People need to get over this notion that next year a car will drive itself and you'll sit in the back with a Martini and the paper. That probably wont happen in our lifetimes

It'll happen during the next decade. Bet against Dr. Moore at your own peril.

(granted, the government will lag 20 years behind the technology, so we'll still have drunk drivers killing people when the autopilots would have been safer)

gosh, it'd be rather un-aerodynamic without the nose-cone. I rather suspect they'll wait to deorbit until the timing is right for the desired landing zone.

Unless there's a crazy-orbit launch with no good rendezvous, in which case landing on a barge is still going to be much cheaper than building a new rocket by an order of magnitude. This is good enough reason to proceed with clearing the patent. That and spanking BO's deserving ass.

Oh, but its people *vanished*. Like freaking David Copperfield.

They didn't die off or move or even, gosh, "left". *Poof* - probably beamed up to the Mayan God's mothership for slave labor.

scientific computing. One of the weak points of OSX

I would have guessed that the high price per unit work for their proprietary hardware would be the limiting factor. Can't you hire for "free" a dedicated linux admin for the cost difference between clusters?

Or is there a specific advantage OSX is bringing to the table? XGrid is long dead, right?

note that they didn't model per-capita ammo supply as an input. Real people aren't going to put two loads of buckshot into the head of a smallpox patient.

agreed (and they know it) - this is probably their 18-month holding pattern while the Israel team gets the power out of Iris. Not having a market position until then is a worse option for them. Not paying a video royalty is obviously better for cost/profitability and developers.

Let me repeat that, in case you appear to misread it. 16,000 airstrikes
I'm not exactly sure how anyone can say we're not "stopping them"

I know if a foreign adversary had launched 16,000 airstrikes on the US, I'd harbor no ill will towards them! Doubly-not if they'd killed my loved ones!

Because people who live in the middle east are the black-haired equivalent to the soulless gingers who roam our strees, except more mindless and probably much-gatherers - amirite?

Oh, wait, did you mean the airstrikes were IMPROVING our safety? ROFL WAFL!

Nokaard (with two dots over the o).

Maybe just 'Discard ' - at least the electronics will fail about the same time as the joinery.

Jesus, NSA contractor - at least register a damn account and build some cred so *somebody* will fall for your propaganda. Do they actually pay you for such phone-it-in worksmanship?

I like Krebs, so DO NOT put him in a position where he has to think about protecting your identity. For the love of all that is holy, boot Tails on a junker laptop at a cafe you never go to and use a throw-away mail account or pastebin it and leave a comment.

Or just walk away. You have no duty to put your life on the line here - everybody who supports the system that will throw you to the lions for being a good guy will suffer for it in kind. You're not obligated to be their saviour. Sucks, but play the shitty hand you're dealt - don't bet all your money wishing you didn't just have a pair of threes.

I'm betting, even in their mom's basement, hardly anyone has time for that.

Time and money are fungible in this case (buy equipment, hire an expert). Rich corporations have time and money to do this. "The People" most certainly do not. Plutocracy managed.

I'm still waiting for the first CEO to go to jail for refusing this.

Dude, you're fourteen years behind the news. The technique is not to get you on the "refusing NSA" charge, but any of the other countless criminal acts you commit every day. This is the primary purpose of a hyper-criminalized environment - so that everybody can be easily bent to the whim of the power structure. See also: charge stacking and the de-facto abolishment of the Sixth Amendment through the plea-bargain process (or, if you're a corporation, the no-plea deal for really efficient fascism.

Seagate is correct. Putting a hash on the website doesn't improve security at all because anyone who can change the download can also change the web page containing the hash. ... A company like Seagate doesn't rely on volunteers at universities to distribute their binaries so the technique is pointless.

There are many possible attacks. A hash on a website is not invulnerable to a rogue employee at Seagate (or one "just following orders").

A hash protects against a rouge insertion at the endpoint. Like if your PC is compromised by an attacker and then you pull the hard drive and [assuming there's a way to get a hash from SMART/ATAPI) you can compare the hash of the firmware that the drive is running to the list of published firmwares at the vendor's site. If the attackers are only modifying a small subset of drives, this works fine - they can't also intercept the check to the vendor's site - not unless they've broken TLS and/or have malware on every possible machine.

A tool to verify the firmware is poetically impossible to write. What code on the drive would provide the firmware in response to a tool query? Oh right ..... the firmware itself.

Well, today you can pull the image from JTAG, or so the experts have said (you can verify the firmware directly from memory with a hash if you have moderate funding). There's all sorts of talk about how ATAPI is write-only for firmware because the vendors don't want their competition to get their code and decompile it. This appears to be nonsense, as any other drive vendor already has the debug tools to pull such things from memory, and extracting it from an update isn't that hard - if a 16K DOS update utility can extract it, so can a multi-billion dollar R&D company.

To make it work you need an unflashable boot loader that acts as a root of trust and was designed to do this from the start. But such a thing is basically pointless unless you're trying to detect firmware reflashing malware and that's something that only cropped up as a threat very recently. So I doubt any hard disk has it.

They most certainly do not. So, here we are at today and need a way forward. There are a few ways forward, a fistful of crypto protocols to choose from to ensure future usefulness of hard drives for security applications, and INCITS/SATA-IO ought to be having emergency meetings _right now_ because this (NSA/GCHQ) is a major threat to the industry. The vendors may need to move operations outside of five-eyes to remain commercially viable.

but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.

Do some traffic analysis on your target's porn habits at the ISP, leave a compromised disc about his favorite kink in a bag on the ground near where he parks his car, and use his "connected" player to zero-day the other equipment on his LAN, installing the APT without even needing to pretend about premesis warrants or anything.

I will preface this by saying "this is really true" because you probably would otherwise read it as a nonsense, sarcastic, or glib comment.

I heard a conversation the other day about some of the terrible new buildings at the nearby university. A very senior administrator said (paraphrased), "you need to hire a hot architect and pay him 20% of the project price to come up with some really shocking architecture, to prove to prospective students that the school is still relevant."

I think he was talking mostly about the atrocity that they added to the Medical School, which looks suspiciously like the post-accident Chernobyl reactor. The "architecture" part of the project probably added $20M over making it look like a classical higher-ed building. I believe this administrator had final sign-off on such an expense.