The best theft is one where the victim doesn't know that they were stolen from.
The second best theft is one where the victim doesn't know when they were stolen from.
The ability to quickly gain access to a locked place without leaving any sign that one gained access would be incredibly useful, especially in environments where valuables are routinely left in cars. Laptops and technical service tools would be big targets in-general, and some people in certain occupations would also be excellent targets for the privileged information that might be in a briefcase in an otherwise-securely-locked trunk.
Then there's the issue of people that leave things in their cars, like copies of their housekeys, that could let a thief in to somewhere else that's more lucrative, or those that leave extra vehicle keys in vehicles so that once a locksmith would let them back-in to the car after they lose their primary keys, they could drive away.
I can see this being an incredibly big problem depending on proliferation. It should at least require people to stop keeping expensive things in trunks that might have been somewhat safe through being hidden.
So to get this straight, you're saying that the German advance into the Soviet Union, starting in 1941, that occupied Belarus, the Baltic states, Russia's half of divided Poland, Ukraine, Crimea, and the western portion of Russia, to the point that it besieged Leningrad, destroyed Stalingrad, and reached the outskirts of Moscow, was not the Soviet Union getting the crap beat out of it by Germany?
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not discounting the Soviet Union in World War 2, as they committed the most men and the most effort to defeating Germany and they took the most German territory as the two fronts approached each other. I'm merely pointing out that they suffered heavy casualties, territorial loss, and materiel losses before the tide turned and they were able to repel the Germans and take territory themselves. Pretending like the Soviet Union didn't suffer horrific losses is discounting the suffering of those at minimum twenty million dead.
The price for a USB stick is so low these days that it will cost more to manage the mailing and return than the stick is worth. And why do they have to format the media? Just let them delete the file if they want to, and then use the stick.
NO, you cannot reuse the stick.
First off, the network is probably airgapped for a reason. There are many known attacks to airgaps, and using a USB drive is a great way to infiltrate and exfiltrate information.
Think something like Stuxnet - it infected an airgapped network, and for that to work, the creators probably did tricks to exfiltrate information to get a map of the network layout.
The only safe way is after the USB stick is used, is to destroy it.
That's part why I suggested formatting and then sending it back, if the method of couriering the media is secure then the originating party can inspect the flash (as formatting isn't terribly thorough) but formatting it might stop the malware from actually executing on a random third-party's computer if something happens and the media is lost. I suppose that is inadequate in some applications though. Maybe a way to preserve the USB media for forensic inspection would be to have a literal bin like hospitals use for sharps disposal where the used media are deposited, to be collected periodically by someone that will forensically analyze them to check the health of the air-gapped network before destroying them.
Also, always assume that your airgapped network is infected. There are many instances where this has been the case - even the US Air Force got their drone control computers infected through USB sticks (meant to update map data).
I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of PROM options these days. It seems like it's making this more difficult than it used to be, especially with the demise of conventional serial and parallel.
I was assuming that this was more of a medium-security system. It's offline because it has no reason to be online, as opposed to being offline because it has a specific reason to not be online.
If it has a specific reason to not be online, then I expect that it might not even have an optical drive, depending on what it's used for. If it's that important then it might not even have external USB ports either. A service technician would have to open up the computer to use an internal USB header to interface to whatever media the update is delivered on. No external USB and no externally-accessible media readers mean that those with casual use of the machines (like another comment mentioning a military drone-aircraft application) probably can't physically tamper terribly easily, but the service technician could do whatever is needed.
I did some quick searching to see if anyone makes a single-write PROM on USB; I could not find one. It looks like about four years ago Toshiba announced an SD module that was write-once through the way its onboard controller was programmed, but I couldn't find a source for them, and if it's a matter of programming in the SD controller I'd be concerned that someone sufficiently motivated might still try to tamper with the SD controller to let them then tamper with the contents.
It does look like there's a shortage of modern read-only tech these days, optical disc appears to really be the only game in town and it comes with its own baggage.
Ship encrypted files on flash with instructions for them to call when the media arrives. Provide phone support to walk them through the install process, where you provide the password to the files at that time. Once the patch is installed, walk them through formatting the flash media and mailing it back to you.
If you really want to be fancy, make the installer check for something that is supposed to be on a legitimate customer system before it even prompts for credentials to decrypt the files, to make sure that it is being used on the correct machines and that it actually is the customer calling.
Never the less, Stalin was very, very angry with the United States and with the United Kingdom as his country lost territory and people to the Germans while he perceived the US and UK as not helping with the war itself. He was also very angry that technical assistance to the Soviet Union was limited; heavy bombers and other large war machines were not sent to the Soviet Union.
In some ways I can't really blame the West. Stalin played realpolitik with the Germans to try to gain territory located between the two of them; Russia also dropped-out of WWI after becoming a Soviet state. Looking at that timeline, Russia started out as antagonist to Germany in WWI, became neutral/friendly to them by the end of WWI, and remained neutral/friendly throughout the 20s and 30s until the hostilities that became WWII got going, where it allied with them to occupy Poland et al. Stalin may well have intended to betray the Germans, but until they attacked Russia and pushed so far into Russian territory there wasn't much reason for the West to look favorably upon the Soviet Union.
How many people know who Nikita Khrushchev is? He put nuclear missiles in Cuba and addressed the UN literally stating that he would bury the West. Putin is no Khrushchev.
Russia has been in an antagonistic relationship with "The West" for hundreds of years. For a time it was France. For a time it was the United Kingdom. For a time it was the Nordic countries. This current round of antagonism goes back to WWII and Russia getting the crap beat out of it by Germany before the US and the UK opened a second front.
Foreign leaders often end up as propaganda. In my relatively short time on this earth I've seen Arafat, Papa Doc, Manuel Noriega, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and probably others that I can't remember used by the media to drive ratings. If you randomly sampled Americans you'd probably find they only know Hussein, but it took two wars and a long occupation for that connection to be made.
Vladimir Putin will probably be just as forgotten to Americans as most of the rest of these men.
Shadowbanning is probably the stupidest form of moderator action. It doesn't address the behavior that caused a need for moderator or administrator action. If anything, for users that don't know that they're shadowbanned it makes them think that their abhorrent behavior is okay because they're still allowed to do it.
The only positive thing that shadowbanning does is to push-off the confrontation so that mods and admins don't have to deal with the day to day pushback from addressing site issues. I suppose that for sites reliant on ad revenue for traffic it also continues to allow that user traffic until the user realizes that they're banned, but it's still a poor way to go about it.
I suspect that Uber is only cheap because they're trying to steal market-share. They're going to want profit and prices will go up once they're indispensable.
If that were to become a regular problem, the law would change so that automakers would put the OBD port under the hood and the hood would be secured with fasteners like triple-square or something intentionally security-minded so that one couldn't access it without more time and tooling than is practical on the side of the street.
On top of that, in markets with expensive, limited quantity licensing, cab companies (the ones that actually own the medallions) would have an interest in eliminating the driver from the equation. They could run as few or as many cars as there's a demand for. Private owner-operators that own one license and one car could still operate that car too, but now they wouldn't necessarily have to be with it the whole time.
I expect that subscribed-to sedan services will increase in popularity as a step above taxis. Paying more than a conventional taxi and giving the subscriber the ability to report/reject cars that are in poor condition will allows the service to charge and ban offenders that mess up cars. On top of that, there are services for school buses where an on-vehicle camera system records the trip to a local disk only and overwrites the recordings after so many days unless a report is made that the footage needs to be pulled before it's overwritten, at which time it's retrieved over-the-air when the vehicle comes in for regular service at the company's garage. That system would work relatively well for a subscription car if it doesn't catch audio and isn't pulled unless there's an actual reason to pull it (like vandalism or evidence that the interior was used for a crime) so long as such conditions are made clear from the beginning.
Taxis will still be a thing, for either those that don't need a sedan often enough to justify paying for a subscription, or for those who cannot subscribe to a sedan service due to previous behavior. Used like a service they'd probably cost more, but used infrequently it wouldn't be that big of a deal. There would also be a greater likelihood of recordings being reviews more frequently.
Private car ownership will continue for people like me that have plenty of room for parking and like you, don't want to share the vehicle with unknown others. I look forward to scenic road trips where I can look at the scenery instead of always having to drive, though I would probably want the option to drive. It would be convenient when going to congested places to be able to be dropped off and let the car go find a place to park itself, or even for the car to just go home if the per-mile cost (like for an electric) is low.
There's also the concept of a work-for-hire. His work at the old institution, if he used that institution's resources like its staff and its equipment, could add a degree of work-for-hire to his results. They probably can't claim sole ownership, but I wouldn't be surprised if they can claim enough to essentially fork the project at the point where he left.
I don't doubt that specific strong-personalities are actually the ones fighting.
I expect that in the end, the data will be copied and both institutions will continue-on. The institution that lost the staff member probably has some legitimate claim to the data since the staff member was not working alone and was using university resources to pursue the work, and the staff member that left has legitimate claim to the work that he has done.
Last time I studied the phenomenon that was called Revolution. Sometimes it turns out the way that you want it to or close enough that life is good (ie, France), and sometimes the process is co-opted by powers that drag everyone down and those who co-opt manage to prop themselves up on top (ie, Russia, China, Zimbabwe).
I'm mildly curious to watch the ramifications of extremely permissive firearms law combined with a history of giving those most inclined to own them what some cultural trappings would claim is good while systematically taking away a lot of what's needed to actually afford to live. For the moment the platform appears to be working, but if that group suddenly finds that it can't afford to eat and can't afford any place to live while those that have funded the campaigns that put them there are more and more exposed for their manipulations if it'll cause something of an open-season on them. It might not, or it might be open-season on all rich people even though there are lots that want to expand social programs, but we won't know until it happens.
Though we're essentially reinventing the old, "cannonballs tied together with a length of chain" design but in miniature, aren't we?
I wonder if water with its associated surface tension could be used, if water would itself be inadequate. Use the mass of the water to carry the fibers...
Might be interesting to watch if pieces of a firearm are dropped-in individually, either over time or else in multiple portions of the yard to different competing gangs. Even funnier if something critical that couldn't be readily made from supplies on-hand was omitted.
Something too light won't have good flight characteristics, it'll be inclined to slow and deflect as it passes through air. Tungsten might be overkill, but it'd probably still need to be heavier than nylon.
I'm thinking that a consumer-grade pressure washer might be enough. It probably doesn't take that much mass or propeller-fouling to bring down a drone, and if the electronics aren't sealed then the water might find its way inside and short it out too.
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The best theft is one where the victim doesn't know that they were stolen from.
The second best theft is one where the victim doesn't know when they were stolen from.
The ability to quickly gain access to a locked place without leaving any sign that one gained access would be incredibly useful, especially in environments where valuables are routinely left in cars. Laptops and technical service tools would be big targets in-general, and some people in certain occupations would also be excellent targets for the privileged information that might be in a briefcase in an otherwise-securely-locked trunk.
Then there's the issue of people that leave things in their cars, like copies of their housekeys, that could let a thief in to somewhere else that's more lucrative, or those that leave extra vehicle keys in vehicles so that once a locksmith would let them back-in to the car after they lose their primary keys, they could drive away.
I can see this being an incredibly big problem depending on proliferation. It should at least require people to stop keeping expensive things in trunks that might have been somewhat safe through being hidden.
So to get this straight, you're saying that the German advance into the Soviet Union, starting in 1941, that occupied Belarus, the Baltic states, Russia's half of divided Poland, Ukraine, Crimea, and the western portion of Russia, to the point that it besieged Leningrad, destroyed Stalingrad, and reached the outskirts of Moscow, was not the Soviet Union getting the crap beat out of it by Germany?
Don't get me wrong, I am certainly not discounting the Soviet Union in World War 2, as they committed the most men and the most effort to defeating Germany and they took the most German territory as the two fronts approached each other. I'm merely pointing out that they suffered heavy casualties, territorial loss, and materiel losses before the tide turned and they were able to repel the Germans and take territory themselves. Pretending like the Soviet Union didn't suffer horrific losses is discounting the suffering of those at minimum twenty million dead.
NO, you cannot reuse the stick.
First off, the network is probably airgapped for a reason. There are many known attacks to airgaps, and using a USB drive is a great way to infiltrate and exfiltrate information.
Think something like Stuxnet - it infected an airgapped network, and for that to work, the creators probably did tricks to exfiltrate information to get a map of the network layout.
The only safe way is after the USB stick is used, is to destroy it.
That's part why I suggested formatting and then sending it back, if the method of couriering the media is secure then the originating party can inspect the flash (as formatting isn't terribly thorough) but formatting it might stop the malware from actually executing on a random third-party's computer if something happens and the media is lost. I suppose that is inadequate in some applications though. Maybe a way to preserve the USB media for forensic inspection would be to have a literal bin like hospitals use for sharps disposal where the used media are deposited, to be collected periodically by someone that will forensically analyze them to check the health of the air-gapped network before destroying them.
Also, always assume that your airgapped network is infected. There are many instances where this has been the case - even the US Air Force got their drone control computers infected through USB sticks (meant to update map data).
I'm a bit disappointed in the lack of PROM options these days. It seems like it's making this more difficult than it used to be, especially with the demise of conventional serial and parallel.
I was assuming that this was more of a medium-security system. It's offline because it has no reason to be online, as opposed to being offline because it has a specific reason to not be online.
If it has a specific reason to not be online, then I expect that it might not even have an optical drive, depending on what it's used for. If it's that important then it might not even have external USB ports either. A service technician would have to open up the computer to use an internal USB header to interface to whatever media the update is delivered on. No external USB and no externally-accessible media readers mean that those with casual use of the machines (like another comment mentioning a military drone-aircraft application) probably can't physically tamper terribly easily, but the service technician could do whatever is needed.
I did some quick searching to see if anyone makes a single-write PROM on USB; I could not find one. It looks like about four years ago Toshiba announced an SD module that was write-once through the way its onboard controller was programmed, but I couldn't find a source for them, and if it's a matter of programming in the SD controller I'd be concerned that someone sufficiently motivated might still try to tamper with the SD controller to let them then tamper with the contents.
It does look like there's a shortage of modern read-only tech these days, optical disc appears to really be the only game in town and it comes with its own baggage.
Ship encrypted files on flash with instructions for them to call when the media arrives. Provide phone support to walk them through the install process, where you provide the password to the files at that time. Once the patch is installed, walk them through formatting the flash media and mailing it back to you.
If you really want to be fancy, make the installer check for something that is supposed to be on a legitimate customer system before it even prompts for credentials to decrypt the files, to make sure that it is being used on the correct machines and that it actually is the customer calling.
Never the less, Stalin was very, very angry with the United States and with the United Kingdom as his country lost territory and people to the Germans while he perceived the US and UK as not helping with the war itself. He was also very angry that technical assistance to the Soviet Union was limited; heavy bombers and other large war machines were not sent to the Soviet Union.
In some ways I can't really blame the West. Stalin played realpolitik with the Germans to try to gain territory located between the two of them; Russia also dropped-out of WWI after becoming a Soviet state. Looking at that timeline, Russia started out as antagonist to Germany in WWI, became neutral/friendly to them by the end of WWI, and remained neutral/friendly throughout the 20s and 30s until the hostilities that became WWII got going, where it allied with them to occupy Poland et al. Stalin may well have intended to betray the Germans, but until they attacked Russia and pushed so far into Russian territory there wasn't much reason for the West to look favorably upon the Soviet Union.
How many people know who Nikita Khrushchev is? He put nuclear missiles in Cuba and addressed the UN literally stating that he would bury the West. Putin is no Khrushchev.
Russia has been in an antagonistic relationship with "The West" for hundreds of years. For a time it was France. For a time it was the United Kingdom. For a time it was the Nordic countries. This current round of antagonism goes back to WWII and Russia getting the crap beat out of it by Germany before the US and the UK opened a second front.
Foreign leaders often end up as propaganda. In my relatively short time on this earth I've seen Arafat, Papa Doc, Manuel Noriega, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and probably others that I can't remember used by the media to drive ratings. If you randomly sampled Americans you'd probably find they only know Hussein, but it took two wars and a long occupation for that connection to be made.
Vladimir Putin will probably be just as forgotten to Americans as most of the rest of these men.
Shadowbanning is probably the stupidest form of moderator action. It doesn't address the behavior that caused a need for moderator or administrator action. If anything, for users that don't know that they're shadowbanned it makes them think that their abhorrent behavior is okay because they're still allowed to do it.
The only positive thing that shadowbanning does is to push-off the confrontation so that mods and admins don't have to deal with the day to day pushback from addressing site issues. I suppose that for sites reliant on ad revenue for traffic it also continues to allow that user traffic until the user realizes that they're banned, but it's still a poor way to go about it.
I love 'em so much I have a beowulf cluster of hot grits down Natalie Portman's pants...
Never thought I'd be nostalgic for Slashdot trolls.
It's called "recycling". And it's a big thing in Germany
So is David Hasselhoff...
Wait, what were we talking about again?
I doubt they will ever create something as remarkable as Wolfstein
Especially if they're working in Germany!
I suspect that Uber is only cheap because they're trying to steal market-share. They're going to want profit and prices will go up once they're indispensable.
If that were to become a regular problem, the law would change so that automakers would put the OBD port under the hood and the hood would be secured with fasteners like triple-square or something intentionally security-minded so that one couldn't access it without more time and tooling than is practical on the side of the street.
On top of that, in markets with expensive, limited quantity licensing, cab companies (the ones that actually own the medallions) would have an interest in eliminating the driver from the equation. They could run as few or as many cars as there's a demand for. Private owner-operators that own one license and one car could still operate that car too, but now they wouldn't necessarily have to be with it the whole time.
I've speculated on this before...
I expect that subscribed-to sedan services will increase in popularity as a step above taxis. Paying more than a conventional taxi and giving the subscriber the ability to report/reject cars that are in poor condition will allows the service to charge and ban offenders that mess up cars. On top of that, there are services for school buses where an on-vehicle camera system records the trip to a local disk only and overwrites the recordings after so many days unless a report is made that the footage needs to be pulled before it's overwritten, at which time it's retrieved over-the-air when the vehicle comes in for regular service at the company's garage. That system would work relatively well for a subscription car if it doesn't catch audio and isn't pulled unless there's an actual reason to pull it (like vandalism or evidence that the interior was used for a crime) so long as such conditions are made clear from the beginning.
Taxis will still be a thing, for either those that don't need a sedan often enough to justify paying for a subscription, or for those who cannot subscribe to a sedan service due to previous behavior. Used like a service they'd probably cost more, but used infrequently it wouldn't be that big of a deal. There would also be a greater likelihood of recordings being reviews more frequently.
Private car ownership will continue for people like me that have plenty of room for parking and like you, don't want to share the vehicle with unknown others. I look forward to scenic road trips where I can look at the scenery instead of always having to drive, though I would probably want the option to drive. It would be convenient when going to congested places to be able to be dropped off and let the car go find a place to park itself, or even for the car to just go home if the per-mile cost (like for an electric) is low.
There's also the concept of a work-for-hire. His work at the old institution, if he used that institution's resources like its staff and its equipment, could add a degree of work-for-hire to his results. They probably can't claim sole ownership, but I wouldn't be surprised if they can claim enough to essentially fork the project at the point where he left.
I don't doubt that specific strong-personalities are actually the ones fighting.
I expect that in the end, the data will be copied and both institutions will continue-on. The institution that lost the staff member probably has some legitimate claim to the data since the staff member was not working alone and was using university resources to pursue the work, and the staff member that left has legitimate claim to the work that he has done.
Last time I studied the phenomenon that was called Revolution. Sometimes it turns out the way that you want it to or close enough that life is good (ie, France), and sometimes the process is co-opted by powers that drag everyone down and those who co-opt manage to prop themselves up on top (ie, Russia, China, Zimbabwe).
I'm mildly curious to watch the ramifications of extremely permissive firearms law combined with a history of giving those most inclined to own them what some cultural trappings would claim is good while systematically taking away a lot of what's needed to actually afford to live. For the moment the platform appears to be working, but if that group suddenly finds that it can't afford to eat and can't afford any place to live while those that have funded the campaigns that put them there are more and more exposed for their manipulations if it'll cause something of an open-season on them. It might not, or it might be open-season on all rich people even though there are lots that want to expand social programs, but we won't know until it happens.
That sounds plausible.
Though we're essentially reinventing the old, "cannonballs tied together with a length of chain" design but in miniature, aren't we?
I wonder if water with its associated surface tension could be used, if water would itself be inadequate. Use the mass of the water to carry the fibers...
Might be interesting to watch if pieces of a firearm are dropped-in individually, either over time or else in multiple portions of the yard to different competing gangs. Even funnier if something critical that couldn't be readily made from supplies on-hand was omitted.
RC Aircraft isn't as ominous sounding as Drone. So no, as long as the word brings ratings to the news stations they'll continue to use it.
Something too light won't have good flight characteristics, it'll be inclined to slow and deflect as it passes through air. Tungsten might be overkill, but it'd probably still need to be heavier than nylon.
As is the case in an arms race.
Perhaps eventually we'll have air guns firing very fine lengths of tungsten wire to physically foul the propellers.
I'm thinking that a consumer-grade pressure washer might be enough. It probably doesn't take that much mass or propeller-fouling to bring down a drone, and if the electronics aren't sealed then the water might find its way inside and short it out too.