Don't you think that Apple resetting the SIM lock is a rather different matter though? I buy an iPhone and pay AT&T a big wad of cash to end the contract. They either hand over the unlock code or they don't - doesn't matter, US law says I can circumvent this anyway. So, I have my nice shiny iPhone, no contract, unlocked to work with any service provider I choose, then Apple comes along and screws me over by locking me back to AT&T, and while they are at it, they change the system so that it can't be unlocked (At this point in time)
Having an expectation that the firmware will screw over software modifications is one thing, but dicking with SIM locks is indeed a nice little legal issue just waiting for a judge to rule against Apple.
Right now the safebrowsing stuff seems to be turned on by default in firefox, this leaves a nice little constant annoyance in the proxy logs. Multiply it by the size of any large corporate office and it becomes nothing short of a waste of bandwidth. (Waste being subjective naturally)
Things like this obviously don't double the traffic, but they do still create noise.
Try and think with your own brain once in a while, repeating what you've seen or heard other people say is just sheepish. The iphone was designed to operate within the GSM specification, it was not designed to operate on a single network. If iphone users have not contracted with AT&T, where exactly is their obligation to do so? All they did was buy a piece of hardware. People have the absolute right to have the simlocks removed, indeed US law even says they can do this. I suspect Apple will eventually find they have a legal obligation to make their updates work with the iPhone, unlocked or otherwise.
"..at one of the fastest growing west coast digital media agencies.." - as a management drone naturally you are compelled to offer up this drivel, however I, as a potential client, would look elsewhere the very moment you uttered those words. If you have to say how great you are, then you are absolutely not worth the value of my money.
If you agency is so great, post your website, give out a little more than just your worthless marketing rhetoric.
Perhaps to clarify a little - countries like Indonesia make huge use of satellite for inter-island communications. If you point a dish at near any satellite in the clark belt you'll see they are almost all loaded up with packet switched networks, E1's, or T1's - In the case of the latter two systems, these are generally filled with compressed voice trunks - including loads of cellular stuff. I think it's still fairly safe to say that a decent percentage of voice calls are routed via satellite depending upon the daily deals that carriers negotiate. They are not in it for call quality, low latency, pathways, or any other advantage the users might gain, it's simply how cheaply they can get your call to its destination.
So the whole 'manager' title is now no better than the lofty responsibilities associated with flipping burgers? You tell someone they are a manager, then you let them make decisions, the title deserves that respect. Seems to me that the glass towered retards at the top don't understand that a couple of phone calls might have solved this issue far better than suspending him and very possibly losing a crap load of sales. You might not like the guy's ideology, but you can bet the average middle class soccer mom cares far less about some random companies bottom line.
I'm well beyond 18-21 years of age, though I don't think what this guy did was something I would disapprove of. If I want my child to have a game, I can always go and buy it myself.
It's a pity you posted AC. Who ever you are, you've obviously never been hit with the wrong end of a law suite. (It ain't fun) If you had, you'd know beyond any doubt that no amount of self delusional geek greatness makes you more intelligent than a trained lawyer at home in their profession. Legal work is not just a bunch of books filled with simple 'if then' statements - logic be damned, the legal system is artistic, creative, and deeply complex, logical it is not - comparing the two fields is not only apples to oranges, it is also absurd and makes me think you are a fool. Being on the receiving end of a subpoena is scary, stressful, gut wrenching, and costly. I hope you never have to experience it, though if you do, and then manage to pass on through and in to the light at the other end, I also hope you find yourself with new found respect for the profession.
Not all lawyers are greedy scumbags, just the same as not all computer programmers are self absorbed retards that think they are infinitely superior to mere '(l)users'
I'm a geek, not a lawyer, I do like to think I know when to shut my mouth and let others speak on my behalf.
Yours would only be a possible theory if he were actually flying in an aircraft capable of flight at altitude high enough to bring on hypoxia. He isn't, at least not very easily, so passing out is pretty low on the list. Having flown this type of aircraft myself, they are not exactly equipped with much in the way of instrumentation. Autopilot, very unlikely. It's an aerobatic machine. You lose consciousness in one of these, you very likely make a crater shortly thereafter.
Re:The winds were NOT very high this morning....
on
Steve Fossett Missing
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· Score: 1
I don't at all disagree with you, though a somewhat unrelated experience. I acquired a radar altimeter many years ago from an auction, very cheap, nobody knew what it was. I thought I'd give it (free) to the first aircraft owner that wanted it. It weighed less than 1 kilogram, had a bog standard sized display, just a small dial with altitude markers. In perfect working condition, still had the plastic and foam wrapping from the factory. Nobody wanted it. The most common rejection was simply that it was too heavy, can't afford the weight penalty. Tried crop duster pilots, general aviation, and a bunch of ultralight communities. Same response. That logic is astounding given the thing would be an excellent additional information point in nearly every instance. Safety comes to mind foremost.
I ended up taking it to an airshow, left it in a maintenance hanger with a note saying 'Free radar altimeter, requires a good home'
I guess my point is that 21 pounds might seem like a huge penalty to you, though to others it's an appropriate addition for those 'just in case' moments.
I don't know that you really understand the corporate mindset behind locking down of phones. It's not about making the hardware cheaper, on a world scale it's already about as cheap as it's going to get - America is part of a small and unique set of countries in which the phone companies have given people the ability to get a desirable object 'right now', often with no up front payment - it feels like it's free. The contract already makes the phone company more money than what they paid for the handset, plus enough to keep their systems running, along with a little extra to bolster the profit margins.
They've found ways to make even more money on top of this by tweaking firmware to force customers to pay extra for things they could have already done for free. This is a cash cow, nothing less. People want the phone as soon as they feel the urge to have it, the market built itself around this desire. It's not wrong, I don't even think that it's bad. After all, even in America people can still buy a phone outright. They have a choice.
I wonder if they will work their website much like the 3rd party unlock stuff for Sony Ericsson. I can't imagine they would sell the entire program, more likely it'll be missing some key components so that users are forced to pay a fee to complete the unlock process (by logging in to their server)
Commercial satellites do indeed have the ability to reveal individual houses, quite easily in fact. Quickbird can resolve to about 60cm per pixel. The only reason they don't put in better optics is political. After that it's all atmospherics. The pictures taken from aircraft are often no better than satellite imagery. Spin google earth somewhere that is not centered on the US and you'll begin to understand.
Yeah, you are right except for the state of the art in prop design. What makes you think the US is far more advanced than anyone else? If I were building a submarine, it'd only help me see what 'you' were up to. There is precious little value in the photograph since anyone building a stealthy submarine will have access to similar types of water tunnels, test facilities, and engineers. The picture is far too low in resolution to be of significant value. One can conclude the optimum performance of a nuclear submarine with simple common sense - go as fast as possible, and do it as quietly as possible - the physics are the same no matter which ocean you are in. Where it might become interesting is if they are using variable pitch or some completely unique and non-conventional design, otherwise the real secrets are in other noise reduction areas that can't be seen. Insulating crew and mechanical noise from reaching the hull.
In the intelligence world, this would be marked somewhere around the secret level at most, scrub out the image source information, and classification will drop much lower. I have seen a lot of imagery make the nightly news during the 10 years I was in the game.
Don't be misled by GSM, it suffers from the very same problems as WiFi, not quite as bad depending upon the frequency the phone wants to use at any given moment. The reason it works so well is simply because they install their antennas directly inside buildings, subways, and just about every walkway that has high enough traffic to earn the carriers extra money. Take a look on the ceiling of just about every shopping center in Hong Kong and you'll see small domed antenna with telco logo's. This is for GSM/3G etc. I live up on the 30th-ish floor of a city building, use a couple of directional yagi antenna for *ahem* free wifi. On any given day I have over 200 AP's to chose from. The vast majority of these are open. The reason you probably don't get anything on the ground is simply because the radio environment is too noisy. Invest in a parabolic dish and that problem will go away.
GSM base stations transmit with much greater power than wifi, but still don't penetrate walls so good either.
Not strictly, the access point could linked using its own transmitter to another router that does provide internet. I do this at home using 3rd party software on a few different linksys routers. It affects throughput a little, but not so significantly that it matters for just a few users. Commercial WiFi gear is far more versatile, the technology already exists to do this on a much larger scale.
I'm not sure what fanboy coolaid you are drinking, but nokia have been far from innovative in handset design. It took them years to understand that phones could actually be designed a tad more stylish than the standard house brick format. Sony Ericsson have it right, fast OS and far more intuitive interfaces, better music players, better sound. The only thing symbian has going for it is that it allows 3rd party software, though this is becoming far more convoluted and difficult with every new iteration of the OS.
No, it will be more expensive, have an illogical and clunky user interface, and take 8 firmware revisions before it becomes remotely stable enough to use. (I used to be a nokia fan boy, though I stopped with the N80 which cost me around $750 US when first released) As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation, though they will find a way to screw that process up even more than they have now. The operating system will spend more time chatting to the TPM chip than all previous symbian versions put together, DRM will be significantly enhanced and soak up any remaining CPU cycles such that it takes at least 3 seconds for any key press to register, followed by another 4 seconds to update the screen. (And that's on a good day)
Until nokia pull their heads out of their collective arses and ease up on the pointless file system restrictions, symbian 3rd edition was the last straw not only for me, but a good many others going by forum chatter. I will not be buying nokia at all.
The alternatives aren't much better, but at least most have already been broken by 3rd party solutions. BB5 is still hit and miss.
It would make far more sense if you weren't so ignorant. You truly believe America is the shining bastion of human rights? Try switching off the fox news for a bit, pick a different channel once in a while. How the fuck did yahoo violate this guys human rights? He chose to use yahoo completely of his own free will - a point that many posters here conveniently overlook - yahoo China was required to hand over information to Chinese law enforcement. They followed Chinese law and did so. Why the need to make such a big deal about it? The guy screwed up and said things that have landed him in jail, he screwed up all on his own. You want yahoo to be responsible not only for your daft outlook on the world, but also for what people can or can't say in email?
Sucks to be the guy, but he could just have easily reported on the traffic or butterflies along the Mekong instead.
>> Ask the journalist who's going to be tortured in jail for the next ten years what chaos is.
Even in China people have free will you know. Given that you don't live there, and from your language, have very probably never been there, how are you even remotely aware that this person will be tortured? Do you not think ~you~ are being hypocritical here? (I know I certainly think you are) Isn't the US condoning torture right now as we type these messages. Conveniently moving prisons to countries where the law is rather less particular about the methods. Maybe you should take a good long look at yourself and the practices of corporate America before you go imposing your misguided ideology. (Maybe you were just fishing for the +5 karma)
I'm not quite sure if you are trolling, perhaps not. Here in the Philippines, most hospitals have overcome this simply by keeping up to date with modern equipment. Everything is shielded, there are no bans at all on cell phones in any part of the vast majority of hospitals. I'm not sure where you from, though I guess the difference could be somewhat cultural - in the US it seems to me that people like someone or something to blame, no matter how outlandish the logic. I know this is a stereotype, but it does exist.
Haven't you seen enough stories here on slashdot that debunk the whole aircraft and fuel station dangers?
I'm not sure what kind of cell phone you have that you might think it could be remotely activated to become a nice little spy toy. I don't know of any evidence that is indicative of off the shelf consumer device being able to do those things in their default state. I've been around active SIGINT for a lot of years, if it were that easy, it'd would have been exploited years ago. Symbian doesn't allow squat to get installed without a series of confirmation dialogs, if there were a remote way in over the air or otherwise, it would be have been exploited many times over. The unlocking scene has long since reverse engineered every aspect of most phones, they'd be the first to speak up if they found back doors of this magnitude, not for the spying ability, but simply because it would be fool proof way to bypass TPM.
I don't quite understand how more security options would equate to less control for the system owner in such a way that it would matter to the owner. Never underestimate the small (very large actually) benefit of encryption. VOIP is no more complicated to intercept than any other trunk. I personally don't want to be categorized, logged, parameterized, and stored in a nice big database by any number of 3 letter agencies right across the world. Ultimately it's not so much that they can hear what I say, but more about the traffic analysis that is possible and how easy it can be to elevate ones 'insignificant' status to something a little less innocuous.
Encryption doesn't solve the fact that I communicated with A, who then communicated with B and C, while X - a known bad guy, called up C and dragged me in to focus, even though I've never heard of B, C or X. Most people don't care, but having worked for the man myself, I have a bit of a vested interest in the state of the art. It's a never ending arms race between convenient consumer solutions, and those behind the scenes that have a keen interest in keeping up.
I agree that it is a spam based problem, but your solution would not work. Who is in control of the verification and validation process? How do you solve the impossible task of preventing spammers from becoming validated and verified senders as well. SPF prevents me from saying I am someone else, though it doesn't prevent abuse of the SPF record, anyone can simply say they allow stupidly large numbers of computers to be authorized to send from any number of domains.
The cost barrier has never stopped spammers from buying up millions of throw away domain names, they have to be making serious money somewhere along the way.
Nice idea, just a pity it wont work. There are some very smart people working over the problem, if there was an easy solution, it would have happened long ago. I'm guessing many people here will have had an uninformed boss or two ask about affiliate programs, distributed marketing schemes, page ranking, and a host of similar trashy scams. Sometimes it's hard to say no to the person that hands out the money every pay day.
It's a human problem with no all encompassing technical solution.
The term Analogue or Digital is not so relevant. There is a visible energy lobe for just about every transmission type, even spread spectrum is obvious and usually well above the noise floor on just about any low end spec/an. TV might fully go the way of copper or fiber, but there are still millions upon millions of other uses for radio. Look how wide spread WiFi has become in just a few short years. You only need a few milliwatts of power on the right frequency to be picked up by satellite. RADAR pumping out kilowatts of energy, emergency services, military, the list is endless. I would imagine radio isn't going to vanish anywhere in the next few hundred (or thousand) generations, unless we stone age ourselves in between.
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Don't you think that Apple resetting the SIM lock is a rather different matter though? I buy an iPhone and pay AT&T a big wad of cash to end the contract. They either hand over the unlock code or they don't - doesn't matter, US law says I can circumvent this anyway. So, I have my nice shiny iPhone, no contract, unlocked to work with any service provider I choose, then Apple comes along and screws me over by locking me back to AT&T, and while they are at it, they change the system so that it can't be unlocked (At this point in time)
Having an expectation that the firmware will screw over software modifications is one thing, but dicking with SIM locks is indeed a nice little legal issue just waiting for a judge to rule against Apple.
Seriously, I don't get the joke?
Right now the safebrowsing stuff seems to be turned on by default in firefox, this leaves a nice little constant annoyance in the proxy logs. Multiply it by the size of any large corporate office and it becomes nothing short of a waste of bandwidth. (Waste being subjective naturally)
Things like this obviously don't double the traffic, but they do still create noise.
Try and think with your own brain once in a while, repeating what you've seen or heard other people say is just sheepish. The iphone was designed to operate within the GSM specification, it was not designed to operate on a single network. If iphone users have not contracted with AT&T, where exactly is their obligation to do so? All they did was buy a piece of hardware. People have the absolute right to have the simlocks removed, indeed US law even says they can do this. I suspect Apple will eventually find they have a legal obligation to make their updates work with the iPhone, unlocked or otherwise.
"..at one of the fastest growing west coast digital media agencies.." - as a management drone naturally you are compelled to offer up this drivel, however I, as a potential client, would look elsewhere the very moment you uttered those words. If you have to say how great you are, then you are absolutely not worth the value of my money.
If you agency is so great, post your website, give out a little more than just your worthless marketing rhetoric.
Perhaps to clarify a little - countries like Indonesia make huge use of satellite for inter-island communications. If you point a dish at near any satellite in the clark belt you'll see they are almost all loaded up with packet switched networks, E1's, or T1's - In the case of the latter two systems, these are generally filled with compressed voice trunks - including loads of cellular stuff. I think it's still fairly safe to say that a decent percentage of voice calls are routed via satellite depending upon the daily deals that carriers negotiate. They are not in it for call quality, low latency, pathways, or any other advantage the users might gain, it's simply how cheaply they can get your call to its destination.
--
Ex 3 letter agency drone.
So the whole 'manager' title is now no better than the lofty responsibilities associated with flipping burgers? You tell someone they are a manager, then you let them make decisions, the title deserves that respect. Seems to me that the glass towered retards at the top don't understand that a couple of phone calls might have solved this issue far better than suspending him and very possibly losing a crap load of sales. You might not like the guy's ideology, but you can bet the average middle class soccer mom cares far less about some random companies bottom line.
I'm well beyond 18-21 years of age, though I don't think what this guy did was something I would disapprove of. If I want my child to have a game, I can always go and buy it myself.
It's a pity you posted AC. Who ever you are, you've obviously never been hit with the wrong end of a law suite. (It ain't fun) If you had, you'd know beyond any doubt that no amount of self delusional geek greatness makes you more intelligent than a trained lawyer at home in their profession. Legal work is not just a bunch of books filled with simple 'if then' statements - logic be damned, the legal system is artistic, creative, and deeply complex, logical it is not - comparing the two fields is not only apples to oranges, it is also absurd and makes me think you are a fool. Being on the receiving end of a subpoena is scary, stressful, gut wrenching, and costly. I hope you never have to experience it, though if you do, and then manage to pass on through and in to the light at the other end, I also hope you find yourself with new found respect for the profession.
Not all lawyers are greedy scumbags, just the same as not all computer programmers are self absorbed retards that think they are infinitely superior to mere '(l)users'
I'm a geek, not a lawyer, I do like to think I know when to shut my mouth and let others speak on my behalf.
Yours would only be a possible theory if he were actually flying in an aircraft capable of flight at altitude high enough to bring on hypoxia. He isn't, at least not very easily, so passing out is pretty low on the list. Having flown this type of aircraft myself, they are not exactly equipped with much in the way of instrumentation. Autopilot, very unlikely. It's an aerobatic machine. You lose consciousness in one of these, you very likely make a crater shortly thereafter.
I don't at all disagree with you, though a somewhat unrelated experience. I acquired a radar altimeter many years ago from an auction, very cheap, nobody knew what it was. I thought I'd give it (free) to the first aircraft owner that wanted it. It weighed less than 1 kilogram, had a bog standard sized display, just a small dial with altitude markers. In perfect working condition, still had the plastic and foam wrapping from the factory. Nobody wanted it. The most common rejection was simply that it was too heavy, can't afford the weight penalty. Tried crop duster pilots, general aviation, and a bunch of ultralight communities. Same response. That logic is astounding given the thing would be an excellent additional information point in nearly every instance. Safety comes to mind foremost.
I ended up taking it to an airshow, left it in a maintenance hanger with a note saying 'Free radar altimeter, requires a good home'
I guess my point is that 21 pounds might seem like a huge penalty to you, though to others it's an appropriate addition for those 'just in case' moments.
I don't know that you really understand the corporate mindset behind locking down of phones. It's not about making the hardware cheaper, on a world scale it's already about as cheap as it's going to get - America is part of a small and unique set of countries in which the phone companies have given people the ability to get a desirable object 'right now', often with no up front payment - it feels like it's free. The contract already makes the phone company more money than what they paid for the handset, plus enough to keep their systems running, along with a little extra to bolster the profit margins.
They've found ways to make even more money on top of this by tweaking firmware to force customers to pay extra for things they could have already done for free. This is a cash cow, nothing less. People want the phone as soon as they feel the urge to have it, the market built itself around this desire. It's not wrong, I don't even think that it's bad. After all, even in America people can still buy a phone outright. They have a choice.
I wonder if they will work their website much like the 3rd party unlock stuff for Sony Ericsson. I can't imagine they would sell the entire program, more likely it'll be missing some key components so that users are forced to pay a fee to complete the unlock process (by logging in to their server)
Commercial satellites do indeed have the ability to reveal individual houses, quite easily in fact. Quickbird can resolve to about 60cm per pixel. The only reason they don't put in better optics is political. After that it's all atmospherics. The pictures taken from aircraft are often no better than satellite imagery. Spin google earth somewhere that is not centered on the US and you'll begin to understand.
Yeah, you are right except for the state of the art in prop design. What makes you think the US is far more advanced than anyone else? If I were building a submarine, it'd only help me see what 'you' were up to. There is precious little value in the photograph since anyone building a stealthy submarine will have access to similar types of water tunnels, test facilities, and engineers. The picture is far too low in resolution to be of significant value. One can conclude the optimum performance of a nuclear submarine with simple common sense - go as fast as possible, and do it as quietly as possible - the physics are the same no matter which ocean you are in. Where it might become interesting is if they are using variable pitch or some completely unique and non-conventional design, otherwise the real secrets are in other noise reduction areas that can't be seen. Insulating crew and mechanical noise from reaching the hull.
In the intelligence world, this would be marked somewhere around the secret level at most, scrub out the image source information, and classification will drop much lower. I have seen a lot of imagery make the nightly news during the 10 years I was in the game.
Don't be misled by GSM, it suffers from the very same problems as WiFi, not quite as bad depending upon the frequency the phone wants to use at any given moment. The reason it works so well is simply because they install their antennas directly inside buildings, subways, and just about every walkway that has high enough traffic to earn the carriers extra money. Take a look on the ceiling of just about every shopping center in Hong Kong and you'll see small domed antenna with telco logo's. This is for GSM/3G etc. I live up on the 30th-ish floor of a city building, use a couple of directional yagi antenna for *ahem* free wifi. On any given day I have over 200 AP's to chose from. The vast majority of these are open. The reason you probably don't get anything on the ground is simply because the radio environment is too noisy. Invest in a parabolic dish and that problem will go away.
GSM base stations transmit with much greater power than wifi, but still don't penetrate walls so good either.
Not strictly, the access point could linked using its own transmitter to another router that does provide internet. I do this at home using 3rd party software on a few different linksys routers. It affects throughput a little, but not so significantly that it matters for just a few users. Commercial WiFi gear is far more versatile, the technology already exists to do this on a much larger scale.
I'm not sure what fanboy coolaid you are drinking, but nokia have been far from innovative in handset design. It took them years to understand that phones could actually be designed a tad more stylish than the standard house brick format. Sony Ericsson have it right, fast OS and far more intuitive interfaces, better music players, better sound. The only thing symbian has going for it is that it allows 3rd party software, though this is becoming far more convoluted and difficult with every new iteration of the OS.
No, it will be more expensive, have an illogical and clunky user interface, and take 8 firmware revisions before it becomes remotely stable enough to use. (I used to be a nokia fan boy, though I stopped with the N80 which cost me around $750 US when first released) As has now become tradition, nokia will require that every single piece of software be signed before installation, though they will find a way to screw that process up even more than they have now. The operating system will spend more time chatting to the TPM chip than all previous symbian versions put together, DRM will be significantly enhanced and soak up any remaining CPU cycles such that it takes at least 3 seconds for any key press to register, followed by another 4 seconds to update the screen. (And that's on a good day)
Until nokia pull their heads out of their collective arses and ease up on the pointless file system restrictions, symbian 3rd edition was the last straw not only for me, but a good many others going by forum chatter. I will not be buying nokia at all.
The alternatives aren't much better, but at least most have already been broken by 3rd party solutions. BB5 is still hit and miss.
It would make far more sense if you weren't so ignorant. You truly believe America is the shining bastion of human rights? Try switching off the fox news for a bit, pick a different channel once in a while. How the fuck did yahoo violate this guys human rights? He chose to use yahoo completely of his own free will - a point that many posters here conveniently overlook - yahoo China was required to hand over information to Chinese law enforcement. They followed Chinese law and did so. Why the need to make such a big deal about it? The guy screwed up and said things that have landed him in jail, he screwed up all on his own. You want yahoo to be responsible not only for your daft outlook on the world, but also for what people can or can't say in email?
Sucks to be the guy, but he could just have easily reported on the traffic or butterflies along the Mekong instead.
>> Ask the journalist who's going to be tortured in jail for the next ten years what chaos is.
Even in China people have free will you know. Given that you don't live there, and from your language, have very probably never been there, how are you even remotely aware that this person will be tortured? Do you not think ~you~ are being hypocritical here? (I know I certainly think you are) Isn't the US condoning torture right now as we type these messages. Conveniently moving prisons to countries where the law is rather less particular about the methods. Maybe you should take a good long look at yourself and the practices of corporate America before you go imposing your misguided ideology. (Maybe you were just fishing for the +5 karma)
I'm not quite sure if you are trolling, perhaps not. Here in the Philippines, most hospitals have overcome this simply by keeping up to date with modern equipment. Everything is shielded, there are no bans at all on cell phones in any part of the vast majority of hospitals. I'm not sure where you from, though I guess the difference could be somewhat cultural - in the US it seems to me that people like someone or something to blame, no matter how outlandish the logic. I know this is a stereotype, but it does exist.
Haven't you seen enough stories here on slashdot that debunk the whole aircraft and fuel station dangers?
I'm not sure what kind of cell phone you have that you might think it could be remotely activated to become a nice little spy toy. I don't know of any evidence that is indicative of off the shelf consumer device being able to do those things in their default state. I've been around active SIGINT for a lot of years, if it were that easy, it'd would have been exploited years ago. Symbian doesn't allow squat to get installed without a series of confirmation dialogs, if there were a remote way in over the air or otherwise, it would be have been exploited many times over. The unlocking scene has long since reverse engineered every aspect of most phones, they'd be the first to speak up if they found back doors of this magnitude, not for the spying ability, but simply because it would be fool proof way to bypass TPM.
I don't quite understand how more security options would equate to less control for the system owner in such a way that it would matter to the owner. Never underestimate the small (very large actually) benefit of encryption. VOIP is no more complicated to intercept than any other trunk. I personally don't want to be categorized, logged, parameterized, and stored in a nice big database by any number of 3 letter agencies right across the world. Ultimately it's not so much that they can hear what I say, but more about the traffic analysis that is possible and how easy it can be to elevate ones 'insignificant' status to something a little less innocuous.
Encryption doesn't solve the fact that I communicated with A, who then communicated with B and C, while X - a known bad guy, called up C and dragged me in to focus, even though I've never heard of B, C or X. Most people don't care, but having worked for the man myself, I have a bit of a vested interest in the state of the art. It's a never ending arms race between convenient consumer solutions, and those behind the scenes that have a keen interest in keeping up.
Subject: Where did you take that?
From: <corrym@email.cz>
Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2007 15:12:52 +0100
To: <Removed>
If your dad see this video you made, he is gonna kill you. here is the link I got http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34BmcXqxdPo
I agree that it is a spam based problem, but your solution would not work. Who is in control of the verification and validation process? How do you solve the impossible task of preventing spammers from becoming validated and verified senders as well. SPF prevents me from saying I am someone else, though it doesn't prevent abuse of the SPF record, anyone can simply say they allow stupidly large numbers of computers to be authorized to send from any number of domains.
The cost barrier has never stopped spammers from buying up millions of throw away domain names, they have to be making serious money somewhere along the way.
Nice idea, just a pity it wont work. There are some very smart people working over the problem, if there was an easy solution, it would have happened long ago. I'm guessing many people here will have had an uninformed boss or two ask about affiliate programs, distributed marketing schemes, page ranking, and a host of similar trashy scams. Sometimes it's hard to say no to the person that hands out the money every pay day.
It's a human problem with no all encompassing technical solution.
The term Analogue or Digital is not so relevant. There is a visible energy lobe for just about every transmission type, even spread spectrum is obvious and usually well above the noise floor on just about any low end spec/an. TV might fully go the way of copper or fiber, but there are still millions upon millions of other uses for radio. Look how wide spread WiFi has become in just a few short years. You only need a few milliwatts of power on the right frequency to be picked up by satellite. RADAR pumping out kilowatts of energy, emergency services, military, the list is endless. I would imagine radio isn't going to vanish anywhere in the next few hundred (or thousand) generations, unless we stone age ourselves in between.