..and that stupid otherwise? The right move was to arrange an IT job interview with Marriott, and claim good security skills.
"I found a security hole in your systems and may help you to improve this, and your systems globally".
That doesn't work either. First interviews aren't going to be given to you just because you apply. If you know of a security hole and you tell them they probably wont believe you without proof and if you prove it then you could end up in the same situation as him.
The problem is I know a lot of people just like this guy who are unable to find jobs but who have skills. That is the source of the problem right there. The people who do the hiring are looking for people who have work experience and hacking doesn't count as experience. It doesn't matter if you're trying to be a pen-tester, they expect you to have some sort of certifications and a degree and most importantly they expect you to know someone.
The economy put him into a state of desperation. It's political policies which ultimately provoked him into breaking the law. The question no one is willing to ask is why is it that some of the most skilled or talented computer geniuses are unable to find jobs?
Secondly the fact that he now has a criminal record could keep him from ever finding a job and set him back even more. So while it does act as a deterrent to these sort of hacks it deters in the exact wrong way. The next hacker wont be asking for a job but instead will simply go right after whatever is profitable. This hacker in this instance was naive and had good intentions and thats precisely why he was awarded with 30 months in prison.
Honestly he'd have got the same time if he would have hacked for money. The fact is he didn't know how to properly hack for money and he didn't have the political connections to be a pen-tester. He had the right intentions but went about it the wrong way.
The point has been to try and control the flow of information not merely to watch it.
I'm fairly certain that the government has an eye on everybody who can write code. If you are a programmer you probably at some point have an FBI file just as a gun owner or bomb maker would. Remember the government considers encryption to be a munition so what does that make a programmer?
In some places. Certainly better than Gary Indiana was in the early 70s. I can vouch personally for that.
"Their water will still be polluted"
In some places. But I'll take my chances with small amounts of runoff related chemicals as opposed to the old style pollutants like sewage, cholera, shigella, etc.
"Their food will still be processed with chemicals"
I'm still waiting to see this food with no chemicals. Every bit that I've seen has chemicals like sodium chloride, dihydrogen monoxide, and an array of chemicals so complex and unknown that we can't even begin to synthesize them in a laboratory.
You would have though that such a marvel would be known to the researchers at a major ag/food science/biochem research university where I work.
Maybe they're all just paid off by the $conspiracy.;)
So because it was toxic in the past it's okay to make the future even more toxic? At some point it's going to cause problems thus you have more sick people with preventable illnesses.
A ban on all ingredients associated with and linked to obesity should be law.
You are proposing to outlaw almost all foods with calories in them. You can become obese eating almost any energy-dense food -- about 90% of all foods.
The goal of personalized medicine is to identify which genomic pattern in a population will respond to a given drug, or identify which drug will work for a given person's genome. It has nothing to do with improving public health policy and only tangentially with reducing health care costs. It has a lot to do with reducing time-to-treatment and making drugs more efficacious.
Emanuel is right that it's nuts to waste money on gene-based treatments which target only the symptoms of disease, when fixing the disease itself necessarily requires a change in lifestyle, which is something that technology cannot and will not fix. Once we accept this, the next step is simply, "How"?
All western countries are healthier than the US. Let's start by looking at what they're doing and then reward americans for doing more of that.
For some people smoking is more dangerous than a high calorie slice of pizza and coke each day. For another person it's drinking. For another person it's something else.
However there are industrial chemicals that hurt everybody regardless of genes. Those have to be removed.
Then depending on what genes a person has and what harms that persons health a personal lifestyle program can be designed. Some people will never get obese and can't put on fat no matter what or how much they seem to eat. Another person puts on fat easily. This is entirely genetic.
But the person who gets fat easily shouldn't eat the same way or act the same as the person who never gets fat. Just like the person who gets addicted to drugs shouldn't smoke while the person who never gets addicted can avoid a drug problem. Lifestyle changes can help but lifestyle changes don't solve every problem and aren't really the responsibility of the doctor any more than the doctor can solve asthma by making the air less polluted.
On one level the patient has to take more responsibility for their health but on the other level the patient should be as well informed as their doctor. There used to be a time where you had to go to medical school to learn certain things. On some level that is still the case. Get rid of the paywalls for medical journals so that patients can keep up with the latest research.
Allow patients to be diagnosed through the internet through remote terminals if necessary. The technology will eventually exist to detect metabolic syndrome using light sensors. The technology will eventually exist to detect blood sugar levels using the same means or through breath. Blood pressure could be remotely determined as well. Remote monitoring will be the major advance.
Don't get me wrong medicine will always be expensive and it probably should be, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as it is. First there aren't nearly enough doctors. Second the cost of medicine is way more expensive than it has to be. Third there isn't enough focus on prevention or preventative care.
Personalized medicine might tell a doctor what sort of preventative care program to put a patient on but it wont necessarily prevent anything if the environment is continuously polluted to the point where the patient gets sick regardless of lifestyle. The asthma epidemic is environmental not lifestyle. Children are developing obesity so it's not lifestyle anymore. What are we going to do? Wait until children are dying of heart attacks and cancer before we figure it out?
So ban HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). It's a vicious cycle - HFCS suppresses the hormone that tells you you're full, so you keep on eating more food with HFCS, further suppressing the "Hey Dummy, Stoppppp!" signal.
Pigs eat corn to fatten up. It has the same long-term effects on humans.
A ban on all ingredients associated with and linked to obesity should be law. HFCS isn't the only ingredient that destroys the metabolism. Obesity also isn't the only problem but a ban of HFCS is necessary because it's an unnecessary ingredient unlike salt which we can't live without.
If obesity is such a concern the political solution is the best solution to cut healthcare costs.
Start by banning HFCS on the federal level and all chemicals like it. Just like asbestos had to be banned, HFCS has to be banned. Pollutants have to be regulated as these environmental factors affect the metabolism as well. Pollution in the plastic containers for example.
After the unhealthy ingredients such as HFCS and transfats are banned then we can logically tackle the obesity problem. Until that point we cannot take any initiative to combat obsesity seriously.
That is why now that the information is released we can figure out how to covertly detect and monitor infections in a way that terrorists don't realize.
This is one of the most relevant comments on this entire story (though Wikipedia puts the current human mortality figure at around 60%).
No, we don't want to censor information. But we DO, in certain cases.
No, in general it's not good for society if scientific information is withheld. But if this baby gets out, would we still HAVE a society? This is truly a nightmare scenario: a virus with mortality rates comparable to ebola, as transmissible as the common flu.
I truly do understand the arguments for putting information out there. But think for a moment about what happens if a suicidal person gets ahold of this, or a religious zealot who thinks it won't affect him or his flock, or some other nut who believes it won't affect him or that society is too sick to go on, etc., etc. All it would take is one.
We're not talking about someone grabbing a high powered rifle and gunning down a few people in a public square (as bad as that can be). We're talking potentially billions dead.
We? First who are we? Censor it from who? And who already has it?
How do we protect ourselves from problems we don't know exist or can't study due to censorship?
Governments? They don't care. Corporations? They don't care. Terrorists? They don't care.
But if you have money then you matter more to them than someone who doesn't. The reason this information should be released is because most of us are people who don't have money. We might be educated enough to understand the danger but we can't afford the vaccine. By knowing the danger exists it allows us to prepare for it.
When the next pandemic does get made or happens naturally, it's better if people know how to contain it, how to stop the spread of it, etc. The more we know about the bird flu the better because it's up to us civilians to protect ourselves from it.
Is there anything we can do to stop bioterrorism? Yes we can have "secret" treatments and vaccines. Keep them classified or secret. We can have well run intelligence agencies. We can monitor people who get an education in certain fields.
Engineers, biochemists, virologists, if they aren't monitored then the intelligence agency sucks.
Its absolutely wrong to censor the entire study to the whole world. However, that's not what the article is talking about. There is no reason that you, or I, need to get my hands on this information, regardless of how interesting it is. They are talking about making sure that the experiment in full can be shared with other scientists that would be able to find this information useful.
You're wrong. If we are going to prevent terrorism, the more of us who know how easy it is the better we will be at detecting it or building devices or organizations to help detect it.
If we know what purchases have to be made to conduct these experiments we could simply update some software to produce red flags when someone buys certain components in this experiment.
From what I've read about it the work they did was not very hard (for an experienced scientist). It is a rather classic case of evolutionary improvement. Take a bunch of ferrets, infect them with the flu, take the most effective strain of the virus and feed it to the next group of ferrets. Repeat until you get a virus with the desired properties.
It takes some time and some experience but it is well within the reach of any sufficiently funded and properly motivated organisation.
Why do we assume they haven't figured that out on their own or couldn't figure that out? It seems like common sense.
There are some details however that might not be so easy to figure out. Either way it's time to focus on making more effective vaccines for the flu.
Militarily applicable research is generally fairly well protected. This research should probably have been kept 'in house' if it's something that the government is worried about.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree that all science should be available to everyone.
And why would governments need to conduct this research?
If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy.
You would not go to jail. It's entirely legal to publish easy to follow step by step instructions to do anything, including meth.
You might not go to jail but there is no guarantee you wont have an accident or end up missing. If governments or organizations want something to stay secret they can resort to extreme measures.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
This is not entirely true. You can make a dirty bomb in your basement and it's relatively cheap. A nuclear weapon isn't always going to result in an explosion but radiation is just as deadly and the spread of harmful radiation doesn't require all that much expense.
Terrorists already can make dirty bombs and take out entire neighborhoods. It's not like censorship helps people in this case because then people don't even know it's possible.
Slashdot Mirror
..and that stupid otherwise? The right move was to arrange an IT job interview with Marriott, and claim good security skills.
"I found a security hole in your systems and may help you to improve this, and your systems globally".
That doesn't work either. First interviews aren't going to be given to you just because you apply. If you know of a security hole and you tell them they probably wont believe you without proof and if you prove it then you could end up in the same situation as him.
The problem is I know a lot of people just like this guy who are unable to find jobs but who have skills. That is the source of the problem right there. The people who do the hiring are looking for people who have work experience and hacking doesn't count as experience. It doesn't matter if you're trying to be a pen-tester, they expect you to have some sort of certifications and a degree and most importantly they expect you to know someone.
The economy put him into a state of desperation. It's political policies which ultimately provoked him into breaking the law.
The question no one is willing to ask is why is it that some of the most skilled or talented computer geniuses are unable to find jobs?
Secondly the fact that he now has a criminal record could keep him from ever finding a job and set him back even more. So while it does act as a deterrent to these sort of hacks it deters in the exact wrong way. The next hacker wont be asking for a job but instead will simply go right after whatever is profitable. This hacker in this instance was naive and had good intentions and thats precisely why he was awarded with 30 months in prison.
Honestly he'd have got the same time if he would have hacked for money. The fact is he didn't know how to properly hack for money and he didn't have the political connections to be a pen-tester. He had the right intentions but went about it the wrong way.
Ultimately it might have been cheaper just to give the guy a job.
Anyone who uses encryption will be flagged as some sort of pedophile or terrorist. So encryption is not the answer.
The point has been to try and control the flow of information not merely to watch it.
I'm fairly certain that the government has an eye on everybody who can write code. If you are a programmer you probably
at some point have an FBI file just as a gun owner or bomb maker would. Remember the government considers encryption to be a munition so what does that make a programmer?
And anyone caught with it will be treated as a child pornographer and will be attacked by vigilantes.
"Their air will still be toxic"
In some places. Certainly better than Gary Indiana was in the early 70s. I can vouch personally for that.
"Their water will still be polluted"
In some places. But I'll take my chances with small amounts of runoff related chemicals as opposed to the old style pollutants like sewage, cholera, shigella, etc.
"Their food will still be processed with chemicals"
I'm still waiting to see this food with no chemicals. Every bit that I've seen has chemicals like sodium chloride, dihydrogen monoxide, and an array of chemicals so complex and unknown that we can't even begin to synthesize them in a laboratory.
You would have though that such a marvel would be known to the researchers at a major ag/food science/biochem research university where I work.
Maybe they're all just paid off by the $conspiracy. ;)
So because it was toxic in the past it's okay to make the future even more toxic? At some point it's going to cause problems thus you have more sick people with preventable illnesses.
A ban on all ingredients associated with and linked to obesity should be law.
You are proposing to outlaw almost all foods with calories in them. You can become obese eating almost any energy-dense food -- about 90% of all foods.
HFCS isn't food, it's an ingredient.
The goal of personalized medicine is to identify which genomic pattern in a population will respond to a given drug, or identify which drug will work for a given person's genome. It has nothing to do with improving public health policy and only tangentially with reducing health care costs. It has a lot to do with reducing time-to-treatment and making drugs more efficacious.
Emanuel is right that it's nuts to waste money on gene-based treatments which target only the symptoms of disease, when fixing the disease itself necessarily requires a change in lifestyle, which is something that technology cannot and will not fix. Once we accept this, the next step is simply, "How"?
All western countries are healthier than the US. Let's start by looking at what they're doing and then reward americans for doing more of that.
Start with clean air, food and water.
For some people smoking is more dangerous than a high calorie slice of pizza and coke each day. For another person it's drinking. For another person it's something else.
However there are industrial chemicals that hurt everybody regardless of genes. Those have to be removed.
Then depending on what genes a person has and what harms that persons health a personal lifestyle program can be designed. Some people will never get obese and can't put on fat no matter what or how much they seem to eat. Another person puts on fat easily. This is entirely genetic.
But the person who gets fat easily shouldn't eat the same way or act the same as the person who never gets fat. Just like the person who gets addicted to drugs shouldn't smoke while the person who never gets addicted can avoid a drug problem. Lifestyle changes can help but lifestyle changes don't solve every problem and aren't really the responsibility of the doctor any more than the doctor can solve asthma by making the air less polluted.
Their air will still be toxic. Their water will still be polluted. Their food will still be processed with chemicals.
What do you expect? No amount of lifestyle change can protect you from every possible form of pollution in the environment.
On one level the patient has to take more responsibility for their health but on the other level the patient should be as well informed as their doctor. There used to be a time where you had to go to medical school to learn certain things. On some level that is still the case. Get rid of the paywalls for medical journals so that patients can keep up with the latest research.
Allow patients to be diagnosed through the internet through remote terminals if necessary. The technology will eventually exist to detect metabolic syndrome using light sensors. The technology will eventually exist to detect blood sugar levels using the same means or through breath. Blood pressure could be remotely determined as well. Remote monitoring will be the major advance.
Don't get me wrong medicine will always be expensive and it probably should be, but it doesn't have to be as expensive as it is. First there aren't nearly enough doctors. Second the cost of medicine is way more expensive than it has to be. Third there isn't enough focus on prevention or preventative care.
Personalized medicine might tell a doctor what sort of preventative care program to put a patient on but it wont necessarily prevent anything if the environment is continuously polluted to the point where the patient gets sick regardless of lifestyle. The asthma epidemic is environmental not lifestyle. Children are developing obesity so it's not lifestyle anymore. What are we going to do? Wait until children are dying of heart attacks and cancer before we figure it out?
So ban HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup). It's a vicious cycle - HFCS suppresses the hormone that tells you you're full, so you keep on eating more food with HFCS, further suppressing the "Hey Dummy, Stoppppp!" signal.
Pigs eat corn to fatten up. It has the same long-term effects on humans.
A ban on all ingredients associated with and linked to obesity should be law. HFCS isn't the only ingredient that destroys the metabolism. Obesity also isn't the only problem but a ban of HFCS is necessary because it's an unnecessary ingredient unlike salt which we can't live without.
If obesity is such a concern the political solution is the best solution to cut healthcare costs.
Start by banning HFCS on the federal level and all chemicals like it. Just like asbestos had to be banned, HFCS has to be banned. Pollutants have to be regulated as these environmental factors affect the metabolism as well. Pollution in the plastic containers for example.
After the unhealthy ingredients such as HFCS and transfats are banned then we can logically tackle the obesity problem. Until that point we cannot take any initiative to combat obsesity seriously.
Why not fill the balloons with drones, burst them over the targets and let the solar powered drones do the rest for weeks at a time?
Someone will shut it down, that's why we can't have nice things.
Good people can use it to catch the bad people. Don't shut it down.
That is why now that the information is released we can figure out how to covertly detect and monitor infections in a way that terrorists don't realize.
This is one of the most relevant comments on this entire story (though Wikipedia puts the current human mortality figure at around 60%).
No, we don't want to censor information. But we DO, in certain cases.
No, in general it's not good for society if scientific information is withheld. But if this baby gets out, would we still HAVE a society? This is truly a nightmare scenario: a virus with mortality rates comparable to ebola, as transmissible as the common flu.
I truly do understand the arguments for putting information out there. But think for a moment about what happens if a suicidal person gets ahold of this, or a religious zealot who thinks it won't affect him or his flock, or some other nut who believes it won't affect him or that society is too sick to go on, etc., etc. All it would take is one.
We're not talking about someone grabbing a high powered rifle and gunning down a few people in a public square (as bad as that can be). We're talking potentially billions dead.
We? First who are we? Censor it from who? And who already has it?
How do we protect ourselves from problems we don't know exist or can't study due to censorship?
Governments? They don't care.
Corporations? They don't care.
Terrorists? They don't care.
But if you have money then you matter more to them than someone who doesn't. The reason this information should be released is because most of us are people who don't have money. We might be educated enough to understand the danger but we can't afford the vaccine. By knowing the danger exists it allows us to prepare for it.
When the next pandemic does get made or happens naturally, it's better if people know how to contain it, how to stop the spread of it, etc. The more we know about the bird flu the better because it's up to us civilians to protect ourselves from it.
Is there anything we can do to stop bioterrorism? Yes we can have "secret" treatments and vaccines. Keep them classified or secret. We can have well run intelligence agencies. We can monitor people who get an education in certain fields.
Engineers, biochemists, virologists, if they aren't monitored then the intelligence agency sucks.
Buy some ferrets and then keep an eye open for the agent assigned to tail you and observe your behaviour.
Or just be a biochemistry or virology student.
Its absolutely wrong to censor the entire study to the whole world. However, that's not what the article is talking about. There is no reason that you, or I, need to get my hands on this information, regardless of how interesting it is. They are talking about making sure that the experiment in full can be shared with other scientists that would be able to find this information useful.
You're wrong. If we are going to prevent terrorism, the more of us who know how easy it is the better we will be at detecting it or building devices or organizations to help detect it.
If we know what purchases have to be made to conduct these experiments we could simply update some software to produce red flags when someone buys certain components in this experiment.
From what I've read about it the work they did was not very hard (for an experienced scientist). It is a rather classic case of evolutionary improvement. Take a bunch of ferrets, infect them with the flu, take the most effective strain of the virus and feed it to the next group of ferrets. Repeat until you get a virus with the desired properties.
It takes some time and some experience but it is well within the reach of any sufficiently funded and properly motivated organisation.
Why do we assume they haven't figured that out on their own or couldn't figure that out? It seems like common sense.
There are some details however that might not be so easy to figure out. Either way it's time to focus on making more effective vaccines for the flu.
Militarily applicable research is generally fairly well protected. This research should probably have been kept 'in house' if it's something that the government is worried about.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree that all science should be available to everyone.
And why would governments need to conduct this research?
If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy.
You would not go to jail. It's entirely legal to publish easy to follow step by step instructions to do anything, including meth.
You might not go to jail but there is no guarantee you wont have an accident or end up missing. If governments or organizations want something to stay secret they can resort to extreme measures.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
This is not entirely true. You can make a dirty bomb in your basement and it's relatively cheap. A nuclear weapon isn't always going to result in an explosion but radiation is just as deadly and the spread of harmful radiation doesn't require all that much expense.
Terrorists already can make dirty bombs and take out entire neighborhoods. It's not like censorship helps people in this case because then people don't even know it's possible.