Interesting! So it uses spatial addressing rather than hardware addressing! That is actually a pretty clever approach, come to think of it. Thank you for breaking this down for me.

I checked TFA, and found this:

So, yes, apparently they're talking about low-level wireless networking protocols, but... it's like saying that your revolutionary new Web search engine is "copper-based." I mean, that's what the conductors on the server CPU are made of, and without copper none of it would work, but it hardly captures what's unique or noteworthy about the technology.

Well for one thing there's the security of the device doing the recording - if it's remotely exploitable then that data is practically exposed to everyone at all times, not just to law enforcement when a dispute needs resolving.

For another thing, existing in a public place != consent to being recorded.

From the OP: "a car using CarSpeak's MAC-based communications was able to stop with a maximum average delay of 0.45 seconds"

This acronym 'MAC' is not used or explained anywhere else in TFS, so it's unclear whether they mean Media Access Control from the IEEE 802 spec (which probably is employed in moving data wirelessly from car to car, but has little to do with the specific problem of detecting or responding to safety hazards) or something else entirely.

Well, I'm certain your computing needs are identical to everyone else's.

If I'd been a member of this subculture back then, I would have tried to assemble roving gangs of hecklers to identify the guys pulling this sort of shit and follow them around making unsolicited observations about how their physiques differed from the guy on the shirtless-barbarian-warrior character class page.

(Not that it would be okay for the tiny minority of Adonis-looking gamer nerds to pull this crap either, but still. Ugh. I am embarrassed on behalf of all geekdom when i hear these stories.)

Thank you.

I am SO sick of this bullshit.

What the serious fuck is wrong with people, man?

I can't imagine why more women don't choose to enter the IT and dev professions when tech sites and forums are so full of gems like this one.

That's why I used the carefully-chosen qualifier "which is actually separable from background noise by any instrumentation."

If this guy is producing 0.2Hz oscillations with his actual vocal cords, they are of such a low amplitude as to be quieter than the noise floor of any sound transducer ever devised, or else he is somehow displacing large fractions of a liter of air per cycle, which is not really possible unless his larynx is many times bigger than an average human's

Or they're scanning entire class-B's at a time, and don't find your network interesting enough to slow down their scan to make an exhaustive search for exploitable services, on the reasoning that anyone clever enough to put them on non-standard ports is probably also updating your packages on a somewhat regular schedule?

If there's any particular reason to want to compromise your box instead of someone else's then perhaps a full portscan and protocol probe is in order, but doing that to every host you scan will probably net them fewer pwnings per hour than casting a wider net for RFC-compliant services.

Whoa, so just being able to write to a shared folder on a Vista machine = infection? Does the OS have to be tricked/exploited into running executable code once you've put some on the drive, or does Vista just go around running binaries for the fun of it when it indexes the filesystem?

OS is definitely germane to a discussion of clueless PC users.

If "made of photons" == "light" then that makes perfect sense.

But as it turns out both "light" and "sound" are defined in colloquial English as perceptual phenomena, and not as categories in physics:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/light
1 a : something that makes vision possible
      b : the sensation aroused by stimulation of the visual receptors
      c : electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength that travels in a vacuum with a speed of about 186,281 miles (300,000 kilometers) per second; specifically : such radiation that is visible to the human eye

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sound

1 a : a particular auditory impression : tone
      b : the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing
      c : mechanical radiant energy that is transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium (as air) and is the objective cause of hearing

In both cases the definition goes out of its way to specify only that subset of the physical phenomena which produces the perceptual phenomena.

Well, yes and no.