Woot! Microcenter in my area has this ... though these days it still has long lines due to inefficiency of the security locker for small & high value products being purchased by newbies.

Still the last good place in my area to sell good and sometime hard to find odd toys & parts locally. The impulse buy at the the single queue is harder to resist though.

Santa Baby, a Fryes in my state Please!

I'd hope that this was a spring board to more positive benefits for consumers of Intel products, especially businesses with big data centers.

It would be a good way to get past the financial crunch times, a derivative of the kill switch is a license switch. IE phoning to power up a few more processors in my grid, then phoning again power them down them in a few weeks.
Would really be easier to do the licensing than now. I'd have a bill for it and could make cases justify the IT costs.

A second case that is beneficial is remotely deactivating a branch office in the face of a natural disaster would also be a positive. Im thinking katrina or other kind of wide spread civil disaster.
Certainly a peace of mind for data loss prevention over physical assets lost to looting or just plain MIA PCs and laptops. Of course would be useful when an embassy is overtaken or deserted without the thermite being set off.

If the kill switch would be audit-able it would be beneficial to Congress, OMB, local gov and business auditors who could get documentation how many times kill switches were used for employee lost equipment, etc... Its a metric unable to be figured out today.

It used to be real news when a Gov PC or laptop went missing. Now a days it how many dozens per month that had to accounted as de-rezed.

If it lowered a consumers deductibles and insurance to have this feature I think they wouldn't mind. But insurance as a system isn't working anyhow.

Lastly we may get some trade wars going on. Im sure no other government would want american origin CPUs at this point. They may just turn to China's copy of what we did 2 years ago. I guess that makes it a positive for China's economy.

I haven't had but once a window for my shared office/cube in 15 years of IT.

I think that EU building architects are way ahead of US building architects for sunshine and Natural Ventilation.

Wireless really helped when it was permitted to work that way. To many coworkers abused that flexibility. We had garden quads within walking distance that helped as well. If upwind of the smokers you could actually feel naturally human at some point during the work day.

Being that there are already active programs running at the .mil/.gov level attempting to account all the workstation disk, and fragmented file space looking for keywords and other trace phrases, file formats and phrase fragments in packets for info leaks in certain datasec compartmentalized areas.....

1) Why would the keepers of the hounds want to deal with a polluted environment with potential false positives from new outlets.

2) While true much of the wiki leaks was sneaker netted, its also about that data not yet exposed.

If anyone Copied/scanned or DL'd something new it could be possibly disk cached while in transit to less than systems of certain clearance.

The phenomena of wiki leaks has its roots well before Nixon, we are just seeing the fruition of the process of dis-enchantment of the 1960's of the enlightenment experiment aka the Unites States.
That dis-enchantment had its roots in the Korean War and subsequent Coldwars
That situation was an arc from WWII which was an arc from WWI...

Anyhow, anyone with a Benedict Arnold bitter streak, Bradley Manning syndrome, or greedy like Aldrich Aimes, or is simply hot for Anna Chapman is not a technologically solvable problem nor policy solvable problem.

Wiki leaks is just a new facet at internet speed of old human nature.

The political message is
1) don't give somebody an idea to copycat
2) send a clear message the next guy that does X -- give the example that when he/she is caught, he/she is going to have rougher treatment.

Nothing new to what I just said since Cain killed Abel.

HP many years ago integraded with brocade switches. There was always an admin password to most HP device at the enterprise level: the cited storage array + fibre switch or tape library robot. However most only worked with physical access to either operator panel or serial port.

Now that IP has been for a few years the new serial port I predict many more devices in the future will have their firmware/management ports compromised. I think its SOP in large vendor enterprise to build such into your systems.

At some point you have to trust the guy inside the datacenter. What scares me is many Datacenter grade IP/KVMs, and other embedded devices are in now SMB and moving into the house.

To be honest its saved my bacon when the OP before me took the secret sauce passwords to Davy Jones locker.

We are in the process of sunsetting all SUN branded equipment for vendors other than Oracle. Its taken over 6 months to renew some contracts and expended far too many cycles & was so painful for us to be worth it to do it again.

For us as a customer its obvious that its a circus inside.

Oracle has chopped off those that used to resell SUN support and service at the knees. These were the guys that would go the extra mile for us, their local customers, yet were told by the great Oracle to take a hike as Oracle would do it better. Apparently we are not worthy of a gov sector sales call back for the EOL boxes we are looking to shelve at this point next year.

We are neither big nor tiny but do a lot of .gov.. I remember cutting my teeth in univ on both IBM & SUN equipment; that led to favorable sales when I entered the industry. I'll miss SUN so much .

On the bright side I hope a bunch of good ex-SUN or ex-IBM or ex whoever people are working hard to bury their former companies who make decisions because of investor avarice not because of in house innovation and genius.

Not to wear tinfoil but it sounds like a Law Enforcement dry run for bigger operations. .gov is "testing" to see how their methods are going to work in real life, if things will stick, how the public reaction to be.
When the horse bolts out of the barn, you better have to grab a pre-tested lasso before data gets to far out.

No one will admit how much data leakage happened since the late 90s with p2p flooding data out of .gov, R&D, and medical offices in the West.

You don't think the intel community never caught on? Lives and reputations are continuing to be be jeopardized with wikileaks... you think people are lying around for it to just happen to them?

Likely a lull as they regroup see how to improve things, then another round.

Politicians & Bureaucrats are not techies, but they tend to hire really smart companies and individuals for consulting and executing their work.

Similar methods which today were used to down some .mp3 or girlie picture site will be in the future be used to down leaked data out of Gov, IBM, Apple, Boeing, Dow Chemical, ....

As for US constitution, we have met the enemy and they is us. Peer Jury? I don't trust to be driving on the road with most of the people around me let alone have 12 decide my fate.

When certain crap is impelled through the fan certain plans are going to be set into motion. They were approved already by people voted upon and installed into power by peaceful means, and will "reflexively" activate.
If the US .gov goes out of control it is because of the citizens of the US, past and present actions, not because of anyone's future action.

Why was I groped at the airport? Someone who was elected or appointed by someone elected perceived a credible threat of real person(s) who can't be identified and "found." instituted a response to that. Whoever that person who wants other people to be hurt or die for whatever reason; will use whatever means and opportunity they have to do it. That is a situation of intractable security.

From a classical point of view; its means, motive and opportunity. US citizens can only react to means , increase/reduce opportunity and fuel or dowse the motivation for any kind of activity criminal or otherwise.

When was the last time anyone asked "why somebody needs a new 32-64GB for their videos, pics & songs?".. that's a whole lot of cash on top of the equipment -- I'm sure they could produce each cassette, cd, dvd or print magazine and the receipts proving they bought license it and they didn't DL it off somewhere for free.

We have met the enemy and they is us - greed, apathy, indifference, do it as long as nobody's hurt or if the "Big X" gets hurt even better. Enough of this kills a Constitutional democracy (big C little d)

Radar Track & Splash

Launching is one thing, where it when & where it splashes down is another. Somewhere along the line it ought to have a radar track unless its really far out.

Could be a home brew DIY given the locale?

The track & distance to splash tells a lot

There once was a company called Sea Launch wasn't there?

Once long ago there was "a href="http://dssresources.com/history/sshistory.html"> vis-a-calc. Who would of thought today we'd be in the mess we are in.

Once long ago there was real and imminent fear that mutual self destruction would occur, and almost did, because the Nuclear C&C systems act out commands fast. Humans were inserted to cool things off.

Wow, now the Wall Street(s) have wired the financial & economic system together with less safeguards of global meltdown when the spreadsheets (now huge programs) start to ping pong (like in Forest Gump in china ) the markets. Its cool --- as long as you keep your eye on the ball.

However societies can't now rely on inserting humans into the chain. Anyhow Stock & Money Traders are not .mil hardy nor accountable like .mil

I cite May 6, 2010 --- b !=m --- who programmed that billions of stocks could be sold without 2 person authorization?
I cite Jerome O'Hara, and George Perez , who worked on programatically cooking the system for Bernie Madoff

The message came from his words to an assembly of the catholic press.

The primary sources are necessary --> Spanish not yet in English. I know /. can work google translation.
Even better I challenge /.ers to read & speak more than 1 human language.

Really, he is urging catholics not to get sucked into false reality that technology can enable. He urges catholics not to live life as a theatre -- he was not addressing the world in his comments -- its the world that got a guilty conscience after hearing them.

Probably most here wont also read the philosophical works of Jacque Ellul (French 1912-1994) who was also a contemporary of Benedict XVI. He was a philosopher who challenged a person holding Technology for Technology's sake world views -- which many do here. Both he and Benedict XVI align on many points concerning technology.

It's actually quite good to see that Benedict is actually active in commentating on Technology (as compared to other Leaders political, or spiritual who never will) and technologies impact/change of human society.
Most here take Technology as de facto like fish take water as de facto in the fish tank. Those that do here should step away from the terminal and get a different perspective for a bit -- give it a whirl.

FWIW I think Ellul's work "La technique ou l'enjeu du siècle" ought to be required reading for those in a Engineering or Comp Sci program. Aldus Huxley is said to have "brought Ellus' work on Technology" to the English speaking world BTW... so also too did the UniBomber read it... but we get all kinds here as well -- probably more of the latter..

Its either planned or SNAFU.

I'd lean toward planned. Somewhere that has to be some infographics showing the Internet doing its thing in reorganizing small whole in the DNS.

I've heard stories of .gov with 3 letter names alligator clipping batteries to the powercords of servers in order to move them "uninterrupted" So I think they got the right stuff to keep the hardware going.

Keyser Söze was not among the suspects --- move along just a hedge move along ---

Its a political show.

It was a synchronized raid by e-crimes unit of the Yard + photojournalist

It has the standard political trial the bad guy in the press pictures
a) stackup of officers in body armor and battering ram -- check
b) photos of the "crime scene ala the laptop" -- Check -- nice Orthodox icons BTW
c) photos of the guilty being lead away in irons by the guard -- Check and Check

It makes no mention of where the money went but only that the active criminals are caught. Some things to think about

1) 2 M &#163 divided by 19 conspirators (unlikely if equally) is still four times the average wage in Britain and just over the top salary of an defective for the yard after 10 years.

2) It doesn't mention what means the yard used. I mean the interception, the wire tapping and other means to know when the transaction was to occur-- to put doubt into the criminal mind?
did the yard keylogger the keyloggers?
did the yard just pay off for a tip?
The yard could hide their means with the need for state secrecy unlike US courts --- until recently.
Still want to take your mobile and net book on your holiday to London?

3) I doubt they got Keyser Söze