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The Military

Could Tech Have Stopped ISIS From Using Our Own Heavy Weapons Against Us? 448

JonZittrain writes: This summer, ISIS insurgents captured Mosul — with with it, three divisions' worth of advanced American military hardware. After ISIS used it to capture the Mosul Dam, the U.S. started bombing its own pirated equipment. Could sophisticated military tanks and anti-aircraft missiles given or sold to countries like Iraq be equipped with a way to disable them if they're compromised, without opening them up to hacking by an enemy?

We already require extra authentication at a distance to arm nuclear weapons, and last season's 24 notwithstanding, we routinely operate military drones at a distance. Reportedly in the Falkland Islands war, Margaret Thatcher was able to extract codes to disable Argentina's Exocet missiles from the French. The simplest implementation might be like the proposal for land mines that expire after a certain time. Perhaps tanks — currently usable without even an ignition key — could require a renewal code digitally signed by the owning country to be entered manually or received by satellite every six months or so.

I'm a skeptic of kill switches, especially in consumer devices, but still found myself writing up the case for a way to disable military hardware in the field. There are lots of reasons it might not work — or work too well — but is there a way to improve on what we face now?

Comment It's FUD? (Score 1) 132

Disclosing the existence of a vulnerability destroys a lot of its value, too. People who can stop using Tails until the issue is sorted out will do so, shutting off whatever intelligence could be gathered from them. If these guys had a real-world exploitable vulnerability and a willingness to sell it to the NSA, they would have sold it and said nothing.

Comment Re:pure rubbish (Score 1) 394

"normal draw is less than 140 watts, put it in standby and get 15 watts"

That's less than 500, but still an order of magnitude more than a set top box should need! IIRC power supply ratings on Apple TV and Roku box are both under 10 watts, real usage is probably 3-5. Add a WD green or similar hard drive (6-8W) and a couple of tuners and encoding ASICS and it still shouldn't break 20 watts at full load.

Comment Re:What a joke.. (Score 2) 186

One device to compromise. If malware infects the LAN-of-things gateway, it can tell your pillows to play deadmau5, tell the lights to flash, and tell the security system to upload shower-cam photos to facebook.

(But then, computer viruses that just annoy the user with sounds and flashing text are deader than dial-up. Connected home malware would probably wait silently for bad weather, then lock you out and demand 0.25 bitcoin to let you back inside, or steal your amazon credentials when the refrigerator orders more milk, or turn on everyone's air conditioner at the same instant to DDoS the power grid.)

Comment Correlation does not imply causation (Score 2, Insightful) 211

More pseudoscience. They say that they're not sure whether this means that porn shrinks your brain, or if the shrunken brain causes porn viewing. But, this leaves out the very real possibility that this correlation means nothing whatsoever. The site below collects correlations that look pretty convincing in the graphs, but quite obviously are unlikely to be cases of causation in either direction:

http://www.tylervigen.com/

Comment Add noise to fix (Score 1) 230

If the misclassification only occurs on rare inputs then any random perturbation of that input is highly likely to be classified correctly.

The fix therefore (likely what occurs in the brain) is to add noise and average the results. Any misclassified nearby input will be swamped by the greater number of correctly classified ones.

Comment Re:Que Oversaturation in 3...2...1... (Score 1) 126

This will actually help!

First, voice doesn't use that much data. For example, Viber (a popular VOIP app) uses 0.5MB/min which would be about 0.5GB for 1000min.

More importantly, once every one is transitioned off 3G onto 4G/LTE (i.e. VOIP over LTE) the carriers can repurpose the 3G spectrum for 4G and thereby gain more 4G/LTE capacity.

Comment Re:Don't understand it. (Score 1) 198

The deal doesn't make sense to me, but presumably it would involve Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine being contracted to stay for some minimum amount of time, which brings a lot of clout (esp. Iovine) in the music biz.

The $3.2B price if true seems insane though. Between 2012 and 2013 Beats bought out HTC's 50% ownership for a total of $415M (25% in 2012 for $150M, 25% in 2013 for $265). So, if half the company is worth $415M, the whole thing should be worth closer to $430M, not $3.2B!

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