The thing about this story is that it doesn't make me outraged. Sure this is cyberwarfare, but that's kind of what the NSA is expected to do. This to me is a lot less controversial than tapping American Citizen's phone calls and metadata. Anybody who thinks every major country in the world isn't already doing stuff like this is overly optimistic. At least this was against a government target and wasn't just industrial espionage.
Probably not as much as you think as he is most likely holed up in a very restrictive hotel that doesn't allow visitors or allow guests to leave their rooms unless they have a connecting flight to catch.
And the facility had extremely tight physical security. International Nuclear Inspectors couldn't touch it. They had to piece together the architecture from international purchase orders/shipping forms and whatever they could pull out of computers that were attached to the internet, and they had to do this for quite a long time while remaining undetected. It's pretty scary when you think about it. That's cyberwarfare in its most pure form.
24,000 successful logins from 15 million attempts sounds like a brute force attack. I wouldn't be surprised at all if all of those compromised accounts had horrible easy to guess passwords.
That has to be some sort of art project? It looks tremendously impractical for real use, although it is in what appears to be an office setting. Most everybody inputs Kanji using a more or less standard keyboard and inputting each character using multiple keystrokes.
Microsoft just can't seem to find a happy place with DRM. They saw the iPod and said "we can do that, only better because you'll be able to share the music!" That sounded great, but then the reality set in that they would have to implement some incredibly onerous DRM to appease the record labels who had just spent the last decade with brown pants after they saw how easy it was to share music digitally. This meant that even though the Zune technically had more features than an iPod, the DRM was also up and in your face constantly unlike the iPod, causing people to resent your product. The best DRM is the one you don't notice.
And then Apple removed DRM from the iTunes Music Store and it was game over.
This is also a case where Microsoft's strategy of always going second backfired. Normally it allows them to avoid risky maneuvers by letting other companies test the waters so Microsoft only jumps in once they're sure it is safe. However, this meant that a great many potential customers already had a ton of music in iTunes and didn't want to leave that behind just to use a product that was pretty much the same as the one they already had.
So Google is basically saying: If you want to make money from the blog we are hosting for free, you have to cut us in on the revenue? I can see how this is a gross violation of people's civil liberties and why they are up in arms over it.
Because Microsoft has a vision where the Kinect is always and forever hooked up to the XBone, so allowing it to be used on a PC wouldn't make sense. It would break your console. So instead they're going to make one for a PC that you can buy that won't leave a XBone orphaned when you try to use it that way.
The way I see it, Kickstarter is best for getting projects going that normal publishers have no interest in. That's why there's a glut of miniature games in there, because mini games are risky and not many VCs want to invest in them. They're also relatively expensive to make and have a niche audience. Yet that niche audience is more than passionate enough to fund countless Kickstarters it seems. This is also a huge boon for indie developers wanting to make games that aren't cover based shooters full of quicktime events. FTL would never have gotten any traction from EA or any large publisher. Plus it lowers the bar for success for companies. As long as they deliver what they promised the customers are happy and presumably they earned enough to keep themselves going. There is no investor breathing down their necks to increase the profit margins every quarter, the artists get to keep more of their money and pretty much all of their creative control.
Really, the only people who get kind of shafted in this are the Backers, who have to take on a lot of risk and are far from guaranteed a good product in the end. Luckily your average Kickstarter backer is out only a few bucks if the project is total flop. It's not like a traditional investor who could be in a lot of trouble when his large risky bets don't yield fruit.
I installed Ubuntu 13.04 last night, because I wanted to run Steam games on Linux and it was their recommended system. First lesson: Clicking the "use the internet to install the most up to date code" is a mistake that causes the installer to stall for many minutes while it does downloads in the background.
Second Lesson: The disk partitioner seems exceedingly bare bones. I installed a new hard drive to do the install on, but the installer really really wanted to blow away my windows disk. I had to do the partitioning by hand (no "automatically lay out something sensible on this disk" option that I could find). This wasn't a hurdle for me, but it seemed pretty unfriendly for new people.
Third Lesson: The user manager is woefully bad. If you want to specify the UID for a user (so they match your other systems and make NFS work so much better), well, you can't. There's no option for that. The password requirements also seem rather steep (16 characters mixed case with punctuation no repeats no dictionary words can't be changed in any gui anywhere?)
Fourth Lesson: the default package manager is now an Apple app store ripoff?!? Ok, the UI is annoying, but at least I can just search for a package like the nfs client and get it right? No. It's back to the command line for you for some apt-get if you want to install a normal package.
Fifth Lesson: Software manager has a kind of hidden option to use the nVidia binary blob drivers so you get decent 3D performance. Doing so breaks compositing which breaks the entire desktop. 3D games run great though! Compositing seems kind of dumb anyway, and the weird search box that wanted to find Amazon products that are similar to "xterm" is something I could do without anyway. I'm just going to install Windowmaker instead once I figure out how to change the damn window manager preferences.
I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be the more polished distribution? Why is everything so hard or annoying in it? I guess the partial answer is Gnome 3, but even that doesn't explain everything. Man that control panel is missing about a million basic features though.
I see this a lot with the various "on rails" development schemes, where they sweep a tremendous amount of complexity under the rug so users can quickly develop whatever they want. Only later they discover that something is broken or slow with their project and now fixing it requires a herculean effort because they never really understood what was happening before. It's discouraging and many projects just resign themselves to being broken or start to incorporate ugly workarounds to try to avoid the problem without really fixing it.
The Government subsidizes traditional oil as well, so I don't see why the ethanol subsidies should be seen as a market failure. Hell, we have entire wars to basically benefit a few big oil companies, I don't see what some very reasonable price floors on barrels of ethanol should be seen so negatively.
The regulation would happen at the exchanges obviously, not some sort of weird computer tax. When you convert your currency into coins (or vice versa) the government will have checks to make sure you're not doing something fraudulent or illegal, checks that will be expensive to implement. This is already happening, and is why it is getting harder and harder over time to convert bitcoins into USD and back.
See, for me the stability is less of an issue because for the primary uses of Bitcoins you aren't holding on to them very long. It doesn't really matter what their current value is because you're buying only what you need to transfer your money to the other guy and then getting out.
So the big advantage of bitcoin is that it lets you send money overseas without the traditionally high service fees, but US (and other countries) are looking to add expensive regulation to the system that will drive up the prices to something similar to what you would find with a traditional service, only without any of the protections a traditional service might provide (which are admittedly pretty slim when sending money overseas).
I can see why the author thinks bitcoin itself is going to wither away. I'm not sure why he thinks some alternate and somehow better scheme is going to take off in its place. He also kind of skips over one of the big markets for bitcoins today: suburban teenagers who are buying mail order drugs and getting their parents to pay for it through their power bill.
I don't suppose the house is planning to actually pay for the enormous expense of putting a permanent human colony on a different planet? They just want NASA to stop everything else that they're doing and start making manned Mars rockets? Is it any wonder NASA struggles with long term projects, with Congress meddling every year with crazy ideas and budget uncertainty?
That really didn't answer the question though. All that says is "you'll need an administrator", without really laying down a framework for figuring out who it should be. It is a certainty that the landlords will be looking for bottom dollar bids on this extra expense that they don't know much about. He'll probably be charged rent for the space the machines take up, as well as power bills and whatnot, making the whole service more expensive than just buying a PC and running it in your apartment/office/etc... Apartments don't have IT departments to fall back on like most people who buy thin client setups.
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The thing about this story is that it doesn't make me outraged. Sure this is cyberwarfare, but that's kind of what the NSA is expected to do. This to me is a lot less controversial than tapping American Citizen's phone calls and metadata. Anybody who thinks every major country in the world isn't already doing stuff like this is overly optimistic. At least this was against a government target and wasn't just industrial espionage.
Probably not as much as you think as he is most likely holed up in a very restrictive hotel that doesn't allow visitors or allow guests to leave their rooms unless they have a connecting flight to catch.
And the facility had extremely tight physical security. International Nuclear Inspectors couldn't touch it. They had to piece together the architecture from international purchase orders/shipping forms and whatever they could pull out of computers that were attached to the internet, and they had to do this for quite a long time while remaining undetected. It's pretty scary when you think about it. That's cyberwarfare in its most pure form.
It's not even a hard problem to deal with, you just pass the flag that tells it to leave sparsefiles sparse.
24,000 successful logins from 15 million attempts sounds like a brute force attack. I wouldn't be surprised at all if all of those compromised accounts had horrible easy to guess passwords.
That has to be some sort of art project? It looks tremendously impractical for real use, although it is in what appears to be an office setting. Most everybody inputs Kanji using a more or less standard keyboard and inputting each character using multiple keystrokes.
You hear that, Gnome team? It's an important lesson. Don't think I'm letting you off either, Ubuntu.
Either that or Don knew for some time that the DRM stuff was going to be a fiasco and was preparing his parachute for months.
Microsoft just can't seem to find a happy place with DRM. They saw the iPod and said "we can do that, only better because you'll be able to share the music!" That sounded great, but then the reality set in that they would have to implement some incredibly onerous DRM to appease the record labels who had just spent the last decade with brown pants after they saw how easy it was to share music digitally. This meant that even though the Zune technically had more features than an iPod, the DRM was also up and in your face constantly unlike the iPod, causing people to resent your product. The best DRM is the one you don't notice.
And then Apple removed DRM from the iTunes Music Store and it was game over.
This is also a case where Microsoft's strategy of always going second backfired. Normally it allows them to avoid risky maneuvers by letting other companies test the waters so Microsoft only jumps in once they're sure it is safe. However, this meant that a great many potential customers already had a ton of music in iTunes and didn't want to leave that behind just to use a product that was pretty much the same as the one they already had.
So Google is basically saying: If you want to make money from the blog we are hosting for free, you have to cut us in on the revenue? I can see how this is a gross violation of people's civil liberties and why they are up in arms over it.
Synaptic is not installed by default, you have to go down to the command line to install it it seems.
Because Microsoft has a vision where the Kinect is always and forever hooked up to the XBone, so allowing it to be used on a PC wouldn't make sense. It would break your console. So instead they're going to make one for a PC that you can buy that won't leave a XBone orphaned when you try to use it that way.
I'm confused, if a connector designed by one company and used only by that company is not a proprietary connector, what is?
The way I see it, Kickstarter is best for getting projects going that normal publishers have no interest in. That's why there's a glut of miniature games in there, because mini games are risky and not many VCs want to invest in them. They're also relatively expensive to make and have a niche audience. Yet that niche audience is more than passionate enough to fund countless Kickstarters it seems. This is also a huge boon for indie developers wanting to make games that aren't cover based shooters full of quicktime events. FTL would never have gotten any traction from EA or any large publisher. Plus it lowers the bar for success for companies. As long as they deliver what they promised the customers are happy and presumably they earned enough to keep themselves going. There is no investor breathing down their necks to increase the profit margins every quarter, the artists get to keep more of their money and pretty much all of their creative control.
Really, the only people who get kind of shafted in this are the Backers, who have to take on a lot of risk and are far from guaranteed a good product in the end. Luckily your average Kickstarter backer is out only a few bucks if the project is total flop. It's not like a traditional investor who could be in a lot of trouble when his large risky bets don't yield fruit.
I installed Ubuntu 13.04 last night, because I wanted to run Steam games on Linux and it was their recommended system. First lesson: Clicking the "use the internet to install the most up to date code" is a mistake that causes the installer to stall for many minutes while it does downloads in the background.
Second Lesson: The disk partitioner seems exceedingly bare bones. I installed a new hard drive to do the install on, but the installer really really wanted to blow away my windows disk. I had to do the partitioning by hand (no "automatically lay out something sensible on this disk" option that I could find). This wasn't a hurdle for me, but it seemed pretty unfriendly for new people.
Third Lesson: The user manager is woefully bad. If you want to specify the UID for a user (so they match your other systems and make NFS work so much better), well, you can't. There's no option for that. The password requirements also seem rather steep (16 characters mixed case with punctuation no repeats no dictionary words can't be changed in any gui anywhere?)
Fourth Lesson: the default package manager is now an Apple app store ripoff?!? Ok, the UI is annoying, but at least I can just search for a package like the nfs client and get it right? No. It's back to the command line for you for some apt-get if you want to install a normal package.
Fifth Lesson: Software manager has a kind of hidden option to use the nVidia binary blob drivers so you get decent 3D performance. Doing so breaks compositing which breaks the entire desktop. 3D games run great though! Compositing seems kind of dumb anyway, and the weird search box that wanted to find Amazon products that are similar to "xterm" is something I could do without anyway. I'm just going to install Windowmaker instead once I figure out how to change the damn window manager preferences.
I thought Ubuntu was supposed to be the more polished distribution? Why is everything so hard or annoying in it? I guess the partial answer is Gnome 3, but even that doesn't explain everything. Man that control panel is missing about a million basic features though.
I see this a lot with the various "on rails" development schemes, where they sweep a tremendous amount of complexity under the rug so users can quickly develop whatever they want. Only later they discover that something is broken or slow with their project and now fixing it requires a herculean effort because they never really understood what was happening before. It's discouraging and many projects just resign themselves to being broken or start to incorporate ugly workarounds to try to avoid the problem without really fixing it.
California is more than the Bay Area.
Yeah, closing the Reston store--for a goddamn Container Store, who asked for the Container Store?!?--was dumb.
The Government subsidizes traditional oil as well, so I don't see why the ethanol subsidies should be seen as a market failure. Hell, we have entire wars to basically benefit a few big oil companies, I don't see what some very reasonable price floors on barrels of ethanol should be seen so negatively.
The regulation would happen at the exchanges obviously, not some sort of weird computer tax. When you convert your currency into coins (or vice versa) the government will have checks to make sure you're not doing something fraudulent or illegal, checks that will be expensive to implement. This is already happening, and is why it is getting harder and harder over time to convert bitcoins into USD and back.
See, for me the stability is less of an issue because for the primary uses of Bitcoins you aren't holding on to them very long. It doesn't really matter what their current value is because you're buying only what you need to transfer your money to the other guy and then getting out.
So the big advantage of bitcoin is that it lets you send money overseas without the traditionally high service fees, but US (and other countries) are looking to add expensive regulation to the system that will drive up the prices to something similar to what you would find with a traditional service, only without any of the protections a traditional service might provide (which are admittedly pretty slim when sending money overseas).
I can see why the author thinks bitcoin itself is going to wither away. I'm not sure why he thinks some alternate and somehow better scheme is going to take off in its place. He also kind of skips over one of the big markets for bitcoins today: suburban teenagers who are buying mail order drugs and getting their parents to pay for it through their power bill.
I don't suppose the house is planning to actually pay for the enormous expense of putting a permanent human colony on a different planet? They just want NASA to stop everything else that they're doing and start making manned Mars rockets? Is it any wonder NASA struggles with long term projects, with Congress meddling every year with crazy ideas and budget uncertainty?
That really didn't answer the question though. All that says is "you'll need an administrator", without really laying down a framework for figuring out who it should be. It is a certainty that the landlords will be looking for bottom dollar bids on this extra expense that they don't know much about. He'll probably be charged rent for the space the machines take up, as well as power bills and whatnot, making the whole service more expensive than just buying a PC and running it in your apartment/office/etc... Apartments don't have IT departments to fall back on like most people who buy thin client setups.
Is the landlord going to run the server farm? This sounds like a support nightmare to me.