Especially as they will want to repeat the exploit but with a different targeted attack if Iran is still silly enough to keep running windows. Interesting the type of attack narrows it down to a nuclear power (understanding the target and it's weaknesses), that has access to windows source code and, didn't give a crap about the economic damage done to M$ by the success of the attack (at a guess around 500 million dollars with governments likely to drop windows earlier at secure location because the air gap is not sufficient), now that narrows the attacking party quite a bit.
Nah, the people who went to all the trouble to create that worm would never rely on chance ie. that had to make sure that it got where they wanted it to get and the only way is for a direct insertion (after what seems like millions invested, rely on chance, illogical). They would also try to camouflage that direct insertion as much as possible to protect it for future use, more likely Russian (a commercial decision) rather than Iranian (a matter of national security).
So will the real question is will Iranians stop using windows and will other countries also seeing this failure join them in abandoning M$ in what are meant to be secure environments. It seems pretty obvious that Iran can either spend over a year trying to clean up their system only to have it fail again, or swap to Linux and clean things up in a week or so (their people would obviously have the expertise to run either OS).
The truth is entirely too many secrets are being kept and not to save lives but to save jobs and careers of incompetent bureaucrats and politicians. Lies that allow tax dollars to flow to corrupt corporations, lies that promote war to feed the military industrial complex and, lies that hide the juvenile nature of the players involved in life and death situations.
Sorry but truth is requirement of true democracy and there are no secrets a government is ever really entitled to hide from the people 'WHO ARE THE GOVERNMENT', a government of the people, by the people and for the people, are no just empty meaningless words. So every bit of information that affects who the people would elect to be their representatives by democratic principle must be released to the people for judgement.
The truth doesn't kill, if the egomaniac had been told the truth of their insignificance from birth then bruising their ego would not lead to war, so secrets protected by lies lead to war, not the truth. The truth applied early and often will lead to a better world, fact.
It seems that the targeting abilities of the wore were wildly exaggerated. The worm reports back to servers, hmm air gap, that makes no sense. It seems there was a lot of obfuscating built into the worm, specifically to hide how it gain entry past an air gap, and how any new program was accepted on appliance based machines.
That'll teach em to run windows on what are meant to be secure systems. The advantage for Linux is you can strip it down to only what is required to run and secure that appliance and nothing more and anything new sets off alarms, including memory scans and even rebooting from rom media upon a regular basis.
Compromising people is the easiest way in, compromising hardware is the hardest to clean out, compromising software, if you set up the system properly cleaning it out is a simple as a system wide reboot.
I would bet the worm 'bought' it's way in and the external stuff was typical 'COINTELPRO' misinformation.
An open root domain system where each country produces it's own root domain and via treaty mirrors addresses. Each ISP defaults to the local national root domain. Could create some interesting problems with circular updates but those could be resolved by establish a priority on mirroring and monitoring changes.
The handy thing is that.gov and.mil could be immediately localised to each nation.
The treaties aren't even required to start the process off, countries just need to launch their own root servers and legislate the use of those servers as default.
Technically it is a parliamentary system, the leader is always reliant upon the majority of members to stay in power and can be tossed out in a single day, so not just minority parties, buts also the supporting party and even the main opposition party.
The reality is Telstra either accepted it or ended up competing against a government provided competing infrstructure, that would severely undercut it's dying copper infrastructure with a brand new fibre to the home infrastructure. The main reason for the buyout, there is a lot of foreign investment in Telstra that would have been screwed over without the buy out.
The big reason for the opposition to fibre, look no further than corporate mass media being right wing and the internet being left wing, advertising as news and the corporate voice being misrepresented as the peoples voice versus the actually really truly peoples voice, the rich and greedy versus the middle class and the poor. You would have to be blind, deaf, dumb and, stupid to have not noticed the change in politics over the last five years and, that is only the beginning. Fibre to the home 100Mbit broadband will further accelerate the reality of a government of the people by the people and for the people, not some corporate corrupting facade of government.
No one ever 'generates' a lot of money, certainly the government mints print it but for every one else making s lot of money is all about being greedy. Paying very little for something and then putting a huge markup on it and selling (importing cheap junk), employing people where you have to capital to buy equipment and they do no and basically selling they're labour for much more than you pay for it, inheriting large sums of money and buying up all the income produce property you can, gambling with other peoples money at financial institutions, oh wait, they is always prostitution they certainly do generate money with their assets but they are the only ones (Psychopath pimps still take the lions share, hmm, much like the rest of the economy).
Human society is a function of all humanity, those that profit most by it should pay the most for the benefit they gain, of course being greedy, they just want more. You neither read, write nor even speak without the support of the rest of humanity. It is time to put a stop upon preying upon the rest of human society and start working together for mutual benefit.
All the mass media channels are going to be stuck with the same problem, either analyses the data a publish the juiciest bits, or get right royally screwed over by the blogs as they analyse the data and publish the juiciest bits all the while crowing about how mass media kowtowed to a bunch of corrupt politicians and tried to keep their criminal behaviour secret.
Then there are news site like http://english.aljazeera.net/ and http://rt.com/ both working hard to gain a global news audience, who will be doing triple time to bust the biggest stories hidden in that data. On the internet there is real hard news competition and a big part of that is multi-lingual global news service and trying to gain an audience of hundreds of millions, the hard hitting no hold barred reporting will be the only way to do it.
And single computer geeks need life insurance, for why? Exactly whom would it meant to support, unless of course there is a provable reincarnation option.
They are called computers, you use them to sort, catalogue and filter all according to your requirements. So filter for pregnant women, check point, shooting and you get all the incident where panicky soldiers murdered pregnant women because their husbands did not stop quickly enough at check points.
I am sure there are other searches like children, shot, patrol or collateral damage, party, bomb or false report, arrest, shot or simply died in custody. You need not read every one, simply search on the worst possible combination of search terms and unfortunately and embarrassingly large numbers of reports turn up. So you don't have to read thousands, sickly you still have to read hundreds though.
Professionally paranoid is an accurate job description for intelligence agencies, they have to imagine very possible threat and then defend against them, they obviously can not wait for successful incursions, say whoops and then defend against them in future, hence professional paranoid is an accurately and tongue in cheek description.
I am also interested upon what basis you declare a universe of galaxies void of intelligent life other than short hair, crested, rock throwing, cranky monkeys, I would hope not from some silly text that declares those often delusional monkeys second only in intelligence to the supreme being of the universe, gees arrogant much;D.
It requires a treaty because costs can be disputed. Simple it cost $1 to make it, I sell it to a bull pucky holding company in a tax haven and they put $10 mark up on it and then sell it to an exporter who sells it overseas for $10 because their business is making too much already and needs the $1 per unit tax loss. The reason you need the tax treaty is to pick up the real difference between cost and profit and that must be tracked globally.
The only other was is to declare all content distribution that cost is purely the physical cost of producing the product and every thing else is profit including advertising costs, publishing administration and licensing costs.
The global treaty is far easier and fairer, yeah I know the psychopath corporations and the insanely greedy rich don't want it, because shock horror they will end up actually paying taxes.
The shift from targeted ballistic to cruise is because cruise is more cost effective, you can pretty much deploy at ten to one ratio. Especially taking into account multiple targeting options, same engine used with different types to enhance speed or range, anti ship and anti ground targets and of course high export income opportunities. Dramatically extend the range by fitting them to ships, planes and submarines and all fired outside of defence zones.
Ground hugging means defence must can only target to that effective horizon add ridges and valleys and the horizon shrinks further, add stealth and the problem further expands and requires defence in depth, add detonation upon damage to take out close range defences with following missiles and the problem magnifies again.
So the only defence against stealth cruise missiles in reality is peace.
It seems like geologist are not the right people to define spending based upon sound risk assessment principles. Based upon how likely the even is to occur (in this case it certainly will occur how often is the only question), the impact upon human life and infrastructure of the event occurring (very severe), all versus the cost of taking precautions to mitigate the losses suffered (far less than the expected losses if no precautions are taken).
Now the big catch is infrastructure and or buildings can have a life of hundred years or more. So while the geologist can sit back and say it is very unlikely the event will occur this year, stretching that out for fifty years is obviously just a guess and the wrong guess is the difference between a earthquake in New Zealand that kills no one and a same sized event in Haiti that kills hundreds of thousands and cripples the economy.
Sounds like a bunch of greedy developers are gambling with other peoples lives and have a geologist on the payroll.
Beware corporate takeovers, they are not always as clear cut as they seem. When one company buys another company company with shares, basically those shares increase in value based upon the additional value of the recently purchased company and obviously substantive owners of the purchased company are now substantive owners of the purchasing company. Reverse takeovers can readily occur amongst other corporate shenanigans, like the creation of a larger corporation with pretend growth driven by purchasing other corporation all than dumped to the public and pension funds for massive profit all driven by less than honest recommendations to big to fail banks.
Hard to tell with the professionally paranoid, how do you know this one isn't designed to look out rather than in, something they are not likely to admit any time soon.
Keep it simple sometimes works best. Simply split the company IT infrastructure in two, for critical services, accounting, productivity etc. use thin clients and for email and the internet use netbooks on a wireless network. Two completely separate networks, so they can trash their portable computers with all the crap off the internet and it has zero impact on critical services.
The netbooks should have a unique recovery media to rebuild each one cutting the down time to say 10 to 20 minutes, generally speaking the only security affected will be the users own personal security as the netbooks should have no access to company critical services including banking and accounting.
There is also 'The intentional infliction of mental harm' under tort which covers things like invasion of privacy and the threat of being sued, including your court costs and the penalties even when you are innocent.
So clearly in the case of the threatening letters there was an intention to inflict mental harm upon the victims and thus extort a payment from them, under tort law this should enable a class action lawsuit to be brought against the attorneys for the harm they have inflicted, where evidence was insufficient for actions to be brought against the defendants.
Sounds like it is high time for a global tax treaty. No tax havens, not B$ tax rates where only the profits and none of the production is shifted, multi-national corporations need to be forced to 'PAY THEIR TAXES' at the location where the profits were made, not some bullshit offshore location. Don't want to pay the taxes at the location where the money was earned the bugger off and work else where.
Basically Ireland pretty much deserved the hole they are now in, they had special low taxes for licensed content distribution (copyright), so they could effectively cheat other countries out of the taxable income generated at the point sale.
So the real question is let them go and pay the full price or help them, meh, let em burn in their debt they don't deserve any better.
The only global cooperation here is the willingness for the global military industrial complex to bleed the taxpayer dry. The 'ballistic' missile shield is completely useless against cruise missiles. Now you have stealth cruise missiles, supersonic cruise missiles, long range cruise missiles, their now planning long range hypersonic cruise missles, so really who is kidding who here.
Russia is only willing to play the game for the opportunity to start selling it's technology into Europe, likely that is part of the behind the scenes bargain struck with the western military industrial complex.
Why spend billions on a 'ballistic' missles shield that is completely useless against ground hugging cruise missiles, especially when every country is in the process of shifting technology that way. What is this, some kind of lying bullshit way to squeeze profits out of what is rapidly becoming pointless technology, can't afford social welfare but can afford a broken multi billion dollar missile shield.
Google pays, how about the user that request the data, don't they also pay. The lie for for slowing down competing services is that no one pays. The truth is the the data is not sent around in circles, the uploader pays and the downloader already pays.
The psychopath business plan is to create a scarcity that does not exist except at peak times in order to inflate traffic profit margins and to create content delivery monopolies where competing content provides are simply squeezed out of business.
Remember POTS plain old telephone service, you had a dedicated line and you could have squeezed as much data as you wished down it, now they are cutting costs and inflating profits by sharing it. Along comes fibre optic where the amount of data that can be squeezed out of it has multiplied by tens of thousands of times and yet they are having more trouble. Truth is incumbents are using political corruption to attempt to not only retain monopolies but in fit's of psychopathic greed extend those monopolies into other areas.
The all new corporate data transmission tax, placing a tax on every transaction that occurs on the internet including personal ones and to protect it with corporate driven censorship, the clamping down of all non profit voices.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially as they will want to repeat the exploit but with a different targeted attack if Iran is still silly enough to keep running windows. Interesting the type of attack narrows it down to a nuclear power (understanding the target and it's weaknesses), that has access to windows source code and, didn't give a crap about the economic damage done to M$ by the success of the attack (at a guess around 500 million dollars with governments likely to drop windows earlier at secure location because the air gap is not sufficient), now that narrows the attacking party quite a bit.
Nah, the people who went to all the trouble to create that worm would never rely on chance ie. that had to make sure that it got where they wanted it to get and the only way is for a direct insertion (after what seems like millions invested, rely on chance, illogical). They would also try to camouflage that direct insertion as much as possible to protect it for future use, more likely Russian (a commercial decision) rather than Iranian (a matter of national security).
So will the real question is will Iranians stop using windows and will other countries also seeing this failure join them in abandoning M$ in what are meant to be secure environments. It seems pretty obvious that Iran can either spend over a year trying to clean up their system only to have it fail again, or swap to Linux and clean things up in a week or so (their people would obviously have the expertise to run either OS).
Not really as you are only configuring the national root as default, you are not making it compulsory and it is easy to point your browser elsewhere.
Secrets kill, they always have and they always will. You can not have a representative democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_government if your representatives are keeping secrets from you.
The truth is entirely too many secrets are being kept and not to save lives but to save jobs and careers of incompetent bureaucrats and politicians. Lies that allow tax dollars to flow to corrupt corporations, lies that promote war to feed the military industrial complex and, lies that hide the juvenile nature of the players involved in life and death situations.
Sorry but truth is requirement of true democracy and there are no secrets a government is ever really entitled to hide from the people 'WHO ARE THE GOVERNMENT', a government of the people, by the people and for the people, are no just empty meaningless words. So every bit of information that affects who the people would elect to be their representatives by democratic principle must be released to the people for judgement.
The truth doesn't kill, if the egomaniac had been told the truth of their insignificance from birth then bruising their ego would not lead to war, so secrets protected by lies lead to war, not the truth. The truth applied early and often will lead to a better world, fact.
It seems that the targeting abilities of the wore were wildly exaggerated. The worm reports back to servers, hmm air gap, that makes no sense. It seems there was a lot of obfuscating built into the worm, specifically to hide how it gain entry past an air gap, and how any new program was accepted on appliance based machines.
That'll teach em to run windows on what are meant to be secure systems. The advantage for Linux is you can strip it down to only what is required to run and secure that appliance and nothing more and anything new sets off alarms, including memory scans and even rebooting from rom media upon a regular basis.
Compromising people is the easiest way in, compromising hardware is the hardest to clean out, compromising software, if you set up the system properly cleaning it out is a simple as a system wide reboot.
I would bet the worm 'bought' it's way in and the external stuff was typical 'COINTELPRO' misinformation.
An open root domain system where each country produces it's own root domain and via treaty mirrors addresses. Each ISP defaults to the local national root domain. Could create some interesting problems with circular updates but those could be resolved by establish a priority on mirroring and monitoring changes.
The handy thing is that .gov and .mil could be immediately localised to each nation.
The treaties aren't even required to start the process off, countries just need to launch their own root servers and legislate the use of those servers as default.
Technically it is a parliamentary system, the leader is always reliant upon the majority of members to stay in power and can be tossed out in a single day, so not just minority parties, buts also the supporting party and even the main opposition party.
The reality is Telstra either accepted it or ended up competing against a government provided competing infrstructure, that would severely undercut it's dying copper infrastructure with a brand new fibre to the home infrastructure. The main reason for the buyout, there is a lot of foreign investment in Telstra that would have been screwed over without the buy out.
The big reason for the opposition to fibre, look no further than corporate mass media being right wing and the internet being left wing, advertising as news and the corporate voice being misrepresented as the peoples voice versus the actually really truly peoples voice, the rich and greedy versus the middle class and the poor. You would have to be blind, deaf, dumb and, stupid to have not noticed the change in politics over the last five years and, that is only the beginning. Fibre to the home 100Mbit broadband will further accelerate the reality of a government of the people by the people and for the people, not some corporate corrupting facade of government.
No one ever 'generates' a lot of money, certainly the government mints print it but for every one else making s lot of money is all about being greedy. Paying very little for something and then putting a huge markup on it and selling (importing cheap junk), employing people where you have to capital to buy equipment and they do no and basically selling they're labour for much more than you pay for it, inheriting large sums of money and buying up all the income produce property you can, gambling with other peoples money at financial institutions, oh wait, they is always prostitution they certainly do generate money with their assets but they are the only ones (Psychopath pimps still take the lions share, hmm, much like the rest of the economy).
Human society is a function of all humanity, those that profit most by it should pay the most for the benefit they gain, of course being greedy, they just want more. You neither read, write nor even speak without the support of the rest of humanity. It is time to put a stop upon preying upon the rest of human society and start working together for mutual benefit.
All the mass media channels are going to be stuck with the same problem, either analyses the data a publish the juiciest bits, or get right royally screwed over by the blogs as they analyse the data and publish the juiciest bits all the while crowing about how mass media kowtowed to a bunch of corrupt politicians and tried to keep their criminal behaviour secret.
Then there are news site like http://english.aljazeera.net/ and http://rt.com/ both working hard to gain a global news audience, who will be doing triple time to bust the biggest stories hidden in that data. On the internet there is real hard news competition and a big part of that is multi-lingual global news service and trying to gain an audience of hundreds of millions, the hard hitting no hold barred reporting will be the only way to do it.
And single computer geeks need life insurance, for why? Exactly whom would it meant to support, unless of course there is a provable reincarnation option.
They are called computers, you use them to sort, catalogue and filter all according to your requirements. So filter for pregnant women, check point, shooting and you get all the incident where panicky soldiers murdered pregnant women because their husbands did not stop quickly enough at check points.
I am sure there are other searches like children, shot, patrol or collateral damage, party, bomb or false report, arrest, shot or simply died in custody. You need not read every one, simply search on the worst possible combination of search terms and unfortunately and embarrassingly large numbers of reports turn up. So you don't have to read thousands, sickly you still have to read hundreds though.
Professionally paranoid is an accurate job description for intelligence agencies, they have to imagine very possible threat and then defend against them, they obviously can not wait for successful incursions, say whoops and then defend against them in future, hence professional paranoid is an accurately and tongue in cheek description.
I am also interested upon what basis you declare a universe of galaxies void of intelligent life other than short hair, crested, rock throwing, cranky monkeys, I would hope not from some silly text that declares those often delusional monkeys second only in intelligence to the supreme being of the universe, gees arrogant much ;D.
Do you think I could make up something like that, I picked it up at a internet law reference site.
It requires a treaty because costs can be disputed. Simple it cost $1 to make it, I sell it to a bull pucky holding company in a tax haven and they put $10 mark up on it and then sell it to an exporter who sells it overseas for $10 because their business is making too much already and needs the $1 per unit tax loss. The reason you need the tax treaty is to pick up the real difference between cost and profit and that must be tracked globally.
The only other was is to declare all content distribution that cost is purely the physical cost of producing the product and every thing else is profit including advertising costs, publishing administration and licensing costs.
The global treaty is far easier and fairer, yeah I know the psychopath corporations and the insanely greedy rich don't want it, because shock horror they will end up actually paying taxes.
The shift from targeted ballistic to cruise is because cruise is more cost effective, you can pretty much deploy at ten to one ratio. Especially taking into account multiple targeting options, same engine used with different types to enhance speed or range, anti ship and anti ground targets and of course high export income opportunities. Dramatically extend the range by fitting them to ships, planes and submarines and all fired outside of defence zones.
Ground hugging means defence must can only target to that effective horizon add ridges and valleys and the horizon shrinks further, add stealth and the problem further expands and requires defence in depth, add detonation upon damage to take out close range defences with following missiles and the problem magnifies again.
So the only defence against stealth cruise missiles in reality is peace.
Especially when they can use passive millimetre wave scanner http://www.millivision.com/ (infra-red) rather than xray back scatter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray.
This has all the stink of one corporations lobbyists simple working harder than another corporations lobbyists and damn the consequences.
It seems like geologist are not the right people to define spending based upon sound risk assessment principles. Based upon how likely the even is to occur (in this case it certainly will occur how often is the only question), the impact upon human life and infrastructure of the event occurring (very severe), all versus the cost of taking precautions to mitigate the losses suffered (far less than the expected losses if no precautions are taken).
Now the big catch is infrastructure and or buildings can have a life of hundred years or more. So while the geologist can sit back and say it is very unlikely the event will occur this year, stretching that out for fifty years is obviously just a guess and the wrong guess is the difference between a earthquake in New Zealand that kills no one and a same sized event in Haiti that kills hundreds of thousands and cripples the economy.
Sounds like a bunch of greedy developers are gambling with other peoples lives and have a geologist on the payroll.
Beware corporate takeovers, they are not always as clear cut as they seem. When one company buys another company company with shares, basically those shares increase in value based upon the additional value of the recently purchased company and obviously substantive owners of the purchased company are now substantive owners of the purchasing company. Reverse takeovers can readily occur amongst other corporate shenanigans, like the creation of a larger corporation with pretend growth driven by purchasing other corporation all than dumped to the public and pension funds for massive profit all driven by less than honest recommendations to big to fail banks.
Hard to tell with the professionally paranoid, how do you know this one isn't designed to look out rather than in, something they are not likely to admit any time soon.
Keep it simple sometimes works best. Simply split the company IT infrastructure in two, for critical services, accounting, productivity etc. use thin clients and for email and the internet use netbooks on a wireless network. Two completely separate networks, so they can trash their portable computers with all the crap off the internet and it has zero impact on critical services.
The netbooks should have a unique recovery media to rebuild each one cutting the down time to say 10 to 20 minutes, generally speaking the only security affected will be the users own personal security as the netbooks should have no access to company critical services including banking and accounting.
There is also 'The intentional infliction of mental harm' under tort which covers things like invasion of privacy and the threat of being sued, including your court costs and the penalties even when you are innocent.
So clearly in the case of the threatening letters there was an intention to inflict mental harm upon the victims and thus extort a payment from them, under tort law this should enable a class action lawsuit to be brought against the attorneys for the harm they have inflicted, where evidence was insufficient for actions to be brought against the defendants.
Sounds like it is high time for a global tax treaty. No tax havens, not B$ tax rates where only the profits and none of the production is shifted, multi-national corporations need to be forced to 'PAY THEIR TAXES' at the location where the profits were made, not some bullshit offshore location. Don't want to pay the taxes at the location where the money was earned the bugger off and work else where.
Basically Ireland pretty much deserved the hole they are now in, they had special low taxes for licensed content distribution (copyright), so they could effectively cheat other countries out of the taxable income generated at the point sale.
So the real question is let them go and pay the full price or help them, meh, let em burn in their debt they don't deserve any better.
The only global cooperation here is the willingness for the global military industrial complex to bleed the taxpayer dry. The 'ballistic' missile shield is completely useless against cruise missiles. Now you have stealth cruise missiles, supersonic cruise missiles, long range cruise missiles, their now planning long range hypersonic cruise missles, so really who is kidding who here.
Russia is only willing to play the game for the opportunity to start selling it's technology into Europe, likely that is part of the behind the scenes bargain struck with the western military industrial complex.
Why spend billions on a 'ballistic' missles shield that is completely useless against ground hugging cruise missiles, especially when every country is in the process of shifting technology that way. What is this, some kind of lying bullshit way to squeeze profits out of what is rapidly becoming pointless technology, can't afford social welfare but can afford a broken multi billion dollar missile shield.
It depends whether you favour time or motion as a dimension, motion makes more logical sense.
Google pays, how about the user that request the data, don't they also pay. The lie for for slowing down competing services is that no one pays. The truth is the the data is not sent around in circles, the uploader pays and the downloader already pays.
The psychopath business plan is to create a scarcity that does not exist except at peak times in order to inflate traffic profit margins and to create content delivery monopolies where competing content provides are simply squeezed out of business.
Remember POTS plain old telephone service, you had a dedicated line and you could have squeezed as much data as you wished down it, now they are cutting costs and inflating profits by sharing it. Along comes fibre optic where the amount of data that can be squeezed out of it has multiplied by tens of thousands of times and yet they are having more trouble. Truth is incumbents are using political corruption to attempt to not only retain monopolies but in fit's of psychopathic greed extend those monopolies into other areas.
The all new corporate data transmission tax, placing a tax on every transaction that occurs on the internet including personal ones and to protect it with corporate driven censorship, the clamping down of all non profit voices.