Is what I've been being told for years now. When I point out that it's been the plan ALL ALONG to expand them out into a Stasi-style force on the highways, in the subways, at the shopping malls, at sporting events, I was branded a tinfoil-hat nutter.
Opposition to the bill, at least in its original form, isn't just from crazy civil libertarian types, either; reader judgecorp points out that it even includes Deputy prime minister of Britain Nick Clegg.
So now, even on Slashdot, anyone who gives a damn about their privacy is "crazy"? The Ministry of Truth is doing a superb job.
Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention.
From a security standpoint, I prefer the FreeBSD model. Nothing extra running, and very secure by default. Anything that's running is there because I made it to do so, and nothing more. The hoops are generally there to make sure the system stays secured.
Don't bother. People on here don't understand basic economics. They think that somehow these pizza joints (franchises mostly that have nothing much to do with John Schnatter anyway...barely keep their heads above water) are raking in cash hand over fist and greedily sticking it into their vaults to swim in occasionally. This is patently false.
If it costs them an extra $50,000 a year to run a restaurant, many will be forced to lay people off, simply because they can't afford to pay them anymore. Some restaurants may even close. But somehow, in the new Amerika, this is progress?
It boggles the mind. Fix the problem within the healthcare system, then worry about forcing the poorest individuals to pay a tax if they don't have healthcare. But since it was packaged up and shoved in the sickly-sweet loving liberal exterior, it has to be good...and anyone who understands the real ramifications of the healthcare act is a very very bad person and/or a racist.
It's not the end of the world, and it'll all get resolved in a day or two; but that's a day or two of mayhem, followed by a couple weeks of clean-up. And it all cost $500 to the terrorist -- which can just as easily be a local. Or worse, a local with an imported cellphone, who doesn't know that he's the one causing the mayhem.
Dude, you can't take down an entire city's communication network with a $500 box or a screwed-up handset. You could jam one cell site, at best. Probably only one sector of one cell site, though. On one carrier. Stop spreading this FUD and bullshit.
In the scenario described in TFA, landlines would still work, 2G would still work, 3G would still work, 4G LTE data might be down on one carrier (in the geographic area covered by one sector of one cell site), but the other carriers and every other sector on the given site will probably still be working. Not to mention every other cell site in the city (most large cities have hundreds or even up near a thousand per carrier) owned by the targeted carrier would still work. Police radios will still work (currently, unless they move to LTE which is completely asinine, but what the article is suggesting.) Amateur radios will still work. Walkie-talkies will still work. The internet will still work.
Please stop watching so many 2012 endoftheworldomgapocalypse movies and action thrillers. They are fiction, things are much more complicated and hard to pull off in real life. If you were transmitting a strong enough signal to jam an entire major city, you would be tracked down in about 45 seconds flat.
Life isn't as scary as the TV would have you believe.
I don't doubt that they are planning to use LTE for public safety, I just question why they would *want* to use LTE for public safety. It's super-fast, but that's where the benefits end from what I've seen. It seems to have mediocre propagation characteristics even at low frequencies, every LTE device I've ever seen will intermittently drop the connection then take a few minutes to restart it, and does indeed seem to have issues with interference in addition to questionable performance in situations with poor signal strength.
Any public safety network (in addition to using not-ready-for-primetime air interfaces such as LTE) should have some kind of analog or failsafe digital fallback mode that uses more robust, rudimentary protocols to fend off attacks such as these, be they intentional or accidental. At any rate, this really should be a non-issue as the number of base stations needed to provide wall to wall LTE service in a city will mitigate this specific attack pretty well.
You can jam radio frequency communications with a sufficiently powerful and/or noisy signal on the same frequency? Who would have thought? I realize that the article is more about LTE's weaknesses, but trying to play it off as some national security weakness is total fearmongering.
Even if LTE is inherently weak against jamming attacks (which is probably by design for the "authorities" to shut it off as they please), so what if one idiot can jam one cell site? (which is what the article really says if you read it) That's really not the end of the world.
And what if he moves around all over the city? The outage follows him from cell to cell, but the others still continue to operate normally. And I could do the same with 1G, 2G, or 3G given a noisy enough or powerful enough signal on the same frequency. And why the hell would first responders/emergency workers be using LTE for anything critical, anyway? They have their own private trunked digital systems to use (that can also be jammed if one was so inclined to do).
So, that being said, can a "Battery Powered Transmitter Crash a City's 4G Network?"
Absolutely, if the city has only one 4G cell site in the city.
Yeah it seems to me that using fake evidence to sue a someone is fraud no matter who the actors are. So assuming that the evidence was fake a crime was committed.
But using fabricated evidence to imprison people is what Police and District Attorneys do across these United States every day. So, it only matters whether or not you are part of the power structure. So, basically, it's cool to lie to a judge as long as you're doing it for "good".
I don't think people understand the definition of secure, then. Before you start worrying about your messages being secure after they leave the device, you should be concerned with the security of the device itself. It's pretty widely accepted by those in the know that Android and iOS are effectively trojans (and/or can easily be compromised if you still believe the OS itself is secure) for spooks of all sorts. If a message absolutely, positively has to be secure, it should never touch a device capable of connecting to an "internet" of any kind.
Now all the Apple fans who decried that Tim Cook's Apple had gone soft and positively made the wrong decision after admitting failure concerning iOS 6 Maps can sleep better at night knowing he is just as big of a maniac, after all.
Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.
I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.
Yep, New York Daily New has the story here. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.
The young kid is still a terrorist. Good thing the police are treating it as "a crime against the government", since we're not in a world where a kid throwing rocks can be "shrugged off". No, indeed, we cannot ever ignore such violent acts of treason. And Linux? LINUX??? The white-text-on-black-screen OS of any true terrorist? I mean anyone who ever dumps out of the window system needs to be investigated thoroughly, let alone someone who does it to A GOVERNMENT COMPUTER?!
The IT guy was obviously working with the little kid to help Al-Qaida. "Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers." This happened Monday? Never forget 9/24. We must now enter a new era, a new world, a world of safety, plexiglass, and ubiquitous Windows 8 on machines with encrypted bootloaders. We'll enforce it all in an act called the Gabby Giffords windows and Windows Protection Act of 2012. Seriously. Never forget 9/24.
While this is most definitely great news for the DIY crowd and the independent repair shops, I don't think it was necessarily done to make things easier on us. Not trash-talking Apple at all for this move, but this is going to save them a metric shitton of money in the long run.
Apple replaces/repairs so many devices with cracked screens that bringing the repair time down from 45 minutes to practically nothing will make the profit margins on their warranties and AppleCare coverage skyrocket. And makes those of us who do these things for fun and profit very happy. Smart business move from all standpoints.
It shouldn't even be an issue. I bet he also had poison (probably under his kitchen sink in rat traps), chemical weapons (probably in a cabinet in the garage), and a whole host of other things that can be used to harm other people. Does he own a car? He could just as easily drive 100 miles an hour through a playground if his intent was actually to harm children. The equation of "$violent nutjob" == "firearms owner" is made every day in the news. It's so transparent anymore that I find it hard to believe people don't see it.
The people in charge can't stand an armed populace, and they want to make owning a gun about as fashionable as smoking unfilitered Lucky Strikes while driving your V8-powered American car with your kids in the back seat to go to McDonalds.
Good thing most of the people who do own guns could give a rat's hind end about being fashionable.
several guns and it's "oh no, he's either going to go on a shooting rampage or he's part of some anti-government anarchist militia!".
A "shooting rampage" is illegal. An "anti-government anarchist militia" is not illegal. Until they start shooting unprovoked. But most people probably believe that being a member of an anti-government group is illegal.
This is called thoughtcrime, and it seems to be running unchecked these days. I don't even own a gun, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that the men in black uniforms aren't the only people who have them.
Touching objects on a screen that look visually like what the physical representations of the function being peformed used to look like before we had PDAs and smartphones is ludicrous!
I'd much prefer a CLI so I can type "cd/usr/bin" then "./phoneapp dial -domestic +13125551212" whenever I want to make a phone call and "./phoneapp hangup -log/var/log/calls.today" when I hang up and want to add the details to a log file. That's much easier for me to understand, and should be self-explanatory to anyone if they just read the command.:)
If that's just too hard for some people, I guess we can have a GUI with red and green icons with antiquated pictures of analog handsets on them, for now. But those should eventually be deprecated in favor of some newer, more modern representation of what a phone looks like.
Let me start out by saying that I don't have any dog in the global warming fight, whatsoever (don't own any stock/have no affiliation with big oil OR big green). I think that, as a whole, people need to conserve resources and embrace new technologies to make the world a cleaner place. But I won't take it as far as the anti-human agenda of many of the fundie AGW supporters. That being said, why would you NOT want to release emails/research? It just gives the conspiracy theorists more fuel for their fires! It's things like this that make those who are not in the know skeptical about the things we say.
If anything, I say release all the emails, release all the data, be as open and transparent as possible. Funny how the people who scream about openness the most are the first to hide when the request comes their way.
No, you don't understand. Designing for multiple unique devices is soo last century. One day, when all you Androidists finally see the light you'll understand that this is what sets the iPhone apart. It thinks differently. And if that means black lines at the top and bottom of the screen, so be it.
I mean, seriously, how can the Apple messiahs be expected to support more than one different configuration? I don't think you understand how much effort goes in to making one device that exudes such elegance, such refined luxury, that Jesus himself would use it.
Android manufacturers can keep their unique, infinitely customizable, wide array of handsets with all their convoluted "options", while everyone else will do what any normal human would do: get the phone that is exactly the same as everyone else's, just as they long to be exactly the same as everyone else.
The RF section of my HTC Rezound blows every Samsung I've ever used out of the water. Only Motorolas have been better. In fact, I'm thinking of returning my GS3 that I paid full retail for because the radios suck so bad. And yes, I've already returned it and gotten another one, just to be sure it wasn't a lemon.
Even when the damage is data retention laws and the best censorship their wholly-owned politicians can shove through the legislature. Will the dying, dinosaur media companies ever realize that Pandora's box can never be closed, and the genie cannot be returned to the bottle?
You would think they would realize now, almost 15 years into this cat-and-mouse game that their offensives are futile, burn goodwill with their customers, and make them look like an angry old man who wants the kids off his lawn.
Smart record, production, and media companies take note right now: You WILL innovate, or you WILL go bankrupt. I'm not some radical pirate or communist, I'm giving you advice, trying to help you. Technology CANNOT be killed by legislation and propaganda. Your only hope is to adapt. Better to realize that now than before you are completely bankrupt. You're welcome.
Facilitating copyright infringement is a crime and has been upheld by the US courts. Linking to copyrighted material would fall under facilitation. You may not agree with it, but that's the way it is. Free speech doesn't give you cover for it either.
And the US courts are always infallible, right? You sound awfully Team USA with your statement.
If someone asks Siri where to hide a dead body, she will give them the locations of Dumps, Mineshafts, Quarries, etc. Would that make Apple accessory to murder?
Slashdot Mirror
So if someone points out the obvious (that every shooter is on some kind of psychoactive medication) they are somehow a scientologist?
And they will have nicely drawn-out lists of who to round-up.
Read in PBS-Style voiceover: "This list brought to you by AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, Twitter, and other message board posts like yours!"
Is what I've been being told for years now. When I point out that it's been the plan ALL ALONG to expand them out into a Stasi-style force on the highways, in the subways, at the shopping malls, at sporting events, I was branded a tinfoil-hat nutter.
Now what, bootlickers?
Opposition to the bill, at least in its original form, isn't just from crazy civil libertarian types, either; reader judgecorp points out that it even includes Deputy prime minister of Britain Nick Clegg.
So now, even on Slashdot, anyone who gives a damn about their privacy is "crazy"? The Ministry of Truth is doing a superb job.
Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention.
From a security standpoint, I prefer the FreeBSD model. Nothing extra running, and very secure by default. Anything that's running is there because I made it to do so, and nothing more. The hoops are generally there to make sure the system stays secured.
Don't bother. People on here don't understand basic economics. They think that somehow these pizza joints (franchises mostly that have nothing much to do with John Schnatter anyway...barely keep their heads above water) are raking in cash hand over fist and greedily sticking it into their vaults to swim in occasionally. This is patently false.
If it costs them an extra $50,000 a year to run a restaurant, many will be forced to lay people off, simply because they can't afford to pay them anymore. Some restaurants may even close. But somehow, in the new Amerika, this is progress?
It boggles the mind. Fix the problem within the healthcare system, then worry about forcing the poorest individuals to pay a tax if they don't have healthcare. But since it was packaged up and shoved in the sickly-sweet loving liberal exterior, it has to be good...and anyone who understands the real ramifications of the healthcare act is a very very bad person and/or a racist.
It's not the end of the world, and it'll all get resolved in a day or two; but that's a day or two of mayhem, followed by a couple weeks of clean-up. And it all cost $500 to the terrorist -- which can just as easily be a local. Or worse, a local with an imported cellphone, who doesn't know that he's the one causing the mayhem.
Dude, you can't take down an entire city's communication network with a $500 box or a screwed-up handset. You could jam one cell site, at best. Probably only one sector of one cell site, though. On one carrier. Stop spreading this FUD and bullshit.
In the scenario described in TFA, landlines would still work, 2G would still work, 3G would still work, 4G LTE data might be down on one carrier (in the geographic area covered by one sector of one cell site), but the other carriers and every other sector on the given site will probably still be working. Not to mention every other cell site in the city (most large cities have hundreds or even up near a thousand per carrier) owned by the targeted carrier would still work. Police radios will still work (currently, unless they move to LTE which is completely asinine, but what the article is suggesting.) Amateur radios will still work. Walkie-talkies will still work. The internet will still work.
Please stop watching so many 2012 endoftheworldomgapocalypse movies and action thrillers. They are fiction, things are much more complicated and hard to pull off in real life. If you were transmitting a strong enough signal to jam an entire major city, you would be tracked down in about 45 seconds flat.
Life isn't as scary as the TV would have you believe.
I don't doubt that they are planning to use LTE for public safety, I just question why they would *want* to use LTE for public safety. It's super-fast, but that's where the benefits end from what I've seen. It seems to have mediocre propagation characteristics even at low frequencies, every LTE device I've ever seen will intermittently drop the connection then take a few minutes to restart it, and does indeed seem to have issues with interference in addition to questionable performance in situations with poor signal strength.
Any public safety network (in addition to using not-ready-for-primetime air interfaces such as LTE) should have some kind of analog or failsafe digital fallback mode that uses more robust, rudimentary protocols to fend off attacks such as these, be they intentional or accidental. At any rate, this really should be a non-issue as the number of base stations needed to provide wall to wall LTE service in a city will mitigate this specific attack pretty well.
You can jam radio frequency communications with a sufficiently powerful and/or noisy signal on the same frequency? Who would have thought? I realize that the article is more about LTE's weaknesses, but trying to play it off as some national security weakness is total fearmongering. Even if LTE is inherently weak against jamming attacks (which is probably by design for the "authorities" to shut it off as they please), so what if one idiot can jam one cell site? (which is what the article really says if you read it) That's really not the end of the world. And what if he moves around all over the city? The outage follows him from cell to cell, but the others still continue to operate normally. And I could do the same with 1G, 2G, or 3G given a noisy enough or powerful enough signal on the same frequency. And why the hell would first responders/emergency workers be using LTE for anything critical, anyway? They have their own private trunked digital systems to use (that can also be jammed if one was so inclined to do). So, that being said, can a "Battery Powered Transmitter Crash a City's 4G Network?" Absolutely, if the city has only one 4G cell site in the city.
Yeah it seems to me that using fake evidence to sue a someone is fraud no matter who the actors are. So assuming that the evidence was fake a crime was committed.
But using fabricated evidence to imprison people is what Police and District Attorneys do across these United States every day. So, it only matters whether or not you are part of the power structure. So, basically, it's cool to lie to a judge as long as you're doing it for "good".
On Android or iOS?
I don't think people understand the definition of secure, then. Before you start worrying about your messages being secure after they leave the device, you should be concerned with the security of the device itself. It's pretty widely accepted by those in the know that Android and iOS are effectively trojans (and/or can easily be compromised if you still believe the OS itself is secure) for spooks of all sorts. If a message absolutely, positively has to be secure, it should never touch a device capable of connecting to an "internet" of any kind.
Now all the Apple fans who decried that Tim Cook's Apple had gone soft and positively made the wrong decision after admitting failure concerning iOS 6 Maps can sleep better at night knowing he is just as big of a maniac, after all.
Tim Cook goofed.
Because he's not a lying egomaniac? I hope you were being sarcastic, but you can never be too sure.
I appreciate his honesty and willingness to be forthcoming about a flaw in their product.
Elsewhere it was revealed that it was a young kid who threw the rocks, and a staffer "accidentally" wiped the computers with a Linux disk.
I say accidentally because he was being investigated for illegal use of campaign funds, and some of the data that may have been of interest to the investigation was lost. And it's not exactly trivial to accidentally wipe your disks with a Linux disk. I can see someone doing it, but you do have to go through enough steps that you have to have been trying to do *something* with that disk even if it wasn't wiping the system.
Yep, New York Daily New has the story here. Apparently like the data wasn't deleted and whoever they had to do their IT didn't know enough about Linux and partitions to realise.
The young kid is still a terrorist. Good thing the police are treating it as "a crime against the government", since we're not in a world where a kid throwing rocks can be "shrugged off". No, indeed, we cannot ever ignore such violent acts of treason. And Linux? LINUX??? The white-text-on-black-screen OS of any true terrorist? I mean anyone who ever dumps out of the window system needs to be investigated thoroughly, let alone someone who does it to A GOVERNMENT COMPUTER?!
The IT guy was obviously working with the little kid to help Al-Qaida. "Grimm and his staffers said the vandalism — cement blocks were thrown through the office's windows — is a cover-up for the attacks on the computers." This happened Monday? Never forget 9/24. We must now enter a new era, a new world, a world of safety, plexiglass, and ubiquitous Windows 8 on machines with encrypted bootloaders. We'll enforce it all in an act called the Gabby Giffords windows and Windows Protection Act of 2012. Seriously. Never forget 9/24.
While this is most definitely great news for the DIY crowd and the independent repair shops, I don't think it was necessarily done to make things easier on us. Not trash-talking Apple at all for this move, but this is going to save them a metric shitton of money in the long run.
Apple replaces/repairs so many devices with cracked screens that bringing the repair time down from 45 minutes to practically nothing will make the profit margins on their warranties and AppleCare coverage skyrocket. And makes those of us who do these things for fun and profit very happy. Smart business move from all standpoints.
It shouldn't even be an issue. I bet he also had poison (probably under his kitchen sink in rat traps), chemical weapons (probably in a cabinet in the garage), and a whole host of other things that can be used to harm other people. Does he own a car? He could just as easily drive 100 miles an hour through a playground if his intent was actually to harm children. The equation of "$violent nutjob" == "firearms owner" is made every day in the news. It's so transparent anymore that I find it hard to believe people don't see it.
The people in charge can't stand an armed populace, and they want to make owning a gun about as fashionable as smoking unfilitered Lucky Strikes while driving your V8-powered American car with your kids in the back seat to go to McDonalds.
Good thing most of the people who do own guns could give a rat's hind end about being fashionable.
several guns and it's "oh no, he's either going to go on a shooting rampage or he's part of some anti-government anarchist militia!".
A "shooting rampage" is illegal. An "anti-government anarchist militia" is not illegal. Until they start shooting unprovoked. But most people probably believe that being a member of an anti-government group is illegal.
This is called thoughtcrime, and it seems to be running unchecked these days. I don't even own a gun, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that the men in black uniforms aren't the only people who have them.
Touching objects on a screen that look visually like what the physical representations of the function being peformed used to look like before we had PDAs and smartphones is ludicrous!
/usr/bin" then "./phoneapp dial -domestic +13125551212" whenever I want to make a phone call and "./phoneapp hangup -log /var/log/calls.today" when I hang up and want to add the details to a log file. That's much easier for me to understand, and should be self-explanatory to anyone if they just read the command. :)
I'd much prefer a CLI so I can type "cd
If that's just too hard for some people, I guess we can have a GUI with red and green icons with antiquated pictures of analog handsets on them, for now. But those should eventually be deprecated in favor of some newer, more modern representation of what a phone looks like.
Let me start out by saying that I don't have any dog in the global warming fight, whatsoever (don't own any stock/have no affiliation with big oil OR big green). I think that, as a whole, people need to conserve resources and embrace new technologies to make the world a cleaner place. But I won't take it as far as the anti-human agenda of many of the fundie AGW supporters. That being said, why would you NOT want to release emails/research? It just gives the conspiracy theorists more fuel for their fires! It's things like this that make those who are not in the know skeptical about the things we say.
If anything, I say release all the emails, release all the data, be as open and transparent as possible. Funny how the people who scream about openness the most are the first to hide when the request comes their way.
No, you don't understand. Designing for multiple unique devices is soo last century. One day, when all you Androidists finally see the light you'll understand that this is what sets the iPhone apart. It thinks differently. And if that means black lines at the top and bottom of the screen, so be it.
I mean, seriously, how can the Apple messiahs be expected to support more than one different configuration? I don't think you understand how much effort goes in to making one device that exudes such elegance, such refined luxury, that Jesus himself would use it.
Android manufacturers can keep their unique, infinitely customizable, wide array of handsets with all their convoluted "options", while everyone else will do what any normal human would do: get the phone that is exactly the same as everyone else's, just as they long to be exactly the same as everyone else.
It's not chump change, but I think most people fail to realize that the Samsung corporation is much more than just Samsung Electronics, the TV, cellphone and electronic gadget maker.. This link should give people an idea of how big Samsung really is.
A billion, while it hurts, doesn't hurt all that bad.
"I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
"We've always been shameless about stealing great ideas" --Steve Jobs "Good artists copy, great artists steal" --Steve Jobs
The RF section of my HTC Rezound blows every Samsung I've ever used out of the water. Only Motorolas have been better. In fact, I'm thinking of returning my GS3 that I paid full retail for because the radios suck so bad. And yes, I've already returned it and gotten another one, just to be sure it wasn't a lemon.
Even when the damage is data retention laws and the best censorship their wholly-owned politicians can shove through the legislature. Will the dying, dinosaur media companies ever realize that Pandora's box can never be closed, and the genie cannot be returned to the bottle?
You would think they would realize now, almost 15 years into this cat-and-mouse game that their offensives are futile, burn goodwill with their customers, and make them look like an angry old man who wants the kids off his lawn.
Smart record, production, and media companies take note right now: You WILL innovate, or you WILL go bankrupt. I'm not some radical pirate or communist, I'm giving you advice, trying to help you. Technology CANNOT be killed by legislation and propaganda. Your only hope is to adapt. Better to realize that now than before you are completely bankrupt. You're welcome.
Facilitating copyright infringement is a crime and has been upheld by the US courts. Linking to copyrighted material would fall under facilitation. You may not agree with it, but that's the way it is. Free speech doesn't give you cover for it either.
And the US courts are always infallible, right? You sound awfully Team USA with your statement.
If someone asks Siri where to hide a dead body, she will give them the locations of Dumps, Mineshafts, Quarries, etc. Would that make Apple accessory to murder?