I don't know the exact laws but mandating bicycle helmets is a good thing! - It is a safety measure just like seat belts in cars. If it were up to me we'd have number plates and drivers licenses for bicycles as well. Way too many people ride their bikes like there's no tomorrow, ignoring both traffic laws and (seemingly) the laws of nature.
I don't see how a mandatory helmet should affect bicycling in a negative way. Safety first. And if you can afford the bike you can afford the helmet so the issue is not financial either.
hacking a web site isn't much of an accomplishment. rather like spray painting over a billboard. taking over a serious system such as a banking mainframe network would be impressive but that requires real knowledge and skill
Exactly. The SEA is nothing but over-glorified script kiddies. They defaced some websites and guessed their way into some DNS registrar accounts - not exactly major feats of hacking.
This is actually also the case with many of the other 'infamous' middle eastern groups - script kiddies with over-inflated egos and terrible spelling skills. Sure they can do some damage but our it-infrastructure is clearly not in danger, provided that at least average security is in place.
... and that too much access to energy would be bad for the human race.
Rubbish! - With unlimited energy we could easily fix both the CO2-related issues from centuries of burning various fossil fuels, and any byproduct from having all this energy.
With unlimited energy we could control the weather for instance. All the damage from extreme weather would be only in history books.
Oh, and of course mining Helium-3 is evil. That's why the nazis hiding on the back side of the Moon is doing it. They went to the Moon because is was the evil thing to do, and the nazis - being ultimately evil at heart - thus had no choice but to go to the Moon and do the evil thing: Mine Helium-3. Returning to Earth in a huge flying saucer called "Götterdämmerung" to set up their nazi-utopia is actually less evil than mining the Helium-3. They even made a film called "Iron Sky" about this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
Basically this is about the failover systems not having sufficient resources to handle their normal job plus the extra stuff failing over to them.
We've had that same issue at the hosting company where I worked 10 years ago. They had a regular power feed and a backup UPS-backed feed, plus an ATS system to automatically fail over the regular feed to the UPS feed when needed. The UPS-feed was regular power, plus batteries and a generator. The idea was that servers with multiple PDUs should be connected to both feeds and everything else to the regular feed. Now, both feeds had the same capacity ratings and the regular feed was close to maximum capacity. This shouldn't be an issue as the dual PDU servers were fairly few.
Now the regular power dies.
The UPS-backed feed now powers everything, including both PDUs in multiple PDU servers, bot the switch isn't completely instantaneous which causes a few servers (5%) to crash and reboot, causing more load still. Now we're quite a bit over capacity and the UPS feeds goes down too. Instant silence. No cooling, no fans, no hum. Just silence.
Lesson learned: Make sure you have enough capacity on your backup systems to handle both the combined needs and a generous margin to ensure that spikes relating to the switchover can be handled as well. Too many high tension systems have limited failover capacity so if more than one thing fails, overload is guaranteed and a cascade failure unavoidable.
Why do so many developers waste time on obfuscation and other ways of hiding the source in scripting languages?
Using utilities like IonCube to 'protect' PHP-code will never stop the dedicated people from reverse engineering the application or re-engineering it. I've seen that countless times. It is security-through-obscurity at best and it will prevent people from both fixing bugs and re-submitting the fixed code to the developers, and finding security issues from simple code reviewing.
If developers of competing applications needs to steal code they're really crappy developers and whatever that makes their application unique will be equally crappy and thus not a threat.
The missiles Asimov mentions in his opening paragraph are what stopped his vision on electricity from coming anywhere near reality: "The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer."
Instead, we're still just as dependent on coal, oil and gas as ever.
Not quite. Both solar and wind are gaining market shares quickly these days. They cannot replace coal, oil, gas or nuclear (yet?), but they can supplement more or less, and in some parts of the world maybe almost replace.
What's more interesting is that the race to create portable electronics (phones, tabs, laptops etc.) has created some radical new forms of batteries. Not radioisotope-based but still chemically-based (lithium-polymer) with a durability many times exceeding the batteries known in 1962.
And a new revolution is just around the corner - the nano-capacitor-style battery is in the prototype stage at the moment. It will offer much higher capacity and much higher power density than lithium-ion, and it will offer instant recharging to full capacity in less than a second. If combined with induction recharging the power cords will be a thing of the past as everything will be battery operated and no cords needed to recharge. The wall sockets will be charging points, turning on for a few seconds when they detect a not fully charged battery nearby.
in fact, due to Asimov's 3 laws, they *can't* murder you in your sleep.
Actually they can. Turns out Asimov made a classic mistake when he created the three laws, a mistake he actually used later when it came to the robots on Solaria. The laws are immutable except through generalization which apparently is only possible for telepathic robots, but the definitions behind them aren't. You can modify the definitions of 'human' and emphasize the check of this, which makes such a robot clearly state when someone appears to be human but fails on a single important parameter: "You're not a human being".
This is of course the so-called 'racist loophole' which allows racists to act against 'sub people' in ways they'd never use against 'real people'. The propaganda of Goebbels portrayed jews as rat-like sub-creatures which existed only to do harm, and so the people had very few qualms when SA started harassing the jews and still very few when Gestapo and the SS started arresting them and sending them to the concentration camps. Slavery has also been consistently justified by the fact that the slaves were not 'real people'.
My predictions for 50 years from now: - No human has returned to the moon.
Wrong. I'm fairly certain that in 50 years there would be a small colony of people living on the moon. Humans will also have visited Mars.
- NovartoGlaxoSmithKline announcing the first pharmceutical cure for religion causes widespread riots in Pakistan and Alabama.
Fun! - But I doubt that religion can be cured pharmaceutically. It isn't a medical condition and the general stupidity usually behind it cannot be cured, although less inbreeding will help.
- In Europe and Canada, the banning of driver controlled cars on public roads go into effect.
It think this will happen sooner.
- Texas becomes the last industrialized country to abolish paper money.
...and this will happen after having used their own Lone Star Dollars for two decades.
- The Sino-American war winds down. With neither side wiling to risk their mainland, it was fought in Korea, which is now in ruins, and Japan, which has become a Chinese protectorate.
Not that unlikely. I think North Korea would have helped creating the Korean wasteland.
Everybody else knows that security-by-obscurity does not work. It may slow some less skilled attackers down but the really dangerous attacker is not affected.
Any state that feels the need to hide important stuff from its own citizens obviously has something to hide, meaning that it gets far too easy to break laws in a systematic manner and keep it from the public. The terrorists cannot use the fact that a US gunship helicopter gunned down a group of unarmed civilians, including journalists, clearly aware that they were unarmed and not any kind of threat. The public on the other hand can use this to prosecute the people responsible, but if it wasn't for the Bradly Manning leaks, these genocidal murderers would have gone free.
If this guy actually thinks the by hiding the ways we protect ourselves, the people under suspicion and so on, we are one up on the terrorists - he's severely mistaken. Any terrorist worth fearing knows all this no matter how hard the government try to hide it. Like any other cold war style stand-off they have people on the inside, just like the government has informants inside the terrorist cells. All the general stuff is well known. Trust me, the relevant people in Al-Queda has known for a long time which weaknesses exist in airport scanners, in the Internet monitoring systems (PRISM?) and so on. Osama Bin Laden for instance used a very simple technique to send and receive emails. Do everything offline and have couriers transport the USB drives with it on foot, bikes, camels whatever that doesn't offer any way of tracking to random Internet cafe's. That kept him effectively hidden for years despite the massive reward on his head. So much for Echelon, PRISM and whatever else they threw at the task of correlating patterns and everything in other to locate him. All these systems failed completely. Bin Laden was in the end betrayed by a servant.
No, government secrecy has only one real purpose and that is to protect those in power from their enemies, which quite obviously include the people who pays their wages. It is a sick system and it needs to be broken down and replaced by transparency and open control. Sure, there are a few things that needs to be kept secret but not the massive amounts they hide today. Any wrong-doings for instance must be made public right away, possibly redacted slightly in order to protect assets not involved. A conservative guess would be that 98% of the stuff currently classified shouldn't be, and from the recent leaks it is obvious that among all this we'll find countless incidents where laws have been seriously broken mostly because they knew they could get away with it because of the secrecy.
I know of a real incident where a news-related forum also forced people to use their real names, which caused a nasty incident 'in real life'.
Now, they didn't have truly anonymous posting to begin with, but the real name and email was hidden, and the self-selected username was shown as poster. They then decided to start displaying the real names instead of the username, not only for new posts but also for the archive posts. This meant that controversial posts now had a real name attached and that meant that the full address was easily available after a quick online search, and unfortunately that meant that people had extremely unpleasant visits from angry readers that apparently lacked words to argue things and decided to use baseball bats instead. Needless to say, It did not end well. This instantly caused a massive drop in postings and today the forum barely exists. Nobody dares post anything anymore. They have not changed their policy, probably because that would be admitting it was a mistake.
The successor was a different forum where they displayed only the first name and the initials of any middle names and the last name. This made it very hard to figure out a real name from a post and people were able to debate without fearing a baseball bat wielding lunatic knocking on the door.
PS: The debate that caused the baseball bat incident revolved around religion, more specifically Islam, and the infamous Mohammed Cartoons. Apparently some Muslims are psychotic or otherwise mentally disturbed when it comes to any criticism of their religion and its primary characters, which means that full disclosure of the identities of participants of debates can be a very bad and dangerous thing. I'm sure there's plenty of other similar topics where severe polarization exists and each side is ready to use any and all means to win a debate, including violence and worse.
All the Snowden data is stored in a safe place outside the UK (and the US of course) according to the people at The Guardian. This is standard procedure for all sensitive information and this was also the case with the exclusive parts of the Wikileaks material. They told the intelligence agents this but they didn't care and proceeded to destroy only the local storage media. So stupid!
The data is out there. It cannot be removed or contained in any way. This is how it is in this day and age, and this is a good thing. Information still wants to be free.
In a related study, it was found that 97% of mass murderers had consumed bread within 24 hours of having committed their rampage.
Actually - and this is significant - all of them had been inhaling Oxygen in a somewhat diluted form through the process known as breathing. There's no question that there is a connection as it is also a fact that people that don't breathe don't murder anyone, let alone more than one. We have to ban Oxygen and forbid all forms of breathing. That will solve all problems with mass murders - guaranteed.
What he means is this: If more than one man is running from the same bear, only the slowest man need worry. When the bear catches up he will forget about the others and only care about the one he caught.
It's the old joke: Two men sit in a tent when they hear a bear outside. The bear is obviously mad and about to attack. One of the men starts putting on his shoes. "Why are you wasting time doing that?!" the other yells. "I can run faster with shoes on" he replies. "You can outrun a bear!" the other yells back. "I don't need to" the first replies, "I just need to run faster than you" he says and leaves the tent and start running.
Truly anonymous email needs to be both encrypted and efficiently hide communication patterns.
If the system is based on a central server that maps addresses and you have the ability to listen to inbound and outbound mail you can fairly easy generate a map that will link real and anonymous email addresses if the system runs in real time. Mails to be relayed should be delayed a random time and sent out in random sized pools. That would hide the link.
An alternative would be a private bulletin board system where no messages ever leave the server and both sender and recipient must log in to send or receive mail. It will also hide the patterns provided the database is completely encrypted, including relations.
Now that a void has opened in this market, I wonder what it would take to set up something very much like Lavabit had? Dunno exactly what they offered but from what I can read posthumously it was little more than a databsse-backed anonymous remailer. Anyone know the details?
Locate the servers in Iceland or similar but have the company be based elsewhere, just to make it extra hard to get international warrants and similar.
I think it's pathetic to create such 'secure' systems and then to cave in at the first sign of trouble.
How hard can it be to set up the systems in such a way that it securely wipes all database files, logs etc. in case one of perhaps many possible trigger events occur. These events can be anything from sending a special mail, a bluetooth proximity, a keystroke, or the absence of any of these. This way it will be obvious that the data is irreversibly lost so there's nothing to gain from applying any 'pressure'.
On the positive side: There's now a huge void in the market, just waiting to be filled! - Profit!!!
The article says this provides compelling evidence that the availability of a show is a key factor in the decision to pirate it.
This is nothing new! - Countless surveys have established long ago that unavailability of both music and television is almost the only motivation for piracy.
Interestingly enough - availability as a piracy motivator is also (along with price) one thing under direct control of the rights holders, and for some reason they flat out refuse to fix this, despite the fact that it will kill off a lot of piracy and make them a lot more money.
I love "Under The Dome" but there's no legal way to get it here in Denmark. It's not on any of the online services and no channels air it. Attempting to access it from a US-based online service results in the usual stupid geo-discrimination. I guess they don't want my money because I live in the wrong place? - Dumb and stupid.
So when I'm downloading the latest episode of some tv-show, I'll get a popup that tells me where to buy this episode? Nice! I'd love to pay for the shows I love but have been unable to find places where I can buy the episodes as they air... For this popup system to make sense, there must be a legal alternative to all illegal downloads, and I haven't been able to find one so it'll be nice with a pointer...
But then... I doubt it. It'll probably be a box saying: "You are downloading material illegally. This material is as yet unavailable legally so you'll just have to do without until further notice. Too bad - but life is hard and then you die. Have a nice day."
The right to privacy should be made part of the charter of Human Rights. That would bypass and invalidate the laws of those so-called civilized countries that already includes provisions for coercing people into giving up passwords and passphrases - I'm especially looking at you, United Kingdom.
Basically it should state that all people have an inviolate right to privacy and a right to protect this privacy. Only in case of a few very specific criminal charges can legislation allow the authorities to coerce the suspect into releasing privacy-protected information, but always only what's related to the case, nothing more. This means that they cannot request a password to decrypt a disk unless they know in advance that the disk only contain information relevant to the case and nothing more. If they want relevant information from such a disk, a trusted third party needs to be involved that will handle the process of accessing the disk and extracting the relevant information and nothing more, ensuring that the authorities only get the relevant information they've requested and nothing more.
Same thing with a search warrant for a home. Today the police are allowed to use everything they find regardless of what they were looking for. If they look for drugs but find a stash of stolen goods, they can prosecute the stolen goods in a new case. Sure, it sounds reasonable but what if the search warrant is more or less bogus, perhaps entirely based on an anonymous tip (happens quite often in cases involving drugs for instance) ? - There's nothing to prevent the authorities from tipping themselves and if you look hard enough in any private space you will find something illegal, so in order to protect against harassment through methods like this, a search warrant must list in fairly specific terms what they expect to find and they're only allowed to use that for litigation purposes. Of course there's nothing to prevent the authorities from knowing what they found and obtaining a new search warrant if they can provide other evidence to validate the request, but if they have nothing and just are going fishing, this Human Rights provision will stop them in a civilized country.
Actually security through unique obscurity does work although not very efficiently on its own. This is actually used all the time in the form of hiding the internal structure of a local network for instance. This adds a level of difficulty to any attempt at penetrating as the attackers needs to find out the structure and the components and thus the possible attack vectors. If you for instance need a server to contact your evil server, messing with nameservers are a good idea, but then you need to either modify the configuration of the server (requires root) or poison the nameservers it uses. This requires that you find out how the internal network works - is it plain and simple or does it use a dedicated vlan on a secondary NIC or maybe some NAT remapping? - It might be that you cannot reach the nameserver at all except on port 53 tcp/udp, or that it simply listens for ssh on a completely different IP or network. Here the obscurity clearly helps in making the intruder work a lot harder to get what he/she wants, obviously making some simply give up and move on.
If Trayvon behaved as the character he appear to be in these pics when Zimmerman challenged him, it's pretty obvious that he would have felt threatened and thus fired the shots justified. But as we don't know what really happened, it's more or less impossible to say if Zimmerman should be acquitted or not.
I've seen scripts that (attempt to) protect e-mail addresses from spammers' scrapers.
Doesn't work much anymore. Scrapers have been known to Google the page they're scraping if it contains javascript because Google actually runs the javascript before creating the preview which means the email addresses are available in cleartext from the Google preview.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the exact laws but mandating bicycle helmets is a good thing! - It is a safety measure just like seat belts in cars. If it were up to me we'd have number plates and drivers licenses for bicycles as well. Way too many people ride their bikes like there's no tomorrow, ignoring both traffic laws and (seemingly) the laws of nature.
I don't see how a mandatory helmet should affect bicycling in a negative way. Safety first. And if you can afford the bike you can afford the helmet so the issue is not financial either.
hacking a web site isn't much of an accomplishment. rather like spray painting over a billboard. taking over a serious system such as a banking mainframe network would be impressive but that requires real knowledge and skill
Exactly. The SEA is nothing but over-glorified script kiddies. They defaced some websites and guessed their way into some DNS registrar accounts - not exactly major feats of hacking.
This is actually also the case with many of the other 'infamous' middle eastern groups - script kiddies with over-inflated egos and terrible spelling skills. Sure they can do some damage but our it-infrastructure is clearly not in danger, provided that at least average security is in place.
... and that too much access to energy would be bad for the human race.
Rubbish! - With unlimited energy we could easily fix both the CO2-related issues from centuries of burning various fossil fuels, and any byproduct from having all this energy.
With unlimited energy we could control the weather for instance. All the damage from extreme weather would be only in history books.
Oh, and of course mining Helium-3 is evil. That's why the nazis hiding on the back side of the Moon is doing it. They went to the Moon because is was the evil thing to do, and the nazis - being ultimately evil at heart - thus had no choice but to go to the Moon and do the evil thing: Mine Helium-3. Returning to Earth in a huge flying saucer called "Götterdämmerung" to set up their nazi-utopia is actually less evil than mining the Helium-3. They even made a film called "Iron Sky" about this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034314/
Basically this is about the failover systems not having sufficient resources to handle their normal job plus the extra stuff failing over to them.
We've had that same issue at the hosting company where I worked 10 years ago. They had a regular power feed and a backup UPS-backed feed, plus an ATS system to automatically fail over the regular feed to the UPS feed when needed. The UPS-feed was regular power, plus batteries and a generator. The idea was that servers with multiple PDUs should be connected to both feeds and everything else to the regular feed. Now, both feeds had the same capacity ratings and the regular feed was close to maximum capacity. This shouldn't be an issue as the dual PDU servers were fairly few.
Now the regular power dies.
The UPS-backed feed now powers everything, including both PDUs in multiple PDU servers, bot the switch isn't completely instantaneous which causes a few servers (5%) to crash and reboot, causing more load still. Now we're quite a bit over capacity and the UPS feeds goes down too. Instant silence. No cooling, no fans, no hum. Just silence.
Lesson learned: Make sure you have enough capacity on your backup systems to handle both the combined needs and a generous margin to ensure that spikes relating to the switchover can be handled as well. Too many high tension systems have limited failover capacity so if more than one thing fails, overload is guaranteed and a cascade failure unavoidable.
Based off of a sample size of 1. Nice generalization.
Hey! That's one better than some of the climate change theories!
Why do so many developers waste time on obfuscation and other ways of hiding the source in scripting languages?
Using utilities like IonCube to 'protect' PHP-code will never stop the dedicated people from reverse engineering the application or re-engineering it. I've seen that countless times. It is security-through-obscurity at best and it will prevent people from both fixing bugs and re-submitting the fixed code to the developers, and finding security issues from simple code reviewing.
If developers of competing applications needs to steal code they're really crappy developers and whatever that makes their application unique will be equally crappy and thus not a threat.
The missiles Asimov mentions in his opening paragraph are what stopped his vision on electricity from coming anywhere near reality: "The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer."
Instead, we're still just as dependent on coal, oil and gas as ever.
Not quite. Both solar and wind are gaining market shares quickly these days. They cannot replace coal, oil, gas or nuclear (yet?), but they can supplement more or less, and in some parts of the world maybe almost replace.
What's more interesting is that the race to create portable electronics (phones, tabs, laptops etc.) has created some radical new forms of batteries. Not radioisotope-based but still chemically-based (lithium-polymer) with a durability many times exceeding the batteries known in 1962.
And a new revolution is just around the corner - the nano-capacitor-style battery is in the prototype stage at the moment. It will offer much higher capacity and much higher power density than lithium-ion, and it will offer instant recharging to full capacity in less than a second. If combined with induction recharging the power cords will be a thing of the past as everything will be battery operated and no cords needed to recharge. The wall sockets will be charging points, turning on for a few seconds when they detect a not fully charged battery nearby.
in fact, due to Asimov's 3 laws, they *can't* murder you in your sleep.
Actually they can. Turns out Asimov made a classic mistake when he created the three laws, a mistake he actually used later when it came to the robots on Solaria. The laws are immutable except through generalization which apparently is only possible for telepathic robots, but the definitions behind them aren't. You can modify the definitions of 'human' and emphasize the check of this, which makes such a robot clearly state when someone appears to be human but fails on a single important parameter: "You're not a human being".
This is of course the so-called 'racist loophole' which allows racists to act against 'sub people' in ways they'd never use against 'real people'. The propaganda of Goebbels portrayed jews as rat-like sub-creatures which existed only to do harm, and so the people had very few qualms when SA started harassing the jews and still very few when Gestapo and the SS started arresting them and sending them to the concentration camps. Slavery has also been consistently justified by the fact that the slaves were not 'real people'.
My predictions for 50 years from now:
- No human has returned to the moon.
Wrong. I'm fairly certain that in 50 years there would be a small colony of people living on the moon. Humans will also have visited Mars.
- NovartoGlaxoSmithKline announcing the first pharmceutical cure for religion causes widespread riots in Pakistan and Alabama.
Fun! - But I doubt that religion can be cured pharmaceutically. It isn't a medical condition and the general stupidity usually behind it cannot be cured, although less inbreeding will help.
- In Europe and Canada, the banning of driver controlled cars on public roads go into effect.
It think this will happen sooner.
- Texas becomes the last industrialized country to abolish paper money.
...and this will happen after having used their own Lone Star Dollars for two decades.
- The Sino-American war winds down. With neither side wiling to risk their mainland, it was fought in Korea, which is now in ruins, and Japan, which has become a Chinese protectorate.
Not that unlikely. I think North Korea would have helped creating the Korean wasteland.
- Coca-Cola reintroduces Cola with Coca extract.
Would be fun.
- I am dead.
So am I.
Like this one from Popular Mechanics in 1954:
http://blogs.osafoundation.org/mitch/Picfrom1954PopulareMechanics.jpg
That's him. Obsolete school actually.
Everybody else knows that security-by-obscurity does not work. It may slow some less skilled attackers down but the really dangerous attacker is not affected.
Any state that feels the need to hide important stuff from its own citizens obviously has something to hide, meaning that it gets far too easy to break laws in a systematic manner and keep it from the public. The terrorists cannot use the fact that a US gunship helicopter gunned down a group of unarmed civilians, including journalists, clearly aware that they were unarmed and not any kind of threat. The public on the other hand can use this to prosecute the people responsible, but if it wasn't for the Bradly Manning leaks, these genocidal murderers would have gone free.
If this guy actually thinks the by hiding the ways we protect ourselves, the people under suspicion and so on, we are one up on the terrorists - he's severely mistaken. Any terrorist worth fearing knows all this no matter how hard the government try to hide it. Like any other cold war style stand-off they have people on the inside, just like the government has informants inside the terrorist cells. All the general stuff is well known. Trust me, the relevant people in Al-Queda has known for a long time which weaknesses exist in airport scanners, in the Internet monitoring systems (PRISM?) and so on. Osama Bin Laden for instance used a very simple technique to send and receive emails. Do everything offline and have couriers transport the USB drives with it on foot, bikes, camels whatever that doesn't offer any way of tracking to random Internet cafe's. That kept him effectively hidden for years despite the massive reward on his head. So much for Echelon, PRISM and whatever else they threw at the task of correlating patterns and everything in other to locate him. All these systems failed completely. Bin Laden was in the end betrayed by a servant.
No, government secrecy has only one real purpose and that is to protect those in power from their enemies, which quite obviously include the people who pays their wages. It is a sick system and it needs to be broken down and replaced by transparency and open control. Sure, there are a few things that needs to be kept secret but not the massive amounts they hide today. Any wrong-doings for instance must be made public right away, possibly redacted slightly in order to protect assets not involved. A conservative guess would be that 98% of the stuff currently classified shouldn't be, and from the recent leaks it is obvious that among all this we'll find countless incidents where laws have been seriously broken mostly because they knew they could get away with it because of the secrecy.
I know of a real incident where a news-related forum also forced people to use their real names, which caused a nasty incident 'in real life'.
Now, they didn't have truly anonymous posting to begin with, but the real name and email was hidden, and the self-selected username was shown as poster. They then decided to start displaying the real names instead of the username, not only for new posts but also for the archive posts. This meant that controversial posts now had a real name attached and that meant that the full address was easily available after a quick online search, and unfortunately that meant that people had extremely unpleasant visits from angry readers that apparently lacked words to argue things and decided to use baseball bats instead. Needless to say, It did not end well. This instantly caused a massive drop in postings and today the forum barely exists. Nobody dares post anything anymore. They have not changed their policy, probably because that would be admitting it was a mistake.
The successor was a different forum where they displayed only the first name and the initials of any middle names and the last name. This made it very hard to figure out a real name from a post and people were able to debate without fearing a baseball bat wielding lunatic knocking on the door.
PS: The debate that caused the baseball bat incident revolved around religion, more specifically Islam, and the infamous Mohammed Cartoons. Apparently some Muslims are psychotic or otherwise mentally disturbed when it comes to any criticism of their religion and its primary characters, which means that full disclosure of the identities of participants of debates can be a very bad and dangerous thing. I'm sure there's plenty of other similar topics where severe polarization exists and each side is ready to use any and all means to win a debate, including violence and worse.
All the Snowden data is stored in a safe place outside the UK (and the US of course) according to the people at The Guardian. This is standard procedure for all sensitive information and this was also the case with the exclusive parts of the Wikileaks material. They told the intelligence agents this but they didn't care and proceeded to destroy only the local storage media. So stupid!
The data is out there. It cannot be removed or contained in any way. This is how it is in this day and age, and this is a good thing. Information still wants to be free.
In a related study, it was found that 97% of mass murderers had consumed bread within 24 hours of having committed their rampage.
Actually - and this is significant - all of them had been inhaling Oxygen in a somewhat diluted form through the process known as breathing. There's no question that there is a connection as it is also a fact that people that don't breathe don't murder anyone, let alone more than one. We have to ban Oxygen and forbid all forms of breathing. That will solve all problems with mass murders - guaranteed.
What he means is this: If more than one man is running from the same bear, only the slowest man need worry. When the bear catches up he will forget about the others and only care about the one he caught.
It's the old joke: Two men sit in a tent when they hear a bear outside. The bear is obviously mad and about to attack. One of the men starts putting on his shoes. "Why are you wasting time doing that?!" the other yells. "I can run faster with shoes on" he replies. "You can outrun a bear!" the other yells back. "I don't need to" the first replies, "I just need to run faster than you" he says and leaves the tent and start running.
Truly anonymous email needs to be both encrypted and efficiently hide communication patterns.
If the system is based on a central server that maps addresses and you have the ability to listen to inbound and outbound mail you can fairly easy generate a map that will link real and anonymous email addresses if the system runs in real time. Mails to be relayed should be delayed a random time and sent out in random sized pools. That would hide the link.
An alternative would be a private bulletin board system where no messages ever leave the server and both sender and recipient must log in to send or receive mail. It will also hide the patterns provided the database is completely encrypted, including relations.
Now that a void has opened in this market, I wonder what it would take to set up something very much like Lavabit had? Dunno exactly what they offered but from what I can read posthumously it was little more than a databsse-backed anonymous remailer. Anyone know the details?
Locate the servers in Iceland or similar but have the company be based elsewhere, just to make it extra hard to get international warrants and similar.
It is truly a sad day now that it seems that the UK censors the Internet more severely than even China.
I think it's pathetic to create such 'secure' systems and then to cave in at the first sign of trouble.
How hard can it be to set up the systems in such a way that it securely wipes all database files, logs etc. in case one of perhaps many possible trigger events occur. These events can be anything from sending a special mail, a bluetooth proximity, a keystroke, or the absence of any of these. This way it will be obvious that the data is irreversibly lost so there's nothing to gain from applying any 'pressure'.
On the positive side: There's now a huge void in the market, just waiting to be filled! - Profit!!!
This is nothing new! - Countless surveys have established long ago that unavailability of both music and television is almost the only motivation for piracy.
Interestingly enough - availability as a piracy motivator is also (along with price) one thing under direct control of the rights holders, and for some reason they flat out refuse to fix this, despite the fact that it will kill off a lot of piracy and make them a lot more money.
I love "Under The Dome" but there's no legal way to get it here in Denmark. It's not on any of the online services and no channels air it. Attempting to access it from a US-based online service results in the usual stupid geo-discrimination. I guess they don't want my money because I live in the wrong place? - Dumb and stupid.
So when I'm downloading the latest episode of some tv-show, I'll get a popup that tells me where to buy this episode? Nice! I'd love to pay for the shows I love but have been unable to find places where I can buy the episodes as they air... For this popup system to make sense, there must be a legal alternative to all illegal downloads, and I haven't been able to find one so it'll be nice with a pointer...
But then... I doubt it. It'll probably be a box saying: "You are downloading material illegally. This material is as yet unavailable legally so you'll just have to do without until further notice. Too bad - but life is hard and then you die. Have a nice day."
The right to privacy should be made part of the charter of Human Rights. That would bypass and invalidate the laws of those so-called civilized countries that already includes provisions for coercing people into giving up passwords and passphrases - I'm especially looking at you, United Kingdom.
Basically it should state that all people have an inviolate right to privacy and a right to protect this privacy. Only in case of a few very specific criminal charges can legislation allow the authorities to coerce the suspect into releasing privacy-protected information, but always only what's related to the case, nothing more. This means that they cannot request a password to decrypt a disk unless they know in advance that the disk only contain information relevant to the case and nothing more. If they want relevant information from such a disk, a trusted third party needs to be involved that will handle the process of accessing the disk and extracting the relevant information and nothing more, ensuring that the authorities only get the relevant information they've requested and nothing more.
Same thing with a search warrant for a home. Today the police are allowed to use everything they find regardless of what they were looking for. If they look for drugs but find a stash of stolen goods, they can prosecute the stolen goods in a new case. Sure, it sounds reasonable but what if the search warrant is more or less bogus, perhaps entirely based on an anonymous tip (happens quite often in cases involving drugs for instance) ? - There's nothing to prevent the authorities from tipping themselves and if you look hard enough in any private space you will find something illegal, so in order to protect against harassment through methods like this, a search warrant must list in fairly specific terms what they expect to find and they're only allowed to use that for litigation purposes. Of course there's nothing to prevent the authorities from knowing what they found and obtaining a new search warrant if they can provide other evidence to validate the request, but if they have nothing and just are going fishing, this Human Rights provision will stop them in a civilized country.
Actually security through unique obscurity does work although not very efficiently on its own. This is actually used all the time in the form of hiding the internal structure of a local network for instance. This adds a level of difficulty to any attempt at penetrating as the attackers needs to find out the structure and the components and thus the possible attack vectors. If you for instance need a server to contact your evil server, messing with nameservers are a good idea, but then you need to either modify the configuration of the server (requires root) or poison the nameservers it uses. This requires that you find out how the internal network works - is it plain and simple or does it use a dedicated vlan on a secondary NIC or maybe some NAT remapping? - It might be that you cannot reach the nameserver at all except on port 53 tcp/udp, or that it simply listens for ssh on a completely different IP or network. Here the obscurity clearly helps in making the intruder work a lot harder to get what he/she wants, obviously making some simply give up and move on.
I'm amazed the Media didn't manage to convict him, despite how hard they tried.
No kidding! - Most media outlets deliberately used this old 'cute' picture of Trayvon:
http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1393803.1373385834!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/neighborhood-watch-trayvon-martin.jpg
which is both several years old and not how he looked when the incident happened.
These are newer pics - note the attitude, the gangsta gold teeth and the tats:
http://weaselzippers.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/trayvon-martin-finger.jpg
http://topconservativenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/trayvon_steroetype.jpg
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/assets/trayvon-martin.jpg
If Trayvon behaved as the character he appear to be in these pics when Zimmerman challenged him, it's pretty obvious that he would have felt threatened and thus fired the shots justified. But as we don't know what really happened, it's more or less impossible to say if Zimmerman should be acquitted or not.
I've seen scripts that (attempt to) protect e-mail addresses from spammers' scrapers.
Doesn't work much anymore. Scrapers have been known to Google the page they're scraping if it contains javascript because Google actually runs the javascript before creating the preview which means the email addresses are available in cleartext from the Google preview.