"The FBI has detected a botnet running on your computer. Due to federal privatization initiatives, botnet removal has been subcontracted to Botnet Blaster 2011. Click here to purchase Botnet Blaster 2011 and avoid having your house stormed by an FBI tactical team."
Being the FBI, wouldn't they start by identifying all bots NOT within the US, and uninstalling those ones? After all, that can come under the purview of protecting the Federation from foreign attack on American soil, and nobody's going to be able to sue them about it. As long as they avoid big multinational corporations, this would be a no-brainer move.
After this, ALL botnet activity would be fully within the US, so they'd have other tools to work with to help mop up the rest.
Just imagine what would have happened if those machines had had direct internet access....
Meaningful security does not imply complete security. The fact that the machines were depending solely on the airgap (which was bridged by unsecured USB keys) for security wasn't all that good either. They needed ACLs and a locked down system at minimum.
Maybe the solution is not to censor the trolls, but to hide any responses.... after a while, people might get the point, and trolls would see that nobody was responding to them, even though their comments were left alone.
The best solution I ever saw involved increasing post delays coupled with randomly (every X posts) replacing the submitted text with a quote of the day (my favorite QOTD list used like this was the Bushisms list). The visibility thing doesn't work because true trolls keep "clean" accounts which they use to monitor the forums they troll.
I've also seen sites that used trollbots and a thread categorization system that would fork any thread where the subject changed (so trolling would never have the desired effect) and start feeding the trolls troll food with cross-links to other troll threads. Seemed effective in those situations, but I'm not sure it would work everywhere.
Remember when Google said that its collection of WiFi hotspots as part of Google Maps was "accidental"?
Now we learn that the Android phone is still collecting hotspot data and sending it to Google. Doesn't seem so accidental after all.
Why does any company need this? There is no advertising that is tied to your hotspot/MAC address.
What can they do with that information, and what can law enforcement do with it?
Did you really miss all the comments explaining this in all the slashdot articles regarding this issue?
Android collects and sends because the location DB is hosted on Google's servers. Apple collects and stores because the location DB is hosted on your device. The location DB is used to locate exact Wifi hotspots and cell towers, so they can be used for triangulation on devices where there's no active GPS signal -- thus allowing you to use location aware apps like maps, weather apps, astronomy apps, exercise apps, social networking apps, etc.
This actually raises a good point... If someone breaks into your network, it doesn't really matter if everything is AES encrypted against a corporate key... if the hacker is also able to gain access to that key and guess/figure out/pull from emails the password.
This is why security zones are important in a company. Certain data sets should never be allowed to see each other.
Hmm... do I get that right that at some level of government, they are drawing the conclusion that militia members are all potential domestic terrorists and should be treated as suspected terrorists?
Who was it again that wrested control of the USA away from England? It sure wasn't the professional armed forces.
Who was it that was given protection in the constitution just in case the government became too authoritarian and overreaching?
Who is it that makes the USA somewhat unique in the modernized world, providing an armed force in defense of the country that is not directly controlled by the government?
Who is it that is no longer allowed to carry the same weapons as the government-funded forces?
I'm not even American, but I sure can see a bit of an issue/conflict of interest here....
I guess Slashdot is expanding its scope to include stuff that anti-matters as well! And now it seem they are trying to up their anti- by trying to produce larger and more complex stable anti-atoms?
You're quoting the bit about Location Services, and when you turn those on, your phone's location is identified for ad services. What Apple is saying here is that the ad services never get to know who they're serving to, and Apple does not store this data either. They could, based on uid, but they say they don't.
The database of cell tower locations has nothing to do with this, other than that it is updated when Location Services is used.
The issue here is not "Apple is tracking me" -- it's "Apple is storing the timestamped location of towers I've been near while using Location Services, and they're backing this up to my computer in the clear without notification."
2nd thought: you can even hide the data on OTHER people's computers using this method, assuming you have access to a few domain names and web servers. You could also initiate a remote expiry/rewrite of key cookies, so the data can be remotely revoked, assuming the person visits somewhere that'll reset the cookie.
You could even overwrite common cookies (store the data in ad cookies, and then usually run ad blocking software). To erase, you disable your ad blocking software, and the ads wipe the data for you:)
You get very little data to store, but this looks like it will be secure and, for a change, really hard or impossible to detect.
Of course a dead giveaway is the access software needed, so this works only for hiding data that the holder cannot access. That and the low data volume (20MB in 160GB are given as example) limits the usefulness to a nice but very academic idea.
I agree... and this made me think: a good method I saw for steganography uses forums and blogs to embed the data in public site inside other documents.
However, why not do something like store the data in a Fake Antivirus program, or even web cookies forged for various sites? Both give you true plausible deniability, as you can deny you ever wanted the data on your machine in the first place... and with the second, you can make the data expire, and even have a remote website that'll automatically reconstitute the data for you given the appropriate key. The data is hidden this way based on the general uselessness of the data as it normally exists, and in its fragmentation (since that data is usually written to disk by a bunch of third parties). Even if someone knew about this method, it would be hard to detect, as the data is hiding in amongst a bunch of constantly changing noise.
I presume you were being humorous, but the answer is simple.... You leave that hot place with lions, elephants and donkeys, and move to somewhere with mammoths, bears and horses. The original phrases are suddenly useless to you, but useful with slightly different meaning in a new context. Keep this changing as the environment changes, and you get "common ways" of saying different things. As a result, what used to mean "Look, a lion! Run." becomes, after a few shifts, "Hurry up, it's time for lunch!" And, of course, you've got simpler examples in English, such as "bad ass".
This is why they're tracking phonemes instead of phrases. All members of a culture tend to learn a limited set of phonemes in early childhood, and those are used to build all the shifting words and phrases in a language.
We'll leave out discussion of colloquialisms and cliches, as that will go nowhere.
Indeed... the bigger issue is that Big Media controls what people think they want... with the middlemen out of the equation, everyone has to make this decision for themselves... and most people would rather follow a herd. This is where social media steps in. Unfortunately, THAT is where Big Media steps back in too... eventually they'll understand that controlling what blogs are popular controls the distribution channels of all IP.
Needless to say, the goods produced by the original copyright holders will probably stay at the same quality; the goods consumed after everyone else has messed with them will be of varying quality.
The only area this all falls apart under is when large numbers of people collaborate on a project (big movie, for example). In this case, they need a single backer who can guarantee the distribution channel in order to force cooperation.
Losing big budget films might not be all that bad however; just different. I've seen lots of cheaply made indie films that were compelling and entertaining without the flashiness of, say, LOTR or Avatar.
You misunderstand... first of all, I don't live in the US. I live in a country that already has more big brotherism. Second, you don't live in a democracy; you live in a democratic republic. How's that been going? I seem to recall you have the lowest voter turnout and lowest voter confidence of any first world nation.
I'm not afraid of some imaginary big brotherism; I'm speaking from experience in the industry. The biggest thing that prevents big brotherism is the fact that government is inefficient -- which does give the advantage to private corporations, who strive for efficiency.
A little more Big Brother would go a long way towards decoupling the economy from things like the Flash Crash and the Housing Bubble and the Credit-Default Swap collapse.
The trick is to use your democratic power to enable the good things and prevent the bad things about the Big Brotherism. But you'd rather use it not to have the good things because you're just paranoid about any government.
The problem here is that the people who wield the "democratic power" are those who benefitted from the Flash Crash, the Housing Bubble, and the Credit-Default Swap. If the US could mobilize its entire population to 1) raise the overall level of education and then 2) actually participate in governing the country, your arguments would be rock solid.
Needless to say, I prefer socialist government to capitalist government -- but there need to be checks and balances on giving a group of individuals (even elected individuals with a limited term) absolute power over a nation.
Back when "copy" meant "take a quill and scrawl out every single letter of the text yourself", and 99% of the audience was incapable of reading, there wasn't much theft of intellectual property.
Along comes the printing press and it still takes a major effort to individually lay out every single letter of the text on a plate, and paper still costs a fortune, and there's still no mass-market audience owing to the continuing single-digit literacy rate.
And then someone invents the linotype, and then photolithography, and grammar school, and the world of copyright goes to hell.
So, no, it's not correct to point to the early history of literature as an example of egalitarian treatment of intellectual property.
Actually, it's back when "copy" meant to imitate someone else, or their work -- such as what Shakespeare did with many of his plays (copied plays or stories previously penned by others). Shakespeare was the Disney of his time, except that in the beginning, the ruling class decided HE was in violation of copyright, the right being held only by royalty. Eventually, when he moved outside their immediate jurisdiction to perform his plays and they became immensely popular among the upper class, the rulers of the land gave him copyright over the works he had been performing.
The world of copyright started off in hell; an effort was temporarily made to redeem it when the US of A was founded, but it barely made it out of purgatory before it was sent back.
Just for clarification (for those who need to watch the videos): Japan and China are not members of the US of A, and have different copyright laws. You can't just take a work published by someone else in some other country and assume it's legal for YOU to publish it via the same service in your own country.
Copyright in North America depends, partly, on intent. If someone is using YouTube to make a backup of personal copies of videos, and puts a blurb right before the FBI warning saying this isn't for public viewing, they might actually be able to get away with it. However, they probably won't, as the copyright holder will just issue a takedown notice and argue that they were placing a copyrighted work in the public domain by uploading to YouTube.
Both sides in this would be significantly incorrect in their conclusions, but it's the result that matters with things intellectual.
Have you ever worked in the Smart Card or Cert industries? This has never been done right, and never will be, due to a reliance on people.
You have to trust that everyone has the certs they're supposed to have, and that no errors in cert deployment happened (wrong cert revoked, inappropriate cert given out, etc). Then there's theft of smart cards, cracking of cards for the private key, control over the card readers (how does the user determine who sees what certs when the person can't even read the data on their card without a reaader -- and not all readers are created equal).
Think of the recent news items where a CA was issuing certificates to an untrusted party, and where MOST CAs were issuing certs for inappropriate zones.
Personally, having dealt with this technology in-depth for over 10 years, I'd rather trust a web of trust (real people) than a CA chain. The CA chain can augment, but it should NEVER replace.
Slashdot Mirror
So... IP addresses are more like corporations?
"The FBI has detected a botnet running on your computer. Due to federal privatization initiatives, botnet removal has been subcontracted to Botnet Blaster 2011. Click here to purchase Botnet Blaster 2011 and avoid having your house stormed by an FBI tactical team."
Being the FBI, wouldn't they start by identifying all bots NOT within the US, and uninstalling those ones? After all, that can come under the purview of protecting the Federation from foreign attack on American soil, and nobody's going to be able to sue them about it. As long as they avoid big multinational corporations, this would be a no-brainer move.
After this, ALL botnet activity would be fully within the US, so they'd have other tools to work with to help mop up the rest.
Just imagine what would have happened if those machines had had direct internet access....
Meaningful security does not imply complete security. The fact that the machines were depending solely on the airgap (which was bridged by unsecured USB keys) for security wasn't all that good either. They needed ACLs and a locked down system at minimum.
Maybe the solution is not to censor the trolls, but to hide any responses.... after a while, people might get the point, and trolls would see that nobody was responding to them, even though their comments were left alone.
The best solution I ever saw involved increasing post delays coupled with randomly (every X posts) replacing the submitted text with a quote of the day (my favorite QOTD list used like this was the Bushisms list).
The visibility thing doesn't work because true trolls keep "clean" accounts which they use to monitor the forums they troll.
I've also seen sites that used trollbots and a thread categorization system that would fork any thread where the subject changed (so trolling would never have the desired effect) and start feeding the trolls troll food with cross-links to other troll threads. Seemed effective in those situations, but I'm not sure it would work everywhere.
Tell me about your mother :D
I have a question, why collect WiFi hotspot data?
Remember when Google said that its collection of WiFi hotspots as part of Google Maps was "accidental"?
Now we learn that the Android phone is still collecting hotspot data and sending it to Google. Doesn't seem so accidental after all.
Why does any company need this? There is no advertising that is tied to your hotspot/MAC address.
What can they do with that information, and what can law enforcement do with it?
Did you really miss all the comments explaining this in all the slashdot articles regarding this issue?
Android collects and sends because the location DB is hosted on Google's servers.
Apple collects and stores because the location DB is hosted on your device.
The location DB is used to locate exact Wifi hotspots and cell towers, so they can be used for triangulation on devices where there's no active GPS signal -- thus allowing you to use location aware apps like maps, weather apps, astronomy apps, exercise apps, social networking apps, etc.
This actually raises a good point...
If someone breaks into your network, it doesn't really matter if everything is AES encrypted against a corporate key... if the hacker is also able to gain access to that key and guess/figure out/pull from emails the password.
This is why security zones are important in a company. Certain data sets should never be allowed to see each other.
Hmm... do I get that right that at some level of government, they are drawing the conclusion that militia members are all potential domestic terrorists and should be treated as suspected terrorists?
Who was it again that wrested control of the USA away from England? It sure wasn't the professional armed forces.
Who was it that was given protection in the constitution just in case the government became too authoritarian and overreaching?
Who is it that makes the USA somewhat unique in the modernized world, providing an armed force in defense of the country that is not directly controlled by the government?
Who is it that is no longer allowed to carry the same weapons as the government-funded forces?
I'm not even American, but I sure can see a bit of an issue/conflict of interest here....
The magnetic moment is also reversed.
he cried as he dragged the heavy weight behind him
Wouldn't the balloon be more likely to deflate into negative space, pulling him along for the ride?
I guess Slashdot is expanding its scope to include stuff that anti-matters as well! And now it seem they are trying to up their anti- by trying to produce larger and more complex stable anti-atoms?
Pshaw, we've had RSS on here for years already!
You're quoting the bit about Location Services, and when you turn those on, your phone's location is identified for ad services. What Apple is saying here is that the ad services never get to know who they're serving to, and Apple does not store this data either. They could, based on uid, but they say they don't.
The database of cell tower locations has nothing to do with this, other than that it is updated when Location Services is used.
The issue here is not "Apple is tracking me" -- it's "Apple is storing the timestamped location of towers I've been near while using Location Services, and they're backing this up to my computer in the clear without notification."
Everything else is just noise.
If you're in to lucid dreaming, just run through the scenarios while you sleep and report back to us :)
2nd thought: you can even hide the data on OTHER people's computers using this method, assuming you have access to a few domain names and web servers. You could also initiate a remote expiry/rewrite of key cookies, so the data can be remotely revoked, assuming the person visits somewhere that'll reset the cookie.
You could even overwrite common cookies (store the data in ad cookies, and then usually run ad blocking software). To erase, you disable your ad blocking software, and the ads wipe the data for you :)
You get very little data to store, but this looks like it will be secure and, for a change, really hard or impossible to detect.
Of course a dead giveaway is the access software needed, so this works only for hiding data that the holder cannot access. That and the low data volume (20MB in 160GB are given as example) limits the usefulness to a nice but very academic idea.
I agree... and this made me think: a good method I saw for steganography uses forums and blogs to embed the data in public site inside other documents.
However, why not do something like store the data in a Fake Antivirus program, or even web cookies forged for various sites? Both give you true plausible deniability, as you can deny you ever wanted the data on your machine in the first place... and with the second, you can make the data expire, and even have a remote website that'll automatically reconstitute the data for you given the appropriate key. The data is hidden this way based on the general uselessness of the data as it normally exists, and in its fragmentation (since that data is usually written to disk by a bunch of third parties). Even if someone knew about this method, it would be hard to detect, as the data is hiding in amongst a bunch of constantly changing noise.
I presume you were being humorous, but the answer is simple....
You leave that hot place with lions, elephants and donkeys, and move to somewhere with mammoths, bears and horses. The original phrases are suddenly useless to you, but useful with slightly different meaning in a new context. Keep this changing as the environment changes, and you get "common ways" of saying different things. As a result, what used to mean "Look, a lion! Run." becomes, after a few shifts, "Hurry up, it's time for lunch!" And, of course, you've got simpler examples in English, such as "bad ass".
This is why they're tracking phonemes instead of phrases. All members of a culture tend to learn a limited set of phonemes in early childhood, and those are used to build all the shifting words and phrases in a language.
We'll leave out discussion of colloquialisms and cliches, as that will go nowhere.
Indeed... the bigger issue is that Big Media controls what people think they want... with the middlemen out of the equation, everyone has to make this decision for themselves... and most people would rather follow a herd. This is where social media steps in. Unfortunately, THAT is where Big Media steps back in too... eventually they'll understand that controlling what blogs are popular controls the distribution channels of all IP.
Needless to say, the goods produced by the original copyright holders will probably stay at the same quality; the goods consumed after everyone else has messed with them will be of varying quality.
The only area this all falls apart under is when large numbers of people collaborate on a project (big movie, for example). In this case, they need a single backer who can guarantee the distribution channel in order to force cooperation.
Losing big budget films might not be all that bad however; just different. I've seen lots of cheaply made indie films that were compelling and entertaining without the flashiness of, say, LOTR or Avatar.
Best to do this just at the start of an election campaign....
You misunderstand... first of all, I don't live in the US. I live in a country that already has more big brotherism. Second, you don't live in a democracy; you live in a democratic republic. How's that been going? I seem to recall you have the lowest voter turnout and lowest voter confidence of any first world nation.
I'm not afraid of some imaginary big brotherism; I'm speaking from experience in the industry. The biggest thing that prevents big brotherism is the fact that government is inefficient -- which does give the advantage to private corporations, who strive for efficiency.
A little more Big Brother would go a long way towards decoupling the economy from things like the Flash Crash and the Housing Bubble and the Credit-Default Swap collapse.
The trick is to use your democratic power to enable the good things and prevent the bad things about the Big Brotherism. But you'd rather use it not to have the good things because you're just paranoid about any government.
The problem here is that the people who wield the "democratic power" are those who benefitted from the Flash Crash, the Housing Bubble, and the Credit-Default Swap. If the US could mobilize its entire population to 1) raise the overall level of education and then 2) actually participate in governing the country, your arguments would be rock solid.
Needless to say, I prefer socialist government to capitalist government -- but there need to be checks and balances on giving a group of individuals (even elected individuals with a limited term) absolute power over a nation.
Back when "copy" meant "take a quill and scrawl out every single letter of the text yourself", and 99% of the audience was incapable of reading, there wasn't much theft of intellectual property.
Along comes the printing press and it still takes a major effort to individually lay out every single letter of the text on a plate, and paper still costs a fortune, and there's still no mass-market audience owing to the continuing single-digit literacy rate.
And then someone invents the linotype, and then photolithography, and grammar school, and the world of copyright goes to hell.
So, no, it's not correct to point to the early history of literature as an example of egalitarian treatment of intellectual property.
Actually, it's back when "copy" meant to imitate someone else, or their work -- such as what Shakespeare did with many of his plays (copied plays or stories previously penned by others). Shakespeare was the Disney of his time, except that in the beginning, the ruling class decided HE was in violation of copyright, the right being held only by royalty. Eventually, when he moved outside their immediate jurisdiction to perform his plays and they became immensely popular among the upper class, the rulers of the land gave him copyright over the works he had been performing.
The world of copyright started off in hell; an effort was temporarily made to redeem it when the US of A was founded, but it barely made it out of purgatory before it was sent back.
Just for clarification (for those who need to watch the videos): Japan and China are not members of the US of A, and have different copyright laws. You can't just take a work published by someone else in some other country and assume it's legal for YOU to publish it via the same service in your own country.
Copyright in North America depends, partly, on intent. If someone is using YouTube to make a backup of personal copies of videos, and puts a blurb right before the FBI warning saying this isn't for public viewing, they might actually be able to get away with it. However, they probably won't, as the copyright holder will just issue a takedown notice and argue that they were placing a copyrighted work in the public domain by uploading to YouTube.
Both sides in this would be significantly incorrect in their conclusions, but it's the result that matters with things intellectual.
Have you ever worked in the Smart Card or Cert industries? This has never been done right, and never will be, due to a reliance on people.
You have to trust that everyone has the certs they're supposed to have, and that no errors in cert deployment happened (wrong cert revoked, inappropriate cert given out, etc). Then there's theft of smart cards, cracking of cards for the private key, control over the card readers (how does the user determine who sees what certs when the person can't even read the data on their card without a reaader -- and not all readers are created equal).
Think of the recent news items where a CA was issuing certificates to an untrusted party, and where MOST CAs were issuing certs for inappropriate zones.
Personally, having dealt with this technology in-depth for over 10 years, I'd rather trust a web of trust (real people) than a CA chain. The CA chain can augment, but it should NEVER replace.