"The permutations for users to tokens to guessing PINs is still astronomical unless an insider was involved that had access to the securid database."

Maybe. But if you think about it, there are approaches that would only require a lot of attempts, not an "astronomical" number. If you know the username of an employee and whatever Lockheed-Martin's helpdesk uses for verification (last four SSN digits or whatever), you can have their password and SecurID PIN reset. Then just try that PIN with every cloned token in your possession. Trying different PINs with the same token will cause a lockout, but will trying each token once with the same PIN? I'm pretty sure that would go unnoticed, especially if the attempts were made from different proxy servers to mask the source IP all being the same.

It could also be that RSA had network captures or SecurID database backups or something along those lines *from* Lockheed-Martin that were sent in for troubleshooting purposes, and *those* were stolen as well.

"The VISOR detected electromagnetic signals across the entire EM spectrum between 1 Hz and 100,000 THz"

As much as I thought the VISOR was a cool concept (which got me interested in multispectral imaging back when I was a kid), unless I'm doing the math wrong, I think someone just made those numbers up (and I don't mean the Star Trek scriptwriters). 100,000 THz (100 PHz, right?) doesn't even get you all of the way through X-rays, let alone into gamma territory.

Also, is it even possible for something that small to detect radio waves of 1 Hz? That's a wavelength of 300 million meters, according to this calculator.

It's hard to tell for sure because of the depth-of-field effect applied to the rendering (which I imagine was the reason they used that effect), but it seems like the quality of the model drops off dramatically the further you get from looking straight down. In the few unblurred street-level frames I caught of the high-resolution video, it's almost as though I'm looking at a clay model of the city which has had really high-quality texturemaps applied to it.

It's still pretty cool, but I don't think anyone is going to be using it to generate FPS maps to play in. It looks like it *might* be good enough to use as the distant background behind hand-built models of the same location, but again, that DOF blur makes it hard to tell.

They seem to have the texture part down pretty well. Maybe they could add a LIDAR system to the drone to improve the model itself?

When I hear people saying "the next big thing" is people bringing in their own devices, my first reaction is that those people are assuming that using their personal devices will be "better", because they won't be locked-down the way managed IT hardware is. But I don't see how that's significantly different or better than just giving employees admin/root access to their own machines. At least with the latter, the devices aren't going back and forth between the (hopefully) firewalled/proxied corporate environment and the wild west of their home network.

What I think is more likely is that aside from limited access (email, maybe web browsing), the criteria for bringing their own devices in will be so onerous that they would rather have separate devices after all, rather than accept the new limitations on using their personal devices. After all, if it were cost-effective to support unmanaged systems, business IT would already be run that way.

"Due to how badly Gibson's big screen adaptation of Johnny Mnemonic butchered the original story, I am worried this too will tarnish my memories of William Gibson's works."

When I was younger, I was somewhat mystified as to why Gibson's stories seemed so amazing on paper, but disappointing to me on the screen.

It wasn't until almost a decade later that I remembered something he'd said when I interviewed him back in the late 90s. I don't remember his exact wording, but it was something like "when someone is reading a novel, they're getting a completely custom, one-off 'film' in their mind".

Suddenly, I had a shocking realization: it wasn't that the people adapting his work for film or television were doing a terrible job of it. It was that I was imagining a very different fictional world than the one he actually wrote about.

In my mind (and a lot of peoples', I think), the world of Neuromancer is grim and bleak. That is, it not only looks like Bladerunner, but it makes its fictional inhabitants feel the way watching Bladerunner makes us feel.

What I've started to believe is that this is not really the case for Gibson himself. There is certainly a lot of the look of Bladerunner in Neuromancer (they draw on the same inspirations, like Heavy Metal comics), but there is also a huge helping of quirky humour, like the Rastafarian space station (or if you go back to Johnny Mnemonic (the short story) itself, elements like the "Aryan Reggae Band").

When I read Neuromancer, those elements are sort of in the background - little one-offs that briefly lighten the mood, like Sebastian's "I make friends!" line in Bladerunner, or the way Doctor Who will have a funny scene right before stabbing the viewer in the gut with something sad. But I think Gibson intended them as being close to (if not fully) on equal footing with the more serious aspects.

If you watch Johnny Mnemonic (the film), or either of the X-Files episodes that Gibson wrote with this in mind, I think you'll see what I mean. All of them are set in a world that looks grim and gritty, but the story itself is actually not. Sort of like The Fifth Element, another Heavy Metal-inspired film.

Anyway, I don't know if I'm right, but the more I think about it, the more I believe I am. Just follow the trail that each of his successive novels points in. Each one is more fantastical and less-serious overall than the previous one.

Track down the shooting script for Johnny Mnemonic - the one that Gibson himself claims is much closer to his original vision for the film. It's really not substantially different than what ended up on screen, at least in the ways that I'm thinking of.

"You can crash cars on the highway today with a well-aimed laser pointer or a few bricks, if that rocks your boat."

Laser pointers and bricks are easy to follow back to their point of origin, because someone has to be actively using them. It's a lot harder for regular people to figure out where a radio transmission is coming from, and it's a lot easier to set up a time-delayed, battery-powered radio transmitter that will interfere with a system like this than the laser or brick equivalent.

"Broken bones: something that bounces off bone and can detect the time to travel which will determine fractures and breaks. If you're using a flat scanning device, everything needs to bounce off something inside the body, rather than pass through and imprint itself on x-ray paper, etc."

I'm thinking it would be a challenge - at best - to find something other than X-rays that will pass through skin but not bone. Why not just add a "medical tricorder"-style hand gadget that emits X-rays, put that on one side of the area to be imaged, and the "tricorder" (which would act as the digital X-ray "film" plate) on the other?

Make the whole back panel of the "tricorder" flip up to reveal the X-ray imaging plate, like the panel on the back of Soviet Geiger counters that flips up for when you want to detect beta radiation.

"Neither is email, so I guess if you could read everyone's email that wouldn't be a weakness either. Get off your high horse, the URL is supposed to be the equivalent of an email account password, if you have it you can access the files otherwise not. You have to make sure only the right people have the URL, but anything that lets others grab the file anyway is obviously a goatse-class backdoor just as if gmail or hotmail was wide open."

I've heard this argument before, and here's the reason I'm skeptical of it:

The password for an email account or website can be transmitted encrypted, so that even if someone intercepts the communication, they don't know the password. This may not *always* be the case, but its the intent of the systems design in most cases.

Treating the URL as "secret" is different because anything that captures it in-between the client and destination host can record it and use it for any purpose it likes, and it may not even be with malicious intent (because URLs aren't supposed to contain "secret" information).

For example, let's say your company runs both a search engine *and* a free-as-in-not-really-but-close-enough-for-most-people email service. Given all the other parsing of email that your service does to generate "relevant" ads, don't you think it would make sense to look for URLs in emails and add those to the indexer for your search engine? There is still plenty of content online that won't be found by simply spidering websites, because in order to get to it, the user has to submit a form or have javascript executing in an actual DOM or whatever, so doing that would be very likely to increase the amount of useful content indexed by your search engine. But all of a sudden, poof, that "secret" Flickr URL is no longer secret, and anyone uses that search engine can find it.

In terms of more malicious intent, consider that there's nothing stopping Google or Microsoft (or other search engine companies) from hosting a bunch of Tor exit nodes, and adding any URLs that pass through *those* to their search indexers, or paying major corporations to funnel URLs from corporate proxy logs to them for the same purpose. I'm not saying they do either of those things, just that there's no reason they couldn't, and I would have a hard time seeing it as truly "wrong", given that URLs aren't supposed to be treated as secret.

"Gee, I don't know, maybe because the only reason he is able to continue his business is that the state guarantees the enforcement of his contracts."

Back in the olden days, the jury-duty stipend was a lot closer to the amount the jury members would make at their normal job. It just hasn't been increased over time. If it worked then, why wouldn't it work now?

I'm not saying that the court should pay jury members $5000/day if they're a billionaire executive, just that it's insulting to even be asked to put yourself in a position where you might not be able to pay your rent/mortgage, and have to *request* to be excused as a result.

I'm fortunate enough now to work for a company that continues to pay my salary during jury duty, but when I was younger, getting a summons filled me with dread for that reason.

"The jury coordinator said that the summoning is absolutely random, based on a Driver's license and voter registration, but I have my doubts: Several people said that they routinely get summoned, some on a yearly basis."

The same is true where I live.

I think it just goes to show that virtually no one seems to be able to code up a decent random-selection process, and furthermore that in most cases, a true shuffle process is more appropriate anyway. That is, instead of randomly selecting from the same pool each time, the pool itself should have its order randomized, then be treated as a stack, where elements are pulled off of the top and not re-used until the entire stack has been processed. If new elements need to be added to the stack in the interim (as they would with jury selection, since the overall pool of jurors is constantly changing), then they should be inserted at random locations in the existing stack.

If Google can't be bothered to get this right for the "shuffle" mode in the Android music player, are government-hired developers really going to be able to do any better for the jury-selection process? I wouldn't be surprised if the jury-selection algorithm even had one of those beginner's mistakes like setting the PRNG seed to another pseudorandom number for "extra randomness", and possibly doing that at every iteration.

"I never saw any good reason why HTTP Referrers and user-agent headers were ever included in the HTTP spec in the first place. The first is extraneous information and the second is contrary to a Web based on open standards (and tends to help malicious sites know which exploits to use)."

The referrer is useful for a number of reasons. Beyond the obvious one (statistical information), this is helpful for setting up mechanisms to help prevent people hot-linking to images (or other content) on your site. For people who have transfer caps or surcharges, it's really frustrating to have a significant part of that taken up by people who hot-link to your images for use as forum icons or other heavily-used things which don't benefit your site in any way.

re: the user-agent header - just because the web is supposedly based on open standards doesn't mean users should all get the same content. Ideally they should all be able to *choose* to access the same content, but most people are going to be happier if a website detects that they're using a smartphone and sends them a version of the content optimized for display on a smaller screen.

I've known a couple of people with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and when they were in the middle of an episode, they would often recall trivial details from the past and incorporate them into what they were talking about. It was actually a little unnerving, sometimes, and I'm someone who tends to remember trivial details better than most people. I didn't really make the "eidetic memory" connection until reading this article. I always assumed that it was just a random sampling of trivia that they had remembered like that. I can easily imagine a brain getting overwhelmed if they're actually dealing with a flood of information at that level of detail.