Comment Re:My mistake - 3 times :-) (Score 1) 17
I have some ideas. I think it's time for a journal entry too.
I have some ideas. I think it's time for a journal entry too.
There's a real dearth of quality submissions lately. Your work is being accepted because the editors need it. Badly. That's why Hugh Pickens keeps getting front paged too, even though he clearly engages in self-promotion. His choice of material is good and write ups concise.
Slashdot needs a new policy and system to foster community contribution. I don't think the site is dead. But I do think editors should consider how to rebuild audience share by transitioning focus away from link aggregation - a market they've lost to Reddit - to content creation. Too many submissions are easily found on Reddit hours before they go live here. That's a bad sign. Fresh content doesn't have that problem.
drinkypoo - gee, I remember you. Nice to see some old timers 'round here.
I'm sure it will feature in Watch Dogs 2 or similar, but it's fairly irrelevant.
Way to let out a balloon. Comparing The Wire to Watch Dogs is like serving Chef Bloyardee and calling it Bolognese.
Carmack's keynote at the 2014 Oculus Connect conference said it would take several more generations before Samsung would have panels that could support seamless 120 fps. Apparently there's a problem with peripheral vision noticing 60fps with a significant number of people. Basically, Samsung is focused on developing panels for the phone market and Oculus piggypacks on that development line. They don't have the market penetration to drive display research.
The most interesting part of his discussion was proposing interlaced formats and variable refresh rates with G-sync to up the perceived refresh rate around peripheral vision.
The talk is about 90 minutes and - ironically - audio is not synced with video. Still, he doesn't talk much bullshit and it's an interesting listen.
I wonder how the group plans to stitch together multiple displays seamlessly. Removing the bezel is only part of the problem. There'd still be a noticeable seam between panels, never mind the problem of lining up pixels. I suppose one could argue that beyond a certain pixel density - +400dpi or something - lining up pixels exactly wouldn't be necessary. But then you'd have to offset by that difference, and the joined panel would have to test for and respond to that offset to compensate.
I think most would be rightly skeptical of this until seeing the tech work first hand.
On another subject, at the Techspot article there was a link to the Ars project. It's some kind of hot swappable modular phone in development.
http://www.techspot.com/news/5...
According to that, you can't swap out CPU or display live but just about everything else would be hot swappable. It's got a nifty photo showing parts to some kind of mock up or beta device.
All I could think of when looking at this was Stringer Bell from The Wire swapping out sim cards in his phone and what a boon that might be for criminals. Or at least crime drama on TV.
in 2013 Edward Snowden's revelations proved what he'd said was true.
sdguero wrote:
He said the buildings that house the trans-oceanic data cables were designed from the ground up with small rooms, broom closet sized, that the primary data cables run through.
... He said that all data traffic entering those rooms left them with a noticable amount of latency (at the time, late 80s he said it was about 10ms), but no hops. He claimed that the federal government had been monitoring internet activity in these data hubs since the dawn of the web.
Mark Klein, former tech from AT&T, claimed to have witnessed installation of one such room at a San Francisco POP in 2002. He gave a formal statement to attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was printed in this Wired Article. The money quote is below:
While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal. I saw this in a design document available to me, entitled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco" dated Dec. 10, 2002. I also saw design documents dated Jan. 13, 2004 and Jan. 24, 2003, which instructed technicians on connecting some of the already in-service circuits to the "splitter" cabinet, which diverts some of the light signal to the secret room. The circuits listed were the Peering Links, which connect Worldnet with other networks and hence the whole country, as well as the rest of the world.
One of the documents listed the equipment installed in the secret room, and this list included a Narus STA 6400, which is a "Semantic Traffic Analyzer". The Narus STA technology is known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets. The company's advertising boasts that its technology "captures comprehensive customer usage data
... and transforms it into actionable information.... (It) provides complete visibility for all internet applications.
EFF proceeded to file a lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T) claiming infringement of privacy by the firm. Though no finding of fact was challenged, ultimately it was dismissed due to retroactive FISA legislation signed by Bush legalizing the process. On appeal, the Supreme Court refused to review the case.
Though many argued that Klein was just one person with a grudge against his employer, and thus dismissed his testimony as overblown or vindictive, in 2013 Edward Snowden's revelations "proved what he'd said was true. That the government did work with network service providers - including AT&T - to install monitoring systems throughout the Internet backbone.
...during the summer of 1975, as reports began leaking out from the Church Committee, I was surprised to learn that the NSA was claiming that it had shut down all of its questionable operations a year and a half earlier. Surprised because I knew the eavesdropping on Americans had continued at least into the prior fall, and may have still been going on. After thinking for a day or so about the potential consequences of blowing the whistle on the NSA—I was still in the Naval Reserve, still attending drills one weekend a month, and still sworn to secrecy with an active NSA clearance—I nevertheless decided to call the Church Committee.
But he didn't stop at the witness stand. Afterward, he continued researching the matter for a book. And the further he dug the more waves he made. Until someone slipped him a then recently declassified copy of a 1976 Justice Department memo [PDF] detailing a criminal investigation into illicit domestic spying by the NSA. But when agency officials discovered he had that document they took extraordinary measures attempting to get it back. From threatening to prosecute under the 1917 Espionage Act to retroactively reclassifying the memo to squelch its contents.
Fearing someone might break into his home and steal the manuscript, Bamford arranged to transport and secure a copy outside of US jurisdiction with a colleague at the Sunday Times of London. It was only upon the 1982 publication of Puzzle Palace that the agency dropped their pursuit of Bamford and his document as a lost cause. That's at least one stark difference between then and today when it comes to whistleblowers, back then they merely threatened espionage charges.
Yogi Berra famously once said, "It's like Deja Vu all over again." And though the Yankees' star wasn't speaking of illicit domestic wiretaps by the national security state, given a comparison of recent revelations to those detailed by Bamford decades earlier the quote certainly fits. In telling his story of how he published details about the last NSA Merry-Go-Round with warrantless wiretapping, Bamford shows us that our recent troubles of lawless surveillance aren't so unique. It's deja-vu all over again. But if deja vu is like a waking dream, this seems more a recurring nightmare for a body-politic lured to snoring slumber by a siren-song of political passivity.
That old Justice Department memo isn't likely to wake the public from their slumber. But within its pages is a stark warning we all should have heeded. As Bamford notes in that Intercept story, the report's conclusion that NSA lawlessness stems straight from the birth of the agency suggests a constitutional conflict systemic and intentional.
...the NSA’s top-secret “charter” issued by the Executive Branch, exempts the agency from legal restraints placed on the rest of the government. “Orders, directives, policies, or recommendations of any authority of the Executive branch relating to the collection
... of intelligence,” the charter reads, “shall not be applicable to Communications Intelligence activities, unless specifically so stated.” This so-called “birth certificate,” the Justice Department report concluded, meant the NSA did not have to follow any restrictions placed on electronic surveillance “unless it was expressly directed to do so.” In short, the report asked, how can you prosecute an agency that is above the law?
"Prosecutive Summary" follows (PDF):
DEC diagnostics would run on a dead whale. -- Mel Ferentz
