I would love to calculate, but I have no idea about the costs of the outage.
The problem with even guessing at them is that the airport and airlines externalize these costs onto the customer in ways most operations could only dream of. If a restaurant canceled my dinner 3 times and delayed it 4 times I would never go there again. With airlines I can't even try to do that. I have tried to avoid some airlines for years, yet I still get forced onto them due to schedule changes and the like. So I can buy a Lufthansa ticket and end up on a Delta flight, even if I am trying to avoid Deliver Everyone's Luggage To Atlanta.
The way we attribute the cost of delays is pretty asinine.
Basically they take and average salary times the number of people who might have been inconvenienced times X hours of delay and add it all up and assign the whole number to this incident. Never mind the fact that the delay never costs most people a dime, because there is no way to schedule your flights and connections with zero wait time.
If the same accounting method were used to price everything in the world your average glass of water would include the entire cost of water collection and distribution system.
We don't yet have the whole story about what happened in the flight 214 cockpit.
The WHOLE story doesn't matter that much.
They flew a perfectly good airplane into the seawall in CAVU weather. Anytime something like that happens with a fully functional aircraft it ALWAYS comes down to pilot error. Doesn't matter if they spilled coffee in their lap or were endlessly deferring to one another like the Chip 'n' Dale chipmunks.
If anything, the NTSB is bending over backward trying NOT to say pilot error, but every other pilot out there is already saying it.
Even after the worst landing of the pilots life, with his plane laying in the weeds with its tail torn off, when the Stew asks if its OK to evacuate the plane, and IN SPITE OF THE FACT that the EVACUATE alarm is sounding in the radio transmissions with the tower, the pilot says, NO, WAIT.
So they sit there for 90 seconds. Only when another Stew sees fire do they break cultural protocol and decide to ignore the captain and evacuate.
I'm curious about what scandal was about to break that involved her...? Seems to be the going paradigm for those high up in the current administration.
That is my thought exactly, or maybe she is just fed up with managing and defending a corrupt and over-reaching government department and wants out before she becomes unhireable.
Stepping out of DHS she will lose all the protection that the administration would provide, but that protection might not mean much when the next shoe drops.
The other possibility is she sees that she will the scapegoat for the Snowden affair anyway so she might as well get out of the street before she gets thrown under the bus.
Given the current way that most schools and universities operate, the hard work servers merely as a filter, to get rid of those they find unsuitable.
There is probably less interest in teaching anything of real value than there is in finding a way to dump a large percentage of the masses that they don't think will make it anyway. All pretense of making sure students learn and understand disappears somewhere in the middle of high school.
From then on out, schools and colleges act as society's steering committee.
Not saying this is wrong, there may be no point in suggesting anything beyond technical school for the motor-head or anything besides finishing school for the air head.
Still you have to wonder how many quality brains are missed by a school structure more interested in sorting than in educating.
Why do you think eBay bought them? It helped connect Skype and PayPal accounts together. There is really no other logical reason why an auction / wire transfer service would be interested in video chat.
Wait, what? You believe that? I've never known skype or video chat to be useful or used at all with ebay shoppers.
The price eBay payed was so astronomical that it could only have been with back-door funding from the Government.
The point was to get Skype out of Estonian hands because there was no reliable way for the NSA to tap into it. Even if they managed to break the encryption they couldn't handle the peer-to-peer routing. It was something they had to either shut down, or buy up.
Ebay turned out to be an incompetent partner, so the government stepped up to the only company that was interested, and I suspect they paid for the Microsoft purchase from ebay, and paid for asure in the process.
No, but the NSA probably paid MS more in tax payer dollars for access to that information than skype cost to buy for MS.
You don't know that the NSA didn't funnel the money, either directly of embedded in contracts, or repay it via tax rebates. Microsoft had no need of Skype. (Neither did Ebay, but they were too incompetent to do the government's bidding).
Almost their first major change was the routing of all calls through microsoft's servers. That was un-necessary from a service perspective, and actually not desirable for either Microsoft or the end user.
Then presto-chango there are Asure datacenters sprouting all over the globe, for "cloud" services that Microsoft didn't even have, and which users didn't exist.
If you could follow the money, my bet is that you would find Skype is a NSA entity since Microsoft took over.
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.
I notice you carefully decided not to quote the first sentence of that paragraph:
Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time.
Why did you leave that out?
51% Believe? How the hell do you measure that? The way I read it is any half assed idle speculation is sufficient to avoid even asking for a warrant at any time.
Is there anyone left on planet earth who still believes the Meta Data Only nonsense?
Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft? Did the NSA demand the routing of all conversations through Microsoft's own servers, instead of the distributed nodes used in the original Skype design? Where is Microsoft actually hosting their Skype servers? Are they using "overseas" Asure data centers so that the 51% can be met?
>> "Hmm... Apparently, NSA employees don't realize that information they post online can be revealed."
I admit to laughing at this.
Or perhaps these are designed and planted to attract people interested in these acronyms and program names to lure them into some sort of trap, or merely to record who looked at these profiles.
Ah, ok, I'll go take my meds now. Latr, but remember: fcsjkeaw jlcekfw6eh ae nasje ki4tsvt!
Exactly. The concept of a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge with femtocell lasers is hilarious.
Perhaps the Idea is to make them last till the tribal society, or the next intelligent species to inhabit earth, matured enough to actually figure this all out. That seems highly unlikely, and chances are they would all be reused as jewelry to hang from ones ears before anyone realized they had any value.
On the other hand, if the post-apocalypse society were humans, in all likelihood these things would be condemned by some religious nutjob and destroyed as some blasphemous sign of the devil, or a showing up of God.
However, setting aside the apocalypse for the moment, you should not disregard the possibility that this might emerge to be the future long-term storage medium, once it is miniaturized to the point where it could be built into small computers. The fact that it could last for millions of years may not even be germane.
It may be easier to detect an electric typewriter, because each key-press triggers one or more solenoids, which emit a small electromagnetic radio signal, detectable through walls.
Further you have the burn requirement of the ribbon, because you can often recover the message from the ribbon, especially single use plastic ribbons.
A smarter choice might have been an purely mechanical typewriter, which emits no radio signal, and has a ribbon that is intended to be used repeatedly, lessening the chance of reading the ribbon.
True, especially when it is only going to get better if they can just keep their pants on (to extend the metaphor).
This represents a major milestone on the spacecraft’s 9½-year journey to conduct the initial reconnaissance of the Pluto system
A couple pixels worth of separation hardly seems all that significant against a flood of noise. Ring we when they get close enough to see surface detail on either Pluto or Charon or some of the larger objects in the Kuiper Belt.
F18 Hardpoints: 11 total: 2× wingtips, 6× under-wing, and 3× under-fuselage with a capacity of 17,750 lb (8,050 kg) external fuel and ordnance, plus a WIDE variety of ordnance. Crew of 1.
B17 Bomber Short range missions (400 mi): 8,000 lb (3,600 kg) Long range missions (800 mi): 4,500 lb (2,000 kg) Crew of 10 (count em: ten)
Drone: Predator B Payload: 3,800 lb (1,700 kg) Maximum. Limited variety. Crew 1 (remote)
Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone. That day may come, but when it does the drone is going to look a lot more like a F18 than a Predator.
Drones are only useful against a unsophisticated enemy with no air support and no jamming capability.
Bet they didnt. What Apple got was that hopefully the DOJ will not consider this lawsuit a pattern of behavior when considering their culpability in the eBook price fixing investigation.
That ship has sailed, and the brunt of that eBook pricing scandal will hit any day now. Don't expect Apple to get out of that one so easily, because the last party to settle in this type of case pays something like 90% of the damages.
I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.
Or could it be that over the intervening time, Apple figured out that their customers are not as stupid as Apple thought they were, and none of them were found trying to download Amazon apps to their walled-garden phones?
Apple expressed that allowing Amazon to continue to use the phrase 'App Store' would ultimately confuse consumers
The contractor was on site for months, because EDA asked them to do the impossible, Prove that it was impossible for them to be infected.
The whole report is an amazing clusterfuck of misunderstandings and agencies speaking to each other in government-cover-your-ass-ees.
The DHS CIRT team told the EDA initially that 146 systems were infected with highly persistent malware. Then they sent them another report with the exact same name that said only 2 systems were infected.
Within 2 weeks of beginning its incident response activities, EDA’s cybersecurity contractor found the initial indications of extremely persistent malware were false positives—not actual malware infections. However, EDA’s CIO sought guaranteed assurance that the components were infection-free and no malware could persist. External incident responders were unable to provide the assurance EDA’s CIO sought, because doing so involved proving that an infection could not exist rather than that one did not exist. By April 16, 2012, despite months of searching, EDA’s cybersecurity contractor was unable to find any extremely persistent malware or indications of a targeted attack on EDA’s systems. Further, the NSA and US-CERT did not find nationstate activity or extremely persistent malware.
If anything it appears there were only a few (2 or 6 depending on what part of the report you read) machines infected, but worrywart EDA management insisted that the contractor keep looking.
The more you look at it the less the contractor seems to be at fault. Had they just walked away, do you think they would ever get hired again?
The actual destruction costs were only: $4,300 (still too much). The rest of that price tag is the total cost of doing the destruction - temporary infrastructure and so on. Not sure why a temporary replacement would cost 10x what was being replaced, though. Still plenty of government waste in the story.
Well except for the mice. You know how mice breed. Destroying those infected mice can take forever, because you find them breeding in closets, junk drawers, sometimes in their original boxes if bought at a TwoFer sale. And the wireless ones can be found a long way away from their nest, under desks, leaving their dongles everywhere.
They were lucky they managed to nip the infestation in the bud. It could have gotten totally out of hand had they owned any traveling laptops with mice. Entire countries might need quarantine. One mouse on a plane, and its game over.
$823,000 for the security contractor that adviced them to do that destruction?
Read the story, or at least read the summary. The contractor did not tell them to do that. The contractor found exactly 6 machines, which they recommended by re-imaged.
Let's say that the PRISM program managed to stop X number of terrorist attacks. As an NSA employee you might very well consider your work to be of good.
More than likely, there are a good number of them second guessing their career choices right now, knowing that what they have been doing is illegal.
Since the cat is now well and truly out of the bag as far as methods, let's have the NSA offer some proof of this "Stopped X Number of Terrorist Attacks" claim before they start hiding behind it. And let's see the proof that they did it all within the law. (After all, if we can't go outside the law to question a terrorist AFTER the fact, why should it be legal to open their mail BEFORE the fact)?
Its easy to make a claim of protecting the country, and then clam up when asked for specifics on the grounds of protecting assets, etc. But that ship has sailed. The means and methods are now out there for all to see.
What I've seen is poor delusional fools wishing on the internet that they could go on a jihad and being offered the tools by an FBI sting operation. But the thing is the idiots would never have carried through on their idle boasting threats had not some FBI plant offered them the means.
In the mean time, when the Russians HAND us some real terrorist wannabes, the FBI sends some naive junior grade agent to interview them and they come away with nothing, only to have them blow up the Boston Marathon. Where was NSA's vaunted capabilities then?
Slashdot Mirror
I would love to calculate, but I have no idea about the costs of the outage.
The problem with even guessing at them is that the airport and airlines externalize these costs onto the customer in ways most operations could only dream of. If a restaurant canceled my dinner 3 times and delayed it 4 times I would never go there again. With airlines I can't even try to do that. I have tried to avoid some airlines for years, yet I still get forced onto them due to schedule changes and the like. So I can buy a Lufthansa ticket and end up on a Delta flight, even if I am trying to avoid Deliver Everyone's Luggage To Atlanta.
The way we attribute the cost of delays is pretty asinine.
Basically they take and average salary times the number of people who might have been inconvenienced times X hours of delay and add it all up
and assign the whole number to this incident. Never mind the fact that the delay never costs most people a dime, because there is no
way to schedule your flights and connections with zero wait time.
If the same accounting method were used to price everything in the world your average glass of water would include the entire cost of water collection and distribution system.
http://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2013/01/17/00/23/XsZ5c.La.91.jpg
Perfect comeback. Owned.
We don't yet have the whole story about what happened in the flight 214 cockpit.
The WHOLE story doesn't matter that much.
They flew a perfectly good airplane into the seawall in CAVU weather.
Anytime something like that happens with a fully functional aircraft it ALWAYS comes down to pilot error. Doesn't matter if
they spilled coffee in their lap or were endlessly deferring to one another like the Chip 'n' Dale chipmunks.
If anything, the NTSB is bending over backward trying NOT to say pilot error, but every other pilot out there is already saying it.
Even after the worst landing of the pilots life, with his plane laying in the weeds with its tail torn off, when the Stew asks if
its OK to evacuate the plane, and IN SPITE OF THE FACT that the EVACUATE alarm is sounding in the radio transmissions
with the tower, the pilot says, NO, WAIT.
So they sit there for 90 seconds. Only when another Stew sees fire do they break cultural protocol and decide to ignore the captain and evacuate.
I'm curious about what scandal was about to break that involved her...?
Seems to be the going paradigm for those high up in the current administration.
That is my thought exactly, or maybe she is just fed up with managing and defending a corrupt and over-reaching
government department and wants out before she becomes unhireable.
Stepping out of DHS she will lose all the protection that the administration would provide, but that protection
might not mean much when the next shoe drops.
The other possibility is she sees that she will the scapegoat for the Snowden affair anyway so she might as
well get out of the street before she gets thrown under the bus.
Given the current way that most schools and universities operate, the hard work servers merely as a filter, to get rid of those they find unsuitable.
There is probably less interest in teaching anything of real value than there is in finding a way to dump a large percentage of the masses that they don't think will make it anyway. All pretense of making sure students learn and understand disappears somewhere in the middle of high school.
From then on out, schools and colleges act as society's steering committee.
Not saying this is wrong, there may be no point in suggesting anything beyond technical school for the motor-head or anything besides finishing school for the air head.
Still you have to wonder how many quality brains are missed by a school structure more interested in sorting than in educating.
Why do you think eBay bought them? It helped connect Skype and PayPal accounts together. There is really no other logical reason why an auction / wire transfer service would be interested in video chat.
Wait, what? You believe that?
I've never known skype or video chat to be useful or used at all with ebay shoppers.
The price eBay payed was so astronomical that it could only have been with back-door funding from the Government.
The point was to get Skype out of Estonian hands because there was no reliable way for the NSA to tap into it. Even if they managed to break the encryption they couldn't handle the peer-to-peer routing. It was something they had to either shut down, or buy up.
Ebay turned out to be an incompetent partner, so the government stepped up to the only company that was interested, and I suspect they paid for the Microsoft purchase from ebay, and paid for asure in the process.
Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft?
No, but the NSA probably paid MS more in tax payer dollars for access to that information than skype cost to buy for MS.
You don't know that the NSA didn't funnel the money, either directly of embedded in contracts, or repay it via tax rebates.
Microsoft had no need of Skype. (Neither did Ebay, but they were too incompetent to do the government's bidding).
Almost their first major change was the routing of all calls through microsoft's servers. That was un-necessary from a
service perspective, and actually not desirable for either Microsoft or the end user.
Then presto-chango there are Asure datacenters sprouting all over the globe, for "cloud" services that Microsoft didn't even have, and which users didn't exist.
If you could follow the money, my bet is that you would find Skype is a NSA entity since Microsoft took over.
Exactly. And if Microsoft conveniently routes all skype off shore, the NSA can log with impunity, hence my other questions.
Targeting US citizens does require an individual warrant, but the NSA is able to collect Americans' communications without a warrant if the target is a foreign national located overseas.
I notice you carefully decided not to quote the first sentence of that paragraph:
Blanket orders from the secret surveillance court allow these communications to be collected without an individual warrant if the NSA operative has a 51% belief that the target is not a US citizen and is not on US soil at the time.
Why did you leave that out?
51% Believe? How the hell do you measure that?
The way I read it is any half assed idle speculation is sufficient to avoid even asking for a warrant at any time.
Is there anyone left on planet earth who still believes the Meta Data Only nonsense?
Did the NSA buy Skype for Microsoft? Did the NSA demand the routing of all conversations through Microsoft's own servers, instead
of the distributed nodes used in the original Skype design?
Where is Microsoft actually hosting their Skype servers? Are they using "overseas" Asure data centers so that the 51% can be met?
>> "Hmm... Apparently, NSA employees don't realize that information they post online can be revealed."
I admit to laughing at this.
Or perhaps these are designed and planted to attract people interested in these acronyms and program names to lure them into some sort of trap, or merely to record who looked at these profiles.
Ah, ok, I'll go take my meds now. Latr, but remember: fcsjkeaw jlcekfw6eh ae nasje ki4tsvt!
Exactly. The concept of a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge with femtocell lasers is hilarious.
Perhaps the Idea is to make them last till the tribal society, or the next intelligent species to inhabit earth, matured enough to actually figure this all out. That seems highly unlikely, and chances are they would all be reused as jewelry to hang from ones ears before anyone realized they had any value.
On the other hand, if the post-apocalypse society were humans, in all likelihood these things would be condemned by some religious nutjob and destroyed as some blasphemous sign of the devil, or a showing up of God.
However, setting aside the apocalypse for the moment, you should not disregard the possibility that this might emerge to be the future long-term storage medium, once it is miniaturized to the point where it could be built into small computers. The fact that it could last for millions of years may not even be germane.
Less likely to be compromises?
It may be easier to detect an electric typewriter, because each key-press triggers one or more solenoids, which emit a small electromagnetic radio signal, detectable through walls.
Further you have the burn requirement of the ribbon, because you can often recover the message from the ribbon, especially single use plastic ribbons.
A smarter choice might have been an purely mechanical typewriter, which emits no radio signal, and has a ribbon that is intended to be used repeatedly, lessening the chance of reading the ribbon.
True, especially when it is only going to get better if they can just keep their pants on (to extend the metaphor).
This represents a major milestone on the spacecraft’s 9½-year journey to conduct the initial reconnaissance of the Pluto system
A couple pixels worth of separation hardly seems all that significant against a flood of noise. Ring we when they get close enough to see surface detail on either
Pluto or Charon or some of the larger objects in the Kuiper Belt.
Total nonsense.
There will be no redefinition of the second, it will be precisely as long as it is today.
We will simply change the ruler with which we measure a second.
Defining a meter as 100 centimeters, or 1000 millimeters, or 10,000,000,000 angstroms, or 3.281 feet does not change the length of a meter.
I desperately was sorry when the blink tag lost prominence. I hope it once again gets it's due respect.
Ok, I see said blink id, but even google search finds no ready answer to what the hell it is/means?
Help me out here...
Its all good, having both around is the best idea.
Going one direction just puts you in a position of weakness.
Drones of today simply can't carry the payload, and aren't likely to any time soon.
Take a look at your average F/A 18E's ordinance capability:
F18
Hardpoints: 11 total: 2× wingtips, 6× under-wing, and 3× under-fuselage with a capacity of
17,750 lb (8,050 kg) external fuel and ordnance, plus a WIDE variety of ordnance.
Crew of 1.
B17 Bomber
Short range missions (400 mi): 8,000 lb (3,600 kg)
Long range missions (800 mi): 4,500 lb (2,000 kg)
Crew of 10 (count em: ten)
Drone: Predator B
Payload: 3,800 lb (1,700 kg) Maximum. Limited variety.
Crew 1 (remote)
Nobody has ever been in a dogfight with a drone. That day may come, but when it does the drone is going to
look a lot more like a F18 than a Predator.
Drones are only useful against a unsophisticated enemy with no air support and no jamming capability.
B is still better than A when it's simpler/less expensive to produce and is already the adopted standard.
So no improvement can be made because someone adopted a standard?
The horse an buggy was a standard for a long time.
The Current STANDARD Atomic Clock (a) is already surpassed by other Atomic Clocks (b) but the new Optical Latice (c) is better still.
I had to do a double take as well.
Bet they didnt. What Apple got was that hopefully the DOJ will not consider this lawsuit a pattern of behavior when considering their culpability in the eBook price fixing investigation.
That ship has sailed, and the brunt of that eBook pricing scandal will hit any day now.
Don't expect Apple to get out of that one so easily, because the last party to settle in this type of case pays something like 90% of the damages.
I am sure that is the reason they dropped it and not because they were throwing dollars at lawyers for a case they couldn't possibly win. They found a way to back out gracefully.
Or could it be that over the intervening time, Apple figured out that their customers are not as stupid as Apple thought they were, and none of them were found trying to download Amazon apps to their walled-garden phones?
Apple expressed that allowing Amazon to continue to use the phrase 'App Store' would ultimately confuse consumers
You should read the report.
The contractor was on site for months, because EDA asked them to do the impossible, Prove that it was impossible for them to be infected.
The whole report is an amazing clusterfuck of misunderstandings and agencies speaking to each other in government-cover-your-ass-ees.
The DHS CIRT team told the EDA initially that 146 systems were infected with highly persistent malware. Then they sent them another report
with the exact same name that said only 2 systems were infected.
Within 2 weeks of beginning its incident response activities, EDA’s cybersecurity
contractor found the initial indications of extremely persistent malware were false
positives—not actual malware infections. However, EDA’s CIO sought guaranteed
assurance that the components were infection-free and no malware could persist.
External incident responders were unable to provide the assurance EDA’s CIO sought,
because doing so involved proving that an infection could not exist rather than that one
did not exist. By April 16, 2012, despite months of searching, EDA’s cybersecurity
contractor was unable to find any extremely persistent malware or indications of a
targeted attack on EDA’s systems. Further, the NSA and US-CERT did not find nationstate activity or extremely persistent malware.
If anything it appears there were only a few (2 or 6 depending on what part of the report you read) machines infected, but
worrywart EDA management insisted that the contractor keep looking.
The more you look at it the less the contractor seems to be at fault.
Had they just walked away, do you think they would ever get hired again?
The actual destruction costs were only: $4,300 (still too much). The rest of that price tag is the total cost of doing the destruction - temporary infrastructure and so on. Not sure why a temporary replacement would cost 10x what was being replaced, though. Still plenty of government waste in the story.
Well except for the mice. You know how mice breed. Destroying those infected mice can take forever, because you find them breeding in closets, junk drawers, sometimes in their original boxes if bought at a TwoFer sale. And the wireless ones can be found a long way away from their nest, under desks, leaving their dongles everywhere.
They were lucky they managed to nip the infestation in the bud. It could have gotten totally out of hand had they owned any traveling laptops with mice. Entire countries might need quarantine. One mouse on a plane, and its game over.
$823,000 for the security contractor that adviced them to do that destruction?
Read the story, or at least read the summary.
The contractor did not tell them to do that. The contractor found exactly 6 machines, which they recommended by re-imaged.
This stupidity was not the contractors fault.
Let's say that the PRISM program managed to stop X number of terrorist attacks. As an NSA employee you might very well consider your work to be of good.
More than likely, there are a good number of them second guessing their career choices right now, knowing that what they have been doing is illegal.
Since the cat is now well and truly out of the bag as far as methods, let's have the NSA offer some proof of this "Stopped X Number of Terrorist Attacks" claim before they start hiding behind it. And let's see the proof that they did it all within the law. (After all, if we can't go outside the law to question a terrorist AFTER the fact, why should it be legal to open their mail BEFORE the fact)?
Its easy to make a claim of protecting the country, and then clam up when asked for specifics on the grounds of protecting assets, etc. But that ship has sailed. The means and methods are now out there for all to see.
What I've seen is poor delusional fools wishing on the internet that they could go on a jihad and being offered the tools by an FBI sting operation. But the thing is the idiots would never have carried through on their idle boasting threats had not some FBI plant offered them the means.
In the mean time, when the Russians HAND us some real terrorist wannabes, the FBI sends some naive junior grade agent to interview them and they come away with nothing, only to have them blow up the Boston Marathon. Where was NSA's vaunted capabilities then?
You seem to have a vehement argument with someone who manufacturers fire safes and advertises them on the Internet.
They chose 125. Maybe you should write them your diatribe via email?