be the case, but it has lately ocurred to me that one reason we don't hear from them might be because about the time they become advanced enough to start generating intelligent signals via physical phenomenon like electromagnetic radiation, they then stumble upon "something" that takes them out. These days, we imagine that to be muclear weapons, which could certainly evaporate an advanced civilization if they got out of hand. But imagine for a moment that warfare is unique to primates (we do hope) and imagine further that civilizations discover nuclear weapons and, like the Chinese apparently did with blackpowder, use them safely for entertainment. What might happen then is a bit more troubling: they go on to play with nuclear processes until the faithful day when they discover something -- a reaction of some kind or a new form of matter -- that simply cannot be contained. And in a flash it devours them. If it is easy to stumble upon, and gives no warning regarding what will happen next, then it becomes a technological trap that no advancing civilization can get past.
I heard it said once that if we ever discover a signal from deep space that suggests an extraterrestrial origin, it will be utterly profound and life altering to be certain, but that NOT finding a signal is equally as profound. I'd go on to suggest that NOT finding a signal is a signal in itself, and a warning: There is something lurking in the actions of the physical universe, buried in it's forms and processes, that will when you hit it just right take you out. And that you run into it sometime shortly after you discover electricity.
Not to bring anybody down, you know.
Have a nice eternity,
theCat
IIRC, the US and Europe ended up getting the biggest share of the IPv4 address space, and this hasn't helped Asian countries much when it comes to growing their Internet presence. I don't know how well IPv6 has taken off there (poorly if things in the US are any indication) so I wonder if one of the goals of the Chinese project is to eventually route their own Class A blocks along with TLDs? If they did that then they would be 100% on their own, as the rest of the 'Net would have to cut them off to avoid packet collisions. Heck, they'd have to set up border mail proxies just to share email with the West... which would give them a lot of filtering/monitoring options too... I bet that is really attractive to them right now.
Most people I know (including a lot of the office folk where I work) use their Mac or Windows PC 99% of the time for Internet related activities like email and web browsing, and increasingly for streaming media like Internet radio and iTunes. Some do compose text intended for print and when they do could get by with Wordpad or TextEdit for basic font control and text formatting. Excel is still an important tool for some, but fewer all the time, usually just the bean counters now. PowerPoint is simply abused. Anything more complex than an RTF file could be handled online by someone like 37signals.com.
In short: 99% of computer users could get by with a basic machine running the basic installed apps saving to broadly available file formats (RTF, TXT, HTM etc) so long as they have broadband. And they don't even know this because nobody pointed it out.
An interesting experiment would be to pull them off the M$ Office Koolaid and watch how they cope. After the initial world-is-ending tears and rending of garments, I suspect most wouldn't miss a step.
Since nobody in their right mind will bother certifying old equipment for resell, what this law does is push all that old stuff off-shore really fast. Most will go to China is my guess.
Now, this undercuts a market in Japan for old stuff, and that market may or may not have been important in the first place. But the law *will* create a few more sales for electronics companies. I suppose Ebay and the others are a bit put off since used electronics might be a big part of their sales... but I don't know that for sure.
Unless someone can show that reselling of fairly old equipment is a huge industry in Japan, I don't see how this is a big deal.
The only way Apple would put Windows on their boxen would be if Apple were getting entirely OUT of the PC business to focus on iPod, iPhone, iDildo etc. And of course that might happen. PCs are getting un-sexy, in fact are beginning to disappear entirely from peoples' thinking. These days a converstaion about something one your PC is more likely about something on the Internet you FOUND via your PC. Taken a step further, what happens when all your apps and data are belong to Google? Or 37signals, or some other combination of service providers? At some point your "PC" became a dumb connection to the Internet, maybe rented like a digital cable box, and the notion that it was "personal" or yours in any true sense just went away. Would Apple/Dell/Gateway/EtcBoxShop even *have* a business model for PC sales in that environment?
/.!
Frankly, I think that what's far more likely to happen is that Microsoft brings on the Linux kernal (or maybe Mach or even OSX) to power their real winner, the Office suite and email, on thin appliances over the Internet. They'll market it as the "xOffice" or something froofroo and will utterly fail to mention the OS under it.
And you heard it first here on
Or double-speak. It's hard to tell them apart if done correctly.
It would be trivially easy for the Chinese leadership to appraoch Google, Y! et al and say "Just serve up the same search results as you do in any other country. We won't throw anyone in jail or kick your servers out of the country if you do. We welcome the internal discussion this would provoke because we want to support free speech."
Let's see if in fact they do that. Nothing short of that exact approach is likely going to cut it.
Agreed, in principle. But one could as easily argue that Islam had it's zenith in the 12th century and is now in some kind of decline. Growing in numbers certainly, but more because of high birth rates in poor Islamic countries than because of any kind of cultural brilliance.
The leaders of modern Islam speak of the Muslims being "humiliated". That's a loaded word, and you can point to any modern issue and say it humiliates the muslims. I guess the World Trade Center humiliated the muslims. Or, just as likely, the slow slide of their culture from world leadership to "the religion of choice of the poor" has been humiliating. That I would buy.
Though this does make one wonder if we ought to be doing more for the poor nations of the world.
I think what you meant to say was "There are no other examples of modern religions that currently preach those parts of their ancient teachings that promote violence against other cultures or religions" because the ancient Hebrews certainly did that, and the Catholics went after the Protestants and heretics in a big way at one time. Not to mention the Witches and Jews.
But you know what, they got over it didn't they? The Arab Muslims have lived in isolation so long they are just now waking up to the realization that there are other types of people in the world (a realization that the Turks, for example, grappled with centuries ago). I think that all these monotheisms suffer from a good dose of xenophobia, and it takes them a while to sort of figure out that they are wrong about a few cherished beliefs before they can... you know... live with anyone not like themselves.
There have been shadowy glimpses of this "other economy" for a while, in the bot army cottage industry and the various rackets where popular sites are threatened with black-out if they don't pay for "protection". But all that is just the warmup to the big show.
Organized crime has found the internet, and they seem to like what they see. It's just like one huge, dark alley lined with endless smoke-filled lounges. Lots of seamy places to meet up. Anonimity if you want it. Under-the-table dealings. Faceless bosses and eager young turks with itchy trigger fingers.
The perfect growth media for scum and parasites.
it goes to a joke site. Can we get some verification of the authenticity of this? Anyone from the old HotWired days want to comment?
There was a time once when firefighters worked not for the government, but for insurance companies, and they would respond to protect structures covered by their employers or would freelance in expectation of payment by the insuror. The problem was that due to profit movites the fire "companies" were not averse to dirty tricks when a fire was set in order to get the "job", and are rumored to have even set a few themselves. The modern fire fighting ethic evolved only after firefighters became government employees charged with protecting everyone.
I don't think Symantec is doing anything to create viruses. But let's be honest; if they *wanted* to, how hard would it be to enter an anonymous chat room, hook up with a blackhat coder in Russia, mail him US$2k in small bills, and have something nasty on the 'net in 24 hours? Not hard at all. Nitpick the details all you want, they would stand to make so much money selling "protection" afterwards that the details of the initial transaction would be trivial.
I think everyone is aware that Symantec and their ilk have little finacial interest in seeing virus and worms disappear, and every interest in seeing them continue. It's just a fact. They only get paid when things break, unless we put them on as government workers like police or firefighters. That's not a proposal, just an observation. Though the NSA *did* develop SELinux... so maybe there's something to it.
The US Dept of Homeland Security issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies advising them to be on the lookout for groups of susicious characters operating backhoes. Intelligence analysts say there is a high probability of a terrorist attack against our network infrastructure in the coming months, the preferred method being excavation of cables, according to unnamed sources. A man was arrested in Montana while attending classes to operate a backhoe and has been under investigation the same sources reveal.
... Taiwan and mainland residents are clamoring for transgenic pig/tiger. A near riot was narrowly averted in Shanghai's meet processing district when several thousand middle-aged men fell out of line at the butchers and mobbed the counters, demanding their share of "aphrodisiac pork". Restaurants across both countries cannot serve enough of the much-sought food ingredient, thought by millions to contain valuable proteins from tigers that will stimulate male function, much as ground tiger penis used to be prized before the tigers became largely extinct. The Chinese government is stepping up breeding programs for trans-pork to help cope with demand. According to Agriculture Minister Du Qinglin,'The government has an obligation to provide products that enhance the quality of life of all Chinese people, and the new transgenic farm animals are intended to meet demand for foods that offer perceived advantages over their plain counterparts.'"
Mod it funny if you want to... but I'm not trying to be funny. There is no technical or practical limit to this madness once started.
That whole "micro" and "soft" thing? I hear that now they have pills for that.
While I appreciate your point, Bill's biggest problem probably isn't envy as much as frustration that his company still hasn't become a recognized world power. MS might indeed operate on a par with the Standard Oil of the previous century, but apparently that level of play isn't enough to ensure global hegemony. Standard Oil had its head handed to it, and even mighty IBM still has to obey civil and criminal law. Is there no route to immortality these days other than to die on a cross?
I suspect that people like Bill Gates thought that riding the technology wave would bring them fabulous, even mythical, levels of personal influence more on a par with the kinds of old than modern CEOs. It must be hard to account for how Google and Linux can get more press than Bill Gates, in his thinking, given that he basically invented the playing field, in his thinking.
...the FCC, like their telco hosts, are doomed to extinction. Consumer protection remains a priority, but currently the FCC doesn't provide even that. Face it, centralized communications facilities are dying, so will their regulators. We might be in for a wild time ('consumer beware' will take on a whole new emphasis) but these dinosaur at least are history.
Nicely put. There is an exchange between Alice and HumptyDumpty that gets at this exactly:
Humpty Dumpty: When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.
Alice: The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things.
Humpty Dumpty: The question is: which is to be master - that's all.
The hardware and IOS vulns may not be entirely new, but the *interest* in them probably is. We've gone from recreational hacking that produced interesting viruses to organized crime looking at ways to make money. When the mob gets involved, you can bet they'll take any route they can, all the time.
IMO hardware vulns are best used to extort businesses, and are no good for terrorism. The DOS, which used to be seen as a tool for revenge, is now used as a tool for extortion. Being able to shut down some business' router, and keep it down, is in the end far more effective than trying to build a small army of bots to packet flood the same router. Master Sun Tzu reminds us: "Therefore those who win every battle are not skillful... those who render others' armies helpless without fighting are the best of all."
That's the science of Internet Warfare.