He went to a country where he knew he had broken the law. He had to know that arrest and prosecution was one of the possible outcomes.
He gambled. He lost.
I'm not sure how he could imagine it turning out any other way...
"Well Mr Nemeth... you sure pulled a fast one on us. I guess we have no choice but to give you a job. Normally in these situations we'd just pay you a few million dollars to keep quiet but if it's a job you want then I guess we have to give in to your demands".
Not going to happen. If nothing else it's cheaper just to make him disappear
China does it to keep the party in power. The US does it to keep the copyright/trademark industries in power. Here is how vast the difference is:
sed -e 's/communist party/intellectual property industries/g'
Somewhere along the way it seems you got lost in the difference between copyright in terms of "stealing media" and the concept of "stealing ideas".
1. If I spend millions making a movie and I don't make any money because everyone just takes a copy of it then the world is a worse place for it - I won't make any more movies (this presumes I was good at making movies in the first place, but you get the idea).
2. It I spend millions developing an idea and I don't make any money because everyone just copies it then the world is a worse place for it - I won't bother investing in R&D developing any more ideas.
3. If I start up a company coming up with a whole load of stupid patents, and also buy stupid patents from other companies, and then use those patents to stifle innovation then the world is a worse place for it - nobody else will bother doing anything new because they'll just get sued.
IP and copyright laws are a _good thing_ in principle, except that they allow the last thing to happen, so in their current implementation they are broken and need to be fixed, but trying to pretend that companies attempting to prevent the unlawful copying of their movies is anything to do with the last two points is wrong, and dumb.
Influenza is a bad example because it has multiple non-human hosts (pigs, birds, maybe others?)... wild birds would be particularly difficult to immunise, and even trying to immunise enough wild pigs to make a difference would be pretty tricky. It's a pretty clever virus:)
But for anything that only survives because a small number of humans refuse to vaccinate, I think you are right.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
So where's smallpox now? Polio will hopefully be there some time soon too.
But you are right in some ways, if the immunisation is only mostly effective and not completely effective, you risk allowing evolution of the disease to happen... if we could immunise everyone against mealses we could wipe it out very quickly. If we only partially immunise then we give the disease long term exposure to immunised people (via non-immunised people) and every time that happens there is a small chance a small variation in the disease could develop into a new strain for which the current vaccination is not as effective.
I'm not sure I get it. If you get vaccinated and I don't and I catch some nasty disease, how am I going to pass it on your vaccinated self? I'm only going to pass it on to those who don't get vaccinated, right?
Whooping cough in an adult is mostly just a slightly nasty cough, but have you ever seen a baby, too young to be immunised, with whooping cough? It's horrible.
The vaccination for measles is administered here in AU at 12 months of age. My daughter caught it at about 11 months and while she had a fairly mild case she was still pretty sick. That wouldn't have happened if everyone had been immunising like they should.
. And that's where H1N1 was different: our then-infant was deemed at risk for severe issues from H1N1 in the unlikely scenario of getting it, i.e., death, so we considered it very differently. My mother was concerned that he'd get autism from it. Of course, I paid that all the attention it deserved (we got the vaccinations and told her over a week later).
My daughter was immunised for Measles about 2 months earlier than scheduled (measles was going around the creche) and a few years later she was diagnosed with Aspergers. I don't believe for a second that the immunisation had anything to do with it though... if anything "caused" it, it was the measles itself that she subsequently caught anyway.
The thing that bugs me about all of this is that even if they did prove some sort of causal link between immunisation and autism (eg a rare gene that gives a chance that a reaction to the immunisation might cause autism), immunisation is still much safer than the alternative, and in a generation or two we'd be rid of a lot of the diseases, so it is IMHO worth the risk.
It's interesting that they are including chickenpox in the list of diseases that they are considering mandatory. It only became widely available once our 4th child was due to be immunised, so he received it, but he caught chickenpox a year or two later anyway, and I heard of plenty of other cases of that happening. I'm dubious about how effective it is.
I'm sure there are lots of places where you can't get enough sun or wind during winter to meet your energy requirements, but there are plenty of places where you can, and even if only 50% of the worlds energy needs could be met with zero emission electricity, we could stop worrying so much about CO2 emissions and peak oil for a little bit longer.
All that electricity they want to "store" comes from COAL so this sucks! Idiots! This is why all government funding to idiot-factories like MIT needs to be CUT IMMEDIATELY.
Precisely. Even if you rolled out enough solar and wind power generation capacity to run the whole world, it would still only work while the sun was shining and/or the wind was blowing... you'd still need coal or nuclear or some other fuel burning source to generate power during the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Unless you had some sort of everlasting battery to store the energy during the sunny or windy days to use during the dark still nights...
I can never quite tell whether people sprouting religious rhetoric are serious or trolling...
You could if you were a Christian. He's trolling. He may be trying to be funny, but he's still trolling. The human sacrifice in the New Testament is one pure, sinless man voluntarily paying for the sins of the rest of us.
Explain the "voluntarily" bit again? He might have resigned himself to his fate and gone willingly, but had he changed his mind he still would have been nailed up there anyway... doesn't sound like the definition of "volunteer" to me.
So yes, this is all related, because Christians are in charge of America, and Christians believe that everybody else should be subject to the same overbearing parenting that Christians were subject to as children. Big brother is their way of foisting their so-called "morality" upon everybody else, willing or unwilling.
Someone has been feeding you crap so you'll hate the Christians and draw your attention away from who the real enemies are.
My troll-o-meter is pegging a 10, but it could be a poes law false positive.
Yeah I got that too. You can never quite tell... some people really are that crazy. I think the "display a random Bible verse on bootup of the device" is a bit of a giveaway though. A smiley face emoticon at the end of the post would have been nice.
Having an app that displays random bible excerpts each time you turn on your phone would be cool, although they'd have to be brief, eg: "kill every woman who has slept with a man" "save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man" "kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women" The more it can be taken out of context, the better!
You can't sacrifice privacy for security, it doesn't work that way.
Christianity is based on the idea that you can sacrifice one man for the salvation of all mankind, so you can see how sacrificing privacy for security might make sense to them;)
I can never quite tell whether people sprouting religious rhetoric are serious or trolling...
Their software serves a legitimate purpose. It reports usage metrics so that phone makers can make phones that better serve people's needs. This is a Good Thing.
The problem is that you should be allowed to opt out. Some people don't like participating in these programs, and that should be their choice. By default, CIQ's software lets the user opt out. The problem here is that some companies are blocking that option or making it extremely difficult. They are the ones who should be criticized here.
The other problem is that you can't opt-out of something if you don't know it's there...
The US has enough bombs to blow up the world already, what makes you think having robots will change anything?
I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but over here in AU it makes the news when one of our soldiers dies overseas, or even when one gets hurt, and then again when their bodies arrive back home. Too many nationals (eg more than 0) getting killed makes war unpopular. The press only tags along because there are soldiers there, and we don't really hear about any of the "enemy" getting killed anyway. If it was all robots on the front line then war wouldn't seem so unpopular to the average viewer... hell it would almost seem like a sport with appropriately mounted cameras and is probably less graphically violent than most video games/movies.
Having robots on the front line could change everything.
Offsite backups are what a lot of companies don't do. They might back up to tape, but the tapes are stored in a pile next to the server. And they never test them.
Accidentally deleting things, is usually fixable, as long as you immediately stop writing new things to that filesystem. Search for undelete tools for whatever platform and filesystem you use.
Or run windows and take VSS snapshots of the shares where users store their data. We haven't had to restore from tape/disk data that someone accidentally deleted in years - the users just restore it themselves from VSS.
Yes it would be hard to get a lot of ID's in the window between releasing the app and someone noticing what it is up to. A "naked lady of the day" app would do the trick - run it for a while until you get a lot of users then turn on the malicious code, but I don't know the numbers on who's using the latest iOS5 jailbreaks, or how many of those would install the theoretical malicious app. Even using an as-yet unknown safari exploit it would be tricky to convince a lot of users to visit your malicious website. An exploit in the facebook app might be a bit better though...
Might be easier just to pay an apple employee to obtain the ID's for you though:)
When faced with a virus that none of the existing tools detect, I open up Process Explorer, tell it to verify signatures, and then check for any currently loaded objects with a signature that can't be verified (or no signature). It's just one part of the investigation but it's certainly a good start.
Or write an app that 'leaks' that information to a server you control. I'm sure Apple would have no hesitation in blacklisting a few thousand ID's that were leaked, but what if it was a few million?
Does anyone have the numbers on how many passwords are obtained by brute force vs other means (key loggers, post-it note stuck to screen)? I've given the entropy thing a bit of thought but unless you choose from a fairly small number of common passwords that sit in the attackers dictionaries, there isn't much risk. If someone obtains your password hash and wants to brute force that then a low-entropy password starts to matter... but on the other hand someone has obtained your password hash, which is a bigger problem.
You are missing the point of the comic. It explicitly measures the entropy of the two password selection schemes. The selection scheme itself is not secret; the point is that if there are about 2048 (2^11) "common" words, then there are 2^44 passwords made out of 4 common words, which is a lot more than the estimated ~2^28 possibilities for the more common password scheme.
What the comic doesn't take into account is methods of discovering the password other than brute force. If the password is known to be 4 common words, and you somehow discover a few letters of the password (eg looking over someone's shoulder) and have a rough idea of the placement of those letters within the password, it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier to guess what the remaining letters are, as opposed to a random password where knowing a few letters in the password doesn't help in determining what the other letters are. Using something like the acoustic keystroke logger posted on Slashdot the other day becomes a whole lot easier too as the search space is diminished because the words are common dictionary words.
Slashdot Mirror
He went to a country where he knew he had broken the law. He had to know that arrest and prosecution was one of the possible outcomes.
He gambled. He lost.
I'm not sure how he could imagine it turning out any other way...
"Well Mr Nemeth... you sure pulled a fast one on us. I guess we have no choice but to give you a job. Normally in these situations we'd just pay you a few million dollars to keep quiet but if it's a job you want then I guess we have to give in to your demands".
Not going to happen. If nothing else it's cheaper just to make him disappear
China does it to keep the party in power. The US does it to keep the copyright/trademark industries in power. Here is how vast the difference is:
Somewhere along the way it seems you got lost in the difference between copyright in terms of "stealing media" and the concept of "stealing ideas".
1. If I spend millions making a movie and I don't make any money because everyone just takes a copy of it then the world is a worse place for it - I won't make any more movies (this presumes I was good at making movies in the first place, but you get the idea).
2. It I spend millions developing an idea and I don't make any money because everyone just copies it then the world is a worse place for it - I won't bother investing in R&D developing any more ideas.
3. If I start up a company coming up with a whole load of stupid patents, and also buy stupid patents from other companies, and then use those patents to stifle innovation then the world is a worse place for it - nobody else will bother doing anything new because they'll just get sued.
IP and copyright laws are a _good thing_ in principle, except that they allow the last thing to happen, so in their current implementation they are broken and need to be fixed, but trying to pretend that companies attempting to prevent the unlawful copying of their movies is anything to do with the last two points is wrong, and dumb.
it's been decades since i played any sort of D&D games but don't you need fire to stop trolls regenerating?
Influenza is a bad example because it has multiple non-human hosts (pigs, birds, maybe others?)... wild birds would be particularly difficult to immunise, and even trying to immunise enough wild pigs to make a difference would be pretty tricky. It's a pretty clever virus :)
But for anything that only survives because a small number of humans refuse to vaccinate, I think you are right.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
So where's smallpox now? Polio will hopefully be there some time soon too.
But you are right in some ways, if the immunisation is only mostly effective and not completely effective, you risk allowing evolution of the disease to happen... if we could immunise everyone against mealses we could wipe it out very quickly. If we only partially immunise then we give the disease long term exposure to immunised people (via non-immunised people) and every time that happens there is a small chance a small variation in the disease could develop into a new strain for which the current vaccination is not as effective.
I'm not sure I get it. If you get vaccinated and I don't and I catch some nasty disease, how am I going to pass it on your vaccinated self? I'm only going to pass it on to those who don't get vaccinated, right?
Whooping cough in an adult is mostly just a slightly nasty cough, but have you ever seen a baby, too young to be immunised, with whooping cough? It's horrible.
The vaccination for measles is administered here in AU at 12 months of age. My daughter caught it at about 11 months and while she had a fairly mild case she was still pretty sick. That wouldn't have happened if everyone had been immunising like they should.
. And that's where H1N1 was different: our then-infant was deemed at risk for severe issues from H1N1 in the unlikely scenario of getting it, i.e., death, so we considered it very differently. My mother was concerned that he'd get autism from it. Of course, I paid that all the attention it deserved (we got the vaccinations and told her over a week later).
My daughter was immunised for Measles about 2 months earlier than scheduled (measles was going around the creche) and a few years later she was diagnosed with Aspergers. I don't believe for a second that the immunisation had anything to do with it though... if anything "caused" it, it was the measles itself that she subsequently caught anyway.
The thing that bugs me about all of this is that even if they did prove some sort of causal link between immunisation and autism (eg a rare gene that gives a chance that a reaction to the immunisation might cause autism), immunisation is still much safer than the alternative, and in a generation or two we'd be rid of a lot of the diseases, so it is IMHO worth the risk.
It's interesting that they are including chickenpox in the list of diseases that they are considering mandatory. It only became widely available once our 4th child was due to be immunised, so he received it, but he caught chickenpox a year or two later anyway, and I heard of plenty of other cases of that happening. I'm dubious about how effective it is.
I'm sure there are lots of places where you can't get enough sun or wind during winter to meet your energy requirements, but there are plenty of places where you can, and even if only 50% of the worlds energy needs could be met with zero emission electricity, we could stop worrying so much about CO2 emissions and peak oil for a little bit longer.
All that electricity they want to "store" comes from COAL so this sucks! Idiots! This is why all government funding to idiot-factories like MIT needs to be CUT IMMEDIATELY.
Precisely. Even if you rolled out enough solar and wind power generation capacity to run the whole world, it would still only work while the sun was shining and/or the wind was blowing... you'd still need coal or nuclear or some other fuel burning source to generate power during the times when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.
Unless you had some sort of everlasting battery to store the energy during the sunny or windy days to use during the dark still nights...
I can never quite tell whether people sprouting religious rhetoric are serious or trolling...
You could if you were a Christian. He's trolling. He may be trying to be funny, but he's still trolling. The human sacrifice in the New Testament is one pure, sinless man voluntarily paying for the sins of the rest of us.
Explain the "voluntarily" bit again? He might have resigned himself to his fate and gone willingly, but had he changed his mind he still would have been nailed up there anyway... doesn't sound like the definition of "volunteer" to me.
So yes, this is all related, because Christians are in charge of America, and Christians believe that everybody else should be subject to the same overbearing parenting that Christians were subject to as children. Big brother is their way of foisting their so-called "morality" upon everybody else, willing or unwilling.
Someone has been feeding you crap so you'll hate the Christians and draw your attention away from who the real enemies are.
My troll-o-meter is pegging a 10, but it could be a poes law false positive.
Yeah I got that too. You can never quite tell... some people really are that crazy. I think the "display a random Bible verse on bootup of the device" is a bit of a giveaway though. A smiley face emoticon at the end of the post would have been nice.
Having an app that displays random bible excerpts each time you turn on your phone would be cool, although they'd have to be brief, eg:
"kill every woman who has slept with a man"
"save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man"
"kill every man in the town. But you may keep for yourselves all the women"
The more it can be taken out of context, the better!
You can't sacrifice privacy for security, it doesn't work that way.
Christianity is based on the idea that you can sacrifice one man for the salvation of all mankind, so you can see how sacrificing privacy for security might make sense to them ;)
I can never quite tell whether people sprouting religious rhetoric are serious or trolling...
Their software serves a legitimate purpose. It reports usage metrics so that phone makers can make phones that better serve people's needs. This is a Good Thing.
The problem is that you should be allowed to opt out. Some people don't like participating in these programs, and that should be their choice. By default, CIQ's software lets the user opt out. The problem here is that some companies are blocking that option or making it extremely difficult. They are the ones who should be criticized here.
The other problem is that you can't opt-out of something if you don't know it's there...
The US has enough bombs to blow up the world already, what makes you think having robots will change anything?
I'm not sure what it's like in the US, but over here in AU it makes the news when one of our soldiers dies overseas, or even when one gets hurt, and then again when their bodies arrive back home. Too many nationals (eg more than 0) getting killed makes war unpopular. The press only tags along because there are soldiers there, and we don't really hear about any of the "enemy" getting killed anyway. If it was all robots on the front line then war wouldn't seem so unpopular to the average viewer... hell it would almost seem like a sport with appropriately mounted cameras and is probably less graphically violent than most video games/movies.
Having robots on the front line could change everything.
Offsite backups are what a lot of companies don't do. They might back up to tape, but the tapes are stored in a pile next to the server. And they never test them.
Accidentally deleting things, is usually fixable, as long as you immediately stop writing new things to that filesystem. Search for undelete tools for whatever platform and filesystem you use.
Or run windows and take VSS snapshots of the shares where users store their data. We haven't had to restore from tape/disk data that someone accidentally deleted in years - the users just restore it themselves from VSS.
If you making having hard balls a crime, then only criminals will have balls of steel.
Yes it would be hard to get a lot of ID's in the window between releasing the app and someone noticing what it is up to. A "naked lady of the day" app would do the trick - run it for a while until you get a lot of users then turn on the malicious code, but I don't know the numbers on who's using the latest iOS5 jailbreaks, or how many of those would install the theoretical malicious app. Even using an as-yet unknown safari exploit it would be tricky to convince a lot of users to visit your malicious website. An exploit in the facebook app might be a bit better though...
Might be easier just to pay an apple employee to obtain the ID's for you though :)
When faced with a virus that none of the existing tools detect, I open up Process Explorer, tell it to verify signatures, and then check for any currently loaded objects with a signature that can't be verified (or no signature). It's just one part of the investigation but it's certainly a good start.
This increase in stolen certs is troubling.
Sure. But then you'd have to buy an iPhone.
Or write an app that 'leaks' that information to a server you control. I'm sure Apple would have no hesitation in blacklisting a few thousand ID's that were leaked, but what if it was a few million?
A broken iPhone really is an emergency! That means I can't play Angry Birds!
So that's why he called 911... he wanted to throw things at pigs.
Does anyone have the numbers on how many passwords are obtained by brute force vs other means (key loggers, post-it note stuck to screen)? I've given the entropy thing a bit of thought but unless you choose from a fairly small number of common passwords that sit in the attackers dictionaries, there isn't much risk. If someone obtains your password hash and wants to brute force that then a low-entropy password starts to matter... but on the other hand someone has obtained your password hash, which is a bigger problem.
You are missing the point of the comic. It explicitly measures the entropy of the two password selection schemes. The selection scheme itself is not secret; the point is that if there are about 2048 (2^11) "common" words, then there are 2^44 passwords made out of 4 common words, which is a lot more than the estimated ~2^28 possibilities for the more common password scheme.
What the comic doesn't take into account is methods of discovering the password other than brute force. If the password is known to be 4 common words, and you somehow discover a few letters of the password (eg looking over someone's shoulder) and have a rough idea of the placement of those letters within the password, it suddenly becomes a whole lot easier to guess what the remaining letters are, as opposed to a random password where knowing a few letters in the password doesn't help in determining what the other letters are. Using something like the acoustic keystroke logger posted on Slashdot the other day becomes a whole lot easier too as the search space is diminished because the words are common dictionary words.
Or we could just let private individuals keep their dignity?
Nah, didn't think so, pointing and jeering is so much more fun.
If private individuals think before they post, it won't be a problem. They won't of course, but yes, that's where the pointing and jeering comes in.
Slashdot doesn't allow you to delete anything you post.