Because Dell is the one who figured it out and disclosed the information. So kudos to Dell for figuring this out and reporting it.
Next, I want to know if they are going to drop the reseller. From the article, the resellers knew who they were selling to.
But was it illegal for said resellers to sell to Syria? It may well not be something their country forbids.
If the computers were on consignment from Dell, its one thing, but if they bought them then resold them, there may not be anything anyone can (or should) do. First sale doctrine and all that.
I suspect Syria is under too much pressure fighting off the rebels to be setting up any tracking system these days anyway./me: reaches for tinfoil hat... If you don't see the US making any more noise about this issue, its entirely possible these specially *cough* enhanced computers were meant to sneak thru the embargo.
You REALLY think suicide bombers are bothered by the fact that you'll know they did it after they did it?
In the Boston case, they apparently had no stomach for suicide, and were gullible enough to believe they would get away with it (they didn't even try to leave town). Only after they saw their pictures all over the TV did they try to steal a car.
These were not real bright guys.
And neither are your average suicide bomber from what I have been reading. The "true believers in the cause" have pretty much been expended and the terror masters now prefer the weak minded and gullible with nothing to lose.
But...Where mass murder and terrorism is concerned what is our objective? Make sure we can punish the guilty or prevent attacks?
So far I am not aware of any revelation that has come out of all the surveillance that would have helped us 'prevent' the bombing. Plenty of things we might have done, but all things we already knew we could be doing but had rejected for reasons of civil liberties, cost, character of our nation etc.
You are exactly right, there is nothing that would be effective in "preventing" the bombing which would not render the country a total police state.
Yes, we lost a few lives, and yes lots of people were hurt. We lost a hell of alot more lives building a nation where we have the right to walk down town with a backpack without being stopped and questioned. (Except perhaps if you are Black and live in some portions of NYC).
There are simply not enough police to tail every miscreant or potential felon in the country, and I for one wouldn't want to live anywhere there were enough police for this task.
The certainty of being caught is the best weapon we have right now.
Did you read past the second sentence of your first link:
While this belief is widely held among American legal professionals, some studies have suggested that crime shows are unlikely to cause such an effect.
As for the second link, pure rubbish, which never once seriously suggests or offers any evidence that ANYONE believe the torcher aspect of the show.
One (not both) had been questioned at the request of the russians. The russians refused to supply enough information about the nature of their prior request, and the FBI questions were answered satisfactorily.
they identified a lot of people on the cameras. a witness told them which guys were the culprits. the realtime videos did zilch to stop them from leaving bags unattended....
feds didn't spend any agents on surveillance on these guys. which would have made it fairly obvious that they were gonna do something stupid,
First, surveillance is not about prevention, it is ALWAYS about catching people after the fact.
You can't seriously be suggesting that the realtime video (it wasn't real time, it was recorded) should be enough to have a policeman appear the instant you take your backpack off and put it at your feet? Do you want to live in a society where there are actually enough cops for that?
The feds didn't spend ANY time surveilling these guys. They ask him some questions in 2011, and he gave all the right answers at the time. Do you really want to live in a society where the mere mention of your name gets you assigned a 24/7 surveillance team for YEARS AND YEARS into the future?
Thing about what you are suggesting. Wouldn't you be the first one to jump on Slashdot and bitch about an FBI team following you around because of something someone else said about you?
You are kidding right? I've got news for you. Between you and Schneier one of you is absolutely an idiot, the other is definitely not, and the one who isn't is a world renowned security expert.
Schneier is a cryptographer, computer security specialist. He knows as much about police work and catching criminals or preventing crime as your average sewer worker.
I don't know what that pedestal you place him on is made of, but it seems to attract a lot of flies.
Good luck if he thinks he convince the American public that televised fiction isn't fact.
Indeed. From what I understand almost everyone believes TV shows as documentaries.
"24" convinced people that beating the crap out of suspects is often the only (and effective) way
"CSI" convinced people that the crappiest image can be enhanced up to a perfectly clear picture in a few clicks.
Oh, yes, please heap some more insult on Americans. Don't bother with a citation, just dig deep into your sack of bullshit and hurl away. Ask yourself who is dumber and more gullible, the guy who watches entertaining make believe-drama (and knows its make-believe drama), or the clown who assumes all americans believe the make-believe drama, simply because someone told him so.
Doesn't it in some way make sense that relatively more resources could (theoretically) be used on solving new problems in better ways, rather than pushing existing products against somebody else's?
Yes, by all means, lets take the engineers away from their construction work, the farmers out of the field, and the nurses off the ward, and the miners out of the mines, and put them all to work finding a better battery technology. Lets forbid advertising. But wait, who will buy our better batteries if they don't know about them?
You can't remake society just because you think you had a good idea.
What Dotcom is aledged to have done was illegal in the country he did it in. The raid was a New Zealand execute raid. Your objections should be directed to that government.
That you can come up with an example that will run through that $17K in no time is totally off point and non germane.
I know a couple medium sized electrical engineering companies I've worked with that replace computers as needed, buy a few software licenses, do very little travel mostly local, and could easily live within $17K. I know 5 man software companies that need even less non-labor capital, and haven't purchased a new computer for years, but attend one or two conferences per year.
Its the non-labor expense ratio between marketing and development that is under discussion here. Not the chest thumping about how expensive your particular project might be.
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
Why do YOU get to decide what is "proper"? Who appointed you?
If plastic and LEDs work what the hell is wrong with using that?
Fiber is getting cheaper all the time. People don't steal fiber because the scrap value of glass or plastic is high. Besides, fiber can support way higher bandwidth, by your own admission in your last paragraph. And fiber is not a scarce commodity, whereas both copper and wireless spectrum is.
Verizon is still going to have to put fiber back into this town in order to supply bandwidth that people want for their computer connections. Pushing voice to wireless is a short term solution at best, with no growth path, whereas pushing fiber to the premises just makes sense.
Abandoning the copper may make sense. But going all wireless is not sustainable in the long run.
you would expect a huge difference what are the overall budgets like.
Yeah, that caught my eye as well. Seem like cherry picking the numbers if you ask me.
Simply because the engineers already have all the tools, desks, materials, computers that they need to develop the the products means they don't need a big non-labor budget.
But you don't sell stuff without advertising, travel, swag, etc. And that is an ongoing expense.
You buy one advertising spot, you need to go out and buy another one tomorrow. Solve one engineering problem on your computer and you don't need a new computer to solve the next one.
I would expect almost any company to have bigger sales costs than development costs. Especially for any product that has to compete in the marketplace.
Show us the whole budget, or stop cherry picking numbers.
Seems the appropriate tags should be "pot", "kettle" and "black".
Really? I think you mostly misunderstand what is going on.
US Government does not routinely haul Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page into court because some user posts child porn or hate speech on Facebook or Google Plus. Nor does the US demand Pakistan or India deliver summons to the web services in those countries to appear in US courts for anti-US hate postings on their services.
In the US, there are procedures to have those types of things taken down if warranted, without demanding that the CEO appear in court and answer personally for content so massive in scope and diverse in nature that no one person or large group could possibly police it all.
And, the US, and most Western governments, would rather allow the stuff to be posted, if for no other reason than doing so provides them with a "watering hole" opportunity for observation.
Its a whole different thing to demand a court appearance by Zuckerberg simply because some guy going by the name of Tokolosh posted some hate rant on his Facebook page. Especially when there are different countries involved, and different laws about what actually is hate speech.
Apparently you are in good company in this misunderstanding of what is going on here, judging by how quickly you were modded insightful.
I've heard of, even seen (on TV) places in China where there are no bees anymore. These are agricultural regions that were reliant upon bees to pollinate their crops.
They went to manual pollination. No shit, actual farmers spend 2-3 weeks every year, hand pollinating their crops. It only works because the average income level is comparatively low there. And let's face it, the choice was do the job by hand or get out of farming. Without outside assistance there are many plants that cannot pollinate themselves, or only do so poorly.
Not this again!!!
They were hand pollinating long before they killed off the bees trying to eradicate a different pest.
They were hand pollinating in situations there bees wouldn't have helped at all because in order to obtain high yield the crops required cross pollination between three related varieties of pears that flower at different times. They had been doing it for years to improve the crop.
Only much later did they accidently eradicate the bees, trying to save these same pear crops from a different pest. But bringing in new bees wouldn't have helped due to the long time between the flowering of the three varieties. They had not been relying on bees at all for years.
Hand pollination is also done in the US, especially when breeding new varieties of corn or apples, where its very important to know exactly what went into the mix. Its actually not that unusual.
And how exactly does this make a 'blind' HUD useful? What is it to display, the time and perhaps your mailbox status? Geez.
It knows exactly where you are, which direction you are facing and which of your friends you are near. It can give you the menu, phone number and hours of the restaurant you are looking at, it can show your driving route, eta, and current speed without taking your eyes off the road, complete with traffic and weather conditions.
I take it you don't own a smartphone, and have never played with any of the virtual reality apps. Yet you feel competent to pontificate on how useless it would be without a camera!
In fact having a camera on board adds very little usability, and gets you kicked out of many private or sensitive areas.
And tiny firecrackers, and the smoke there-of. Legal uses of black powder would easily swamp and overwhelm this detector. So in order to prevent false positives, expect a major crackdown on black powder. Vaseline too.
Further, its never been hard to train dogs to sniff out black powder, so having a machine that does this is probably not much cheaper.
yes but it is not recording *everything* which is what people are fearing with Google glasses.
And how hard is that to imagine? You can't know when it is recording, so the safe thing is to assume it always is.
After all, it's just another peripheral, and who knows how much capacity is in the pocket or the purse?
If you wouldn't allow someone to walk into your home or office with a cam corder and film you at your desk with all your papers laying about, why would you allow them to wear Google Glasses in your office?
More worrying, what about instead of taking out satellites and drone control towers, an enemy takes over them with a virus.
Sure the average foot soldier might not use or encounter very many networked devices. But what if the guidance system in every smart bomb was redirected back at our own troops, ever Predator drone was reprogrammed to search and destroy all humans.
What about military people also watching Battle Star Galactica? You spoze they ever did?
Slashdot Mirror
Because Dell is the one who figured it out and disclosed the information. So kudos to Dell for figuring this out and reporting it.
Next, I want to know if they are going to drop the reseller. From the article, the resellers knew who they were selling to.
But was it illegal for said resellers to sell to Syria?
It may well not be something their country forbids.
If the computers were on consignment from Dell, its one thing, but if they bought them then resold them, there may not be anything anyone can (or should) do. First sale doctrine and all that.
I suspect Syria is under too much pressure fighting off the rebels to be setting up any tracking system these days anyway. /me: reaches for tinfoil hat...
If you don't see the US making any more noise about this issue, its entirely possible these specially *cough* enhanced computers were meant to sneak thru the embargo.
You REALLY think suicide bombers are bothered by the fact that you'll know they did it after they did it?
In the Boston case, they apparently had no stomach for suicide, and were gullible enough to believe they would get away with it (they didn't even try to leave town). Only after they saw their pictures all over the TV did they try to steal a car.
These were not real bright guys.
And neither are your average suicide bomber from what I have been reading. The "true believers in the cause" have pretty much been expended and the terror masters now prefer the weak minded and gullible with nothing to lose.
But...Where mass murder and terrorism is concerned what is our objective? Make sure we can punish the guilty or prevent attacks?
So far I am not aware of any revelation that has come out of all the surveillance that would have helped us 'prevent' the bombing. Plenty of things we might have done, but all things we already knew we could be doing but had rejected for reasons of civil liberties, cost, character of our nation etc.
You are exactly right, there is nothing that would be effective in "preventing" the bombing which would not render the country a total police state.
Yes, we lost a few lives, and yes lots of people were hurt.
We lost a hell of alot more lives building a nation where we have the right to walk down town with a backpack without being stopped and questioned. (Except perhaps if you are Black and live in some portions of NYC).
There are simply not enough police to tail every miscreant or potential felon in the country, and I for one wouldn't want to live anywhere there were enough police for this task.
The certainty of being caught is the best weapon we have right now.
Did you read past the second sentence of your first link:
While this belief is widely held among American legal professionals, some studies have suggested that crime shows are unlikely to cause such an effect.
As for the second link, pure rubbish, which never once seriously suggests or offers any evidence that ANYONE believe the torcher aspect of the show.
Check your facts.
One (not both) had been questioned at the request of the russians. The russians refused to supply enough information about the nature of their prior request, and the FBI questions were answered satisfactorily.
they identified a lot of people on the cameras. a witness told them which guys were the culprits. the realtime videos did zilch to stop them from leaving bags unattended. ...
feds didn't spend any agents on surveillance on these guys. which would have made it fairly obvious that they were gonna do something stupid,
First, surveillance is not about prevention, it is ALWAYS about catching people after the fact.
You can't seriously be suggesting that the realtime video (it wasn't real time, it was recorded) should be enough to have a policeman appear the instant you take your backpack off and put it at your feet? Do you want to live in a society where there are actually enough cops for that?
The feds didn't spend ANY time surveilling these guys. They ask him some questions in 2011, and he gave all the right answers at the time. Do you really want to live in a society where the mere mention of your name gets you assigned a 24/7 surveillance team for YEARS AND YEARS into the future?
Thing about what you are suggesting. Wouldn't you be the first one to jump on Slashdot and bitch about an FBI team following you around because of something someone else said about you?
You are kidding right? I've got news for you. Between you and Schneier one of you is absolutely an idiot, the other is definitely not, and the one who isn't is a world renowned security expert.
Schneier is a cryptographer, computer security specialist.
He knows as much about police work and catching criminals or preventing crime as your average sewer worker.
I don't know what that pedestal you place him on is made of, but it seems to attract a lot of flies.
Good luck if he thinks he convince the American public that televised fiction isn't fact.
Indeed. From what I understand almost everyone believes TV shows as documentaries.
"24" convinced people that beating the crap out of suspects is often the only (and effective) way
"CSI" convinced people that the crappiest image can be enhanced up to a perfectly clear picture in a few clicks.
Oh, yes, please heap some more insult on Americans. Don't bother with a citation, just dig deep into your sack of bullshit and hurl away.
Ask yourself who is dumber and more gullible, the guy who watches entertaining make believe-drama (and knows its make-believe drama), or the clown who assumes all americans believe the make-believe drama, simply because someone told him so.
Doesn't it in some way make sense that relatively more resources could (theoretically) be used on solving new problems in better ways, rather than pushing existing products against somebody else's?
Yes, by all means, lets take the engineers away from their construction work, the farmers out of the field, and the nurses off the ward, and the miners out of the mines, and put them all to work finding a better battery technology. Lets forbid advertising. But wait, who will buy our better batteries if they don't know about them?
You can't remake society just because you think you had a good idea.
What Dotcom is aledged to have done was illegal in the country he did it in.
The raid was a New Zealand execute raid. Your objections should be directed to that government.
So you design bridges, or houses and after each house or bridge, you worry so much about your competition that you run out and buy a new computer?
Because the old one is worn out?
You are delusional.
That you can come up with an example that will run through that $17K in no time is totally off point and non germane.
I know a couple medium sized electrical engineering companies I've worked with that replace computers as needed, buy a few software licenses, do very little travel mostly local, and could easily live within $17K. I know 5 man software companies that need even less non-labor capital, and haven't purchased a new computer for years, but attend one or two conferences per year.
Its the non-labor expense ratio between marketing and development that is under discussion here. Not the chest thumping about how expensive your particular project might be.
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
Why do YOU get to decide what is "proper"? Who appointed you?
If plastic and LEDs work what the hell is wrong with using that?
Fiber is getting cheaper all the time. People don't steal fiber because the scrap value of glass or plastic is high.
Besides, fiber can support way higher bandwidth, by your own admission in your last paragraph.
And fiber is not a scarce commodity, whereas both copper and wireless spectrum is.
Verizon is still going to have to put fiber back into this town in order to supply bandwidth that people want for their computer connections. Pushing voice to wireless is a short term solution at best, with no growth path, whereas pushing fiber to the premises just makes sense.
Abandoning the copper may make sense. But going all wireless is not sustainable in the long run.
you would expect a huge difference what are the overall budgets like.
Yeah, that caught my eye as well. Seem like cherry picking the numbers if you ask me.
Simply because the engineers already have all the tools, desks, materials, computers that they need to develop the the products means they don't need a big non-labor budget.
But you don't sell stuff without advertising, travel, swag, etc. And that is an ongoing expense.
You buy one advertising spot, you need to go out and buy another one tomorrow.
Solve one engineering problem on your computer and you don't need a new computer to solve the next one.
I would expect almost any company to have bigger sales costs than development costs. Especially for any product that
has to compete in the marketplace.
Show us the whole budget, or stop cherry picking numbers.
Seems the appropriate tags should be "pot", "kettle" and "black".
Really? I think you mostly misunderstand what is going on.
US Government does not routinely haul Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page into court because some user posts child porn or hate speech on Facebook or Google Plus. Nor does the US demand Pakistan or India deliver summons to the web services in those countries to appear in US courts for anti-US hate postings on their services.
In the US, there are procedures to have those types of things taken down if warranted, without demanding that the CEO appear in court and answer personally for content so massive in scope and diverse in nature that no one person or large group could possibly police it all.
And, the US, and most Western governments, would rather allow the stuff to be posted, if for no other reason than doing so provides them with a "watering hole" opportunity for observation.
Its a whole different thing to demand a court appearance by Zuckerberg simply because some guy going by the name of Tokolosh posted some hate rant on his Facebook page. Especially when there are different countries involved, and different laws about what actually is hate speech.
Apparently you are in good company in this misunderstanding of what is going on here, judging by how quickly you were modded insightful.
I'm thinking you missed a whoosh there.
Seems like the GP meant a subtle play on words, using obscuring as in "hiding" not as in "rare" or "seldom used".
I've heard of, even seen (on TV) places in China where there are no bees anymore. These are agricultural regions that were reliant upon bees to pollinate their crops.
They went to manual pollination. No shit, actual farmers spend 2-3 weeks every year, hand pollinating their crops. It only works because the average income level is comparatively low there. And let's face it, the choice was do the job by hand or get out of farming. Without outside assistance there are many plants that cannot pollinate themselves, or only do so poorly.
Not this again!!!
They were hand pollinating long before they killed off the bees trying to eradicate a different pest.
They were hand pollinating in situations there bees wouldn't have helped at all because in order to obtain high yield the crops required cross pollination between three related varieties of pears that flower at different times. They had been doing it for years to improve the crop.
Only much later did they accidently eradicate the bees, trying to save these same pear crops from a different pest.
But bringing in new bees wouldn't have helped due to the long time between the flowering of the three varieties.
They had not been relying on bees at all for years.
Read about it here.
Lets not get our stories mixed up, mKay?
Hand pollination is also done in the US, especially when breeding new varieties of corn or apples, where its very important to know exactly what went into the mix. Its actually not that unusual.
As opposed to the bee keepers, who, in all likelyhood are incorporated as well?
Always an excuse to rant against the corporations. Jeezuz, give it a rest!
And how exactly does this make a 'blind' HUD useful? What is it to display, the time and perhaps your mailbox status? Geez.
It knows exactly where you are, which direction you are facing and which of your friends you are near. It can give you the menu, phone number and hours of the restaurant you are looking at, it can show your driving route, eta, and current speed without taking your eyes off the road, complete with traffic and weather conditions.
I take it you don't own a smartphone, and have never played with any of the virtual reality apps. Yet you feel competent to pontificate on how useless it would be without a camera!
In fact having a camera on board adds very little usability, and gets you kicked out of many private or sensitive areas.
Have eyes. Can read.
Dude: .)
Im not worried about my own webcam.
(I would have thought that was obvious to
But people don't wander into my office with their computer and webcam running and record the contents of my desk and the confidential paper there on.
And tiny firecrackers, and the smoke there-of.
Legal uses of black powder would easily swamp and overwhelm this detector. So in order to prevent false positives,
expect a major crackdown on black powder. Vaseline too.
Further, its never been hard to train dogs to sniff out black powder, so having a machine that does this is probably not much cheaper.
No one has ever said it wasn't going to change.
'Its current form' == FOR DEVELOPERS, SOLD TO DEVELOPERS, MARKETED TO DEVELOPERS
Exactly my point. It won't survive in its current form. Virtually nothing does.
It will get smaller, do more useful things, and be less obvious.
yes but it is not recording *everything* which is what people are fearing with Google glasses.
And how hard is that to imagine?
You can't know when it is recording, so the safe thing is to assume it always is.
After all, it's just another peripheral, and who knows how much capacity is in the pocket or the purse?
If you wouldn't allow someone to walk into your home or office with a cam corder and film you at your desk
with all your papers laying about, why would you allow them to wear Google Glasses in your
office?
More worrying, what about instead of taking out satellites and drone control towers, an enemy takes over them with a virus.
Sure the average foot soldier might not use or encounter very many networked devices. But what if the guidance system in every smart bomb was redirected back at our own troops, ever Predator drone was reprogrammed to search and destroy all humans.
What about military people also watching Battle Star Galactica? You spoze they ever did?
NAH, that could never happen!