Patch the BIOS itself. AWARD BIOSes typically can be edited, and new features added. Some information about this is available from around the Etherboot project.
Fast food is about eating in the conditions of time constraints. The time constraints plus the geographical, transport, and supply constraints at the given area limit the number of available choices. So in some areas the available choice is pretty much reduced to McDonald's and KFC. The mentioned McD has the habit of buying out smaller brandless feeding places in attractive locations (because when all you can do is a dozen of variants of all-the-same tasteless crapburgers, location is everything). Therefore the US-licensed fast food is effectively using brute force money power for gaining profits via reducing alternative choices for people while in some scenarios being unavoidable (given additional constraints in what is a reasonable transport pattern in the conditions of mass transportation, if it is reasonable to prepare and bring boxed lunch, unwillingness to go hungry, etc.). Same for eg. Coca Cola corp. products - due to their tendency to control the distribution chain it is fairly difficult in many restaurants to find a non-Coke-owned soft drink.
Given that the imposed rules of the Holy Market say that money is everything and then some, such expansion is an unsurprising development. Just please do not ask to be loved for that, nor claim it is a proof how much you are liked in the world. You can buy market share. You can't buy love.
To add a minor insult to the injury, there is no lack of better alternatives in large areas of the US itself, both of eg. smaller fast food chains and products (Jack in the Box onion rings, anyone? Or cream soda?). However, they tend to be too small to be able to expand globally. Therefore only the crappiest of the crap is being aggressively marketed and exported worldwide, unfavorably distorting the US perception in the world by the means of bulldozing over often better local products by the sheer economy of scale, ruthless marketing, and exclusive partnerships.
To give the credit where it belongs, this is not as much a problem with the US itself as with the now-transnational megacorporations originating from there.
Easy. Spamhaus gets the.uk domain, outside of ICANN reach, and problem solved.
As a precaution for the future, we the technicians should also think about a robust, distributed architecture for RBL querying that would be in effect lawyerproof. Cryptography then can secure the integrity of the data, while the database itself that is queried will be hidden from direct reach of not only the self-nominated "authorities" but also of various denial-of-service attacks that took down some other RBLs. Think about it as a DoS preventing architecture and count with lawsuits as one of the attack vectors. If a judge's decision can't be enforced, it's irrelevant; and I, for one, will opt for querying a service declared illegal if it means less spam for mailboxes I admin.
The same architecture will be handy for other kinds of DNS-like queries, supplying informations potentially unfriendly to big corporations (eg. eco-friendliness of products or active boycotts of vendors), and potentially for making the DNS itself more robust.
There will be such technology. People will either make it themselves, or some enterpreneur in China without Hollywood ties gets the idea they can make more money by making stuff that people really want. A small-ish company can easily sell loads of stuff over the Internet.
Alternatively, somebody hacks a mainstream player with the required hardware and releases an open-source firmware that allows such use.
We will get what we want. We just won't get it from the Mainstream Vendors anytime soon.
What's obvious on flying one-way? Why is so much meaning put into so little detail? Why is it so obviously wrong to not have clear travel plans, or being dispatched to a task with unknown time to finish or with unknown city to travel to for the next assignment (many service techs could speak up here)?
"Hmm, Mr Anderson I see you installed Windows XP later year. Yet for some reason you installed a years worth of MS Updates yesterday. I also noticed that there are no other files created between last year and yesterday. Per chance, have you rolled back to an image?"
"Yes, I did. I wanted to get rid of a spyware and less drastic attempts failed. You know, Mr. Judge, they are getting pretty persistent."
Because community-based websites and bulletin boards have been around for such a long time, and there are so-o-o-o-o many legal challenges and precedents in that space.
A long list of prior art, relevant to something they call "chatrooms" without closely specifying the underlying technology, here.
There will be also a plethora of precedents where the link layer was not based on the Internet, but on classified personal ads, telephone, and snail-mail. Not even mentioning the in-between step, the BBS systems. But some people still think that addition of TCP/IP means some fundamental, radical change.
One very tangentially relevant case from 1993, occurring purely in the cyberspace, here (with a condensed summary here).
I am seeing activism on the grass roots level against MySpace like I haven't seen since the early 90's (the kind of awareness that laid the groundwork for all the online child protection legislation).
If the "good" community spaces are smart, they will toss MySpace out into the snow with extreme prejudice then circle the wagons before the Clintons and the Liebermans and all the other politicos up for re-election start painting them with the same brush they are currently tarring-up for MySpace.
How? What is a "good" and a "bad" community space?
Right or Wrong, there is a BIG RECKONING coming, and it WILL be impacting business models throughout the 'Net.
It may lead into healthy decentralization and move off the model of umbrella corporations shielding the communities. P2P, anyone? Or the Next Big Thing will be stationed on servers in India or Brazil, out of reach of rabid packs of attorneys. Because this lawsuit is a combination of a routine mishap, big wealthy corporation tangentially involved, and a greedy lawyer.
My Prediction, based on historical precedent? MySpace goes the way of GeoCities (socially un-cool and retro), and the kids all start gravitating to their own (and de-centralized) unique TLDs, just like their neo-adult blogging counterparts.
Anything enclosed with content capable of evolving gas will explode when subjected to high temperature. A laptop contains a number of such things; from the battery cells themselves to electrolytic capacitors. A capacitor that finds itself in the middle of a fire can announce its lack of happiness in a pretty loud way.
And it does not have to burn that bright. It's enough when it overloads the CCD chip of the camera that took the shot. Try it, with proper exposition even a candle flame can look insanely bright on a photograph.
This presumes existence of the mentioned significant other. It also presumes that the crappy copy is not used before taking the SO to the movie, in order to assess the crappiness of the movie plotline. (I suppose THAT is the real risk for Hollywood, together with the cellphone technology allowing realtime proliferation of the news that the Newest Heavily Advertised Must-see Flick is yet another flop. But there is no gadget to prevent this, and the only remedy - produce less crappy movies - is outside of the grasp of an average MPAA droid.)
If you try to maintain the distance, somebody else overtakes you and crams into the space and you are where you were before. Otherwise it is a good idea.
It does not have to be a camera. Use a bunch of jewels of the retroreflectivity and shape that mimic a CCD chip, sew them on your clothes. Suddenly the machine sees a plethora of false targets. Meanwhile your cam can have a mask over it that obscures the edges of the CCD, turning the square spot the electronics look for into a jagged-edges blob. In addition, you can put a hot mirror over the lens, passing the visible light but reflecting everything longer than 750 nanometers, rendering the dazzler inefficient.
Result: Expensive toy that people with low tech skills waste money on, while it will be virtually worthless against a determined opponent who did not sleep through high school physics.
Even the fast ciphers (AES128, Blowfish, etc) will max-out a rather fast CPU on a 100Mbps network, and the slower, much more secure ones are far, far worse (3DES, AES256, etc).
100 Mbps counts as insane data rate, in common-user conditions. In home environment, you need to secure data just when hauling them over the outside Net, and even the fastest cable modem rarely even reaches 10 Mbps (we aren't talking Korea here). 802.11g networks may present a challenge, though.
Custom-built hardware (ASICs) do far better than cheap CPUs, but it's still a significant hurdle.
For a home user, yes. For a spy plane, the added cost is a pittance. Everything is relative.
And I presume the airplanes in question certainly do have "insane data rates" since they are being used for surveilance, which means a very quick series of very high-resolution images.
They also have insane budgets. See above.
Since when do airplanes have network cards?
How would you connect the equipment together? You need some sort of network interface.
Unless you have fragments of large pieces of data spread over the drive (Windows with FAT32?) I can't imagine seek times being a bottleneck.
This claim assumes sequential writing of a single datastream.
True, but day-to-day use becomes exponetially more difficult as well, since you need to run all of your data, reading and writing, through both ciphers every time.
Nitpicking: This is only linearly more difficult, which in the age of cheap MIPS is not really that important - unless you handle insane data rates. Even with an affordable off-the-shelf CPU, the bottleneck may still be the network card or the disk head seeking.
Subsequent use of two different algorithms with roughly the same required number of machine time will only take twice as long. While the adversary is still limited to either finding a joint vulnerability, or two subsequent holes in the algorithms used.
That said, a barn-sized joint vulnerability is present in virtually every system and is usually called "the user".
You're right it would likely not be allowed for a flight-critical system. However, for an electronic warfare surveillance system, which is more likely to require high capacity storage media than a flight computer, it is a good method.
There is a possibility; just make our own. Slap together a suitably big CPLD or FPGA with the required peripherals, and write the hardware definition in Verilog or VHDL. The board itself can have many uses, therefore should not pose export issues, and the software can be developed in some free country. Some algorithms are already available at opencores.org, the rest should be possible to write.
Imagine script kiddies getting a hold of these devices and sticking them near an airport.
So there'll be minor issues for a while, the navg systems are more redundant than you think. Then the same radio tech gets deployed on the airplanes themselves, and together with cryptographically signed signals and phased array antennas the airport/aircraft equipment can easily discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate signals. Where's the problem?
Furthermore, all the bitching about privacy you see here at Slashdot might take on a new meaning once anyone out there is listening in on your cellphone conversations (again).
NSA already does. Together with anybody who can hack up a diode downconverter or mail-order a scanner from Canada.
This may at least be a good reason for the sheeple to demand less insecure telephones; the "too complicated" vendors' cop-out from the Analog Age doesn't apply anymore.
Yes, I saw their site. Neat stuff, and would buy some if I didn't already source both a Geiger and a laser cheaper elsewhere.
Radioactive isotopes...
Yes, a microcurie each. Only one is 10 microcurie, and even that is rather laughable amount. If your scaredness look up at your ceiling, you will see a round thing that is called a smoke detector, which typically contains about 0.9-1 microcurie of Americium-241. Do you still worry? What about that shining-display alarmclock your neighbor inherited after grandpa? You know, the one that does not shine anymore but still contains a good amount of Radium-226? Call FBI, call hazmat squad, PANIC!!!
burning lasers...
Lousy low-power diode-pumped Nd:YAG with an integrated KTP frequency doubler. Nothing to really worry about. Besides, they are Bloody Expensive.
uranium...
Which is fairly harmless, even if a chunk of it flies straight through you. Didn't you read the Pentagon's DU risk assessments? (Seriously, unless you eat it or breathe its oxide, worrying about it will do more harm to you by the psychological stress than it itself.)
heavy water...
And that's dangerous WHY? It's not like your neighbor can afford enough uranium ore and enough heavy water to build a CANDU reactor in ther basement. You can drink heavy water, and if you won't overdo it, it won't harm you. Try it, in the amounts you can afford it will be harmless.
is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying
I *hope* they are buying, and make the classes interesting enough to motivate more students to pursue science/technology careers.
and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set?
Why not? See above. Besides, if mom or dad played with similar things when young, they know already that it's not more risky than climbing on the tree in their garden, just in different ways.
Don't worry about it.
Or, maybe better solution: please keep worrying. Please worry so much it gets you a stomach ulcer, let it burst, and then die and stop scaremongering. Just don't attempt to get the laws pushed through to reflect your chickenheart attitude and spoil the fun for all.
Slashdot Mirror
Patch the BIOS itself. AWARD BIOSes typically can be edited, and new features added. Some information about this is available from around the Etherboot project.
Given that the imposed rules of the Holy Market say that money is everything and then some, such expansion is an unsurprising development. Just please do not ask to be loved for that, nor claim it is a proof how much you are liked in the world. You can buy market share. You can't buy love.
To add a minor insult to the injury, there is no lack of better alternatives in large areas of the US itself, both of eg. smaller fast food chains and products (Jack in the Box onion rings, anyone? Or cream soda?). However, they tend to be too small to be able to expand globally. Therefore only the crappiest of the crap is being aggressively marketed and exported worldwide, unfavorably distorting the US perception in the world by the means of bulldozing over often better local products by the sheer economy of scale, ruthless marketing, and exclusive partnerships.
To give the credit where it belongs, this is not as much a problem with the US itself as with the now-transnational megacorporations originating from there.
As a precaution for the future, we the technicians should also think about a robust, distributed architecture for RBL querying that would be in effect lawyerproof. Cryptography then can secure the integrity of the data, while the database itself that is queried will be hidden from direct reach of not only the self-nominated "authorities" but also of various denial-of-service attacks that took down some other RBLs. Think about it as a DoS preventing architecture and count with lawsuits as one of the attack vectors. If a judge's decision can't be enforced, it's irrelevant; and I, for one, will opt for querying a service declared illegal if it means less spam for mailboxes I admin.
The same architecture will be handy for other kinds of DNS-like queries, supplying informations potentially unfriendly to big corporations (eg. eco-friendliness of products or active boycotts of vendors), and potentially for making the DNS itself more robust.
s/"security and networking"/marketing/
There will be such technology. People will either make it themselves, or some enterpreneur in China without Hollywood ties gets the idea they can make more money by making stuff that people really want. A small-ish company can easily sell loads of stuff over the Internet. Alternatively, somebody hacks a mainstream player with the required hardware and releases an open-source firmware that allows such use. We will get what we want. We just won't get it from the Mainstream Vendors anytime soon.
Keylogger on the machine? Well... can it record a VoIP conversation?
Those wackos have nukes. Hence, yes.
Easy with the polygraph. If you believe it does not work, it won't respond. You can train with a suitable kind of a biofeedback device.
What's obvious on flying one-way? Why is so much meaning put into so little detail? Why is it so obviously wrong to not have clear travel plans, or being dispatched to a task with unknown time to finish or with unknown city to travel to for the next assignment (many service techs could speak up here)?
"Yes, I did. I wanted to get rid of a spyware and less drastic attempts failed. You know, Mr. Judge, they are getting pretty persistent."
Could such "spyware defense" work?
"I'm tired of these mutherfucking snakes in my mutherfucking Ireland!" -- St. Patrick
A long list of prior art, relevant to something they call "chatrooms" without closely specifying the underlying technology, here.
There will be also a plethora of precedents where the link layer was not based on the Internet, but on classified personal ads, telephone, and snail-mail. Not even mentioning the in-between step, the BBS systems. But some people still think that addition of TCP/IP means some fundamental, radical change.
One very tangentially relevant case from 1993, occurring purely in the cyberspace, here (with a condensed summary here).
I am seeing activism on the grass roots level against MySpace like I haven't seen since the early 90's (the kind of awareness that laid the groundwork for all the online child protection legislation).
I see just yet another moral panic.
If the "good" community spaces are smart, they will toss MySpace out into the snow with extreme prejudice then circle the wagons before the Clintons and the Liebermans and all the other politicos up for re-election start painting them with the same brush they are currently tarring-up for MySpace.
How? What is a "good" and a "bad" community space?
Right or Wrong, there is a BIG RECKONING coming, and it WILL be impacting business models throughout the 'Net.
It may lead into healthy decentralization and move off the model of umbrella corporations shielding the communities. P2P, anyone? Or the Next Big Thing will be stationed on servers in India or Brazil, out of reach of rabid packs of attorneys. Because this lawsuit is a combination of a routine mishap, big wealthy corporation tangentially involved, and a greedy lawyer.
My Prediction, based on historical precedent? MySpace goes the way of GeoCities (socially un-cool and retro), and the kids all start gravitating to their own (and de-centralized) unique TLDs, just like their neo-adult blogging counterparts.
May quite well happen. Today hot, tomorrow not.
And it does not have to burn that bright. It's enough when it overloads the CCD chip of the camera that took the shot. Try it, with proper exposition even a candle flame can look insanely bright on a photograph.
Use a whitelist of coordinates of known-good cameras. (And open a potential vulnerability of photographing from a whitelisted point.)
This presumes existence of the mentioned significant other. It also presumes that the crappy copy is not used before taking the SO to the movie, in order to assess the crappiness of the movie plotline. (I suppose THAT is the real risk for Hollywood, together with the cellphone technology allowing realtime proliferation of the news that the Newest Heavily Advertised Must-see Flick is yet another flop. But there is no gadget to prevent this, and the only remedy - produce less crappy movies - is outside of the grasp of an average MPAA droid.)
Even too long exposition to bright blue light can be dangerous.
If you try to maintain the distance, somebody else overtakes you and crams into the space and you are where you were before. Otherwise it is a good idea.
Result: Expensive toy that people with low tech skills waste money on, while it will be virtually worthless against a determined opponent who did not sleep through high school physics.
100 Mbps counts as insane data rate, in common-user conditions. In home environment, you need to secure data just when hauling them over the outside Net, and even the fastest cable modem rarely even reaches 10 Mbps (we aren't talking Korea here). 802.11g networks may present a challenge, though.
Custom-built hardware (ASICs) do far better than cheap CPUs, but it's still a significant hurdle.
For a home user, yes. For a spy plane, the added cost is a pittance. Everything is relative.
And I presume the airplanes in question certainly do have "insane data rates" since they are being used for surveilance, which means a very quick series of very high-resolution images.
They also have insane budgets. See above.
Since when do airplanes have network cards?
How would you connect the equipment together? You need some sort of network interface.
Unless you have fragments of large pieces of data spread over the drive (Windows with FAT32?) I can't imagine seek times being a bottleneck.
This claim assumes sequential writing of a single datastream.
Nitpicking: This is only linearly more difficult, which in the age of cheap MIPS is not really that important - unless you handle insane data rates. Even with an affordable off-the-shelf CPU, the bottleneck may still be the network card or the disk head seeking.
Subsequent use of two different algorithms with roughly the same required number of machine time will only take twice as long. While the adversary is still limited to either finding a joint vulnerability, or two subsequent holes in the algorithms used.
That said, a barn-sized joint vulnerability is present in virtually every system and is usually called "the user".
You're right it would likely not be allowed for a flight-critical system. However, for an electronic warfare surveillance system, which is more likely to require high capacity storage media than a flight computer, it is a good method.
There is a possibility; just make our own. Slap together a suitably big CPLD or FPGA with the required peripherals, and write the hardware definition in Verilog or VHDL. The board itself can have many uses, therefore should not pose export issues, and the software can be developed in some free country. Some algorithms are already available at opencores.org, the rest should be possible to write.
So there'll be minor issues for a while, the navg systems are more redundant than you think. Then the same radio tech gets deployed on the airplanes themselves, and together with cryptographically signed signals and phased array antennas the airport/aircraft equipment can easily discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate signals. Where's the problem?
Furthermore, all the bitching about privacy you see here at Slashdot might take on a new meaning once anyone out there is listening in on your cellphone conversations (again).
NSA already does. Together with anybody who can hack up a diode downconverter or mail-order a scanner from Canada.
This may at least be a good reason for the sheeple to demand less insecure telephones; the "too complicated" vendors' cop-out from the Analog Age doesn't apply anymore.
Just wait for when vegans find out that plants have feelings too.
Yes, I saw their site. Neat stuff, and would buy some if I didn't already source both a Geiger and a laser cheaper elsewhere.
Radioactive isotopes...
Yes, a microcurie each. Only one is 10 microcurie, and even that is rather laughable amount. If your scaredness look up at your ceiling, you will see a round thing that is called a smoke detector, which typically contains about 0.9-1 microcurie of Americium-241. Do you still worry? What about that shining-display alarmclock your neighbor inherited after grandpa? You know, the one that does not shine anymore but still contains a good amount of Radium-226? Call FBI, call hazmat squad, PANIC!!!
burning lasers...
Lousy low-power diode-pumped Nd:YAG with an integrated KTP frequency doubler. Nothing to really worry about. Besides, they are Bloody Expensive.
uranium...
Which is fairly harmless, even if a chunk of it flies straight through you. Didn't you read the Pentagon's DU risk assessments? (Seriously, unless you eat it or breathe its oxide, worrying about it will do more harm to you by the psychological stress than it itself.)
heavy water...
And that's dangerous WHY? It's not like your neighbor can afford enough uranium ore and enough heavy water to build a CANDU reactor in ther basement. You can drink heavy water, and if you won't overdo it, it won't harm you. Try it, in the amounts you can afford it will be harmless.
is this what you expect high school science teachers are buying
I *hope* they are buying, and make the classes interesting enough to motivate more students to pursue science/technology careers.
and Mom and Dad put in little Timmy's chemistry set?
Why not? See above. Besides, if mom or dad played with similar things when young, they know already that it's not more risky than climbing on the tree in their garden, just in different ways.
Don't worry about it.
Or, maybe better solution: please keep worrying. Please worry so much it gets you a stomach ulcer, let it burst, and then die and stop scaremongering. Just don't attempt to get the laws pushed through to reflect your chickenheart attitude and spoil the fun for all.