This guy(who I won't name, you know who you are), was once writing some PHP code for some webapp. Well in app, he had some delete links and he hadn't finished the authentication code apparently, so googlebot crawled is site, followed all of the delete links and completely wiped out his database.

Of course, you can keep googlebot away from your crappy code with robots.txt too...

Not to mention the power systems for the entire DC area are too important to allow any outages no matter how short.

Bahaha...the power goes out in the DC area all the freaking time. Pepco is notorious for power outages in DC. They blame the "dense tree canopy of the city" or something retarded. Ask anyone who's lived there for a while.

The DC metro area has suffered major outages, the remnants of Hurricane Isabel knock out most of the power and water in Fairfax County, Virginia as well.

Anything important in the DC metro area and well everywhere else, is going to have both battery and generator backup power, knowing that grid power can and does fail all the time.

Too important my ass...the power reliability in DC was like living in a third world country.

Ram is considered volatile memory, meaning it loses its info when power is turned off.

Stick a battery on the drive with the RAM instead of flash? You know, battery backed cache is not a new thing. Usually you see it for RAID controllers. There isn't any reason a small battery could be installed with the drive, recharged via the power supply, to keep the ram alive.

Any questions?

Sounds like you still have questions. For one, that is all Linus would have been able to do anyways, the RDRAND instruction isn't privledged.

You'd hope that whatever userspace program, be it openssl etc, would be smart about its usage of the RDRAND instruction. It would certainly need to be, as the RDRAND instruction doesn't exist on every CPU, certainly not a lot of older ones. Most any cryptographic software worth its salt has methods of specify its PRNG source as well.

Random numbers aren't something that should be left to chance.

It's not as simple as just commenting out a few lines of code.

No, it's easier than that. You can simply pass nordrand to the kernel. It was the first thing I saw when I opened up
arch/x86/kernel/cpu/rdrand.c
__setup("nordrand", x86_rdrand_setup);

So there...don't like rdrand, don't use it.

From Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

                nordrand [X86] Disable the direct use of the RDRAND
                                                instruction even if it is supported by the
                                                processor. RDRAND is still available to user
                                                space applications.

Shouldn't we be welcoming RdRand with open arms? It's a mathematically proven high-quality random number generator that lets chips like Ivy Bridge & Haswell produce large amounts of true random data (not a simple PRNG data) at multi-gigabit speeds.

I'm guessing they are implying that the stream coming from RdRand isn't actually random, but perhaps an AES encrypted stream that the NSA has the key for. Not that I've ever seen any proof of that, it seems maybe in the tin foil hat realm..but who knows what hides in intel's microcode?

Then if you don't understand how to make this sort of change, then you aren't smart enough to understand why you should or should not be using RDRAND it in the first place.

You have the source code, remove rdrand from the kernel yourself.

It sure sounds like Microsoft wants to be like Big Blue, making their big bucks in consulting services. It seems to be working out okay for them, I'm not entirely sure Microsoft however can manage not to shoot themselves in the foot in trying it.

It also seems that there is two classes of EPIRBS, the class I activates automatically and the class II which is a manual activated device. If it was a class II device and they went down in a hurry there might not have been time to activate it either. I have no clue which type of device they had onboard.

If anything, it is certainly is a reminder that the ocean is still a very dangerous place.

I just googled a bit for further information about the ship and came across a rather interesting thread: http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/f121/schooner-nina-merged-3-threads-105498.html

It appears the ship is equipped with an EPIRB that hasn't been activated apparently. Perhaps they really are just offcourse and not lost.

This sounds like what these guys were doing: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/06/25/1215246/twisted-oam-beams-carry-25-terabits-per-second

Not sure if its the same groups or not, but pretty much the same idea.

Why wouldn't you just be able to play a video back to it of the subject making the required facial expression?

We do the same with alcohol as well, it's called "denatured" alcohol aka poisoned with methyl alcohol or something equally as toxic. We do it for even a more sinister purpose than abuse control, tax revenue.

I second this..debootstrap is your friend. We don't need no stinking installers! :D