Any communications app could do this because they all have permission to access the mic and the network. This is not new, and you basically have to trust whatever you install.
If people could confine themselves to crying wolf when there is evidence of a wolf, that would be great. Because we already gloss over too many real vulnerabilities and poor practices in favor of sensationalism and nonsense.
Declare that it has no standing in law and ignore it; by interfering with it using unnecessary violence then refusing any dialogue the Spanish have given the Catalonians no options.
That isn't really feasible.
If Spain does nothing now, eventually Catalonia will do something that Spain must respond to. I mean, Catalonia wants independence because they want something that Spain isn't giving them, right?
Ignoring it may allow time for reconciliation, but most likely it will simply allow Catalonia to prepare its defense and seek allies.
I have no opinion for or against Catalonian independence, but it is quite reasonable for Spain to respond with immediate and decisive military action if they wish to retain control.
Probably the larger problem is that this is indicative of the type of problem that we will start to see with nationalized health care
Way to politicize the issue. In the most unproductive manner possible.
Americans hospitals were affected by ransomware outbreaks too. We didn't hear much about it because they are private organizations that don't need to report to the public. If you think IT in American health care is much better then NHS, I have some very bad news for you. Health care IT security was a joke until the government stepped in.
There was some improvement in the wake of HIPAA, but even now it is hit-and-miss. As it stands, government is the sole reason for the existence of any meaningful security. Hopefully, some massive HIPAA fines will straighten out the slackers.
we continue down this dangerous, dangerous road
We're already on the dangerous road. US health care has been ranked behind most European nations for over a decade.
Maybe a billionaire can fly in and get better service in the US, but overall we're behind. This isn't true for regular people like you and me---people who have jobs and need that salary to live. We are not better off with the current system.
And don't even go into Obamacare, because we're behind the curve with or without it. It was too little of a change to do much, in spite of the political shouting match it provoked.
The right way is to have humans do this job. They're cheaper and more effective.
The 1970s called. They want their facts back.
You need humans to not only check stock levels, but to see and fix any other problems that may be around (anything on the floor, broken something, etc.).
We have autonomous cars driving on American highways right now, and you think we can't figure this out? (Granted, they are required to have an engineer present in case the system fails, but that requirement will be gone before long.) Floor obstructions were already addressed, as the article says the robot can drive around them or schedule another visit if an area is completely blocked.
People need to fix issues, but a combination of robots and cameras can find most things. Detecting spills and messy shelves isn't much harder than what we are already doing. As always, you'll need to rely on manual spot checks for areas where robots and cameras are not practical or not allowed.
Retail stores that don't have human employees actively working in them turn to shit very very quickly.
It's not like they're getting rid of their entire staff. If anything, it will make them more effective. Having an updated map of shelves and what needs to be stocked will make it a lot easier to keep product available. This frees up the staff to work with customers and clean the store.
Since most CAPTCHAs authorize a session lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, it is reasonable to be very demanding. A bot can cause enormous disruption in only a few minutes---if that's what it's designed for. Or it can scrape a lot of data, especially if you have several working in parallel.
If anything, 1% is a very low bar.
That's well within the realm of random dumb luck.
Most CAPTCHAs are image grids or alphanumeric textboxes. There are far more than 100 input options for either scenario, so a random input will have substantially less than a 1% success rate.
Hell, with only two alphanumeric characters, you have a 1/36 * 1/36 chance of guessing correctly. That's 0.07%. And that's case insensitive. If you go case-sensitive, it's 1/62 * 1/62, or about 0.03% random success. And those success rates plummet rapidly as you add more characters.
This is very basic math, so I doubt you thought before posting. Sometimes a reasonable number has an unusually small or large magnitude.
Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
We can make antimatter in a lab, and it does not annihilate slowly when released. If there were significant antimatter around, there needs to be some explanation of how it behaves differently. Because there is a lot of energy, and it would have to be so much slower than what we've observed.
When a very small amount of matter annihilates, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons annihilate only a tiny fraction of its material.
E.g., a back of the envelope calculation for a 10-lb nuclear payload: 10 lb = 4.535 kg = 4.07 E22 joules if converted 100% into energy cribbing from google, 1 Megaton TNT = 4.18 E15 joules
Simple division yields an energy release of ~97,000,000 MT from 10 lbs of matter. Compare that to a modern nuclear weapon in the range of 5-50 MT.
If you weighed 200 lbs, that would be 1,940,000,000 MT of energy. We're talking asteroid-extinction levels of energy. And there are billions of people on earth who weigh about this much. There is a lot of energy. The annihilation would have to be impossibly slow compared to what we've seen in the lab.
How many of these do you need before you start wondering if there is something worth considering in the Intelligent Design theory
Unless you can quantify the "intelligent designer" and use its properties to make further predictions, it is inherently unscientific and therefore irrelevant.
Science is about establishing explanations for the world around us that are increasingly well-tested, accurate, and precise. Intelligent Design is intellectual masturbation that accomplishes neither of those goals.
You're free to believe whatever you want, but your pseudo-philosophical meanderings add nothing to discussions of science.
Americans that own and fly planes aren't killing 40,000 people every year.
Now you're confounding the issue. Planes have a lower rate of fatalities both in total and per capita. Part of the reason for this is that the licensing and maintenance requirements are very demanding.
If airplane ownership started to create that kind of liabilty then yes, we would likely be talking about prohibiting ownership
No, we just regulated planes a long time ago, and we are starting to do so with cars now. In both cases, we aim to eliminate the risks where it is reasonably cost-effective to do so.
The cost equation is different for a plane with hundreds of passengers that can destroy an entire block of houses in a crash. In comparison, a single car can rarely destroy a single building or kill more than a dozen people. An errant plane can do so much damage that we established rules at the very beginning, and a single accident is enough to merit reconsideration of the rules.
Yes, people can do ugly or bad fixes with shady 3rd-party equipment. They could do quality repairs too.
One thing that helps ensure quality repairs is the availability of original parts and service documents. That way, you have good hardware and good procedures.
Apple could still have certified repair centers. Places where they make sure the shop uses official parts, and the staff can follow the procedures correctly. They can still require certified centers to handle all warranty repairs.
But if I want to fix it myself or take it to someone local with lower rates, then I should have those options. The MA right-to-repair law addresses that situation without changing everything else.
Voice recognition has been around commercially for 20 years.
Not reliable consumer-grade voice recognition.
I remember voice recognition 20 years ago, and you had to train the application if it was intended to be general-purpose. If you wanted vaguely acceptable accuracy, the training could take hours. If you want to use it in a noisy environment, forget about accuracy entirely. The only good way to avoid these problems was to limit its dictionary to a specific domain/function.
Compare that to today: I can speak natural English sentences to Google or IVRs (the good ones, anyway), and they mostly work as expected. I can do this in just about any environment without pre-training the system. I could probably push them to make a mistake if I wanted to, but I can do the same thing with human beings too.
If 50%+ of the people want it, either the market or the laws should suffice. If the market doesn't deliver it, then why not pass a law? We gave the government its authority for a reason.
We have a long and established history of big business being total dickheads because they could get away with it.
If every notable manufacturer does roughly the same thing, how do you vote with your wallet for a company that doesn't? You don't---because you there is effectively no choice in the matter. So you vote for laws instead.
Meat packing companies let workers get dismembered or killed to shave a few pennies off every pound of meat. We got together and said, "Fuck that, we'll pay 0.2% more for our meat, and you will stop putting your workers into conditions where they end up disabled or dead."
Every business can provide access to service documents and sell parts for reasonable prices. It's not hard to do either of those things.
are YOU obligated to help other people repair their stuff?
No one has to repair anything on their own time. In doing business, however, I am obligated to follow the laws of the nation(s) where I operate.
We the people told American businesses they can't dump sludge in our rivers. We told them that they have to provide clear and honest information to investors. We make all kinds of rules because the country works better when corporations fucking behave themselves.
We can tell them to post their service documents and make parts available if we damn well please.
And we know they already have the documents and the supply of parts---their service departments need those things to function.
How about 500 years of common law on property? Isnâ(TM)t that enough?
How do you repair a device when the manufacturer refuses to sell you replacement parts?
What happens they refuse to disclose reset/pairing procedures for devices that require it, or disclose that information only to authorized shops under NDA?
How do you diagnose a problem when the manufacturer refuses to supply documentation?
Because none of those things are covered under common law. Sure, you can rip it open, but the ability to actually repair modern electronics requires at least a modicum of cooperation from the vendor.
It's not like the good old days when you could replace a busted vacuum tube with another one off the shelf. Most devices have hardware modules that cannot be built by hand, so either you get them from the manufacturer or you don't fix the device. Manufacturers have shown an unwillingness to make things repairable, so we either suck it up or pass a law to make them do it.
In a nascent field, most of the users are also experts. It comes with the territory.
The specialization into designers and expert users indicates maturation of the field. This is what happens when people take your technology and build something new on top of it.
In fact, this specialization may be the only universal metric of maturity---anything else I can imagine does not apply historically.
If you find yourself lying to people, then you're being unethical.
I'll dispute that.
In a free marketplace, producers and consumers rely on accurate and complete information to make decisions in their own best interests. Incomplete disclosure reduces the overall quality of the production/purchasing decisions.
If lying elicits disclosure of useful information, then it can be better ethically---but the negative effects of such deception must be weighed as well. A simple, naive rule such as, "Don't lie" will always fail; it's only a question of when.
An obvious failure is when a dictator is committing genocide, and you know where a member of the persecuted group is hiding. Clearly, you should lie if you can---unless you have a moral justification for genocide.
I thought this was a BENEFIT of working from home, away from the distractions of the office
Sometimes the distractions at home are worse than at the office. Three pre-teen children, for instance, can add quite a bit of disruption.
My employer has it right, I think. I can stay late, work in peace, and earn credited time whenever I want. The credited time works the same as vacation time. Overall, I prefer this to overtime.
seriously you think 2500-3000 in 2012 WHOLESALE for a HTPC, i.e. the cost before taxes, shipping, retailer margins and costs etc is added on is possible?
Wrong from start to finish, and here's why:
First of all, business-to-business sales do not incur tax, at least not in the US.
Second, volume shipping between manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers ends up pretty cheap on a per-unit basis. Much lower than customers pay for their FedEx/UPS delivery.
And the last point is the most important: Retail margins on OEM PCs are minimal. We're talking about 1-2%. They make most of their profit on accessories and warranty/maintenance contracts.
Some brick and mortar stores even hit negative margins on the actual PCs. Why would they do that? Because they have dedicated sales staff who add accessories to each sale. This has been fairly common, going back to the late 1990s/early 2000s. There were years where the average PC sold for 2% below cost (across the enterprise for a large chain).
It would need to retail for over 5 grand for that to make sense and at that price it would have to be a low volume item.
That hasn't been true for a long, long time. Some products maintain healthy margins---TVs, receivers, car stereos, and home theater speakers. Just not PCs.
While these HTPCs may have sold at above-average margins, I seriously doubt a PC invoiced at $2500 listed for more than $3K.
How "binding"? Just until the next time the Attorney General decides to change it?
I would assume so. It is possible to make rules that are difficult for a successor to remove, but it is usually impossible to make permanent changes---that requires Congress.
If the next AG reverses course, Microsoft (or other companies) could resume their legal challenges if they wish.
For that matter, anyone with a security clearance has a higher than average likelihood of some loyalty to secret or not-so-secret societies that prey on the kind of mental instability that is rife in the military.
Could you please link to where you learned this information? There has certainly been a lot of psych research on veterans and active military lately, but I've never heard of anything like this.
Everyone involved with this should be ashamed.
Everybody knows the NSA and CIA have top-tier cybersecurity talent. The tech industry just wants access to a product, and they are willing to pay for it.
It goes without saying... unless there is a national security interest in sharing that information, they should be told to pound sand.
Slashdot Mirror
And Samsung put facebook on my J1 Ace. I can't get the fucker off. And the fucker starts itself up when I disable it. WTF?!?
So, since facebook's app acts that way, I don't believe a word that asshole says.
I wouldn't know how Facebook's app acts, but the fact that you can't remove it is 100% Samsung's fault. Only the OEM can mandate a third-party app.
Don't like it? Don't buy their products.
Any communications app could do this because they all have permission to access the mic and the network. This is not new, and you basically have to trust whatever you install.
If people could confine themselves to crying wolf when there is evidence of a wolf, that would be great. Because we already gloss over too many real vulnerabilities and poor practices in favor of sensationalism and nonsense.
Declare that it has no standing in law and ignore it; by interfering with it using unnecessary violence then refusing any dialogue the Spanish have given the Catalonians no options.
That isn't really feasible.
If Spain does nothing now, eventually Catalonia will do something that Spain must respond to. I mean, Catalonia wants independence because they want something that Spain isn't giving them, right?
Ignoring it may allow time for reconciliation, but most likely it will simply allow Catalonia to prepare its defense and seek allies.
I have no opinion for or against Catalonian independence, but it is quite reasonable for Spain to respond with immediate and decisive military action if they wish to retain control.
as a european entity, would their membership be rejected?
Spain is a member; Catalonia is not. If they were no longer part of Spain, they would have to become a member in their own right.
They would have to petition for membership, negotiate terms, and persuade the current members of their suitability.
Plus, the EU would have to recognize them as independent nation in order to consider their application in the first place.
Probably the larger problem is that this is indicative of the type of problem that we will start to see with nationalized health care
Way to politicize the issue. In the most unproductive manner possible.
Americans hospitals were affected by ransomware outbreaks too. We didn't hear much about it because they are private organizations that don't need to report to the public. If you think IT in American health care is much better then NHS, I have some very bad news for you. Health care IT security was a joke until the government stepped in.
There was some improvement in the wake of HIPAA, but even now it is hit-and-miss. As it stands, government is the sole reason for the existence of any meaningful security. Hopefully, some massive HIPAA fines will straighten out the slackers.
we continue down this dangerous, dangerous road
We're already on the dangerous road. US health care has been ranked behind most European nations for over a decade.
Maybe a billionaire can fly in and get better service in the US, but overall we're behind. This isn't true for regular people like you and me---people who have jobs and need that salary to live. We are not better off with the current system.
And don't even go into Obamacare, because we're behind the curve with or without it. It was too little of a change to do much, in spite of the political shouting match it provoked.
The right way is to have humans do this job. They're cheaper and more effective.
The 1970s called. They want their facts back.
You need humans to not only check stock levels, but to see and fix any other problems that may be around (anything on the floor, broken something, etc.).
We have autonomous cars driving on American highways right now, and you think we can't figure this out? (Granted, they are required to have an engineer present in case the system fails, but that requirement will be gone before long.) Floor obstructions were already addressed, as the article says the robot can drive around them or schedule another visit if an area is completely blocked.
People need to fix issues, but a combination of robots and cameras can find most things. Detecting spills and messy shelves isn't much harder than what we are already doing. As always, you'll need to rely on manual spot checks for areas where robots and cameras are not practical or not allowed.
Retail stores that don't have human employees actively working in them turn to shit very very quickly.
It's not like they're getting rid of their entire staff. If anything, it will make them more effective. Having an updated map of shelves and what needs to be stocked will make it a lot easier to keep product available. This frees up the staff to work with customers and clean the store.
Who decided that?
Since most CAPTCHAs authorize a session lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, it is reasonable to be very demanding. A bot can cause enormous disruption in only a few minutes---if that's what it's designed for. Or it can scrape a lot of data, especially if you have several working in parallel.
If anything, 1% is a very low bar.
That's well within the realm of random dumb luck.
Most CAPTCHAs are image grids or alphanumeric textboxes. There are far more than 100 input options for either scenario, so a random input will have substantially less than a 1% success rate.
Hell, with only two alphanumeric characters, you have a 1/36 * 1/36 chance of guessing correctly. That's 0.07%. And that's case insensitive. If you go case-sensitive, it's 1/62 * 1/62, or about 0.03% random success. And those success rates plummet rapidly as you add more characters.
This is very basic math, so I doubt you thought before posting. Sometimes a reasonable number has an unusually small or large magnitude.
Maybe they got the rate of annihilation wrong. Maybe the mutual destruction process is ongoing.
We can make antimatter in a lab, and it does not annihilate slowly when released. If there were significant antimatter around, there needs to be some explanation of how it behaves differently. Because there is a lot of energy, and it would have to be so much slower than what we've observed.
When a very small amount of matter annihilates, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. Even the most powerful nuclear weapons annihilate only a tiny fraction of its material.
E.g., a back of the envelope calculation for a 10-lb nuclear payload:
10 lb = 4.535 kg = 4.07 E22 joules if converted 100% into energy
cribbing from google, 1 Megaton TNT = 4.18 E15 joules
Simple division yields an energy release of ~97,000,000 MT from 10 lbs of matter. Compare that to a modern nuclear weapon in the range of 5-50 MT.
If you weighed 200 lbs, that would be 1,940,000,000 MT of energy. We're talking asteroid-extinction levels of energy. And there are billions of people on earth who weigh about this much. There is a lot of energy. The annihilation would have to be impossibly slow compared to what we've seen in the lab.
what kind of universe we're dealing with if we ever decide to visit.
It will be a universe with a you-shaped hole in it. Because you will annihilate everything you touch. Kind of like Symantec.
How many of these do you need before you start wondering if there is something worth considering in the Intelligent Design theory
Unless you can quantify the "intelligent designer" and use its properties to make further predictions, it is inherently unscientific and therefore irrelevant.
Science is about establishing explanations for the world around us that are increasingly well-tested, accurate, and precise. Intelligent Design is intellectual masturbation that accomplishes neither of those goals.
You're free to believe whatever you want, but your pseudo-philosophical meanderings add nothing to discussions of science.
yeah I can see why device vendors are fighting this - they will ultimately end up eating the costs.
Not with the current laws.
Show us a repair receipt from a certified shop before we touch the device. Win-win for everybody thereafter.
US warranty law already allows manufacturers to deny service due to improper repairs.
However, they must service the device regardless of 3rd-party work if the defect is unrelated to the other repairs.
Maybe not a win-win in the traditional sense, but it is fair to all parties.
Americans that own and fly planes aren't killing 40,000 people every year.
Now you're confounding the issue. Planes have a lower rate of fatalities both in total and per capita. Part of the reason for this is that the licensing and maintenance requirements are very demanding.
If airplane ownership started to create that kind of liabilty then yes, we would likely be talking about prohibiting ownership
No, we just regulated planes a long time ago, and we are starting to do so with cars now. In both cases, we aim to eliminate the risks where it is reasonably cost-effective to do so.
The cost equation is different for a plane with hundreds of passengers that can destroy an entire block of houses in a crash. In comparison, a single car can rarely destroy a single building or kill more than a dozen people. An errant plane can do so much damage that we established rules at the very beginning, and a single accident is enough to merit reconsideration of the rules.
Yes, people can do ugly or bad fixes with shady 3rd-party equipment. They could do quality repairs too.
One thing that helps ensure quality repairs is the availability of original parts and service documents. That way, you have good hardware and good procedures.
Apple could still have certified repair centers. Places where they make sure the shop uses official parts, and the staff can follow the procedures correctly. They can still require certified centers to handle all warranty repairs.
But if I want to fix it myself or take it to someone local with lower rates, then I should have those options. The MA right-to-repair law addresses that situation without changing everything else.
Voice recognition has been around commercially for 20 years.
Not reliable consumer-grade voice recognition.
I remember voice recognition 20 years ago, and you had to train the application if it was intended to be general-purpose. If you wanted vaguely acceptable accuracy, the training could take hours. If you want to use it in a noisy environment, forget about accuracy entirely. The only good way to avoid these problems was to limit its dictionary to a specific domain/function.
Compare that to today: I can speak natural English sentences to Google or IVRs (the good ones, anyway), and they mostly work as expected. I can do this in just about any environment without pre-training the system. I could probably push them to make a mistake if I wanted to, but I can do the same thing with human beings too.
If 50%+ of the people want it, either the market or the laws should suffice. If the market doesn't deliver it, then why not pass a law? We gave the government its authority for a reason.
We have a long and established history of big business being total dickheads because they could get away with it.
If every notable manufacturer does roughly the same thing, how do you vote with your wallet for a company that doesn't? You don't---because you there is effectively no choice in the matter. So you vote for laws instead.
Meat packing companies let workers get dismembered or killed to shave a few pennies off every pound of meat. We got together and said, "Fuck that, we'll pay 0.2% more for our meat, and you will stop putting your workers into conditions where they end up disabled or dead."
Every business can provide access to service documents and sell parts for reasonable prices. It's not hard to do either of those things.
are YOU obligated to help other people repair their stuff?
No one has to repair anything on their own time. In doing business, however, I am obligated to follow the laws of the nation(s) where I operate.
We the people told American businesses they can't dump sludge in our rivers. We told them that they have to provide clear and honest information to investors. We make all kinds of rules because the country works better when corporations fucking behave themselves.
We can tell them to post their service documents and make parts available if we damn well please.
And we know they already have the documents and the supply of parts---their service departments need those things to function.
How about 500 years of common law on property? Isnâ(TM)t that enough?
How do you repair a device when the manufacturer refuses to sell you replacement parts?
What happens they refuse to disclose reset/pairing procedures for devices that require it, or disclose that information only to authorized shops under NDA?
How do you diagnose a problem when the manufacturer refuses to supply documentation?
Because none of those things are covered under common law. Sure, you can rip it open, but the ability to actually repair modern electronics requires at least a modicum of cooperation from the vendor.
It's not like the good old days when you could replace a busted vacuum tube with another one off the shelf. Most devices have hardware modules that cannot be built by hand, so either you get them from the manufacturer or you don't fix the device. Manufacturers have shown an unwillingness to make things repairable, so we either suck it up or pass a law to make them do it.
In a nascent field, most of the users are also experts. It comes with the territory.
The specialization into designers and expert users indicates maturation of the field. This is what happens when people take your technology and build something new on top of it.
In fact, this specialization may be the only universal metric of maturity---anything else I can imagine does not apply historically.
If you find yourself lying to people, then you're being unethical.
I'll dispute that.
In a free marketplace, producers and consumers rely on accurate and complete information to make decisions in their own best interests. Incomplete disclosure reduces the overall quality of the production/purchasing decisions.
If lying elicits disclosure of useful information, then it can be better ethically---but the negative effects of such deception must be weighed as well. A simple, naive rule such as, "Don't lie" will always fail; it's only a question of when.
An obvious failure is when a dictator is committing genocide, and you know where a member of the persecuted group is hiding. Clearly, you should lie if you can---unless you have a moral justification for genocide.
Lying is generally but not universally bad.
There is a huge difference between "doing wrong" in a moral sense and a legal sense.
That said, secretly shopping at your competitors' shop is standard practice. I'd hesitate to judge them, as I suspect both sides are doing it.
I thought this was a BENEFIT of working from home, away from the distractions of the office
Sometimes the distractions at home are worse than at the office. Three pre-teen children, for instance, can add quite a bit of disruption.
My employer has it right, I think. I can stay late, work in peace, and earn credited time whenever I want. The credited time works the same as vacation time. Overall, I prefer this to overtime.
Are we going to stop blurring faces and documents on camera and switch to using black bars?
Or, really, any completely opaque symbol would suffice.
An opaque overlay is computationally cheaper than blurring too. Not that should be an issue anymore anyway.
seriously you think 2500-3000 in 2012 WHOLESALE for a HTPC, i.e. the cost before taxes, shipping, retailer margins and costs etc is added on is possible?
Wrong from start to finish, and here's why:
First of all, business-to-business sales do not incur tax, at least not in the US.
Second, volume shipping between manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers ends up pretty cheap on a per-unit basis. Much lower than customers pay for their FedEx/UPS delivery.
And the last point is the most important: Retail margins on OEM PCs are minimal. We're talking about 1-2%. They make most of their profit on accessories and warranty/maintenance contracts.
Some brick and mortar stores even hit negative margins on the actual PCs. Why would they do that? Because they have dedicated sales staff who add accessories to each sale. This has been fairly common, going back to the late 1990s/early 2000s. There were years where the average PC sold for 2% below cost (across the enterprise for a large chain).
It would need to retail for over 5 grand for that to make sense and at that price it would have to be a low volume item.
That hasn't been true for a long, long time. Some products maintain healthy margins---TVs, receivers, car stereos, and home theater speakers. Just not PCs.
While these HTPCs may have sold at above-average margins, I seriously doubt a PC invoiced at $2500 listed for more than $3K.
How "binding"? Just until the next time the Attorney General decides to change it?
I would assume so. It is possible to make rules that are difficult for a successor to remove, but it is usually impossible to make permanent changes---that requires Congress.
If the next AG reverses course, Microsoft (or other companies) could resume their legal challenges if they wish.
For that matter, anyone with a security clearance has a higher than average likelihood of some loyalty to secret or not-so-secret societies that prey on the kind of mental instability that is rife in the military.
Could you please link to where you learned this information? There has certainly been a lot of psych research on veterans and active military lately, but I've never heard of anything like this.
Everyone involved with this should be ashamed.
Everybody knows the NSA and CIA have top-tier cybersecurity talent. The tech industry just wants access to a product, and they are willing to pay for it.
It goes without saying... unless there is a national security interest in sharing that information, they should be told to pound sand.