If you have a freshly erased videotape and a freshly beaten-to-death handcuffed suspect on the ground in front of you, you're going to have a difficult time explaining that particular coincidence.
Re:Ridiculous invasion of privacy
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Better yet get down on your knees and thank your lucky stars that this exists. It will be awfully hard for a cop to beat you to death for resisting arrest if there's a camera pointed at him as well. And no more pulling people over for "weaving" (e.g. driving while black) then searching their vehicle for drugs. Believe me, this absolutely works to your advantage.
I'm guessing that within ten years it will be impossible to prosecute anyone in court unless the entire arrest is recorded.
Already on Motorcycles
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DVRs for Cop Cars
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· Score: 4, Informative
A motorcycle is a rather space-constrained and high-vibration environment, and a conventional tape-based system simply wouldn't cut it. A company here in Wheat Ridge, CO has done several installations for the Colorado State Patrol's Harleys. They also borrowed a BMW R1150RTP from us and did a demo installation on it.
The system works just as described: The system is always recording to a programmable-length buffer; once the officer cuts his disco lights on, the buffer becomes a permanent file and current events are appended to it.
I didn't ask any questions about how easy it was to erase files off the system, but I remember seeing a keypad on the unit and the guy I brought the bike to did enter a code before he got into any of the menus. It would be easy enough give those codes to the station chiefs, but not the patrol officers.
Okay, so run up Caldera's legal bills into the millions, let public and investor opinion drive their stock value into the pennies, then buy them out and destroy them all utterly.
Wal-Mart aggressively defends itself against every single profiteering lawsuit filed against it. They are the single most sued entity in the U.S., apart from the U.S. itself. There are seminars on suing Wal-Mart.
Buy the company, declare all its IP community property, fire every single employee, burn their buildings, loot their coffers, trample their crops and sew their fields with salt.
The flying car went the way that civil aviation in general is heading: sued out of existence, or prevented from moving forward due to the prospect of being sued out of existence.
Progress is dangerous. If I make a product that will kill one user in a million, and everyone in America buys one, I'll face two hundred and eighty wrongful death suits, class action suits, branding as a mass murderer, and ghod help me if one of those failures happens during sweeps week.
Flying is fairly simple, but the consequences of error are rather specatular.
Cars were invented before lawsuits were so widespread; this is part of the reason Ford isn't bankrupt from all the innocent bystanders crossing the street in front of their potentially lethal products.
But the tort system in America is biased towards the right to be stupid and my obligation to accomodate your stupidity regardless of what you're doing with my product. So no, I'm sure as hell not going to build you a flying car just so you can sue me when you fuck up.
The TCO charts in the article quote the employement cost of one Unix admin (for the ~500 campus-based machines) at $120,000/year against the cost of five Windows admins at $75,000/year. This seems about the right ratio in staff and pay.
That's probably $100k/year in salary and $20k/year in coffee, but hey.
Wasn't it Airbus that lost a plane and crew at the Paris Air Show a few years back, because the plane's fly-by-wire software locked the controls? Don't know the whole story, but I've seen video of it flying smoothly and gracefully right into the ground.
Imbedded systems ain't a toy. When something goes wrong, it better by-god be able to fix itself, or it stays gone wrong.
Let's see what we can do to make it ten precent, shall we? I want to see how many record company execs we can make lose their wives or girlfriends because they're only making half a million a year now.
so all these huge trade deficits are just rumours then?
Sigh. No, Sparky. They're not just rumors. In addition to being the largest exporter in the world, The United States is also the largest importer in the world.
Many if not most manual typewriters didn't have one, I'm sure. Mom's didn't. The electric Brother I learned to type on had a 1, as did my Dad's office's IBM Selectric. I still love the Selectric and if I had to have a typewriter (and could afford it), that would be the one.
But the last time I had to use a typewriter, I shamed myself with how thoroughly computers had spoiled me by having a backspace key.
And my mom still has a typewriter with no one ("1")key, just a lowercase L ("l"). She got it in college and, yes, she couldn't afford a "1" key. One of my first programming jobs was fixing a mailing address database that had some, but not all, the "1"s in the street numbers and zip codes represented as "l".
There's no magic bullet, yah. No the methodology. But just because there's no eliminate doesn't mean there's no minimize.
I must admit the largest project I've worked on so far had only 350,000 lines of code, and given the then sorry state of Jave debugging, we pretty much settled for leaving footprints in the code.
Okay, so debugging hasn't gotten any better in the last couple of decades. I gotta say it's because the focus of methodology research has been on the development process itself, and that's an extremely good thing.
The more work goes in before you get to the debugging stage, the less buggy your product will be. A well-designed system does not need as much debugging later. I know I'm idealizing, but I've seen this bear out, especially when version N > 1 comes out and it's been hacked to smithereens because of poor design choices in the previous iteration.
Probably the most amazing bit of self-fulfilling prophecy you'll ever hear on a software project is a manager saying, "We'd better start coding now, because we're going to have a lot of debugging to do."
As for catching things ahead of time, I've always put breadcrumbs in my code to spew to stderr or a Java error console class or wherever. Very easy to #ifdef out later and trivial to turn back on later.
It's good to see the author advocates using a macro tool and not hacking sendmail.cf directly. It's scary in there.
I'm trying to remember who said this:
When I first started working with sendmail, I was convinced that the
cf file had been created by someone bashing their head on the keyboard. After a week, I realised this was, indeed, almost certainly the case
I don't think it's entrapment, or enticement, or anything else along the lines, either. But IANAL, and I suspect a good L could say the victim of prosecution was lured, that they were looking for security holes in the networks of prospective clients, that they were the zombie of someone else doing the real attack, they were dead at the time, etc.
Oh yeah, sorry I forgot the I and the O were next to each other.
My alternative approach is that I'd like to set up a similar system, wait for them to hack into it, and then do a hunt for the bastards running the scam. Any holes in this plan?
Entrapment, maybe? Rationally, I can shoot down that argument by saying it's not entrapment to leave your front door unlocked; OTOH I can say it's murder to leave your front door unlocked and rigged to fire a shotgun when it opens.
I'd say go for it. Make sure your honeypit is used for something legitimate, and create a real company to own it, then put a legal-disclaimer banner at the SMTP login, then use existing anti-cracking laws to nail 'em.
Slashdot Mirror
Then DMCA the shit out of anybody who attempts to access it.
If you have a freshly erased videotape and a freshly beaten-to-death handcuffed suspect on the ground in front of you, you're going to have a difficult time explaining that particular coincidence.
I'm guessing that within ten years it will be impossible to prosecute anyone in court unless the entire arrest is recorded.
The system works just as described: The system is always recording to a programmable-length buffer; once the officer cuts his disco lights on, the buffer becomes a permanent file and current events are appended to it.
I didn't ask any questions about how easy it was to erase files off the system, but I remember seeing a keypad on the unit and the guy I brought the bike to did enter a code before he got into any of the menus. It would be easy enough give those codes to the station chiefs, but not the patrol officers.
On the other hand...
Also, you misspelled either fuckin' or fucking.
Wal-Mart aggressively defends itself against every single profiteering lawsuit filed against it. They are the single most sued entity in the U.S., apart from the U.S. itself. There are seminars on suing Wal-Mart.
Buy the company, declare all its IP community property, fire every single employee, burn their buildings, loot their coffers, trample their crops and sew their fields with salt.
Is anybody else reminded of how back during the Inquisition the actual torture was done on the Church's behalf by princes and other subcontractors?
Progress is dangerous. If I make a product that will kill one user in a million, and everyone in America buys one, I'll face two hundred and eighty wrongful death suits, class action suits, branding as a mass murderer, and ghod help me if one of those failures happens during sweeps week.
Flying is fairly simple, but the consequences of error are rather specatular.
Cars were invented before lawsuits were so widespread; this is part of the reason Ford isn't bankrupt from all the innocent bystanders crossing the street in front of their potentially lethal products.
But the tort system in America is biased towards the right to be stupid and my obligation to accomodate your stupidity regardless of what you're doing with my product. So no, I'm sure as hell not going to build you a flying car just so you can sue me when you fuck up.
Out of curiosity, what is it he wasn't learning?
That's probably $100k/year in salary and $20k/year in coffee, but hey.
But to be pedantic, they Segways were pre-banned in San Francisco. What they've done is fail to unban them.
Imbedded systems ain't a toy. When something goes wrong, it better by-god be able to fix itself, or it stays gone wrong.
Let's see what we can do to make it ten precent, shall we? I want to see how many record company execs we can make lose their wives or girlfriends because they're only making half a million a year now.
But the last time I had to use a typewriter, I shamed myself with how thoroughly computers had spoiled me by having a backspace key.
And my mom still has a typewriter with no one ("1")key, just a lowercase L ("l"). She got it in college and, yes, she couldn't afford a "1" key. One of my first programming jobs was fixing a mailing address database that had some, but not all, the "1"s in the street numbers and zip codes represented as "l".
I must admit the largest project I've worked on so far had only 350,000 lines of code, and given the then sorry state of Jave debugging, we pretty much settled for leaving footprints in the code.
The more work goes in before you get to the debugging stage, the less buggy your product will be. A well-designed system does not need as much debugging later. I know I'm idealizing, but I've seen this bear out, especially when version N > 1 comes out and it's been hacked to smithereens because of poor design choices in the previous iteration.
Probably the most amazing bit of self-fulfilling prophecy you'll ever hear on a software project is a manager saying, "We'd better start coding now, because we're going to have a lot of debugging to do."
As for catching things ahead of time, I've always put breadcrumbs in my code to spew to stderr or a Java error console class or wherever. Very easy to #ifdef out later and trivial to turn back on later.
I'm trying to remember who said this:
Oh yeah, sorry I forgot the I and the O were next to each other.
I'd say go for it. Make sure your honeypit is used for something legitimate, and create a real company to own it, then put a legal-disclaimer banner at the SMTP login, then use existing anti-cracking laws to nail 'em.
Assuming you track them down.
He's important enough to me. Millions of people---me included---can die at his whim; you, on the other hand, are just some guy.
Hey, I don't matter much in the scheme of things, either, except to my wife and my dog.