I'm playing devils advocate in this post and trying to get you non gun owners to see how unreasonable you are being when you tell gun owners what they should be allowed to buy and own.

Every year there are FAR more deaths caused by automobiles than firearms can even begin to touch. But do we blame the 80 year old who is probably too old to drive and hit the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and mowing down dozens of people in the process? Or do we blame the dangerous automobile which in the hands of the inept, or the maniacal, allows a normal human being to become an unstoppable killing machine.

Imagine instead of a school shooting, the debate was somebody driving into a crowded market and running dozens of children over. And in response to this, instead of seeing it for the singular act of craziness it is, the politicians and non car owners go up in arms saying that cars are dangerous, and no reasonable person could ever need a car with more than 60 horsepower because the speed limit is 55-70mph in most states. Then New York passes a landmark law that bans all sports cars, all trucks, and mandates that no car can have more than 60 horsepower or a gas tank that can run for more than an hour so that people cannot go on long police chases.

Now imagine, as a car owner, having these people telling you that YOUR car is the reason for the tragic mowing down of little kids, not the stupid driver, but the car itself and then further imagine that the politicians and non car owners start trying to tell you that nobody needs a car with more than 60 horsepower or an hour of gasoline.

That is exactly what is happening right now to gun owners. The same way that you might like to drive something more than an econobox because it's fun, and you like sporty cars, some gun owners like exotic guns, and semi automatic rifles. You don't like faster cars because you think you're going to drive in the Indy 5000 some day any more than some gun owners like assault rifles because they think they might need to fend off armed attackers.

Except that you may never be exptected to drive in a professional racecar race but it's absolutely important to the freedom of your country that you should be able to arm yourself to fend off all attackers foreign AND DOMESTIC. The reason we have the right to bear arms is to defend our nation from all tyranny, whether it be a corrupt government or a foreign invader.

As many people have stated, assault rifles make up less than 1% of firearm deaths every year. Mass shootings happen incredibly infrequently and they are the fault of deranged individuals. If I needed to kill dozens of people I wouldn't need an AR15, I'd just need to point the front end of my car into a crowd of people.....your car is more of a killing machine than any rifle, and everybody has one.

Society operates on trust. Trust that the other people you meet arn't trying to do you harm. This is the only way our society can operate. If we operated on the assumption that everyone was trying to do us harm, we could never leave our houses, we could never do business with each other, socialize, work with each other, in effect society would cease to exist. The fact that mass murders sometimes occur is a small price we sometimes pay for having an open society built on trust. Inevitably some people will betray that trust, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't trust each other, it means some people are despicable.

How to win at terrorism, attack people, and instead of blaming you they blame each other. Instead of punishing you, they punish themselves. Instead of taking away your freedom by putting you in prison, they take away their own freedoms. This is how terrorism wins folks.

Blame the asshole who pulled the trigger, not the weapon they chose and definitely not the people who also use those weapons. Think about the killing power of an automobile the next time you are driving past a school crossing full of children. Trust.

And for the record, you don't even have a constitutional right to own and operate an automobile but you do for owning and using firearms.

The Register UK website has picked up this story now several days after my submission. YOu may read it here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/04/ubisoft_gaming_account_hijack_caper/

If you find yourself facing down the droid, don't let your wookie use it for target practice and it will not self destruct!

I have worked on GSM networks for a living for over a decade and I am calling BS on this yellow editorial.

What the author is suggesting is the wireless equivalent of hacking by Physical Level Access. No OS in the world can be 'secure' if you gain physical access to the machine it's running on. The idea that somebody can deduce your name and address, drive to your residence and get your mobile to attach to their pico cell for purposes of mining your data is ludicrous.

1. IMSI is nothing special. It is nothing more than the entry the Home Location Register (HLR) uses to store information about your profile. Information like which Visitor Location Register (VLR) you are attached to, if you're roaming, what your phone number (MSISDN) is etc.

It does NOT contain any information about you, your name, your home address, your billing etc.
In order to view the IMSI profile in the HLR you would have to hack into ATT, Tmobile etc cellular network, know where to find the HLR's IP, how to log into it, and what commands to run to query the subscriber profile. Even if you did all that all you'd get out of it is a phone number......

There are MULTIPLE levels of security to secure the cellular network from unauthorized users gaining access to the switching equipment.
Firewall, VPN, Sitekey, multiple levels of logins and passwords requiring passing through multiple un NAT/PAT subnets.

If you had that kind of access you could do far more than look up somebody's phone number.

2. Even if someone had your IMSI, and knew where you lived, and set up a pico cell to try to trick your phone..... Your phone would not authenticate to the pico cell without a proper KI value. The KI is not something you can just look up and copy. Even having your IMSI, they can't get around the fact that GSM is encrypted and they don't have the key.

They would also not be able to make your mobile hand over to their pico cell because there is no handover to that non existant BTS in the Base Station Controller or BSC. Phones don't just attach willy nilly to any old radio signal.

3. If a person wanted to go through that much trouble to find out info about you they might as well break into your home and replace your Iphone with one that has spyware preinstalled, it would be FAR EASIER than trying to hack/spoof the network.

And lastly your IMSI, MSISDN, SIM, KI, CCID, IMEI, any of that stuff does not link to your name, home address, or your account. That information is on the customers billing network, usually handled by a 3rd party vendor. Gaining any of that information would require hacking yet another set of computer systems.

In summary.

1. Your IMSI is not a secret someone can use to come after you.
2. The HLR doesn't have any personal identifiable information about you.
3. Someone can't sit out side your house and sniff all your secrets by tricking your phone.
4. There are much easier ways to do these things if they really wanted your information. You are much more likely to be keylogged and exposed by using trojan software.

1. Phone carriers carry huge costs associated with their infrastructure.

ATT is not just a handset, it is a network, a series of hundreds of switching centers, hundreds of thousands of radio sites, support infrastructure etc etc. One does not simply "buy them out".

2. Say you had several billion dollars and convinced ATT to walk away from their cash cow, Do you then have any idea how much money it costs to operate that infrastructure?

Mobile carriers have small margins. The only real profit they make is from value added services like data and various subscriber options. It's a thin margin business unless you do it in high enough volume and with an existing infrastructure.

ATT doesn't want to spend money expanding their networks to support more data, it's not going to get them new customers or make the existing ones pay more. So they get to profit by squeezing as many mobiles on as they can and make the consumers use less bandwidth by charging them an arm and a leg for doing more than checking email.

Think of it like this. If ATT were an airliner, it wouldn't save them money to fly faster jets. The best way they could make money would be to sit people 2 to a seat and make you contractually obligated to fly every month for 2 years with them.

Apple is smarter than that. They are in a high margin business right now selling iphones that cost $100 to make for $300-$600. They don't even have to eat the MFG costs, they just outsource it to China. Apple is lean and mean, they design, others build, you buy, they laugh all the way to the bank. Why would they WANT ATT?

You will not be able to reach it yourself, your wrist just doesn't bend far enough to give you the leverage you need. Your best bet is to get a product from an adult store that is custom made for the job. It will have the angle you need to reach it yourself. Good luck.

When I read about a study like this it really makes me wonder about the people who formed these conclusions. There was a similar debate in the recent past about the female orgasm being fake as well.

I'm going to be frank and if you are easily offended stop reading now.

I'm not a doctor or a sex therapist but I have a girlfriend and together we both have first hand experience with the g-spot. I am not going to debate whether it is a separate nerve bundle or the physiology or lack there of. My argument in favor of it existing is one of experience. Without getting graphic, there are several ways for a woman to reach orgasm, and dependent upon how she is stimulated, it will result in different types of orgasm. Both in intensity, and physical and biological responses such as increased secretions and the color and texture of them.

When the gspot is stimulated and induces an orgasm, the excretions that result are unlike those obtained from any other stimulation. The color is different, and it comes from a different place in the vagina. The smoking gun is that it can not be replicated by stimulating her in any other way than that spot.

My opinion is that there is a nerve bundle that stimulates a woman similar to the prostate on a man, the result of which is a thick white fluid, almost like paste being excreted. Clitoral and vaginal orgasms do not result in this type of excretion.

I'm not arguing the mechanics of the g-spot, only the results. If it were non-existant then the orgasm would be as well, since the orgasm is real the spot must be as well.

You got to love their stance "If people had problems with the church why didn't they take it up with church officials? We have a dedicated department...."

It's like an SS officer saying "If people have problems with the Gestapo why haven't they taken them up with us? We have a dedicated group of individuals that deal with people like them. And by deal I mean assassinate"

Like anybody who's suffered torture is going to complain to their torturers.....

disingenuous

Get a cushion?

That's an analog landline convention. They are talking about 3G which isn't getting to the world the same way a voice call would so there are no channels like there would be for say an analog call at 64kbps trunking and SS7 sent via a signaling link.

I think if you sent so much information you saturated your available bandwidth that any messages not picked up by CALEA also would fail to be delivered. I don't know what 'device' they picked up to do this testing since CALEA is a standard not a box. But I'm guessing that they found a flaw with it, not with the CALEA standard.

PS, and I can tell you from experience it's not uncommon for the voice portion of a call to go to multiple recipients and for an intercept to send data to more than one agency. And at each step of the way it is stored if unable to be sent, and in the last leg before it gets to the agency it's actually archived.

You would need somebody inside of the telco's network with very specific knowledge in order to interrupt an intercept. I think the paper exposes a flaw more with that device than with CALEA.

DMS is just an acronym for a message switch. Ericsson, Lucent, Alcatel, Nokia, Nortel, doesn't matter who makes it, the standards are the same.