I really don't care if it is more efficient for everyone to live in a telephone booth sized house I would literally give up everything I own to live in a phone booth--as long as it's a Tardis!
Moxie Soda...Wow, there's some cool aliens! They didn't just enhance Coca-Cola, they sent it back through time! Too bad they didn't stick a short primer on time travel on the back so we too could learn how to do that.
Have you disassembled the firmware in your MP3 player lately? Your hard drives? The BIOS on your mainboard? For all I care that pimped-up multimedia keyboard you bought at El Cheapo the other day could have a keylogger built-in and ready, waiting to be triggered by you typing that innocent-looking CAPTCHA on the cuckoo-watching forum. Ready to phone home when the number of keystrokes has died down in the middle of the night.
The fact that something seems unlikely doesn't mean it is impossible, and so it merits some serious discussion.
Of course they're not going to target nuclear missile silos on their first attempt. I bet they are just gauging the response time to an innocent pinprick. If (and when) they think the time is right, Kuang Grade Mark 11 will be ready.
Heck, there are even WiFi dongles that pretend to be hard drives with drivers on them until those drivers are installed. Actually, they pretend to be CD-ROM drives, so they are kind of U3 devices, too. My bad.
Please think and educate yourself before spreading meta-FUD.
Read up on U3 and see also this posting above. Today's SoC's with USB controllers are so versatile that they can pretend to be almost any device that can possibly be connected to an USB port. Heck, there are even WiFi dongles that pretend to be hard drives with drivers on them until those drivers are installed.
Never underestimate the power of the Microsoft Side.
For a lockdown policy, disabling explorer and command prompt and then allowing autorun is about as stupid as locking down your house with the greatest and latest in security tech, then leaving the master key on the doorstep outside.
Ok, to soup this up a bit with respect to the plasma TV sale mentioned earlier.
Say that I bought 4 plasma TV's at the listed price of $27/each, printed the confirmation and used that to negotiate with my partners to hold a big presentation of my product at the Ritz, wining and dining included. Now say Amazon didn't confirm their cancellation of my order. Would I be able to claim damages because their failure to confirm cancellation caused me to fail to cancel the presentation in time?
...is the supercomputer. It has millions of (semi-)intelligent processors craniofacially attached to its nodes. Though parallelism is rampant, effective clustering and resource allocation are rare to be found, that with all those processors just idly blabbering away at each other most of the time...
Who is talking about Skype having to support encrypted data? What the GP is talking about is a kind of modem. Remember those boxes that sent and received screechy noises down the phone line? What comes in from the mic jack and goes out the headphone jack will look like audio to Skype. You can use any encryption you like (as long as the resulting noise doesn't get mangled too badly by Skype's audio compression algorithms).
Either that or the interceptors have gotten a legitimately signed certificate for the site in question from the root CA. If this were true and someone was able to prove it, it would seriously undermine the entire trust model used for the most common form of encrypted communication on the internet. The latter. Google for "verisign lawful intercept". Add to that: - Laws (and those upholding them) can be bought - Criminals have money..and it's "Game over, man, game over!" like you said. It's a variant of my sig, really.
Yet one more reason to support Open Source software.
To take your argument somewhat further (to satisfy the paranoid?): make sure the OS and tools you use don't contain 'uninvited guests', i.e. malware. Consider this wonderful little gem: tcc. It's a C compiler whose source code (in particular the obfuscated version) you could wear printed on a T-shirt or have tattoo'd on your back. It's tiny and compiles blazingly fast (Way back when it was used to compile a kernel while booting!) The tcc source (the unobfuscated version) can be verified not to contain malware by any competent C programmer. I propose improving tcc such that it is able to compile GNU tools and libraries without too much hassle, at the same time fixing the GNU stuff to compile with tcc. Next bootstrap tcc, bootstrap gcc, build your kernel and tools, then the world. Why not bootstrap gcc directly? Well, because in theory the standard library and code generator of your host compiler could store 'uninvited guests' into the target at each stage, and no amount of bootstraping cycles might be able to get rid of all of it. The (statically linked) tcc binary is very small and can easily be verified not to contain malware.
GSM signal tracking is not very accurate (to within 100 feet I believe). RFID tracking, because of its short range, is much better at 'zooming in' on a target, particularly in areas that have poor GSM coverage.
Addition: (1) I don't mean those bulky plastic 'cases' hanging from the sleeves of shirts in the '90s, those are ancient history. (2) You could be tracked anywhere you have to pass through a narrow space. Two 'coupled' antennas facing each other, where you have to pass between them, can theoretically double the distance at which the tag can be read.
Longer answer: Don't assume that in the future the salesperson 'deactivating' your tags actually does so. (S)he will merely reprogram the tag from 'set off the burglary alarm' mode to 'tracking' mode, so competitors' shops, turnstiles, stairwells, gates etc. can track you whenever you wear the item.
yet to a programmer [cookies] were simply harmless text files that got blown out of proportion by the media. What are your SSN, credit card details and online banking login info but harmless strings of characters? That is, until some malware stores them inside a cookie, to be gobbled up by some random online gambling ad server next time you surf the Web...
Slashdot Mirror
Q: What is the thrust-to-weight ratio of an undrunk pop bottle rocket?
A: Pepsi or Coca-Cola?
Of course it is still a pop bottle. The pop will just be that much louder when it blows...
...that is, unless NASA thought of Australia as their recycling bin. $ME ducks for cover...
Many Slashdotters don't often $ make children, they fork() parent processes.
Perhaps managing IPC and dealing with zombies comes more naturally to them than dealing with tantrums and changing diapers.
Forgot about Skylab already? NASA just let it scatter all over Down Under and into the Pacific. Talk about littering!
Heck, even a guy from a planet in a galaxy far, far away can brag about shooting them!
Moxie Soda...Wow, there's some cool aliens! They didn't just enhance Coca-Cola, they sent it back through time! Too bad they didn't stick a short primer on time travel on the back so we too could learn how to do that.
Have you disassembled the firmware in your MP3 player lately? Your hard drives? The BIOS on your mainboard?
For all I care that pimped-up multimedia keyboard you bought at El Cheapo the other day could have a keylogger built-in and ready, waiting to be triggered by you typing that innocent-looking CAPTCHA on the cuckoo-watching forum. Ready to phone home when the number of keystrokes has died down in the middle of the night.
The fact that something seems unlikely doesn't mean it is impossible, and so it merits some serious discussion.
Of course they're not going to target nuclear missile silos on their first attempt. I bet they are just gauging the response time to an innocent pinprick. If (and when) they think the time is right, Kuang Grade Mark 11 will be ready.
Please think and educate yourself before spreading meta-FUD.
Read up on U3 and see also this posting above.
Today's SoC's with USB controllers are so versatile that they can pretend to be almost any device that can possibly be connected to an USB port. Heck, there are even WiFi dongles that pretend to be hard drives with drivers on them until those drivers are installed.
Never underestimate the power of the Microsoft Side.
For a lockdown policy, disabling explorer and command prompt and then allowing autorun is about as stupid as locking down your house with the greatest and latest in security tech, then leaving the master key on the doorstep outside.
Ok, to soup this up a bit with respect to the plasma TV sale mentioned earlier.
Say that I bought 4 plasma TV's at the listed price of $27/each, printed the confirmation and used that to negotiate with my partners to hold a big presentation of my product at the Ritz, wining and dining included. Now say Amazon didn't confirm their cancellation of my order. Would I be able to claim damages because their failure to confirm cancellation caused me to fail to cancel the presentation in time?
Roswell.
...is the supercomputer. It has millions of (semi-)intelligent processors craniofacially attached to its nodes. Though parallelism is rampant, effective clustering and resource allocation are rare to be found, that with all those processors just idly blabbering away at each other most of the time...
With apologies to Sun, they were there first.
Who is talking about Skype having to support encrypted data? What the GP is talking about is a kind of modem. Remember those boxes that sent and received screechy noises down the phone line?
What comes in from the mic jack and goes out the headphone jack will look like audio to Skype.
You can use any encryption you like (as long as the resulting noise doesn't get mangled too badly by Skype's audio compression algorithms).
Add to that:
- Laws (and those upholding them) can be bought
- Criminals have money
Yet one more reason to support Open Source software.
To take your argument somewhat further (to satisfy the paranoid?): make sure the OS and tools you use don't contain 'uninvited guests', i.e. malware.
Consider this wonderful little gem: tcc. It's a C compiler whose source code (in particular the obfuscated version) you could wear printed on a T-shirt or have tattoo'd on your back. It's tiny and compiles blazingly fast (Way back when it was used to compile a kernel while booting!)
The tcc source (the unobfuscated version) can be verified not to contain malware by any competent C programmer.
I propose improving tcc such that it is able to compile GNU tools and libraries without too much hassle, at the same time fixing the GNU stuff to compile with tcc. Next bootstrap tcc, bootstrap gcc, build your kernel and tools, then the world.
Why not bootstrap gcc directly? Well, because in theory the standard library and code generator of your host compiler could store 'uninvited guests' into the target at each stage, and no amount of bootstraping cycles might be able to get rid of all of it. The (statically linked) tcc binary is very small and can easily be verified not to contain malware.
Gentoo from scratch?!
Approaching SHOE Event Horizon...Tagged!
How many ROADS must a man walk down...? Not long from now, you can find out, with Google Maps.
"first they came for the..."
Oh well, nevermind.
Huh? There's no'one left to stand up for me? Damn...
GSM signal tracking is not very accurate (to within 100 feet I believe). RFID tracking, because of its short range, is much better at 'zooming in' on a target, particularly in areas that have poor GSM coverage.
Addition:
(1) I don't mean those bulky plastic 'cases' hanging from the sleeves of shirts in the '90s, those are ancient history.
(2) You could be tracked anywhere you have to pass through a narrow space. Two 'coupled' antennas facing each other, where you have to pass between them, can theoretically double the distance at which the tag can be read.
Short answer: Shoplifting prevention devices.
Longer answer: Don't assume that in the future the salesperson 'deactivating' your tags actually does so. (S)he will merely reprogram the tag from 'set off the burglary alarm' mode to 'tracking' mode, so competitors' shops, turnstiles, stairwells, gates etc. can track you whenever you wear the item.
That is, until some malware stores them inside a cookie, to be gobbled up by some random online gambling ad server next time you surf the Web...