As Noam Chomsky points out, in US foreignpolicyspeak "stability" means "obedience to US corporate demands".
Well, he who pays the piper calls the tune. The United States offers a host of pretty compelling benefits, not among the least of which is the protection of our vast military, to our allies and friends. It's only natural that we should ask for certain things in return for these benefits. That's the way the world works after all.
From what I understand Skype uses encryption as well as proprietary protocols to provides its services. No doubt many governments around the world, fearing the possibilities enabled by secure and anonymous point-to-point communication, would be very interested in learning anything they can about how it works and what weaknesses it might have, if any.
Even if this case didn't include that feature (probably either by luck or because this was merely a proof of concept), it's only a matter of time before someone hooks up the next bug to privilege escalation code. Both the iPhone and mac books have been popular and successful targets at the p0wn to own competitions over the years. Also, the mac users that I have come into contact with over the years have, almost without exception, been smug and dismissive of any sort of virus or trojan on their beloved macs. These people are setting themselves up for some nasty surprises down the line if they don't make some changes to their computing habits.
Incidentally these guys were NHS doctors which makes you wonder how competent they actually were at treating people.
Well, if the rest of the NHS is anything to go by, not very. One gets what one pays for after all or less than half of what one pays for when government taxes and spends your money for you. Isn't socialism wonderful?
To a user, nothing has changed since before MacDefender.
No doubt, that is a primary goal of the hack. Users are much less likely to take aggressive removal actions if they don't even realize that their system has been compromised. Meanwhile, the rootkit silently steals login credentials (your online banking credentials perhaps), participates in other hacks and receives instructions from the remote command and control system of the botnet to which it has been linked.
Mac OS X and Linux have a root user that protects the system against rogue processes causing too much damage.
The goal is not to "damage" your system, or at least not in the way that most people think. The goal is to monetize your computing resources, without your consent and against your wishes, irrespective of legality. If it makes money and they can use your machine to do it, especially without alerting you to their presence, then it will be done.
Especially when users hand the trojan their root password, like what was done with MacDefender.
It was also released in a variant that rooted the machine without needing to ask the user for the password. The update may have closed that particular hole, but silently rooting the system without having to ask a user for the password is a complete p0wn of the most serious kind. These types of exploits are just the sort that rootkit authors are always on the lookout for and will pay dearly for.
Having completed a CS degree myself, including a course in numerical analysis, it's my opinion that part of the problem stems from a general lack of agreement on what constitutes the essential upper-division coursework. When I was completing my CS degree it was possible to take several different tracks in the upper division courses and still qualify for the degree. For example, one could choose to concentrate in compilers, languages and formal grammars, automata theory, algorithms and complexity theory, AI and several other niches (the exact choices escape me now). However, there wasn't enough time to take all of them and still finish in 4 years and because some upper division CS courses were only offered once per year or even once every other year (for niche or less popular areas) the choice of which upper division series to pursue was often limited at best. This subject has already been beaten to death here on Slashdot, but eventually CS must really become more of a school, like engineering or other sciences, with distinct and separate majors within the school to allow proper focus on specific areas of inquiry rather than offering a hodgepodge of generalist CS-related knowledge all rolled into one degree program.
Having completed an undergraduate CS degree some years back now, I am of the opinion that one of the best ways to do this is for the universities to make appropriate prerequisite courses available to interested or promising high school students through their extension programs (i.e. the courses that are offered to non-enrolled students). Another possibility is for CS to move towards a more formalized 5 year course of study, as many other engineering and science majors have already done, where the first year is spent preparing to study primary material, but not really making progress towards a degree.
No, but the 102 year old Walmart greeter could certainly trip the silent alarm before taking refuge in the safe room. Meanwhile, the police (the Swiss police carry compact and high quality machine guns and have no sense of humor) will be converging on the area and cutting off all of the escape routes. The casks are probably designed to keep the materials secure, not for easy or quick access, so by the time these "terrorists" get set up to blast or cut through the casks to get at the material the aforementioned police will have arrived and either arrested or machine gunned them (terrorists choice). Let us also not forget that every male Swiss citizen above a certain age keeps an assault rifle and ammunition in their homes. No, Switzerland is a really bad place to commit a crime. Those terrorists will almost certainly seek their materials elsewhere if they have any sense.
IANAL, but I highly doubt that the creation of a corporation with a single employee (who is also the whole owner) would make everything right with the IRS. If it was that easy to throw the IRS of the case, nobody would be complaining about this. No, there would have to be at least some minimum plausible separation between the employees of a corporation and those making the deals and signing the contracts in order to pass the 25-part "are you an employee or a contractor" test published by the IRS. I haven't dealt with an IRS audit personally, but from all that I have read the IRS takes a rather dim view of tax sheltering schemes, no matter how clever or creative the structure and they have seen it all. If you think you can get away with a one-person consulting operation with an LLC, then by all means give it a try, but don't be surprised when the IRS comes calling on your clients with a bill for back taxes, interest and penalties.
I also attended religious schools, mainly because they were better run and had fewer problems than the local public schools (which here in California were and are disasters). As the parent said, the science courses taught the theory of evolution, but the religious courses primarily focused on the practical details of religious instruction, including the basic tenets of Catholicism, the Mass and issues related to Catholic social justice theory. In fact, I cannot recall a single instance where time was spent in religion class discussing Creationism. Actually, looking back on it, I'm grateful for the high quality education I received from those Jesuits. They really do know their math and science and it definitely put me on track towards the CS degree that I subsequently earned.
You probably wouldn't know this, being from the Netherlands, but here in the United States it's not just the health insurance that makes freelance software development difficult, but rather a little known section of the US Federal Tax Code: Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This law, which was originally supposed to curb certain tax practices at IBM, has had the unfortunate side effect of making it practically impossible to work as a professional individual independent software developer here in the United States. Basically, unless you form a company with at least three developers, where you are all employees of this company, and then do contracts with other companies through your company; the Internal Revenue Service (the tax collector here in the US) could go after your clients by saying that you were actually their employee and not an independent contractor (i.e. they owe the IRS payroll taxes, social security, medicare and the like). This is why almost every professional software developer here in the United States is an employee of a company and not an independent. Just one more small example of how stupid US tax policies make US companies and workers less competitive. BTW: This section of the law was originally written by a liberal New York Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wielded it as a blunt instrument to offset changes to the tax code involving Americans working abroad. So lawyers and doctors can be independents here in the United States, but not software developers or IT professionals. It's fucking stupid really, but that is what I've come to expect from the American left; when it comes to fixing or growing the US economy, they've all got rocks in their heads.
Nobody is entitled to success. That was and remains my point. Success must be earned through competition and competition produces winners and losers. That is reality. I am successful in no small part due to my winning attitude. Losers make excuses, but winners make their own success.
And people wonder why America has such a large wealth disparity.
There will always be wealth disparity in a free society. That is neither surprising nor unexpected. For those who support freedom there is no other way. Indeed, greater equality through authoritarian enforcement leads only to an equal share of misery. The late Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, said it best, "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
I compete to win and so should you. Own your failures (and learn from them), take your winnings and make no apologies; that's my motto. If you can't or won't compete, there are many hungry Indians and Chinese who would jump at the chance to take your place.
If you are so convinced that your business ideas are right and everyone else is doing it wrong, why not prove that by getting out there, founding a company and making a mint? Try your hand at being an entrepreneur or starting your own company before criticizing businesses for giving employees a raw deal. Anyone can be an employee after all, but it takes hard work, courage, skill and yes even a bit of luck to be an entrepreneur who creates new jobs and new wealth. Always remember that fortune favors the bold, not the timid.
This principle extends even more broadly to any dealings with the authorities. Generally speaking, reporting a crime is usually not in your best interest. The police are looking to arrest a suspect (any suspect, including you) and the DA is looking to secure a conviction. There is little or nothing to be gained from exposure to these risks so why take them? If you aren't involved, keep your mouth shut, forget about it and walk away. Secrecy is the winning strategy.
Successful companies with large cash balances tend to attract lawsuits as lawyers carefully investigate every possible angle of attack. Microsoft, with its legendary cash hoard (at one time north 40 billion dollars) was a perennial favorite in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Google has also been sued many times and now, at last, it's Apple's turn. Large amounts of cash draws lawyers like shit draws flies; that's just the way our system works.
Fallout: New Vegas was produced by Obsidian Entertainment (which includes some Black Isle alums who worked on Fallout 1 and 2) on behalf of Bethesda (which purchased most of the copyrights, excluding MMO, from what was left of Interplay) whereas Fallout 3 was produced directly by Bethesda. If the choice is between having some localized rootkit DRM (Sony Style...pun intended), taking my chances with a cracked.exe, using Steam or not playing the game at all; I'll make do with Steam. At least Steam provides some level of service in return, which is more than can be said of most cracks (trojanz anyone?) and certainly better better than what you'll get from the likes of SecuRom (a Sony product...yuck).
we may be the pioneer of state bankruptcy before much longer here
California is always first into everything, no matter how stupid ($3 billion for stem cell research? why not, just add it to our tab), so why should bankruptcy be any different. I'm a California resident and personally, I would be the first to celebrate a California bankruptcy. It would be the final and indisputable proof of stupid policies and gross mismanagement, mostly from the left I might add, that took a once prosperous and well run state and flushed it completely down the toilet. In another decade, California will be as bad as Mexico, complete with high unemployment, out-of-control gang violence and corrupt government unless some fairly drastic changes are made and fast. I don't hold out much hope, so I am already planning an exit from Cali, when the proves to be necessary. What will happen when all of the most productive people finally flee the state? We'll see whether 99% of everyone left can live off the remaining 1% who actually pay the bills. It hasn't worked so far, but here in California that's just when the politicians here like to double down on the same stupid policies that messed things up in the first place.
Getting out of bed each morning entails risk. Walking out your door entails risk. Even staying at home involves risk. In life, risks are inescapable but they are not necessarily intolerable. I take the risk of being killed on the road every day that I enter my vehicle and drive it to and from work. That is simply part of my reality right now and I have learned to accept the risks associated with it. Indeed, I was once very nearly killed in an automobile accident on the way home from work (no doubt that would have made my enemies here on Slashdot very happy). So yes, to answer your question, I am willing to risk being maimed or killed by your irresponsibility in exchange for living in a free society where I can choose to drive to and from work. Would I be happy if it happened? Probably not, but I can live with that.
as a matter of fact, places focusing in prevention (not in your straw-man style of course) of crime, disease, accidents, etc. fare quite well with that approach.
Since you seem to be so unhappy with our car culture here in the United States, perhaps a move to one of those car-free places, that you hold in such high esteem, would be better for everyone (and people say that I'm not egalitarian).
Slashdot Mirror
As Noam Chomsky points out, in US foreignpolicyspeak "stability" means "obedience to US corporate demands".
Well, he who pays the piper calls the tune. The United States offers a host of pretty compelling benefits, not among the least of which is the protection of our vast military, to our allies and friends. It's only natural that we should ask for certain things in return for these benefits. That's the way the world works after all.
From what I understand Skype uses encryption as well as proprietary protocols to provides its services. No doubt many governments around the world, fearing the possibilities enabled by secure and anonymous point-to-point communication, would be very interested in learning anything they can about how it works and what weaknesses it might have, if any.
Even if this case didn't include that feature (probably either by luck or because this was merely a proof of concept), it's only a matter of time before someone hooks up the next bug to privilege escalation code. Both the iPhone and mac books have been popular and successful targets at the p0wn to own competitions over the years. Also, the mac users that I have come into contact with over the years have, almost without exception, been smug and dismissive of any sort of virus or trojan on their beloved macs. These people are setting themselves up for some nasty surprises down the line if they don't make some changes to their computing habits.
Incidentally these guys were NHS doctors which makes you wonder how competent they actually were at treating people.
Well, if the rest of the NHS is anything to go by, not very. One gets what one pays for after all or less than half of what one pays for when government taxes and spends your money for you. Isn't socialism wonderful?
Citation, please?
take your pick
To a user, nothing has changed since before MacDefender.
No doubt, that is a primary goal of the hack. Users are much less likely to take aggressive removal actions if they don't even realize that their system has been compromised. Meanwhile, the rootkit silently steals login credentials (your online banking credentials perhaps), participates in other hacks and receives instructions from the remote command and control system of the botnet to which it has been linked.
Mac OS X and Linux have a root user that protects the system against rogue processes causing too much damage.
The goal is not to "damage" your system, or at least not in the way that most people think. The goal is to monetize your computing resources, without your consent and against your wishes, irrespective of legality. If it makes money and they can use your machine to do it, especially without alerting you to their presence, then it will be done.
Especially when users hand the trojan their root password, like what was done with MacDefender.
It was also released in a variant that rooted the machine without needing to ask the user for the password. The update may have closed that particular hole, but silently rooting the system without having to ask a user for the password is a complete p0wn of the most serious kind. These types of exploits are just the sort that rootkit authors are always on the lookout for and will pay dearly for.
No, you are being sold either way, one way or another. Privacy policies and even laws be damned, it's the all-mighty dollar that ultimately wins out.
Having completed a CS degree myself, including a course in numerical analysis, it's my opinion that part of the problem stems from a general lack of agreement on what constitutes the essential upper-division coursework. When I was completing my CS degree it was possible to take several different tracks in the upper division courses and still qualify for the degree. For example, one could choose to concentrate in compilers, languages and formal grammars, automata theory, algorithms and complexity theory, AI and several other niches (the exact choices escape me now). However, there wasn't enough time to take all of them and still finish in 4 years and because some upper division CS courses were only offered once per year or even once every other year (for niche or less popular areas) the choice of which upper division series to pursue was often limited at best. This subject has already been beaten to death here on Slashdot, but eventually CS must really become more of a school, like engineering or other sciences, with distinct and separate majors within the school to allow proper focus on specific areas of inquiry rather than offering a hodgepodge of generalist CS-related knowledge all rolled into one degree program.
Having completed an undergraduate CS degree some years back now, I am of the opinion that one of the best ways to do this is for the universities to make appropriate prerequisite courses available to interested or promising high school students through their extension programs (i.e. the courses that are offered to non-enrolled students). Another possibility is for CS to move towards a more formalized 5 year course of study, as many other engineering and science majors have already done, where the first year is spent preparing to study primary material, but not really making progress towards a degree.
No, but the 102 year old Walmart greeter could certainly trip the silent alarm before taking refuge in the safe room. Meanwhile, the police (the Swiss police carry compact and high quality machine guns and have no sense of humor) will be converging on the area and cutting off all of the escape routes. The casks are probably designed to keep the materials secure, not for easy or quick access, so by the time these "terrorists" get set up to blast or cut through the casks to get at the material the aforementioned police will have arrived and either arrested or machine gunned them (terrorists choice). Let us also not forget that every male Swiss citizen above a certain age keeps an assault rifle and ammunition in their homes. No, Switzerland is a really bad place to commit a crime. Those terrorists will almost certainly seek their materials elsewhere if they have any sense.
Or the 1961 Corvair: "Unsafe at any speed..."
IANAL, but I highly doubt that the creation of a corporation with a single employee (who is also the whole owner) would make everything right with the IRS. If it was that easy to throw the IRS of the case, nobody would be complaining about this. No, there would have to be at least some minimum plausible separation between the employees of a corporation and those making the deals and signing the contracts in order to pass the 25-part "are you an employee or a contractor" test published by the IRS. I haven't dealt with an IRS audit personally, but from all that I have read the IRS takes a rather dim view of tax sheltering schemes, no matter how clever or creative the structure and they have seen it all. If you think you can get away with a one-person consulting operation with an LLC, then by all means give it a try, but don't be surprised when the IRS comes calling on your clients with a bill for back taxes, interest and penalties.
I also attended religious schools, mainly because they were better run and had fewer problems than the local public schools (which here in California were and are disasters). As the parent said, the science courses taught the theory of evolution, but the religious courses primarily focused on the practical details of religious instruction, including the basic tenets of Catholicism, the Mass and issues related to Catholic social justice theory. In fact, I cannot recall a single instance where time was spent in religion class discussing Creationism. Actually, looking back on it, I'm grateful for the high quality education I received from those Jesuits. They really do know their math and science and it definitely put me on track towards the CS degree that I subsequently earned.
You probably wouldn't know this, being from the Netherlands, but here in the United States it's not just the health insurance that makes freelance software development difficult, but rather a little known section of the US Federal Tax Code: Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This law, which was originally supposed to curb certain tax practices at IBM, has had the unfortunate side effect of making it practically impossible to work as a professional individual independent software developer here in the United States. Basically, unless you form a company with at least three developers, where you are all employees of this company, and then do contracts with other companies through your company; the Internal Revenue Service (the tax collector here in the US) could go after your clients by saying that you were actually their employee and not an independent contractor (i.e. they owe the IRS payroll taxes, social security, medicare and the like). This is why almost every professional software developer here in the United States is an employee of a company and not an independent. Just one more small example of how stupid US tax policies make US companies and workers less competitive. BTW: This section of the law was originally written by a liberal New York Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who wielded it as a blunt instrument to offset changes to the tax code involving Americans working abroad. So lawyers and doctors can be independents here in the United States, but not software developers or IT professionals. It's fucking stupid really, but that is what I've come to expect from the American left; when it comes to fixing or growing the US economy, they've all got rocks in their heads.
What makes you so entitled to success over them?
Nobody is entitled to success. That was and remains my point. Success must be earned through competition and competition produces winners and losers. That is reality. I am successful in no small part due to my winning attitude. Losers make excuses, but winners make their own success.
And people wonder why America has such a large wealth disparity.
There will always be wealth disparity in a free society. That is neither surprising nor unexpected. For those who support freedom there is no other way. Indeed, greater equality through authoritarian enforcement leads only to an equal share of misery. The late Nobel Prize winning economist, Milton Friedman, said it best, "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."
I compete to win and so should you. Own your failures (and learn from them), take your winnings and make no apologies; that's my motto. If you can't or won't compete, there are many hungry Indians and Chinese who would jump at the chance to take your place.
If you are so convinced that your business ideas are right and everyone else is doing it wrong, why not prove that by getting out there, founding a company and making a mint? Try your hand at being an entrepreneur or starting your own company before criticizing businesses for giving employees a raw deal. Anyone can be an employee after all, but it takes hard work, courage, skill and yes even a bit of luck to be an entrepreneur who creates new jobs and new wealth. Always remember that fortune favors the bold, not the timid.
This principle extends even more broadly to any dealings with the authorities. Generally speaking, reporting a crime is usually not in your best interest. The police are looking to arrest a suspect (any suspect, including you) and the DA is looking to secure a conviction. There is little or nothing to be gained from exposure to these risks so why take them? If you aren't involved, keep your mouth shut, forget about it and walk away. Secrecy is the winning strategy.
Successful companies with large cash balances tend to attract lawsuits as lawyers carefully investigate every possible angle of attack. Microsoft, with its legendary cash hoard (at one time north 40 billion dollars) was a perennial favorite in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Google has also been sued many times and now, at last, it's Apple's turn. Large amounts of cash draws lawyers like shit draws flies; that's just the way our system works.
This is exactly the sort of thing we need to put a stop to! People enjoying music!
The big music labels already do that quite well enough on their own
Fallout: New Vegas was produced by Obsidian Entertainment (which includes some Black Isle alums who worked on Fallout 1 and 2) on behalf of Bethesda (which purchased most of the copyrights, excluding MMO, from what was left of Interplay) whereas Fallout 3 was produced directly by Bethesda. If the choice is between having some localized rootkit DRM (Sony Style...pun intended), taking my chances with a cracked .exe, using Steam or not playing the game at all; I'll make do with Steam. At least Steam provides some level of service in return, which is more than can be said of most cracks (trojanz anyone?) and certainly better better than what you'll get from the likes of SecuRom (a Sony product...yuck).
we may be the pioneer of state bankruptcy before much longer here
California is always first into everything, no matter how stupid ($3 billion for stem cell research? why not, just add it to our tab), so why should bankruptcy be any different. I'm a California resident and personally, I would be the first to celebrate a California bankruptcy. It would be the final and indisputable proof of stupid policies and gross mismanagement, mostly from the left I might add, that took a once prosperous and well run state and flushed it completely down the toilet. In another decade, California will be as bad as Mexico, complete with high unemployment, out-of-control gang violence and corrupt government unless some fairly drastic changes are made and fast. I don't hold out much hope, so I am already planning an exit from Cali, when the proves to be necessary. What will happen when all of the most productive people finally flee the state? We'll see whether 99% of everyone left can live off the remaining 1% who actually pay the bills. It hasn't worked so far, but here in California that's just when the politicians here like to double down on the same stupid policies that messed things up in the first place.
Getting out of bed each morning entails risk. Walking out your door entails risk. Even staying at home involves risk. In life, risks are inescapable but they are not necessarily intolerable. I take the risk of being killed on the road every day that I enter my vehicle and drive it to and from work. That is simply part of my reality right now and I have learned to accept the risks associated with it. Indeed, I was once very nearly killed in an automobile accident on the way home from work (no doubt that would have made my enemies here on Slashdot very happy). So yes, to answer your question, I am willing to risk being maimed or killed by your irresponsibility in exchange for living in a free society where I can choose to drive to and from work. Would I be happy if it happened? Probably not, but I can live with that.
Since it's not implemented now there is some hope that it won't be implemented in self driving cars.
The lawyers will see to that, I assure you.
as a matter of fact, places focusing in prevention (not in your straw-man style of course) of crime, disease, accidents, etc. fare quite well with that approach.
Since you seem to be so unhappy with our car culture here in the United States, perhaps a move to one of those car-free places, that you hold in such high esteem, would be better for everyone (and people say that I'm not egalitarian).