I'm not arguing that this technology is not rife with the possibility of easily doing something heinous with it. I'm totally on board with that. I'm arguing that, in this case, Microsoft refusing to sell it because it didn't work properly is not a rights issue. It's a functional issue. I'd be impressed if they refused to sell it to law enforcement, not because it didn't work, but because it lowers the activation energy required for abuse so much that it essentially is a catalyst for it. Microsoft should have refused to even consider it. Not consider it, then say sorry, it's not really working all that well so we better not.
Turning down a sale because they are concerned about the technology's accuracy is not turning it down based on a human rights concern. If it was a human rights concern, they'd have turned down the sale because they were concerned it would be misused by law enforcement.
The end user interface is the last thing that needs standardization. Desktops that look or act differently aren't the problem. What needs standardization is the back end API. There should only be one way for the installer to interface with the desktop manager for adding a new program icon. One way for a program to register its "settings". A single "control panel" where any program can add its configuration settings to. There should only be one form of IPC. One way for a printer to register a driver.
Once those issues are solved, once we have a rock-solid core set of standards there, then there can be a million distributions that look and feel different, that distinguish themselves by catering to X, Y, or Z. It won't matter. Any program will still be able to run on any of them, because they may look and feel different, but they will act and be configured the same.
Monoculture for UI is stifling. Monoculture for API is liberating.
Anyone who think that it was just metadata that the NSA was collecting is hopelessly naive. Intelligence agencies, which, by definition, are intended to run with limited oversight, are not capable of voluntarily self restricting their information collection. You build an apparatus that is capable of monitoring, it will fulfill its design intention. It's not a matter if if the information is being collected, it's only a matter of who is collecting it.
While I tend to agree that social media is a sewer, I'm curious, what was Linus' excuse for his bad behaviour? Linus was out of control for years, something that has been commented on here before.
Did the social media gremlins make him do it? Oh, but the difference was, when he lets someone have it with both barrels he didn't give a fuck if his name was plastered over it because he was famous enough to get away with it.
You know what, I actually have more hope for someone who is only nasty when being anonymous. It may be cowardly, but at least that person has the social conscience enough to actually recognize that his or her behaviour was pants. Linus didn't even have that, and I'm beginning to suspect he still doesn't and only went through his reformation at the recognition and then insistence of others.
An open letter to Linus: You're good at making kernels. Please continue. You're pants at social interaction and recognizing/interpreting/correcting behavioural issues, so please, just don't.
You don't own anything in the digital world. Stop renting and look for real books nobody can remove.
This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.
Invest a little time, make an effort to learn a little, and exercise some self reliance. It is still possible to have all the benefits of digital books with very little of the drawbacks. Sure, it's great to hold, touch, and experience a real book. Some of my books will never be digital. But there is also something to be said to carrying around an entire library on reader. And an e-ink display is just hands down better than any phone or tablet.
I highly recommend a Kobo reader in conjunction with Calibre e-book manager. It's not difficult to buy books off, say, Amazon and pull them into Calibre. A plugin strips off the Digital Restrictions Management and I can easily convert it to e-pub and load it on my reader. I have access to the myriad of free books. Once it's in Calibre, no one can take it away from me. And I know if I decide to ditch my Kobo for some other hardware, that Calibre will likely support it. It's my future-proof e-book library. I can also move my library to my phone - while I don't like to do a/lot/ of reading on my phone, it is nice to have books there in case I go somewhere without my reader.
Prerelease code is a trade secret. Any code is a trade secret. Uploading web shells to enhance and extend his access... Giving the access details to all his friends on IRC.
This isn't some estate brat who egged a house. Basically he picked the lock, robbed the house, put duct tape over the latch so that it couldn't properly lock and more, then told all his friends the house address so that they could pick over the stuff he didn't necessarily want.
This is meta, but has anyone else noticed odd downvotings? At the time I write this, there are about 10 "no" posts all downvoted to 0. The post I'm replying to being one of them, even though it is quite value added with a cogent and persuasive point about the benefit to time ratio.
Makes me question the moderation point generation system. I've noticed what appears to be targeted/questionable/organized downvoting on more and more posts in recent months.
According to the article, there is an interface called "Facebook Lite" that is used for accessing facebook on low-bandwidth connections; it was primarily the Facebook Lite users that had their passwords stored in plain text.
Fair enough, maybe all the users created through that lite interface had their passwords unhashed. But if you read the article, there are tens of millions of regular users too. And you can't tell me that no one who created an account through the lite version never tried to log in the normal way ever. Which means, somewhere the login API had to have global support for determining the difference between a hashed and plain-text password. Someone had to add that. Global support for differentiating between unhashed and hashed passwords on login had to be added on purpose. This cannot be a user creation issue alone.
Lies? Well, yes, clearly there has been some lying. I can't speak towards whether or not the CEO admitted to using this to hack emails, that I've never heard (is there a reference for this?) but I can tell you there has to be some lying going on.
The clear lie is the claim they didn't know and that they are now "investigating" how this happened. That is so far off just PR spin that it's a blatant lie.
Their login database, for software reasons, has to be one of three methods. It has to be a) store 100% of the passwords as plain-text, b) store 100% of the passwords as hashed, or c) be a hybrid system that allows either a plain-text or a hashed password with a marker for each entry specifying whether that entry is hashed or plain.
Now, they clearly don't have system A or B above by their own admission (they admitted to having 200-600mil plain text passwords but not all passwords were plain text). Which means, they had to have system C - a hybrid. You CAN'T have a hybrid system without code specifically designed for it on both ends (storing the password then authenticating against it later). A system that is capable of storing either plain text or hashed passwords must be able to then differentiate between them when the user logged in and that code didn't just appear out of the ether. You can't accidentally store the password as plain-text and then when the user logs in have the login authentication code hash their login password and successfully check that hash against one stored plain-text.
So their whole "OMFG NW" and "we're checking how this happened" isn't even PR spin. It's a plain-text lie.
Repeat after me kiddies: Legal, Taxed and Regulated.
Better yet, how about just "legal"?
I see no need to tax it beyond what any retail item is taxed. Or regulated beyond what the law already allows, in that if it turns out to have been harmful then the seller is liable civilly, and if it turns out to have been harmful and the seller knew (or used ingredients that the seller ought to have known) were harmful then they are liable criminally. Until then, caveat emptor.
Almost all vape "juice" made in North America is already limited to nicotine and ingredients and flavourings that are on the FDA's Generally Recognized as Safe list and they limit the hardware to temperatures that those ingredients would already be exposed to during cooking. They do that for the very reason of liability. Pretty hard to argue that vape juice is harmful when it is nothing more than what you might get coming off a cake that's baking in your oven. So I'm not sure that the municipality of San Francisco would have a leg to stand on for most of it. Of course, if you're getting the cheap made in China stuff, well, you as a buyer deserve what you get when you buy stuff coming from a place where they use industrial waste in baby formula.
As far as those arguing that vape makers are "pushing" it to children, well, when it's just flavourings and a mild stimulant, how is that different from Mountain Dew, or any of the billion fruity energy drinks?
That cries out for a citation much as a man lost in the desert for a week cries out for water.
Other people might not appreciate the hyperbole but I do. Well done.
As far as I know, the very best known attacks of AES256 reduce it to an effective 253 bits. That is FAR from broken in any sense.
No, this is precisely what broken means. In a cryptographic sense (which I was careful to mention as being what I meant) broken is any attack which renders a result in less than brute-force time. AES's break is significant because it's not a reduced-round version that is vulnerable. It's the full version version. Rijndael's primary competitor in the AES competition was Serpent. Serpent's design philosophy was safety. Their design strategy was to include the number of rounds they thought would be safe against any attack during it's lifetime, and then to take that and double it. Serpent was, unfortunately, rejected, but their design philosophy was sound. It's not the known attacks that ever get you. It is, of course, the unknown. Security margin is important.
Unfortunately, AES now has zero security margin. As mentioned, it's not a reduced round variant that has been broken. It's the full cipher. Which means every subsequent advance isn't biting into more rounds of security margin. It's biting into the real security of the cipher. The attack is still infeasible today. It requires 2^126 calculations (down from 2^126.2).
That all being said, you latched onto the least important aspect of my point earlier, so let's refocus back on the important issue. Which was that it's easy for armchair security experts to just make sweeping statements about how we should just not rely on vulnerable technology. Fine. Let's see you get every bit of your important data into non-vulnerable algorithms in a layered security system. First describe that system to us, and then explain how you'll go about making sure your banking, health care, tax, social media, GPS location, television viewing preference, purchasing habits, email, and insurance information is properly migrated over into that system. I'm quite intrigued.
Seriously though, if your security is immediately breached when someone breaks your encryption, you should rethink your security
Ah. Spoken like a true armchair security warrior. I love the sweeping declarations. If your security is breached when someone can open all your locks then you should rethink your security.
Here are a few points to consider for you: 1) My electronic security isn't all (or even necessarily mostly) in my hands any more. It's in the hands of banks, government agencies, and (not me but for the rest of you) social networks. I'm just sure that every tired career bureaucrat is just jumping at quantum computing resistant security. They are just right on that. 2) In addition to my most important data residing, for the most part, in the hands beyond my control, so are the standards. Name a major implementation of an encryption technology standard that deprecated an algorithm before it was demonstrably broken. AES is currently broken in a cryptographic sense and there is not whisper on the horizon of deprecating it. Too costly. 3) In addition to data being at the control of others, and available cryptography being at the mercy of established standards, even when standards are quick enough to add "heir and a spare" algorithms, the software that makes use of those standards doesn't necessarily have the configurability to choose the right algos. Dovecot, for example, just recently added in configurations to allow you to select which curves to use. For years you were stuck with terrible NIST curves which are at best horribly suspect, even though most systems had better curves.
All these things are mitigatable to an extent, but you have to be a hermit not to be vulnerable.
It's actually not a bad idea. Microsoft has been trying to transition for Software as a Service for years. They want to drag everyone kicking and screaming into paying them monthly for the privilege of using Windows. So, how to transition people who would rather go back to DOS than pay Microsoft to use their OS? You bring out back-to-back versions of Windows that are so hated and draconian that people will pay to keep security updates going on Windows 7.
People won't pay to use their OS, but they may pay to keep security updates going on the last version to be usable. Way to sneak Software as a Service into the back door, Microsoft.
If I had wanted to, I could have withheld him from getting pertussis vaccines. I didn't, though. Getting a disease is not necessarily a lifetime immunity. Also, the acellular pertussis vaccine which has been distributed since about 1982 has exceedingly low risk. Since pertussis is typically mixed with diphtheria and tetanus, it would have complicated his vaccine regimen.
There is a higher risk of a random staph aureus spore in the air land on the needle tip in the few seconds it's exposed to the air and him getting flesh eating disease from the needle itself than there is a complication from the pertussis vaccine itself.
Not sure where your cynicism about vaccine risks comes from.
Twitter and Facebook have been the flagship champions of empty-calorie non-information from their inception. How anyone even cares about 'dis' information there is beyond me.
Anyone who uses Twitter or Facebook for "information" in the first place deserves to be the victim of disimformation.
This isn't wrong. This patent actually kind of makes that point.
For a patent to be valid, it has to add to the state of the art. In other words, it can't be obvious. But "if it's too cold to use, then warm it up" is pretty obvious. The point of this patent is basically as a litigation tool, not to innovate. There have been thermostats and heaters used in virtually every form of device on the planet (and a lot of satellites and probes off the planet) since the invention of electricity. This isn't innovation. It's not even really intended to hold up in court. It's a stick to keep smaller entities out of the market. It's the shotgun approach. You get a bunch of people together to try and figure out the most obvious answers to a whole pile of minor problems so that if/when another player comes around and inadvertently uses one of those solutions, you can then sue.
why the hell were you traveling with a 2 week old infant? You shouldn't be traveling with a newborn until they're 2 months old at the very least
Different people, parents and pediatricians alike, have different opinions when and how far and by what means it is safe to travel with an infant. A certain amount of travel will be required from day one (well, two or three) for anyone who is not walking distance from a hospital. What about people who live a three hour drive from a hospital? Do you suggest everyone in those circumstances has to rent a room in the hospital's locale for two months? Now, in this particular case, with pertussis incubating in him, it was decidedly unsafe to travel. I had no way of knowing that, though, and stand by my decision to take him to see his grandparents. I am of the opinion that, in general, infants are more robust than you seem to give them credit for.
That being said, just as a sanity check, I did some research just now on what the prevailing opinion is of health-care providers and parents alike with respect to when it's safe to travel with an infant. The prevailing opinion that I can see is that a moderate road trip after an infant's two-week checkup is perfectly safe, and not uncommon. I see no significant difference between putting him to bed at night in his crib or in his car seat. He slept the whole way.
I suspect if you are a parent then you are likely a parent of one. First-time parents are always over-protective. There's nothing wrong with that, per se. The problem is in today's society where more and more parents have only one child, many parents are not growing out of their over-protectiveness and there is less institutional knowledge being passed on by those who have had two or three or more.
We can't wrap up our child in cellophane until after they have been immunized against everything. Which is why it's so important for as much of the public as a whole to get immunized.
When my youngest son was two weeks old he developed whooping cough while on a trip to visit my parents. I remember him going from slight cough to blue lips in about an hour. I will never forget the desperate trip to the local hospital, the ambulance to the slightly larger regional hospital, and the air ambulance trip to the major center. We were lucky, my son is still with us and healthy today. But it was touch and go.
There is some question of how he contracted it, but still the most likely vector is from someone who was unvaccinated. The church I attended at the time was quite conservative and vaccination conspiracy theories were pretty popular then.
If vaccination conspiracy nuts only hurt themselves, I would tend to agree. But there are many diseases that you can't vaccinate for right away. Plus, remember, it's not the conspiracy nut who is the one hurt in any case. It's the conspiracy nut's innocent children. They don't deserve deadly diseases, or the knowledge that they passed on a lethal disease to an infant.
Sex is so much better without a condom. But for some reason I can't shake this fever.
1) Sure is. Glad not everyone uses one, or you wouldn't be here to post that. 2) This is more akin to everyone in the world being forced to wear a condom as Microsoft rapes you any time they see fit. Wouldn't you like the choice?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not arguing that this technology is not rife with the possibility of easily doing something heinous with it. I'm totally on board with that. I'm arguing that, in this case, Microsoft refusing to sell it because it didn't work properly is not a rights issue. It's a functional issue. I'd be impressed if they refused to sell it to law enforcement, not because it didn't work, but because it lowers the activation energy required for abuse so much that it essentially is a catalyst for it. Microsoft should have refused to even consider it. Not consider it, then say sorry, it's not really working all that well so we better not.
Turning down a sale because they are concerned about the technology's accuracy is not turning it down based on a human rights concern. If it was a human rights concern, they'd have turned down the sale because they were concerned it would be misused by law enforcement.
The end user interface is the last thing that needs standardization. Desktops that look or act differently aren't the problem. What needs standardization is the back end API. There should only be one way for the installer to interface with the desktop manager for adding a new program icon. One way for a program to register its "settings". A single "control panel" where any program can add its configuration settings to. There should only be one form of IPC. One way for a printer to register a driver.
Once those issues are solved, once we have a rock-solid core set of standards there, then there can be a million distributions that look and feel different, that distinguish themselves by catering to X, Y, or Z. It won't matter. Any program will still be able to run on any of them, because they may look and feel different, but they will act and be configured the same.
Monoculture for UI is stifling. Monoculture for API is liberating.
Does the study prove that the people who are footing the bill for it feel financially secure? Are they happier?
Anyone who think that it was just metadata that the NSA was collecting is hopelessly naive. Intelligence agencies, which, by definition, are intended to run with limited oversight, are not capable of voluntarily self restricting their information collection. You build an apparatus that is capable of monitoring, it will fulfill its design intention. It's not a matter if if the information is being collected, it's only a matter of who is collecting it.
While I tend to agree that social media is a sewer, I'm curious, what was Linus' excuse for his bad behaviour? Linus was out of control for years, something that has been commented on here before.
Did the social media gremlins make him do it? Oh, but the difference was, when he lets someone have it with both barrels he didn't give a fuck if his name was plastered over it because he was famous enough to get away with it.
You know what, I actually have more hope for someone who is only nasty when being anonymous. It may be cowardly, but at least that person has the social conscience enough to actually recognize that his or her behaviour was pants. Linus didn't even have that, and I'm beginning to suspect he still doesn't and only went through his reformation at the recognition and then insistence of others.
An open letter to Linus: You're good at making kernels. Please continue. You're pants at social interaction and recognizing/interpreting/correcting behavioural issues, so please, just don't.
You don't own anything in the digital world. Stop renting and look for real books nobody can remove.
This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.
Invest a little time, make an effort to learn a little, and exercise some self reliance. It is still possible to have all the benefits of digital books with very little of the drawbacks. Sure, it's great to hold, touch, and experience a real book. Some of my books will never be digital. But there is also something to be said to carrying around an entire library on reader. And an e-ink display is just hands down better than any phone or tablet.
I highly recommend a Kobo reader in conjunction with Calibre e-book manager. It's not difficult to buy books off, say, Amazon and pull them into Calibre. A plugin strips off the Digital Restrictions Management and I can easily convert it to e-pub and load it on my reader. I have access to the myriad of free books. Once it's in Calibre, no one can take it away from me. And I know if I decide to ditch my Kobo for some other hardware, that Calibre will likely support it. It's my future-proof e-book library. I can also move my library to my phone - while I don't like to do a /lot/ of reading on my phone, it is nice to have books there in case I go somewhere without my reader.
!protected != !confidential
Prerelease code is a trade secret. Any code is a trade secret.
Uploading web shells to enhance and extend his access...
Giving the access details to all his friends on IRC.
This isn't some estate brat who egged a house. Basically he picked the lock, robbed the house, put duct tape over the latch so that it couldn't properly lock and more, then told all his friends the house address so that they could pick over the stuff he didn't necessarily want.
Narrowly avoiding prison is wide of the mark.
This is meta, but has anyone else noticed odd downvotings? At the time I write this, there are about 10 "no" posts all downvoted to 0. The post I'm replying to being one of them, even though it is quite value added with a cogent and persuasive point about the benefit to time ratio.
Makes me question the moderation point generation system. I've noticed what appears to be targeted/questionable/organized downvoting on more and more posts in recent months.
...is calling him a "security researcher".
Or, d) none of the above.
According to the article, there is an interface called "Facebook Lite" that is used for accessing facebook on low-bandwidth connections; it was primarily the Facebook Lite users that had their passwords stored in plain text.
Fair enough, maybe all the users created through that lite interface had their passwords unhashed. But if you read the article, there are tens of millions of regular users too. And you can't tell me that no one who created an account through the lite version never tried to log in the normal way ever. Which means, somewhere the login API had to have global support for determining the difference between a hashed and plain-text password. Someone had to add that. Global support for differentiating between unhashed and hashed passwords on login had to be added on purpose. This cannot be a user creation issue alone.
Lies? Well, yes, clearly there has been some lying. I can't speak towards whether or not the CEO admitted to using this to hack emails, that I've never heard (is there a reference for this?) but I can tell you there has to be some lying going on.
The clear lie is the claim they didn't know and that they are now "investigating" how this happened. That is so far off just PR spin that it's a blatant lie.
Their login database, for software reasons, has to be one of three methods. It has to be a) store 100% of the passwords as plain-text, b) store 100% of the passwords as hashed, or c) be a hybrid system that allows either a plain-text or a hashed password with a marker for each entry specifying whether that entry is hashed or plain.
Now, they clearly don't have system A or B above by their own admission (they admitted to having 200-600mil plain text passwords but not all passwords were plain text). Which means, they had to have system C - a hybrid. You CAN'T have a hybrid system without code specifically designed for it on both ends (storing the password then authenticating against it later). A system that is capable of storing either plain text or hashed passwords must be able to then differentiate between them when the user logged in and that code didn't just appear out of the ether. You can't accidentally store the password as plain-text and then when the user logs in have the login authentication code hash their login password and successfully check that hash against one stored plain-text.
So their whole "OMFG NW" and "we're checking how this happened" isn't even PR spin. It's a plain-text lie.
Repeat after me kiddies: Legal, Taxed and Regulated.
Better yet, how about just "legal"?
I see no need to tax it beyond what any retail item is taxed. Or regulated beyond what the law already allows, in that if it turns out to have been harmful then the seller is liable civilly, and if it turns out to have been harmful and the seller knew (or used ingredients that the seller ought to have known) were harmful then they are liable criminally. Until then, caveat emptor.
Almost all vape "juice" made in North America is already limited to nicotine and ingredients and flavourings that are on the FDA's Generally Recognized as Safe list and they limit the hardware to temperatures that those ingredients would already be exposed to during cooking. They do that for the very reason of liability. Pretty hard to argue that vape juice is harmful when it is nothing more than what you might get coming off a cake that's baking in your oven. So I'm not sure that the municipality of San Francisco would have a leg to stand on for most of it. Of course, if you're getting the cheap made in China stuff, well, you as a buyer deserve what you get when you buy stuff coming from a place where they use industrial waste in baby formula.
As far as those arguing that vape makers are "pushing" it to children, well, when it's just flavourings and a mild stimulant, how is that different from Mountain Dew, or any of the billion fruity energy drinks?
That cries out for a citation much as a man lost in the desert for a week cries out for water.
Other people might not appreciate the hyperbole but I do. Well done.
As far as I know, the very best known attacks of AES256 reduce it to an effective 253 bits. That is FAR from broken in any sense.
No, this is precisely what broken means. In a cryptographic sense (which I was careful to mention as being what I meant) broken is any attack which renders a result in less than brute-force time. AES's break is significant because it's not a reduced-round version that is vulnerable. It's the full version version. Rijndael's primary competitor in the AES competition was Serpent. Serpent's design philosophy was safety. Their design strategy was to include the number of rounds they thought would be safe against any attack during it's lifetime, and then to take that and double it. Serpent was, unfortunately, rejected, but their design philosophy was sound. It's not the known attacks that ever get you. It is, of course, the unknown. Security margin is important.
Unfortunately, AES now has zero security margin. As mentioned, it's not a reduced round variant that has been broken. It's the full cipher. Which means every subsequent advance isn't biting into more rounds of security margin. It's biting into the real security of the cipher. The attack is still infeasible today. It requires 2^126 calculations (down from 2^126.2).
That all being said, you latched onto the least important aspect of my point earlier, so let's refocus back on the important issue. Which was that it's easy for armchair security experts to just make sweeping statements about how we should just not rely on vulnerable technology. Fine. Let's see you get every bit of your important data into non-vulnerable algorithms in a layered security system. First describe that system to us, and then explain how you'll go about making sure your banking, health care, tax, social media, GPS location, television viewing preference, purchasing habits, email, and insurance information is properly migrated over into that system. I'm quite intrigued.
Ah. Spoken like a true armchair security warrior. I love the sweeping declarations. If your security is breached when someone can open all your locks then you should rethink your security.
Here are a few points to consider for you:
1) My electronic security isn't all (or even necessarily mostly) in my hands any more. It's in the hands of banks, government agencies, and (not me but for the rest of you) social networks. I'm just sure that every tired career bureaucrat is just jumping at quantum computing resistant security. They are just right on that.
2) In addition to my most important data residing, for the most part, in the hands beyond my control, so are the standards. Name a major implementation of an encryption technology standard that deprecated an algorithm before it was demonstrably broken. AES is currently broken in a cryptographic sense and there is not whisper on the horizon of deprecating it. Too costly.
3) In addition to data being at the control of others, and available cryptography being at the mercy of established standards, even when standards are quick enough to add "heir and a spare" algorithms, the software that makes use of those standards doesn't necessarily have the configurability to choose the right algos. Dovecot, for example, just recently added in configurations to allow you to select which curves to use. For years you were stuck with terrible NIST curves which are at best horribly suspect, even though most systems had better curves.
All these things are mitigatable to an extent, but you have to be a hermit not to be vulnerable.
Facebook who?
Miracast has been mirroring Android apps since 2012. To Windows or almost any TV. How is this remotely new or innovative?
It's actually not a bad idea. Microsoft has been trying to transition for Software as a Service for years. They want to drag everyone kicking and screaming into paying them monthly for the privilege of using Windows. So, how to transition people who would rather go back to DOS than pay Microsoft to use their OS? You bring out back-to-back versions of Windows that are so hated and draconian that people will pay to keep security updates going on Windows 7.
People won't pay to use their OS, but they may pay to keep security updates going on the last version to be usable. Way to sneak Software as a Service into the back door, Microsoft.
If I had wanted to, I could have withheld him from getting pertussis vaccines. I didn't, though. Getting a disease is not necessarily a lifetime immunity. Also, the acellular pertussis vaccine which has been distributed since about 1982 has exceedingly low risk. Since pertussis is typically mixed with diphtheria and tetanus, it would have complicated his vaccine regimen.
There is a higher risk of a random staph aureus spore in the air land on the needle tip in the few seconds it's exposed to the air and him getting flesh eating disease from the needle itself than there is a complication from the pertussis vaccine itself.
Not sure where your cynicism about vaccine risks comes from.
You're not wrong.
Twitter and Facebook have been the flagship champions of empty-calorie non-information from their inception. How anyone even cares about 'dis' information there is beyond me.
Anyone who uses Twitter or Facebook for "information" in the first place deserves to be the victim of disimformation.
This isn't wrong. This patent actually kind of makes that point.
For a patent to be valid, it has to add to the state of the art. In other words, it can't be obvious. But "if it's too cold to use, then warm it up" is pretty obvious. The point of this patent is basically as a litigation tool, not to innovate. There have been thermostats and heaters used in virtually every form of device on the planet (and a lot of satellites and probes off the planet) since the invention of electricity. This isn't innovation. It's not even really intended to hold up in court. It's a stick to keep smaller entities out of the market. It's the shotgun approach. You get a bunch of people together to try and figure out the most obvious answers to a whole pile of minor problems so that if/when another player comes around and inadvertently uses one of those solutions, you can then sue.
It's also a sad state of affairs when a car is announced to be "powered" by what amounts to the dashboard.
Different people, parents and pediatricians alike, have different opinions when and how far and by what means it is safe to travel with an infant. A certain amount of travel will be required from day one (well, two or three) for anyone who is not walking distance from a hospital. What about people who live a three hour drive from a hospital? Do you suggest everyone in those circumstances has to rent a room in the hospital's locale for two months? Now, in this particular case, with pertussis incubating in him, it was decidedly unsafe to travel. I had no way of knowing that, though, and stand by my decision to take him to see his grandparents. I am of the opinion that, in general, infants are more robust than you seem to give them credit for.
That being said, just as a sanity check, I did some research just now on what the prevailing opinion is of health-care providers and parents alike with respect to when it's safe to travel with an infant. The prevailing opinion that I can see is that a moderate road trip after an infant's two-week checkup is perfectly safe, and not uncommon. I see no significant difference between putting him to bed at night in his crib or in his car seat. He slept the whole way.
I suspect if you are a parent then you are likely a parent of one. First-time parents are always over-protective. There's nothing wrong with that, per se. The problem is in today's society where more and more parents have only one child, many parents are not growing out of their over-protectiveness and there is less institutional knowledge being passed on by those who have had two or three or more.
We can't wrap up our child in cellophane until after they have been immunized against everything. Which is why it's so important for as much of the public as a whole to get immunized.
When my youngest son was two weeks old he developed whooping cough while on a trip to visit my parents. I remember him going from slight cough to blue lips in about an hour. I will never forget the desperate trip to the local hospital, the ambulance to the slightly larger regional hospital, and the air ambulance trip to the major center. We were lucky, my son is still with us and healthy today. But it was touch and go.
There is some question of how he contracted it, but still the most likely vector is from someone who was unvaccinated. The church I attended at the time was quite conservative and vaccination conspiracy theories were pretty popular then.
If vaccination conspiracy nuts only hurt themselves, I would tend to agree. But there are many diseases that you can't vaccinate for right away. Plus, remember, it's not the conspiracy nut who is the one hurt in any case. It's the conspiracy nut's innocent children. They don't deserve deadly diseases, or the knowledge that they passed on a lethal disease to an infant.
1) Sure is. Glad not everyone uses one, or you wouldn't be here to post that.
2) This is more akin to everyone in the world being forced to wear a condom as Microsoft rapes you any time they see fit. Wouldn't you like the choice?