If I was a narcissist and had money to burn - which I don't - I might make a hobby of buying lots-of-paperwork-required guns just because I would be the only one on my block with such a collection.
For safety's sake - and to calm down the local police - I would put a gun-lock or some equivalent on them and I would take further steps so it would take hours rather than minutes to make the gun fire-able. I wouldn't keep more than a token amount of ammo on-site either.
To the extent that people make torture, snuff (murder), and animal- and child- or other-abuse movies for entertainment or financial (vs. war/propaganda) purposes and distribute those on the Internet, then the topic of this article is far, far from the "ugliest corner of the Internet."
People who enjoy others' pain and can't or won't follow the laws regarding torture and abuse need serious mental and/or spiritual help. Those who go out of their way to profit from this kind of thing likely need spiritual help as well, independent of any criminal penalties.
If this is a true direct takeover where no driver interaction is required, then it should be an "OH SH*T" moment for car-makers and will likely result in an "urgent/car is unsafe to drive" recall.
If it's a "social engineering" feat AND the car can be driven without the user touch-screen, then it will still result in a recall but customers will be warned to not use the touch-screen while driving (sorry customer, no radio for you until you come in for the repair).
Personally, I think it's great that this is being researched and publicized. Customers will start to demand that it be "impossible - enforced in hardware" for a car to be taken over in this manner.
I don't get enough phone calls or texts for this to be an issue, but I get a ton of email.
When I'm at my PC, I have "alert me" turned on, because it's usually worth the bother.
But on my phone, I have everything on "manual." If someone emails me after business hours and I'm not expecting an email, I won't see it until the next day. If I am expecting it, I will either manually check it a few times that evening or I'll temporarily turn on "push."
By the way, I do know how to put my phone on "silent" and on the rare cases when I absolutely need to be free of interruption, I use that feature.
When I don't want to be tracked, there is "airplane mode/wifi off/bluetooth off", the "power off" feature, and, for some phones at least, battery removal. And if Donald Trump releases my phone number, there's always the industrial shredding machine/crusher.
You forget, it's not just the little guys being hurt by this. It's also Google, etc. It takes them time to go through these and they take the hit to their reputation if they always blindly process obviously-bogus requests without so much as looking at it.
Google has the money, the clout, and the legal talent to fight back even if the law seems to favor those making the bogus complaints. As Tepples said below, there is precedent.
Out of every million requests you are going to have some obvious mistakes. That's human nature. But it's a huge problem when companies just "throw a bunch of requests at the wall and see what sticks" without much cost to them for invalid requests.
Google and others who receive large volumes of requests should have some procedure to weed out those who send too many requests where the sender obviously didn't do his "due diligence" or worse, is trying to game the system.
Hopefully they can work out a voluntary system with the high-volume DMCA-takedown-notice requesters where the requester agrees in advance to pay "liquidated damages" (aka a "Google fine") for every rejected request and where they accept that they will be put into a "slow processing lane" if their rate of such requests gets too high.
If Google etc. can't come to a voluntary agreement with a particular high-volume sender and that sender's rate of invalid requests gets too high, Google, etc. should take the requester to court to get an order prohibiting the requester from sending any future request without an affidavit declaring that they have done "due diligence." If they don't sign the oath, it won't be a valid request. If they do sign it and didn't do the due diligence, they will be found in contempt of court and face criminal perjury charges.
I figured "taking out drones" would fall in the same category as a fireman breaking a car's windows or pushing it out of the way if it's parked in front of a hydrant when the fireman needs access to that hydrant to fight a fire, then asking a cop to ticket the owner for parking in front of the hydrant.
In case you are wondering, the break-the-windows-and-give-the-owner-a-ticket scenario is covered by the law in at least one state if not most/all of them. And no, the car owner isn't allowed to sue the fire dept. for damage to the windows or the water damage when they disconnect and water gets all over the inside of his car.
... on whether the FM radio receiver can be used - even indirectly - to send control instructions to the engine or other "car" parts of the car.
One hypothetical example of where this might be an issue is if the car's braking or accelerator systems were voice-activated. If this is the case and there isn't a sure-fire mechanism to prevent the radio's sound from being interpreted as commands from the driver, then, well, the implications are obvious and left as an exercise to the reader.
If the "car" part of the car were completely disconnected from any "outside" communication, the problem would go away.
Now, there are times where allowing outside control of the car is useful, such as remote-start of the heating and A/C systems so the car isn't an icebox or oven when you get in, and (perhaps) a remote-slowdown or remote-prevent-engine-start command as part of an anti-theft-system, but if you are going to do this, you have to do it right and you have to assume that even if you do it right, someone will be able to defeat your security. You have to ask yourself, as a manufacturer, is it really worth it to allow my customers the conveniences of remote-control in exchange for the small but very real risk that an adversary could exploit it to kill my customer or someone else?
Even if the bad guys are arrested today and the blackmail threat is gone, they will either be shut down from customer lawsuits or their customers will abandon them in droves, leading to bankruptcy.
I get that they have server maintenance to pay for;
Maybe I don't understand how Slingboxes work, but the general concept of a "home DVR you can access from anywhere" doesn't seem to require that the vendor maintain a server or stay in business for that matter for the basic DVR and remote-viewing functionality to work.
This whole thing is really too bad. If I get to the point where I need to remote-view my DVR, shenanigans like this are going to make a home-brew box attractive by comparison.
There is some information that really shouldn't on "live" storage until there is a specific request, and once it is "made live" it should be purged after a reasonable period of time if it isn't still being accessed.
For example, the feds could keep most records of former employees and very-sensitive records of current employees "offline" unless there is a specific need to have that record immediately available. If an employee or government agency needs immediate access to a routine, not-very-sensitive record such as hire- and termination-dates, tough - they will have to wait 5 minutes for the human being who keeps the "offline" data to retrieve it and put it "online." For more sensitive data, the wait may be longer.
"Offline" doesn't necessarily mean "on a disk, in a locked drawer." It could mean "on an isolated, secure system which only a small group of people have access to."
Bottom line:
If an adversary gets in and tries to do a wholesale data dump, either he's going to only get the stuff that happens to be online, or he's going to create a huge volume of data-retrieval requests which will get unwanted attention.
The important part of the article that was left out of the summary is that Microsoft is trying to address the problem by funding programs that encourage girls to get into the talent pipeline at a young age and stick with it.
How many nations are setting up front group "contractors" and "private sector" teams that are a direct link back to their own military counterintelligence units? [emphasis added]
If they are smart, "zero."
If they are smart, national police who set front groups will make sure it's done indirectly enough that it will be hard to tie the "front" group back to the government entity in question.
As to the number of nations whose police forces use private groups as fronts in some way, shape, or form? The answer is probably close to or equal to the total number of nations with police forces. Sigh.
It will cost you some bucks, but the simplest-to-maintain connection would be a dedicated machine at the far end to act as a firewall that forces all traffic through a VPN, and some box at your end to receive the VPN's traffic and route it wherever it needs to go.
Doing it this way means there is no special software to install on the clients and nothing will "break" when Windows 10 or Raspberry Pi's next OS revision comes out.
For appliances like these, I would recommend you consider one of the specialized distributions that are built with this kind of thing - and the security that goes with them - in mind. A decade ago I would've said OpenBSD but there may be something better out there now.
Most stop lights have (or, 20 years ago, had) a graceful fail-safe mode: When the software is confused or there is a hardware fault like "incompatible green lights detected" the systems go into a failsafe mode, which is usually an all-way stop.
A reasonable fail-safe mode for a car door lock would be that it could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the inside and at least one door (typically both front doors) could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the outside.
Give users a sandboxed system that they can use to request access to specific firewalled web sites (a remote desktop connection to a virtual machine should do the trick).
If they need to save data to those web sites or upload files to them, give them some storage space that can be used for this purpose, but scan the bejesus out of anything that is saved to that location before it's allowed to be copied to your "normal" data-storage locations.
Once they log off, destroy the sandbox (or archive it for IT post-analysis).
One of the earlier commentators was right about one thing: Management has a business to run. If tech gets in the way of getting work done, that's a bad thing. If the bosses perceive that tech is getting in the way when it's really saving them from a disaster later, they will still perceive it as a bad thing and act accordingly.
Incorporating yourself and paying yourself a salary to avoid payroll taxes is likely to attract auditors (well, not this year, the IRS is too poor, but in the future, it will).
If you do this, be sure to contact a tax professional so you know what hoops to jump through to survive an audit.
On the plus side, you can write off the tax professional's fees as a business expense:).
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If I was a narcissist and had money to burn - which I don't - I might make a hobby of buying lots-of-paperwork-required guns just because I would be the only one on my block with such a collection.
For safety's sake - and to calm down the local police - I would put a gun-lock or some equivalent on them and I would take further steps so it would take hours rather than minutes to make the gun fire-able. I wouldn't keep more than a token amount of ammo on-site either.
To the extent that people make torture, snuff (murder), and animal- and child- or other-abuse movies for entertainment or financial (vs. war/propaganda) purposes and distribute those on the Internet, then the topic of this article is far, far from the "ugliest corner of the Internet."
People who enjoy others' pain and can't or won't follow the laws regarding torture and abuse need serious mental and/or spiritual help. Those who go out of their way to profit from this kind of thing likely need spiritual help as well, independent of any criminal penalties.
If this is a true direct takeover where no driver interaction is required, then it should be an "OH SH*T" moment for car-makers and will likely result in an "urgent/car is unsafe to drive" recall.
If it's a "social engineering" feat AND the car can be driven without the user touch-screen, then it will still result in a recall but customers will be warned to not use the touch-screen while driving (sorry customer, no radio for you until you come in for the repair).
Personally, I think it's great that this is being researched and publicized. Customers will start to demand that it be "impossible - enforced in hardware" for a car to be taken over in this manner.
... does it run [on] Linux?
Oh wait, I'm thinking of that other snake.
I don't get enough phone calls or texts for this to be an issue, but I get a ton of email.
When I'm at my PC, I have "alert me" turned on, because it's usually worth the bother.
But on my phone, I have everything on "manual." If someone emails me after business hours and I'm not expecting an email, I won't see it until the next day. If I am expecting it, I will either manually check it a few times that evening or I'll temporarily turn on "push."
By the way, I do know how to put my phone on "silent" and on the rare cases when I absolutely need to be free of interruption, I use that feature.
When I don't want to be tracked, there is "airplane mode/wifi off/bluetooth off", the "power off" feature, and, for some phones at least, battery removal. And if Donald Trump releases my phone number, there's always the industrial shredding machine/crusher.
You forget, it's not just the little guys being hurt by this. It's also Google, etc. It takes them time to go through these and they take the hit to their reputation if they always blindly process obviously-bogus requests without so much as looking at it.
Google has the money, the clout, and the legal talent to fight back even if the law seems to favor those making the bogus complaints. As Tepples said below, there is precedent.
Out of every million requests you are going to have some obvious mistakes. That's human nature. But it's a huge problem when companies just "throw a bunch of requests at the wall and see what sticks" without much cost to them for invalid requests.
Google and others who receive large volumes of requests should have some procedure to weed out those who send too many requests where the sender obviously didn't do his "due diligence" or worse, is trying to game the system.
Hopefully they can work out a voluntary system with the high-volume DMCA-takedown-notice requesters where the requester agrees in advance to pay "liquidated damages" (aka a "Google fine") for every rejected request and where they accept that they will be put into a "slow processing lane" if their rate of such requests gets too high.
If Google etc. can't come to a voluntary agreement with a particular high-volume sender and that sender's rate of invalid requests gets too high, Google, etc. should take the requester to court to get an order prohibiting the requester from sending any future request without an affidavit declaring that they have done "due diligence." If they don't sign the oath, it won't be a valid request. If they do sign it and didn't do the due diligence, they will be found in contempt of court and face criminal perjury charges.
Yes, I did miss the joke.
That begs the question though, is it considered an obscenity when you key down with your middle, er, digit? :P .
... for a reason.
I Google'd "bruce perens site:fcc.gov" and this came up as the first hit.
I figured "taking out drones" would fall in the same category as a fireman breaking a car's windows or pushing it out of the way if it's parked in front of a hydrant when the fireman needs access to that hydrant to fight a fire, then asking a cop to ticket the owner for parking in front of the hydrant.
In case you are wondering, the break-the-windows-and-give-the-owner-a-ticket scenario is covered by the law in at least one state if not most/all of them. And no, the car owner isn't allowed to sue the fire dept. for damage to the windows or the water damage when they disconnect and water gets all over the inside of his car.
... on whether the FM radio receiver can be used - even indirectly - to send control instructions to the engine or other "car" parts of the car.
One hypothetical example of where this might be an issue is if the car's braking or accelerator systems were voice-activated. If this is the case and there isn't a sure-fire mechanism to prevent the radio's sound from being interpreted as commands from the driver, then, well, the implications are obvious and left as an exercise to the reader.
If the "car" part of the car were completely disconnected from any "outside" communication, the problem would go away.
Now, there are times where allowing outside control of the car is useful, such as remote-start of the heating and A/C systems so the car isn't an icebox or oven when you get in, and (perhaps) a remote-slowdown or remote-prevent-engine-start command as part of an anti-theft-system, but if you are going to do this, you have to do it right and you have to assume that even if you do it right, someone will be able to defeat your security. You have to ask yourself, as a manufacturer, is it really worth it to allow my customers the conveniences of remote-control in exchange for the small but very real risk that an adversary could exploit it to kill my customer or someone else?
Even if the bad guys are arrested today and the blackmail threat is gone, they will either be shut down from customer lawsuits or their customers will abandon them in droves, leading to bankruptcy.
I get that they have server maintenance to pay for;
Maybe I don't understand how Slingboxes work, but the general concept of a "home DVR you can access from anywhere" doesn't seem to require that the vendor maintain a server or stay in business for that matter for the basic DVR and remote-viewing functionality to work.
This whole thing is really too bad. If I get to the point where I need to remote-view my DVR, shenanigans like this are going to make a home-brew box attractive by comparison.
There is some information that really shouldn't on "live" storage until there is a specific request, and once it is "made live" it should be purged after a reasonable period of time if it isn't still being accessed.
For example, the feds could keep most records of former employees and very-sensitive records of current employees "offline" unless there is a specific need to have that record immediately available. If an employee or government agency needs immediate access to a routine, not-very-sensitive record such as hire- and termination-dates, tough - they will have to wait 5 minutes for the human being who keeps the "offline" data to retrieve it and put it "online." For more sensitive data, the wait may be longer.
"Offline" doesn't necessarily mean "on a disk, in a locked drawer." It could mean "on an isolated, secure system which only a small group of people have access to."
Bottom line:
If an adversary gets in and tries to do a wholesale data dump, either he's going to only get the stuff that happens to be online, or he's going to create a huge volume of data-retrieval requests which will get unwanted attention.
Perhaps I am naive, but I just assumed airplane cargo holds had some sort of fire-suppression mechanism.
The important part of the article that was left out of the summary is that Microsoft is trying to address the problem by funding programs that encourage girls to get into the talent pipeline at a young age and stick with it.
How many nations are setting up front group "contractors" and "private sector" teams that are a direct link back to their own military counterintelligence units? [emphasis added]
If they are smart, "zero."
If they are smart, national police who set front groups will make sure it's done indirectly enough that it will be hard to tie the "front" group back to the government entity in question.
As to the number of nations whose police forces use private groups as fronts in some way, shape, or form? The answer is probably close to or equal to the total number of nations with police forces. Sigh.
It will cost you some bucks, but the simplest-to-maintain connection would be a dedicated machine at the far end to act as a firewall that forces all traffic through a VPN, and some box at your end to receive the VPN's traffic and route it wherever it needs to go.
Doing it this way means there is no special software to install on the clients and nothing will "break" when Windows 10 or Raspberry Pi's next OS revision comes out.
For appliances like these, I would recommend you consider one of the specialized distributions that are built with this kind of thing - and the security that goes with them - in mind. A decade ago I would've said OpenBSD but there may be something better out there now.
Most stop lights have (or, 20 years ago, had) a graceful fail-safe mode: When the software is confused or there is a hardware fault like "incompatible green lights detected" the systems go into a failsafe mode, which is usually an all-way stop.
A reasonable fail-safe mode for a car door lock would be that it could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the inside and at least one door (typically both front doors) could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the outside.
Don't forget the cost of time. In most places public transport greatly increases your commute time.
On the other hand, you gain a lot of it back if you can work while riding the bus/train/whatever.
For me it's a huge "net loss" even if driving+parking had the same dollar cost as a bus/train ticket.
Give users a sandboxed system that they can use to request access to specific firewalled web sites (a remote desktop connection to a virtual machine should do the trick).
If they need to save data to those web sites or upload files to them, give them some storage space that can be used for this purpose, but scan the bejesus out of anything that is saved to that location before it's allowed to be copied to your "normal" data-storage locations.
Once they log off, destroy the sandbox (or archive it for IT post-analysis).
One of the earlier commentators was right about one thing: Management has a business to run. If tech gets in the way of getting work done, that's a bad thing. If the bosses perceive that tech is getting in the way when it's really saving them from a disaster later, they will still perceive it as a bad thing and act accordingly.
Incorporating yourself and paying yourself a salary to avoid payroll taxes is likely to attract auditors (well, not this year, the IRS is too poor, but in the future, it will).
If you do this, be sure to contact a tax professional so you know what hoops to jump through to survive an audit.
On the plus side, you can write off the tax professional's fees as a business expense :).
This guy, because I agree with everything he has to say.