If they truly believe that it was the work of a nation-state, there is every reason to think it isn't cleaned up. Stuxnet didn't even reside just in computers. It infected programmable logic controllers attached to centrifuges, and then could re-infect computers on the network after they've been cleaned. If you really believe that Russia, or China has really compromised their network, and you have information that's worth more than a million dollars to them, then you should assume that everything (printers, routers, video-conferencing equipment, everything with a jack, plus the bios of all your computers) may be infected.

People tend to view $170,000 as a lot of money. But it's not. Computers for office workers can easily run under $1000. Hourly labor to clean things may be $50 per hour when you include overhead and benefits. And you're not even sure you got rid of the infection. If you mostly run apps that are resident on hardened servers, use imaging to make it easy to deploy new PCs, and don't have a lot of high end hardware, it may make sense to just replace everything with clean hardware. Honestly, for departments where you do think that there's stuff that sophisticated attackers may want, it may make sense to occasionally do this kind of purge occasionally even if you don't know there's been an attack. Take a look at the Sony Playstation breach for an idea of what getting compromised can cost. It's a hell of a lot more than $170,000.

Now I'm disappointed. When I saw the title, I thought there was gonna be a funny punch line.

At least this one sounds sufficiently evil. "Secured Debt Obligation" sounds like it should be secure. "Credit Default Swap" sounds confusing, and probably not something you would want to mess with ("Why would I want to swap defaults?"). But Dark Pools? That sounds good and evil.

It seems to me that if this works, and you can't get it off, it will probably just get your laptop thrown in a trash bin, or chopped for parts. Mildly satisfying in terms of pissing off your thief, but rather questionable with regard to helping you get your stuff back.

In our city, it depends a lot on how it was stolen. If you left it unattended at a Starbucks and it disappeared, good luck. But if you lost it through a burglary, the cops will often go to the trouble to track it. Same with xBoxes that use Live. Because sometimes when they track one of these, they find an entire garage full of stolen electronics.

Some people mod insightful instead of funny because insightful grants karma, and funny doesn't, IIRC.

I am one of the early beta testers for this project. The satellite went live a few hours ago. And as far as I can tell, it's far, far inferior to the US GPS system. With GPS, I get very accurate longitude and latitude, and coarse altitude location information. All the INRSS system keeps telling me is :

Although they've promised a firmware upgrade that will show you as being somewhere on the circle that represents the intersection of that sphere and the Earth's surface.

Don't be so pessimistic. That's what people said about Sears/K-Mart. I'm not saying it's not a really, really bad idea. I'm just saying don't be pessimistic in general. You know, generally.

People who really think their time is valuable don't overclock. It's a hobby that tries to squeeze the most out of a given $ of hardware. But after you factor in the amount of time you spend messing around with the thing to try to eek out that additional performance, and add in the lost work time caused by unexpected crashes and instability, you're better off just buying the most expensive hardware you can, and replacing it when something better comes along.

That said, the people who do that need to be grateful to the overclocking crowd. There needs to be bleeding edge people finding out what works and what doesn't, such as the great work they've done with cooling technology. The best of what the overclockers are doing today turns into tomorrow's high end mainstream.

Local guys are not going to find someone who transmits from a moving car a couple of times a week for a few minutes each time. If you're doing more than that, then yes, you're putting yourself at risk. But that pretty much goes true for any communications medium. The longer you talk, the more often you talk, the less you move around, the more likely you are to get caught. And, again, the big problem really isn't placing the call. It's where to place the call TO, which is why the feds really want to get all these numbers in the first place.

I know that. But it's become a common term for a government issued phone. If I say a Lifeline phone, people tend to think "I've fallen... AND I CAN'T GET UP!" or something like that. The world is full of commonly accepted terms that don't mean what they sound like they mean. You can fight it, or you can just go with it, and move on with your life.

That's what code is for. Not encryption, code. Talk in codewords. Get a ham license (or better yet, don't get one) then get a 2 meter radio, and move somewhere with an autopatch. That goes a long way towards giving you an anonymous outgoing phone number. And I'm guessing the spooks aren't just standing by to triangulate positions. That shit takes actual work by people, as opposed to harvesting tons of digital communication, which is easily done by computers.

Again, this is assuming that you're up to something nefarious. If you're not, just give up. it's hopeless to try to avoid this sort of surveillance if you want to live like an everyday person. The only way to stop them is to vote in people who say they'll change things (Like Obama?) or overthrow the government. The first option isn't likely to succeed, and the second isn't worth the cost.

And even if you succeed, you're still being watched by corporations all the time.

No. Not in real time. The point is that they can go back in time and see what you did after they've identified you as a person of interest. The government has pretty much said as much. A lot of this apparatus is designed around the idea that the more information they collect, the more they can use one incident (whether it is successful or not) to prevent future incidents by tracking the person back in time and see who else might be connected. Then prevent them from doing anything.

I buy a $10 Obamaphone from a drug dealer that got one in trade for crack. He uses it a few times, then doesn't want it any more. The nice thing is that the crackhead can remember, maybe on a good day, who he gave the phone to. But the drug dealer deals through enough of the Obamaphones that he won't have any idea who he sold that particular Obamaphone to. So the government ends up with two criminals with clear possession of the thing. Assuming I don't do anything stupid like turn the thing on in my own neighborhood, they'll have a hard time making the third jump to me, but are gonna spend a shitload of time checking out dealer and his friends.

Disclaimer: I haven't actually done this, but it seems a lot better than buying phones from staples if you're truly up to something nefarious.

Or get a fucking job?