Where I work, all employees have to sign one of those "everything I create at work belongs to the company" agreements. Combine that agreement with doing work on my personal computer at home. What happens if I come up with something cool, salable, and completely not related to my day job, but all that work was done on a machine that I also use in conjunction with my day job? What's to prevent my employer's lawyers from laying claim to my new product?
If it's your computer, the work was not done on company time, and your employment is under Californina law, what will prevent them from laying claim is California IP law. B-)
Consult a lawyer if you're working in other states. (Heck: Consult one even if you're working in CA for a CA company. After all, IANAL and even if I were I'm not YOUR lawyer.)
I'd settle for fixing the telomeres after cell division.
There's already an enzyme to do that.
It's turned off in most cells. This is apparently an anti-cancer mechanism.
If a cell's "make a copy" switch gets stuck on (which can happen in a LOT of ways), letting the telomeres shorten with every cell division and having the cell die (or stop dividing through a different "switch) when they get too short means you get a lump that then maybe then dies off. Leave telomerase turned on and you get your own version of the grey-goo scenario internally, as the dividing cells go on forever, chewing up all your internal resources to make more of themselves until the rest of you dies from being starved or squeezed aside (very painfully).
You start with telomeres long enough to build a body and then grow fingernails, hair, and blood cells and repair damage for 80 years or more but keep cancers down to little bump sizes unless they find a way to turn the enzyme back on.
Also (from the Wikipedia article on High-G training) - even without such extreme support:
Early experiments showed that untrained humans were able to tolerate 17 g eyeballs-in (compared to 12 g eyeballs-out) for several minutes without loss of consciousness or apparent long-term harm.
... wouldn't opening the thing up at the bottom produce enough pressure from the inrushing water?
It's not just a matter of pressure. You can't go faster than the speed of sound in the fluid.
That's why they're using hot hydrogen: Through a convenient coincidence (?) the speed of sound in that is about the same as the Earth's escape velocity. B-)
Now maybe they could compress and heat the hydrogen by letting the sea push it. But then they have to pump the seawater out against the pressure at depth (or pump it up to the surface, which is the same thing) to "reload". And clean the chamber. It's easier to just compress and heat the nice, clean gas.
Assuming a 10G constant acceleration, the resulting barrel length is ~185 miles.
You can assume a lot more than that. Like whales (which collapse internally if beached) the human body can handle a lot more gravity when immersed in water and neutrally buoyant.
Nowhere near what surface-mounted electronics can take, of course. Bodies have air-filled regions and other variations in density. But (as Heinlein pointed out long before the Apollo Project) a "water cushion" makes a great supporter.
Maybe not even immersed. Think: "form-fitting, very shallow, waterbed". Or thin water-filled cushions under the entire body with no, or minimal, gaps between them.
A problem with making it longer is the amount of air that it has to move out of the way as the projectile traverses the length of the barrel... and if the air pressure goes up as you go down (i can't see how it wouldn't) it gets denser too.
That's dead easy: The vehicle has to be pressurized anyhow. Pump the barrel out to a near vacuum. It already has to handle enormous pressures - another 15 psi is lost in the noise.
If you get it right the residual trace of gas will compress until, as the projectile leaves the muzzle, the resistance is a close match to the air resistance of the projectile through free air. Result: No sudden change in g forces.
Sure, it wasn't able to shoot at most targets. Just ones that happened to be 800 miles west of iraq. For example, the entirety of Israel.
Unless I've missed something, Project Babylon (at the time of the apparent assassination) had so far only constructed a single, horizontal (i.e. no elevation) test barrel and the two that were planned were (disguised as?) satellite launchers - which means they were pointed EAST.
(Not to say that there weren't plans to ACTUALLY build them pointed another direction. And of course if you have enough delta-v on the projectile for full orbital capability it's trivial to re-tweak it to drop the projectile where you want it in a wide area around your own location after going around the long way.)
The POINT, however, had nothing to do with whether Saddam really was planning to use it to attack Israel.
The POINT is that ANY orbital gun has such potential. (And THIS ONE could hit pretty much anything with trivial aiming). Or at least it has enough such potential that governments may roadblock its construction or take out the project or its personnel in a preemptive strike to avoid upsetting the balance of power that currently benefits them.
Same applies to private space launchers of any type, of course. But doing it with big "guns" immediately gets civilian officials thinking in terms of "being shot at".
(For those not familiar with academic crypto-speak: "Alice" and "Bob" are typically used rather than "user A" and "user B" for describing a communications security scenario. Usually Alice and Bob are the communicating parties but in this case I've (mis)used them for two people trying to communicate with Facebook nearly simultaneously. Another such name is "Eve", the canonical eavesdropper.)
1) Alice and Bob are both logging in to facebook. They send the last message of the login at nearly the same time. 2) Facebook 3) AT&T gives Alice's cookie to Bob. (Several ways to do this.) 4) Because Bob's browser was expecting the reply with the cookie from Facebook it accepts it and continues with the login step. Except for having the wrong cookie everything is as it should be. 5) Bob's transactions are marked with Alice's cookie until he logs out, logs in again, or the session expires. He's logged in as Alice.
If you read the fine article, one of the examples is exactly that. In step 3) "Bob" and "Alice" had their replies-with-cookie swapped so they each ended logged in as the other.
... is that it also lets you drop 1000 lb on any spot on the planet (if you don't mind it coming down at 13,000 MPH or so).
So your project ends up as the target of a lot of governmental "gun control" activity.
Look what happened when Iraq tried it (using one that was built into a mountain so it couldn't be aimed at most terrestrial targets): Mossad assassinated the designer mid-project, governments seized critical parts as they were being shipped, and finally the conquering army made them destroy the remainder of the project as a condition of the cease-fire.
Yep. The only stable orbit that intersects the planet's surface is an escape hyperbola. An ellipse that does it once does it multiply. POW!
But by getting high enough above most of the atmospheric friction and having some dwell time there before falling back you've solved most of the problem. Circularizing the orbit (or at least raising the perigee above the atmosphere) is a minor job for a rocket motor compared to clawing its way up from a standing start while carrying the fuel for the whole launch.
Even getting a running start with most of the get-to-orbital-altitude work done before starting the motor and fuel consumption is a tremendous improvement.
Also: Muzzle velocity is MORE than enough to start a scramjet. I wonder if the free oxidizer would be more of a help than the extra engine weight is a hindrance.
It should be really low frequency. More of a slow and slight pressure variation in the water than a shock wave. Look out behind it though - here it comes on recoil.
The noise in the AIR when the projectile leaves the muzzle will be LOUD. But some silencer tech can be used to mitigate that.
Geez. Think of the size of the muzzle brake on that puppy.
Make it long enough and it CAN launch people. (You'll need good streamlining to avoid nasty deceleration when it leaves the muzzle, though.)
The ocean is DEEP. Something that's roughly neutrally buoyant (i.e. a gun barrel supported by floats distributed along its length) needs to spend negligible structural strength supporting itself. (It only needs to be strong on any part that protrudes from the water - which might be a lot to avoid sinking it when it recoils.) You might want to put "helper combustion chambers" along it periodically to boost and smooth the acceleration if you want to launch live stuff though.
Also you can make it larger diameter and put sabots on the projectile while it's in the barrel to reduce the internal pressure variations or fire very dense loads. (Doesn't really help the materials strength issues, though, because the curvature lessens as diameter rises.)
Recoil? By being submerged it's an inside-out hydraulic shock absorber. B-)
LORAN coverage is very limited.... Have a look at the map.
LORAN is in no way a useful backup for GPS except in a very small part of the oceans.Look closer at that map.
Take a closer look at that map. It goes out a goodly distance from the coasts.
They say that, in an airplane, you can do anything you want as long as you don't do it close to the ground. Much the same is true for boats and the shore.
If you're really far out in an ocean you can get back to a continent by sailing east or west until you pick up the shore. (If you've lost track of which set of continents is the desired target you're already in serious trouble.) Trips to another hemisphere from temperate latitudes are major undertakings. Northern hemisphere boaters tend to stay there most of their lives.
No sextant? You can approximate your latitude without a time-hack and even without a protractor you can hack up an instrument to get your latitude within a few degrees with a piece of string, a weight, and a random piece of something like a book or a cutting board. Get roughly to the right latitude (so you will get roughly to the desired port) use the instrument to compensate for north/south drift from currents, and sail east or west until you're within range of LORAN.
It's when you get near the shore that you're in trouble if you don't have something better than eyeballs - especially if you end up there after dark. LORAN can give you enough warning that you can safely rig the boat for unattended sailing and get some shut-eye without worrying about running aground when you find the continent. If GPS is down, LORAN is gone, and you don't have a sextant, a chronometer (or a radio to get a time broadcast), good charts, and a lot of training in celestial navigation, you'd better put out the sea anchor after dark. This about doubles your trip time so you'd better have lots of fresh water and provisions.
... the site operator would notice the drop in load pretty quickly.
Not if the fake site made the equivalent query to the real site. (It could even forward the ads so the real site wouldn't lose revenue - unless the real site's software decided that the ads were mostly going to a small number of IP addresses and didn't count them as unique views.)
If it were done that way the only way the site operator would know anything was wrong is if he noticed the change in IP address distribution on the queries - or happened to query his own site from far enough outside it that he hit the diversion and noticed the extra results included.
Loran-C has been used for distributing TDM network clocking by at least one major long distance telephone carrier, before they all switched over to GPS. I wonder if they got all the equipment converted (or switched to SONET or later non-TDM packet-based stuff)?
Some boxes referencing to Loran-C and some to GPS would work so well that the omission might not be noticed. Until the Loran-C shuts down and the boxes start to lose sync. The resulting frame slips would make little "clicks" in any legacy phone connections. But data traffic could get hit big time.
200m is good for what ? - Retrieve a crab/lobstrer pot ? - Retrieve a Man Overboard ? - Fetch a gill net ? - Meet with a sister ship during a seine net operation ?... No.. lemme tell you.. 200m is NOT good enough !
How about:
- Find a port when you're somewhere random in an ocean?
I'd be HAPPY to live with a 200 meter error if I'm trying to, say, get the Golden Gate Bridge to show over the horizon in time to beat a squall line into San Francisco Bay. Or to know if I'm FAR ENOUGH OFF the west coast of North America that I won't be blown onto it before a storm I can't outrun blows by.
What bugs me is this statement from the Coast Guard:
If a single, domestic national system to back up GPS is identified as being necessary, the Department of Homeland Security will complete an analysis of potential backups to GPS. The continued active operation of Loran-C is not necessary to advance this evaluation.
They're studying whether they NEED a backup so they'll turn off the only current backup before the study is finished or (if required) the replacement backup is deployed?
That's NUTS! What happens if GPS is compromised between the decommissioning of LORAN-C and the deployment of the hypothetical replacement?
Also: Why deploy a DIFFERENT backup and make all the users buy ANOTHER device when they ALREADY HAVE LORAN-C equipment? Even if the equipment was FREE the cost of obtaining it and installing it, multiplied by the number of users, would be astronomical. Unless something damned cheap, built off some other deployed tech, is designed, the cost of maintaining LORAN-C would be a drop in the bucket.
Chortle. (Don't see why this was modded "interesting" rather than "funny".)
But seriously:
I'm wondering how long it would take for the Chinese authorities to notice if a similar hijack took the searchers to a site that LOOKED like the real one but:
- gave them uncensored search results
- with the links that would be blocked by the Great Firewall redirected through unblocked proxies.
Obviously launching this from anywhere INSIDE China would make the perpetrator a likely candidate for involuntary organ donation. But can you imagine the trial of someone from OUTSIDE China who was caught after perpetrating such a thing? THAT might set some interesting precedents.
The young generally have little experience with privacy and why it's important. Until they get bit by the consequences of excessive disclosure. Then they learn to value it.
(It's not just Gen-Y-ers. It happened to me, and I'm a boomer - which means I predate the Internet by a bunch. B-b)
Zuckerberg's business consists of making a lot of money by catering to those who have yet to learn the lesson. And management positions attract those for whom telling the truth when a lie is more convenient is also not a social norm. Of COURSE he'll make such claims. And they're sheer self-serving puffery.
I think that apparently the vendors aren't doing a damn thing to patch a good amount of these reported vulnerabilities if they are being reported in a proactive manner. Seems as if once the exploits are running rampant in the wild then the vendors scramble to develop patches. Not the best business practices all the way around, but it's the way it is.
I'd feed better if, rather than lumping all the vendors together and 0-day disclosing vulnerabilities found in any of them, Intevydis tracked which vendors failed to respond and continued to give the others warning.
Maybe a 3-strikes policy. Or (for vendors with large products and lots of opportunities for bugs) a percentage of slow/no vs. fast fixes.
And the newbies should be assumed responsive until proven otherwise.
Seems to me that would put even more pressure on companies to be responsive, by giving the responsive among their competitors two additional advantages:
- time to fix the bug, and
- customer perception that the unresponsive vendor might be subject to sudden attacks due to disclosed vulnerabilities when the responsive vendor would both get warnings and have a track record of fixing before disclosure.
Slashdot Mirror
The real WTF is that "Chuck Norris" works as a password into anything: Facebook, your online bank account, your sister's pants...
But it only works for Chuck Norris.
Where I work, all employees have to sign one of those "everything I create at work belongs to the company" agreements. Combine that agreement with doing work on my personal computer at home. What happens if I come up with something cool, salable, and completely not related to my day job, but all that work was done on a machine that I also use in conjunction with my day job? What's to prevent my employer's lawyers from laying claim to my new product?
If it's your computer, the work was not done on company time, and your employment is under Californina law, what will prevent them from laying claim is California IP law. B-)
Consult a lawyer if you're working in other states. (Heck: Consult one even if you're working in CA for a CA company. After all, IANAL and even if I were I'm not YOUR lawyer.)
Can they make HP ink?
Yes.
But they haven't figured out how to reset the chip in the ink cartridge to accept that it's been refilled.
I'd settle for fixing the telomeres after cell division.
There's already an enzyme to do that.
It's turned off in most cells. This is apparently an anti-cancer mechanism.
If a cell's "make a copy" switch gets stuck on (which can happen in a LOT of ways), letting the telomeres shorten with every cell division and having the cell die (or stop dividing through a different "switch) when they get too short means you get a lump that then maybe then dies off. Leave telomerase turned on and you get your own version of the grey-goo scenario internally, as the dividing cells go on forever, chewing up all your internal resources to make more of themselves until the rest of you dies from being starved or squeezed aside (very painfully).
You start with telomeres long enough to build a body and then grow fingernails, hair, and blood cells and repair damage for 80 years or more but keep cancers down to little bump sizes unless they find a way to turn the enzyme back on.
... a "water cushion" makes a great supporter.
Also (from the Wikipedia article on High-G training) - even without such extreme support:
... wouldn't opening the thing up at the bottom produce enough pressure from the inrushing water?
It's not just a matter of pressure. You can't go faster than the speed of sound in the fluid.
That's why they're using hot hydrogen: Through a convenient coincidence (?) the speed of sound in that is about the same as the Earth's escape velocity. B-)
Now maybe they could compress and heat the hydrogen by letting the sea push it. But then they have to pump the seawater out against the pressure at depth (or pump it up to the surface, which is the same thing) to "reload". And clean the chamber. It's easier to just compress and heat the nice, clean gas.
Assuming a 10G constant acceleration, the resulting barrel length is ~185 miles.
You can assume a lot more than that. Like whales (which collapse internally if beached) the human body can handle a lot more gravity when immersed in water and neutrally buoyant.
Nowhere near what surface-mounted electronics can take, of course. Bodies have air-filled regions and other variations in density. But (as Heinlein pointed out long before the Apollo Project) a "water cushion" makes a great supporter.
Maybe not even immersed. Think: "form-fitting, very shallow, waterbed". Or thin water-filled cushions under the entire body with no, or minimal, gaps between them.
A problem with making it longer is the amount of air that it has to move out of the way as the projectile traverses the length of the barrel... and if the air pressure goes up as you go down (i can't see how it wouldn't) it gets denser too.
That's dead easy: The vehicle has to be pressurized anyhow. Pump the barrel out to a near vacuum. It already has to handle enormous pressures - another 15 psi is lost in the noise.
If you get it right the residual trace of gas will compress until, as the projectile leaves the muzzle, the resistance is a close match to the air resistance of the projectile through free air. Result: No sudden change in g forces.
Sure, it wasn't able to shoot at most targets. Just ones that happened to be 800 miles west of iraq. For example, the entirety of Israel.
Unless I've missed something, Project Babylon (at the time of the apparent assassination) had so far only constructed a single, horizontal (i.e. no elevation) test barrel and the two that were planned were (disguised as?) satellite launchers - which means they were pointed EAST.
(Not to say that there weren't plans to ACTUALLY build them pointed another direction. And of course if you have enough delta-v on the projectile for full orbital capability it's trivial to re-tweak it to drop the projectile where you want it in a wide area around your own location after going around the long way.)
The POINT, however, had nothing to do with whether Saddam really was planning to use it to attack Israel.
The POINT is that ANY orbital gun has such potential. (And THIS ONE could hit pretty much anything with trivial aiming). Or at least it has enough such potential that governments may roadblock its construction or take out the project or its personnel in a preemptive strike to avoid upsetting the balance of power that currently benefits them.
Same applies to private space launchers of any type, of course. But doing it with big "guns" immediately gets civilian officials thinking in terms of "being shot at".
Great, now you've leaked their names ...
Ho ho! B-)
(For those not familiar with academic crypto-speak: "Alice" and "Bob" are typically used rather than "user A" and "user B" for describing a communications security scenario. Usually Alice and Bob are the communicating parties but in this case I've (mis)used them for two people trying to communicate with Facebook nearly simultaneously. Another such name is "Eve", the canonical eavesdropper.)
How in the World can this be AT&T's fault ...
1) Alice and Bob are both logging in to facebook. They send the last message of the login at nearly the same time.
2) Facebook
3) AT&T gives Alice's cookie to Bob. (Several ways to do this.)
4) Because Bob's browser was expecting the reply with the cookie from Facebook it accepts it and continues with the login step. Except for having the wrong cookie everything is as it should be.
5) Bob's transactions are marked with Alice's cookie until he logs out, logs in again, or the session expires. He's logged in as Alice.
If you read the fine article, one of the examples is exactly that. In step 3) "Bob" and "Alice" had their replies-with-cookie swapped so they each ended logged in as the other.
... is that it also lets you drop 1000 lb on any spot on the planet (if you don't mind it coming down at 13,000 MPH or so).
So your project ends up as the target of a lot of governmental "gun control" activity.
Look what happened when Iraq tried it (using one that was built into a mountain so it couldn't be aimed at most terrestrial targets): Mossad assassinated the designer mid-project, governments seized critical parts as they were being shipped, and finally the conquering army made them destroy the remainder of the project as a condition of the cease-fire.
Yep. The only stable orbit that intersects the planet's surface is an escape hyperbola. An ellipse that does it once does it multiply. POW!
But by getting high enough above most of the atmospheric friction and having some dwell time there before falling back you've solved most of the problem. Circularizing the orbit (or at least raising the perigee above the atmosphere) is a minor job for a rocket motor compared to clawing its way up from a standing start while carrying the fuel for the whole launch.
Even getting a running start with most of the get-to-orbital-altitude work done before starting the motor and fuel consumption is a tremendous improvement.
Also: Muzzle velocity is MORE than enough to start a scramjet. I wonder if the free oxidizer would be more of a help than the extra engine weight is a hindrance.
It should be really low frequency. More of a slow and slight pressure variation in the water than a shock wave. Look out behind it though - here it comes on recoil.
The noise in the AIR when the projectile leaves the muzzle will be LOUD. But some silencer tech can be used to mitigate that.
Geez. Think of the size of the muzzle brake on that puppy.
Make it long enough and it CAN launch people. (You'll need good streamlining to avoid nasty deceleration when it leaves the muzzle, though.)
The ocean is DEEP. Something that's roughly neutrally buoyant (i.e. a gun barrel supported by floats distributed along its length) needs to spend negligible structural strength supporting itself. (It only needs to be strong on any part that protrudes from the water - which might be a lot to avoid sinking it when it recoils.) You might want to put "helper combustion chambers" along it periodically to boost and smooth the acceleration if you want to launch live stuff though.
Also you can make it larger diameter and put sabots on the projectile while it's in the barrel to reduce the internal pressure variations or fire very dense loads. (Doesn't really help the materials strength issues, though, because the curvature lessens as diameter rises.)
Recoil? By being submerged it's an inside-out hydraulic shock absorber. B-)
GPS is too far ingrained into the US infrastructure now to be turned off.
Who said anything about the US turning off GPS? There are LOTS of ways for it to fail.
For starters, consider:
- hostile jamming of the well-known signals. (All those clients get disrupted. How convenient for somebody who wants to attack the US infrastructure.)
- "sanding" a significant number of the satellites into vapor or otherwise nonfunctionality - either due to hostile activity or meteorite activity.
- multiple satellite failures due to a multi-century solar flare event.
I could go on.
LORAN coverage is very limited. ... Have a look at the map.
LORAN is in no way a useful backup for GPS except in a very small part of the oceans.Look closer at that map.
Take a closer look at that map. It goes out a goodly distance from the coasts.
They say that, in an airplane, you can do anything you want as long as you don't do it close to the ground. Much the same is true for boats and the shore.
If you're really far out in an ocean you can get back to a continent by sailing east or west until you pick up the shore. (If you've lost track of which set of continents is the desired target you're already in serious trouble.) Trips to another hemisphere from temperate latitudes are major undertakings. Northern hemisphere boaters tend to stay there most of their lives.
No sextant? You can approximate your latitude without a time-hack and even without a protractor you can hack up an instrument to get your latitude within a few degrees with a piece of string, a weight, and a random piece of something like a book or a cutting board. Get roughly to the right latitude (so you will get roughly to the desired port) use the instrument to compensate for north/south drift from currents, and sail east or west until you're within range of LORAN.
It's when you get near the shore that you're in trouble if you don't have something better than eyeballs - especially if you end up there after dark. LORAN can give you enough warning that you can safely rig the boat for unattended sailing and get some shut-eye without worrying about running aground when you find the continent. If GPS is down, LORAN is gone, and you don't have a sextant, a chronometer (or a radio to get a time broadcast), good charts, and a lot of training in celestial navigation, you'd better put out the sea anchor after dark. This about doubles your trip time so you'd better have lots of fresh water and provisions.
... the site operator would notice the drop in load pretty quickly.
Not if the fake site made the equivalent query to the real site. (It could even forward the ads so the real site wouldn't lose revenue - unless the real site's software decided that the ads were mostly going to a small number of IP addresses and didn't count them as unique views.)
If it were done that way the only way the site operator would know anything was wrong is if he noticed the change in IP address distribution on the queries - or happened to query his own site from far enough outside it that he hit the diversion and noticed the extra results included.
Loran-C has been used for distributing TDM network clocking by at least one major long distance telephone carrier, before they all switched over to GPS. I wonder if they got all the equipment converted (or switched to SONET or later non-TDM packet-based stuff)?
Some boxes referencing to Loran-C and some to GPS would work so well that the omission might not be noticed. Until the Loran-C shuts down and the boxes start to lose sync. The resulting frame slips would make little "clicks" in any legacy phone connections. But data traffic could get hit big time.
200m is good for what ? ... No.. lemme tell you.. 200m is NOT good enough !
- Retrieve a crab/lobstrer pot ?
- Retrieve a Man Overboard ?
- Fetch a gill net ?
- Meet with a sister ship during a seine net operation ?
How about:
- Find a port when you're somewhere random in an ocean?
I'd be HAPPY to live with a 200 meter error if I'm trying to, say, get the Golden Gate Bridge to show over the horizon in time to beat a squall line into San Francisco Bay. Or to know if I'm FAR ENOUGH OFF the west coast of North America that I won't be blown onto it before a storm I can't outrun blows by.
Hear hear.
What bugs me is this statement from the Coast Guard:
They're studying whether they NEED a backup so they'll turn off the only current backup before the study is finished or (if required) the replacement backup is deployed?
That's NUTS! What happens if GPS is compromised between the decommissioning of LORAN-C and the deployment of the hypothetical replacement?
Also: Why deploy a DIFFERENT backup and make all the users buy ANOTHER device when they ALREADY HAVE LORAN-C equipment? Even if the equipment was FREE the cost of obtaining it and installing it, multiplied by the number of users, would be astronomical. Unless something damned cheap, built off some other deployed tech, is designed, the cost of maintaining LORAN-C would be a drop in the bucket.
Chortle. (Don't see why this was modded "interesting" rather than "funny".)
But seriously:
I'm wondering how long it would take for the Chinese authorities to notice if a similar hijack took the searchers to a site that LOOKED like the real one but:
- gave them uncensored search results
- with the links that would be blocked by the Great Firewall redirected through unblocked proxies.
Obviously launching this from anywhere INSIDE China would make the perpetrator a likely candidate for involuntary organ donation. But can you imagine the trial of someone from OUTSIDE China who was caught after perpetrating such a thing? THAT might set some interesting precedents.
But false to fact.
The young generally have little experience with privacy and why it's important. Until they get bit by the consequences of excessive disclosure. Then they learn to value it.
(It's not just Gen-Y-ers. It happened to me, and I'm a boomer - which means I predate the Internet by a bunch. B-b)
Zuckerberg's business consists of making a lot of money by catering to those who have yet to learn the lesson. And management positions attract those for whom telling the truth when a lie is more convenient is also not a social norm. Of COURSE he'll make such claims. And they're sheer self-serving puffery.
I think that apparently the vendors aren't doing a damn thing to patch a good amount of these reported vulnerabilities if they are being reported in a proactive manner. Seems as if once the exploits are running rampant in the wild then the vendors scramble to develop patches. Not the best business practices all the way around, but it's the way it is.
I'd feed better if, rather than lumping all the vendors together and 0-day disclosing vulnerabilities found in any of them, Intevydis tracked which vendors failed to respond and continued to give the others warning.
Maybe a 3-strikes policy. Or (for vendors with large products and lots of opportunities for bugs) a percentage of slow/no vs. fast fixes.
And the newbies should be assumed responsive until proven otherwise.
Seems to me that would put even more pressure on companies to be responsive, by giving the responsive among their competitors two additional advantages:
- time to fix the bug, and
- customer perception that the unresponsive vendor might be subject to sudden attacks due to disclosed vulnerabilities when the responsive vendor would both get warnings and have a track record of fixing before disclosure.
Ha! One of the commentors on the second blog entry has the reference:
The stuff about information being involved reminds me of Frederick W. Kantor's "Information Mechanics".