Really, the armed forces is a lot like any other large organization. If a piece of hardware has to be custom modified for some particular task (like something designed to go in a tank and manage fire control or something), then that piece of hardware will be very expensive and will only be upgraded when the needs are compelling (thus will tend to be 5-10 years old or more on average). For vehicles designed with just a laptop attachment point, then the upgrade cycle will be much faster because the procurement office will buy the available model and use that. The upgrade cycle may not even be so bad because soldiers are famously hard on their equipment and even hardened laptops can take only so much abuse.
How did Google change the rules of the internet? It's not like they were the first search engine (just the first one that wasn't evil). I still connect to their servers with a web browser and run queries. They do provide a previously rare amount of "web 2.0" functionality (their office suite for instance), but even that's a minor tweak, not "changing the rules of the internet completely" by any measure.
I've always found the apparent dread fear the devs have that someone somewhere might finish the game to be excellent protection against getting addicted. Seriously, when the game has about a million ways to screw the player over randomly in ways they could not prevent and also offers no save points and is structured such that even experts have less than a 1% chance of beating the game (which is not short by any measure).
Every few years I pick up Nethack again and give it a whirl, and it always goes the same way. I'll lose a few characters in the early levels where you have almost no tricks up your sleeve and the monsters are still strong. Then I'll get a character past the hump and really start to make progress, only to be killed by some complete bullcrap like opening a door and discovering a monster room, so you close and try to pin (or wizard lock) the door when a dragon walks up behind you and one of the monsters on the other side of the door destroys it and pins you between them. So you pull out the emergency scroll of teleport and it teleports you right into the middle of the monster room, onto a sleep gas trap. That's when I stop playing the game for a couple more years.
I have to echo the statement about the Williams Pinball game. My wife picked it up and I thought it was going to be another halfassed pinball simulator like pretty much every pinball game on every console ever. Instead, it's addicting and fun, and the physics model actually works surprisingly well. They even have good boards on it (except for Jive Time, that table is evil).
The first game was pretty fun, but the difficulty depended almost entirely on how good you were at hitting the spacebar at just the right moment to counter. Once you got good at that the game became way too easy. If you weren't, then your characters were going to be repeatedly maimed about 20' into the second stage. It was either get your block/counter timing down (and make the game way too easy) or die horribly. Items were for the most part a waste of time.
I'd like to see a re-balance in the second issue to make full blocks/countering harder (reduce the timing windows or don't give us the flash or randomize it a bit or something), but to also make it less necessary (not every enemy attack needs to do 3/4 of your HP worth in damage!).
I don't think I've ever used a touchscreen ATM, they ALL have those buttons here. Maybe some of them have touchscreens too, but I've never actually tried. The problem is that there is still a calibration issue between the buttons and the screen. I mean how many times have you started to use an ATM only to see a screen like this? It happens all of the time around here.
This story is a bit old and has been rung through the media wringer already. The issue is that the machines they were using require a 20(!!) point calibration process, and apparently the poll workers weren't being careful enough when setting it up. It's a combination of a badly designed machine and lazy/incompetent poll workers. The good news is that since the states are pushing so heavily on early voting this year, there is a chance they'll figure out workarounds for issues like this before the general election.
What difference does it make how the data was run through the cipher? Does chunking the data up into blocks improve the security somehow, despite using the same crypto algorithm with the same number of bits?
And I've still never seen anybody use 72 bit encryption for anything ever.
To be fair though, 802.11's encryption wasn't even 64 bits, since defects in the WEP algorithm reduced it do a laughably weak 40 bits before the out and out bugs made it even more trivial to break.
RC5-72 was completely pointless because I've never seen anybody use it. RC5-64 was at least forced on people due to export restrictions and other such nonsense (lots of early 802.11b cards for instance). The next step people take is typically AES, but brute forcing the AES keyspace is completely impractical.
The problem: at a cost of 150 Billion, you would never ever make the money back on it. That and 150 Billion is almost certainly too low, since you not only have to get land rights across half of the country, but you also have to cross the rockies.
As long as the restrictions are reasonably commonsense, I don't think small businesses should be exempt. In the end it doesn't matter if my personal information ends up on the black market via a small business or a large business with lax security, either way I'm screwed.
Simple solutions that would solve 95% of the data leaks (especially the big ones):
1. Never store customer data on machines that must travel outside of the company.
2. Regardless of #1, all laptops have full disk encryption where possible, and extra safeguards (could be a sticker on the top that says NO PERSONAL DATA) against storing such data on those machines otherwise.
Getting people to practice proper database security is harder, and may not be practical to legislate. I'm not sure. Still, the vast majority of publicized personal information thefts have been the result of stolen laptops with personal information left unencrypted. It is simply not acceptable to carry around unencrypted personal data like that, no matter how small your company is, not with effective and cheap disk encryptors available.
Reminds me of a Futurama line:
[The Planet Express Ship is being dragged underwater by a colossal mouth bass.]
Leela: Depth at forty five hundred feet. Forty eight hundred. Fifty hundred. Five thousand feet.
Professor Farnsworth: Dear Lord, that's over 150 atmospheres of pressure.
Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
Actually, yes. If a player is discovered to be compromised, it can be added to a "bad guys" list and locked out. The list can be updated remotely or by trying to play a newer disc.
Oh ultrasonic waves, is there anything people won't claim you can do? Had this device come out 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been exactly the same except the "ultrasonic waves" would have been replaced by magnets, because that was the in thing at the time. Colliding alcohol molecules? What in the world are they talking about?
If this thing actually works as advertised I'll eat my hat.
My favorite part of that was the last requirement:
7) Once all these accounts are created, I need you to visit a URL and fill out 2000 forms and enter the information for the Gmail Accounts you created.
The scary thing is the number of bids he has racked up for a lousy $50 job. I wonder if people are dumb enough to believe his "this first job pays crap, but the next one will be really good!" bullshit?
A better way to steal old stuff is to literally intercept it on the way to the trash can. Since it's off of the books nobody will ever come looking for it. I've collected quite a number of entirely usable ethernet cables, mice, keyboards, etc... from labs that were being torn down or reconfigured.
To be fair, LaTeX is pronounced La-Tech. Although the image of fetish cowboys always pops in my head when I start talking about TeX and LaTeX. The biggest difference is that TeX and LaTeX are both only used by a relatively small number of professionals. The kind of people who complain about the GIMP's name wouldn't even be able to install LaTeX.
I thought the point was that they can forge their return IP address because they can spoof the Syncookie somehow? The attack being that you just force the host to create a gob-jillion syncookies (which have to be stored, eating up resources) and then do a plain old resource exhaustion attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm sure every potential recruit would just love to have to install a VPN client to go check out af.mil.
Really, the armed forces is a lot like any other large organization. If a piece of hardware has to be custom modified for some particular task (like something designed to go in a tank and manage fire control or something), then that piece of hardware will be very expensive and will only be upgraded when the needs are compelling (thus will tend to be 5-10 years old or more on average). For vehicles designed with just a laptop attachment point, then the upgrade cycle will be much faster because the procurement office will buy the available model and use that. The upgrade cycle may not even be so bad because soldiers are famously hard on their equipment and even hardened laptops can take only so much abuse.
How did Google change the rules of the internet? It's not like they were the first search engine (just the first one that wasn't evil). I still connect to their servers with a web browser and run queries. They do provide a previously rare amount of "web 2.0" functionality (their office suite for instance), but even that's a minor tweak, not "changing the rules of the internet completely" by any measure.
Yes, clearly a near 1% success rate among lifelong experts is far too easy. We must rush to find harder versions!
I've always found the apparent dread fear the devs have that someone somewhere might finish the game to be excellent protection against getting addicted. Seriously, when the game has about a million ways to screw the player over randomly in ways they could not prevent and also offers no save points and is structured such that even experts have less than a 1% chance of beating the game (which is not short by any measure).
Every few years I pick up Nethack again and give it a whirl, and it always goes the same way. I'll lose a few characters in the early levels where you have almost no tricks up your sleeve and the monsters are still strong. Then I'll get a character past the hump and really start to make progress, only to be killed by some complete bullcrap like opening a door and discovering a monster room, so you close and try to pin (or wizard lock) the door when a dragon walks up behind you and one of the monsters on the other side of the door destroys it and pins you between them. So you pull out the emergency scroll of teleport and it teleports you right into the middle of the monster room, onto a sleep gas trap. That's when I stop playing the game for a couple more years.
I have to echo the statement about the Williams Pinball game. My wife picked it up and I thought it was going to be another halfassed pinball simulator like pretty much every pinball game on every console ever. Instead, it's addicting and fun, and the physics model actually works surprisingly well. They even have good boards on it (except for Jive Time, that table is evil).
The first game was pretty fun, but the difficulty depended almost entirely on how good you were at hitting the spacebar at just the right moment to counter. Once you got good at that the game became way too easy. If you weren't, then your characters were going to be repeatedly maimed about 20' into the second stage. It was either get your block/counter timing down (and make the game way too easy) or die horribly. Items were for the most part a waste of time.
I'd like to see a re-balance in the second issue to make full blocks/countering harder (reduce the timing windows or don't give us the flash or randomize it a bit or something), but to also make it less necessary (not every enemy attack needs to do 3/4 of your HP worth in damage!).
I don't think I've ever used a touchscreen ATM, they ALL have those buttons here. Maybe some of them have touchscreens too, but I've never actually tried. The problem is that there is still a calibration issue between the buttons and the screen. I mean how many times have you started to use an ATM only to see a screen like this? It happens all of the time around here.
This story is a bit old and has been rung through the media wringer already. The issue is that the machines they were using require a 20(!!) point calibration process, and apparently the poll workers weren't being careful enough when setting it up. It's a combination of a badly designed machine and lazy/incompetent poll workers. The good news is that since the states are pushing so heavily on early voting this year, there is a chance they'll figure out workarounds for issues like this before the general election.
What difference does it make how the data was run through the cipher? Does chunking the data up into blocks improve the security somehow, despite using the same crypto algorithm with the same number of bits?
And I've still never seen anybody use 72 bit encryption for anything ever.
To be fair though, 802.11's encryption wasn't even 64 bits, since defects in the WEP algorithm reduced it do a laughably weak 40 bits before the out and out bugs made it even more trivial to break.
RC5-72 was completely pointless because I've never seen anybody use it. RC5-64 was at least forced on people due to export restrictions and other such nonsense (lots of early 802.11b cards for instance). The next step people take is typically AES, but brute forcing the AES keyspace is completely impractical.
The problem: at a cost of 150 Billion, you would never ever make the money back on it. That and 150 Billion is almost certainly too low, since you not only have to get land rights across half of the country, but you also have to cross the rockies.
Then I've got great news for you about tape drives.
I want to know where you find offsite backup for 12TB of data daily at only $20k.
Yeah, but compare that to air cooling. Air is HOW old?
As long as the restrictions are reasonably commonsense, I don't think small businesses should be exempt. In the end it doesn't matter if my personal information ends up on the black market via a small business or a large business with lax security, either way I'm screwed.
Simple solutions that would solve 95% of the data leaks (especially the big ones):
1. Never store customer data on machines that must travel outside of the company. 2. Regardless of #1, all laptops have full disk encryption where possible, and extra safeguards (could be a sticker on the top that says NO PERSONAL DATA) against storing such data on those machines otherwise.
Getting people to practice proper database security is harder, and may not be practical to legislate. I'm not sure. Still, the vast majority of publicized personal information thefts have been the result of stolen laptops with personal information left unencrypted. It is simply not acceptable to carry around unencrypted personal data like that, no matter how small your company is, not with effective and cheap disk encryptors available.
Reminds me of a Futurama line:
[The Planet Express Ship is being dragged underwater by a colossal mouth bass.]
Leela: Depth at forty five hundred feet. Forty eight hundred. Fifty hundred. Five thousand feet.
Professor Farnsworth: Dear Lord, that's over 150 atmospheres of pressure.
Fry: How many atmospheres can this ship withstand?
Professor Farnsworth: Well it's a spaceship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one.
Actually, yes. If a player is discovered to be compromised, it can be added to a "bad guys" list and locked out. The list can be updated remotely or by trying to play a newer disc.
Thank you Anonymous Coward, you sound exactly like a testimonial from one of those infomercials, which makes me even more skeptical of the device.
Oh ultrasonic waves, is there anything people won't claim you can do? Had this device come out 5 or 10 years ago, it would have been exactly the same except the "ultrasonic waves" would have been replaced by magnets, because that was the in thing at the time. Colliding alcohol molecules? What in the world are they talking about?
If this thing actually works as advertised I'll eat my hat.
The scary thing is the number of bids he has racked up for a lousy $50 job. I wonder if people are dumb enough to believe his "this first job pays crap, but the next one will be really good!" bullshit?
A better way to steal old stuff is to literally intercept it on the way to the trash can. Since it's off of the books nobody will ever come looking for it. I've collected quite a number of entirely usable ethernet cables, mice, keyboards, etc... from labs that were being torn down or reconfigured.
Like condoms
To be fair, LaTeX is pronounced La-Tech. Although the image of fetish cowboys always pops in my head when I start talking about TeX and LaTeX. The biggest difference is that TeX and LaTeX are both only used by a relatively small number of professionals. The kind of people who complain about the GIMP's name wouldn't even be able to install LaTeX.
I thought the point was that they can forge their return IP address because they can spoof the Syncookie somehow? The attack being that you just force the host to create a gob-jillion syncookies (which have to be stored, eating up resources) and then do a plain old resource exhaustion attack.