Interesting article, which (indirectly) raises an even more interesting question:

If China was behind the StuxNet worm, why would they risk undoing all of their careful origin-obfuscation work by subsequently carrying out two high-risk meat-space operations against high-level Iranian engineers?

One possibility is that they simply didn't . Once the worm came to light, some other intelligence agency with a more direct way of handling things may have decided to seize the opportunity to increase the worm's lifespan by eliminating the people most likely to stop it.

If two different parties were behind the worm and the assassinations, TFA's China theory might indeed be plausible.

But Bethesda CAN'T release a new Elder Scrolls game!

Elder Scrolls has always been a single-player series, and single-player is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD! Our lords and masters at EA have said so!

I have to wonder if the 11th would have been so quick to insist that the strictest local community standards apply in every case if non-pornographic material was involved. Hypothetical case in point:

    1) Some particularly radical bastion of liberalism / progressivism (Berkeley, perhaps, or another community with similar values) passes a city ordinance declaring particularly inflammatory anti-abortion speech as "obscene", "inciting to riot", etc.

    2) Arrest warrants are immediately issued throughout the south-eastern US for various high profile clergymen (e.g. Pat Robertson), and other pro-life firebrands as various pieces of inflammatory pro-life literature (e.g. videotapes) are purchased and received by members of the local police.

    3) Said individuals are arrested, extradited to California, tried, convicted, sentenced, and begin their prison sentences.

    4) During this time, they appeal their sentences through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

If the members of the 11th Court suddenly "switched team jerseys" and were sitting on the bench of the 9th Circuit court, would they uphold these convictions?

Using the reasoning they applied against Mr. Little (the defendant), they would. However, if you believe that these same judges would actually choose to follow this reasoning, I have a nice bridge to sell you.

Normally, I would expect that the Supreme Court would (eventually) backhand the 11th for such an egregious violation of the 1st Amendment, but given the recent much-broader-than-necessary ruling on campaign finance reform, I suspect that they'll find a way not to.

No problem. She's "on", he fixes computer & surreptitiously installs the next "problem", set to go off in a couple weeks. She is "grateful", then goes away. He is mercifully left in peace while she is "off".

Next problem surfaces. Wash, rinse, repeat. Properly managed, he should be able to have a rotating schedule of girlfriends who go away after their problem is solved. I'm starting to wonder why the hell I didn't think of this while I still had the chance to put it into practice.

In what universe is it acceptable for vendor A to modify vendor B's software on User C's (i.e. my) computer? To modify it at all, let alone with security-impacting ramifications?

Earth to Microsoft: drive-by downloads are among the worst of vulnerabilities. They must be avoided at all costs. And the way to avoid them is not to be more careful when writing and installing unnecessary little browser plug-ins. The way to avoid them is not to install unnecessary little browser plug-ins in the first place. (And if you simply must install unnecessary little browser plug-ins, do it with your own grotty browser, not the non-Microsoft one I installed specifically to avoid all the security concerns of yours.)

Sheesh.

I (Mike Shaver) am the person who spoke with the person at Microsoft. I'm not going to name them, because that's not my place, but this was not a case of us sticking it to Microsoft -- it was a case of us protecting our mutual users, with their agreement. We're working (today, as I type this) on ways to make the blocklist entry less disruptive for people who have their systems patched up. If we had known about the vulnerability before it was publicly disclosed, we could have done a lot more to make it smooth for users, but timing left us with an unpleasantly reduced set of options.

Chrome Frame was required for running Google Wave (HTML5) in IE. So its not much different than all those Active X plugins you used to have to install to get other things to work back in the "bad old days".

Speak for yourself. My brother-in-law has been in auto repair for years. We swap work all the time, and it works out great.

That statement is consistent with what I heard from Microsoft, though their post has been updated since that conversation. And MSFT has seen that text; if it's not correct, I'm sure I'll hear it from them, and will be happy to correct it. (I wrote the text pretty quickly, since it was late on Friday night and we were getting inbound already from the blocklist addition.) But that's really ancillary to the issue, which is that Firefox users are vulnerable to a problem that we learned about this week, which is labelled as an IE problem/patch. Microsoft and Mozilla agreed that we should block the plugin and add-on to mitigate the risk while we made sure that FF users were going to install that IE patch. This isn't an us-vs-them thing, but I don't know who you're talking to at Microsoft who is saying different things.

drsquare:

You forget that people get an education to become better at something, so your point about a "better Chinese student" versus an American student is somewhat irrelevant. You can't really define what constitutes a "better" student, because the results of which are not seen possibly for decades beyond that education.

Is it a student that studies all of the time? What about students who don't need to study all of the time yet still pass their classes? Is it a student that attends every class? What if you don't need to attend every class?

It can be argued that even if the American student isn't quite as educated or capable in a mental sense as the Chinese student, that the money should still go to the American student. After all, chances are he's going to stay within this country while the Chinese student may or may not have an allegiance to be here. After all, it's a lot easier to come to the US than it is to go to any other country from the US. This includes language.

So you spend our tax dollars to educate some smart Chinese student who has a strong possibility of returning to his home country with his education, versus a student that is more than likely going to stay in the US, providing us with the knowledge he learned.

There are a lot of problems in the US Education system, but this sort of comparison isn't related to any of them.

We do need to think about our future energy needs both with respect to the environment and energy security. What we don't need is silly government micro management of our lives.

I agree here.

So yes that means we need to subsidize nuclear, wind and solar power.

Here I disagree. There should be no subsidies. Let people pay the full cost of the energy they use and they're more likely to be conservative.

The problem is that the greenies block everything.

What's with the FUD?

greenies don't want to allow wind power on mountains in Vermont and New Hampshire even though no-one lives on the top of a mountain.

Here is one who supports geothermal, solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. And most of those I know also support them. Googling falcon geothermal or solar or wind site:slashdot.org you can see where I have repeatedly supported renewable energy. For instance with the " Wind Could Provide 100% of World Energy Needs" thread I posted a number of tymes in support of alternative energy. I have also posted the Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States which details the wind potential of various parts of the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind power to supply the 48 continuous states with power. In some of my posts I posted I supported the Solar Grand Plan. In it they conclude solar energy could "supply 69 percent of the U.S.'s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050."

Falcon

Its doubtfull the next gen systesm are going to go non-media based. The go is nice but it still takes hours to download anything just think how much data will be needed for even blue-ray type games? 10 million people downloading 30 gigs at a time is going to hurt any server:P

I disagree: getting rid of physical distribution and killing second-hand sales with one move will compensate any bandwidth they'll have to pay.

Unfortunately, unless we pass a law that eliminates the ability of Home Owner Associations to deny approval for solar energy devices, these are not likely to become widespread.

I was equating providers making ISPs pay for your content to having ISPs make content providers pay to be seen. You have effectively shown that I was wrong in that understanding.