If you ever came into contact with any of Gates' code, you would know he was a mediocre coder. Gladwell neglected to mention [SOP for that douchetard] that Gates' mom was on several boards with the IBM CEO, which is how Gates ended up with the greatest licensing deal in human history (DOS), that he hired someone to copy Gary Kildall's CP/M and call it DOS [MS would later pay $1 billion in out of court settlement to the holder of the license to it], and that Gates uncle was VP at First Interstate, where he obtained his original financing.

Otherwise, I agree overall with your comments.

. . . used to say, "It ain't what people don't know, it's what they think they know!"

I've come in contact with at least one super genius that I know of, and it was a most humbling experience. I have solved technical problems which previous companies and persons have spent hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars, to solve, to no avail. Perseverance prevails when intelligence is sometimes lacking . . .

....are "allowed" to cyberjack any Boeing (or other commercial airliner) jet!

Yep. Very much so.

Every once in a while Illiad sticks in a new story line, but it's getting more and more rare. I was just struck by the reference to goatce.cx.

I hereby claim that I have hands, therefore I am able to stab someone. Should I be detained and my property seized because I am ABLE to commit a crime?

Situational.

The government does NOT do jokes about fucking with airplanes.

I guarantee you that if you were walking around an airport with a knife talking about how you COULD stab then you'd be detained. And they'd probably keep your knife.

Until one understands all the ARINC systems aboard, both the Boeing 777 and Airbus, and the satellites (including the Inmarsat satellites), and the avionics systems at control towers are ARTCCs and earth ground stations and VSATS, and the Microsemi FPGAs installed, and the Freescale chips, etc., and the report on the backdoored Actel/Microsemi chips, etc., this nebulous talk is all soooooo much bullcrap from the yahoos. With hardware trojans and hardware malware pre-installed, especially in any or all of the 1,000Microsemi FPGAs onboard a Boeing 777, plus other ARINC items, one cannot begin to fathom just how easy it is for the guilty parties to hack this and other avionics systems, and all others with such chips, etc.

Close to where I live are large intertidal mudflats. Every other summer some tourist drives a brand new four by four out there and gets stuck. And then, of course, the tide comes in. When the vehicles are recovered two or three tides later, they are insurance write-offs - the electrics, interior, and engine are all beyond repair.

You do not want to immerse something complex and expensive in salt water unless you really, really have to.

One of those occasions where I wish I had mod points but don't. Mod the parent post up!

Seawater is extremely corrosive. Engineering the rocket engine to survive sudden immersion in seawater when very hot would add a great deal to the complexity and cost (and probably weight). And that's before you add the cost of engineering the rest of the vehicle to resist corrosion.

Good-bye, Mr. Chips!

(Or, why that missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 is a really, really big deal --- besides the murder of 239 souls aboard.) Onboard flight MH370 were twenty employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a major microchip producer, owner of major fabrication facilities (referred to as foundries in the industry).

Back in 2012, some researchers at an institute connected with Cambridge University discovered a backdoor, at the hardware level, in the Actel/Microsemi chip used for military purposes, designed and manufactured by the Microsemi Corporation. What the authors didn’t mention in their highly technical paper was that these chips are also to be found in ARINC avionics (ACARS: Aircraft Communications and Addressing Reporting System, formerly known as ARINC Communications and Addressing Report System --- plus other avionics communications systems), transponders and the black boxes (flight data recorders, cockpit voice recorders, crash recorders, etc.).

Microsemi chips are produced at Freescale foundries, as well as Freescale chips are also to be found in ARINC avionics, transponders along with a wide range of other industry applications.

It is important to note that the owners of Freescale Semiconductors are the Blackstone Group, the major private equity/leveraged buyout (PE/LBO) firm, and the majority owner, and the Carlyle Group, another PE/LBO firm and a minority owner.

It is also important to note that ARINC (designer and manufacturer of major avionics systems (fly-by-wire) aboard Boeing and Airbus jets was until recently owned by the Carlyle Group, and a portion of ARINC still is, as they moved ARINC’s DoD division over to Booz Allen, the major government intelligence contractor (where Edward Snowden last worked in America), and also owned by the Carlyle Group.

Malaysian Airlines, which may have figured into it, was at that time partially owned by the hedge fund of Lord Jacob Rothschild, long an advisor to the aforementioned Blackstone Group.

The previously mentioned Microsemi Corporation, whose chips are backdoored, or compromised, is managed by James Peterson, CEO and board member. Peterson is one of the sons of Peter G. Peterson, founding member of the Blackstone Group.

Both the process of chipping (purposely introducing defects into chips for cryptographic penetration) and backdoors in chips, dates back to the late 1950s and 1960s.

When the U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, it contained chipped cryptographic communications gear, developed by the NSA at the instigation of the CIA, which the CIA hoped the Soviets would copy, allowing deep penetration by the NSA. Unfortunately, this was around the time of the real defection of two NSA employees (Martin and Mitchell), so after being given the coordinates of the U-2’s air route by previous “defector” Lee Oswald to allow the Soviets to shoot it down, they were now possibly savvy to the covert operation’s agenda.

The first major successful operation involving backdoored chips was supposed to have occurred in the 1980s, when an American industrial controls computer system (SCADA) was sold illegally through a Swiss firm to the Soviets, and resulted in a series of major explosions at their northern Baltic Sea naval installation (chips set to control maximum temperatures of fuels did the opposite).

When a group is seeking to compromise, and therefore control, both the Internet and a wide spectrum of computer hardware applications (communications, transportation, industrial, financial, etc.) the process of chip access is crucial, and to do that covertly it must be done at the chip fabrication point.

Hence the use of, and subsequent disposal (murder), of those Freescale Semiconductor engineers aboard flight MH370. Below is the youtube link to a video from a SAIConference (SAIC, is one of the two government intelligence contractors, the other being Booz Allen), the expert from University College London (who spent years with the GCHQ), explains in general how to hack into a Boeing 777, but then ends with his opinion that it wasn’t hacked into --- unfortunately, he refrains from mentioning who the systems are designed and manufactured by, and also their ownership!

(And by the way, just how many Microsemi FPGAs are onboard the Boeing 777’s systems? 1,000!)

Very crucial data . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Suggested reading: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps3...

Read to the end for a secret revelation.

One for all the various forums, social sites and other crap that is of absolutely no importance to me and if it gets leaked and you use it to log in as me on one of them, you can post comments in my name - omg, the sky is falling.

The problem there is that all it takes is one crap site and an attacker can check all of your "reset answers" (pet's name / mom's name / etc) to see if they can be used for an attack.

One is for sites that I have some stakes in, like accounts in online games and such, where you could do some damage in the sense of destroying something that took me time to create (delete my GW2 characters, I'd hate you for it, but no real damage has been done).

A different password but does it still have the same "reset answers" that the other category does?

And you are depending upon the admins of those sites to correctly secure them and keep them sites secure for THEIR ENTIRE EXISTENCE.

And one I use for sites where you could do some damage that I could probably reverse, but it would take effort and might cause me real-world inconveniences, such as shopping sites where you could order something in my name and I'd have to go and cancel the order or send it back or whatever.

Just about all of the damage can be reversed. It's just a matter of how much time and how much money is lost doing so.

This is about preventing the damage before it costs you time and money.

Your Amazon account should NOT have the same password that your eBay account has. No matter how much you trust either of them.

My PayPal and banking accounts have their own passwords, ...

And they should have their own email accounts tied to them. If someone cracks your GameYouUsedToPlay.com account that should NOT give them the email address you use at your bank.

Now, for the secret revelation!

Passwords WERE once used for security.

NOW they are mostly (99.9%+) used for MARKETING. That is why almost all the sites out there require a unique login. And those sites are very lax with their MARKETING data (your username/password/answers).

Once you understand that (and what information you are leaking when you give it to them) you can make better decisions on how much RE-USABLE information you want to give them.

Think about what the minimum information an attacker would need to access your bank account (either login or social engineering) and then look at how many sites have that information.

It doesn't matter. If someone is cracking your (end-user) password at work then they probably have some other means of attempting it.

1. keylogger
2. some reduction attack
3. pass the hash
4. fake authentication request & server
5. etc

By the time the attacker has copies of the hashes and is trying to use any of the techniques in TFA on them it's too late for you as an end-user.

For non-work websites just remember 2 things:
a. DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD
b. If it is financial, don't use the same username/email-address as other sites.

The problem is that easy to get at fossil fuels are gone. They've already been gotten, and they're not coming back easily.

Yes , that is the correct Syntax.

Will this post without Slashdot requiring me to be human? What is up with slashdot randomly logging me out while I'm typing a post?