Odd chance? Do you keep all your e-mail? Think I delete a good 95% of it immediately after reading (simply 'coz many are CFPs that I really don't care about...). Execs who handle potentially incriminating mail might read/remember/delete as a force of habit.
A simple but inadequate approach might simply be to scan through a raw disk device -- remember the/dev entries, and dd? If only an unlink was used, and not much writing since then, it might have a chance.
A data recovery specialist would probably be able to describe how to recover material that's been deliberately overwritten (say, just a couple of passes). Recall that some standards call for several differing passes of overwriting in order to prevent recovery of sensitive information...
Those that live in the UK probably would NOT want to lose the key, IIRC. Over here in the US, failure to produce the key might be contempt of court, destruction of evidence, or obstruction of justice (but hey, IANAL) -- in much the same way that destroying any other form of evidence is itself a criminal act.
As for a fake key -- theoretically you could claim an XOR-based OTP, and simply have a fake key to turn incriminating text into vaguely suspicious, plausible but non-incriminating text (as I sincerely doubt a jury would believe that you OTP'd a cookbook recipe... especially, say, if it's to a staffer at a foreign embassy or whatever). This would might be perjury or worse if caught, however.
They lie. That tendency is VERY well documented over many years.
It's also possible that it's not representative. I've heard that some pollsters, when looking for a specific target demographic, might ask a question that they DON'T list. If you answer that "incorrectly", they hang up and don't count you -- since they haven't asked you the rest of the questions.
* Elections and political pressure; although DoJ officials aren't elected by the public, its budget IS controlled by legislators.
* It shows that if you frame questions well, you can report darn satisfactory results.
* It's important to remember that most folks don't stay obsessively informed about their own country, let alone about overseas incidents such as an attack on a UN bus carrying Serbs, or the fact that the next president of Russia will likely be either Yeltsin's pardoner, or a Communist.
Don't forget that there are other porters out there, as well. Apparently Sir-Tech's _Jagged Alliance 2_ and its to-be-released expansion pack "Unfinished Business" are both being ported by a company called Tribsoft. They don't appear to have announced any other projects yet, 'tho, although they're taking suggestions.
The verbal section is a nifty way to measure one's masochism (namely, cramming vocab lists). Finding one of those obnoxious 5k word lists and learning them works. Arguably, it's also a psych experiment as test-takers strive to uncover the most likely logic behind different exam questions in the reading-comp.
The math section measures speed and care, and whether or not the student reached trigonometry. Actually, I don't remember whether it went that far; took it... hrmmm, maybe '93 or whenever -- plus or minus a year, anyway. Long enough ago and t'was sufficiently unimpressive to stick in my memory.
* Statistically, skin color has something to do with SAT score. Note that I specified "SAT score", not intelligence; SAT scores have underpredicted minority college success, so something weird is going on.
* No remotely sane admissions department uses SATs as anything more than a rough guide, anyway. 'course, the CWRU GPA/SAT-based offer always struck me as insane. $12K/yr for a, what, 3.2 or 3.5, and a 1400? How odd. If they're only going to choose on one factor like that, they're not worth my time. 'specially considering that something as silly as vocab-cramming can be remarkably effective for a test.
* Colin Powell, if memory serves, is on record as describing how AA helped him.
Statistically, racial minorities do worse on various standardized tests -- SATs, Stanford-Binet IQ tests, and so forth -- than do whites. If memory serves, this is generally true *even when controlling for socioeconomic background*.
This gap is fairly consistent.
However, it HAS also been found that statistically, the SAT (for instance) under-predicts the rates of success for college minorities. This suggests that either
* The SAT doesn't *completely* measure college success (seems obvious 'nuff, eh? It's correlated, IIRC, but not perfectly. Perfect would look like a case of forged evidence.) * It's somehow biased against minorities.
This is perhaps possible for the verbal section, but seems rather strange for the mathematics (at least IMHO). Therefore there are already measures such as one reading-comp essay always being chosen with an eye towards women (IIRC) or minorities...
I'm tempted to think it's the university looking out for itself, by massively reducing its legal vulnerabilities. Many of the best students -- of any ethnicity or background -- would probably be incredibly turned off by this bizarre treatment. After all, if they can apply anywhere, then they can choose places that DON'T believe that they need a boost.
It may have the same motivation as state schools promising admissions to anyone in the top % of their high school graduating class. It's nominally race-neutral, but since in fact many of more visible [to reporters] poorer, worse-performing schools are dominated by minorities, this has the effect of giving them a boost in admissions...
The first reaction I had to the article was that it was an allegedly race-neutral way of introducing subjectivity in order to get the *effects* of affirmative action programs, while making it harder to mount a court challenge.
There is, after all, absolutely no objectivity in this process. None. Nada. That means it's practically impossible to overcome this in court on racial-bias grounds, in contrast to the usual race-norming practices (which are VERY explicit in their bias, and thus visible to even the most incredibly clueless jury).
In addition, once word gets out that a Gov't agency has hidden something, they'll *never* hear the end of it. Ever.
Nixon tried to help cover for a burglary by his CRP bozos, and the whole ugly mess unravelled.
AG Reno revealed that pyrotechnic tear gas canisters HAD been fired at Waco, and it revived the whole Davidian case -- combined with footage that's strongly suggestive of Federal gunfire, and with shell casings found at a building used by ATF forces... and they also made the mistake of initially denying the presence of US Army Special Forces personnel...
Pres. Clinton denied the whole darned Lewinsky mess, in court no less. Oops; looked like he had learned that he could get away with it, after the Flowers affair, and his strange denial of marijuana inhalation.
And so forth. Generally, it's much, MUCH better for a public official or agency to provide full and immediate disclosure if a) it can be leaked, b) it looks bad, and c) leaking it won't hurt nat'l security.
Erm. Somehow, I think there are a LOT of damn-well-qualified mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, and so forth that don't have time for this board because they're busy doing research. And the NSA isn't all "hackers"... they do more than try to keep a high uptime and work on security glitches. There's a heck of a lot of theory going on there.
The willingness to be vocal only matters if somebody's listening.
There are, for instance, plenty of folks who don't like the Gov't. These range widely, however. There are folks who run militias that even *cooperate* with the Feds in manhunts, because they aren't interested in starting a civil war, but who train for partisan warfare if the need arises; there are loners who keep quiet, and then stash away fertilizer and detonaters in their home, and read and re-read the latest pamphlets on the New World Order.
For every Weatherman or Black Panther (ok, so these examples aren't contemporary...) who may be vocal in promoting civil warfare and insurgency, there may be many other voices who are just as strident, if not more -- but who really wouldn't *do* anything. So how do you tell 'em apart, without listening and occasionally investigating?
I'm not sure about the latter two -- unlike the first two, they didn't have a penchant for genocide or other mass extermination -- and didn't leave behind a doctrine that altered the world, as did Marx. I'd rather put Lenin down, than Marx, for it was Lenin who first implemented it with the extreme degree of ruthlessness and cynicism that became hallmarks of nominally Communist dictatorships.
Folks like Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, and the two Columbine shoooters come to mind -- they DIDN'T have the direct support of huge governments or even particularly large movements; they operated either alone or in small cells; they didn't need all that much resources; and their effects were disproportionately large.
Even the last two, who may strike you as odd choices for that list, had a national impact -- the HCI demagogues and their allies took political advantage of the incident to try to push their agenda, and the firearms industry is a regular punching bag for folks like Mr. Rather. To shock a nation can have repercussions well beyond that of the actual incident. When you figure that a small cell has a much lower chance of detection before an attempt, and is easier to motivate and mobilize rapidly -- then we run into problems.
You do know that the CPUSA *was* used both for funneling money and recruiting agents, in addition to the regular "legal" networks operating under diplomatic cover, and the various fronts used by illegals? That it directly aided the recruitment of agents in the Manhattan Project, various high-level jobs (asst. sec. of the Treasury, a Presidential aide, and so forth), and so forth?
FWIW, the CIA with the help of a GRU colonel helped screw over the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Go figure, eh?
Pacific? For the most part, perhaps, but... there are still
a) foreign intelligence services operating in the US and elsewhere, whose interests do not coincide -- and "allies" generally do spy on each other. Witness the recent reports over France spying on British commercial interests, most likely passing on the industrial espionage to its own companies, for instance. Admittedly, those two have fought a number of wars, but they're *nominally* friendly now.
b) extremist groups of all types here -- from small-time groups like radical eco-terrorists who'll likely do no more than arson, B&E, trespass and the occasional attempted murder; to "religious" fundies who ignore prohibits about bloodshed, and decide to express their viewpoints through home-made bombs; and so forth. There are quite a few people with violent tendencies and a serious grudge against the Gov't, heretics, or whatever other group you care to name.
c) Some of their monitoring probably deals with overseas investigations -- people over here connected with folks over there. If, say, a drug kingpin in Miami went looking to obtain Russian surplus military hardware from a underpaid, rather disgruntled general, the NSA could be handy. Or if somebody realized he could be making quite a lot of money selling US-made automatic rifles over to the British underground...
A T3 and a standard phone service provide different guarantees.
Can you be sure that your packets are sent with a regular, non-bursty lag, in-order? Or that your connection quality won't suddenly be impacted by somebody transferring a couple of GB of data for a research project? Or that, in turn, your own connections aren't increasing somebody else's latency?
Supposedly the bandwidth requirements for this service in question aren't too high -- but they do have to measure that to quantify this suspicion.
And, as somebody who's had packets routed to Hell and back -- from Netrek w/ 25% packet loss, to e-mail delayed for a week, to an e-mail meant for me popping up in the inbox of a stranger on a different continent -- I'm not too trusting of the *reliability* of that T3. Heck, the network here has problems rather frequently, and they're not all because some schmo decides it'd be a hoot to flood our network. Hand me that phone, will ya?
The students probably don't even come close to funding uni expenses. The tuition certainly isn't enough... and odds are, the students are NOT the largest taxpayers in the area...
As long as the packages are verifiable through, say, some cryptographic signature that confirms that it DID come from a trusted source w/o tampering...
a) the research doesn't wander into certain morality issues, like involving fetal-tissue research or cloning b) there's a budget surplus and the science doesn't cost THAT much c) it doesn't strike people as blatantly silly
There probably won't be that much opposition.
Were tax revenues NOT so unexpectedly high c/o the booming economy, then there might be griping about cost-effectiveness.
He's getting desperate for a *positive* legacy. After all, he does not want his dysfunctional personal life to dominate his entries in the history books.
Statements like, "President Clinton, only the second ever to be impeached, and whose character was impugned by astonishing revelations of improper and crass behavior..." are NOT what he has in mind for schoolkids to learn years from now.
Hrm. Even assuming that your routers are smart enough to do this... what if there are too many hosts?
That is, so many hosts compared to bandwidth that either
a) You limit each user to an incredibly low amount of bandwidth, thus guaranteeing that you will not overcommit... { exacerbated because a uni most likely has many hosts at any given time that are not accessing the pipe to the Outside }
or
b) You allow overcommitting, which means in theory you may again be forced to deny people more bw even though they're now well within the announced limits.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd chance? Do you keep all your e-mail? Think I delete a good 95% of it immediately after reading (simply 'coz many are CFPs that I really don't care about...). Execs who handle potentially incriminating mail might read/remember/delete as a force of habit.
/dev entries, and dd? If only an unlink was used, and not much writing since then, it might have a chance.
A simple but inadequate approach might simply be to scan through a raw disk device -- remember the
A data recovery specialist would probably be able to describe how to recover material that's been deliberately overwritten (say, just a couple of passes). Recall that some standards call for several differing passes of overwriting in order to prevent recovery of sensitive information...
That would depend.
Those that live in the UK probably would NOT want to lose the key, IIRC. Over here in the US, failure to produce the key might be contempt of court, destruction of evidence, or obstruction of justice (but hey, IANAL) -- in much the same way that destroying any other form of evidence is itself a criminal act.
As for a fake key -- theoretically you could claim an XOR-based OTP, and simply have a fake key to turn incriminating text into vaguely suspicious, plausible but non-incriminating text (as I sincerely doubt a jury would believe that you OTP'd a cookbook recipe... especially, say, if it's to a staffer at a foreign embassy or whatever). This would might be perjury or worse if caught, however.
Even more obvious:
Perhaps they're looking for EVIDENCE on the cracked machines? Like log files and anything else that lets 'em trace backwards?
Cops working a homicide don't just give up if the murderer ain't there. They start tracking down witnesses and other leads...
They lie. That tendency is VERY well documented over many years.
It's also possible that it's not representative. I've heard that some pollsters, when looking for a specific target demographic, might ask a question that they DON'T list. If you answer that "incorrectly", they hang up and don't count you -- since they haven't asked you the rest of the questions.
It's relevant because..
* Elections and political pressure; although DoJ officials aren't elected by the public, its budget IS controlled by legislators.
* It shows that if you frame questions well, you can report darn satisfactory results.
* It's important to remember that most folks don't stay obsessively informed about their own country, let alone about overseas incidents such as an attack on a UN bus carrying Serbs, or the fact that the next president of Russia will likely be either Yeltsin's pardoner, or a Communist.
Don't forget that there are other porters out there, as well. Apparently Sir-Tech's _Jagged Alliance 2_ and its to-be-released expansion pack "Unfinished Business" are both being ported by a company called Tribsoft. They don't appear to have announced any other projects yet, 'tho, although they're taking suggestions.
The verbal section is a nifty way to measure one's masochism (namely, cramming vocab lists). Finding one of those obnoxious 5k word lists and learning them works. Arguably, it's also a psych experiment as test-takers strive to uncover the most likely logic behind different exam questions in the reading-comp.
The math section measures speed and care, and whether or not the student reached trigonometry. Actually, I don't remember whether it went that far; took it... hrmmm, maybe '93 or whenever -- plus or minus a year, anyway. Long enough ago and t'was sufficiently unimpressive to stick in my memory.
* Statistically, skin color has something to do with SAT score. Note that I specified "SAT score", not intelligence; SAT scores have underpredicted minority college success, so something weird is going on.
* No remotely sane admissions department uses SATs as anything more than a rough guide, anyway. 'course, the CWRU GPA/SAT-based offer always struck me as insane. $12K/yr for a, what, 3.2 or 3.5, and a 1400? How odd. If they're only going to choose on one factor like that, they're not worth my time. 'specially considering that something as silly as vocab-cramming can be remarkably effective for a test.
* Colin Powell, if memory serves, is on record as describing how AA helped him.
Statistically, racial minorities do worse on various standardized tests -- SATs, Stanford-Binet IQ tests, and so forth -- than do whites. If memory serves, this is generally true *even when controlling for socioeconomic background*.
This gap is fairly consistent.
However, it HAS also been found that statistically, the SAT (for instance) under-predicts the rates of success for college minorities. This suggests that either
* The SAT doesn't *completely* measure college
success (seems obvious 'nuff, eh? It's
correlated, IIRC, but not perfectly. Perfect
would look like a case of forged evidence.)
* It's somehow biased against minorities.
This is perhaps possible for the verbal section, but seems rather strange for the mathematics (at least IMHO). Therefore there are already measures such as one reading-comp essay always being chosen with an eye towards women (IIRC) or minorities...
A real question is -- who benefits?
I'm tempted to think it's the university looking out for itself, by massively reducing its legal vulnerabilities. Many of the best students -- of any ethnicity or background -- would probably be incredibly turned off by this bizarre treatment. After all, if they can apply anywhere, then they can choose places that DON'T believe that they need a boost.
It may have the same motivation as state schools promising admissions to anyone in the top % of their high school graduating class. It's nominally race-neutral, but since in fact many of more visible [to reporters] poorer, worse-performing schools are dominated by minorities, this has the effect of giving them a boost in admissions...
Hrmmph.
The first reaction I had to the article was that it was an allegedly race-neutral way of introducing subjectivity in order to get the *effects* of affirmative action programs, while making it harder to mount a court challenge.
There is, after all, absolutely no objectivity in this process. None. Nada. That means it's practically impossible to overcome this in court on racial-bias grounds, in contrast to the usual race-norming practices (which are VERY explicit in their bias, and thus visible to even the most incredibly clueless jury).
It's hard to hide something this significant.
In addition, once word gets out that a Gov't agency has hidden something, they'll *never* hear the end of it. Ever.
Nixon tried to help cover for a burglary by his CRP bozos, and the whole ugly mess unravelled.
AG Reno revealed that pyrotechnic tear gas canisters HAD been fired at Waco, and it revived the whole Davidian case -- combined with footage that's strongly suggestive of Federal gunfire, and with shell casings found at a building used by ATF forces... and they also made the mistake of initially denying the presence of US Army Special Forces personnel...
Pres. Clinton denied the whole darned Lewinsky mess, in court no less. Oops; looked like he had learned that he could get away with it, after the Flowers affair, and his strange denial of marijuana inhalation.
And so forth. Generally, it's much, MUCH better for a public official or agency to provide full and immediate disclosure if a) it can be leaked, b) it looks bad, and c) leaking it won't hurt nat'l security.
Erm. Somehow, I think there are a LOT of damn-well-qualified mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, and so forth that don't have time for this board because they're busy doing research. And the NSA isn't all "hackers"... they do more than try to keep a high uptime and work on security glitches. There's a heck of a lot of theory going on there.
The willingness to be vocal only matters if somebody's listening.
There are, for instance, plenty of folks who don't like the Gov't. These range widely, however. There are folks who run militias that even *cooperate* with the Feds in manhunts, because they aren't interested in starting a civil war, but who train for partisan warfare if the need arises; there are loners who keep quiet, and then stash away fertilizer and detonaters in their home, and read and re-read the latest pamphlets on the New World Order.
For every Weatherman or Black Panther (ok, so these examples aren't contemporary...) who may be vocal in promoting civil warfare and insurgency, there may be many other voices who are just as strident, if not more -- but who really wouldn't *do* anything. So how do you tell 'em apart, without listening and occasionally investigating?
*shrug*
I'm not sure about the latter two -- unlike the first two, they didn't have a penchant for genocide or other mass extermination -- and didn't leave behind a doctrine that altered the world, as did Marx. I'd rather put Lenin down, than Marx, for it was Lenin who first implemented it with the extreme degree of ruthlessness and cynicism that became hallmarks of nominally Communist dictatorships.
Folks like Lee Harvey Oswald, Timothy McVeigh, and the two Columbine shoooters come to mind -- they DIDN'T have the direct support of huge governments or even particularly large movements; they operated either alone or in small cells; they didn't need all that much resources; and their effects were disproportionately large.
Even the last two, who may strike you as odd choices for that list, had a national impact -- the HCI demagogues and their allies took political advantage of the incident to try to push their agenda, and the firearms industry is a regular punching bag for folks like Mr. Rather. To shock a nation can have repercussions well beyond that of the actual incident. When you figure that a small cell has a much lower chance of detection before an attempt, and is easier to motivate and mobilize rapidly -- then we run into problems.
You do know that the CPUSA *was* used both for funneling money and recruiting agents, in addition to the regular "legal" networks operating under diplomatic cover, and the various fronts used by illegals? That it directly aided the recruitment of agents in the Manhattan Project, various high-level jobs (asst. sec. of the Treasury, a Presidential aide, and so forth), and so forth?
FWIW, the CIA with the help of a GRU colonel helped screw over the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Go figure, eh?
*raises an eyebrow*
Pacific? For the most part, perhaps, but... there are still
a) foreign intelligence services operating in the US and elsewhere, whose interests do not coincide -- and "allies" generally do spy on each other. Witness the recent reports over France spying on British commercial interests, most likely passing on the industrial espionage to its own companies, for instance. Admittedly, those two have fought a number of wars, but they're *nominally* friendly now.
b) extremist groups of all types here -- from small-time groups like radical eco-terrorists who'll likely do no more than arson, B&E, trespass and the occasional attempted murder; to "religious" fundies who ignore prohibits about bloodshed, and decide to express their viewpoints through home-made bombs; and so forth. There are quite a few people with violent tendencies and a serious grudge against the Gov't, heretics, or whatever other group you care to name.
c) Some of their monitoring probably deals with overseas investigations -- people over here connected with folks over there. If, say, a drug kingpin in Miami went looking to obtain Russian surplus military hardware from a underpaid, rather disgruntled general, the NSA could be handy. Or if somebody realized he could be making quite a lot of money selling US-made automatic rifles over to the British underground...
A T3 and a standard phone service provide different guarantees.
Can you be sure that your packets are sent with a regular, non-bursty lag, in-order? Or that your connection quality won't suddenly be impacted by somebody transferring a couple of GB of data for a research project? Or that, in turn, your own connections aren't increasing somebody else's latency?
Supposedly the bandwidth requirements for this service in question aren't too high -- but they do have to measure that to quantify this suspicion.
And, as somebody who's had packets routed to Hell and back -- from Netrek w/ 25% packet loss, to e-mail delayed for a week, to an e-mail meant for me popping up in the inbox of a stranger on a different continent -- I'm not too trusting of the *reliability* of that T3. Heck, the network here has problems rather frequently, and they're not all because some schmo decides it'd be a hoot to flood our network. Hand me that phone, will ya?
The students probably don't even come close to funding uni expenses. The tuition certainly isn't enough... and odds are, the students are NOT the largest taxpayers in the area...
Hrm. Is the Canadian law consistent with international copyright treaties (which I suspect, at least, that Canada is a signatory to?)?
As long as the packages are verifiable through, say, some cryptographic signature that confirms that it DID come from a trusted source w/o tampering...
As long as
a) the research doesn't wander into certain
morality issues, like involving fetal-tissue
research or cloning
b) there's a budget surplus and the science
doesn't cost THAT much
c) it doesn't strike people as blatantly silly
There probably won't be that much opposition.
Were tax revenues NOT so unexpectedly high c/o the booming economy, then there might be griping about cost-effectiveness.
He's getting desperate for a *positive* legacy. After all, he does not want his dysfunctional personal life to dominate his entries in the history books.
Statements like, "President Clinton, only the second ever to be impeached, and whose character was impugned by astonishing revelations of improper and crass behavior..." are NOT what he has in mind for schoolkids to learn years from now.
Ah, but wait until some DoD scientist injects people with nanotech that creates Borg implants and extreme motivation to assimilate... :-)
Hrm. Even assuming that your routers are smart enough to do this... what if there are too many hosts?
That is, so many hosts compared to bandwidth that either
a) You limit each user to an incredibly low amount of bandwidth, thus guaranteeing that you will not overcommit... { exacerbated because a uni most likely has many hosts at any given time that are not accessing the pipe to the Outside }
or
b) You allow overcommitting, which means in theory you may again be forced to deny people more bw even though they're now well within the announced limits.