i second the 'huh?' from the other poster. Apple did grant the USB consortium some patents, but they were not involved with the design of the USB C connector at all. It was developed by a committee, with some fairly major contributions from Google.

So, in other words, these models were specifically made for and distributed by an ISP, and were not off-the-shelf models. The backdoors were there for the ISP managers.

Well, I trust my ISPs router ... well, not at all, actually.

Because I assume my ISP is either incompetent or dishonest, I don't really care which, I simply don't trust them. And I sure as fuck don't trust them with access to my actual network. I want a layer of security between me and their shit, because I assume their stuff is trivially hacked.

My wife and I each have our offices set up where our own router is getting DHCP from the ISPs router, and then firewalling everything from it. We each have our own locked down wifi, and entirely separate networks. I'm pondering a third router to provide the guest wifi.

Other than disabling the ISPs wifi and using our own, I wouldn't even know the SSID or the password for the ISPs crap. I assume they haven't turned it on without asking, but I never check -- come to think of it, I'd have to find out how.

My parents and my in-laws have routers we've bought them to sit behind the crap the ISP provides. Because I know for a fact that in both cases the ISP provides a router with default wifi SSID and passwords which are published in the docs they give you.

Because it's printed in the "how to" for every damned subscriber, and you can't change it, you can pretty much imagine that if you find an SSID of the right name you can connect to it, and probably have management access to it.

For 99% of network users out there, these vulnerabilities are of no practical concern.

But the problem is so many households trust that the wide open, back doored, well known remote-admin credentialed, shitty routers they've been provided with give them any form of security.

Which means for the overwhelming majority of home users who aren't tech savvy and paranoid, these vulnerabilities are absolutely of practical concern ... because their PCs are directly plugged into the ISPs router, or they're using wifi from the ISPs router.

I'm betting a lot of home users figure they have the router from the ISP, so they don't need anything else.

That these are ISP models doesn't diminish the number of people who could be impacted ... it greatly magnifies it. Because most people who don't know better (and a few who do) connect their PC directly to the ISPs router.

Honestly, go talk to a random neighbor .. see if they have anything between them and their ISPs router. My best is they don't.

Almost certainly the case on three grounds.

(1) Getting a serious fusion effort off the ground is fabulously expensive. Even if you have some kind of whizbang micro-reactor concept you need a small army of physicists, engineers and highly skilled fabricators. People who don't come cheap.

(2) Running out of cash is what most startups do.

(3) They probably didn't have as much cash as "everyone knows they have", for the simple reason that the best way to convince someone to give you the mountain of cash you need is to make them thing you've as good as got it from someone else.

I have a feeling that the typical ATX power cable is a much lower gauge than each wire in a USB cable. Or are USB 3.1 cables going to be thicker?

I don't think you fully grasp how the Soviet Russia meme works...

Yeah, sorry, the Pauls take great positions on one or two issues and the rest of them are batshit crazy. That's a reflection of reality, not a conspiracy theory.

That said, I might actually vote for Rand, because I think it's time for the pendulum to swing back to the other end of the spectrum for a while. Not all of the changes will be for the best, assuming he manages to make any, but we really need to take a break from the national security/world police routine.

why the F*ck do u need 10g @ home??

VNC/remote desktop running at 4k resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate?

I didn't think to mention it in my previous post, but a dual-socket AMD Opteron 63xx system might be a reasonable alternative. Opterons appear to be significantly cheaper than Xeons (and in some cases, cheaper than I7s), to the point that you could get a 16-24 core AMD system for close to the same price as a high-end i7 (let alone a Xeon). I have no idea which would win on the benchmarks, though.

By the way, what sort of open-source GIS tools do you use? I occasionally find myself wanting to do GIS-related stuff, but I don't know where to start.

Again, you're conflating two things that are significant enough that I don't see a simple one-to-one comparison here.

The clear difference here is that the trolls in the article are a nebulous entity whereas the media trolls are not. I know to laugh at Glenn Beck and Katie Couric. I know who they are. I recognize their blubbering stupid talking heads. They're a trainwreck of lies and half truths. On the other hand, you can't stop google from returning search results that confirm what you're looking for. When it's a "trending hastag" on Twitter, you can't figure out if it's legit or not. How do I know that podonski432 on Twitter is the same individual on Youtube named ashirefort posting videos of an explosion is the same person retweeting podonski432 and adding ashirefort's video to their tweet?

Mass media doesn't employ subterfuge and I sure as hell can stop reading the New York Post & Washington Times & CNSNews & Huffington Post and all that other drivel. I can't, however, identify easily that this account on Twitter is just the new troll account that tricked me last time.

You do know that it's news if the New York Times is caught lying or spreading known falsities, right? I watched Jon Stewart hold a "reporters" feet to the WMD fire on one of his recent episodes. There's no self-policing mechanism like that among trolls.

Pablo Escobar probably never sold any drugs either, he just put the network in place for other people to sell them and took a percent of the profits.

Well, astroturfing is no new tactic but ... I think what this article deals with is scale. 400 clearly skilled (bilingual at the least) individuals running multiple catfish personalities online day in and day out ... the whole thing on a budget of $400k a month? That level and size is probably unparalleled by ... say, Digg's conservative idiots.

You have one entity orchestrating the 12 hours a day work of 400 individuals on topics that are pro-Russian and tangentially pro-Russian. They are sophisticated enough to "hit play" at a certain time to unfold a natural disaster or assassination or anything to destabilize/confuse a region and they do so over many accounts on multiple social media platforms. They create video, screenshots, websites, etc. And they use proxies and sufficiently sophisticated means to appear to be disjoint at first glance.

They appear to have run an exercise on a rubber plant explosion in Louisiana for no other discernible purpose than to test out their new super powers or demonstrate their abilities to their customers/leaders.

Frankly put, I'm unaware of "American organized political trolling" that rivals this. This is paid. This is tightly controlled. This is prepared. This is unified. American organized political trolling is just a run-of-the-mill monkey shitfight with the occasional Koch Bros/Soros website (usually easily sourceable) thrown in.

Now if you can point me to a faked ISIS attack on American soil right before an election that was done by some political group stateside, I'd be interested to hear about it.

The charges weren't all dropped. He still faces trial in Maryland for one count of murder for hire, and additional drug distribution charges. You can argue that he wasn't convicted, but that's not a condition for consideration in sentencing.

Is anybody pretending that corporations and politicians aren't already effectively doing the same thing?

Only they pretty it up with foundations and think tanks who put out position papers to benefit the talking points of the people paying for them.

Propaganda comes in many forms. And from many sources.

And even some of the people who will be hand-wringing about this propaganda will be endorsing some other stuff.