Maybe (in fact, almost certainly) Google wanted to capture every packet, measure its signal strength and collect statistics to get more detailed maps of wireless networks than what a simple "3 lines" script would provide. Why would you discount that as not being "credible", but instead accept the even more incredible possibility that (despite until now being a legitimate business) they're involved in some sort of international conspiracy to illegally use random people's private wi-fi data?
A common way of mapping wireless networks is using software like Kismet, which is in fact what Google used, and which in its default configuration saves all packets received. If you claim it must be true that "some evil is involved" because they used standard widely used software rather than your 3-line script, you don't know what you're talking about.
"Moving electrons between two chips" isn't entirely accurate. What moves is a wave of electric potential; the electrons themselves don't actually move very far.
The bottleneck will probably be the speed of the burner. If the data's going from the SSD to RAM and back to the burner, the bus has to carry data at twice the rate of burning, which it can do easily.
You really think the government will bother to look through this data? It simply wouldn't be worth it.
It's little segments of logs mostly less than a minute long from unencrypted wireless networks. The chance of there being anything useful in it is so low that it wouldn't be worth the effort. And then there's the inconvenience of not being able to admit they used it, since such use would be illegal and much more outrageous than what Google's already done.
Besides, if the government wants random bits of logs of random people's internet use, they can get those from ISPs already.
Yeah because academics are idiots who measure performance in incorrect calculations per second, and they did this research without thinking of all these things that you've thought up in two minutes reading the Slashdot summary.
Because (as a little bit of common sense or a minute of reading the article would tell you) the patent is longer and more detailed than the Slashdot summary and actually describes a specific non-trivial innovation.
We don't actually have an internet filter here in Australia, so asking "have they implemented the filter properly" isn't meaningful. But in the unlikely event that the government's plan doesn't fall in a heap and we do end up with a filter in a year or two, it'll definitely be implemented at the ISP level.
People in Australia are free to own their own modems and computers and run their own operating systems on them. There's a huge variety of hardware in use. It'd be logistically impossible, as well as very unpopular, for the government to forcibly replace everyone's modem.
Yes, but they've performed all the maintenance over the network for 30 years, and work around hardware problems, without ever having to go up there and replace hardware or boot from external media. No general-purpose computer has that sort of reliability.
Inside the hard drive case itself are the magnets that move the read/write head. They're probably stronger than almost every other magnet you've played with. They sit a few centimetres from the disk all the time and it still works.
Everything outside the case is further away from the disk and shielded by the case.
The point is, for an external magnetic field to suddenly erase all the world's hard drives it would have to be extremely strong. Like, strong enough to make your paperclips jump off your desk and impale you, or something.
Besides, there's a lot of stuff on flash memory and CDs and even paper. If all the world's hard drives were somehow erased, we'd lose a lot of specific data, but we wouldn't have lost all internet culture. A single intact disc of Wikipedia or some other useful resource could tell a future archaeologist more about our culture than we know about any previous culture.
My phone's emissions when idle are for something on the order of a few seconds an hour. Non-voice work is also intermittent. And if the phone is 10 times further away from your brain, the received power at your brain is 100 times less.
I believe that if you make one short call a day, the energy your brain receives from that call will probably still be enough to make all the other network traffic negligible in comparison.
2. If you read the article, they had included software that collected traffic, like emails, etc.
Yes. As in, they collected/all/ wireless traffic with the intention of checking which hotspot it came from and measure its signal strength. I don't think there's any indication that they specifically tried to log emails or that they did any of this for purposes other than locating hotspots.
If you're good you can make it a P2P network, like the Skype network or the BitTorrent DHT. Have all the commands cryptographically signed; it doesn't matter where a message is coming from as long as it has the right signature. Then it will be extremely difficult for attackers to find where the controlling server is. The commands to their computer will probably be forwarded to them from some other bot near them in the network, not directly from your control server, and they can't find out where the other bot gets its commands from.
Once the botnet gets big enough and has a few semi-reliable hosts in it, you can dispense with DNS and centralised control altogether. Just like with Skype or BitTorrent, if you keep a list of addresses of semi-reliable hosts you can connect to one of them and discover its peers and connect to them and get onto the network without using DNS or a hardcoded central server. And then you can control your botnet from anywhere as long as you have the appropriate client program and private key, and it'll be hard to track you and impossible to shut you down.
When airlines look to buy more planes, the ability to keep flying the next time this happens might be a significant factor in deciding which planes to buy. If it's actually safe enough, such a statement could be a reasonable thing for Boeing to do.
The summary says "Apparently there is neither any opt-out nor even notice to users". This despite the fact that it's not retroactive and is actually opt-in (with a big popup window asking "Link your profile to these pages?"), and that even after opting in you can edit and delete your "connections" at any time.
Sure, Slashdot editors might not bother to fix typos or any of the other errors we see every day on Slashdot. But one would expect them to be a little bit careful about defamation and check before posting blatant lies like this.
It wouldn't be useful for security, because Javascript can take the form data and send it anywhere at any time, independent of whether the element is actually in a form or not and where it submits to.
It'd be a "This form is probably secure but might possibly not be" indication, which is completely useless and misleading to any non-web-developer.
If you can override it, essentially all they're doing is informing you of power demand, not monitoring you without your consent or forcing you to do anything. Explain what oppressive totalitarian privacy-violating government regimes (i.e "Big Brother") have to do with any of this.
An idle cellphone will transmit occasionally to tell the network it's still on, but not very often and not for very long. Something on the order of a few seconds per hour. The 2 hours per month might become 3 at a stretch, but certainly not 20 or 200.
There's an IPv6 address autoconfiguration scheme that involves using the MAC address as part of the IPv6 address. If people use it then everyone they connect to will know their MAC address.
Yes, Linux caches data from disks in RAM. But what we're talking about here is not caching in RAM, but using a fast disk (SSD) as cache for a slow disk.
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When we say a "screwup" we mean that the developers screwed up by making the project vulnerable to such an attack and not detecting it sooner.
A common way of mapping wireless networks is using software like Kismet, which is in fact what Google used, and which in its default configuration saves all packets received. If you claim it must be true that "some evil is involved" because they used standard widely used software rather than your 3-line script, you don't know what you're talking about.
"Moving electrons between two chips" isn't entirely accurate. What moves is a wave of electric potential; the electrons themselves don't actually move very far.
The bottleneck will probably be the speed of the burner. If the data's going from the SSD to RAM and back to the burner, the bus has to carry data at twice the rate of burning, which it can do easily.
You really think the government will bother to look through this data? It simply wouldn't be worth it. It's little segments of logs mostly less than a minute long from unencrypted wireless networks. The chance of there being anything useful in it is so low that it wouldn't be worth the effort. And then there's the inconvenience of not being able to admit they used it, since such use would be illegal and much more outrageous than what Google's already done. Besides, if the government wants random bits of logs of random people's internet use, they can get those from ISPs already.
Seriously, people, get some common sense.
Because (as a little bit of common sense or a minute of reading the article would tell you) the patent is longer and more detailed than the Slashdot summary and actually describes a specific non-trivial innovation.
I have a meaningful social life which doesn't depend at all on owning technology less than a year old. Is that unusual?
People in Australia are free to own their own modems and computers and run their own operating systems on them. There's a huge variety of hardware in use. It'd be logistically impossible, as well as very unpopular, for the government to forcibly replace everyone's modem.
They're inside the case somewhere beside the disks (not above or below them).
Yes, but they've performed all the maintenance over the network for 30 years, and work around hardware problems, without ever having to go up there and replace hardware or boot from external media. No general-purpose computer has that sort of reliability.
Everything outside the case is further away from the disk and shielded by the case.
The point is, for an external magnetic field to suddenly erase all the world's hard drives it would have to be extremely strong. Like, strong enough to make your paperclips jump off your desk and impale you, or something.
Besides, there's a lot of stuff on flash memory and CDs and even paper. If all the world's hard drives were somehow erased, we'd lose a lot of specific data, but we wouldn't have lost all internet culture. A single intact disc of Wikipedia or some other useful resource could tell a future archaeologist more about our culture than we know about any previous culture.
I believe that if you make one short call a day, the energy your brain receives from that call will probably still be enough to make all the other network traffic negligible in comparison.
Yeah, if it's Windows the screen has to be blue, and the user just has to click the gobbledygook.
Yes. As in, they collected /all/ wireless traffic with the intention of checking which hotspot it came from and measure its signal strength. I don't think there's any indication that they specifically tried to log emails or that they did any of this for purposes other than locating hotspots.
I'm in Melbourne, Australia and we have almost all our power cables above ground.
If you're good you can make it a P2P network, like the Skype network or the BitTorrent DHT. Have all the commands cryptographically signed; it doesn't matter where a message is coming from as long as it has the right signature. Then it will be extremely difficult for attackers to find where the controlling server is. The commands to their computer will probably be forwarded to them from some other bot near them in the network, not directly from your control server, and they can't find out where the other bot gets its commands from. Once the botnet gets big enough and has a few semi-reliable hosts in it, you can dispense with DNS and centralised control altogether. Just like with Skype or BitTorrent, if you keep a list of addresses of semi-reliable hosts you can connect to one of them and discover its peers and connect to them and get onto the network without using DNS or a hardcoded central server. And then you can control your botnet from anywhere as long as you have the appropriate client program and private key, and it'll be hard to track you and impossible to shut you down.
When airlines look to buy more planes, the ability to keep flying the next time this happens might be a significant factor in deciding which planes to buy. If it's actually safe enough, such a statement could be a reasonable thing for Boeing to do.
Sure, Slashdot editors might not bother to fix typos or any of the other errors we see every day on Slashdot. But one would expect them to be a little bit careful about defamation and check before posting blatant lies like this.
It'd be a "This form is probably secure but might possibly not be" indication, which is completely useless and misleading to any non-web-developer.
If IP addresses run out and the price rises because people still want to use them, that's not "artificial scarcity", it's just scarcity.
If you can override it, essentially all they're doing is informing you of power demand, not monitoring you without your consent or forcing you to do anything. Explain what oppressive totalitarian privacy-violating government regimes (i.e "Big Brother") have to do with any of this.
An idle cellphone will transmit occasionally to tell the network it's still on, but not very often and not for very long. Something on the order of a few seconds per hour. The 2 hours per month might become 3 at a stretch, but certainly not 20 or 200.
There's an IPv6 address autoconfiguration scheme that involves using the MAC address as part of the IPv6 address. If people use it then everyone they connect to will know their MAC address.
Yes, Linux caches data from disks in RAM. But what we're talking about here is not caching in RAM, but using a fast disk (SSD) as cache for a slow disk.