what is an encrypted VPN? I thought all VPNs were encrypted?
You can use GRE or IPIP tunnels to make a VPN which will be completely unencrypted. I normally use IPSEC over the top of that where encryption is required.
They do not need to do real-time processing of the data: that is only necessary for filtering.
That may be true for passive surveillance (http traffic, emails, IMs), but most-definitely not for VPNs, as in this specific case.
You absolutely need to trap the packets in real time in order to actually break the VPN connection open so you can get at the actual payload (cleartext, post-decrypted) data within the stream. The initial cryptographic handshake has to be captured, in order for them to peel it open and get inside.
You can't do that days later, when all you have is an encrypted stream of bits.
They only need to know that the citizen is using an encrypted VPN. This implies that they have something to hide and are therefore a suspect, and actual evidence no longer matters.
My Windows 7 laptop will regularly not come out of sleep, requiring a battery removal to resolve. This occurs more often when I'm packing up and unplug something while it's going to sleep. Typically this happens after about 3 weeks since last reboot, which really sucks because it only has to get to a month and it gets rebooted to install updates anyway.
The other annoying thing it does is when it wakes up it still thinks it has the external monitor attached (the VGA/DVI monitor only - the USB attached ones are fine). To resolve this when i've changed location and have another second screen I have to unplug it, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in again. Worse when I'm somewhere where I don't have a second screen at all and I have to muck around to get Windows to understand I only have the laptop screen
Now it's probably true that the above issues are caused by third party drivers, and not Windows itself, but it still sucks.
The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.
Dear Linux kernel, i'll be ready when my disk is done spinning up. kthanksbye
Iris scan technology is good enough to identify people at quite a long distance these days as well. Even a garment with only the eyes exposed won't help.
After all, wearing a mask of the president might get you accused of racisim.
I think the facial recognition would probably still work on a typical hijab (outfit covering head and chest, but not necessarily the face), maybe you meant burqa or niqab. In any case, if someone questions your wearing of it they get accused of racism instead.
It's just a bunch of polymeric hydrocarbons... bury it in the ground until you know what to do with it.
I used to be scared of plastics, but after looking at the chemistry the only thing I worry about is plastic in the wrong place(i.e. - around a seabird or in the gyres). Sure, the polymerizing catalysts can sometimes be scary, and some plasticizers like BPA can have minor effects, but generally plastic is OK in my book.
Hell, once I understood what plastic was it became really cool. It's like they found a way to turn crap into useful products. Hydrogen and carbon...
Hell yes. Maybe it could be sorted first so that when future generations have figured out what to do with it they don't have to try and figure out what was buried where, but maybe they'll have solved that problem too. Much better to bury this carbon underground instead of spewing CO2 into the air, I think. I sometimes wonder about future generations mining our old garbage pits...
Time to face the music and deal with the garbage produced, instead of making it somebody else's problem.
I think that's the whole point. Hopefully industry will realise that there is an actual and real cost to disposing of this crap, will build the very tiny unit cost into the original product, and will take back the rubbish left over and deal with it properly. I suspect that what will really happen is that they'll find another poor country to use as a dumping ground and lobby the government to shut the hell up about it, assuming they haven't already.
Some states in Australia force a 5c recycling rebate on aluminium cans, so the shop is forced to pay the 5c when the customer returns the cans. A similar thing might work where the government monitors your purchases, and then weighs and sorts the contents of your recycling bin, and flags when they suspect you haven't been recycling all the stuff you've purchased. I'm sure we can trust the government not to misuse this information...
Compared to a speed where accidents like this are less likely to happen, if such a thing exists. It could be that OS release cycles are unsafe at any speed!
That aside SSDs don't have problems with it (it was a firmware bug, Samsung fixed it) and if your data is important, you probably don't want to rely on your journal to make sure it is intact.
If it was a firmware bug and has been patched then the point is irrelevant, but journals wouldn't have made it better anyway. Because of wear leveling etc, stuff gets written all over an SSD basically at random. And when a block of data gets full the SSD logic will move anything useful in that block to other places on the disk and then erase the original block. If the power failed and a firmware bug meant that pointers weren't saved then you've essentially taken a shotgun to your disk and potentially a whole erase block sized unit of data may be gone. Journals aren't the answer to all problems.
And neither are UPS's for that matter. More and more home computers are coming with SSD's and even if the shop managed to do a UPS upsell, most cheap UPS's don't last very long at all, and the home user isn't going to know until the power fails the first time.
delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route
Hmmm... so the human does actually have to be alive on delivery. That complicates things a little... I wonder if I can get a special exemption for that rule if I pass an official some cash under the table.
and "ground route" too. If I strap a person to a rocket and that rocket is _close_ to the ground for its entire journey, does that count?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
What ever happened to your "don't be evil" mantra? Obviously you're dealing with a historically evil company, but don't stoop to their level.
Normally i'm rooting for Google, especially in a battle against Microsoft. When the battle is "who can be the most evil" though, I'm somewhat conflicted.
It's almost like the Rebel Alliance coming to the conclusion that if the Empire blew up one planet, the Rebel Alliance need to blow up two planets in order to beat them.
Let me just add that that's 3 times the count of Linux desktop users.
(MS has 3.7% share of phone market, Linux has less than 1% of desktop. If we assume the size of two markets to be almost the same, then that's what we can conclude).
While you are technically correct (normally the best kind of correct), this is slashdot and pointing out elephants will not be tolerated.
Agree. If you think it's okay for the untrusted secretary or IT department of an organisation to supply the public key then you don't understand public key encryption. Just use a password protected file and supply the password out-of-band.
If the data is important enough to encrypt then the public key is important enough to get properly. Asking the person who answers the phones to send you the key is not properly. Even asking the IT department to send it probably isn't good enough as they are in the perfect position to give you their fake key, intercept the email, decrypt it, then re-send it with the real key to the real recipient.
If you are just worried about casual snooping of your "personal data", then just use something like 7zip and provide them with the password out-of-band.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
They can't, at least not reliably. As long as we keep saying it's really important to catch criminals before their crimes, we are going to be indirectly telling our government that it's ok to occasionally do all those things that you don't want them to do.
There is a person with nasty intentions and 99 people with average intentions. You can tell them apart one of two ways: 1) wait to see what they do. 2) Be inhumane and un-American to all 100 of them, and then say "at least I think I got the bad guy." And there isn't a third way.
This person gets it. Part of the price of living in a free society is occasional acts of terrorism and mass shootings. The alternative is that we all become imprisoned by the removal of our freedoms, and then the "terrorists win" anyway. Law enforcement is fine but the current situation is going too far.
Not following you... XP didn't support >4GB memory. The hacks I were referring to involved dumping pieces of 2003 and registry tweaks into your XP install to enable PAE mode. Nothing to do with the P2 processor.
Just sending a bunch of keywords in email isn't enough - emacs has had a spook function since the 80s so they are kind of used to that stuff by now./ You'll have to act like a crazy-pants terrorist.
To make it really work we need to bring the eternal september to the islamic extremist websites. Everybody go post on those arabic jihadi websites. Uh, does anyone know of any arabic jihadi websites? Or how to read and write arabic?
Even that's not enough. Everyone needs to buy backpacks, pressure cookers, and explosives, so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists. Also take lots of flying lessons but deliberately skip the parts about landing and taking off. And bring a knife and a gun with you _every_ time you fly. They can't lock us all up right?
I still use Windows XP and Windows 2000. They were good operating systems and, from my perspective, Vista, 7, and 8 haven't brought anything to the table. Quite the opposite, in fact: I went full penguin after Vista came out. It was patently clear that Microsoft was going in a direction I didn't want to go.
64 bit OS, allowing >4GB memory? There were hacks, and there was XP64, but neither of those really count as solutions
SSD Trim support?
Neither of those do anything to counteract the bad taste of Vista, or 8. 7 was okay though, once you get used to it (and it's less of a jump than getting used to Linux). I'd use Linux on my desktop if I could though. I use it just about everywhere else.
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what is an encrypted VPN? I thought all VPNs were encrypted?
You can use GRE or IPIP tunnels to make a VPN which will be completely unencrypted. I normally use IPSEC over the top of that where encryption is required.
That may be true for passive surveillance (http traffic, emails, IMs), but most-definitely not for VPNs, as in this specific case.
You absolutely need to trap the packets in real time in order to actually break the VPN connection open so you can get at the actual payload (cleartext, post-decrypted) data within the stream. The initial cryptographic handshake has to be captured, in order for them to peel it open and get inside.
You can't do that days later, when all you have is an encrypted stream of bits.
They only need to know that the citizen is using an encrypted VPN. This implies that they have something to hide and are therefore a suspect, and actual evidence no longer matters.
My Windows 7 laptop will regularly not come out of sleep, requiring a battery removal to resolve. This occurs more often when I'm packing up and unplug something while it's going to sleep. Typically this happens after about 3 weeks since last reboot, which really sucks because it only has to get to a month and it gets rebooted to install updates anyway.
The other annoying thing it does is when it wakes up it still thinks it has the external monitor attached (the VGA/DVI monitor only - the USB attached ones are fine). To resolve this when i've changed location and have another second screen I have to unplug it, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in again. Worse when I'm somewhere where I don't have a second screen at all and I have to muck around to get Windows to understand I only have the laptop screen
Now it's probably true that the above issues are caused by third party drivers, and not Windows itself, but it still sucks.
The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.
Dear Linux kernel, i'll be ready when my disk is done spinning up. kthanksbye
Iris scan technology is good enough to identify people at quite a long distance these days as well. Even a garment with only the eyes exposed won't help.
Fine then, burqa + highly reflective sunglasses.
After all, wearing a mask of the president might get you accused of racisim.
I think the facial recognition would probably still work on a typical hijab (outfit covering head and chest, but not necessarily the face), maybe you meant burqa or niqab. In any case, if someone questions your wearing of it they get accused of racism instead.
It's just a bunch of polymeric hydrocarbons... bury it in the ground until you know what to do with it.
I used to be scared of plastics, but after looking at the chemistry the only thing I worry about is plastic in the wrong place(i.e. - around a seabird or in the gyres). Sure, the polymerizing catalysts can sometimes be scary, and some plasticizers like BPA can have minor effects, but generally plastic is OK in my book.
Hell, once I understood what plastic was it became really cool. It's like they found a way to turn crap into useful products. Hydrogen and carbon...
Hell yes. Maybe it could be sorted first so that when future generations have figured out what to do with it they don't have to try and figure out what was buried where, but maybe they'll have solved that problem too. Much better to bury this carbon underground instead of spewing CO2 into the air, I think. I sometimes wonder about future generations mining our old garbage pits...
Time to face the music and deal with the garbage produced, instead of making it somebody else's problem.
I think that's the whole point. Hopefully industry will realise that there is an actual and real cost to disposing of this crap, will build the very tiny unit cost into the original product, and will take back the rubbish left over and deal with it properly. I suspect that what will really happen is that they'll find another poor country to use as a dumping ground and lobby the government to shut the hell up about it, assuming they haven't already.
Some states in Australia force a 5c recycling rebate on aluminium cans, so the shop is forced to pay the 5c when the customer returns the cans. A similar thing might work where the government monitors your purchases, and then weighs and sorts the contents of your recycling bin, and flags when they suspect you haven't been recycling all the stuff you've purchased. I'm sure we can trust the government not to misuse this information...
"Are they moving too fast?""
Compared to what, Windows, IOS, OSX, What?
Compared to a speed where accidents like this are less likely to happen, if such a thing exists. It could be that OS release cycles are unsafe at any speed!
That aside SSDs don't have problems with it (it was a firmware bug, Samsung fixed it) and if your data is important, you probably don't want to rely on your journal to make sure it is intact.
If it was a firmware bug and has been patched then the point is irrelevant, but journals wouldn't have made it better anyway. Because of wear leveling etc, stuff gets written all over an SSD basically at random. And when a block of data gets full the SSD logic will move anything useful in that block to other places on the disk and then erase the original block. If the power failed and a firmware bug meant that pointers weren't saved then you've essentially taken a shotgun to your disk and potentially a whole erase block sized unit of data may be gone. Journals aren't the answer to all problems.
And neither are UPS's for that matter. More and more home computers are coming with SSD's and even if the shop managed to do a UPS upsell, most cheap UPS's don't last very long at all, and the home user isn't going to know until the power fails the first time.
have they solved the corruption-on-power-failure issues yet?
delivers a live human from Los Angeles to San Francisco, over a fixed ground route
Hmmm... so the human does actually have to be alive on delivery. That complicates things a little... I wonder if I can get a special exemption for that rule if I pass an official some cash under the table.
and "ground route" too. If I strap a person to a rocket and that rocket is _close_ to the ground for its entire journey, does that count?
nuff said
I dunno. Futurama depicts those tubes as having a very tight turn radius. That can't be good for your spine.
What will he say next week to be in the news ?
I know. For those of us that go around far exceeding the action of just designing and launching a successful electric car and credible challenge to the established auto-industry and develop and produce space vehicles, including the he first privately funded liquid-fuelled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit, he is all talk.
but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?
Sorry, were we not doing this?
What ever happened to your "don't be evil" mantra? Obviously you're dealing with a historically evil company, but don't stoop to their level.
Normally i'm rooting for Google, especially in a battle against Microsoft. When the battle is "who can be the most evil" though, I'm somewhat conflicted.
It's almost like the Rebel Alliance coming to the conclusion that if the Empire blew up one planet, the Rebel Alliance need to blow up two planets in order to beat them.
Let me just add that that's 3 times the count of Linux desktop users.
(MS has 3.7% share of phone market, Linux has less than 1% of desktop. If we assume the size of two markets to be almost the same, then that's what we can conclude).
While you are technically correct (normally the best kind of correct), this is slashdot and pointing out elephants will not be tolerated.
Agree. If you think it's okay for the untrusted secretary or IT department of an organisation to supply the public key then you don't understand public key encryption. Just use a password protected file and supply the password out-of-band.
If the data is important enough to encrypt then the public key is important enough to get properly. Asking the person who answers the phones to send you the key is not properly. Even asking the IT department to send it probably isn't good enough as they are in the perfect position to give you their fake key, intercept the email, decrypt it, then re-send it with the real key to the real recipient.
If you are just worried about casual snooping of your "personal data", then just use something like 7zip and provide them with the password out-of-band.
They can't, at least not reliably. As long as we keep saying it's really important to catch criminals before their crimes, we are going to be indirectly telling our government that it's ok to occasionally do all those things that you don't want them to do.
There is a person with nasty intentions and 99 people with average intentions. You can tell them apart one of two ways: 1) wait to see what they do. 2) Be inhumane and un-American to all 100 of them, and then say "at least I think I got the bad guy." And there isn't a third way.
This person gets it. Part of the price of living in a free society is occasional acts of terrorism and mass shootings. The alternative is that we all become imprisoned by the removal of our freedoms, and then the "terrorists win" anyway. Law enforcement is fine but the current situation is going too far.
Not following you... XP didn't support >4GB memory. The hacks I were referring to involved dumping pieces of 2003 and registry tweaks into your XP install to enable PAE mode. Nothing to do with the P2 processor.
They want us to help them improve their automated monitoring.
If anything it's a ploy by the terrorists so they can go about their business under the noise floor.
Just sending a bunch of keywords in email isn't enough - emacs has had a spook function since the 80s so they are kind of used to that stuff by now./ You'll have to act like a crazy-pants terrorist.
To make it really work we need to bring the eternal september to the islamic extremist websites. Everybody go post on those arabic jihadi websites. Uh, does anyone know of any arabic jihadi websites? Or how to read and write arabic?
Even that's not enough. Everyone needs to buy backpacks, pressure cookers, and explosives, so the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists. Also take lots of flying lessons but deliberately skip the parts about landing and taking off. And bring a knife and a gun with you _every_ time you fly. They can't lock us all up right?
I still use Windows XP and Windows 2000. They were good operating systems and, from my perspective, Vista, 7, and 8 haven't brought anything to the table. Quite the opposite, in fact: I went full penguin after Vista came out. It was patently clear that Microsoft was going in a direction I didn't want to go.
64 bit OS, allowing >4GB memory? There were hacks, and there was XP64, but neither of those really count as solutions
SSD Trim support?
Neither of those do anything to counteract the bad taste of Vista, or 8. 7 was okay though, once you get used to it (and it's less of a jump than getting used to Linux). I'd use Linux on my desktop if I could though. I use it just about everywhere else.
"I'd buy that for a doller!"
That was my first thought too. Lots of potential for advertising! - "Fukushima Springs Water - bring out your inner super hero!"
Please turn in your geek credentials at the door. Thanks in advance.
"Papers, please"