He got the harsh reprimand because he was stupid... Sure, go ahead and reverse-engineer the code to discover vulnerabilities, but is it really necessary to *publish* that code?? I don't think so. Most people won't have the proprietary source code in the first place, so having just this fragment won't enable anyone to fix their own copy.
If the guy had published notes on the vulnerabilities and perhaps withheld the exploits for a month, it's very doubtful that the company could make a copyright violation charge stick. He shot himself in the foot when he published the code, even if that code fragment was completely worthless without the rest of the code.
We're pretty much in agreement - people get all fired up about *anyone* at all being able to see them on a camera, without apparently realizing that the Mk1 Human Eyeball coupled to a Mk1 Human Brain is far better at image recognition than any generally available surveillance system. That's ignoring the possibility of military systems, which may be a bad assumption...
The "big deal" to us on SlashDot is that a bunch of so-called security people have installed *something* without taking basic security precautions. The "big deal" to the general public is that, not only are they being watched at the mall or wherever, but the id10ts who installed the cameras are letting anyone, including terrorists, access the cameras.
On the other hand, the general public won't give a damn about it, until someone convinces them that they have a right to walk through the mall without anyone seeing them on camera, and never mind that a thousand people have seen them...
the man in question was not charged in the targetting of the helicopter specifically because there is no provision in the act to allow for this
Wouldn't that come under the same heading as "interfering with a flight crew"?? Or don't helicopter pilots count as flight crew? Or doesn't the USA Patriot act consider helicopters dangerous??
antiterrorism charges aren't necessarily as far out as one might think.
Except that, as the article says:
Justice Department officials said they do not suspect terrorism in any of the cases
As for doing it more than once, the guy's attorney says he was playing with his daughter, pointing at stars, etc. That doesn't sound like a one-off exercise to me. If that's what he really was doing, he could have been out there any number of times, pointing out constallations, for example. "See that group of stars? That's Orion. And there's the Pole Star, and the Space Station is over that way somewhere. And that's a Police helicopter... Oh crap, now I'm in trouble..."
The successful psychics have already foreseen their winnings and have taken controlling positions in the media so they can quash the stories
They've foreseen the amount of crap they'd get if it became public, so they're deliberately picking smaller prizes.
How do you know that the occasional big lottery winners aren't psychics?? If they're that good, they'd surely be able to prevent information about their abilities from being made public...
They've foreseen the tax audit that would probably follow such a headline
Maybe the really good psychics have already left the country...
The average computer user won't even notice the extra tax, if it's added on to the list price. It'll just be a slight blip in the slow downward price trend.
Now, if it's added on at the checkout, like sales tax in the US, that's going to surprise a lot of people...
I'm thinking that if they can get up there with enough technology to slice it up and deorbit it in aeroshells, they might be better off taking a pile of solar cells and a damn big induction coil. Assuming there's enough metal content, they could run a melted zone from one end to the other to separate out different elements, then slice it up and sell the fractions. Kinda like the way columns of germanium and silicon are (were?) first purified, then doped with specific impurities to get electronics-grade material.
The problem with the brute force methods of slicing rocks is that you tend to spin in the opposite direction unless you have a decent anchor, such as gravity. And as for Nobel's invention, blowing it up is probably going to piss off a large number of other space users...
If you don't take your laptop, it doesn't affect your "be one with nature" goal.
I wonder just how many of the "be one with nature" crowd are wearing man-made fabrics, sleeping in tents held up by poles made of metal processed from ores and held closed by zippers, or even cooking canned or dried produce??
I wonder how AOL's account drones would react to "I'm moving to a new house that has no phone or cable service", or even "He died. I'm his brother and I already have Internet service from insert ISP here. Fuck off and leave me alone".
I think the grandparent was describing the "worst case" scenario, at least in Gratis' eyes - everyone who signs up qualifies for the freebie by fulfilling the requirements. In that case, Gratis won't see much profit until so many people have joined that the market is saturated and the late-comers don't qualify.
Of course, that can happen anywhere in the tree. If I signed up, I don't think I'd be able to get 5 other people together to help me qualify. Not that I don't know enough people, it's just that the people I know really don't give a damn about iPods... So, Gratis would immediately see a profit from me, and I'm not going to give it to them.
BTW, could someone who has signed up explain how Gratis gets around people creating a bunch of fictitious friends?? Sure, that would be fraud, but how could they tell??
Even so, they could use a hell of a lot of ground-based computing power that they simple couldn't afford to boost to orbit, let alone loop around the moon... It might not be fast by today's standards, but I'll bet they had more tonnage of computers available than the whole weight of the Apollo Lunar orbiter & lander
They'd be swamped by the traffic and false positives. For example, a story I heard that may or may not be true - a sysadmin came across an email that read, in part, something like, "I'm fed up with her whining and moaning. Tomorrow she gets the knife." The sysadmin alerted the police to a possible murder. When they broke into the email sender's house/apartment they found a guy just about to take his female dog to the vet to be speyed...
The point being that "they" are not going to be able to determine whether "meet me at George's" means "see you at the bar", or "attack the Whitehouse".
I'm amazed that that they're even considering trying to monitor chatrooms &c. It's trivial to set up servers anywhere on the net that can be accessed from anywhere else. Why would terrorists want to use public servers??
1) They'll be pissed off, and return the CD to the store because it's "broken".
So, what do stores do with CDs that have had the shrinkwrap removed?? Send them back, or drop them in clearance bins?? If they get sent back to the manufacturer, there's a way to get their attention. How many returns would they take before altering their policies??
OK, so here's a question - if you buy the DRM-thing anyway, then download the same material that someone else ripped, does that count as "bypassing the DRM mechanism"?? I'd like to think not, but it's not always that simple with the DMCA. So far, the RIAA is mostly taking action against people sharing lots of stuff, but the day may yet come when they expand their litigation to include downloaders as well.
The guy in New Zealand is some kind of jet engine designer, and has already built a pulsejet-powered go-cart (or something similar) that runs at 30-40mph. I think the only reason he was shutdown was that he went public. He'd already built a large part of the missile, mostly from parts bought and shipped from the US, including some parts bought on eBay, IIRC. If he had: 1) enough funding; and 2) kept quiet, he probably would have managed at least a couple of test flights before being caught.
The car-top launch was for initial lift, but mostly for airflow into the jet. The engine on his "buggy" is U-shaped and I think doesn't require the initial airflow, unless a simple fan is enough to start it. I don't know if it would be powerful enough to get a small winged missile into the air.
Either way, whether "smart" enough to follow a road, or simply arcing over, small jet-engined missiles are something to worry about. And it wouldn't even need to explode - rig a paintball-gun air cannister to disperse a couple of pounds of flour while flying down Main Street...
I thought the E911 system worked with a GPS receiver in the phone, which would only bleat it's current location (via something like SMS) when properly "pinged" by the emergency service you just called. If that fails, they might still be able to triangulate using your signal strength at three or more cell towers that can "see" your phone.
How about the dude in New Zealand that was constructing a "cruise" missile from off-the-shelf components?? IIRC, that was supposed to have a range of 100 miles or so. Launch was going to be from the rooftop of a vehicle going about 65 mph in the rough direction of the target, guidance via GPS and onboard computer to fly between waypoints to the target.
It would be easy enough to program the waypoints by simply driving to the target and having a tracking device remember waypoints every time the car changed direction. Then, at a later date, load the track into the missile and launch. No buildings to dodge, if the missile is flying down the highway.
If the GPS is turned off, the onboard computer could still navigate by computing time and distance between waypoints. Once it reaches a built-up area, it really doesn't much matter what it hits, as long as it destroys something that people care about.
Slashdot Mirror
If the guy had published notes on the vulnerabilities and perhaps withheld the exploits for a month, it's very doubtful that the company could make a copyright violation charge stick. He shot himself in the foot when he published the code, even if that code fragment was completely worthless without the rest of the code.
We're pretty much in agreement - people get all fired up about *anyone* at all being able to see them on a camera, without apparently realizing that the Mk1 Human Eyeball coupled to a Mk1 Human Brain is far better at image recognition than any generally available surveillance system. That's ignoring the possibility of military systems, which may be a bad assumption...
On the other hand, the general public won't give a damn about it, until someone convinces them that they have a right to walk through the mall without anyone seeing them on camera, and never mind that a thousand people have seen them...
Wouldn't that come under the same heading as "interfering with a flight crew"?? Or don't helicopter pilots count as flight crew? Or doesn't the USA Patriot act consider helicopters dangerous??
Except that, as the article says:
As for doing it more than once, the guy's attorney says he was playing with his daughter, pointing at stars, etc. That doesn't sound like a one-off exercise to me. If that's what he really was doing, he could have been out there any number of times, pointing out constallations, for example. "See that group of stars? That's Orion. And there's the Pole Star, and the Space Station is over that way somewhere. And that's a Police helicopter... Oh crap, now I'm in trouble..."So targetting lasers use visible light?? I always assumed they used something like infrared so the target didn't have a clue.
I don't think infrared imaging is going to be very effective when there's hundreds of square miles ofr fucking hot desert in all directions
The average computer user won't even notice the extra tax, if it's added on to the list price. It'll just be a slight blip in the slow downward price trend.
Now, if it's added on at the checkout, like sales tax in the US, that's going to surprise a lot of people...
I'm thinking that if they can get up there with enough technology to slice it up and deorbit it in aeroshells, they might be better off taking a pile of solar cells and a damn big induction coil. Assuming there's enough metal content, they could run a melted zone from one end to the other to separate out different elements, then slice it up and sell the fractions. Kinda like the way columns of germanium and silicon are (were?) first purified, then doped with specific impurities to get electronics-grade material.
A better way would be to get some of those green "weapon grade" lasers
I thought, "what, they're not already??"
I wonder just how many of the "be one with nature" crowd are wearing man-made fabrics, sleeping in tents held up by poles made of metal processed from ores and held closed by zippers, or even cooking canned or dried produce??
I wonder how AOL's account drones would react to "I'm moving to a new house that has no phone or cable service", or even "He died. I'm his brother and I already have Internet service from insert ISP here. Fuck off and leave me alone".
Of course, that can happen anywhere in the tree. If I signed up, I don't think I'd be able to get 5 other people together to help me qualify. Not that I don't know enough people, it's just that the people I know really don't give a damn about iPods... So, Gratis would immediately see a profit from me, and I'm not going to give it to them.
BTW, could someone who has signed up explain how Gratis gets around people creating a bunch of fictitious friends?? Sure, that would be fraud, but how could they tell??
Even so, they could use a hell of a lot of ground-based computing power that they simple couldn't afford to boost to orbit, let alone loop around the moon... It might not be fast by today's standards, but I'll bet they had more tonnage of computers available than the whole weight of the Apollo Lunar orbiter & lander
The point being that "they" are not going to be able to determine whether "meet me at George's" means "see you at the bar", or "attack the Whitehouse".
I'm amazed that that they're even considering trying to monitor chatrooms &c. It's trivial to set up servers anywhere on the net that can be accessed from anywhere else. Why would terrorists want to use public servers??
1) They'll be pissed off, and return the CD to the store because it's "broken".
So, what do stores do with CDs that have had the shrinkwrap removed?? Send them back, or drop them in clearance bins?? If they get sent back to the manufacturer, there's a way to get their attention. How many returns would they take before altering their policies??
OK, so here's a question - if you buy the DRM-thing anyway, then download the same material that someone else ripped, does that count as "bypassing the DRM mechanism"?? I'd like to think not, but it's not always that simple with the DMCA. So far, the RIAA is mostly taking action against people sharing lots of stuff, but the day may yet come when they expand their litigation to include downloaders as well.
The car-top launch was for initial lift, but mostly for airflow into the jet. The engine on his "buggy" is U-shaped and I think doesn't require the initial airflow, unless a simple fan is enough to start it. I don't know if it would be powerful enough to get a small winged missile into the air.
Either way, whether "smart" enough to follow a road, or simply arcing over, small jet-engined missiles are something to worry about. And it wouldn't even need to explode - rig a paintball-gun air cannister to disperse a couple of pounds of flour while flying down Main Street...
Sorry, just had to do it :)
I thought the E911 system worked with a GPS receiver in the phone, which would only bleat it's current location (via something like SMS) when properly "pinged" by the emergency service you just called. If that fails, they might still be able to triangulate using your signal strength at three or more cell towers that can "see" your phone.
But that would violate my patent on "A Method of Navigating by Looking Out The Window"!!! Terrorists wouldn't dare risk the wrath of the US courts!!!
It would be easy enough to program the waypoints by simply driving to the target and having a tracking device remember waypoints every time the car changed direction. Then, at a later date, load the track into the missile and launch. No buildings to dodge, if the missile is flying down the highway.
If the GPS is turned off, the onboard computer could still navigate by computing time and distance between waypoints. Once it reaches a built-up area, it really doesn't much matter what it hits, as long as it destroys something that people care about.