Why not just make a "suicide" drone, i.e. a drone with an EMP mounted on board. It fries itself, but also fries everything in front of it. Focusing would be significantly less of an issue from 10 ft away...
And people smart enough to have a clue start running. Problem is most of our ilk has better and more interesting stuff with our time and don't want to put up with clowns like these guys.
Maybe we should make the EFF a political party as well...
Boy, I can imagine all of the companies that have employees connect through VPNs to do confidential work will love this. I work for an internationally-based corporation that has me on a VPN before I can even BEGIN to work and I would imagine they'll be pretty pissed off if the FBI is legally hacking into their private systems.
This is such bullshit. When are we going to get some lawmakers who actually understand the fucking technology?
I cut my programming teeth on C as a middle schooler. It wasn't so bad. I had a hard time with pointers at first but that was more because I was learning from a "Teach Yourself C in 24 hours" book on loan from my cousin without any sort of teacher whatsoever.
C has been my go-to language ever since. I know more than many of my friends who are actual CS and IT people (my background is in physics and math, but I now mostly program for medical image reconstruction) about computer architecture, assembly, how a CPU works, and the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of a system, because of that choice. Coding for GPUs also came very naturally to me. I've never had any issues whatsoever picking up any other language when I have needed to use one or when C wasn't appropriate.
I feel pretty strongly that C is an excellent choice for a first programming language and much more flexible, useful and powerful than something like VB. I think that this day in age, Python would also be an excellent choice for a first programming language. It's not going anywhere for a few generations, that's for sure. Or... MATLAB anyone?;-)
Setting up NASA? - Since when is space rockets in the Constitution!???
2nd amendment: Every man, woman and child has a god-given right to a couple of space rockets. Now if only we could get rid of that pesky ten day waiting period.;-)
When will they learn that science research == business development?
Exactly! Full disclosure: I'm a grad student right now, so I'm a little biased, but I also work for a large multinational corporation (Ted Cruz loves those, right?). I have a perspective not many folks have.
The only strategic reason I can see for a move like this is defund science from a taxpayer perspective, and then claim business/industry will pick up the slack, but what most people don't see is how much work industry pulls from the academic world. Yank federal funding and you really mess with everyone.
More expensive than r&d and implementation is brain drain and a recession.
What can anyone (republicans, libertarians, etc.) have to gain from this choice? Couldn't they have put, literally, anyone else in this spot? Even Ted Cruz has to understand that defunding science hurts everyone. Is the goal to just make everything shit over the next two years?
Fuck this. I'm sick of it. All we seem to be doing in politics anymore is just trying to piss the other guy off and it's infuriating. Can't we strive for ANY sort of progress that isn't to just oppose the other guy, or is that too much to ask?
Why not just find the bug, report it, then move on?
I completely agree with many folks that this type of work has value and is desperately important to the field (and extremely educational for the researcher and software company), but the level of effort to actually generate an exploit that works regularly is the point of diminishing returns. This seems to be pretty novel work, so the outcomes will be useful in a broader sense, but not everything is like that.
Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO.
It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.
Some of the best advice I got from one of my college math professors: "If they [grad schools] don't offer to pay for your PhD, they don't really want you."
After an undergrad degree in science, you really shouldn't have to pay for your education anymore. If you do, you better fucking knock it out of the park with your research because otherwise you're going to take on a lot of debt for what is most likely not a huge return.
I wouldn't say I'm sick to the teeth, but I'd have to agree that "hacking" has gotten out of hand these days. I'm sure it was posted here, but the pacemaker hack that came out a couple of years ago (I have no idea if that's the correct date) is a perfect example of so much energy and money expended on finding a "bug" that few folks if any would have been able to uncover. There seems to be so much work put into finding and exploiting one tiny little thing that, like you said, is destined to be patched. I think the point made about the confiscation and security checks is interesting in this case.
On a slightly unrelated note, has anyone noticed that these days the work "hack" is so grossly overused? Everything is "hacking" and the word even shows up in "maker" circles (or "hacker" circles). Whatever happened to just "tinkering" or "developing?" I'm in academia and in my field all anyone wants to seem to do is reverse engineer stuff that manufacturers are already doing and then tweak it slightly. In many circles this would be called "hacking," but for us it's "research." Should I be calling myself a hacker or a scientist?
I liked the short story "The Roads Must Roll" but I can't imagine that being an especially compelling movie. It focuses on a lot of the same ideas as Starship Troopers.
I'm not sure I follow why this is a headline on Slashdot. Clickbait? Inviting inflammatory discussion? What are we going to gain from having this here?
That third case ("cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy,") is the reason why we need things like black phone, silent circle, encrypted phone lines/connections, encrypted text messages, encrypted everything. The laws might be outdated, but the technology isn't.
They don't want to respect our privacy or the US Constitution? Let's make it too difficult and expensive for them to keep trying to mess with us.
... I second what the author says about the software.
I used to be a whole-hearted apple fan. Now I only use linux for computing (on a converted chromebook) and my iPhone 5C and Apple TV are the last things I use that are apple. IOS 8 is totally twitchy with lots of app crashes, poor battery management (my phone died with 8% battery life the other day), and a footprint so large that I can hardly do anything on my 16gb phone ( less than 1 year old) anymore. My Apple TV can't seem to handle displaying album art correctly but other than that works for the most part.
Yosemite caused my old apple laptop to slow down to such a crawl that it has essentially become unusable. Whereas with Snow Leopard and even Lion (to a lesser extent though) it was great. I was fortunate enough to not suffer with the wifi issues others did, but things of the sort have plagued the latest software releases.
I think apple would do themselves a favor by slowing down a bit, and doubling down on reducing footprint size and upping the speed of the current features instead of always trying to add new stuff. Basically we need a repeat of the change from leopard to snow leopard; i.e. we need a "Snow Yosemite."
Pure cyber war would be fascinating. If we could leave meat-space war out of it, all-out cyber attacks would be wild. And then they'd be celebrate in the news as a "blow to the enemy." People might actually learn something about computers, the private security sector would explode, economically it'd probably do wonders to get people to trend to STEM fields. I'd guess we would see crazy developments in cryptography too. And fucking Sony might learn to encrypt their data.
We keep asking what to do to get more kids interested in tech...
If I didn't think someone would be a dick and lob a hand grenade onto someone's "soil" and cause World War III, I'd almost hope that cyber war would happen just to see the side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah! Perhaps he should...
Why not just make a "suicide" drone, i.e. a drone with an EMP mounted on board. It fries itself, but also fries everything in front of it. Focusing would be significantly less of an issue from 10 ft away...
And people smart enough to have a clue start running. Problem is most of our ilk has better and more interesting stuff with our time and don't want to put up with clowns like these guys.
Maybe we should make the EFF a political party as well...
Hah! Sad but true.
Boy, I can imagine all of the companies that have employees connect through VPNs to do confidential work will love this. I work for an internationally-based corporation that has me on a VPN before I can even BEGIN to work and I would imagine they'll be pretty pissed off if the FBI is legally hacking into their private systems.
This is such bullshit. When are we going to get some lawmakers who actually understand the fucking technology?
Such idiots...
I cut my programming teeth on C as a middle schooler. It wasn't so bad. I had a hard time with pointers at first but that was more because I was learning from a "Teach Yourself C in 24 hours" book on loan from my cousin without any sort of teacher whatsoever.
;-)
C has been my go-to language ever since. I know more than many of my friends who are actual CS and IT people (my background is in physics and math, but I now mostly program for medical image reconstruction) about computer architecture, assembly, how a CPU works, and the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of a system, because of that choice. Coding for GPUs also came very naturally to me. I've never had any issues whatsoever picking up any other language when I have needed to use one or when C wasn't appropriate.
I feel pretty strongly that C is an excellent choice for a first programming language and much more flexible, useful and powerful than something like VB. I think that this day in age, Python would also be an excellent choice for a first programming language. It's not going anywhere for a few generations, that's for sure. Or... MATLAB anyone?
"'Civilized' men tried to kill you, so we will call it defense"
The song "Search and Destroy" by Ima Robot
Setting up NASA? - Since when is space rockets in the Constitution!???
2nd amendment: Every man, woman and child has a god-given right to a couple of space rockets. Now if only we could get rid of that pesky ten day waiting period. ;-)
When will they learn that science research == business development?
Exactly! Full disclosure: I'm a grad student right now, so I'm a little biased, but I also work for a large multinational corporation (Ted Cruz loves those, right?). I have a perspective not many folks have.
The only strategic reason I can see for a move like this is defund science from a taxpayer perspective, and then claim business/industry will pick up the slack, but what most people don't see is how much work industry pulls from the academic world. Yank federal funding and you really mess with everyone.
More expensive than r&d and implementation is brain drain and a recession.
What can anyone (republicans, libertarians, etc.) have to gain from this choice? Couldn't they have put, literally, anyone else in this spot? Even Ted Cruz has to understand that defunding science hurts everyone. Is the goal to just make everything shit over the next two years?
Fuck this. I'm sick of it. All we seem to be doing in politics anymore is just trying to piss the other guy off and it's infuriating. Can't we strive for ANY sort of progress that isn't to just oppose the other guy, or is that too much to ask?
Real bad.
Why not just find the bug, report it, then move on?
I completely agree with many folks that this type of work has value and is desperately important to the field (and extremely educational for the researcher and software company), but the level of effort to actually generate an exploit that works regularly is the point of diminishing returns. This seems to be pretty novel work, so the outcomes will be useful in a broader sense, but not everything is like that.
Go to a good undergraduate school but if you do not get into one of the best institutions for grad school DO NOT GO. It's that bad out there and it's winner take all.
Some of the best advice I got from one of my college math professors: "If they [grad schools] don't offer to pay for your PhD, they don't really want you."
After an undergrad degree in science, you really shouldn't have to pay for your education anymore. If you do, you better fucking knock it out of the park with your research because otherwise you're going to take on a lot of debt for what is most likely not a huge return.
I wouldn't say I'm sick to the teeth, but I'd have to agree that "hacking" has gotten out of hand these days. I'm sure it was posted here, but the pacemaker hack that came out a couple of years ago (I have no idea if that's the correct date) is a perfect example of so much energy and money expended on finding a "bug" that few folks if any would have been able to uncover. There seems to be so much work put into finding and exploiting one tiny little thing that, like you said, is destined to be patched. I think the point made about the confiscation and security checks is interesting in this case.
On a slightly unrelated note, has anyone noticed that these days the work "hack" is so grossly overused? Everything is "hacking" and the word even shows up in "maker" circles (or "hacker" circles). Whatever happened to just "tinkering" or "developing?" I'm in academia and in my field all anyone wants to seem to do is reverse engineer stuff that manufacturers are already doing and then tweak it slightly. In many circles this would be called "hacking," but for us it's "research." Should I be calling myself a hacker or a scientist?
Like what?
I liked the short story "The Roads Must Roll" but I can't imagine that being an especially compelling movie. It focuses on a lot of the same ideas as Starship Troopers.
I'm not sure I follow why this is a headline on Slashdot. Clickbait? Inviting inflammatory discussion? What are we going to gain from having this here?
That third case ("cases in which the technology is used in public places or other locations at which the FBI deems there is no reasonable expectation of privacy,") is the reason why we need things like black phone, silent circle, encrypted phone lines/connections, encrypted text messages, encrypted everything. The laws might be outdated, but the technology isn't.
They don't want to respect our privacy or the US Constitution? Let's make it too difficult and expensive for them to keep trying to mess with us.
... I second what the author says about the software.
I used to be a whole-hearted apple fan. Now I only use linux for computing (on a converted chromebook) and my iPhone 5C and Apple TV are the last things I use that are apple. IOS 8 is totally twitchy with lots of app crashes, poor battery management (my phone died with 8% battery life the other day), and a footprint so large that I can hardly do anything on my 16gb phone ( less than 1 year old) anymore. My Apple TV can't seem to handle displaying album art correctly but other than that works for the most part.
Yosemite caused my old apple laptop to slow down to such a crawl that it has essentially become unusable. Whereas with Snow Leopard and even Lion (to a lesser extent though) it was great. I was fortunate enough to not suffer with the wifi issues others did, but things of the sort have plagued the latest software releases.
I think apple would do themselves a favor by slowing down a bit, and doubling down on reducing footprint size and upping the speed of the current features instead of always trying to add new stuff. Basically we need a repeat of the change from leopard to snow leopard; i.e. we need a "Snow Yosemite."
Pure cyber war would be fascinating. If we could leave meat-space war out of it, all-out cyber attacks would be wild. And then they'd be celebrate in the news as a "blow to the enemy." People might actually learn something about computers, the private security sector would explode, economically it'd probably do wonders to get people to trend to STEM fields. I'd guess we would see crazy developments in cryptography too. And fucking Sony might learn to encrypt their data. We keep asking what to do to get more kids interested in tech... If I didn't think someone would be a dick and lob a hand grenade onto someone's "soil" and cause World War III, I'd almost hope that cyber war would happen just to see the side effects.