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.)

I want a flying car that folds into a briefcase like George Jetson.

Me, too.

Other "prior art" occurs in the 1988 feature movie version of Jitlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time.

See 1:05:25 throug 1:11:10

Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.

Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.

It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?

The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.

As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".

My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.

The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.

Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)

[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]

Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"

I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.

I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).

The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.

Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.

Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.

To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).

Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,

Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.

While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?

Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)

Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)

Of course, neither political party is anything like they were when Abe was around. In most issues they have swapped position.

Actually, in most places people have been propagandized to THINK they swapped position. But when you look at how they actually voted on various subjects (civil rights laws and Internet censorship, for two of a host of examples) or how the programs they produced actually worked out (The Great Society for just one in a host of examples), expect to find that the alleged swap is mostly smoke, mirrors, and very effective political propaganda.