Everywhere this psychopath goes, ...

Why is Slashdot giving this guy a forum?

Because they can?

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(For those not familiar with psychopathy, that's a psychopath joke. It's funny, laugh.)

An observation more than a question, but feel free to comment (especially if you have information on the subject).

Starting shortly after your Belizian adventure I've noticed a rash of radio advertising, touting Belize as a tax haven and secure retirement site for those ith substantial assets, and trying to sell land to them. These adds always strike me as funny.

Since their authorities went after you, has Belize suffered a sudden drop in interest as a "safe haven" for the retiring well-off, or perhaps an exodus of others already there?

otherwise known as "learning sociopathic manipulation"?

An occultist I knew (now on the "other side", unfortunately) considered charisma to be a form of Black Magic: mind control of others to get them to do things for the charismatic that would not be their reasoned choice and might be enormously harymful to their own interests.

Having said that, it's clear that a lot of nerds are so far at the other end of this arms race that they need substantial help to be able to hold their ground against the Pointy Haired among the boss class. It's refreshing to find that it is learnable, and that nerd/tech techniques can be applied to understanding and controlling it.

Look out world: After a few years of application of the psychological equivalent Moore's Law, you might see an explosion of technocrats from the tech incubator enclaves like Silicon Valley.

And look out techies: If the above meme starts circulating among the current powers that be, you might see a burst of government interventioin in and suppression of the tech enclaves.

Wait, Homeopathy is like vaccination????

Yep.

For a long time allergists and allergy desensitization treatments were disparaged by much of the medical community because of the procredure's similarity to Homeopathic treatments and theory.

Does it cause Autism?

Nope.

Neither, apparently, does vaccination. If I recall correctly: The research claiming to show that was sponsored by trial lawyers, many attempts were made to replicate it but they all failed, the journal which published it (and, eventually, even the doctor who performed it) withdrew it. Vaccines have some risks and downsides, both from the active ingredients and the preservatives, but apparently autism is not one of them.

Of course, after all the publicity, there are plenty of people who still believe in a vaccine/autism connection. Just as there are still people who believe in autointoxication and that a lack of "regular" daily bowel movements sickens people - a theory that was heavily pushed by the US government during WW I, when it was covering up the spreading of the influenza epidemic by its refusal to "hamper the war effort" by minimizing movement of infected troops among US bases at home.

So they can distribute "Bill of Rights" posters with the Second Amendment deleted?

... apparently people are still using Facebook.

Well, they were two years ago. From TFA:

Riley was 13, in sixth grade, when she posted on Facebook two years ago that she hated a school hall monitor because she was mean.

Letting such agorithms compete seems an excellent reason to encourage, rather than reject by law, ride-coordination services like Uber and Lyft.

Taxi licensing laws aren't about giving the CUSTOMERS good service. They're about limiting competition so the licensed cab owners have a regulated oligopoly that limits competition and keeps the prices higher than market-clearing.

It's much like the laws limiting car sales to dealers that are giving Tesla such a problem.

This is crony capitalism at its most blatant.

Heck, you don't even have to dig that deep to realize that an atom does not resemble the solar system, even though both have small things orbiting a large central mass.

Actually electrons DON'T orbit nuclei. What they do is more akin to being standing waves surrounding them. With the opposite charges on the electrons and the nuclei, if they orbited in the classical mechanics sense they'd continuously emit electromagnetic radiation and the orbit would quickly decay. This is part of what put physicists onto the track of quantum mechanics.

It's one of the big differences between the nanoscopic world where quantum mechanical effects become obviously far larger than the classical mechanics approximations they approach at large scales in incoherent bulk material.

I'm curious about which patents are being asserted. The news items somehow never get around to listing the patent numbers or describing them.

(I worked for a router company when Nortel was sinking and suing everybody who did anythig with SONET for infringement, in a desperate attempt to come up with enough money to avoid going under. Very much like a drowning person dragging others down. Some of my inventions (including patented ones) were in a chip that had something to do with SONET, so I (and other designers on the project) were called in to explain how the way WE did things didn't infringe these particular paptents. My stuff didn't infringe, IMHO, though I don't know about other people's. Nevertheless, the company settled the suit by cutting a cross-license deal (incuding paying them a few million because Nortel had more patents).

[Parent poster talks of ONE of his many anti-gun (i.e. anti-gun-in-private-hands) projects.]

Prohibition of something means the illegal providers of it have less competition and can thus sell for a higher price. So it's very convenient for those sellers. Thus, for instance, drug lords are just fine with keeping the drug laws strong and complex, and opposed to legalization of their product (which would put them in competition with efficient conglomerates who could compete the pants off them).

(Incidentially: I suspect Yee's opposition to video games was a spinoff of his antigun agenda.)

By the way: Pro-gunners are celebrating tonight. (The call from a friend a few hours ago with the news made both my wife my own day. B-) )

... people fully EXPECT the NSA to be upto nasty secret snooping habits. That is actually the minor part of the story that caused the outrage. The more dangerous fact is that the NSA can demand companies or individuals turn over data to them and impose a gag order thus forcing them to keep it secret.

I agree that the latter IS a big problem. But I don't agree that it's the ONLY problem, or the only BIG one.

National Security Letters are still relatively narrow compared to what the NSA did. They also tapped the fibers Google and others used to communicate with each other, and used these taps to snoop everything that went across them, without Google's knowledge.

I encountered a Google engineer with job responsibilities related to that at a conference last year, and he was LIVID. They'd tapped fibers OWNED BY GOOGLE - trespassing and damaging them (aong with Google's credibility) in the process - with no letters, warrants, wink-wink-nudge-nudge, or what-have-you. Google has since been installing encryption thorughout it's network - not just where it leaves the building, but even from rack to rack.

Maybe they're still stuck disclosing SOME stuff. But at least they're trying to know what it is, do their best to minimize it (and protect their model), and avoid inadvertently firehosing EVERYTHING into the maw of the NSA.

She is making a dangerous assumption that if tax revenues increased the extra would be spent on schools

THANK you! That is beautifully expressed. It should be instantly understood by anyone hearing pro-tax propaganda by Lewis or others in a debate or comments-allowed-publication setting.

It's a prototype for similar arguments for raising taxes allegedly for other purposes as well.

They made their bathroom walls out of glass and then complained that he was a peeping tom for setting up a webcam from across the street. Scuzzy? yes, but not illegal.

It varies by state. But...

Pointing a webcam at an uncovered bathroom or bedroom window generally IS explicitly illegal. It will get you busted and into the registered sex offender database.

IANAL but if I undersand this correctly the test is whether the peeped-at has a "reasonable expectation of privacy".

In the all-glass bathroom case you might claim that the bathroom user did not have a reasonable expectation. But what if the switch from opaque walls to glass was made by a contractor and the homeowner was blind? That's the kind of situation we have here, and the accused knew it.

Once upon a time, decades ago, the built-in permission systems of computers were also usually considered (by their users and administrators, before the law got involved) to also assumed to be a presumed-valid expression of intent. My preference would be to have this approach recognized in law - if only to avoid slippery-slopes between users and jail, and to put any blame for security flaws like this on the people designingn and deploying the tools. But then things happened (like WiFi access points being shipped with security features off to reduce service calls by new users), and the law has been going a different way.

The BIOS has bare back access to the hardware. Why cant it log the keyboard and dump it out the Ethernet? Why cant it access the ram directly?

Built-in threats include more than just BIOS. At least one, and probably most, chip makers build in backdoors that do exactly what you describe, and much more. It's built right into the silicon, too.

Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)

One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).

Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.

You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.

If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.

Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):

Hardware-based AMT features include:

amt.feature:Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.

amt.feature: Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall on an open LAN to establish a secure communication tunnel (via AMT) back to the IT console. Examples of an open LAN include a wired laptop at home or at an SMB site that does not have a proxy server.

amt.feature: Protected Audio/Video Pathway for playback protection of DRM-protected media.

Additional AMT features in laptop PCs

Laptops with AMT also include wireless technologies:

michael@shuttle:~/nomad-michael/letters$ cat amt.feature
Modern laptops and desktops come with remote administration tools built into the chips on the board. (The vendors tout this as a feature, simplifying administration of a large company's workstations. It's easier and cheaper to build it into everything than to be selective, so it's in the machines sold to individuals, too.)

One example: Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) and its standard Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), the latter standardized in 1998 and supported by "over 200 hardware vendors". This is built into the northbridge (or, in early models, the Ethernet) chip).

Just TRY to get a "modern laptop" (or desktop), using an Intel chipset, without this feature.

You can't disable it: Dumping the credentials or reverting to factory settings just makes it think it hasn't been configured yet and accept the first connection (ethernet or WiFi, whether powered up or down) claiming to be the new owner's sysadmins.

If the NSA doesn't know how to use this to spy on, or take over, a target computer, they aren't doing their jobs.

Some of the things this can do (from the Wikipedia articles - see them for the footnotes):

Hardware-based AMT features include:

Encrypted, remote communication channel for network traffic between the IT console and Intel AMT.

                Ability for a wired PC (physically connected to the network) outside the company's firewall on an open LAN to establish a secure communication tunnel (via AMT) back to the IT console. Examples of an open LAN include a wired laptop at home or at an SMB site that does not have a proxy server.

                Remote power up / power down / power cycle through encrypted WOL.

                Remote boot, via integrated device electronics redirect (IDE-R).

                Console redirection, via serial over LAN (SOL).

                Keyboard, video, mouse (KVM) over network.

                Hardware-based filters for monitoring packet headers in inbound and outbound network traffic for known threats (based on programmable timers), and for monitoring known / unknown threats based on time-based heuristics. Laptops and desktop PCs have filters to monitor packet headers. Desktop PCs have packet-header filters and time-based filters.

                Isolation circuitry (previously and unofficially called "circuit breaker" by Intel) to port-block, rate-limit, or fully isolate a PC that might be compromised or infected.

                Agent presence checking, via hardware-based, policy-based programmable timers. A "miss" generates an event; you can specify that the event generate an alert.

                OOB alerting.

                Persistent event log, stored in protected memory (not on the hard drive).

                Access (preboot) the PC's universal unique identifier (UUID).

                Access (preboot) hardware asset information, such as a component's manufacturer and model, which is updated every time the system goes through power-on self-test (POST).

                Access (preboot) to third-party data store (TPDS), a protected memory area that software vendors can use, in which to version information, .DAT files, and other information.

                Remote configuration options, including certificate-based zero-touch remote configuration, USB key configuration (light-touch), and manual configuration.

                Protected Audio/Video Pathway for playback protection of DRM-protected media.

Additional AMT features in laptop PCs

Laptops with AMT also include wireless technologies:

                Support for IEEE 802.11 a/g/n wireless protocols
 

                Cisco-compatible extensions for Voice over WLAN

This just happens to be one I'm familiar with. I don't know whether (or which) other chip makers (such as AMD) have similar "features" built in as well (though I'd be surprised if they didn't, since they want to sell into big companies, too).

Credited in the titles as "55MPH Briefcase", but I don't think Jittlov ever got it going that fast.

Didn't he call it "killer" or something like it, because it was so difficult to control, especially on that down-the-hill run?

(I thought of it, too, buit posted following up something early in the discussion before seeing the WoSaT posting.)