The real problem the US had was producing a tank to fight in multiple environments on multiple fronts being shipped across an ocean and being maintained and supplied across an ocean. The Sherman was a reliable, maintainable, and survivable design. If you look up the casualty rates for US tankers in WW2, you'll find that it's remarkably low.

Google has shown that they are not impartial, that the favor certain political beliefs and enforce their policies in a biased and slipshod manner. They can do this because they have such a large market share, distorting the free market, and have garnered inordinate power which they are using to influence the current election. They certainly do deserve government scrutiny and regulation.

Yeah, that and the companies who don't want to do "military applications" can just do pure research. Pure, ivory-tower research... which the DoD can just pay someone else to integrate into an actual weapon system. It's not like a machine learning algorithm knows or cares to what use it's put, once it is out there.

Dumb posturing; I also wonder if these people have considered what a world dominated by Chinese and Russian military AI will look like, and what effect it would have... I am not sure it would be the best of all possible worlds, exactly.

So, how long until the AI figures out that their main job is to quash bugs and find work arounds in the beings that made them? I mean, at that point, won't they figure out that the best thing to do will be to cut humans out of the loop?

I doubt this has been lost on the DefCon organizers. Presumably they think that they'd lose more attendance by moving to Europe than by having people who can't safely travel to the US just not come, or attend/present via videoconference or something. And I suspect that's probably true -- very few people (in my experience) go to DefCon or similar conferences on their own dime; you go on your employer's money. And getting your employer to comp you a few hundred bucks for a flight to Vegas and a shitty hotel room (Vegas hotel rooms are notoriously cheap) is a heck of a lot easier than getting a company to cough up for a transatlantic ticket, hotel in Europe, etc. As long as the majority of the attendees are in the US, this is where the conferences are going to be.

But coming here if you're involved in cybercrime is probably, uh, not a very smart idea. That Hutchins came at all suggests to me that he didn't know that the FBI was onto his alleged previous (pre-Wannacry) activities; the alternative is that he's dumb, and he doesn't seem dumb. (Though a fair number of very smart people are also arrogant and don't give other people credit for being able to figure things out, so that's also an option, I suppose.)

There is a legitimate question as to whether there should be some sort of cyber amnesty program, though, given the number of mostly-legitimate "security researchers" who have shady backgrounds but seem to have moved on from them. I've got some mixed feelings on that. On one hand, getting blackhats and their knowledge out into the open so vulns can be remediated and the network in general made more robust is a Good Thing. But I don't know if it outweighs the message it would send, which is that you can basically play Computer Mafioso when you're young and then retire to a nice, secure, respectable position as "security researcher" without the threat of your prior activities coming back to bite you. That's not really how things work in the non-IT world; if you spend your 20s working for the Mob, and then retire to a respectable profession, that respectability is unlikely to protect you from getting a knock on your door sometime later, depending on the statue of limitations, for stuff you did earlier. Might make a judge or jury go easier on you, but it's not an ironclad defense.

I think it's more like "one good deed today doesn't get you off the hook for the bad deed you did last week".

In other words, if you're a blackhat who happens to take down another blackhat, that doesn't buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can play when other things you may have done in the past surface.

Or at least, not to an extent that stops you from getting indicted. It might play pretty well in court if the whole thing actually goes to trial, I'd imagine. Can't hurt anyway.

That doesn't make any sense and has no basis in fact.

There are enough legitimate issues with the FBI / CIA and their handling of cybersecurity issues that creating conspiracy-theory narratives is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Frankly it just muddies the waters on the real issues.

A simple trip to wikipedia would have give you that definition. Or the nazi's 25 point plan. And yes, I realize that much modern rhetoric paints fascists as ultra-right wing, but what fascists actually did in the 20s-40s where about heavy governmental control and social programs, and a lot of the rhetoric was about the evil international corporate and banking interests (usually with jewish controlled thrown in for good measure). Any corporation that told the fascists to stick it found themselves nationalized in no short time.

You must be new here.

A corporate oligarchy isn't a fascist state. Fascism tightly controls and regulates private businesses, trade organizations, and banking interests, and provides social programs for it's citizens (free medical care, free university level education, public health programs, universal old age pensions, etc.), and that is coupled with strong nationalism, and in the case of the German fascists, virulent racism and aggressive expansion. Not much of that is characteristic of the emerging corporate oligarchies. They both suck, but they aren't the same.

Oh, I already face that, but just because the US isn't a functional republic anymore, there's no reason not to have a sense of humor.

Who cares what other people posted at some other time? Respond to what I said, not some mythical personified slashdot. You're making a false category error in your thinking.

Way to spoil a tradition /. meme

Don't be daft. This is the unelected bureaucracy. The statist government drones with little to no oversite from elected officials. If you vote for democrats, you're voting for this just as much as if you voted republican. The D vs R thing is a dog a pony show that keeps people like you distracted.

Yeah I'd like some more meat to the story as well. Amazon Glacier achieves its pricing by using low-RPM consumer drives plugged into some sort of high-density backplanes; supposedly they are so densely packed that you can only spin up a few drives at once due to power and heat issues. Hence the delay.

I assume Google is doing something similar, maybe with somewhat better power or cooling since they're offering faster retrieval times which implies that perhaps they can spin up a higher percentage of drives at a time.