The trouble is, as the Entrope mentioned, unless they tell you specifically what information is not to be published, then how are you to know? Making it illegal to publish data about "sensitive areas" means somehow they have to make it clear what areas are sensitive, or else they are creating unrealistic expectations. Imagine a law that said it is illegal to proceed through a green traffic light when an unmarked police car is approaching from a perpendicular direction. How can you obey such a law since ANY car could be an unmarked police car. Same with making a blanket law that is equivalent to saying you may not publish anything the government deems sensitive unless they give you a way to know what information that is.

And in the summary, I don't think the phrase "The mapping competition required citizens to map their neighbourhoods" is phrased very well, since Google doesn't have the legal authority to require people to do anything. Do they stop you from using the Google search page unless you first submit a neighborhood detail?

While I agree the probability is low as compared to how the gloom-and-doomer portray it, I can immediately see a few major issues with your analysis.

1) The CME doesn't have to directly hit the Earth since disrupting the magnetosphere, which is many times the size of just the Earth, is what would be required.

2) I don't believe CMEs are uniform in the direction they occur since they are created by anomalies in the Sun's magnetic field, which like the Earth's, has poles. I could not however readily find any breakdown about distribution versus latitude

3) Your caveat is a big one. Your analysis is treating the CME as if it is a single point in space, equivalent to if the Sun fired a bullet at the Earth. The reality is, as you mentioned, CMEs have width, breadth, and height, and these dimensions are big. A CME may be many times the size of the Earth. CMEsalso spread out as they travel the 1 AU it takes to get here. That last part is both good and bad, since the original strength of the CME at the Sun would devastate the Earth, while the greatly weakened version that reaches this far could at worse cause havoc, not devastation.

In short, the Earth has been flying around this neighborhood for a few billion years, including hosting animal life for a good chunk of that, and so far we haven't seen any CME calamities. The game changer is of course our use of satellites and long haul electrical lines which are prone to disruption or damage from a strong CME, but based on the number of known events, the odds of a massive CME causes widespread damage is very low, though not as low as you calculated (0.0028% in 100 years). There may be a handful of CMEs a year that the Sun puts out that if they were to hit Earth could break things, as you pointed out the Earth is a small target in a very large shooting ranges. If I had to guess based on known statistics, a major ground-based disruption will probably happen about once every 100 years. (reference solar storms of 1859 and of 1989)

This is actually one of my nits with these kinds of articles. When someone says "Now one physicist has worked out the answer", the use of the phrase "the answer" means in English that the question is now closed. He has found THE answer, meaning the one and only answer, hence the use of the word 'the' instead of the word 'a'. In reality, the article should say "Now one physicist has worked out a possible answer". What he has presented is a theory that he believes is consistent with known physics and observations. That is all it is.

No, like if they want to gain access to data in company ACME Co, they do some research about that company, find people who belong to it, often in specific groups they are particularly interested in (the missile division of ACME for example), then seak out information on these people, like what conferences they have attended (attendee lists are often published on the web) or what projects at the company they are working on (a newsletter on the web mentions them in a small article about the Ramrod SuperAgile Counterstrike Missile System), then send them an email tailored just for them: Hi Joe, we found another missile system using flight parameters that may be interesting for use in the Ramrod. Here is the website..., signed your coworker Frank.

The spam from your bank doesn't normally address you by name, or mention details like your account number or which local branch you use and when. In fact, it is the lack of such details that most people use for clues that it is spam, so when those details are there they typically trust it. That is the gist of the article.

Except the article is about spear-phishing. In spear-phishing, the emails are tailored to the intended victim, pretending to be from someone the attacker knows or believes the victim trusts, such as an email from their boss or their HR department, and the emails normally include information that the victim assumes isn't public which adds to the email's trust. Such emails may pretend to contain important employee training updates, company newsletters, specific conference information for conferences the target is known to attend, references by project name to projects the victim is working on, etc. This means the spear-phishing email is very different from typical spam which is clearly marketing, or so generic as to be obvious spam. It also means that without confirming the email's legitimacy via out-of-band methods, it may be virtually impossible to verify if it is real or not.

The problem for the defenders is the only real defense against a well crafted spear-phishing email is to instruct people NEVER to open an attachment, to click on a link, to visit a website if so instructed, or even to respond with information that may be requested. But such a world would render most business email useless.

No, an NSL is specifically only for requesting of information.

From Wikipedia: A national security letter (NSL) is an administrative subpoena ...

A subpoena is a writ issued to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence.

What makes the NSL special, and the reason people believe it is unconstitutional, is 1) it is not directly authorized by a judge, and 2) it can come with the requirement that the recipient not disclose that it happened or that the disclosure occurred.

An NSL is NOT a blank check for the government to order people to do whatever they say. It is very specific in its abilities, and that is only to request information, and possibly (though while the norm, this is not required) to require its existence to be kept confidential. So you see, I do know, as does anyone else who does a cursory lookup about what an NSL is.

Er, I mean on advice of COUNSEL. Damn spell checker.

The conference didn't stop the presentation, the presenters withdrew it on advice of their own council since they believe they didn't have the legal authority to present the results of the research.

Put your tin foil away. People at institutions like Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute typically work on grants and funding that come with conditions, such as the funder owns the material or can dictate its dissemination. It sounds like the researchers discovered something they thought interesting, looked around and decided BlackHat would be a good place to present, then the lawyers pointed out that they hadn't yet received the required permissions per the funding agreement/grant so they have backed off for now.

An NSL is a directive to disclose info that may include the requirement not to reveal the disclosure occurred. An NSL is not a way to simply order someone to be quiet.

I recently saw an article that said, basically, by installing privacy software you make your machine more unique versus the other machines on the Internet and therefore make it EASIER to uniquely identify your machine. You may not be loading the cookies they try to ram down your browser's throat, and all the other persistent ways to track, but they can tell you DON'T load certain images, or keep certain cookies, and that too can be a clue for them.

They did tell us they did it in a Twitter post right after the shootdown, but that was when they thought they had shot down a military transport. Then they discovered the plane was a civilian airliner so they deleted the post and shifted into denial mode. Nope, didn't shoot it, never had such a missile system, nothing to see so please go away.

I also find funny Putin's explanation that it is Ukraine's fault since if they were to have just rolled over and let the fighters have what they want, then they wouldn't have been shooting at planes. Officer, it isn't my fault the guy got shot, he got in the way of my bullet so it's his fault!

This is what they say, now let's see what they do! I truly hope they are true to their words, including behind the scenes where we don't normally see.

The problem with your description is that some of the laws Tesla is now fighting are recent legislation or regulations. For example, in New Jersey, the regulation prohibiting Tesla from performing direct sales was only put in place on March 11, 2014 by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (composed of political appointees of the Governor). Likewise in New York, they are looking at passing legislation to ban the way Tesla is selling vehicles.

NY dealers have Tesla ban in sights

It is/was legal but being made illegal. While aspects of the requirement of franchises may be in previous laws, Tesla built their model to comply with those laws, so the dealership associations are having their paid stooges rewrite the laws to block Tesla.

Traditional car companies see Tesla as a threat. They see Tesla is using a different sales model, namely that Tesla sells their cars directly to the consumer instead of using a dealership, and then the big guys use this difference to try and block Tesla from selling cars by influencing state legislatures (with things like money) to pass laws that say new cars can only be be sold through a franchised car dealership, not directly. The car companies know that all the new US car companies in the last century that have tried to enter market using dealership have failed for a few reasons, but one big one is that the new guy is too small so the dealership is one that would handle multiple brands, and as the new unproven line, the cars don't get pushed, so wither and die. That is what the big manufacturers want, for Tesla to fail, and they are paying their lawmakers to create laws to make Tesla's job impossible.

My problem with these kind of articles is how they state it as 'case closed'. All this is is a theory of what is happening. Maybe it has a lot of solid science behind it, maybe it is even right, but right now it is still just a theory for us to explain what is happening. Using words like "Now an international team has solved the mystery" makes it sound like there is no debate, this is the answer, and anyone who says otherwise is an idiot. While I am not a scientist, I come close enough, and this fails the scientific method, at least in how the reporting represents it.

OK, I feel better now.