1. Secure boot with verification of the entire OS. 2. All installed software runs in a sandbox. 3. All installed software gets automated updates. 4. All OS configuration is cloud-backed. 5. Full disk encryption by default, with protection of each user profile (such that no user can read another's profile). 6. Ability to reset to factory state with a single click, with re-configuration just requiring a user to login with a cloud ID.
There are certainly things you can do with Windows that you can't do with ChromeOS. However, the real value of ChromeOS is that it brings a fairly comprehensive data security and configuration management solution to the masses, and by security I mean it in the full sense - not just preventing others from accessing your data, but ensuring that you don't lose access to your data.
When I get my hands on a new Windows install I spend about half a day tweaking and hardening things. When I get my hands on a new Chromebook I just enter my WiFi WPA2 key and log into it.
Google supports running Chromium OS on any Chromebook. It basically has everything but a few plugins, which I believe you can install (though those are not FOSS).
I wouldn't say it is any less FOSS than something like the Linux Kernel if you don't de-blob it.
The problem is that they're not going to let you JUST stream GOT. They're going to probably want you to commit to a year full of programs you won't watch at $20/month or something crazy like that. If you could pay $15 for a whole season of GOT streamed I suspect that it would be a popular offering.
#4 is really the show-stopper for me, with #2 being a close second.
If I want to buy 1 series from HBO, I don't want to pay $120/yr for it. That is just WAY too much for a single show. Yes, I realize that I'm getting another 47 shows that I don't watch along with it - that doesn't really win me over...
Honestly, I really wish the US Government would just issue national IDs, including an electronic component with a standardized interface (cheap enough to be deployed to any PC, and usable for remote applications in a secure way). This would make identity theft nearly impossible (or at least much easier to clean up after-the-fact), and kill off many social engineering attacks and the need for passwords in general.
The usual fear is that a US government ID would create some kind of big brother system. The thing is, we already have that - the US doesn't need an ID to identify everybody, since they operate on such a large scale they can just scan every yearbook, facebook account, email, security camera, etc to identify everybody all the time. They undoubtedly assign a unique ID to every person they identify, so they basically have that government ID system already, and we get to suffer all the downsides of that. What we don't get to experience are any of the upsides, since while the US government might be able to tell who I am while posting this, nobody else can.
There is also no reason that a government ID couldn't be used in a semi-anonymous manner. When I authenticate to slashdot they could give slashdot a unique identifier for me which is traceable to me upon issuance of a warrant, but which is different from the ID they issue for any other website. That means nobody else can log in as me to Slashdot, and I don't need any slashdot-specific credentials, but I can still be a pseudonym as far as Slashdot is concerned (but I can only create a single account). We could even allow somebody to have multiple IDs for a single domain all traceable to the same real person (with a warrant). Obviously there needs to be a lot of policy around who can insist on having a real identity vs a pseudo-one, or when somebody is allowed to have sock-puppets, etc.
I don't know about their policies specifically, but its usually done so that if someone gets a hold of a password file and manages to break a few passwords, hopefully they'll have changed by the time the attacker tries to actually make use of them.
They certainly will change them - to the next sequentially-numbered password. Everybody I've ever talked to about password aging says that they use an incremental number appended to the same password they've used for years.
Sure, if you're attempting to brute force a live system that would be a basic security practice. But what about when an attacker has acquired your password hashes via some other method? It's not like you can stop them from plugging away at the hash over and over again until they get a match, and then use that match in the real world. Actually, it's probably faster to try and dictionary/brute force a hash table (even if it is salted) than to attack a live environment.
Yup. Having password expiration also doesn't help at all in these cases either. If they try "password27" and it fails, do you think they aren't going to try "password28"?
Will it do so if the server presents an untrusted certificate? POP3 supports TLS as well, but Google has it configured to reject any connection presenting a certificate they don't trust. So, the alternative is unencrypted POP3, which also does not present a certificate that they trust but for whatever reason everybody always seems fine with that.
In general, Google has tried to be very supportive of encryption, e.g. DKIM for authentication (and SPF) to STARTTLS for privacy.
Ugh - you managed to pick two of my pet peeves. I used to securely bounce all my mail from my domain to my gmail account using TLS so that all my email flowed to Gmail encrypted.
However, GMail started enforcing DKIM more strongly, which means that much of my bounced email started, well, bouncing. So, I switched to POP3 retrieval of email. Then I discovered that GMail won't support TLS/SSL unless the presented certificate is trusted by them. So, as a result I've moved from instant delivery of encrypted email to polled delivery of unencrypted email with my credentials probably sent in plaintext (I'm not quite sure whether Gmail at least supports something other than plain text authentication when not using SSL/TLS). I use disposable credentials to an account used only for POP3 with only a copy of my email, so that at least mitigates the damage if they leak.
Of course, I realize that my use case is the obvious 0.01% one, and part of why I like to use Gmail as my MUA if not my MTA is its effective spam removal.
Even if you count all the labor involved, you're still talking about what amounts to a pot luck event. It is way cheaper than a professionally catered event, etc. Also, he fed them breakfast, not dinner. Pancakes are WAY cheaper than filets.
Agree. I think my wife and I spent about $1k on our wedding total, and we probably had 50-100 people on the invite list.
We held the ceremony in the evening and just had snacks for the reception. I think we had a pot luck rehearsal dinner. Decorations were just whatever was easily borrowed, etc. Flowers were artificial. Dresses were inexpensive, and many were handmade. A friend took photos.
As far as I can tell everybody still enjoyed it, and I wouldn't change much if I did it over again.
You don't need to treat a wedding as a state affair. There are a lot better things for a new couple to spend money on.
The problem is that between being asymptomatic and being on death's door you have moderate flu symptoms and are contagious. That is something we want to keep an eye on.
As far as Al Qaeda goes, I was just pointing out the irony of the situation. In any case, if they wanted to spread it around I agree that they probably would want to avoid catching it. If you had a sample of tainted blood/vomit/whatever you could easily soak a rag in that and wipe every doorknob in town. Even if you wore no protection it would take a week before you showed any symptoms, so if you were into suicide you could just keep a bag of vomit in your coat pocket and periodically dip your hand in it as you go about your day.
I don't think we should be more serious about quarantines to keep Ebola out of the hands of terrorists. I think we should stay on top of quarantines because it simply makes sense.
Now, you may argue with the specifics, but the general trend has been downward since 2009. Or a more detailed article.
I think the statistic you're looking for is this. Nobody believes the official US unemployment rate - it only makes sense as a short-term trend. The US doesn't count anybody who has been unemployed long-term.
Whether by choice or not, the participation rate does reflect the potential manpower available in an emergency without impacting the normal labor force.
That must be the non-GSM Galaxy Nexus. I'll agree that they damaged their reputation on this one, but this is why they haven't done a non-GSM Nexus since.
The GSM Galaxy Nexus received updated for 1.5 years from initial release, which is what they all basically get. I still would like to see longer support, and there is a chance that the Nexus 4 will get the L release.
Obviously you haven't since everyone knows you don't download an unstable rom unless you're working with others to create one...
You must be of the school of thought that says if a project calls a release "stable" it is. Cyanogenmod actually seems to have gotten better with their M releases which actually target stability instead of proclaiming it, but it is still a fairly minimal use of the word "stable."
In more mature projects stable means that the software was tested BEFORE it was released, in basically the same form that was actually released, and that if a bug comes up it will be fixed quickly, without the addition of new features that might cause undesired changes. When Linux 3.17.1 comes along, it will only contain backported bugfixes/etc with a very low risk of regressions, and 3.17.0 went through 6 release candidates before it was released. That certainly was not the way Cyanogenmod worked a year or two ago, though they're moving closer to something like this now (they still don't have long-term stable releases, though).
I was trying to point out how fucking ridiculous your initial assertion was. Throw Africa to the lions? You're an idiot. You have literally no idea what you're saying and yet you keep flapping your jaw.
When did I ever suggest throwing Africa to the lions? We absolutely should be helping to deal with the problems there. Isolation is at best a stalling move - you can't just let millions of people harbor an infection and hope that it won't spread beyond your ability to contain it.
Right now we're basically just sitting back and watching what happens, which is about the worst thing we can do. We're not taking serious measures to either contain or solve the problem. If we treated these kinds of problems more seriously in the first place, we wouldn't be where we are now, so now we need to spend a fortune and deal with it.
Actually, Oxytocin is destroyed in the gastrointestinal tract in humans. It's normally administered via intravenous injection or nasal spray.
It is actually available in a pill form now, but you have to get it specially compounded. I'm only aware of one pharmacy in the US that does it (though there may be more by now).
Is there any bioequivalence or clinical data that suggests that it actually works? Or did some compounding pharmacy just throw it into a pill and start selling it?
Compounding pharmacies are both useful and necessary. However, of late some have earned a reputation for just being end-runs around regulations designed to ensure that the drugs we buy are both safe and effective. The fact that they can throw some stuff in a pill doesn't mean that it works.
Normally if you want to reformulate something into a new form you need to do a bio-equivalence study. That means giving somebody either the accepted or new versions of the drug and measuring the concentration of the drug over time in their blood, to demonstrate that it is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted in a manner similar to the original. If that is the case, then it is very likely that the new form is just as safe and effective as the original. It isn't THAT expensive to do these kinds of studies (compared to full-blown clinical trials), but you know how cost-cutting goes. That compounding pharmacy in New England couldn't be bothered to clean the mold off the ceiling.
Wikipedia states it (Bremelanotide) was found as a side-effect of a tanning agent.
I genuinely wonder... is this how research works in neurology? Do we even have a basic understanding that could help us design such drugs, or are we just dependent on whatever side-effects come out of drugs from other fields?
Well, if you want another data point viagra was originally being developed for blood pressure I believe, and they found a side-effect. I believe propecia is in the same boat as well.
Happens all the time, not that this is necessarily the norm.
What you are suggesting is literally as ridiculous as shutting down California because of a school shooting in New York.
We're not talking about shootings. We're talking about an infectious disease.
A better analogy would be shutting down an entire company email system because 2% of the users of that system have been infected with a virus that spreads by email and is on the lookout for industrial control systems so that it can cause extremely expensive sabotage. Most corporate administrators would do just that in such a situation until they could deploy patches/signatures/etc to contain the spread of the virus, since so much is at stake.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been to set up a quarantine around a few villages when the problem first came up - that would have been pretty easy to do. However, as with most such incidents nobody wants to interfere with somebody else's problem until things are completely out of control.
The alternative seems to be to sit back and see what happens. Maybe that will work out, maybe it won't. I don't debate that there is a decent chance that everything will go fine if we don't do much of anything. However, this has the potential to be an incredible disaster, so I think that is about as wise as just hoping that another Cat 3 hurricane doesn't hit New Orleans, or that everything will work fine in 2038 without any code audits.
But, if everything works out fine the pundits will be out in full force saying, "see, I told you it would be fine" - just as many point to Y2K and call it a waste of effort. I bet they still own fire insurance.
I run a tor relay so I'd be shocked if they haven't rooted every box I own.
Sounds like ninjas keep you up in the middle of the night...
Nope, I sleep quite well. Like I said, I run a tor relay, so the NSA probably has all my boxes rooted (even if just to monitor the tor network). They aren't going to send in ninjas, since I doubt I'm particularly difficult for them to hack. I have standard software like apache, postfix, and openssh (and obviously tor) facing the internet, and that assumes that they don't have an exploit available for openwrt. Sure, I always keep everything patched, but that doesn't help against zero-days. How many of those were in Stuxnet, again?
I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Not much I can do about it one way or another.
If I called up the FBI and told them that I had anthrax in my basement they'd send in a small army. If I called up the CDC and told them that I had lunch with the guy who had Ebola they'd tell me to stay home and call them if I get a fever. Maybe we should be less worried about saving money, and more worried about whether I decide I get tired of staying home and just make one quick trip to the grocery store.
If you had anthrax in your basement, you would most likely be a dangerous nutcase you could do untold damage. If you had lunch with the guy who had Ebola, the assumption would be that you are a normal upstanding godfearing citizen who knows that if they leave their apartment after being told to stay and someone dies because of that they would get hit with a manslaughter charge.
Funny. When you go to borrow money at the bank they don't just assume that you're a fine upstanding citizen who will pay back the loan. People act negligently all the time - just look at how they drive. If you put 100 people in self-imposed quarantine, chances are a few are going to step out (only for important stuff, of course).
Also, imagine if the news broke that Al Qaeda or whatever was working hard to try to break into the CDC to steal Ebola samples for a biological weapon - you'd probably see an army stationed outside the research labs. Think about it - if they want to get their hands on it now all they have to do is go visit somebody who is waiting at home for the results of their tests.
"Pulling out all the stops" sounds like a good idea, except if you think about it, it gives you absolutely no guidance about what you should do. Some of those "stops" would actually make things worse, and others would be a ridiculous overreaction. For example, should we quarrantine the state of Texas? After all there's been a case of transmission there. That's an overreaction....there aren't infinite dollars, even to fight Ebola.
Well, you could quarantine the folks who actually came in contact with the one case. And by quarantine I mean actually putting them in a segregated area of some kind, with controlled access, not telling them to stay home and to call if they get a fever.
Sure, there aren't "infinite" dollars, but you're not saving money if you save a few million and then end up with an actual outbreak.
Also, there is no reason that we can start mass-producing treatments like wmapp. Sure, it could turn out to not work out as well as it seems, but it isn't like there are a lot of other options. Whatever options there are should also be explored.
Situations like this almost always cost a lot less if you spend a lot of money up-front vs waiting for things to really get bad and then REALLY spend a lot of money. What else are we going to spend the money on? Certainly it isn't going to the welfare state...
Sneaking from Africa to the US isn't exactly easy to pull off. You have to base your quarantine on geographic borders as a starting point - if you wanted to do a travel ban it would make the most sense to just ban the entire continent. Then by all means narrow it down as you get things under control on the ground. However, the current outbreak is way to big to just put a fence around it.
Just shut down all air and sea travel to the entire continent, and if other countries don't go along with it include them in the ban. Worst case you just shut down all international travel. Yes, this will cost billions of dollars, but so will an outbreak.
A water/bleach spray down at entrace and exit before taking off gear. The spray down is part of the process in Africa but not in the US , which is just dumb.
But, they just redid the paint last year! Nobody would choose us as the best place to give birth and have colonoscopies if we had bleach splotches on the wall!
Slashdot Mirror
Will those windows laptops have:
1. Secure boot with verification of the entire OS.
2. All installed software runs in a sandbox.
3. All installed software gets automated updates.
4. All OS configuration is cloud-backed.
5. Full disk encryption by default, with protection of each user profile (such that no user can read another's profile).
6. Ability to reset to factory state with a single click, with re-configuration just requiring a user to login with a cloud ID.
There are certainly things you can do with Windows that you can't do with ChromeOS. However, the real value of ChromeOS is that it brings a fairly comprehensive data security and configuration management solution to the masses, and by security I mean it in the full sense - not just preventing others from accessing your data, but ensuring that you don't lose access to your data.
When I get my hands on a new Windows install I spend about half a day tweaking and hardening things. When I get my hands on a new Chromebook I just enter my WiFi WPA2 key and log into it.
https://chromium.googlesource....
Google supports running Chromium OS on any Chromebook. It basically has everything but a few plugins, which I believe you can install (though those are not FOSS).
I wouldn't say it is any less FOSS than something like the Linux Kernel if you don't de-blob it.
No zombified, closed-down Linux for me. I will continue to use the real thing.
Please be sure to stop using your DVR, automobile, and the other 47 Linux systems you intereact with every day which don't offer you a bash prompt. :)
I do get what you're saying, but the purpose of a Chromebook is not the same as the purpose for the general-purpose Linux distro I'm typing this on.
The problem is that they're not going to let you JUST stream GOT. They're going to probably want you to commit to a year full of programs you won't watch at $20/month or something crazy like that. If you could pay $15 for a whole season of GOT streamed I suspect that it would be a popular offering.
#4 is really the show-stopper for me, with #2 being a close second.
If I want to buy 1 series from HBO, I don't want to pay $120/yr for it. That is just WAY too much for a single show. Yes, I realize that I'm getting another 47 shows that I don't watch along with it - that doesn't really win me over...
Honestly, I really wish the US Government would just issue national IDs, including an electronic component with a standardized interface (cheap enough to be deployed to any PC, and usable for remote applications in a secure way). This would make identity theft nearly impossible (or at least much easier to clean up after-the-fact), and kill off many social engineering attacks and the need for passwords in general.
The usual fear is that a US government ID would create some kind of big brother system. The thing is, we already have that - the US doesn't need an ID to identify everybody, since they operate on such a large scale they can just scan every yearbook, facebook account, email, security camera, etc to identify everybody all the time. They undoubtedly assign a unique ID to every person they identify, so they basically have that government ID system already, and we get to suffer all the downsides of that. What we don't get to experience are any of the upsides, since while the US government might be able to tell who I am while posting this, nobody else can.
There is also no reason that a government ID couldn't be used in a semi-anonymous manner. When I authenticate to slashdot they could give slashdot a unique identifier for me which is traceable to me upon issuance of a warrant, but which is different from the ID they issue for any other website. That means nobody else can log in as me to Slashdot, and I don't need any slashdot-specific credentials, but I can still be a pseudonym as far as Slashdot is concerned (but I can only create a single account). We could even allow somebody to have multiple IDs for a single domain all traceable to the same real person (with a warrant). Obviously there needs to be a lot of policy around who can insist on having a real identity vs a pseudo-one, or when somebody is allowed to have sock-puppets, etc.
I don't know about their policies specifically, but its usually done so that if someone gets a hold of a password file and manages to break a few passwords, hopefully they'll have changed by the time the attacker tries to actually make use of them.
They certainly will change them - to the next sequentially-numbered password. Everybody I've ever talked to about password aging says that they use an incremental number appended to the same password they've used for years.
Sure, if you're attempting to brute force a live system that would be a basic security practice. But what about when an attacker has acquired your password hashes via some other method? It's not like you can stop them from plugging away at the hash over and over again until they get a match, and then use that match in the real world. Actually, it's probably faster to try and dictionary/brute force a hash table (even if it is salted) than to attack a live environment.
Yup. Having password expiration also doesn't help at all in these cases either. If they try "password27" and it fails, do you think they aren't going to try "password28"?
IMAP uses TLS.
Will it do so if the server presents an untrusted certificate? POP3 supports TLS as well, but Google has it configured to reject any connection presenting a certificate they don't trust. So, the alternative is unencrypted POP3, which also does not present a certificate that they trust but for whatever reason everybody always seems fine with that.
In general, Google has tried to be very supportive of encryption, e.g. DKIM for authentication (and SPF) to STARTTLS for privacy.
Ugh - you managed to pick two of my pet peeves. I used to securely bounce all my mail from my domain to my gmail account using TLS so that all my email flowed to Gmail encrypted.
However, GMail started enforcing DKIM more strongly, which means that much of my bounced email started, well, bouncing. So, I switched to POP3 retrieval of email. Then I discovered that GMail won't support TLS/SSL unless the presented certificate is trusted by them. So, as a result I've moved from instant delivery of encrypted email to polled delivery of unencrypted email with my credentials probably sent in plaintext (I'm not quite sure whether Gmail at least supports something other than plain text authentication when not using SSL/TLS). I use disposable credentials to an account used only for POP3 with only a copy of my email, so that at least mitigates the damage if they leak.
Of course, I realize that my use case is the obvious 0.01% one, and part of why I like to use Gmail as my MUA if not my MTA is its effective spam removal.
Even if you count all the labor involved, you're still talking about what amounts to a pot luck event. It is way cheaper than a professionally catered event, etc. Also, he fed them breakfast, not dinner. Pancakes are WAY cheaper than filets.
Agree. I think my wife and I spent about $1k on our wedding total, and we probably had 50-100 people on the invite list.
We held the ceremony in the evening and just had snacks for the reception. I think we had a pot luck rehearsal dinner. Decorations were just whatever was easily borrowed, etc. Flowers were artificial. Dresses were inexpensive, and many were handmade. A friend took photos.
As far as I can tell everybody still enjoyed it, and I wouldn't change much if I did it over again.
You don't need to treat a wedding as a state affair. There are a lot better things for a new couple to spend money on.
The problem is that between being asymptomatic and being on death's door you have moderate flu symptoms and are contagious. That is something we want to keep an eye on.
As far as Al Qaeda goes, I was just pointing out the irony of the situation. In any case, if they wanted to spread it around I agree that they probably would want to avoid catching it. If you had a sample of tainted blood/vomit/whatever you could easily soak a rag in that and wipe every doorknob in town. Even if you wore no protection it would take a week before you showed any symptoms, so if you were into suicide you could just keep a bag of vomit in your coat pocket and periodically dip your hand in it as you go about your day.
I don't think we should be more serious about quarantines to keep Ebola out of the hands of terrorists. I think we should stay on top of quarantines because it simply makes sense.
BoLS says unemployment is down to around 6%.
Now, you may argue with the specifics, but the general trend has been downward since 2009. Or a more detailed article.
I think the statistic you're looking for is this. Nobody believes the official US unemployment rate - it only makes sense as a short-term trend. The US doesn't count anybody who has been unemployed long-term.
Whether by choice or not, the participation rate does reflect the potential manpower available in an emergency without impacting the normal labor force.
That must be the non-GSM Galaxy Nexus. I'll agree that they damaged their reputation on this one, but this is why they haven't done a non-GSM Nexus since.
The GSM Galaxy Nexus received updated for 1.5 years from initial release, which is what they all basically get. I still would like to see longer support, and there is a chance that the Nexus 4 will get the L release.
Obviously you haven't since everyone knows you don't download an unstable rom unless you're working with others to create one...
You must be of the school of thought that says if a project calls a release "stable" it is. Cyanogenmod actually seems to have gotten better with their M releases which actually target stability instead of proclaiming it, but it is still a fairly minimal use of the word "stable."
In more mature projects stable means that the software was tested BEFORE it was released, in basically the same form that was actually released, and that if a bug comes up it will be fixed quickly, without the addition of new features that might cause undesired changes. When Linux 3.17.1 comes along, it will only contain backported bugfixes/etc with a very low risk of regressions, and 3.17.0 went through 6 release candidates before it was released. That certainly was not the way Cyanogenmod worked a year or two ago, though they're moving closer to something like this now (they still don't have long-term stable releases, though).
I was trying to point out how fucking ridiculous your initial assertion was. Throw Africa to the lions? You're an idiot. You have literally no idea what you're saying and yet you keep flapping your jaw.
When did I ever suggest throwing Africa to the lions? We absolutely should be helping to deal with the problems there. Isolation is at best a stalling move - you can't just let millions of people harbor an infection and hope that it won't spread beyond your ability to contain it.
Right now we're basically just sitting back and watching what happens, which is about the worst thing we can do. We're not taking serious measures to either contain or solve the problem. If we treated these kinds of problems more seriously in the first place, we wouldn't be where we are now, so now we need to spend a fortune and deal with it.
Actually, Oxytocin is destroyed in the gastrointestinal tract in humans. It's normally administered via intravenous injection or nasal spray.
It is actually available in a pill form now, but you have to get it specially compounded. I'm only aware of one pharmacy in the US that does it (though there may be more by now).
Is there any bioequivalence or clinical data that suggests that it actually works? Or did some compounding pharmacy just throw it into a pill and start selling it?
Compounding pharmacies are both useful and necessary. However, of late some have earned a reputation for just being end-runs around regulations designed to ensure that the drugs we buy are both safe and effective. The fact that they can throw some stuff in a pill doesn't mean that it works.
Normally if you want to reformulate something into a new form you need to do a bio-equivalence study. That means giving somebody either the accepted or new versions of the drug and measuring the concentration of the drug over time in their blood, to demonstrate that it is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted in a manner similar to the original. If that is the case, then it is very likely that the new form is just as safe and effective as the original. It isn't THAT expensive to do these kinds of studies (compared to full-blown clinical trials), but you know how cost-cutting goes. That compounding pharmacy in New England couldn't be bothered to clean the mold off the ceiling.
Wikipedia states it (Bremelanotide) was found as a side-effect of a tanning agent.
I genuinely wonder... is this how research works in neurology? Do we even have a basic understanding that could help us design such drugs, or are we just dependent on whatever side-effects come out of drugs from other fields?
Well, if you want another data point viagra was originally being developed for blood pressure I believe, and they found a side-effect. I believe propecia is in the same boat as well.
Happens all the time, not that this is necessarily the norm.
What you are suggesting is literally as ridiculous as shutting down California because of a school shooting in New York.
We're not talking about shootings. We're talking about an infectious disease.
A better analogy would be shutting down an entire company email system because 2% of the users of that system have been infected with a virus that spreads by email and is on the lookout for industrial control systems so that it can cause extremely expensive sabotage. Most corporate administrators would do just that in such a situation until they could deploy patches/signatures/etc to contain the spread of the virus, since so much is at stake.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been to set up a quarantine around a few villages when the problem first came up - that would have been pretty easy to do. However, as with most such incidents nobody wants to interfere with somebody else's problem until things are completely out of control.
The alternative seems to be to sit back and see what happens. Maybe that will work out, maybe it won't. I don't debate that there is a decent chance that everything will go fine if we don't do much of anything. However, this has the potential to be an incredible disaster, so I think that is about as wise as just hoping that another Cat 3 hurricane doesn't hit New Orleans, or that everything will work fine in 2038 without any code audits.
But, if everything works out fine the pundits will be out in full force saying, "see, I told you it would be fine" - just as many point to Y2K and call it a waste of effort. I bet they still own fire insurance.
Sounds like ninjas keep you up in the middle of the night ...
Nope, I sleep quite well. Like I said, I run a tor relay, so the NSA probably has all my boxes rooted (even if just to monitor the tor network). They aren't going to send in ninjas, since I doubt I'm particularly difficult for them to hack. I have standard software like apache, postfix, and openssh (and obviously tor) facing the internet, and that assumes that they don't have an exploit available for openwrt. Sure, I always keep everything patched, but that doesn't help against zero-days. How many of those were in Stuxnet, again?
I'm not going to lose sleep over it. Not much I can do about it one way or another.
If I called up the FBI and told them that I had anthrax in my basement they'd send in a small army. If I called up the CDC and told them that I had lunch with the guy who had Ebola they'd tell me to stay home and call them if I get a fever. Maybe we should be less worried about saving money, and more worried about whether I decide I get tired of staying home and just make one quick trip to the grocery store.
If you had anthrax in your basement, you would most likely be a dangerous nutcase you could do untold damage. If you had lunch with the guy who had Ebola, the assumption would be that you are a normal upstanding godfearing citizen who knows that if they leave their apartment after being told to stay and someone dies because of that they would get hit with a manslaughter charge.
Funny. When you go to borrow money at the bank they don't just assume that you're a fine upstanding citizen who will pay back the loan. People act negligently all the time - just look at how they drive. If you put 100 people in self-imposed quarantine, chances are a few are going to step out (only for important stuff, of course).
Also, imagine if the news broke that Al Qaeda or whatever was working hard to try to break into the CDC to steal Ebola samples for a biological weapon - you'd probably see an army stationed outside the research labs. Think about it - if they want to get their hands on it now all they have to do is go visit somebody who is waiting at home for the results of their tests.
"Pulling out all the stops" sounds like a good idea, except if you think about it, it gives you absolutely no guidance about what you should do. Some of those "stops" would actually make things worse, and others would be a ridiculous overreaction. For example, should we quarrantine the state of Texas? After all there's been a case of transmission there. That's an overreaction....there aren't infinite dollars, even to fight Ebola.
Well, you could quarantine the folks who actually came in contact with the one case. And by quarantine I mean actually putting them in a segregated area of some kind, with controlled access, not telling them to stay home and to call if they get a fever.
Sure, there aren't "infinite" dollars, but you're not saving money if you save a few million and then end up with an actual outbreak.
Also, there is no reason that we can start mass-producing treatments like wmapp. Sure, it could turn out to not work out as well as it seems, but it isn't like there are a lot of other options. Whatever options there are should also be explored.
Situations like this almost always cost a lot less if you spend a lot of money up-front vs waiting for things to really get bad and then REALLY spend a lot of money. What else are we going to spend the money on? Certainly it isn't going to the welfare state...
Sneaking from Africa to the US isn't exactly easy to pull off. You have to base your quarantine on geographic borders as a starting point - if you wanted to do a travel ban it would make the most sense to just ban the entire continent. Then by all means narrow it down as you get things under control on the ground. However, the current outbreak is way to big to just put a fence around it.
Just shut down all air and sea travel to the entire continent, and if other countries don't go along with it include them in the ban. Worst case you just shut down all international travel. Yes, this will cost billions of dollars, but so will an outbreak.
I think we need to get serious about this...
A water/bleach spray down at entrace and exit before taking off gear. The spray down is part of the process in Africa but not in the US , which is just dumb.
But, they just redid the paint last year! Nobody would choose us as the best place to give birth and have colonoscopies if we had bleach splotches on the wall!