Cell phone theft makes money for the manufacturers and cell carriers. People who couldn't afford one otherwise get one for free, and the subscriber buys another.
That is why its not implemented in the US.
Try to focus. This has nothing to do with terrorism and can't be used to prevent it.
They guy bringing it back to you for a refund is likely to be carrying a 2x4.
Nothing in the story said the carriers are going to recover the phones. They are just going to disable them so there is no incentive to steal them or sell them and report them stolen. You aren't going to get it back.
This just doesn't happen. Look, people, the vast majority of carriers in the world already to this, and they have no such problem.
There are checks and balances. Some require a police report, others simply require you to appear in person, show your ID and match it to your account credentials.
Contrary to popular opinion, this scheme wasn't dreamed up by 7th graders, Its built into the GSM spec and widely used.
Long overdue, this technology has proven to reduce phone theft in places like Australia. Getting mugged for your phone is rapidly becoming very common in the US. There is a switch in every GSM system database designed for precisely this purpose. Its in the GSM specs. All these carriers are running the same call connection software. (Most of them are too clueless to have developed their own).
Why not turn it on WITHIN carriers in 45 days flat, and between carriers within 90 days? Some say there is money to be made by selling you a new phone, and the carriers were unwilling to forego that revenue stream. The thief (or the people who buy from the thieves) have to sign up for service, but they won't be buying any new phone with that service. Many also suggest that a good portion of the non-contract market is using stolen phones.
But turning this on is not hard. Carriers have been dragging their feet on this for decades.
The tinfoil hat in me expects the carriers to turn this into another way to make money, if not by charging a fee, then by using it as an excuse to not accept phones purchased elsewhere, or by insistin you bring your phone in for them to record the IMEI, and charging a fee to record it.
Except that NPR IS government funded, as I pointed out above.
In my back of the envelop calculations, I specifically LEFT OUT tax exemption status precisely to AVOID this whole argument. No good deed goes unpunished.
NPR gets about 15% of its funding from Government (directly AND through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is 100% federal funds). Add to this another 14% from universities (which are mostly disguised federal and state pass-thru money).
The bulk of their funding is from individuals and businesses, and foundations. Foundations and Businesses amount to another 28%, all of which is a write for the foundation or business, so more money out of the federal pocket.
The individual category is 34% and there is no real way to tell how much of that is a tax write off as well.
So roughly 58% of NPRs budget is from the Government, either directly, or by tax write off which has the same effect on government.
(Totally disregarding the fact that NPR is tax exempt which eliminates corporate taxes which amount to about 34% of income according to Wikipedia).
People smart enough to know about the hacks are usually smart enough not to run their bill down to zero. People see their historical usage on every Electric bill, its not like they are unaware records are being kept.
Thieves just run down their usage over time by 25% of their prior usage, which is consistent with what you can accomplish by being frugal (or going on vacation). Public awareness of shortages can drive electrical usage for an entire city down by 25%.
Dumb people might go for "the big hack", but these are the only ones that get caught, because simple computer programs running against billing data make them so obvious.
Without meter-by-meter inspection, you can't tell if loss of household income (layoff) caused increased frugality or if they tampered with the meter, as long as they keep from pushing usage down by less than 25% or so.
If you Read TFA, you will find that detection is very difficult, and these were with users that had hacked their meter in a very obvious way, such that the"altered meter typically reduces a customer’s bill by 50 percent to 75 percent". If you can't easily spot 50% reduction, you would have no chance of spotting a 25% reduction.
Besides the fact that you don't need to mess with dangerous line-voltages, this is no different than normal meter fraud. I can't imagine anything other than incompetence being the reason this was not found. A utility buys electricity, or makes it, and the amount they put on the grid is a known quantity and easily measured. If the amount that they are billing for is less than that, something is wrong. You can do the numbers on a per-line or a per-substation basis, possibly even more granular than that. All the major HV lines and substations have their own meters which report back to HQ. A single person stealing electricity is somewhat hard to catch, but if substantial amounts of people got away with this for an extended period of time, someone was not doing their job.
But take your average mid size city, and the substations cover huge areas. HV feeders typically feed entire neighborhoods and step down to lower voltage on the neighborhood feed without any such meter. Line loss is variable, not a constant you can be assured of over time. Your mom's current frugality binge can make a significant difference in usage month to month.
So how do you find the 6 houses out of 100 that reduce their consumption by some amount less than the average variance? Especially if they ratchet it down slowly in the high use season?
And even if you statistically isolate a few suspects, how do you prove it? About the only way to do so is to put another meter upstream of each suspect house. Expensive, and not at all stealthy, so the suspect can drop the hack.
A power company in an area I lived in, where power was still distributed with overhead wires, would put the meter at the top of the off-property pole as a way of advertising people they had caught tampering with meters. The entire neighborhood knew what that meant. They could still read them remotely, so it didn't involve any additional work load on their staff once installed.
1701-D would have been huge, perhaps too large to be feasible, the !701-A was 289 M long, 72 M high and 127 meters wide which would make it a lot more feasible
" Feasible" isn't a word that comes immediately to mind as a limiting convept while walking around in Vegas.
And even more interesting, in all three studies the pesticide was intentionally fed to the bees in the sugar water; it wasn't collected by the bees. The Harvard study also points out the bee keepers feed their colonies HFCS, which apparently started containing trace amounts of the pesticide about the time they noticed colony collapse become a problem. Kind of sounds like they need to stop feeding HFCS.
But was this food grade HFCS?
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Does anyone know if SSL solves the problem? Can a malicious endpoint act as a proxy so the SSL connection is between the endpoint and the real site and then serve you a different SSL certificate with the adverts included. (Although I doubt they can make a certificate look like the legitimate website.) Alternatively they could just drop everything down to HTTP...
They might be able to pull this off, but the revenue they could earn off of such a scheme would never pay the lawyer bills. One could argue this would be a DMCA violation. (In fact, they seem to be on shaky legal ground altering un-encryption streams. It is after all, a form of scraping and perhaps copyright violation.)
The drop everything to HTTP would certainly be noticed.
We started at 300 baud, and were lucky to get that. The long period of dead traffic right in the middle of the message taunted you to hang up and dial again, only to have it sputter out another few characters.
I remember the daily ritual of signing on to Compuserve to get the daily email from our customers in Europe, as well as telex orders.
It was pretty much useless as far as I can recall, but it was a boat load cheaper than phone calls for tech support issues. When we first started, there was just beginning to be interconnection between Compuserve and a few other providers. Customers would send us Compuserve mails to let us know they were having problems dialing into our BBS system from India, and Britain.
The internet came along in our part of the hinterlands, and we hopped on that as fast as possible. We were only too happy to be free of these other services. Even if Email did take a day to arrive (I kid you not, it took a day to get an email from India, and it was routed through the most amazing places).
So, no, not nostalgic. Nightmare perhaps. Trying to type an answer to a tech support question into the glass tty screen with the minute meter clicking in your head, because copy/paste hadn't really been worked out yet. Being charged by the message length!! Arrrggggh.
It is not a far jump to go from lifetime titles for a temporary job to passing those titles to their descendants.
Write back when a Senator or General's offspring is free to use the title. Till then, you have vastly misstated the issue.
Most British (as well as continental) titles, Duke, Lord, etc. were always handed down via linage or marriage, and they in historic times the had real power, as the Kings representative. Knights (Sir) are about the only title that was earned on the battle field, and it came with virtually no privilege.
how to handle much higher bit rates than 2Mbit in an office or home due to shorter bit periods and smooshing of the signal by reflections.
Exactly this!
Much as the Auzies like to thump their chest and claim to have invented WIFI, the point was it was in use prior to these guys tackling the problem of reflections. That problem was well known at the time, and range as well as wall penetration suffered as a result.
CSIRO didn't invent WIFI, they merely tweaked it. Tweaked it in a good way, mind you, but not a particularly novel or un-obvious way, but a good enough way.
So when these inevitably are downed for some reason (e.g. technical malfunctions, enemy interference, etc), what's to stop the enemy from reverse engineering the technology and gaining "nuclear secrets"?
I wouldn't worry so much about the secrets, but rather the nuclear materials you provide them free of charge for anyone who manages to shoot (or lure) one down.
And the summary completely misses the main point of the story:
The fact that the program has been halted is something that Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on drone warfare, suggests may be lost in the attention on the nuclear aspect of the project.
“What people seem to be missing is that the program was not approved. We are not building it!” he told me. “All sorts of ideas are proposed by scientists, and this one was found to involve a technology not yet ready for prime time and which carries some deep concerns about its implications for operations, legal concerns, and fear of accident impact. So it was not approved.”
Apparently the submitter, in typical Anonymous Coward fashion, failed to read past the first paragraph.
These are not titles, and certainly not entitlements.
Senator, General, Admiral, Judge, are simply a Rank, or Job Description. They differ from Duke, Count, King, in that they are something you EARN, by bullet, ballot, study, or just hard work. One's contribution to society via these professions are simply recognized as an honorarium. These are utterly different than titles in the British sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Cell phone theft makes money for the manufacturers and cell carriers. People who couldn't afford one otherwise get one for free, and the subscriber buys another.
That is why its not implemented in the US.
Try to focus. This has nothing to do with terrorism and can't be used to prevent it.
They guy bringing it back to you for a refund is likely to be carrying a 2x4.
Nothing in the story said the carriers are going to recover the phones. They are just going to disable them so there is no incentive to steal them or sell them and report them stolen. You aren't going to get it back.
This just doesn't happen. Look, people, the vast majority of carriers in the world already to this, and they have no such problem.
There are checks and balances. Some require a police report, others simply require you to appear in person, show your ID and match it to your account credentials.
Contrary to popular opinion, this scheme wasn't dreamed up by 7th graders, Its built into the GSM spec and widely used.
Long overdue, this technology has proven to reduce phone theft in places like Australia. Getting mugged for your phone is rapidly becoming very common in the US. There is a switch in every GSM system database designed for precisely this purpose. Its in the GSM specs. All these carriers are running the same call connection software. (Most of them are too clueless to have developed their own).
Why not turn it on WITHIN carriers in 45 days flat, and between carriers within 90 days? Some say there is money to be made by selling you a new phone, and the carriers were unwilling to forego that revenue stream. The thief (or the people who buy from the thieves) have to sign up for service, but they won't be buying any new phone with that service. Many also suggest that a good portion of the non-contract market is using stolen phones.
But turning this on is not hard. Carriers have been dragging their feet on this for decades.
The tinfoil hat in me expects the carriers to turn this into another way to make money, if not by charging a fee, then by using it as an excuse to not accept phones purchased elsewhere, or by insistin you bring your phone in for them to record the IMEI, and charging a fee to record it.
Which is precisely why I didn't say that.
Would you please stop putting words in my mouth?
And its easier to see under the street light.
QED.
Except that NPR IS government funded, as I pointed out above.
In my back of the envelop calculations, I specifically LEFT OUT tax exemption status precisely to AVOID this whole argument. No good deed goes unpunished.
We're less likely to find planets resembling our own around red dwarfs.
Citation needed.
There seems precious little evidence for this unless by "resembling our own" your ONLY criteria is orbiting a sun "resembling our own".
Isn't this akin to looking for your lost keys under the street light because its brighter there?
It would seem that finding life on planets around red dwarfs is just as likely, even if we have no direct experience with life on such planets.
Churches:
Funds from Government? No.
Funds from CPB? No.
Funds from Universities: No.
Tax exempt? Not always, but mostly.
Your Troll? Fail.
NPR gets about 15% of its funding from Government (directly AND through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is 100% federal funds).
Add to this another 14% from universities (which are mostly disguised federal and state pass-thru money).
The bulk of their funding is from individuals and businesses, and foundations. Foundations and Businesses amount to another 28%, all of
which is a write for the foundation or business, so more money out of the federal pocket.
The individual category is 34% and there is no real way to tell how much of that is a tax write off as well.
So roughly 58% of NPRs budget is from the Government, either directly, or by tax write off which has the same effect on government.
(Totally disregarding the fact that NPR is tax exempt which eliminates corporate taxes which amount to about 34% of income according to Wikipedia).
People smart enough to know about the hacks are usually smart enough not to run their bill down to zero.
People see their historical usage on every Electric bill, its not like they are unaware records are being kept.
Thieves just run down their usage over time by 25% of their prior usage, which is consistent with what you can accomplish by being frugal
(or going on vacation). Public awareness of shortages can drive electrical usage for an entire city down by 25%.
Dumb people might go for "the big hack", but these are the only ones that get caught, because simple computer programs running
against billing data make them so obvious.
Without meter-by-meter inspection, you can't tell if loss of household income (layoff) caused increased frugality or if they tampered
with the meter, as long as they keep from pushing usage down by less than 25% or so.
If you Read TFA, you will find that detection is very difficult, and these were with users that had hacked their meter in a very obvious way,
such that the"altered meter typically reduces a customer’s bill by 50 percent to 75 percent". If you can't easily spot 50% reduction, you
would have no chance of spotting a 25% reduction.
Besides the fact that you don't need to mess with dangerous line-voltages, this is no different than normal meter fraud. I can't imagine anything other than incompetence being the reason this was not found. A utility buys electricity, or makes it, and the amount they put on the grid is a known quantity and easily measured. If the amount that they are billing for is less than that, something is wrong. You can do the numbers on a per-line or a per-substation basis, possibly even more granular than that. All the major HV lines and substations have their own meters which report back to HQ. A single person stealing electricity is somewhat hard to catch, but if substantial amounts of people got away with this for an extended period of time, someone was not doing their job.
But take your average mid size city, and the substations cover huge areas. HV feeders typically feed entire neighborhoods and step down to lower voltage on the neighborhood feed without any such meter. Line loss is variable, not a constant you can be assured of over time. Your mom's current frugality binge can make a significant difference in usage month to month.
So how do you find the 6 houses out of 100 that reduce their consumption by some amount less than the average variance? Especially if they ratchet it down slowly in the high use season?
And even if you statistically isolate a few suspects, how do you prove it? About the only way to do so is to put another meter upstream of each suspect house. Expensive, and not at all stealthy, so the suspect can drop the hack.
A power company in an area I lived in, where power was still distributed with overhead wires, would put the meter at the top of the off-property pole as a way of advertising people they had caught tampering with meters. The entire neighborhood knew what that meant. They could still read them remotely, so it didn't involve any additional work load on their staff once installed.
There's a Tower of Pisa in Vegas?
Not exactly, but it was called that early in its development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veer_Towers
Google Street View Link
1701-D would have been huge, perhaps too large to be feasible, the !701-A was 289 M long, 72 M high and 127 meters wide which would make it a lot more feasible
" Feasible" isn't a word that comes immediately to mind as a limiting convept while walking around in Vegas.
And even more interesting, in all three studies the pesticide was intentionally fed to the bees in the sugar water; it wasn't collected by the bees. The Harvard study also points out the bee keepers feed their colonies HFCS, which apparently started containing trace amounts of the pesticide about the time they noticed colony collapse become a problem. Kind of sounds like they need to stop feeding HFCS.
But was this food grade HFCS?
Is the FDA on board with pesticide being passed thru at detectable levels in a supposedly simple processed food product?
Does anyone know if SSL solves the problem? Can a malicious endpoint act as a proxy so the SSL connection is between the endpoint and the real site and then serve you a different SSL certificate with the adverts included. (Although I doubt they can make a certificate look like the legitimate website.) Alternatively they could just drop everything down to HTTP...
They might be able to pull this off, but the revenue they could earn off of such a scheme would never pay the lawyer bills. One could argue this would be a DMCA violation. (In fact, they seem to be on shaky legal ground altering un-encryption streams. It is after all, a form of scraping and perhaps copyright violation.)
The drop everything to HTTP would certainly be noticed.
Awww, the inevitable floor sort, and the diagonal marker lines.....
14.4?
Whipersnapper! Get off my lawn.
We started at 300 baud, and were lucky to get that. The long period of dead traffic right in the middle of the message taunted you to hang up and dial again, only to have it sputter out another few characters.
I remember the daily ritual of signing on to Compuserve to get the daily email from our customers in Europe, as well as telex orders.
It was pretty much useless as far as I can recall, but it was a boat load cheaper than phone calls for tech support issues.
When we first started, there was just beginning to be interconnection between Compuserve and a few other providers. Customers would send us Compuserve mails to let us know they were having problems dialing into our BBS system from India, and Britain.
The internet came along in our part of the hinterlands, and we hopped on that as fast as possible. We were only too happy to be free of these other services. Even if Email did take a day to arrive (I kid you not, it took a day to get an email from India, and it was routed through the most amazing places).
So, no, not nostalgic. Nightmare perhaps. Trying to type an answer to a tech support question into the glass tty screen with the minute meter clicking in your head, because copy/paste hadn't really been worked out yet. Being charged by the message length!! Arrrggggh.
No thank you. I'm not taking the tour.
It is not a far jump to go from lifetime titles for a temporary job to passing those titles to their descendants.
Write back when a Senator or General's offspring is free to use the title. Till then, you have vastly misstated the issue.
Most British (as well as continental) titles, Duke, Lord, etc. were always handed down via linage or marriage, and they in historic times the had real power, as the Kings representative. Knights (Sir) are about the only title that was earned on the battle field, and it came with virtually no privilege.
how to handle much higher bit rates than 2Mbit in an office or home due to shorter bit periods and smooshing of the signal by reflections.
Exactly this!
Much as the Auzies like to thump their chest and claim to have invented WIFI, the point was it was in use prior to these guys tackling the problem of reflections. That problem was well known at the time, and range as well as wall penetration suffered as a result.
CSIRO didn't invent WIFI, they merely tweaked it. Tweaked it in a good way, mind you, but not a particularly novel or un-obvious way, but a good enough way.
Go read the story and you will find out how much money we will throw down a rat hole.
ZERO. Program was not halted.
So when these inevitably are downed for some reason (e.g. technical malfunctions, enemy interference, etc), what's to stop the enemy from reverse engineering the technology and gaining "nuclear secrets"?
I wouldn't worry so much about the secrets, but rather the nuclear materials you provide them free of charge for anyone who manages to shoot (or lure) one down.
And the summary completely misses the main point of the story:
The fact that the program has been halted is something that Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on drone warfare, suggests may be lost in the attention on the nuclear aspect of the project.
“What people seem to be missing is that the program was not approved. We are not building it!” he told me. “All sorts of ideas are proposed by scientists, and this one was found to involve a technology not yet ready for prime time and which carries some deep concerns about its implications for operations, legal concerns, and fear of accident impact. So it was not approved.”
Apparently the submitter, in typical Anonymous Coward fashion, failed to read past the first paragraph.
These are not titles, and certainly not entitlements.
Senator, General, Admiral, Judge, are simply a Rank, or Job Description. They differ from Duke, Count, King, in that they are something you EARN, by bullet, ballot, study, or just hard work. One's contribution to society via these professions are simply recognized as an honorarium. These are utterly different than titles in the British sense.