I just sent Representative Hooley a quick note thanking her for voting against this bill. I had previously written to Senators Wyden and Smith about the issue of telecom immunity; Wyden's response was very encouraging. The letter I got from Smith didn't sound like he particularly understood the issue, but he's a Republican so that didn't surprise me.
A truly patriotic judge may deny the motion because the FISA amendment is unconstitutionally granting the telcos and government a free pass after the fact, but he'll be putting his career on the line if he does. This is precisely why judges are not elected. He wouldn't be risking his career... but he wouldn't have been appointed to the bench in the first place if he were the type of person who would do that sort of thing.
Uhh, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that Dell only gets paid if you actually USE the trialware. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. They get paid for installing it, just like TV stations get paid to show commercials even if you don't watch them.
The IT guy blames his boss for installing the Alexa toolbar, which lead to the deletion of all dynamic content on the company's web site.
No it didn't.
Yes, the Alexa toolbar isn't something anybody needs to run, and yes, Alexa should respect robots.txt, but whoever set up their web site is clearly incompetent:
1) Never rely on robots.txt for security. 2) The article says the Alexa spider captured usernames and passwords? What the hell were usernames and passwords doing unprotected on the web site? 3) The Alexa spider clicked all the Delete links. Never ever use links to delete things! Always use a submit button with POST, not GET. Generally, most spiders won't submit POST forms.
Security through obscurity is even less effective when the obscurity is poor.
How do you know the prof didn't use pine to read the email? No one would ever know if I read an email. Once the email has been received by my mail server, no one knows (except me) if it got read & saved, read & deleted, or just deleted. Presumably by "readnotify is extremely reliable for this particular prof" he meant that the recipient is known not to be a pine user, because readnotify has always worked when sending mail to this recipient in the past.
I can assure you, I never looked for a picture of a man bending over and holding his huge gaping anus open. Sometimes you see things on the Internet that you really really weren't looking for.
I'm not sure you completely understand just how much 1.5TB a day is... Either that, or they don't understand how fast an OC3 line is. If I've done my math right, 1.5TB a day is 18.2 megabytes per second, which is almost exactly the speed of an OC3 line, assuming you keep it completely saturated 24/7.
Verizon FIOS tops out at about a third of that in certain areas, or considerably less everywhere else.
Your logic only applies to local ISPs. Nationwide ISPs still have to pay for bandwidth between each POP and the news server. Putting a news server in each POP isn't economically feasible; at every ISP I've worked at the admins all complained that running a news server is an expensive pain in the ass, so maintaining several of them just isn't an option.
Passengers matter, because the passengers will prevent a hijacker from gaining control of the airplane. Let me spell it out for you:
The fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 was prevented from reaching its destination, probably partly because some of the passengers were able to communicate with the ground via cell phone and found out about the other three planes. If the same thing happened today (regardless of any additional security measures), the passengers would not have allowed the hijackers to get as far as they did.
Prior to 9/11, a hijacker could simply threaten to kill hostages (passengers or crew) unless their demands (such as gaining access to the cockpit, or simply telling the pilot what to do) are met. The expectation was that if you comply with their demands, they won't kill anyone, and the best way to assure everyone's safety was to do what they say, until the plane is on the ground. Once the plane has landed and the passengers are safe, the hijackers can be dealt with by law enforcement.
In that environment, additional security measures don't really matter. You can prevent most weapons from getting on the plane, but the hijacker could simply grab an old woman and threaten to break her neck with his bare hands. You can lock the cockpit door, but as long as the pilots have the ability to open it, if they believe the safest course of action is to open the door (so the hijacker won't break the woman's neck), they'll open the door. You can put armed air marshals on the plane, but they may not be able to stop the hijacker without the risk of killing or injuring the hostage.
We are no longer living in that environment. Today, if a hijacker manages to sneak a gun onto a plane, the minute he tries to take a hostage, 300 other passengers are going to do everything they can to stop him, because they now understand that their own best chance for survival is to stop the hijacker (failure to do so could result in the plane being flown into a building). There will probably be casualties, but the hijacker will be stopped.
Terrorists understand this. If they try to hijack an airplane, they will fail, so they're not going to try, unless they're really stupid. Additional security measures don't matter either way.
Even before 9/11, if the hijackers were on El Al, they would have been subject to attack by the plainclothes air marshals present on each flight. Also, the flight attendants have army training. Before 9/11 The U.S. doctrine was to give into hostage demands, I don't think the Israeli doctrine was the same. Fair point. I was mostly talking about US domestic commercial flights; expectations may have been different in other countries.
The solution to aircraft hijackings has be listed in post hijacking reports since the 1960s. Strengthen the flight deck walls and door and keep the door locked. If this had been done 9/11 could never have happened. After all, if the Israeli airline could do it why couldn't everyone else. Au contraire! Before 9/11 the hijackers simply would have said "unlock the door or we'll start killing hostages," and they would have unlocked the door. The assumption at the time was that if you make the hijackers think you're giving in to their demands, they'll land the plane safely and let the hostages go, and then you can try to capture the hijackers. The American people now understand that some hijackers want to use planes as weapons and are willing to die for their cause. Consequently, the threat of killing hostages no longer carries any weight.
Locked door or not, after 9/11 it is no longer possible to hijack a plane and fly it into a building.
Are any of these images copyrighted? If the judge posted them on his web site, could the copyright holders sue him for infringement - "making available" copyrighted material?
You misunderstood - the messages are not spam, they're legitimate messages from an automated system. GMail groups them together because they have identical subject lines; the user wants to manage them individually.
Sorry, I meant an Explosives Trace Detection (ETD) wand.
ETD is commonly used at airports by TSA screeners, who use a dry pad on the end of a wand to wipe a surface - baggage, shoes, clothing. They then put the pad into an ion mobility spectrometer that can detect traces of explosives. Source
What is the real reason for these scanners? I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say...
Lining the pockets of the people who make the scanners. Manufacturing a device the use of which is mandated by the government can be quite profitable, I imagine.
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I just sent Representative Hooley a quick note thanking her for voting against this bill. I had previously written to Senators Wyden and Smith about the issue of telecom immunity; Wyden's response was very encouraging. The letter I got from Smith didn't sound like he particularly understood the issue, but he's a Republican so that didn't surprise me.
Uhh, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that Dell only gets paid if you actually USE the trialware. I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way. They get paid for installing it, just like TV stations get paid to show commercials even if you don't watch them.
The difference is, nobody was offering Win98 for $50 more back then.
Hold on a minute here.
The IT guy blames his boss for installing the Alexa toolbar, which lead to the deletion of all dynamic content on the company's web site.
No it didn't.
Yes, the Alexa toolbar isn't something anybody needs to run, and yes, Alexa should respect robots.txt, but whoever set up their web site is clearly incompetent:
1) Never rely on robots.txt for security.
2) The article says the Alexa spider captured usernames and passwords? What the hell were usernames and passwords doing unprotected on the web site?
3) The Alexa spider clicked all the Delete links. Never ever use links to delete things! Always use a submit button with POST, not GET. Generally, most spiders won't submit POST forms.
Security through obscurity is even less effective when the obscurity is poor.
Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister is equally acceptable.
You forgot about the padlock on the chassis.
Either way, I don't think anyone is disputing that it's a "fairly decent product". That's not the issue here.
I can assure you, I never looked for a picture of a man bending over and holding his huge gaping anus open. Sometimes you see things on the Internet that you really really weren't looking for.
:-)
But yeah, you're mostly right.
Well, if they halt all e-mail service coming out of their network, it would cut down on the spam received by the rest of us...
Verizon FIOS tops out at about a third of that in certain areas, or considerably less everywhere else.
Your logic only applies to local ISPs. Nationwide ISPs still have to pay for bandwidth between each POP and the news server. Putting a news server in each POP isn't economically feasible; at every ISP I've worked at the admins all complained that running a news server is an expensive pain in the ass, so maintaining several of them just isn't an option.
Passengers matter, because the passengers will prevent a hijacker from gaining control of the airplane. Let me spell it out for you:
The fourth plane hijacked on 9/11 was prevented from reaching its destination, probably partly because some of the passengers were able to communicate with the ground via cell phone and found out about the other three planes. If the same thing happened today (regardless of any additional security measures), the passengers would not have allowed the hijackers to get as far as they did.
Prior to 9/11, a hijacker could simply threaten to kill hostages (passengers or crew) unless their demands (such as gaining access to the cockpit, or simply telling the pilot what to do) are met. The expectation was that if you comply with their demands, they won't kill anyone, and the best way to assure everyone's safety was to do what they say, until the plane is on the ground. Once the plane has landed and the passengers are safe, the hijackers can be dealt with by law enforcement.
In that environment, additional security measures don't really matter. You can prevent most weapons from getting on the plane, but the hijacker could simply grab an old woman and threaten to break her neck with his bare hands. You can lock the cockpit door, but as long as the pilots have the ability to open it, if they believe the safest course of action is to open the door (so the hijacker won't break the woman's neck), they'll open the door. You can put armed air marshals on the plane, but they may not be able to stop the hijacker without the risk of killing or injuring the hostage.
We are no longer living in that environment. Today, if a hijacker manages to sneak a gun onto a plane, the minute he tries to take a hostage, 300 other passengers are going to do everything they can to stop him, because they now understand that their own best chance for survival is to stop the hijacker (failure to do so could result in the plane being flown into a building). There will probably be casualties, but the hijacker will be stopped.
Terrorists understand this. If they try to hijack an airplane, they will fail, so they're not going to try, unless they're really stupid. Additional security measures don't matter either way.
Got it?
Somehow you completely missed my point. Congratulations.
The door doesn't matter. The passengers do.
Locked door or not, after 9/11 it is no longer possible to hijack a plane and fly it into a building.
Are any of these images copyrighted? If the judge posted them on his web site, could the copyright holders sue him for infringement - "making available" copyrighted material?
I see a typo.
You misunderstood - the messages are not spam, they're legitimate messages from an automated system. GMail groups them together because they have identical subject lines; the user wants to manage them individually.
Of course I understand that, but a gun might contain MORE metal than the plates and screws inside this guy's body.
Lining the pockets of the people who make the scanners. Manufacturing a device the use of which is mandated by the government can be quite profitable, I imagine.
If anything seems suspicious, presumably a wand will find the C4. Not a ceramic knife though.