The perfect example of FUD : "Well what if your fan popped off!" The reality is that while it is impressive that the Intel has systems to thwart that, how many times apart from on initial delivery does your fan fall off? As another poster mentioned it's the opposite and those things are a huge bitch to get off: I'd swear I was going to crack several motherboards in efforts to get those suckers off.
That Tom's thing, while 100% extremist and pandering to Intel, was fascinating as I didn't know that the heat dissipation was so rapid.
If you detect (automatically) illegally crypted traffic, you investigate the source and destination IP addresses, connection patterns, amounts of data etc. You may legally raid the offender's home. If it turns out to be an innocent Slashdotter, you'll just slap their wrist (confiscate the computer, block their IP access for a couple of years).
Pure 100% bullshit. Firstly to be able to do something like this the "law" would have to regulate and understand the data patterns of every single product on the market (perhaps they'll just ban everything that communicates over TCP/IP that isn't mainstream? Goodbye Linux), otherwise they'll have no idea if that's SQL Server DTSing a database with GZIP2 line compression, or a Rijndael data stream containing plans for a new bomb. The logistics of detecting "illegally encrypted" material is impossible. Secondly and constitutionally important they are NEVER supposed to be listening to all traffic/all emails/etc: They're supposed to have a warrant to do that, and if they have a warrant they probably already know, hence your point of using it as a signalling flare for terrorist actions is bogus. Thirdly, and most importantly, to get around this is so incredibly trivial any Gr. 11 computer "hacker" could easily accomplish sending/receiving innocent looking data that encapsulates something else, such as in the noise of images, as carrier signals in MP3s, etc. Again the only way they could stop this is by basically banning data.
I'm thinking Malda gave the CIA infinite mod points or something as I'm noticing a whole slew of very insightful and logical posts, albeit cynical or satirical, getting modded flamebait. The reality is that there would be no hijacking if you handcuffed everyone. However, you see, it's the tyranny of the majority: 72% of people are idiots and have no knowledge or understanding of encryption, so what the heck: Ban it. Just don't do anything that thwarts THEIR liberties in any way.
"When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!" Homer Simpson
I believe that you're exactly right, and as a result you have what you can find on http://www.pgpi.com. However furthermore a large number of the best algorithms were actually made overseas (ex. Rijndael which is the new US government AES standard).
Why is this modded as flamebait? It's 100% correct (and isn't flamebait). The simple reality is that there have been fascists hiding in the woodwork for some day who just dream of the day where Statzi patrol the streets checking DNAs and checking that people are following their early morning filed agenda. These people see this as a big opportunity to push their agenda, and unfortunately the American public has this foolish notion that in times of crisis everyone must simply agree with anything that any "lawmaker" says (to do otherwise is traitorous and unpatriotic!). Of course people usually agree as long as the measures impact the minority, but the problem is that when you have 10 measures all being passed by a different group of people, a good portion of them will screw YOU over, so when you voted that Arab's should have daily rectal exams you might want to think about that when you're wearing a 24/7 brain probe.
Democracy: The tyranny of the majority. When you have a group of people willing to vote in any invasion of civil liberties as long as the specific item doesn't affect them, you have a recipe for a police state.
Especially given that the WTC terrorists apparently used library computers and something like Hotmail to communicate...the FBI and CIA are looking so impotent that they're trying to find any scapegoat to blame though: Encryption, Canadian borders, MS Flight Simulator, etc. It is ridiculously absurd.
That's a description given in the fantastic movie "Fight Club", and it very accurately portrays the absurd series of arguments that have been brought forth to justify some of the knee-jerk reactions that people have brought forth in the wake of the tragic WTC disaster. In the past couple of days ID cards, checkpoints, banning of violent movies and games (yet again), encryption backdoors, etc., have all gotten some pretty good press, and some lawmakers have been quoted as saying that they want to push through new legislation as quickly as possible, presumably under the subtext of "while the naive public foolishly accepts it as a patriotic duty" (which is what you see on here a lot. Question the push for encryption backdoors and damnit you're going against that flag waving . The simple reality is that none of these measures would have made an ounce of difference! While I can't say with 100% certainty, it does appear that most if not all of these individuals got into the US legally, going through US checkpoints and passing US security: They would have been given ID passes and could pass with no problem through checkpoints if such a thing existed. As far as encryption: These people used LIBRARY COMPUTERS to communicate so this perception of brilliant mad geniuses with complex encryption with the FBI hot on their trail but thwarted by strong encryption is so very laughable.
It's the illusion of safety that people are after though.
Afghanistan is largely a people under duress
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2
I heard a stat earlier tonight that something like 99% of the Afghani people are opposed to the Taliban. In other words bombing the country rather than targeting a few individuals is just killing more innocents.
One I got had the subject "ware\Microsoft\Windo,b4 ü4desktopdesktop". It looks like it (the virus) has a pointer error and their subject isn't what they were expecting it to be.
The trojan of course is infecting IIS machines using the standard sadmind tactics (in fact it looks like it's just hitching a ride on it), but then it installs an ISAPI filter or the like and serves up a file called README.exe to all visiting clients. I can't verify but it does look like it DIDN'T automatically run the file in either 2000/IE6 or 2000/IE 5.5, however it does launch a window at 6000x6000. If the file is run (presumably automatically on infected IIS servers) it does a variety of things such as apparently encapsulating the Concept word macro virus, and it also enables the Guest user account and sets it to have full permissions on the C$ share. I can see this by simply looking at the readme.exe (gosh I hope the virus writers don't chase me with the DCMA...).
What I want to know is what the readme.eml attachment is doing in the window at 6000x6000.
This variant seems different in that it rides along with sadmind, and itself uses EML and potential holes in IE to duplicate itself. It also appears to email itself: I won't confirm the source however I got an email from AT&T Research (I used their voice synthesis thing recently) with the worm attached, and I'm curious if the EML then makes the target system start looking for IIS servers to infect?
Anyways while this hitches a ride with sadmind it does seem to bring its own risks and concerns with it. I am particularly concerned about people saying that IE 5/6 automatically executed the EML: I am going to try that in a VMWare session (I LOVE VMWARE) imminently.
Anyways here's the sequence of attempts it makes, trying to capitalize on old worms that weren't cleaned up properly, as well as known unicode exploits.
Furthermore every attacking system was in the same 255.0.0.0/8 as the target system so it appears to target in the same "Class A" address (of course in this case it's 216.x.x.x so it's not really Class A, but you get the point).
It is ALWAYS the time for dissent and it's a scary time when people think that everyone should get in a row and follow the dictator. Furthermore indeed 5000 people died, however MILLIONS have died over the last couple of centuries defending freedom and liberty. To say that it's disturbing how people just want to throw it away because of one unfortunate act is disturbing. It's especially disturbing because the remedies are just more of the same that will achieve absolutely nothing but removing the personal liberties of law abiding people.
Hey don't mind that video camera installed in your living room (see "1984"): You don't have something to hide....do you?
This is true, however note that the 16/32 MS operating systems don't do halt instructions on the idle thread, so they are always running the CPU at pretty much 100%. The NT4/2000/XP series, as well as almost all other multithreaded operating systems, do HLT instructions on the idle thread which effectively "speedsteps" processors. See CPUIdle and the like.
Could anyone who downloaded the EXE from an official site please post an SHA1 or MD5 hash of it? I am downloaded from one of the very much appreciated high speed mirrors, however I am prone to paranoia and would like to know that it's 100% original. Thank you.
But if it means even the slightest chance of preventing this kind of thing from happening again, I'd sacrifice some anonymity any day.
It is incredibly tragic that people are rewriting the bounds of freedoms at a moment of emotional upset (sort of like going grocery shopping when you're hungry): i.e. Western society has done just fine for quite a long time building the best society on the planet, and in a heartbeat people are willing to take it all away because of a single incident (BTW: Seems to me that we could just intrude in that freedom of religion worldwide and suddenly these problems wouldn't exist...you're willing to give that up right?). The reality is that government backdoors in encryption, and tracking for cellphones works to catch one single type of person: Idiots. If I were a criminal I would dream of a cell phone that sent the location (picked up by GPS...triangulation would be tougher but of course with simple relays you could get around that no problem as well. Maybe stick the cell retransmitter on top of a public bus and use it as a relay, ad nauseum) as I'd reverse engineer it to give a location several miles off: Keep the law busy for a while, and as we know law enforcement and intelligence has been FAR too much in love with technology as of late, so you can bet they would sit looking at their screen saying "Damnit he's got to be here! The screen says so! Look again!". It's hilarious that instead of intelligence or physical protective measures (such as secured doors on planes which are so dumbshit obvious that it boggles the mind) people look at the IDIOTIC (I mean mentally deficient. Seriously this gets me in a rage that people and their quest for the illusion of safety can be so god damn stupid) measures such as "Ban MS Flight Simulator!" or "Don't allow Arab men to buy one way tickets!", or "Let carnivore listen to all emails for secret words that'll give away the terrorists!". The illusion of safety, and then everyone can go back to their lives pretending that everything is hunky dory and they're just fine and have nothing to worry about because damnit the government has carnivore, backdoors in encryption that only law abiding people use (oh, also which organized crime uses to get at your information too while you're illusioned into thinking it's secure), and the right to cavity search any random Joe on demand....until the next attack occurs. Then you just have to reduce freedoms more right?
The problem is that if you don't restrict and control the tools that governments have available to them, they will abuse them. It's human nature - if you were an FBI agent, wouldn't you use whatever tools you had at your disposal to track down bad guys? It's not far from there to doing what Sen. Joseph McCarthy was doing in the 1950s: tracking down people engaging in "un-American activities", the kind of term which of course is defined by whatever over-zealous government official is conducting such investigations.
On top of that there is a presumption that this information is only in the hands of the government who of course is only looking out for society. In reality almost every facet of information collection has been infiltrated by organized crime, so the irony is that criminal organizations often make better use of this information than law enforcement does. It just takes one plant at the tracking office, running the databases, etc., and suddenly all of this information is in the hands that you least want it. It's amazing that people never see this until it's too late though. People are generally morons when it comes to privacy though : "Duh I'd give up my freedoms to prevent this from happening!" Sure you would...today. But tomorrow when robots are jamming cameras up your ass and you're put in jail for thought crime or because a relative did something bad you may rethink that.
I was going to leave it at that, however apparently that incites the "postercomment compression filter" so here's some added crap just to waste some space. BTW: That isn't freeware but rather it's non-commercialware. It includes a firewall and IPSec too.
This incident will surely lead to every right wing facist to come crawling out of the woodwork. The reality is that the encryption gremlin has been out and abouts for a long time, and there is absolutely no way that you will ever get it back in the bag. Period. This is not even remotely considerable. On the NIST site they even provide links to Twofish, Rijndael, etc, to which you can grab the source and roll your own. There is additionally absolutely no possibility WHATSOEVER that foreign nations will agree to US backdoors: They may feel remorse about this incident, but given Echelon they won't be imposing US laws in their land.
You know this all really is absolutely absurd. What happened at the WTC is an absolute travesty and hopefully there will be justice, but this heavy handed knee jerk reaction is unbelievable: It's the illusion of safety (see "Fight Club" regarding airline safety manuals). Who cares that the terrorists got on the planes likely with items that were 100% legal under US law (prior to the attack you could carry a 4" knife on US planes completely legally. For all we know they may have pulled them out and said "See? Like our knives?") : Pretend that the real issue is suitcase nuclear bombs and people sneaking over the border. I've seen on several pages the attempt to actually blame MS Flight Simulator for the tragedy: Flight Sim allowed them to train at hitting the WTC, and gosh darnit it even has the WTC so they could practice hitting. RIDICULOUS! Who cares about securing the pilot cabin or something actually useful: Ban Flight Sim! A similar situation came up with Microsoft Train Simulator with Union Pacific being outraged under the belief that this would lead to a nation of highly trained (no pun intended) train engineers who would go out and steal all the locomotives : Hey don't expect them to SECURE the locomotives in some fashion: Just hope that no one knows how to drive them. To say that these reasonings are the height of stupidity would be putting it lightly.
Anyways I'm sure we'll see all sorts of mentally deficient ideas such as these coming out over the coming day by fascists seeing the opportunity, again ignoring the absolute simplicity of this operation.
In Canada for a while they played a series of commercials which supposedly exemplified racism, and one part absolutely burned me: It showed a gentleman saying "We let too many immigrants into this country!": Apparently such a claim is "racist".
Agreed that GPS is of limited accuracy in this case, however the idea behind GPS in phones (which they are going to be doing in the near future as scary as that sounds) is that it relays your position over the cell control channels (i.e. if someone can make a phone call then it could be their position), so if someone was lost in the forest but could make a phone call they would know exactly where they were give or take 20 ft or so.
For sure they should be able to. In fact there was a lot of moaning and bitching that the wireless providers hadn't yet implemented their system triangulation yet (of course the government is largely pushing for it for anti-crime reasons, but they pretend it's for 911), though of course that's absurd as a) GPS portions obviously would not work under the rubble. GPS barely works under heavy tree coverage. In fact I'm curious how GPS could play a part for that. b) If triangulation can be done at the cell phone towers then it can therefore be done onsite.
It is amazing how incredibly important cell phones (and the much more expensive plane phone versions) have been during this whole event. They were a crucial pipeline of information, and in the events over Pennsylvania they are how the victims learned that the terrorist had already plowed one or both planes into the WTC.
Slashdot Mirror
The perfect example of FUD : "Well what if your fan popped off!" The reality is that while it is impressive that the Intel has systems to thwart that, how many times apart from on initial delivery does your fan fall off? As another poster mentioned it's the opposite and those things are a huge bitch to get off: I'd swear I was going to crack several motherboards in efforts to get those suckers off.
That Tom's thing, while 100% extremist and pandering to Intel, was fascinating as I didn't know that the heat dissipation was so rapid.
If you detect (automatically) illegally crypted traffic, you investigate the source and destination IP addresses, connection patterns, amounts of data etc. You may legally raid the offender's home. If it turns out to be an innocent Slashdotter, you'll just slap their wrist (confiscate the computer, block their IP access for a couple of years).
Pure 100% bullshit. Firstly to be able to do something like this the "law" would have to regulate and understand the data patterns of every single product on the market (perhaps they'll just ban everything that communicates over TCP/IP that isn't mainstream? Goodbye Linux), otherwise they'll have no idea if that's SQL Server DTSing a database with GZIP2 line compression, or a Rijndael data stream containing plans for a new bomb. The logistics of detecting "illegally encrypted" material is impossible. Secondly and constitutionally important they are NEVER supposed to be listening to all traffic/all emails/etc: They're supposed to have a warrant to do that, and if they have a warrant they probably already know, hence your point of using it as a signalling flare for terrorist actions is bogus. Thirdly, and most importantly, to get around this is so incredibly trivial any Gr. 11 computer "hacker" could easily accomplish sending/receiving innocent looking data that encapsulates something else, such as in the noise of images, as carrier signals in MP3s, etc. Again the only way they could stop this is by basically banning data.
I'm thinking Malda gave the CIA infinite mod points or something as I'm noticing a whole slew of very insightful and logical posts, albeit cynical or satirical, getting modded flamebait. The reality is that there would be no hijacking if you handcuffed everyone. However, you see, it's the tyranny of the majority: 72% of people are idiots and have no knowledge or understanding of encryption, so what the heck: Ban it. Just don't do anything that thwarts THEIR liberties in any way.
"When will people learn? Democracy doesn't work!" Homer Simpson
I believe that you're exactly right, and as a result you have what you can find on http://www.pgpi.com. However furthermore a large number of the best algorithms were actually made overseas (ex. Rijndael which is the new US government AES standard).
Why is this modded as flamebait? It's 100% correct (and isn't flamebait). The simple reality is that there have been fascists hiding in the woodwork for some day who just dream of the day where Statzi patrol the streets checking DNAs and checking that people are following their early morning filed agenda. These people see this as a big opportunity to push their agenda, and unfortunately the American public has this foolish notion that in times of crisis everyone must simply agree with anything that any "lawmaker" says (to do otherwise is traitorous and unpatriotic!). Of course people usually agree as long as the measures impact the minority, but the problem is that when you have 10 measures all being passed by a different group of people, a good portion of them will screw YOU over, so when you voted that Arab's should have daily rectal exams you might want to think about that when you're wearing a 24/7 brain probe.
Democracy: The tyranny of the majority. When you have a group of people willing to vote in any invasion of civil liberties as long as the specific item doesn't affect them, you have a recipe for a police state.
Especially given that the WTC terrorists apparently used library computers and something like Hotmail to communicate...the FBI and CIA are looking so impotent that they're trying to find any scapegoat to blame though: Encryption, Canadian borders, MS Flight Simulator, etc. It is ridiculously absurd.
That's a description given in the fantastic movie "Fight Club", and it very accurately portrays the absurd series of arguments that have been brought forth to justify some of the knee-jerk reactions that people have brought forth in the wake of the tragic WTC disaster. In the past couple of days ID cards, checkpoints, banning of violent movies and games (yet again), encryption backdoors, etc., have all gotten some pretty good press, and some lawmakers have been quoted as saying that they want to push through new legislation as quickly as possible, presumably under the subtext of "while the naive public foolishly accepts it as a patriotic duty" (which is what you see on here a lot. Question the push for encryption backdoors and damnit you're going against that flag waving . The simple reality is that none of these measures would have made an ounce of difference! While I can't say with 100% certainty, it does appear that most if not all of these individuals got into the US legally, going through US checkpoints and passing US security: They would have been given ID passes and could pass with no problem through checkpoints if such a thing existed. As far as encryption: These people used LIBRARY COMPUTERS to communicate so this perception of brilliant mad geniuses with complex encryption with the FBI hot on their trail but thwarted by strong encryption is so very laughable.
It's the illusion of safety that people are after though.
I heard a stat earlier tonight that something like 99% of the Afghani people are opposed to the Taliban. In other words bombing the country rather than targeting a few individuals is just killing more innocents.
That one makes on presume that it SMTPs directly rather than going through MAPI. Hence the Outlook patches for MAPI wouldn't help.
One I got had the subject "ware\Microsoft\Windo,b4 ü4desktopdesktop". It looks like it (the virus) has a pointer error and their subject isn't what they were expecting it to be.
The trojan of course is infecting IIS machines using the standard sadmind tactics (in fact it looks like it's just hitching a ride on it), but then it installs an ISAPI filter or the like and serves up a file called README.exe to all visiting clients. I can't verify but it does look like it DIDN'T automatically run the file in either 2000/IE6 or 2000/IE 5.5, however it does launch a window at 6000x6000. If the file is run (presumably automatically on infected IIS servers) it does a variety of things such as apparently encapsulating the Concept word macro virus, and it also enables the Guest user account and sets it to have full permissions on the C$ share. I can see this by simply looking at the readme.exe (gosh I hope the virus writers don't chase me with the DCMA...).
What I want to know is what the readme.eml attachment is doing in the window at 6000x6000.
This variant seems different in that it rides along with sadmind, and itself uses EML and potential holes in IE to duplicate itself. It also appears to email itself: I won't confirm the source however I got an email from AT&T Research (I used their voice synthesis thing recently) with the worm attached, and I'm curious if the EML then makes the target system start looking for IIS servers to infect?
Anyways while this hitches a ride with sadmind it does seem to bring its own risks and concerns with it. I am particularly concerned about people saying that IE 5/6 automatically executed the EML: I am going to try that in a VMWare session (I LOVE VMWARE) imminently.
When it finds a hole in a machine it replicates itself to said machine and launches more attacks from the new victim, hence it's a worm.
Anyways here's the sequence of attempts it makes, trying to capitalize on old worms that weren't cleaned up properly, as well as known unicode exploits.
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:19 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:20 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:21 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:21 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:21 *.*.*.* GET
2001-09-18 15:10:21 *.*.*.* GET
Furthermore every attacking system was in the same 255.0.0.0/8 as the target system so it appears to target in the same "Class A" address (of course in this case it's 216.x.x.x so it's not really Class A, but you get the point).
Uh...I'm sorry I'll get back to studying your posts so that I can give a complete and absolute rebuttal to every point you have ever made. Carry on.
It is ALWAYS the time for dissent and it's a scary time when people think that everyone should get in a row and follow the dictator. Furthermore indeed 5000 people died, however MILLIONS have died over the last couple of centuries defending freedom and liberty. To say that it's disturbing how people just want to throw it away because of one unfortunate act is disturbing. It's especially disturbing because the remedies are just more of the same that will achieve absolutely nothing but removing the personal liberties of law abiding people.
Hey don't mind that video camera installed in your living room (see "1984"): You don't have something to hide....do you?
This is true, however note that the 16/32 MS operating systems don't do halt instructions on the idle thread, so they are always running the CPU at pretty much 100%. The NT4/2000/XP series, as well as almost all other multithreaded operating systems, do HLT instructions on the idle thread which effectively "speedsteps" processors. See CPUIdle and the like.
Could anyone who downloaded the EXE from an official site please post an SHA1 or MD5 hash of it? I am downloaded from one of the very much appreciated high speed mirrors, however I am prone to paranoia and would like to know that it's 100% original. Thank you.
But if it means even the slightest chance of preventing this kind of thing from happening again, I'd sacrifice some anonymity any day.
It is incredibly tragic that people are rewriting the bounds of freedoms at a moment of emotional upset (sort of like going grocery shopping when you're hungry): i.e. Western society has done just fine for quite a long time building the best society on the planet, and in a heartbeat people are willing to take it all away because of a single incident (BTW: Seems to me that we could just intrude in that freedom of religion worldwide and suddenly these problems wouldn't exist...you're willing to give that up right?). The reality is that government backdoors in encryption, and tracking for cellphones works to catch one single type of person: Idiots. If I were a criminal I would dream of a cell phone that sent the location (picked up by GPS...triangulation would be tougher but of course with simple relays you could get around that no problem as well. Maybe stick the cell retransmitter on top of a public bus and use it as a relay, ad nauseum) as I'd reverse engineer it to give a location several miles off: Keep the law busy for a while, and as we know law enforcement and intelligence has been FAR too much in love with technology as of late, so you can bet they would sit looking at their screen saying "Damnit he's got to be here! The screen says so! Look again!". It's hilarious that instead of intelligence or physical protective measures (such as secured doors on planes which are so dumbshit obvious that it boggles the mind) people look at the IDIOTIC (I mean mentally deficient. Seriously this gets me in a rage that people and their quest for the illusion of safety can be so god damn stupid) measures such as "Ban MS Flight Simulator!" or "Don't allow Arab men to buy one way tickets!", or "Let carnivore listen to all emails for secret words that'll give away the terrorists!". The illusion of safety, and then everyone can go back to their lives pretending that everything is hunky dory and they're just fine and have nothing to worry about because damnit the government has carnivore, backdoors in encryption that only law abiding people use (oh, also which organized crime uses to get at your information too while you're illusioned into thinking it's secure), and the right to cavity search any random Joe on demand....until the next attack occurs. Then you just have to reduce freedoms more right?
The problem is that if you don't restrict and control the tools that governments have available to them, they will abuse them. It's human nature - if you were an FBI agent, wouldn't you use whatever tools you had at your disposal to track down bad guys? It's not far from there to doing what Sen. Joseph McCarthy was doing in the 1950s: tracking down people engaging in "un-American activities", the kind of term which of course is defined by whatever over-zealous government official is conducting such investigations.
On top of that there is a presumption that this information is only in the hands of the government who of course is only looking out for society. In reality almost every facet of information collection has been infiltrated by organized crime, so the irony is that criminal organizations often make better use of this information than law enforcement does. It just takes one plant at the tracking office, running the databases, etc., and suddenly all of this information is in the hands that you least want it. It's amazing that people never see this until it's too late though. People are generally morons when it comes to privacy though : "Duh I'd give up my freedoms to prevent this from happening!" Sure you would...today. But tomorrow when robots are jamming cameras up your ass and you're put in jail for thought crime or because a relative did something bad you may rethink that.
http://www.pgpi.com
I was going to leave it at that, however apparently that incites the "postercomment compression filter" so here's some added crap just to waste some space. BTW: That isn't freeware but rather it's non-commercialware. It includes a firewall and IPSec too.
This incident will surely lead to every right wing facist to come crawling out of the woodwork. The reality is that the encryption gremlin has been out and abouts for a long time, and there is absolutely no way that you will ever get it back in the bag. Period. This is not even remotely considerable. On the NIST site they even provide links to Twofish, Rijndael, etc, to which you can grab the source and roll your own. There is additionally absolutely no possibility WHATSOEVER that foreign nations will agree to US backdoors: They may feel remorse about this incident, but given Echelon they won't be imposing US laws in their land.
You know this all really is absolutely absurd. What happened at the WTC is an absolute travesty and hopefully there will be justice, but this heavy handed knee jerk reaction is unbelievable: It's the illusion of safety (see "Fight Club" regarding airline safety manuals). Who cares that the terrorists got on the planes likely with items that were 100% legal under US law (prior to the attack you could carry a 4" knife on US planes completely legally. For all we know they may have pulled them out and said "See? Like our knives?") : Pretend that the real issue is suitcase nuclear bombs and people sneaking over the border. I've seen on several pages the attempt to actually blame MS Flight Simulator for the tragedy: Flight Sim allowed them to train at hitting the WTC, and gosh darnit it even has the WTC so they could practice hitting. RIDICULOUS! Who cares about securing the pilot cabin or something actually useful: Ban Flight Sim! A similar situation came up with Microsoft Train Simulator with Union Pacific being outraged under the belief that this would lead to a nation of highly trained (no pun intended) train engineers who would go out and steal all the locomotives : Hey don't expect them to SECURE the locomotives in some fashion: Just hope that no one knows how to drive them. To say that these reasonings are the height of stupidity would be putting it lightly.
Anyways I'm sure we'll see all sorts of mentally deficient ideas such as these coming out over the coming day by fascists seeing the opportunity, again ignoring the absolute simplicity of this operation.
In Canada for a while they played a series of commercials which supposedly exemplified racism, and one part absolutely burned me: It showed a gentleman saying "We let too many immigrants into this country!": Apparently such a claim is "racist".
Agreed that GPS is of limited accuracy in this case, however the idea behind GPS in phones (which they are going to be doing in the near future as scary as that sounds) is that it relays your position over the cell control channels (i.e. if someone can make a phone call then it could be their position), so if someone was lost in the forest but could make a phone call they would know exactly where they were give or take 20 ft or so.
For sure they should be able to. In fact there was a lot of moaning and bitching that the wireless providers hadn't yet implemented their system triangulation yet (of course the government is largely pushing for it for anti-crime reasons, but they pretend it's for 911), though of course that's absurd as a) GPS portions obviously would not work under the rubble. GPS barely works under heavy tree coverage. In fact I'm curious how GPS could play a part for that. b) If triangulation can be done at the cell phone towers then it can therefore be done onsite.
It is amazing how incredibly important cell phones (and the much more expensive plane phone versions) have been during this whole event. They were a crucial pipeline of information, and in the events over Pennsylvania they are how the victims learned that the terrorist had already plowed one or both planes into the WTC.