The naive part is the interest in a "dirty bomb" in the first place.
Why take on the significant additional risk of discovery for something that won't inflict much more damage?
You're thinking like an engineer, not a terrorist. The objective of a terrorist is to create fear and mass panic, and in this case overreaction that ultimately leads to an invasion which they can claim is a holy war against Islam.
A bomb the press can call "nuclear" will get more press coverage and a LOT more concern and reaction than an IED. Not necessarily because of a worse effect, but because laypeople are afraid of and do not understand science. That's why MRI's are called MRI's today instead of nMRI's. That's why a movies and television shows can warn against reactors exploding, when nuclear reactors do NOT explode. A dirty bomb can scare people more, and that helps terrorists.
You've also got the possibility of a propaganda radiation murder like when Putin had that guy in the UK murdered with... I think soup? That gets a lot of coverage.
they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns
A teacher cannot fill a student's mind the way you would fill a glass of water.
It is a nice, simplistic, happy idea that if the teachers just had the right information, the knowledge would fill the student's mind. But alas, attempting to teach conditional statements to students is not actually enough to raise their IQs. Or even to get them interested in conditionals. They already offer math, which has a directly proven IQ benefit; to students who are interested in it.
A nice, simplistic, happy idea that I didn't advance.
IQ alone is not a measure of intelligence, or interest, and of course getting students to apply a mental pattern is more complex than simply giving teachers knowledge. Teachers need both knowledge and training, and it still won't be enough if the kids are in the wrong environment too much of the time. But it's a start.
Duh, 4B or 1.6k$ anyway, peanuts compared to patient data, but the hackers better hope they are never caught, for that little money its an awful lot of prison time
Forget prison time, they're not going to ever be able to get particularly good medical care.
It's not that everybody must, it's that most should.
A lot of people are really unfathomably stupid. And they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns. One of those is if-then statements.
If A then B. If C then not D. Just the idea of reacting intelligently, of planning ahead a little bit and choosing an action based on what happens, rather than intuiting your way through life.
Of course almost nobody is going to do that all the time, and that's good because habits and ignorance save a lot of time and can make life much more practical. But people should have the chance to learn.
I have nothing against the poor or struggling out there, and I like to think that often I'm a charitable person, and give, etc.
But man, do you seriously base your purchases on how it might be perceived by others in your family or friends...or even strangers???
I mean, do you and those people actually look at what kind of computer as a sort of status symbol?
No, and you're missing the point. It's not about the status symbol (at least, not for me--obviously there are people for whom it is about that, and they are mostly people who are overspending). It's not about how it might be perceived by others. It's about the fact that there are probably people in your life, perhaps just very tangentially, where $100 would make a massive difference in a month of their life. (In some cases it utterly destroys someone's life and affects whether they get their kids medical care, etc..., but let's keep it broader than that because I'll assume your peers are mostly pretty well-off.) In making a choice to purchase a luxury good rather than to gift that person even a fraction of your money, you are making a choice to leave that person in misery when it would cost you hardly anything to help. That problem can be something as simple as getting in a car accident--frequently that can lead to large medical costs, bankruptcy, job loss, etc...
And buying things..."socially responsible"?? Wow..that's a foreign concept to me....if I see something I want or need, I buy it. I've never heard of anyone giving more thought to a purchase than that. What does "socially responsible" purchasing mean and look like???
Then you haven't met a lot of people, or at least you haven't paid attention. Socially responsible purchasing means purchasing that takes into account the effect your purchase has on the rest of the world. Obviously you can't know all of the effect, but it's more obvious with some purchases than others. Yes, there are organizations that work hard on making sure supply chains are free of child labor and other abuses, and some people are very careful about what they buy for that reason. And some people buy antibiotic-free meat because they are concerned about the evolution of antibiotic-resistance bacteria that is threatening the medical system of the entire industrialized world. And some people choose to buy a used car instead of a new one because they want to save the extra money for their kids--for someone other than them. People care about something more than their own needs and devices.
I mean the world is the world. There always have been and always will be...haves and have nots. That's just they way life is.
And blacks will never go to school with whites, women will never vote or be able to work as anything other than a teacher, and Jews have always been mistreated.
Only then that changed.
You're years on earth are limited and you don't need to waste time on crap that doesn't matter. Get and do what makes you happy, and while at it..try to make others happy.
But at the same time, realize you can't save the world, and life it too short to waste trying to....
You can't save the world. But you can change it, a little.
The initial programmer didn't respond professionally; neither did NPM.
This was a cease-and-desist letter over a trademark. The programmer's public statement about the guy being a patent lawyer, even if it's true, it's irrelevant.
All they had to do was either (1) have a lawyer send back a letter saying there was no likelihood of confusion and nobody in their right mind was going to think a node module was an instant messaging app and the like, or (2) change the name--did they even have a lawyer call back *explain* the problem with a name change and ask the Trademark holder to let them mark it as deprecated for a year? Or (if they cannot afford an hour or three from a lawyer) do it themselves?
And when withdrawing his packages, the programmer should have been responsible to the open source community and, again, marked packages as deprecated for a period of time before withdrawing them. This was just irresponsible.
My last Mac is 10 years old now. MacBook Pro Core 2 Duel. I still use it to watch some stuff on iTunes with it. My Current laptop a ThinkPad is approaching 5 years now. Compared to the new tech, it still is very fast and I have no needs for an upgrade.
My desktop is seven years old, albeit with a few updates. My laptop (a Dell E4300) I picked up off ebay for a hundred bucks and added an SSD. The desktop does almost anything I ask of it (I think XCOM2 was the only game it had a problem with, and it would probably run that with a new video card). The laptop doesn't do gaming but handles standard work tasks (web browsing, word processing) and Netflix without a problem. Most of the world doesn't need more than that.
If you're running a lot of massive builds on your local machine, running highly processor-intensive tasks, processing a massive amount of data, or are unable to run modern programs you need, it can absolutely make sense to shell out for a new machine. But otherwise (in most cases), it's just unnecessary spending on a luxury. It pollutes the environment, it's a slap in the face to *any* poorer relations or friends you might have, if you don't have trusts set up for your kids already it's kind of a slap in the face to them, and it's far from a socially responsible way to spend your money because almost the entire nonprofit world out there is trying to serve millions of people on budgets that would make you live on rice and ramen.
There are a few exceptions--maybe you are an engineer who designs hardware for the new system or needs to understand the customer experience better--but for most people, it's just a waste.
A cashless world makes bribes much harder, drug dealing much harder, and the billions of dollars evading child support much more likely to actually go to child support.
When laws get in the way we should be fixing the laws, but cash is mostly about avoiding the laws, which means having cash generally punishes people who follow the law. Avoiding being tracked for privacy reasons is probably less than one millionth of the cash spent in the country.
1) China has Apple, and every every other US tech company, compromised at the highest level, and we're all fucked.
2) China's government is not so much comprised of shit-for-brains idiots who have to get on television to appease a bunch of even more shit-for-brains idiots by appearing to "get tough on terr'ism." as ours. And while they'd no doubt like to be able to monitor all electronic communication with more efficiency than they do; they understand that forcing tech companies to build in that backdoor not only lets them do so, but lets everyone else spy on them that much more easily too.
Personally, I'm hoping for #2.
China attempts to compromise every US tech company. I assume they do this with human intelligence assets as well as electronically.
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Speed and wear-and-tear. A computer system can keep traffic moving through an intersection at speed in both directions, interleaving cars. But if there is a roundabout, both of the cars have to make (usually) tight turns, resulting in centripetal force and a corresponding need to slow down.
For human drivers, roundabouts cause fewer deaths (because people slow down) but more collisions (because more judgment is involved in determining stay-vs-go).
"...you just need to surrender your individual autonomy and hand over total control to us. It's necessary for increased efficiency!"
You know, this argument seems strangely familiar...
It turns out that's how it works. There is often a tradeoff between safety, efficiency, and civil order on the one hand, and personal autonomy on the other. There is a cost to personal autonomy. If we give everyone nukes, sooner or later someone blows up a city. If we give everyone AKs, sooner or later someone shoots up a school or a mall. If we give everyone cars, sooner or later people kill each other with them, deliberately or by accident. If you give people the ability to control dangerous things with their free will and imperfect responses, other people die and maybe the actor dies.
So you have to make a judgment call about the level of autonomy you desire and how many lives it's worth. If you can reduce traffic accidents a thousand fold, isn't that worth at least making automated driving the default?
Sure, but remember how having cars that interlocked with each other and shared engine power they exchanged funding for via microcredit transactions would increase traffic efficiency too?
We're a LONG time from having this be a practical thing. Probably at least half a century.
The first organization to successfully develop advanced general artificial intelligence trained toward its goals and towards preventing the development of other AI wins. It just wins.
We can try to beat it, but we're the ant colony trying to stop the man from building a new house. He can outthink us at every turn.
The entire "anti-establishment" premise of the summary is wrong. It is not anti-establishment for security professionals to refuse to break security.
It is professionally responsible. It's like if a priest is ordered to convert a parishioner to satanism, a doctor is ordered to harm a patient, or a cop is ordered to beat the crap out of an old lady.
Why? If the cause is cyberattacks, we are in a much more adversarial relationship with North Korea at the moment. China's cyberattacks are directed at espionage and industrial espionage; this isn't their style.
Look, it's not 1953 any more. If they actually pull out of the cease-fire, Seoul will be destroyed in a matter of minutes. If they start a war by lobbing nukes at the US, North Korea will be reduced to a sheet of glass in a matter of days, and damn the nuclear winter.
Quite. "Expressing minority opinions" equals "trolling", in the modern parlance, and a lot of people quite seriously try to argue that should be illegal in its own right.
Not quite, no. Expressing insane ideas without recognizing any possibility that you might be wrong or willingness to engage in legitimate discussion, while going on for pages about why you are right in a way which totally misses the thread of argument is considered trolling if it ALSO is in not in approximate agreement with the majority opinion.
For example, if you insist vaccines cause autism but express willingness to be proven wrong and squarely address points raised to prove you wrong, you are not usually a troll. But if you insist you are right despite all of the evidence to the contrary and go on for dozens of posts, you are a troll.
Big company data breaches these days pretty regularly expect lawsuits to result. While some of them (Amex is probably included) mostly avoid responsibility by including no-class-action and arbitration clauses in their contracts, they are still going to make sure every word of an announcement like this is vetted by their litigation counsel.
That means that explanations that may be used against them in court are not going to be included.
It also means that this announcement is written to consumers, but it is also, and more honestly, directed at a future judge or jury.
Slashdot Mirror
The naive part is the interest in a "dirty bomb" in the first place.
Why take on the significant additional risk of discovery for something that won't inflict much more damage?
You're thinking like an engineer, not a terrorist. The objective of a terrorist is to create fear and mass panic, and in this case overreaction that ultimately leads to an invasion which they can claim is a holy war against Islam.
A bomb the press can call "nuclear" will get more press coverage and a LOT more concern and reaction than an IED. Not necessarily because of a worse effect, but because laypeople are afraid of and do not understand science. That's why MRI's are called MRI's today instead of nMRI's. That's why a movies and television shows can warn against reactors exploding, when nuclear reactors do NOT explode. A dirty bomb can scare people more, and that helps terrorists.
You've also got the possibility of a propaganda radiation murder like when Putin had that guy in the UK murdered with... I think soup? That gets a lot of coverage.
they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns
A teacher cannot fill a student's mind the way you would fill a glass of water.
It is a nice, simplistic, happy idea that if the teachers just had the right information, the knowledge would fill the student's mind. But alas, attempting to teach conditional statements to students is not actually enough to raise their IQs. Or even to get them interested in conditionals. They already offer math, which has a directly proven IQ benefit; to students who are interested in it.
A nice, simplistic, happy idea that I didn't advance.
IQ alone is not a measure of intelligence, or interest, and of course getting students to apply a mental pattern is more complex than simply giving teachers knowledge. Teachers need both knowledge and training, and it still won't be enough if the kids are in the wrong environment too much of the time. But it's a start.
Duh, 4B or 1.6k$ anyway, peanuts compared to patient data, but the hackers better hope they are never caught, for that little money its an awful lot of prison time
Forget prison time, they're not going to ever be able to get particularly good medical care.
Stop This Everybody Must...stuff
It's not that everybody must, it's that most should.
A lot of people are really unfathomably stupid. And they could increase their intelligence by probably an order of magnitude if they internalized a few important additional mental patterns. One of those is if-then statements.
If A then B. If C then not D. Just the idea of reacting intelligently, of planning ahead a little bit and choosing an action based on what happens, rather than intuiting your way through life.
Of course almost nobody is going to do that all the time, and that's good because habits and ignorance save a lot of time and can make life much more practical. But people should have the chance to learn.
rack your own server in the DC then and you have full control over the software running on it.
Rack your own server in your office if security is actually important to you. At least, if you're capable of maintaining it.
I have nothing against the poor or struggling out there, and I like to think that often I'm a charitable person, and give, etc.
But man, do you seriously base your purchases on how it might be perceived by others in your family or friends...or even strangers???
I mean, do you and those people actually look at what kind of computer as a sort of status symbol?
No, and you're missing the point. It's not about the status symbol (at least, not for me--obviously there are people for whom it is about that, and they are mostly people who are overspending). It's not about how it might be perceived by others. It's about the fact that there are probably people in your life, perhaps just very tangentially, where $100 would make a massive difference in a month of their life. (In some cases it utterly destroys someone's life and affects whether they get their kids medical care, etc..., but let's keep it broader than that because I'll assume your peers are mostly pretty well-off.) In making a choice to purchase a luxury good rather than to gift that person even a fraction of your money, you are making a choice to leave that person in misery when it would cost you hardly anything to help. That problem can be something as simple as getting in a car accident--frequently that can lead to large medical costs, bankruptcy, job loss, etc...
And buying things..."socially responsible"?? Wow..that's a foreign concept to me....if I see something I want or need, I buy it. I've never heard of anyone giving more thought to a purchase than that. What does "socially responsible" purchasing mean and look like???
Then you haven't met a lot of people, or at least you haven't paid attention. Socially responsible purchasing means purchasing that takes into account the effect your purchase has on the rest of the world. Obviously you can't know all of the effect, but it's more obvious with some purchases than others. Yes, there are organizations that work hard on making sure supply chains are free of child labor and other abuses, and some people are very careful about what they buy for that reason. And some people buy antibiotic-free meat because they are concerned about the evolution of antibiotic-resistance bacteria that is threatening the medical system of the entire industrialized world. And some people choose to buy a used car instead of a new one because they want to save the extra money for their kids--for someone other than them. People care about something more than their own needs and devices.
I mean the world is the world. There always have been and always will be...haves and have nots. That's just they way life is.
And blacks will never go to school with whites, women will never vote or be able to work as anything other than a teacher, and Jews have always been mistreated.
Only then that changed.
You're years on earth are limited and you don't need to waste time on crap that doesn't matter. Get and do what makes you happy, and while at it..try to make others happy.
But at the same time, realize you can't save the world, and life it too short to waste trying to....
You can't save the world. But you can change it, a little.
The initial programmer didn't respond professionally; neither did NPM.
This was a cease-and-desist letter over a trademark. The programmer's public statement about the guy being a patent lawyer, even if it's true, it's irrelevant.
All they had to do was either (1) have a lawyer send back a letter saying there was no likelihood of confusion and nobody in their right mind was going to think a node module was an instant messaging app and the like, or (2) change the name--did they even have a lawyer call back *explain* the problem with a name change and ask the Trademark holder to let them mark it as deprecated for a year? Or (if they cannot afford an hour or three from a lawyer) do it themselves?
And when withdrawing his packages, the programmer should have been responsible to the open source community and, again, marked packages as deprecated for a period of time before withdrawing them. This was just irresponsible.
To put it in perspective, 15 gigawatts of production would (if operating at full capacity) generate about 0.6% of the world energy demand from 2008.
It's a lot of new solar, but also only a small percentage of what is needed.
My last Mac is 10 years old now. MacBook Pro Core 2 Duel. I still use it to watch some stuff on iTunes with it.
My Current laptop a ThinkPad is approaching 5 years now. Compared to the new tech, it still is very fast and I have no needs for an upgrade.
My desktop is seven years old, albeit with a few updates. My laptop (a Dell E4300) I picked up off ebay for a hundred bucks and added an SSD. The desktop does almost anything I ask of it (I think XCOM2 was the only game it had a problem with, and it would probably run that with a new video card). The laptop doesn't do gaming but handles standard work tasks (web browsing, word processing) and Netflix without a problem. Most of the world doesn't need more than that.
If you're running a lot of massive builds on your local machine, running highly processor-intensive tasks, processing a massive amount of data, or are unable to run modern programs you need, it can absolutely make sense to shell out for a new machine. But otherwise (in most cases), it's just unnecessary spending on a luxury. It pollutes the environment, it's a slap in the face to *any* poorer relations or friends you might have, if you don't have trusts set up for your kids already it's kind of a slap in the face to them, and it's far from a socially responsible way to spend your money because almost the entire nonprofit world out there is trying to serve millions of people on budgets that would make you live on rice and ramen.
There are a few exceptions--maybe you are an engineer who designs hardware for the new system or needs to understand the customer experience better--but for most people, it's just a waste.
A cashless world makes bribes much harder, drug dealing much harder, and the billions of dollars evading child support much more likely to actually go to child support.
When laws get in the way we should be fixing the laws, but cash is mostly about avoiding the laws, which means having cash generally punishes people who follow the law. Avoiding being tracked for privacy reasons is probably less than one millionth of the cash spent in the country.
Well, there are two possibilities:
1) China has Apple, and every every other US tech company, compromised at the highest level, and we're all fucked.
2) China's government is not so much comprised of shit-for-brains idiots who have to get on television to appease a bunch of even more shit-for-brains idiots by appearing to "get tough on terr'ism." as ours. And while they'd no doubt like to be able to monitor all electronic communication with more efficiency than they do; they understand that forcing tech companies to build in that backdoor not only lets them do so, but lets everyone else spy on them that much more easily too.
Personally, I'm hoping for #2.
China attempts to compromise every US tech company. I assume they do this with human intelligence assets as well as electronically.
What, you didn't notice every drug dealer in the developed world uses these things?
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, but if the last guy I saw buy a burner phone was up to something non-shady I'll eat my hat.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Are they also less likely to marry? Because it turns out people die a lot quicker if there isn't someone there to realize they tripped, for example.
What would be the comparative advantage with respect to a roundabout?
I know they are not very popular in the US, but they can be very efficient, and prevent the frustration of waiting at busy intersection (especially if going in the non-popular direction).
Speed and wear-and-tear. A computer system can keep traffic moving through an intersection at speed in both directions, interleaving cars. But if there is a roundabout, both of the cars have to make (usually) tight turns, resulting in centripetal force and a corresponding need to slow down.
For human drivers, roundabouts cause fewer deaths (because people slow down) but more collisions (because more judgment is involved in determining stay-vs-go).
"...you just need to surrender your individual autonomy and hand over total control to us. It's necessary for increased efficiency!"
You know, this argument seems strangely familiar...
It turns out that's how it works. There is often a tradeoff between safety, efficiency, and civil order on the one hand, and personal autonomy on the other. There is a cost to personal autonomy. If we give everyone nukes, sooner or later someone blows up a city. If we give everyone AKs, sooner or later someone shoots up a school or a mall. If we give everyone cars, sooner or later people kill each other with them, deliberately or by accident. If you give people the ability to control dangerous things with their free will and imperfect responses, other people die and maybe the actor dies.
So you have to make a judgment call about the level of autonomy you desire and how many lives it's worth. If you can reduce traffic accidents a thousand fold, isn't that worth at least making automated driving the default?
Sure, but remember how having cars that interlocked with each other and shared engine power they exchanged funding for via microcredit transactions would increase traffic efficiency too?
We're a LONG time from having this be a practical thing. Probably at least half a century.
The first organization to successfully develop advanced general artificial intelligence trained toward its goals and towards preventing the development of other AI wins. It just wins.
We can try to beat it, but we're the ant colony trying to stop the man from building a new house. He can outthink us at every turn.
The entire "anti-establishment" premise of the summary is wrong. It is not anti-establishment for security professionals to refuse to break security.
It is professionally responsible. It's like if a priest is ordered to convert a parishioner to satanism, a doctor is ordered to harm a patient, or a cop is ordered to beat the crap out of an old lady.
Why? If the cause is cyberattacks, we are in a much more adversarial relationship with North Korea at the moment. China's cyberattacks are directed at espionage and industrial espionage; this isn't their style.
destroyed with what? The nuclear devices they've tested can't be put on missile. This is good time to preemptively strike NK, would be very wise move
Conventional arms. North Korea has more than enough conventional arms aimed at Seoul to level the city.
Look, it's not 1953 any more. If they actually pull out of the cease-fire, Seoul will be destroyed in a matter of minutes. If they start a war by lobbing nukes at the US, North Korea will be reduced to a sheet of glass in a matter of days, and damn the nuclear winter.
Quite. "Expressing minority opinions" equals "trolling", in the modern parlance, and a lot of people quite seriously try to argue that should be illegal in its own right.
Not quite, no. Expressing insane ideas without recognizing any possibility that you might be wrong or willingness to engage in legitimate discussion, while going on for pages about why you are right in a way which totally misses the thread of argument is considered trolling if it ALSO is in not in approximate agreement with the majority opinion.
For example, if you insist vaccines cause autism but express willingness to be proven wrong and squarely address points raised to prove you wrong, you are not usually a troll. But if you insist you are right despite all of the evidence to the contrary and go on for dozens of posts, you are a troll.
The reason for this selling decision is probably that Google brain felt the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Big company data breaches these days pretty regularly expect lawsuits to result. While some of them (Amex is probably included) mostly avoid responsibility by including no-class-action and arbitration clauses in their contracts, they are still going to make sure every word of an announcement like this is vetted by their litigation counsel.
That means that explanations that may be used against them in court are not going to be included.
It also means that this announcement is written to consumers, but it is also, and more honestly, directed at a future judge or jury.