Every form of energy is unclean at SOME point - solar panels aren't clean (their production isn't very efficient),...
But there is one point - during USAGE the hydrogen fuel cells are a lot cleaner than cars, leaving pollution a business mainly during the creation of the fuel.
While the pollution in those cases might still be a lot, we can also do quite a lot to reduce emissions at that particular place (in fact, we can build any kind of device to help clean up the production emissions. In a car, we can't do that - due to constraints in weight (you can't install a 3 ton pollution filter in a car weighing half a ton), size (similar to the above) and price (hardly any consumer will buy a "clean" fuel powered car, if the equipment to filter the emissions from the engine costs several 10s of thousands of dollars.
A "factory" that extracts hydrogen neither needs to care too much about the size/weight/price of the emission filters -- granted, they WILL care about the price, but once one company actually installs the very best filter equipment and is still able to offer their hydrogen at a good price, they WILL start advertising the fact and hence put the other manufacturers under pressure to come up with similarly good pollution filtering or risk losing business to eco-aware fuel buyers...
Isn't this something that DEC tried in the early Alpha days? I vaguely seem to remember that Vobis, a German computer reseller, was including a tool claiming to do this with every Alpha they sold.
Though I have no clue how well this tool worked...
IPv6 doesn't address all the issues (e.g. combatting Worm spreading).
On the other hand - I would second a more rapid adoption of IPv6 any day. Maybe whatever intel feels neccessary to add to the Internet can be introduced at this level instead of trying to add a solution to IPv4 and therefore delaying IPv6 even further (since it will cost resources to adapt v4 and on top of that additional resources to plan this for v6 and re-implement it there as well)...
Well - this might help in some situations, but I would ask you to consider another few points on this:
a) If you run an access point in your room and use the wallpaper as to no longer disturb others with your airwaves -- why not just use a wired connection? Within a single room, it's definetely cheaper...
b) If you don't run an access point, you can use the Anti-WiFi wallpaper to keep the airwaves of the other students access points out - but at the same time, this will indiscriminately also block out the airwaves from the free campus service you actually might want to use...
c) if you put up anti-wifi wallpaper (which isn't going to be cheap), bear in mind that the landlord will very probably as you to take it down (and put up normal wallpaper again) once you decide to move out again...
In either case, it does not seem a good solution.
Anti-WiFi wallpaper makes sense, when you have a really good reason to keep ALL airwaves out (say, near medical operating equipment,...) - in other cases, it's probably not really going to be of much use...
You're right - the airwaves aren't regulated. But they aren't telling you, that it is illegal to use them.
Take another example - if a few tenants on the ground floor of the building would constantly have all water faucets / showers running at full tilt, than that might result in the ones of the top floor no longer getting enough water to take a shower. In this case, your use of water is perfectly legal, but the landlord might still try and evict you since your behaviour is disruptive to the other tenants (or - before trying to get you out, try and find a compromise that is workable for everyone). If the landlord wouldn't do anything about it - he might actually even be sued by those who no longer have access to water (since the water comes with the flat).
No - but no matter where you try and rent a place, if YOUR behaviour causes problems for the landlord or disrupts the landlords work, then you'll most likely be evicted. You could then still go and move somewhere else, where this might be tolerated!
In this particular case, and in the way they explain the situation, it does not seem to be an unreasonable request to me.
If those apartments belong to the University, and the presence of your access point harms/disrupts the operation of their own network then to me it looks like it is well within the rights of the university to demand this - and as they can't single out a specific access point to cause the problem it seems just that they require ALL to be shut down.
On the other if those apartments do not belong to the university, then I wouldn't see how they should even try and enforce this.
In either case, it's not much of an issue - and it's not a freedom of speech / censorship issue, since they DO allow private access to the internet by wired means...
Re:It ends when they get some tech folks in there
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No - it will end once they put legislation into place to also punish abuse of patent laws.
(e.g. introduce a blocking period for a company/holding if they introduce an abusive patent; e.g. a patent that clearly violates obviousness restrictions, or patents that have lots of prior art, like the TAB-links patent seems to have; if a company were denied even filing additional patents for a year of so after trying patent abuse, it would definitely put more pressure on the companies to only submit sensible patents; because otherwise they might forfeit the possibility to patent something that might really warrant a patent).
It wouldn't neccessarily need to speak to the ground stations of each provider. If it's relayed through a satellite it'll just be fed back as a regular (international) phone call.
What they WOULD need are roaming agreements with as many telcos as possible to allow all their mobiles to be used on to the plane. And - this is in the interest of both the airlines, as well as the telcos themselves [it IS a selling point for a telco if its mobiles can be used on a plane].
There is one issue, though:
Will they be able to offer services on all bands (900, 1800, 1900 MHz), or will they restrict to ONE band and require the passengers to have a mobile capable of it. I know, *I* would be quite pissed, if they would require me to buy a 1900MHz US band mobile so I could use it on a flight within Europe (900+1800MHz). I don't know whether there is micro-cell equipment that could handle all three...
As for the question about charges - that's fairly trivial, they'll charge everything that they can get away with...
I don't know whether the telcos will allow them to use variable roaming charges (usually, roaming charges are a fixed amount per minute), because I could easily see the airlines wanting to charge MORE for a call from a long-haul flight, as their corporate clients on the planes might be more pressed to actually MAKE calls from longer flights, rather than short local flights [the chances of you actually absolutely HAVING to make a call will certainly be lower on very short flights].
Also, with more and more people having notebooks, I see the possibility that the whole thing might fall away with the advent of Wifi Internet access on planes, as you could use VoIP instead.
Karl May, a German author of travel stories didn't visit the US until long after writing his books. Neither did he visit any of the other places outside of Europe that he wrote about. Yet a lot of his stories have been fairly accurate as to the surroundings they have been describing.
Admitted, it's more likely for an author to set his real-world stories in a setting he knows (most likely something close to his place of living at the time of writing), but it doesn't HAVE to be the case...
While I do support equal opportunities/emancipation issues, has MIT selected this woman because she is female and very good in her area of expertise, or has MIT selected her because she was the best irrespective of gender?
Don't get me wrong here - if she is the BEST for the post, she should get it, but looking at things like the gender quotas like we have had in Germany - these are the wrong way (as they block progressing potentially better male candidates, if the female member quota hasn't been reached yet. This also led to a court case brought on by (IIRC) a civil cervant skipped in a promotion because there was another woman who could take the post - that case went all the way to the highest EU court which ruled that these kinds of quota regulations also are a form of gender discrimination and hence are deemed illegal.
And there are similar things happening - in a Swiss University I saw a notice for a competition about women in academic study courses, with a prize of EUR 10.000 for the best diploma thesis to be handed in by a female student that year. That particular competition notice actually had been put up by the "equal opportunities" advisor of the school... Where's the equal opportunity here?
In the UK, there is a female-only car insurance (Diamond), which will only accept female clientele because their insurance claims would in average be lower (hence allowing female drivers to save money, while indirectly increasing the insurance cost of males, by removing drivers with "lower claims" from male/female car insurance companies)...
a) (google-like) jobs well suited to a high degree of parallel processing.
b) complicated problems that can't easily be broken down to make use of a large number of CPUs, but require a lot of operations to be completed in the proper sequence.
On the first, a cluster is a great idea. On the second, a reaaaaaallly fast CPU is a great idea.
Nobody doubts he was a dictator that ought to have been ousted from his position. But there are so many of those in this world that we DIDN'T deal with.
An especially dangerous aspect of this issue is that the US chose to attack Iraq because of WMD that the weapons inspectors couldn't find and Iraq denied it had -- all the while Bush wouldn't dare saying too strong a word to North Korea anymore, now that they're actually touting to have developed nuclear weaponry. (And openly starting up a nuclear reactor again that they want to use to get to more nuclear material usable in a bomb).
What's the lesson for any cheap-ass third world dictator now?
Simple: Get a nuke, and the US will leave you in peace -- or - following the latest developments - get a nuke, and the US will even reduce their troops in the neighbouring country. On the other hand, if you have relatively weak forces and no WMD, *then* there is no way you can keep the US from attacking you...
If this whole policy achieves one thing, then it will be the proliferation of ABC arsenals world wide.
a) a page reloading script certainly shouldn't all that a hacker is capable of - but since they want people to voluntarily take part in this, they can't resort to illegal things. And page reloading can hardly be deemed illegal.
b) If you DO want to personally criticise someone (and I think "You yourself are an idiot" easily qualifies for that), then at least don't hide behind an "Anonymous Coward" mask.
I'm sorry - I happen to be German, and I followed the German news in the run-up to war.
The BND (the German CIA counterpart) stated they don't have evidence supporting this - they didn't have proof of non-existense of the alleged weapons either - but that's beside the point. Based on exactly THOSE issues, Germany did take its anti-war stance. There were (almost) no protests against the Afghan war, since people were convinced that the Taliban were in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but in the Iraq case, I have yet to meet a single compatriot that thought this war was justified...
Hint: Just because the republican Iraq war examination white-wash said "the Germans also said Iraq HAD WMD" doesn't neccessarily make it so. The Germans happened to say, we ca NOT prove Saddam has NO weapons. But that's about the extend of it.
Germans don't like terror either - and there are people worried Germany might become a target for Al Qaeda terror cells as well. And as such, Germany would certainly support a war against any country openly supporting terrorism (or at least, a country that is proven to be supporting terrorism); but that doesn't mean to blindly follow Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld.
It isn't HACKING... It's just HACKERS that came up with the idea...
(It's very much the same concept it wouldn't be electrocuting, if electricians would have come up with the idea; or drowning if it would have been plumbers... Imagine this - hackers don't "hack" 24 hours a day - they DO other stuff as well...
The question is just, whether that will be in a couple of months, or in 4 years and a couple of months...
While I hope his re-election campaign will fail (badly), I am not convinced it will.
All the guy needs to do is to occasionally raise (and then silently drop) terror alert levels again to create enough fear in the population to go for his kind of hard-liner politics...
Wouldn't eliminating the Republican's "free speech" on the web via DDOS attacks basically amount to cyber-terrorism?
Hint! Hint! You wouldn't want Bush to go for more governmental control of the Internet in order to fight all kinds of cyber-terrorism, wouldn't you?
And - if this really hits the Republicans, it won't be long before Bush's spin-doctors claim the whole idea was, in fact, initiated by Al Qaeda members.......remember how, in front of the UN in the run-up to the Iraq war, a couple of trucks in the middle of the desert were "mobile bio weapon research/development platforms"? (Exactly those that, like all the weapons of mass distruction, can't be found now)...
Personally, when I saw that google was restricting the share emission to U.S. persons, I got relatively pissed off at them. I didn't intend to buy any shares of them, but to restrict access to the shares seems hardly "fair". I don't know how quickly the US would step in if some well known company abroad would effectively forbid US investors to get any stock from them...
In reaction to this, so far, I've reduced my usage of gmail (intend to drop it completely shortly) and google is now a "fallback" when I need a search engine - vivisimo.com looks more and more appealing everyday. And since google doesn't want non-US-persons to invest in them (at least not for the IPO), my guess is they don't want non-US-business either. And I'll try my best to honor it.
Right now, I'm just curious whether I'm the only one to take such measures, or whether others did so as well.
In this case, we're heating a very cold (and potentially very isolated part of the lake) as opposed to the sunshine spreading its energy all across the lake.
Picture this: Normal sunlight on a warm and sunny day warms up your skin - but drink plenty, and it won't harm you (too much). But if you take a lens and focus even only a small part of that sunlight energy on a particular place on your skin - and no amount of drinking cold drinks is going to prevent the pain...
This isn't saying we shouldn't do, what they're doing in Toronto - anything we do is going to have consequences in some shape or form anyway. But at least, we should keep a very close eye on it - and even monitor different parts of the lake that (to our knowledge) should be relatively untouched by this thing.
I wouldn't laugh about this too much
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Yes, I couldn't suppress a first smirk upon seeing this article. But then again, there are two major reasons we shouldn't be laughing too much about this:
a) While uncertainty about Micro$oft brings some more people to Linux (which is touted to be more secure, but then again - it can just as well be penetrated by hackers), it also turns people away from using the Internet because they get too scared of what's going on there. The latter are mostly elderly people, but nevertheless - even they should be free to use the Internet, something which a number of them dread now because they feel their privacy (through spyware) and/or financial background (due to phish scams) may be at risk. And this is not a good thing.
b) Staying still, laughing about Micro$ofts misfortune here has to more immediate effects: (a) it will spurn M$ developers even more to deliver better software - and (b) has Linux people potentially stay back and enjoy M$'s misfortune (and hence giving M$ more time to catch up, security-wise, that is). Do you want to sit at the "other" end of the story in a year or two - once M$ has sorted out most of its security issues, while linux might be more and more negligent of these issues (because everyone "knows" that it's Windows that's insecure).
Personally, I've had some of my machines broken into about 2 years ago - and that was out of negligence (thinking Linux would be safe enough on its own). In the end, it probably was just a couple of script-kiddies breaking into the box to install - of all things - an IRC proxy/cache/logger on the machine. I don't know how the originally got into the machine, as I am not even quite sure WHEN it happened. But it went far enough that they even replaced the system's own ps/netstat/... to make sure those wouldn't display the "wrong" processes. I only noticed a problem when I inadvertently stumbled across it...
Since that time, I've done some more work trying to secure the box as far as (with MY knowledge) possible - but I'll no longer think my machines are inherently better than a M$ server might be. M$ *will* catch up - and they DO have the money they need to fix these kinds of problems.
The question is - do WE have the idealism to hunt down every single bug? (M$ people don't need the idealism for it - they get well PAID to do it).
Take a look back at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis - numbers of infected people were rising faster and faster, despite rising media coverage - until about the point the "educational" aspect of using condoms set in... Once that disappeared from the screens (and hence from everyday presence) that "educational" aspect has been forgotten - which explains the new rise.
Spam is a measure that has to be attacked on a global legislative scale. I think that spam is actually one of the largest political challenges nowadays, simply because it will require (basically) all governments to agree on an issue without giving in to economic pressures by those who actually make money off it....hence - it won't be solved...:-(
Unless - we can keep the educational aspects alive and hence make spams, phish scams, 419ers,... more and more cost ineffective.
There is, of course, another issue as well - if you eliminate 98% of the phish scams - that'll probably also mean that people will start paying less attention to the problem at hand and might hence become less careful about those phish scams that DO make it into their inbox.
This might be in a way comparable to the rates of HIV/AIDS spread during the late 80s/early 90s when there was LOTS of media attention to the issue, and people would actually think about what they were doing. Now, a couple of years after the height of media attention to it, the problems are rising again (simply because people no longer think about the issue).
In the same way, I would guess people might fall more easily for phish scams, once the become more rare again.
Apart from the issue that a suicide bomber dies on that particular flight, do you really think the guy really has to fly a lot first in order to get acquainted with planes so he could be a more effective suicide bomber?
It's nonsense... Also - depending on what people do, you might flag them for totally harmless things (i.e. what do you do if Hassan Al Brahimi is actually a consultant often flying between different cities staying at those for sometimes and afternoon, sometimes a couple of weeks.
Flagging people is just bound to cause a major fuck up sooner or later.
Also, for a while, the Department for Homeland security was apparently contemplating on whether they should color-code passengers according to their threat potential. One of their ideas was that (non-US) people known to have had training on automatic weapons should be chained to their seats for the duration of the flight......sounds like a great security publicity ploy - until you start thinking about the fact that terrorists will hardly ever tout their training (so you won't know whether the guy HAD the training or not -- actually, their plans would probably even hinge on the fact that you don't know. All the while you're harassing people, who like me, learnt to operate automatic weapons as part of their compulsory military service (i..e people who even had little choice about whether they WANTED to learn this or not)...
Personally, I've struck the US off my list of potential holiday destinations, until the whole patridiot act mess has been resolved (and removed). In the meantime, I will not even entertain job offers that might require me to go to the US - I'm simply sick of the kind of paranoia the Bush government is celebrating...
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Every form of energy is unclean at SOME point - solar panels aren't clean (their production isn't very efficient), ...
But there is one point - during USAGE the hydrogen fuel cells are a lot cleaner than cars, leaving pollution a business mainly during the creation of the fuel.
While the pollution in those cases might still be a lot, we can also do quite a lot to reduce emissions at that particular place (in fact, we can build any kind of device to help clean up the production emissions. In a car, we can't do that - due to constraints in weight (you can't install a 3 ton pollution filter in a car weighing half a ton), size (similar to the above) and price (hardly any consumer will buy a "clean" fuel powered car, if the equipment to filter the emissions from the engine costs several 10s of thousands of dollars.
A "factory" that extracts hydrogen neither needs to care too much about the size/weight/price of the emission filters -- granted, they WILL care about the price, but once one company actually installs the very best filter equipment and is still able to offer their hydrogen at a good price, they WILL start advertising the fact and hence put the other manufacturers under pressure to come up with similarly good pollution filtering or risk losing business to eco-aware fuel buyers...
Isn't this something that DEC tried in the early Alpha days? I vaguely seem to remember that Vobis, a German computer reseller, was including a tool claiming to do this with every Alpha they sold.
Though I have no clue how well this tool worked...
IPv6 doesn't address all the issues (e.g. combatting Worm spreading).
On the other hand - I would second a more rapid adoption of IPv6 any day. Maybe whatever intel feels neccessary to add to the Internet can be introduced at this level instead of trying to add a solution to IPv4 and therefore delaying IPv6 even further (since it will cost resources to adapt v4 and on top of that additional resources to plan this for v6 and re-implement it there as well)...
Well - this might help in some situations, but I would ask you to consider another few points on this:
...) - in other cases, it's probably not really going to be of much use...
a) If you run an access point in your room and use the wallpaper as to no longer disturb others with your airwaves -- why not just use a wired connection? Within a single room, it's definetely cheaper...
b) If you don't run an access point, you can use the Anti-WiFi wallpaper to keep the airwaves of the other students access points out - but at the same time, this will indiscriminately also block out the airwaves from the free campus service you actually might want to use...
c) if you put up anti-wifi wallpaper (which isn't going to be cheap), bear in mind that the landlord will very probably as you to take it down (and put up normal wallpaper again) once you decide to move out again...
In either case, it does not seem a good solution.
Anti-WiFi wallpaper makes sense, when you have a really good reason to keep ALL airwaves out (say, near medical operating equipment,
You're right - the airwaves aren't regulated. But they aren't telling you, that it is illegal to use them.
Take another example - if a few tenants on the ground floor of the building would constantly have all water faucets / showers running at full tilt, than that might result in the ones of the top floor no longer getting enough water to take a shower. In this case, your use of water is perfectly legal, but the landlord might still try and evict you since your behaviour is disruptive to the other tenants (or - before trying to get you out, try and find a compromise that is workable for everyone). If the landlord wouldn't do anything about it - he might actually even be sued by those who no longer have access to water (since the water comes with the flat).
No - but no matter where you try and rent a place, if YOUR behaviour causes problems for the landlord or disrupts the landlords work, then you'll most likely be evicted. You could then still go and move somewhere else, where this might be tolerated!
In this particular case, and in the way they explain the situation, it does not seem to be an unreasonable request to me.
If those apartments belong to the University, and the presence of your access point harms/disrupts the operation of their own network then to me it looks like it is well within the rights of the university to demand this - and as they can't single out a specific access point to cause the problem it seems just that they require ALL to be shut down.
On the other if those apartments do not belong to the university, then I wouldn't see how they should even try and enforce this.
In either case, it's not much of an issue - and it's not a freedom of speech / censorship issue, since they DO allow private access to the internet by wired means...
No - it will end once they put legislation into place to also punish abuse of patent laws.
(e.g. introduce a blocking period for a company/holding if they introduce an abusive patent; e.g. a patent that clearly violates obviousness restrictions, or patents that have lots of prior art, like the TAB-links patent seems to have; if a company were denied even filing additional patents for a year of so after trying patent abuse, it would definitely put more pressure on the companies to only submit sensible patents; because otherwise they might forfeit the possibility to patent something that might really warrant a patent).
It wouldn't neccessarily need to speak to the ground stations of each provider. If it's relayed through a satellite it'll just be fed back as a regular (international) phone call.
What they WOULD need are roaming agreements with as many telcos as possible to allow all their mobiles to be used on to the plane. And - this is in the interest of both the airlines, as well as the telcos themselves [it IS a selling point for a telco if its mobiles can be used on a plane].
There is one issue, though:
Will they be able to offer services on all bands (900, 1800, 1900 MHz), or will they restrict to ONE band and require the passengers to have a mobile capable of it. I know, *I* would be quite pissed, if they would require me to buy a 1900MHz US band mobile so I could use it on a flight within Europe (900+1800MHz). I don't know whether there is micro-cell equipment that could handle all three...
As for the question about charges - that's fairly trivial, they'll charge everything that they can get away with...
I don't know whether the telcos will allow them to use variable roaming charges (usually, roaming charges are a fixed amount per minute), because I could easily see the airlines wanting to charge MORE for a call from a long-haul flight, as their corporate clients on the planes might be more pressed to actually MAKE calls from longer flights, rather than short local flights [the chances of you actually absolutely HAVING to make a call will certainly be lower on very short flights].
Also, with more and more people having notebooks, I see the possibility that the whole thing might fall away with the advent of Wifi Internet access on planes, as you could use VoIP instead.
So what?
Karl May, a German author of travel stories didn't visit the US until long after writing his books.
Neither did he visit any of the other places outside of Europe that he wrote about. Yet a lot of his stories have been fairly accurate as to the surroundings they have been describing.
Admitted, it's more likely for an author to set his real-world stories in a setting he knows (most likely something close to his place of living at the time of writing), but it doesn't HAVE to be the case...
While I do support equal opportunities/emancipation issues, has MIT selected this woman because she is female and very good in her area of expertise, or has MIT selected her because she was the best irrespective of gender?
Don't get me wrong here - if she is the BEST for the post, she should get it, but looking at things like the gender quotas like we have had in Germany - these are the wrong way (as they block progressing potentially better male candidates, if the female member quota hasn't been reached yet. This also led to a court case brought on by (IIRC) a civil cervant skipped in a promotion because there was another woman who could take the post - that case went all the way to the highest EU court which ruled that these kinds of quota regulations also are a form of gender discrimination and hence are deemed illegal.
And there are similar things happening - in a Swiss University I saw a notice for a competition about women in academic study courses, with a prize of EUR 10.000 for the best diploma thesis to be handed in by a female student that year. That particular competition notice actually had been put up by the "equal opportunities" advisor of the school... Where's the equal opportunity here?
In the UK, there is a female-only car insurance (Diamond), which will only accept female clientele because their insurance claims would in average be lower (hence allowing female drivers to save money, while indirectly increasing the insurance cost of males, by removing drivers with "lower claims" from male/female car insurance companies)...
Where's the equal opportunity here?
Well, supercomputing can be either of two issues
a) (google-like) jobs well suited to a high degree of parallel processing.
b) complicated problems that can't easily be broken down to make use of a large number of CPUs, but require a lot of operations to be completed in the proper sequence.
On the first, a cluster is a great idea.
On the second, a reaaaaaallly fast CPU is a great idea.
Nobody doubts he was a dictator that ought to have been ousted from his position. But there are so many of those in this world that we DIDN'T deal with.
An especially dangerous aspect of this issue is that the US chose to attack Iraq because of WMD that the weapons inspectors couldn't find and Iraq denied it had -- all the while Bush wouldn't dare saying too strong a word to North Korea anymore, now that they're actually touting to have developed nuclear weaponry. (And openly starting up a nuclear reactor again that they want to use to get to more nuclear material usable in a bomb).
What's the lesson for any cheap-ass third world dictator now?
Simple: Get a nuke, and the US will leave you in peace -- or - following the latest developments - get a nuke, and the US will even reduce their troops in the neighbouring country. On the other hand, if you have relatively weak forces and no WMD, *then* there is no way you can keep the US from attacking you...
If this whole policy achieves one thing, then it will be the proliferation of ABC arsenals world wide.
Two things here:
a) a page reloading script certainly shouldn't all that a hacker is capable of - but since they want people to voluntarily take part in this, they can't resort to illegal things. And page reloading can hardly be deemed illegal.
b) If you DO want to personally criticise someone (and I think "You yourself are an idiot" easily qualifies for that), then at least don't hide behind an "Anonymous Coward" mask.
I'm sorry - I happen to be German, and I followed the German news in the run-up to war.
The BND (the German CIA counterpart) stated they don't have evidence supporting this - they didn't have proof of non-existense of the alleged weapons either - but that's beside the point. Based on exactly THOSE issues, Germany did take its anti-war stance. There were (almost) no protests against the Afghan war, since people were convinced that the Taliban were in cahoots with Al Qaeda, but in the Iraq case, I have yet to meet a single compatriot that thought this war was justified...
Hint: Just because the republican Iraq war examination white-wash said "the Germans also said Iraq HAD WMD" doesn't neccessarily make it so.
The Germans happened to say, we ca NOT prove Saddam has NO weapons. But that's about the extend of it.
Germans don't like terror either - and there are people worried Germany might become a target for Al Qaeda terror cells as well. And as such, Germany would certainly support a war against any country openly supporting terrorism (or at least, a country that is proven to be supporting terrorism); but that doesn't mean to blindly follow Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld.
It isn't HACKING... It's just HACKERS that came up with the idea...
(It's very much the same concept it wouldn't be electrocuting, if electricians would have come up with the idea; or drowning if it would have been plumbers... Imagine this - hackers don't "hack" 24 hours a day - they DO other stuff as well...
The question is just, whether that will be in a couple of months, or in 4 years and a couple of months...
While I hope his re-election campaign will fail (badly), I am not convinced it will.
All the guy needs to do is to occasionally raise (and then silently drop) terror alert levels again to create enough fear in the population to go for his kind of hard-liner politics...
Just a second... How is "reloading a page" illegal?
Unless they would intend to break into their servers, this doesn't seem illegal...
Unethical, yes, but not illegal... Is it?
Wouldn't eliminating the Republican's "free speech" on the web via DDOS attacks basically amount to cyber-terrorism?
...remember how, in front of the UN in the run-up to the Iraq war, a couple of trucks in the middle of the desert were "mobile bio weapon research/development platforms"? (Exactly those that, like all the weapons of mass distruction, can't be found now)...
Hint! Hint! You wouldn't want Bush to go for more governmental control of the Internet in order to fight all kinds of cyber-terrorism, wouldn't you?
And - if this really hits the Republicans, it won't be long before Bush's spin-doctors claim the whole idea was, in fact, initiated by Al Qaeda members....
So - where is google heading now?
Personally, when I saw that google was restricting the share emission to U.S. persons, I got relatively pissed off at them. I didn't intend to buy any shares of them, but to restrict access to the shares seems hardly "fair". I don't know how quickly the US would step in if some well known company abroad would effectively forbid US investors to get any stock from them...
In reaction to this, so far, I've reduced my usage of gmail (intend to drop it completely shortly) and google is now a "fallback" when I need a search engine - vivisimo.com looks more and more appealing everyday. And since google doesn't want non-US-persons to invest in them (at least not for the IPO), my guess is they don't want non-US-business either. And I'll try my best to honor it.
Right now, I'm just curious whether I'm the only one to take such measures, or whether others did so as well.
But is this comparable?
In this case, we're heating a very cold (and potentially very isolated part of the lake) as opposed to the sunshine spreading its energy all across the lake.
Picture this: Normal sunlight on a warm and sunny day warms up your skin - but drink plenty, and it won't harm you (too much). But if you take a lens and focus even only a small part of that sunlight energy on a particular place on your skin - and no amount of drinking cold drinks is going to prevent the pain...
This isn't saying we shouldn't do, what they're doing in Toronto - anything we do is going to have consequences in some shape or form anyway. But at least, we should keep a very close eye on it - and even monitor different parts of the lake that (to our knowledge) should be relatively untouched by this thing.
Yes, I couldn't suppress a first smirk upon seeing this article. But then again, there are two major reasons we shouldn't be laughing too much about this:
a) While uncertainty about Micro$oft brings some more people to Linux (which is touted to be more secure, but then again - it can just as well be penetrated by hackers), it also turns people away from using the Internet because they get too scared of what's going on there. The latter are mostly elderly people, but nevertheless - even they should be free to use the Internet, something which a number of them dread now because they feel their privacy (through spyware) and/or financial background (due to phish scams) may be at risk. And this is not a good thing.
b) Staying still, laughing about Micro$ofts misfortune here has to more immediate effects: (a) it will spurn M$ developers even more to deliver better software - and (b) has Linux people potentially stay back and enjoy M$'s misfortune (and hence giving M$ more time to catch up, security-wise, that is). Do you want to sit at the "other" end of the story in a year or two - once M$ has sorted out most of its security issues, while linux might be more and more negligent of these issues (because everyone "knows" that it's Windows that's insecure).
Personally, I've had some of my machines broken into about 2 years ago - and that was out of negligence (thinking Linux would be safe enough on its own). In the end, it probably was just a couple of script-kiddies breaking into the box to install - of all things - an IRC proxy/cache/logger on the machine. I don't know how the originally got into the machine, as I am not even quite sure WHEN it happened. But it went far enough that they even replaced the system's own ps/netstat/... to make sure those wouldn't display the "wrong" processes. I only noticed a problem when I inadvertently stumbled across it...
Since that time, I've done some more work trying to secure the box as far as (with MY knowledge) possible - but I'll no longer think my machines are inherently better than a M$ server might be. M$ *will* catch up - and they DO have the money they need to fix these kinds of problems.
The question is - do WE have the idealism to hunt down every single bug? (M$ people don't need the idealism for it - they get well PAID to do it).
Take a look back at the beginning of the HIV/AIDS crisis - numbers of infected people were rising faster and faster, despite rising media coverage - until about the point the "educational" aspect of using condoms set in... Once that disappeared from the screens (and hence from everyday presence) that "educational" aspect has been forgotten - which explains the new rise.
...hence - it won't be solved... :-(
... more and more cost ineffective.
Spam is a measure that has to be attacked on a global legislative scale. I think that spam is actually one of the largest political challenges nowadays, simply because it will require (basically) all governments to agree on an issue without giving in to economic pressures by those who actually make money off it.
Unless - we can keep the educational aspects alive and hence make spams, phish scams, 419ers,
There is, of course, another issue as well - if you eliminate 98% of the phish scams - that'll probably also mean that people will start paying less attention to the problem at hand and might hence become less careful about those phish scams that DO make it into their inbox.
This might be in a way comparable to the rates of HIV/AIDS spread during the late 80s/early 90s when there was LOTS of media attention to the issue, and people would actually think about what they were doing. Now, a couple of years after the height of media attention to it, the problems are rising again (simply because people no longer think about the issue).
In the same way, I would guess people might fall more easily for phish scams, once the become more rare again.
Apart from the issue that a suicide bomber dies on that particular flight, do you really think the guy really has to fly a lot first in order to get acquainted with planes so he could be a more effective suicide bomber?
...sounds like a great security publicity ploy - until you start thinking about the fact that terrorists will hardly ever tout their training (so you won't know whether the guy HAD the training or not -- actually, their plans would probably even hinge on the fact that you don't know. All the while you're harassing people, who like me, learnt to operate automatic weapons as part of their compulsory military service (i..e people who even had little choice about whether they WANTED to learn this or not)...
It's nonsense... Also - depending on what people do, you might flag them for totally harmless things (i.e. what do you do if Hassan Al Brahimi is actually a consultant often flying between different cities staying at those for sometimes and afternoon, sometimes a couple of weeks.
Flagging people is just bound to cause a major fuck up sooner or later.
Also, for a while, the Department for Homeland security was apparently contemplating on whether they should color-code passengers according to their threat potential. One of their ideas was that (non-US) people known to have had training on automatic weapons should be chained to their seats for the duration of the flight...
Personally, I've struck the US off my list of potential holiday destinations, until the whole patridiot act mess has been resolved (and removed). In the meantime, I will not even entertain job offers that might require me to go to the US - I'm simply sick of the kind of paranoia the Bush government is celebrating...