That's like saying I should totally believe in some religion or other just because 'everyone' else around me does. (Or a billion other analogies, I couldn't think of one based on cars)
What do you do when so many of these 'scientists' have vastly differing opinions on the same subject, but no hard evidence to show one way or the other which is the more accurate truth.
The climate is definitely changing. Millions of us know this from all around the globe without any need for a scientist to tell us it is happening. Clouds and rain in what is normally the dry season, snow in summer, etc.
Seems to me much of the bullshit is coming from the emotionally funded parts of the scientific community.
Maybe cataloguing and tagging all the anecdotal evidence from people like the parent poster might just turn out to be an interesting statistical data point to add to our total understanding of things.
Space may be unknown, but by commonly accepted theories the universe is also pretty damn big. Some people even throw around the word 'infinite' Regardless, even if space is some twisted doughnut shape, there are still a few hundred billion other galaxies out there that we can see just in the visible universe. This little fact, at least in my tiny world, equates to a rather large potential for similar types of solar system being out there.
I concur with the parent poster. This makes us very much not special at all.
The problem with this theory is that there are about 100,000 geeks in the world that love nothing more than to tag every single man made object in space. They even have programs to show every bit in real time graphically orbiting the planet. Many of these are free for download.
You can't put or have anything in space bigger than a small stone and not have some government or organization find and tag it, only to release that data to the general public at some point not very long after that. Lots of RADAR being pumped out in to space just for this very purpose.
If the ISS was moving because of anything other than debris from a Russian spy sat, then the slashdot headline here would spell it out. Even the military make use of the work from these guys, it can sometimes actually be more up to date.
Me: Ex 3 letter agency drone that worked in the satellite area for a while.
Wrong segment of the market son. VIA aren't catering to the likes of you, they are aiming for laptops and embedded SOHO stuff. This is a far more lucrative area for their business model. I don't know that they even want to compete on the cutting edge with NVidia. I'm sure they certainly have the financial capacity to do so if they desired anyway, but the market is not screaming out for dual DVI setups just yet.
Linux is getting hugely popular on the low cost laptop scene here in Asia. When you overhear the average person on the street discussing the benefits of Ubuntu (or whatever) over Apple or Microsoft, it is safe to say that these latter two entities are no longer nearly as relevant as they once were.
If VIA didn't do anything about this they would absolutely lose out big time to the competition. People want cheap, they don't want to buy hardware and then have to pay more than it cost just for the operating system and an office suite. This action at its core is likely driven by profits and not good will, at least not in the upper reaches of the company anyway.
A bunch of months ago now VIA quietly released an accelerated driver for their Chrome9 video chipset (not open source, but a big step in the right direction) - now I can run Compiz mostly trouble free.
I worked in government for a lot of years and lived through quite a few investigations and audits by these 'oversight' groups.
I always found it amusing when I read the odd final report or two - in most cases their summaries state the investigations were wide reaching and involved consultation with staff from all levels of the workforce. Given that in some cases the very things I was personally working on were being investigated, and the very tiny scope of people involved, never once did anyone approach me and ask questions. Ever.
You might want to question FISA or whatever oversight mechanism exists in your neck of the world a little more closely too.
I do concur with you by the way, removal of power is often the most correct solution.
I would say this 200k is akin to how GSM (phone) associations can be made. Good old traffic analysis. Bad guy calls another bad guy, both of these are firm targets. Wife calls bad guy, she is a target. Friend of wife calls wife, she is also now a target. Friend of wife calls second cousin of second bad guy, second cousin is a target. And so on. It's a big spider web.
The vetting process to be issued a security clearance is, in the majority, done at a personal one on one level. (Mostly why it can take 6 months to 2 years) This means that the relevant security branch goes out and actually interviews your friends, friends of friends, teachers, family, etc.
As part of the application process you sign a ton of documents that authorize the government to go to your banks and financial institutions (or whatever) and extract your data wholesale. They don't check up on you 'in secret' and nor is ones job title a secret for most positions within secret 3 letter agencies.
Chasing down slashdot posts and wiki entries are not very high on the investigative list.
I would say that almost none of these were either good or bad guys, just innocents caught at some depth in an automated system. I would also hazard that there aren't enough monkeys to draft up 200k letters anyway. It was probably a little bash scripting with a bit of awk and sed on the side.
And for some reason (magic possibly involved) this little storm of yours is causing the price of fuel (gas) for me to go up, and I live almost exactly on the other side of the planet from you.
If this small spot on the earth is so volatile that it can cause financial repercussions in Asia, why not move it somewhere less prone to disaster? There's a whole lot of coastline you can use to plant down your 'most important port in the nation'
Typhoons are a constant in this part of the world for many months of the year, earthquakes are a little more infrequent, but they are also common, this is life on the pacific rim. What do we do? We build our stuff out of reinforced concrete and steel. We manage the water system so that we don't have our cities flooded. (Exception being for Tsunami, they have right of way in most cases)
In 50 years nobody will care how much was spent on it, they'll be looking back at the results.
A bunch of spy satellites, a telescope, and a few trips to a couple of space stations just outside the atmosphere. These things are absolutely cool and all, but they have nothing on sending a few guys to go and kick the dirt around on another moon or planet.
Which is more interesting, I'm going to stick with the the Moon and anything further away than that.
About 10 or 12 years ago when I was living in Australia I used to pay absolutely every single bill by visa debit card on line (No possibility of overdrawing, no money, no pay). Electricity, water, gas, telephone, shopping, take out, etc.
They did have a system you could set up to do it automatically back then too, though given that all of these pay on line services only took perhaps no more than 2 minutes to actually complete, I never saw the point. You could also pay by phone in much the same way, dial up the number on the bill, follow a couple of prompts, type the amount, cc number, and done.
Australia has been pretty forward thinking in terms of on line payments, at least in the early days of the internet they were, probably things have stagnated since then, I don't live there any more.
Unlimited bandwidth would mean you have a tube infinitely big from which to draw your internet goodness. Most home computers don't support much over 1Gbps, and I don't know of anyone selling or building equipment at the infinite end of the scale, including secret 3 letter agencies.
Bandwidth is very finite, and sadly so is the total amount of data that can be sucked through the pipe.
Unlimited service would be without limitation on data rates or total number of bits transferred.
>>> Of course, no one on earth can build a 47 story concrete building.
It depends on the definition of concrete a little bit. In Asia most buildings are made from concrete strengthened with steel rods. (rebar) These structures regularly pass the 47 story mark. The building I live in has 52 floors above ground, with a further 7 underground. (Some of these are utility but they are still 'floors')
We've had magnitude 6 earthquakes occur a couple of times as well as the odd typhoon here and there, the only way to notice is a slight dizzy feeling, and you know, looking out the window to see the building swaying a couple of feet.
I think I prefer this type of construction rather than the steel frame more common in the US. Even the big fires here don't bring down buildings - we leave that to corruption and cutting corners on quality:-)
I think you actually mean RAR to about 17 different parts, zip those together, password the zip, then RAR all of that in to one big file including 3 or 4.nfo files with ego tripping greetings.
I ride a motorbike (really, I do!), it doesn't matter what make or model it is. Like most these days it has a black box driving the ponies inside the shiny motor thing, it also manages a myriad of other crap from timing through to the seat warming my arse along cold mountain rides.
Now I can buy myself an after market black box which functions perfectly fine on the bike, but it also happens to plug in to my off the shelf network switch using a bog standard bit of cat 5 with a couple of RJ-45 plugs on either end. It talks DHCP and whatever.
Does it matter that someone purchased the actual black box from the manufacturer, opened it up, did a little tinkering of their own, shoved a web based front end on it, then repackaged and rebranded as something else which I then purchased? This 'new black box' allows me to tweak things the manufacturer never intended. So what.
It might piss off the manufacturer such that it matters to them a great deal, maybe they miss out on the revenue. Such things sure as hell don't matter to me, and that is what actually matters at the end of the day.
I have no idea what my point is, just that I guess I'm a little old school, I figure when you sell something, it's not yours anymore.
My Nokia N95 has been playing the part of an access point for near on a year and a half already, before that my N80, sharing its internet to various laptops when the starbucks goes dead. (In fact, any S60v3 with wifi can do this)
This is not a new thing at all, and definitely not unique to the iPhone.
IMEI changes are not unusual in my Asian part of the world. I'm sure it can be done on the iPhone if someone feels the need to scratch that particular itch bad enough.
This is how many modern target specific jammers work in the military, particularly in relation to RADAR. To answer your question, yes, you could do this to create a bigger error in nearby receivers, though it makes more sense to spoof all the visible satellites rather than just one at any given point in space and time.
How current GPS jamming works is as you describe. Noise.
Ultimately swamping the GPS transmissions with noise is far more effective than spoofing. For military situations you could almost be certain some little elint weenie is circling above at FL300 with itchy trigger fingers, so spoofing or swamping are going to get you dead real fast anyway.
For all other situations it depends on what you aim is.
Spread spectrum is actually a pretty rare modulation method in the satellite world, at least it is for anything other than telemetry and a few other odds and ends. You don't come across it very often though you can definitely see all of them with any half decent spec/an. Contrary to what a lot of people say, they are far from undetectable, they do stand out in their own way, usually a decent number of dB above the noise floor.
Some of the RADAR specific stuff I used back in the day went from DC right up to a whole lot of GHz. Even transmissions of very (very) short duration were easily spotted. You get to know the radio environment pretty quickly, so anything odd stands out.
The US is not dirty in any sense of the way I understand 'dirty'
I live in a Manila high rise condo (Philippines), nice part of town, but I travel almost daily across the city. My usual journey leaves me thinking that most of those pictures look about as clean as the queens bathroom in comparison.
This country has some world class areas, stunning in fact, yet you take a peek over the fence line and you'll see shanties 5 stories high filling up absolutely every bit of space left vacant for more than a few minutes. (Outside of Manila is a different story, not clean, but not disgustingly dirty either, provincial cities are generally far better than Manila)
The Philippines, definitely not as bad as parts of China, but really, the US is far from dirty. It shouldn't even be in the list.
Stick in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and a few others in the region and you'll have yourself a list of dirty, in every possible way:-)
Someone else clearly has no idea either:-) Echelon is so 1950's and simply has never existed in the way you claim. Aside from this it is a physical impossibility anyway. Anyone calling attention to this persistent little word is actually somewhat deserving of the phrase you have used. This is simply because they close their eyes to reality in favour of a good old conspiracy theory instead.
Individual 3 letter agencies. That's all you'll find, each of them with different missions and objectives. Martin from DSD some years back offered up the existence of the UKUSA relationship. 5 countries that pass little secret notes amongst themselves. It's not the only association, it's just one of hundreds made by all countries the world over.
To put things in to perspective for you: Absolutely none of these agencies have unlimited resources or humans to throw around. They have a finite number of magic boxes that do their business. Now how many strands of fiber cover the earth, how many satellites exist, how many signals do they relay at any one instant in time. How many terrestrial forms of communication exist, copper, radio, light.
The answer is absolutely vastly more than every single intelligence agency on the earth combined could ever hope to suck down. But even if they could, what is important and what is junk without hindsight or human analysis?
Your average undersea cable isn't just one massive big packet switched transmission you can plug in to wireshark, they have thousands of discreet methods of communication, some encrypted, some multiplexed, some utterly unique.
What stops me setting up my own radio link across a border? I could make it mobile, I could use frequency hopping, spread spectrum, directional antenna, encryption, everything and anything available. Do I have to tell anyone I've done this? Nope, I might break a few laws, but the chance of getting caught is so slim it really doesn't factor very high.
Slashdot Mirror
That's like saying I should totally believe in some religion or other just because 'everyone' else around me does. (Or a billion other analogies, I couldn't think of one based on cars)
What do you do when so many of these 'scientists' have vastly differing opinions on the same subject, but no hard evidence to show one way or the other which is the more accurate truth.
The climate is definitely changing. Millions of us know this from all around the globe without any need for a scientist to tell us it is happening. Clouds and rain in what is normally the dry season, snow in summer, etc.
Seems to me much of the bullshit is coming from the emotionally funded parts of the scientific community.
Maybe cataloguing and tagging all the anecdotal evidence from people like the parent poster might just turn out to be an interesting statistical data point to add to our total understanding of things.
15 seconds is annoying about that sir.
Space may be unknown, but by commonly accepted theories the universe is also pretty damn big. Some people even throw around the word 'infinite' Regardless, even if space is some twisted doughnut shape, there are still a few hundred billion other galaxies out there that we can see just in the visible universe. This little fact, at least in my tiny world, equates to a rather large potential for similar types of solar system being out there.
I concur with the parent poster. This makes us very much not special at all.
The problem with this theory is that there are about 100,000 geeks in the world that love nothing more than to tag every single man made object in space. They even have programs to show every bit in real time graphically orbiting the planet. Many of these are free for download.
You can't put or have anything in space bigger than a small stone and not have some government or organization find and tag it, only to release that data to the general public at some point not very long after that. Lots of RADAR being pumped out in to space just for this very purpose.
If the ISS was moving because of anything other than debris from a Russian spy sat, then the slashdot headline here would spell it out. Even the military make use of the work from these guys, it can sometimes actually be more up to date.
Me: Ex 3 letter agency drone that worked in the satellite area for a while.
Wrong segment of the market son. VIA aren't catering to the likes of you, they are aiming for laptops and embedded SOHO stuff. This is a far more lucrative area for their business model. I don't know that they even want to compete on the cutting edge with NVidia. I'm sure they certainly have the financial capacity to do so if they desired anyway, but the market is not screaming out for dual DVI setups just yet.
Linux is getting hugely popular on the low cost laptop scene here in Asia. When you overhear the average person on the street discussing the benefits of Ubuntu (or whatever) over Apple or Microsoft, it is safe to say that these latter two entities are no longer nearly as relevant as they once were.
If VIA didn't do anything about this they would absolutely lose out big time to the competition. People want cheap, they don't want to buy hardware and then have to pay more than it cost just for the operating system and an office suite. This action at its core is likely driven by profits and not good will, at least not in the upper reaches of the company anyway.
A bunch of months ago now VIA quietly released an accelerated driver for their Chrome9 video chipset (not open source, but a big step in the right direction) - now I can run Compiz mostly trouble free.
http://linux.via.com.tw/support/downloadFiles.action
I worked in government for a lot of years and lived through quite a few investigations and audits by these 'oversight' groups.
I always found it amusing when I read the odd final report or two - in most cases their summaries state the investigations were wide reaching and involved consultation with staff from all levels of the workforce. Given that in some cases the very things I was personally working on were being investigated, and the very tiny scope of people involved, never once did anyone approach me and ask questions. Ever.
You might want to question FISA or whatever oversight mechanism exists in your neck of the world a little more closely too.
I do concur with you by the way, removal of power is often the most correct solution.
I would say this 200k is akin to how GSM (phone) associations can be made. Good old traffic analysis. Bad guy calls another bad guy, both of these are firm targets. Wife calls bad guy, she is a target. Friend of wife calls wife, she is also now a target. Friend of wife calls second cousin of second bad guy, second cousin is a target. And so on. It's a big spider web.
The vetting process to be issued a security clearance is, in the majority, done at a personal one on one level. (Mostly why it can take 6 months to 2 years) This means that the relevant security branch goes out and actually interviews your friends, friends of friends, teachers, family, etc.
As part of the application process you sign a ton of documents that authorize the government to go to your banks and financial institutions (or whatever) and extract your data wholesale. They don't check up on you 'in secret' and nor is ones job title a secret for most positions within secret 3 letter agencies.
Chasing down slashdot posts and wiki entries are not very high on the investigative list.
I would say that almost none of these were either good or bad guys, just innocents caught at some depth in an automated system. I would also hazard that there aren't enough monkeys to draft up 200k letters anyway. It was probably a little bash scripting with a bit of awk and sed on the side.
And for some reason (magic possibly involved) this little storm of yours is causing the price of fuel (gas) for me to go up, and I live almost exactly on the other side of the planet from you.
If this small spot on the earth is so volatile that it can cause financial repercussions in Asia, why not move it somewhere less prone to disaster? There's a whole lot of coastline you can use to plant down your 'most important port in the nation'
Typhoons are a constant in this part of the world for many months of the year, earthquakes are a little more infrequent, but they are also common, this is life on the pacific rim. What do we do? We build our stuff out of reinforced concrete and steel. We manage the water system so that we don't have our cities flooded. (Exception being for Tsunami, they have right of way in most cases)
In 50 years nobody will care how much was spent on it, they'll be looking back at the results.
A bunch of spy satellites, a telescope, and a few trips to a couple of space stations just outside the atmosphere. These things are absolutely cool and all, but they have nothing on sending a few guys to go and kick the dirt around on another moon or planet.
Which is more interesting, I'm going to stick with the the Moon and anything further away than that.
About 10 or 12 years ago when I was living in Australia I used to pay absolutely every single bill by visa debit card on line (No possibility of overdrawing, no money, no pay). Electricity, water, gas, telephone, shopping, take out, etc.
They did have a system you could set up to do it automatically back then too, though given that all of these pay on line services only took perhaps no more than 2 minutes to actually complete, I never saw the point. You could also pay by phone in much the same way, dial up the number on the bill, follow a couple of prompts, type the amount, cc number, and done.
Australia has been pretty forward thinking in terms of on line payments, at least in the early days of the internet they were, probably things have stagnated since then, I don't live there any more.
Unlimited bandwidth would mean you have a tube infinitely big from which to draw your internet goodness. Most home computers don't support much over 1Gbps, and I don't know of anyone selling or building equipment at the infinite end of the scale, including secret 3 letter agencies.
Bandwidth is very finite, and sadly so is the total amount of data that can be sucked through the pipe.
Unlimited service would be without limitation on data rates or total number of bits transferred.
>>> Of course, no one on earth can build a 47 story concrete building.
It depends on the definition of concrete a little bit. In Asia most buildings are made from concrete strengthened with steel rods. (rebar) These structures regularly pass the 47 story mark. The building I live in has 52 floors above ground, with a further 7 underground. (Some of these are utility but they are still 'floors')
We've had magnitude 6 earthquakes occur a couple of times as well as the odd typhoon here and there, the only way to notice is a slight dizzy feeling, and you know, looking out the window to see the building swaying a couple of feet.
I think I prefer this type of construction rather than the steel frame more common in the US. Even the big fires here don't bring down buildings - we leave that to corruption and cutting corners on quality :-)
So what you are saying is that my 14 bucks sent off to godaddy via a stolen credit card could actually scam you out of your life savings then. Meh.
Kind sir, please do get a better understanding the actual problem before placing your trust in such an untrustworthy system.
The only thing certificates currently prove is that someone had access to the email address listed in DNS at one point in time.
I think you actually mean RAR to about 17 different parts, zip those together, password the zip, then RAR all of that in to one big file including 3 or 4 .nfo files with ego tripping greetings.
I ride a motorbike (really, I do!), it doesn't matter what make or model it is. Like most these days it has a black box driving the ponies inside the shiny motor thing, it also manages a myriad of other crap from timing through to the seat warming my arse along cold mountain rides.
Now I can buy myself an after market black box which functions perfectly fine on the bike, but it also happens to plug in to my off the shelf network switch using a bog standard bit of cat 5 with a couple of RJ-45 plugs on either end. It talks DHCP and whatever.
Does it matter that someone purchased the actual black box from the manufacturer, opened it up, did a little tinkering of their own, shoved a web based front end on it, then repackaged and rebranded as something else which I then purchased? This 'new black box' allows me to tweak things the manufacturer never intended. So what.
It might piss off the manufacturer such that it matters to them a great deal, maybe they miss out on the revenue. Such things sure as hell don't matter to me, and that is what actually matters at the end of the day.
I have no idea what my point is, just that I guess I'm a little old school, I figure when you sell something, it's not yours anymore.
Eat, sleep, procreate. Everything else is human invention.
My Nokia N95 has been playing the part of an access point for near on a year and a half already, before that my N80, sharing its internet to various laptops when the starbucks goes dead. (In fact, any S60v3 with wifi can do this)
This is not a new thing at all, and definitely not unique to the iPhone.
How many hogs heads for one of those naked Amazonian tribal chicks?
IMEI changes are not unusual in my Asian part of the world. I'm sure it can be done on the iPhone if someone feels the need to scratch that particular itch bad enough.
This is how many modern target specific jammers work in the military, particularly in relation to RADAR. To answer your question, yes, you could do this to create a bigger error in nearby receivers, though it makes more sense to spoof all the visible satellites rather than just one at any given point in space and time.
How current GPS jamming works is as you describe. Noise.
Ultimately swamping the GPS transmissions with noise is far more effective than spoofing. For military situations you could almost be certain some little elint weenie is circling above at FL300 with itchy trigger fingers, so spoofing or swamping are going to get you dead real fast anyway.
For all other situations it depends on what you aim is.
Spread spectrum is actually a pretty rare modulation method in the satellite world, at least it is for anything other than telemetry and a few other odds and ends. You don't come across it very often though you can definitely see all of them with any half decent spec/an. Contrary to what a lot of people say, they are far from undetectable, they do stand out in their own way, usually a decent number of dB above the noise floor.
Some of the RADAR specific stuff I used back in the day went from DC right up to a whole lot of GHz. Even transmissions of very (very) short duration were easily spotted. You get to know the radio environment pretty quickly, so anything odd stands out.
The US is not dirty in any sense of the way I understand 'dirty'
I live in a Manila high rise condo (Philippines), nice part of town, but I travel almost daily across the city. My usual journey leaves me thinking that most of those pictures look about as clean as the queens bathroom in comparison.
This country has some world class areas, stunning in fact, yet you take a peek over the fence line and you'll see shanties 5 stories high filling up absolutely every bit of space left vacant for more than a few minutes. (Outside of Manila is a different story, not clean, but not disgustingly dirty either, provincial cities are generally far better than Manila)
The Philippines, definitely not as bad as parts of China, but really, the US is far from dirty. It shouldn't even be in the list.
Stick in Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and a few others in the region and you'll have yourself a list of dirty, in every possible way :-)
Someone else clearly has no idea either :-) Echelon is so 1950's and simply has never existed in the way you claim. Aside from this it is a physical impossibility anyway. Anyone calling attention to this persistent little word is actually somewhat deserving of the phrase you have used. This is simply because they close their eyes to reality in favour of a good old conspiracy theory instead.
Individual 3 letter agencies. That's all you'll find, each of them with different missions and objectives. Martin from DSD some years back offered up the existence of the UKUSA relationship. 5 countries that pass little secret notes amongst themselves. It's not the only association, it's just one of hundreds made by all countries the world over.
To put things in to perspective for you: Absolutely none of these agencies have unlimited resources or humans to throw around. They have a finite number of magic boxes that do their business. Now how many strands of fiber cover the earth, how many satellites exist, how many signals do they relay at any one instant in time. How many terrestrial forms of communication exist, copper, radio, light.
The answer is absolutely vastly more than every single intelligence agency on the earth combined could ever hope to suck down. But even if they could, what is important and what is junk without hindsight or human analysis?
Your average undersea cable isn't just one massive big packet switched transmission you can plug in to wireshark, they have thousands of discreet methods of communication, some encrypted, some multiplexed, some utterly unique.
What stops me setting up my own radio link across a border? I could make it mobile, I could use frequency hopping, spread spectrum, directional antenna, encryption, everything and anything available. Do I have to tell anyone I've done this? Nope, I might break a few laws, but the chance of getting caught is so slim it really doesn't factor very high.