Verifying a voting machine ought to be easier than verifying a slot machine, as there's not *supposed* to be a random factor in the voting machine. I suppose a voting machine verifier could have a third-party-compiled copy of the code, and some kind of big connector to the address bus in the machine being tested. Run the two in lockstep with an overseer processor verifying that the sequence of instructions being followed is identical. I'm not sure who I'd trust to produce and operate such a device, though. Certainly not the voting machine company, or the current government (of whichever party, BTW).
So we're back to demanding a paper trail, with recounts being handled by live auditors. Forget fancy punches and dangling chads too. Let the paper record be printed clearly, and make it clear to the voter that if the mark doesn't come out, s/he should tell the polling people and get the machine serviced.
they offer a new, annoying way to deliver ads in public spaces
About 25 years ago a guy where I worked set up an ultrasonic receiver alongside a numeric-keypad operated lock. The transmitter wasn't complicated - just a square-wave generator, the ultrasonic transducer, a battery and a pushbutton. I made one myself out of parts from Radio Shack.
Where am I going with this?? About $5 worth of parts gets you a device that ought to be capable of disrupting the incoming ultrasonic beam... OK, so it will take some fiddling to optimise the jamming effect, but it should be possible.
2,000?? I could name an IT company with over 100,000 and a policy to use only MS products on every desktop... I didn't let that stop me installing Gentoo on my laptop, but I made it dual-boot so I can access the internal sites that go out of their way to be nasty to non-IE users.
I can bust that one - the one time I had a flu shot in school, I was so sick the next day I couldn't get out of bed. That was in November of whatever year that was. That Christmas I had flu again, then again around Easter. I won't claim the 2nd and 3rd times were exclusively due to the vaccine, but the 1st time was just too much of a coincidence. And it wasn't just me, either - at least a dozen other kids went down with flu the day after the shots.
Re:Your show is great fun to watch and all, but...
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Ask The Mythbusters
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Another show they had to get a friend from the FBI to supply tracer rounds because they were 'illegal' in California.
I was really surprised by the explanation given as to how the tracer rounds work. Phosphorus tips that ignite due to air friction?? Where did that come from?? When I was in school, the quartermaster in our Cadet Force took apart some tracer rounds to show us how they work. From the outside, they look like regular rounds, but once you pull the bullet from the casing you see that it's a bit longer than a normal bullet. The extra length is a hollow space that's filled with some kind of magnesium compound. When fired, the burning cordite sets fire to it.
The net effect is that the shooter sees the bright magnesium flare at the back of the bullet, rather than the target seeing a burning tip getting bigger. That's not to say that the target wouldn't see the flare anyway, but tracer is mostly used for the shooter's benefit, not to terrify the target...
I've seen the exact same effect with dry leaves in the back of my truck. They get picked up by the rotating bubble and just swirl around. One will occasionally get enough lift to hit the main airflow and be dragged out, but most of them just follow me around.
I would like to have seen what happened with the tailgate completely removed, too. It looked like the drag was partly due to the extra length of the horizontal gate. I also wonder what difference one of those "air gate" nets would make?
Anybody else out there pulled similar stunts to what I described?
I guess I did the opposite - I met my future wife at a Mensa Annual Gathering in London. No, I didn't go to the meetings specifically to meet girls, that was just a pleasant side effect. It was a way to have some kind of social life that didn't include most of the people I worked with. Mind you, some of the discussions we had were a bit odd - for example, one night it became desperately important to determine when the next Feb 29 would occur on a Monday. I don't think anyone came up with an answer that everyone else would accept, but that was probably due to working the problem in the presence of alcohol...
We've got "gifted and talented" pullout programs too, and while they may not be expected to do the *exact* same work as the regular class in addition to the extra, they are certainly doing more work. My wife and I opted not to have our kids participate when the offers were made. They get more than enough mental stimulation at home to make up for what little they might get from the extra classwork.
What Microsoft should be penalized for with regards to the browser is that, historically, they wouldn't let any other browser be available as an icon on the desktop on a new system. They wouldn't let *anything* appear on the desktop except regular Windows icons. Breaking that agreement would cost a PC manufacturer their cheap Windows licensing deal.
OK, so that's understandable from a support perspective. The Microsoft support desk wouldn't want to deal with any random crap loaded up by the manufacturer, particularly if some of that random crap made the system unstable.
Personally, I'm wondering how long it will take the Dept of Homeland Security to classify this as a terrorist act. With DoD computers infected, I'm sure a number of off-duty employees could locate the relevant Sony people and introduce them to the secret, non-existant jails we've heard so much about recently.
Other people have suggested that removing the rootkit could be viewed as a DMCA violation, and that the antivirus/spyware companies didn't want to run that risk. With something like $50Bn in the bank, Microsoft would be one of the few companies that could send in a battalion of lawyers to waste the court's time until Sony gave up. Or, as with the EU fine, simply pay it out of the petty cash box.
Does Sony market any kind of Windows-compatible PC?? If they do, initiating legal action against Microsoft would probably result in a renegotiation of their Windows license fees...
Sometimes the CEO manages to avoid jailtime. However, the media *ought* to be all over the story, which may or may not have a negative effect on the company stock price (which *would* hurt the CEO), and the courts can levy big fines against the company. Both those results could get the CEO sued by his own stockholders...
unless ISPs suddenly find the motivation and the money to start taking fine tuned control over what every user does
It's not difficult or expensive to stop people hosting their own stuff at home. Instead of an ISP blocking inbound port 25, 80, 443, etc, they could block *everything* inbound barring a few exceptions. The vast majority of people do what on the Internet?? Read email, surf the web and chat via IM. None of those need to allow an inbound SYN packet on *any* port. Well, maybe the IM clients, for direct file transfer. The majority of *legal* traffic is initiated by the user's machine sending a SYN packet to the remote host, getting a SYN/ACK back, and the connection's open. Block inbound SYN packets and nobody talks to you.
OK, so that's overly simplistic, but it's easy and cheap to do. It would also go a long way towards cutting the legs out from under the spammers and virus writers.
This is the problem, you see. These "obviously guilty" terrorists are apparently not "obviously guilty" enough. Either that, or the USA is (essentially) publically admitting that its judicial system is inadequate.
Just wondering here - do you think it might be cheaper for the government to simply keep those folks locked up than to let them get into the court system?? Obviously they can't just let them go, in case one or more really *does* turn out to be a terrorist, so Gitmo might be the next cheapest option...
What would be the point, unless it had an Internet connection to match the speed?? Having a zombie cluster wouldn't achieve anything if it spent large amount of time idle while waiting for the network to catch up.
But, as other people have pointed out already, if you (as the spyware detector programmer) sell your program to someone who has spyware already present on their computer, you're completely off the hook. Just because your program can detect SpyMon and correctly identify it as spyware, it doesn't necessarily follow that you *must* have downloaded, installed and executed a copy of SpyMon yourself. It's very likely that you independantly thought up ways that spyware might hide, and put in detection methods to locate such junk. It's also very possible that SpyMon is using a "well-known" method of hiding, such as the "$sys$" method that Sony tried recently.
Oh, I don't know... If people on the cruise ship realized they had pretty much the same options as passengers on a hijacked airplane, the pirates wouldn't get away with it so easily.
Apparently some mis-guided politicians set up an international treaty that prevents non-military ship from carrying weapons. These would be the same guys who go everywhere by gov't-funded air travel and are thereby not putting themselves in harm's way anyway...
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Only if you don't put a bit of sticky tape around the outer tracks on the CD...
Do you think the Nevada Gaming Commission broke out in a cold sweat when the MD5 Collision Source Code Released story came out??
Verifying a voting machine ought to be easier than verifying a slot machine, as there's not *supposed* to be a random factor in the voting machine. I suppose a voting machine verifier could have a third-party-compiled copy of the code, and some kind of big connector to the address bus in the machine being tested. Run the two in lockstep with an overseer processor verifying that the sequence of instructions being followed is identical. I'm not sure who I'd trust to produce and operate such a device, though. Certainly not the voting machine company, or the current government (of whichever party, BTW).
So we're back to demanding a paper trail, with recounts being handled by live auditors. Forget fancy punches and dangling chads too. Let the paper record be printed clearly, and make it clear to the voter that if the mark doesn't come out, s/he should tell the polling people and get the machine serviced.
About 25 years ago a guy where I worked set up an ultrasonic receiver alongside a numeric-keypad operated lock. The transmitter wasn't complicated - just a square-wave generator, the ultrasonic transducer, a battery and a pushbutton. I made one myself out of parts from Radio Shack.
Where am I going with this?? About $5 worth of parts gets you a device that ought to be capable of disrupting the incoming ultrasonic beam... OK, so it will take some fiddling to optimise the jamming effect, but it should be possible.
2,000?? I could name an IT company with over 100,000 and a policy to use only MS products on every desktop... I didn't let that stop me installing Gentoo on my laptop, but I made it dual-boot so I can access the internal sites that go out of their way to be nasty to non-IE users.
I can bust that one - the one time I had a flu shot in school, I was so sick the next day I couldn't get out of bed. That was in November of whatever year that was. That Christmas I had flu again, then again around Easter. I won't claim the 2nd and 3rd times were exclusively due to the vaccine, but the 1st time was just too much of a coincidence. And it wasn't just me, either - at least a dozen other kids went down with flu the day after the shots.
I was really surprised by the explanation given as to how the tracer rounds work. Phosphorus tips that ignite due to air friction?? Where did that come from?? When I was in school, the quartermaster in our Cadet Force took apart some tracer rounds to show us how they work. From the outside, they look like regular rounds, but once you pull the bullet from the casing you see that it's a bit longer than a normal bullet. The extra length is a hollow space that's filled with some kind of magnesium compound. When fired, the burning cordite sets fire to it.
The net effect is that the shooter sees the bright magnesium flare at the back of the bullet, rather than the target seeing a burning tip getting bigger. That's not to say that the target wouldn't see the flare anyway, but tracer is mostly used for the shooter's benefit, not to terrify the target...
I would like to have seen what happened with the tailgate completely removed, too. It looked like the drag was partly due to the extra length of the horizontal gate. I also wonder what difference one of those "air gate" nets would make?
I guess I did the opposite - I met my future wife at a Mensa Annual Gathering in London. No, I didn't go to the meetings specifically to meet girls, that was just a pleasant side effect. It was a way to have some kind of social life that didn't include most of the people I worked with. Mind you, some of the discussions we had were a bit odd - for example, one night it became desperately important to determine when the next Feb 29 would occur on a Monday. I don't think anyone came up with an answer that everyone else would accept, but that was probably due to working the problem in the presence of alcohol...
We've got "gifted and talented" pullout programs too, and while they may not be expected to do the *exact* same work as the regular class in addition to the extra, they are certainly doing more work. My wife and I opted not to have our kids participate when the offers were made. They get more than enough mental stimulation at home to make up for what little they might get from the extra classwork.
OK, so that's understandable from a support perspective. The Microsoft support desk wouldn't want to deal with any random crap loaded up by the manufacturer, particularly if some of that random crap made the system unstable.
That doesn't make it right, though.
Personally, I'm wondering how long it will take the Dept of Homeland Security to classify this as a terrorist act. With DoD computers infected, I'm sure a number of off-duty employees could locate the relevant Sony people and introduce them to the secret, non-existant jails we've heard so much about recently.
Does Sony market any kind of Windows-compatible PC?? If they do, initiating legal action against Microsoft would probably result in a renegotiation of their Windows license fees...
Could it be that Microsoft was negotiating for the source, in order to beef up their *own* DRM software?? Naahh, that couldn't possibly be it... :)
Sometimes the CEO manages to avoid jailtime. However, the media *ought* to be all over the story, which may or may not have a negative effect on the company stock price (which *would* hurt the CEO), and the courts can levy big fines against the company. Both those results could get the CEO sued by his own stockholders...
It's not difficult or expensive to stop people hosting their own stuff at home. Instead of an ISP blocking inbound port 25, 80, 443, etc, they could block *everything* inbound barring a few exceptions. The vast majority of people do what on the Internet?? Read email, surf the web and chat via IM. None of those need to allow an inbound SYN packet on *any* port. Well, maybe the IM clients, for direct file transfer. The majority of *legal* traffic is initiated by the user's machine sending a SYN packet to the remote host, getting a SYN/ACK back, and the connection's open. Block inbound SYN packets and nobody talks to you.
OK, so that's overly simplistic, but it's easy and cheap to do. It would also go a long way towards cutting the legs out from under the spammers and virus writers.
Just wondering here - do you think it might be cheaper for the government to simply keep those folks locked up than to let them get into the court system?? Obviously they can't just let them go, in case one or more really *does* turn out to be a terrorist, so Gitmo might be the next cheapest option...
What would be the point, unless it had an Internet connection to match the speed?? Having a zombie cluster wouldn't achieve anything if it spent large amount of time idle while waiting for the network to catch up.
The way I read that, it implies that Gates himself believes previous versions of Windows have not been as powerful or as easy to use as Linux...
4. People pushing their own blog software.
But, as other people have pointed out already, if you (as the spyware detector programmer) sell your program to someone who has spyware already present on their computer, you're completely off the hook. Just because your program can detect SpyMon and correctly identify it as spyware, it doesn't necessarily follow that you *must* have downloaded, installed and executed a copy of SpyMon yourself. It's very likely that you independantly thought up ways that spyware might hide, and put in detection methods to locate such junk. It's also very possible that SpyMon is using a "well-known" method of hiding, such as the "$sys$" method that Sony tried recently.
See?? There *is* a good reason for running Gentoo... :)
And to be strictly accurate, "X Windows" is not X. From the man page (man X):
Oh, I don't know... If people on the cruise ship realized they had pretty much the same options as passengers on a hijacked airplane, the pirates wouldn't get away with it so easily.
Apparently some mis-guided politicians set up an international treaty that prevents non-military ship from carrying weapons. These would be the same guys who go everywhere by gov't-funded air travel and are thereby not putting themselves in harm's way anyway...
You're assuming that the USPTO actually gives a damn about prior art, and from what we've seen in recent times, that may not be a valid assumption...