This difference was even more dramatic when the topic was stem cells. Here, the survey included questions that rated a person's knowledge of stem cell biology. Among the non-religious, the level of knowledge roughly correlated with the desire to see federal funding of stem cell research: the more people know, the more they supported funding. Among the highly religious, however, the level of support for funding was independent of expertise. Thus, improving knowledge of the science behind stem cells is not a simple route to building support for research on them.
He's building a straw man just to tear it down. The issues according to evangelicals was EMBRYONIC Stem Cells and not using federal funding to create new human life just to destroy it for medical research. But this entire argument quickly became moot because scientists found other methods of obtaining the exact stem cells the desired using other means. SO, there IS federal funding for Stem Cell research, and nobody is or has been opposing it. This entire issue is resolved but for the fact that the members of the religion of science want to keep using it against the "evangelicals" in order to paint them as ignorant heathens who need to enter reeducation camp.
Notice how the author doesn't point out that it was EMBRYONIC stem cells, and tries to make the point that them damned evangelicals are against researching cures for paralysis.
Yeah, you want me to pay attention to your science writing? Stick to the facts. Be accurate, don't use straw men to make your argument. Present the facts and let the people judge. This whining is indicative of those who wish to indoctrinate people and can't understand "Why aren't they BELIEVING ME?!"
From the way the question was posed, I can tell the writer is biased and is trying to get me to believe in something. Solar cycles exist, it is proven, we can observe, study, model them. The weather exists, we observe that too. Anthropogenic global warming. Sorry, that is the religion of the left. It is something that they believe in just as fervently as the most religious adhere to their convictions. The author whines asking "Why don't they believe me?!" Because you are using data, combining it with faith and preaching it. Sorry, I am not interested in your religion.
If I presented to you a list of cold, hard, facts. What the hell do I care if you don't believe me. Guess what, water is wet, the earth is round and it orbits the sun... If some idiot wanted to dispute these issues, what the hell do I care. If their ignoring the facts has no bearing or impact on me whatsoever.
With this information in the headlines now, a person could steal the identity of a deceased person and assume their credit profile by sending a forged "certified letter" stating "I'm not dead, please reinstate my accounts!"
My dad was declared dead without his knowledge (heh) and I discovered this when I was entering college and applying for student loans or a grant or something. I got a call from the financial aid office stating to my surprise that my father was deceased. I called my dad at work and told him the bad news - to which he replied with something like "That's why I'm so tired!"
It was a fairly straightforward process to bring my Dad 'back from the dead', but this was many years ago.
My daughter set up a password on her account.. she was 5-6 at the time. I didn't require it of her, but she didn't want her younger brother and sister accessing her profile. Sure enough, she was having trouble logging in - she'd forgotten her password. And she was getting frustrated. She was typing in key after key and I had to ask "are you typing in your password or are you just typing...?" She stated she was typing in her password, so I had her step aside and sat down. I asked her "okay, what is your password?" She replied with "Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy"
I stopped, turned, and looked at her with a slackjawed parent look on my face because I had never taught her about passphrases. I repeated it back, "MickeyMinniePlutoGoofy?" And was stunned when she confirmed it.
I asked how she came up with the password and she told me "You said my password had to contain at least four characters."
She knows her alphabet, but characters, those are in cartoons...
From TFA: Limited data received from the satellite indicated that its on-board computer tried rebooting several times, but those efforts failed, said one official, who is knowledgeable about the program and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Let me guess: they forgot to disable the keyboard check within the BIOS on the satellite.
KEYBOARD ERROR OR KEYBOARD NOT FOUND - PRESS [F1] TO CONTINUE [F2] FOR SETUP
And then the use of the phrase "the Underground" is itself a joke. This implies that they try to hide their activities. What a joke! They operate out in the open, swapping and sharing information, harvesting data. The use of that term "The Underground" is like calling the Open Source Software movement a "covert operation". This is the open source software of the criminal underworld - with a twist... everyone steals the other guys code and takes full credit for writing all of it. Incremental improvements.
YOu wanna bitch and whine about me sharing the information? Hell, the site is going to be gone in a few days, only to resurface somewhere else. Google the name, you'll find it again. Hell, you can subscribe to his RSS feed to keep you updated on the latest phishing techniques.
You see, trying to hunt down one of these criminals is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles, combined with international borders and different jurisdictions, etc. etc. These people have nothing to fear, nothing to lose, and everything to gain...
These idiots just set up a site and wrote a story about it. I've done more than this on a single weekend collecting data for LE Agencies or trainings I provide to Judges/Lawyers and Gov't IT Workers. Hell, I've set up a Linux VMware server that hosts all the current phishing sites on a single instance.
The genius here, going by the name "Brain", provides first class phishing sites with a catch - he has encrypted his email address and integrated it into the pages he's written. When Script Kiddies like the ones in this article set up the "Brain" sites, a copy of the stolen credentials gets secretly sent to Brain as well as the Phisherman... making Brain the first Commercial Phisherman I have encountered.
Give a man fire, you keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
The RFID chips have a transmission range of 3cm, thats one freakin' inch. If you have a large antenna, you can get 30cm range (1 foot). Half the people I know use a key card to access/unlock doors at work. Those things have an RFID chip in them. How close do you have to hold those up to the reader? Yup, 3cm.
If you had a 6' satellite dish mounted on the back of a truck, you could theoretically blast out a signal strong enough to activate the RFID receiver and get it to reflect back a signal to the dish, but the weakness of the return signal is so minute that you still would not be able to hear the return signal past 10' away.
Sorry, but does the government really care if you have any more "hot pockets" in your freezer? These articles are more about scare tactics than reality.
Now, a concern that has been brought up is programmable RFID chips. If your can of Campbell's Tomato soup had a programmable RFID tag then a customer could program it with self replicating code and place it back on the shelf. Then, when the store took inventory and scanned the shelf, the "infected" can of soup would receive the energy pulse and reply not with the information the reader is looking for, but with a reprogramming signal that would "reprogram" the cans of soup around it with the self replicating code. Could you imagine a whole WalMart being quarantined due to an RFID worm outbreak?
It isn't really possible, the return signal from an RFID chip isn't even strong enough to power up an RFID chip next to it, but it is nevertheless fun to think about.
Read my/. journal article on RFID chips and the need to adopt them.
There is a long history here that needs to be taken into consideration... We are seeing a paradigm shift in our government that is long overdue. It used to be that the government had to protect paper documents, "eyes only", and the biggest threat were photocopiers and miniature cameras... not any more.
I wrote about this transformation last year. Is it any wonder why the NSA is being brought up and groomed to help protect the critical information assets that the United States has?
From my post:
HumInt/SigInt: Human Intelligence, CIA Signal Intelligence, NSA
The English have been masters at the spy trade for centuries. In WWII, the United States felt that it should get into the act and turned to the English for guidance.
With their tutelage, the CIA became a formidable tool against the Soviet threat throughout the cold war. We had clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders. Gathering intelligence became a methodical science... then, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders went with it.
The growth of the internet created an atmosphere wherein information and 'intelligence' became a commodity. Then the emergence of an enemy that is not only difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define but who also operates entirely without borders. The polar opposite from what the CIA were trained to do.
Not only has this rule-set reset turned the CIA upside-down, it has rendered it all but useless. The UK isn't doing much better either. The problem is that western society itself is at odds with the rules required to make an effective spy agency. Our open government(s), free access to information, laws against spying on citizens and so forth are what both protect our civil liberties as well as create the environment in which our enemies can plot against us.
The CIA knew about al Qaeda operators operating in the USA prior to 9/11, yet did nothing to notify the FBI. This is because of the opposing nature of each agency. The CIA finds a criminal and wants to string them along to see what intelligence they can uncover by monitoring them. When the FBI finds a criminal, they want to string them up. From the CIA perspective, the FBI sure knows how to screw up an investigation and destroy your intelligence network.
The CIA is now dysfunctional to the point of uselessness. In fact, there isn't a single effective spy agency in the western world. The current battle we're fighting and the enemy we face is one that cannot be defeated by military might, it is a war that MUST be fought using intelligence.
So, the administration turned to the only other agency with experience in gathering and monitoring enemies. It also happens that this agency is experts at SigInt, as opposed to the HumInt. The problem is that the NSA is forbidden by law from spying on American Citizens, UNLESS they are monitoring overseas communications. This exception has always been allowed, no warrant necessary. There is no law that states that I have the constitutional right to conspire with enemies overseas.
No other nation even comes close to the SigInt capabilities of the NSA...
So, what would happen if the Microsoft DRM update management and monitoring "feature" has a "bug" and hits 100% utilization as it tries to verify the authenticity and my right to possess my entire music collection... do i have to pay a processor tax for that? What about a runtime condition? An app locks up and hits 100% utilization until it is killed. OOPS, I need to ante up for the Tflop tax. Or when I file my annual procmon return I cna apply for earned op/sec credit, filing as head of household...
I'm not about to pay a tax on other peoples poorly written software.
I've owned one of these lasers for a little over two years now. It is nothing short of amazing to hold in your hand and press the button on what is nothing more than a pen sized laser pointer that will illuminate an object over 40 miles away. When you first take hold of one of these at night, the desire to point out any and every object you can see with your naked eye is overwhelming. It takes a better man than I am to resist that temptation. Then if you have the opportunity to illuminate a moving object? It is a very natural desire, I've felt it. Its like seeing a car accident and avoiding the temptation to even look. It is easy to criticize.
When my wife took hold of the laser, we were driving in the car in SoCal and she illuminated a mansion up on a hill and exclaimed "This thing is AWESOME!" which was one of the only times in memory she has shown avid approval of any of my "toys". Then she said "I can see why people want to shine this at flying objects."
If you illuminate any of the reflective street signs with the laser, it is amazingly impressive. The entire sign, regardless of size, illuminates so blindingly bright that you cannot look at it. Do this at a street sign over a freeway and you could easily cause an accident.
To avoid the temptation not to play with one of these is too great. I sympathize with this couple completely.
I wrote my previous comment as I was about to nod off, didn't proofread it... you're right, I did start spouting nonsense.
For the record, I am a MCT, a big time MS User and supporter (both morally and technically)... I am not one of these stereotypical Slashdot knee-jerk MS Bashers. I use Linux where necessary, it is an invaluable tool I use when needed. I have a couple versions I run in a VM environment on my various MS boxes. Outside that, I am completely Windows.
What it boils down to is that I am profoundly disappointed with Microsoft and its release of Vista. There was no need that I was aware of to redo the Printer Drivers or the Video subsystem. Perhaps I am wrong, I don't know. What I do know is that video drivers were stable, frame rates were fast (I am not a gamer, but) video playback worked great. Things were stable enough that Windows 2003 has been out for five years and were only at SP2 level. Things were pretty stable coming out of the redesign starting with Win2k.
Many moons ago, I worked at WordPerfect. I was there when WordPerfect for Windows was first released. It was a disaster. WPWin5.1 was nothing but WP DOS 5.1 with a WYSIWYG interface bolted on. WPWin6.0 was a complete redesign that was arguably worse than WPWin5.1. For users that were accustomed to the stability of WP Dos 5.1, they were furious - and rightfully so, such that when Microsoft came out with Word, even though it sucked, it at least worked. And thus was the fall of WordPerfect.
The only parallel I wish to draw here is that there was a LOT riding on WordPerfect getting it right. With Vista, there is/was a lot riding on MS getting it right. Well, MS didn't get it done right. Vista is the modern day equivalent of the Edsel.
If it has nothing to do with DRM, then please explain to me why every single device needs updated drivers in order to work properly under Vista when it used to be that Windows 2000, XP and 2003 all used the same exact driver? Win2k-XP-2003 all had their unified driver model that worked wonderfully. Video card frame rates were fast, audio playback worked, life was 'good'. All hardware developers had to do was to create one driver that complied with the Microsoft unified driver model and they could relax knowing that it would work the same under all versions of Microsoft's products.
Microsoft destroyed the Unified Driver model under Vista. Why? So that they could create an entirely *NEW* path through the kernel that was completely isolated from *EVERYTHING ELSE*. They tore up a perfectly good freeway in order to put in, not just a carpool lane, but a "top secret" carpool lane that whenever occupied, walls would be thrown up such that no eavesdropping could take place on the traffic as it passed.
Forget that this is impossible to accomplish, but that didn't matter. Microsoft didn't rewrite the kernel to make it more secure, they rewrote it to secure premium content. This entire reworking of the kernel architecture has screwed everything up because every few milliseconds, the kernel needs to check to see if premium content is being played.
Let me ask you this: At what point do you think the Vista DRM activates when playing premium content? When it reads the data from the HD-DVD disk? Yes... but what if you disabled that level... whelllll, we need to check at the kernel level, ring0, see if it is trying to get snuck past the front gates. You see, at every step along the way, your content is being checked, and double checked to see if DRM should be getting applied. If it didn't, then the advanced DRM features of Vista would have been trivial to circumvent.
You cannot have this level of kernel modification and NOT have it impact every other part of the system... Peering into the kernel activity using debug tools you can see the OS methodically checking itself, navel gazing if you will.
I'm telling you, even though the DRM 'features' might not be 'active' when 'premium content' is not present, the rerouting of the freeways and the building up of whole new subsystems has created a nightmare for any application or hardware device to access kernel resources... and adding insult to injury, if the kernel thinks it is trying to be subverted (if it gets paranoid), then the kernel can reset/reload the whole stack for that process that is running, no questions asked. The offending application or driver simply gets an error code and bam, thats it. How the hell are developers supposed to code a stable application when they're not dealing with BUGS, they're having to deal with, TILT BITS! (yes, just like on a pinball machine). Seriously, how can a developer know what the OS is considering a tilt bit? What other apps are running that might be causing tilt bits to get set?
Which is why I say that Vista is truly the longest suicide note in history...
No, that is how Vista *SHOULD* work... How it *ACTUALLY* works in practice is something else entirely. The saving grace that keeps up the appearance of it working, albeit slowly, is that they spent so much development time creating error recovery that resets the stack/application and resumes without actually crashing. Put a debug trace on the app, you'll be able to see it tanking and restarting. So people complain about speed instead of it just not working, or crashing.
For the record- I'm using Vista64 to write this. I've been trying to use Vista all year since its release. I use MS products 24/7, I'm not just some Linux junkie that is lookin to bash MS.
Your comment is akin to claiming "I Don't have cancer, so therefore nobody else has cancer, and if they do have it, it is all in their head and its their fault anyway..."
I do not dispute that YOU can copy files without issue, but it does not change the fact that I do have problems with this and I am far from being the only one. This is the fallout from when Microsoft put Mickey Mouse in charge of vista kernel development.
Mickey wanted DRM, now it can reset the network traffic if it is suspicious of breach. It also depends on how the information was encoded... Your comments
Until they completely pull DRM out of the kernel, I will never support the corporate adoption within our enterprise. In a perfect world, the DRM should only activate when "Premium Content" is being played. However, if we are copying gigabytes of.mp3 voice recording files (recorded phone calls to customer service, etc.) Vista just bogs down and stops. "It won't do that", we were promised last year while Vista was being readied for release. "It shouldn't do that" we're told when we encountered the problems, but it doesn't matter, Because. It. DOES.
With today's computers and today's work environment who DOESN'T work with or Manipulate multimedia content at some point? How could we possibly rely on an operating system that treats all multimedia content as special requiring extra inspection attempting to verify that I'm not trying to circumvent some nonexistent copy protection.
Windows Vista truly is the longest suicide note in history.
Oh yeah!?! Well, the Bonneville Salt Flats are 125452549094400.2 Square Millimeters!!! ahem...
If this is accurate (and it does appear to be), Bolivia is much, much bigger. You could lose Bonneville salt flats in Bolivia. I would also further speculate that both locations are equally flat as the salt will form a flat, equally distributed surface whenever it rains. I know from survey after survey that the Bonneville Salt Flats are within the margin of error for the measuring equipment to even detect variations in uniform surface 'flatness' where the margin of error is within 1' (30.48cm) altitude for 10 miles (16.09km) linear distance.
All my life I heard how they were the largest, flattest spot on the earth - so I assumed it was true because people from around the world went there to race.
The dried Bonneville Salt Flats (open to the public) and its attached military only area called the Dougway Proving Grounds are the flattest place on earth. They have been used by the military for the past 40+ years to calibrate space and weapons systems. Pretty much every land speed record has been made at the Bonneville Salt Flats, including breaking the sound barrier. The variation of altitude is so minimal that it is within the accuracy of the measurement equipment used to calibrate altitude variations, but it has been certified to be less than 1 foot of elevation for every 10 miles.
And every year it gets 'reset'... The springtime runoff from the surrounding mountains will cover the entire salt flats with a perfect 1/2" of water. It is SO COOOL to go out there when there is a *PERFECT* sheet of water covering the salt, it looks like the worlds largest piece of glass. You can actually *SEE* the curvature of the earth. I have a picture of a much younger me 'walking on water' because it is so smooth you cannot tell that the water is only 1/2" (1.5cm) deep.
Working out on the salt flats, doing surveys, the survey crew would drive out 1 mile and hold up a survey marker. At five miles out we could not see them any more, we asked them to raise it up over their heads and we saw the marker rise up over the horizon like it was the sun coming up.
Because it is the worlds largest and flattest spot on earth, my father, an engineer in flight optics systems, has built optical calibration targets used by the military to calibrate autopilot systems, weapons guidance systems, terrain following radar systems, satellite optics systems and all that jazz for the military... which is why I grew up in Utah, am intimately familiar with the flats, and know without a doubt that my dad has worked on black projects that I hope someday he'll be able to tell me about (including flights into and out of the Janet terminal).
The way they're making money today with SPAM is through pump-n-dump schemes.
Permit me to break it down for you: The Phishers will phish usernames and passwords for brokerage accounts, or they will collect the information from personal users by means of a trojan. The criminals log into these accounts and schedule sell orders for whatever stocks they are holding, and schedule buy orders for the penny stock they are going to pump-n-dump. Then they walk away.
They execute the spam, eager traders read the spam, look at the account and see that volume of shares purchased have been bought up in the past n-hours and they jump in. The pumpers have bought their stock before hand and once the volume peaks, they dump. The account holders whose accounts were compromised are left holding the pumped-dumped stock...
The criminals are getting GOOD! They don't need to worry about transferring money out of the compromised brokerage accounts, they are stealing the money and laundering it all in the same step.
And it should be no big surprise that the criminal organizations behind the whole operations is the Russians.
Welcome to professional bank robbery in the 21st century.
Try Malaysia and Indonesia that's where I see a load of botnets coming from.
Yes, they have a lot of botnets there, but that is NOT where the bot-herders reside. That is simply an indication of an internet populace that hasn't caught up with the concept of needing to patch, update AntiVirus, clean off malware.
The same thing holds true for China, even more so. Being that China runs on pirated software, they don't have access to windows update (They fail windows genuine validation) so they deliberately avoid patching even the critical updates for fear of "getting caught" and then the patches discovering the pirated copy and disabling the OS.
So, when you read in the papers that CHINA IS ATTACKING THE USA!!! LAUNCH ZE MISSLES!!! CYBERRRRRWARRRRGH!!! Don't buy into it - they're being used as proxies. While there might be truth to it, it is still a lot of hype.
Slashdot Mirror
He's building a straw man just to tear it down. The issues according to evangelicals was EMBRYONIC Stem Cells and not using federal funding to create new human life just to destroy it for medical research. But this entire argument quickly became moot because scientists found other methods of obtaining the exact stem cells the desired using other means. SO, there IS federal funding for Stem Cell research, and nobody is or has been opposing it. This entire issue is resolved but for the fact that the members of the religion of science want to keep using it against the "evangelicals" in order to paint them as ignorant heathens who need to enter reeducation camp.
Notice how the author doesn't point out that it was EMBRYONIC stem cells, and tries to make the point that them damned evangelicals are against researching cures for paralysis.
Yeah, you want me to pay attention to your science writing? Stick to the facts. Be accurate, don't use straw men to make your argument. Present the facts and let the people judge. This whining is indicative of those who wish to indoctrinate people and can't understand "Why aren't they BELIEVING ME?!"
From the way the question was posed, I can tell the writer is biased and is trying to get me to believe in something. Solar cycles exist, it is proven, we can observe, study, model them. The weather exists, we observe that too. Anthropogenic global warming. Sorry, that is the religion of the left. It is something that they believe in just as fervently as the most religious adhere to their convictions. The author whines asking "Why don't they believe me?!" Because you are using data, combining it with faith and preaching it. Sorry, I am not interested in your religion.
If I presented to you a list of cold, hard, facts. What the hell do I care if you don't believe me. Guess what, water is wet, the earth is round and it orbits the sun... If some idiot wanted to dispute these issues, what the hell do I care. If their ignoring the facts has no bearing or impact on me whatsoever.
Cut the guy some slack, he was educated in an American School.
With this information in the headlines now, a person could steal the identity of a deceased person and assume their credit profile by sending a forged "certified letter" stating "I'm not dead, please reinstate my accounts!"
My dad was declared dead without his knowledge (heh) and I discovered this when I was entering college and applying for student loans or a grant or something. I got a call from the financial aid office stating to my surprise that my father was deceased. I called my dad at work and told him the bad news - to which he replied with something like "That's why I'm so tired!"
It was a fairly straightforward process to bring my Dad 'back from the dead', but this was many years ago.
Joel
My daughter set up a password on her account.. she was 5-6 at the time. I didn't require it of her, but she didn't want her younger brother and sister accessing her profile.
Sure enough, she was having trouble logging in - she'd forgotten her password. And she was getting frustrated.
She was typing in key after key and I had to ask "are you typing in your password or are you just typing...?"
She stated she was typing in her password, so I had her step aside and sat down. I asked her "okay, what is your password?"
She replied with "Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy"
I stopped, turned, and looked at her with a slackjawed parent look on my face because I had never taught her about passphrases. I repeated it back, "MickeyMinniePlutoGoofy?" And was stunned when she confirmed it.
I asked how she came up with the password and she told me "You said my password had to contain at least four characters."
She knows her alphabet, but characters, those are in cartoons...
Let me guess: they forgot to disable the keyboard check within the BIOS on the satellite.
KEYBOARD ERROR OR KEYBOARD NOT FOUND - PRESS [F1] TO CONTINUE [F2] FOR SETUP
And then the use of the phrase "the Underground" is itself a joke. This implies that they try to hide their activities. What a joke! They operate out in the open, swapping and sharing information, harvesting data. The use of that term "The Underground" is like calling the Open Source Software movement a "covert operation". This is the open source software of the criminal underworld - with a twist... everyone steals the other guys code and takes full credit for writing all of it. Incremental improvements.
YOu wanna bitch and whine about me sharing the information? Hell, the site is going to be gone in a few days, only to resurface somewhere else. Google the name, you'll find it again. Hell, you can subscribe to his RSS feed to keep you updated on the latest phishing techniques.
You see, trying to hunt down one of these criminals is like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles, combined with international borders and different jurisdictions, etc. etc. These people have nothing to fear, nothing to lose, and everything to gain...
--Joel Helgeson
These idiots just set up a site and wrote a story about it. I've done more than this on a single weekend collecting data for LE Agencies or trainings I provide to Judges/Lawyers and Gov't IT Workers. Hell, I've set up a Linux VMware server that hosts all the current phishing sites on a single instance.
The genius here, going by the name "Brain", provides first class phishing sites with a catch - he has encrypted his email address and integrated it into the pages he's written. When Script Kiddies like the ones in this article set up the "Brain" sites, a copy of the stolen credentials gets secretly sent to Brain as well as the Phisherman... making Brain the first Commercial Phisherman I have encountered.
Give a man fire, you keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Joel Helgeson
The RFID chips have a transmission range of 3cm, thats one freakin' inch. If you have a large antenna, you can get 30cm range (1 foot).
/. journal article on RFID chips and the need to adopt them.
Half the people I know use a key card to access/unlock doors at work. Those things have an RFID chip in them. How close do you have to hold those up to the reader? Yup, 3cm.
If you had a 6' satellite dish mounted on the back of a truck, you could theoretically blast out a signal strong enough to activate the RFID receiver and get it to reflect back a signal to the dish, but the weakness of the return signal is so minute that you still would not be able to hear the return signal past 10' away.
Sorry, but does the government really care if you have any more "hot pockets" in your freezer? These articles are more about scare tactics than reality.
Now, a concern that has been brought up is programmable RFID chips. If your can of Campbell's Tomato soup had a programmable RFID tag then a customer could program it with self replicating code and place it back on the shelf. Then, when the store took inventory and scanned the shelf, the "infected" can of soup would receive the energy pulse and reply not with the information the reader is looking for, but with a reprogramming signal that would "reprogram" the cans of soup around it with the self replicating code. Could you imagine a whole WalMart being quarantined due to an RFID worm outbreak?
It isn't really possible, the return signal from an RFID chip isn't even strong enough to power up an RFID chip next to it, but it is nevertheless fun to think about.
Read my
Joel Helgeson
There is a long history here that needs to be taken into consideration... We are seeing a paradigm shift in our government that is long overdue. It used to be that the government had to protect paper documents, "eyes only", and the biggest threat were photocopiers and miniature cameras... not any more.
I wrote about this transformation last year. Is it any wonder why the NSA is being brought up and groomed to help protect the critical information assets that the United States has?
From my post:
HumInt/SigInt:
Human Intelligence, CIA
Signal Intelligence, NSA
The English have been masters at the spy trade for centuries. In WWII, the United States felt that it should get into the act and turned to the English for guidance.
With their tutelage, the CIA became a formidable tool against the Soviet threat throughout the cold war. We had clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders. Gathering intelligence became a methodical science... then, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the clearly defined enemies with clearly defined borders went with it.
The growth of the internet created an atmosphere wherein information and 'intelligence' became a commodity. Then the emergence of an enemy that is not only difficult, if not impossible, to clearly define but who also operates entirely without borders. The polar opposite from what the CIA were trained to do.
Not only has this rule-set reset turned the CIA upside-down, it has rendered it all but useless. The UK isn't doing much better either. The problem is that western society itself is at odds with the rules required to make an effective spy agency. Our open government(s), free access to information, laws against spying on citizens and so forth are what both protect our civil liberties as well as create the environment in which our enemies can plot against us.
The CIA knew about al Qaeda operators operating in the USA prior to 9/11, yet did nothing to notify the FBI. This is because of the opposing nature of each agency. The CIA finds a criminal and wants to string them along to see what intelligence they can uncover by monitoring them. When the FBI finds a criminal, they want to string them up. From the CIA perspective, the FBI sure knows how to screw up an investigation and destroy your intelligence network.
The CIA is now dysfunctional to the point of uselessness. In fact, there isn't a single effective spy agency in the western world. The current battle we're fighting and the enemy we face is one that cannot be defeated by military might, it is a war that MUST be fought using intelligence.
So, the administration turned to the only other agency with experience in gathering and monitoring enemies. It also happens that this agency is experts at SigInt, as opposed to the HumInt. The problem is that the NSA is forbidden by law from spying on American Citizens, UNLESS they are monitoring overseas communications. This exception has always been allowed, no warrant necessary. There is no law that states that I have the constitutional right to conspire with enemies overseas.
No other nation even comes close to the SigInt capabilities of the NSA...
So, what would happen if the Microsoft DRM update management and monitoring "feature" has a "bug" and hits 100% utilization as it tries to verify the authenticity and my right to possess my entire music collection... do i have to pay a processor tax for that? What about a runtime condition? An app locks up and hits 100% utilization until it is killed. OOPS, I need to ante up for the Tflop tax. Or when I file my annual procmon return I cna apply for earned op/sec credit, filing as head of household...
I'm not about to pay a tax on other peoples poorly written software.
I always ask my dad "Do you remember the last time you were tested for Alzheimer's?"
It pisses him off...
Replace "laser" with "gun"? Sorry, there is no equivalence. I've never been able to hit anything with a gun.
I've owned one of these lasers for a little over two years now. It is nothing short of amazing to hold in your hand and press the button on what is nothing more than a pen sized laser pointer that will illuminate an object over 40 miles away. When you first take hold of one of these at night, the desire to point out any and every object you can see with your naked eye is overwhelming. It takes a better man than I am to resist that temptation. Then if you have the opportunity to illuminate a moving object? It is a very natural desire, I've felt it. Its like seeing a car accident and avoiding the temptation to even look. It is easy to criticize.
When my wife took hold of the laser, we were driving in the car in SoCal and she illuminated a mansion up on a hill and exclaimed "This thing is AWESOME!" which was one of the only times in memory she has shown avid approval of any of my "toys". Then she said "I can see why people want to shine this at flying objects."
If you illuminate any of the reflective street signs with the laser, it is amazingly impressive. The entire sign, regardless of size, illuminates so blindingly bright that you cannot look at it. Do this at a street sign over a freeway and you could easily cause an accident.
To avoid the temptation not to play with one of these is too great. I sympathize with this couple completely.
I wrote my previous comment as I was about to nod off, didn't proofread it... you're right, I did start spouting nonsense.
For the record, I am a MCT, a big time MS User and supporter (both morally and technically)... I am not one of these stereotypical Slashdot knee-jerk MS Bashers. I use Linux where necessary, it is an invaluable tool I use when needed. I have a couple versions I run in a VM environment on my various MS boxes. Outside that, I am completely Windows.
What it boils down to is that I am profoundly disappointed with Microsoft and its release of Vista. There was no need that I was aware of to redo the Printer Drivers or the Video subsystem. Perhaps I am wrong, I don't know. What I do know is that video drivers were stable, frame rates were fast (I am not a gamer, but) video playback worked great. Things were stable enough that Windows 2003 has been out for five years and were only at SP2 level. Things were pretty stable coming out of the redesign starting with Win2k.
Many moons ago, I worked at WordPerfect. I was there when WordPerfect for Windows was first released. It was a disaster. WPWin5.1 was nothing but WP DOS 5.1 with a WYSIWYG interface bolted on. WPWin6.0 was a complete redesign that was arguably worse than WPWin5.1. For users that were accustomed to the stability of WP Dos 5.1, they were furious - and rightfully so, such that when Microsoft came out with Word, even though it sucked, it at least worked. And thus was the fall of WordPerfect.
The only parallel I wish to draw here is that there was a LOT riding on WordPerfect getting it right. With Vista, there is/was a lot riding on MS getting it right. Well, MS didn't get it done right. Vista is the modern day equivalent of the Edsel.
I just hope they get Server 2008 done right...
If it has nothing to do with DRM, then please explain to me why every single device needs updated drivers in order to work properly under Vista when it used to be that Windows 2000, XP and 2003 all used the same exact driver? Win2k-XP-2003 all had their unified driver model that worked wonderfully. Video card frame rates were fast, audio playback worked, life was 'good'. All hardware developers had to do was to create one driver that complied with the Microsoft unified driver model and they could relax knowing that it would work the same under all versions of Microsoft's products.
Microsoft destroyed the Unified Driver model under Vista. Why? So that they could create an entirely *NEW* path through the kernel that was completely isolated from *EVERYTHING ELSE*. They tore up a perfectly good freeway in order to put in, not just a carpool lane, but a "top secret" carpool lane that whenever occupied, walls would be thrown up such that no eavesdropping could take place on the traffic as it passed.
Forget that this is impossible to accomplish, but that didn't matter. Microsoft didn't rewrite the kernel to make it more secure, they rewrote it to secure premium content. This entire reworking of the kernel architecture has screwed everything up because every few milliseconds, the kernel needs to check to see if premium content is being played.
Let me ask you this: At what point do you think the Vista DRM activates when playing premium content? When it reads the data from the HD-DVD disk? Yes... but what if you disabled that level... whelllll, we need to check at the kernel level, ring0, see if it is trying to get snuck past the front gates. You see, at every step along the way, your content is being checked, and double checked to see if DRM should be getting applied. If it didn't, then the advanced DRM features of Vista would have been trivial to circumvent.
You cannot have this level of kernel modification and NOT have it impact every other part of the system... Peering into the kernel activity using debug tools you can see the OS methodically checking itself, navel gazing if you will.
I'm telling you, even though the DRM 'features' might not be 'active' when 'premium content' is not present, the rerouting of the freeways and the building up of whole new subsystems has created a nightmare for any application or hardware device to access kernel resources... and adding insult to injury, if the kernel thinks it is trying to be subverted (if it gets paranoid), then the kernel can reset/reload the whole stack for that process that is running, no questions asked. The offending application or driver simply gets an error code and bam, thats it. How the hell are developers supposed to code a stable application when they're not dealing with BUGS, they're having to deal with, TILT BITS! (yes, just like on a pinball machine). Seriously, how can a developer know what the OS is considering a tilt bit? What other apps are running that might be causing tilt bits to get set?
Which is why I say that Vista is truly the longest suicide note in history...
No, that is how Vista *SHOULD* work... How it *ACTUALLY* works in practice is something else entirely.
The saving grace that keeps up the appearance of it working, albeit slowly, is that they spent so much development time creating error recovery that resets the stack/application and resumes without actually crashing. Put a debug trace on the app, you'll be able to see it tanking and restarting. So people complain about speed instead of it just not working, or crashing.
For the record- I'm using Vista64 to write this. I've been trying to use Vista all year since its release. I use MS products 24/7, I'm not just some Linux junkie that is lookin to bash MS.
Joel
Your comment is akin to claiming "I Don't have cancer, so therefore nobody else has cancer, and if they do have it, it is all in their head and its their fault anyway..."
I do not dispute that YOU can copy files without issue, but it does not change the fact that I do have problems with this and I am far from being the only one. This is the fallout from when Microsoft put Mickey Mouse in charge of vista kernel development.
Mickey wanted DRM, now it can reset the network traffic if it is suspicious of breach. It also depends on how the information was encoded... Your comments
Until they completely pull DRM out of the kernel, I will never support the corporate adoption within our enterprise. In a perfect world, the DRM should only activate when "Premium Content" is being played. However, if we are copying gigabytes of .mp3 voice recording files (recorded phone calls to customer service, etc.) Vista just bogs down and stops. "It won't do that", we were promised last year while Vista was being readied for release. "It shouldn't do that" we're told when we encountered the problems, but it doesn't matter, Because. It. DOES.
With today's computers and today's work environment who DOESN'T work with or Manipulate multimedia content at some point? How could we possibly rely on an operating system that treats all multimedia content as special requiring extra inspection attempting to verify that I'm not trying to circumvent some nonexistent copy protection.
Windows Vista truly is the longest suicide note in history.
Oh yeah!?! Well, the Bonneville Salt Flats are 125452549094400.2 Square Millimeters!!! ahem...
If this is accurate (and it does appear to be), Bolivia is much, much bigger. You could lose Bonneville salt flats in Bolivia. I would also further speculate that both locations are equally flat as the salt will form a flat, equally distributed surface whenever it rains. I know from survey after survey that the Bonneville Salt Flats are within the margin of error for the measuring equipment to even detect variations in uniform surface 'flatness' where the margin of error is within 1' (30.48cm) altitude for 10 miles (16.09km) linear distance.
All my life I heard how they were the largest, flattest spot on the earth - so I assumed it was true because people from around the world went there to race.
The dried Bonneville Salt Flats (open to the public) and its attached military only area called the Dougway Proving Grounds are the flattest place on earth. They have been used by the military for the past 40+ years to calibrate space and weapons systems. Pretty much every land speed record has been made at the Bonneville Salt Flats, including breaking the sound barrier. The variation of altitude is so minimal that it is within the accuracy of the measurement equipment used to calibrate altitude variations, but it has been certified to be less than 1 foot of elevation for every 10 miles.
And every year it gets 'reset'... The springtime runoff from the surrounding mountains will cover the entire salt flats with a perfect 1/2" of water. It is SO COOOL to go out there when there is a *PERFECT* sheet of water covering the salt, it looks like the worlds largest piece of glass. You can actually *SEE* the curvature of the earth. I have a picture of a much younger me 'walking on water' because it is so smooth you cannot tell that the water is only 1/2" (1.5cm) deep.
Working out on the salt flats, doing surveys, the survey crew would drive out 1 mile and hold up a survey marker. At five miles out we could not see them any more, we asked them to raise it up over their heads and we saw the marker rise up over the horizon like it was the sun coming up.
Because it is the worlds largest and flattest spot on earth, my father, an engineer in flight optics systems, has built optical calibration targets used by the military to calibrate autopilot systems, weapons guidance systems, terrain following radar systems, satellite optics systems and all that jazz for the military... which is why I grew up in Utah, am intimately familiar with the flats, and know without a doubt that my dad has worked on black projects that I hope someday he'll be able to tell me about (including flights into and out of the Janet terminal).
The way they're making money today with SPAM is through pump-n-dump schemes.
Permit me to break it down for you:
The Phishers will phish usernames and passwords for brokerage accounts, or they will collect the information from personal users by means of a trojan. The criminals log into these accounts and schedule sell orders for whatever stocks they are holding, and schedule buy orders for the penny stock they are going to pump-n-dump. Then they walk away.
They execute the spam, eager traders read the spam, look at the account and see that volume of shares purchased have been bought up in the past n-hours and they jump in. The pumpers have bought their stock before hand and once the volume peaks, they dump. The account holders whose accounts were compromised are left holding the pumped-dumped stock...
The criminals are getting GOOD! They don't need to worry about transferring money out of the compromised brokerage accounts, they are stealing the money and laundering it all in the same step.
And it should be no big surprise that the criminal organizations behind the whole operations is the Russians.
Welcome to professional bank robbery in the 21st century.
Spam will quit when Criminals give up crime. It'll never happen. They make money from it.
Yes, they have a lot of botnets there, but that is NOT where the bot-herders reside. That is simply an indication of an internet populace that hasn't caught up with the concept of needing to patch, update AntiVirus, clean off malware.
The same thing holds true for China, even more so. Being that China runs on pirated software, they don't have access to windows update (They fail windows genuine validation) so they deliberately avoid patching even the critical updates for fear of "getting caught" and then the patches discovering the pirated copy and disabling the OS.
So, when you read in the papers that CHINA IS ATTACKING THE USA!!! LAUNCH ZE MISSLES!!! CYBERRRRRWARRRRGH!!! Don't buy into it - they're being used as proxies. While there might be truth to it, it is still a lot of hype.