One of the best ways to track ants back to the nest is to lay out a cupcake.

It would be interesting to see if the DMCA folks have deployed bots and will looking for this file in transit; leaving the courts trying to separate out leaches from newbies

Certain parties in the name of copyright have already been cited as poisoning torrents as far back as 2005.

Will they be tracing and then analyzing the UL/DL. If "private" torrents are encrypting having a well known file helps break or isolate the encryption in use.

I wonder if somebody figured out how to detect the patterns of a torrent not so much in the transmission but in the reception.

It would be awesome if some sends the file through analysis to see if it is injected and carrying any traceable meta data, spyware or unidentified cruft.

DARPA just didn't on a whim send up a bunch of red ballons... I doubt the film industry is brainless about money when they release in this way.

Watching the audience is something great film makers & studios have learned to do.

Meth is not a drug its poison to the human body and society for both use and manufacture.
It has not a peer to alcohol, or other lesser drugs.

War on Drugs? How about War on Money Laundering?! Thats the imperialism of the mafia over civil society.

I say money laundering is the serious and imminent threat to geek culture.
Too many geeks are getting sucked into the underworld's lure of fast money, trinkets and bobbles and hallmarks of evil-geekdom.

Will anyone miss the old days when geeks would just rip-off cpu cycles, disk space and bandwidth for wares & p0rn from their company sites.
Next it moved into fencing parts -- where did all that Disk & memory go from the upgrades last month?
Now entire data centers have been compromised in Eastern Europe by mafia seeking to money launder all sorts of activity.

Looking at one of the mug shots. gang / mafia is involved: Nasty stuff, stone cold died in the wool killers & innocent lives wreaked.

Here is the AG post

Its enlightening the AG says it accounts for 2/3 of the ID theft: probably to cloak procurement of the means to manufacture, warehouse, and transport the nasty stuff. That means other much more serious crimes have to be committed in support of this industry... not just the simple possession.

Here are general facts about meth and more reading.

Companies have many ways to vet new-hires and typically do a probation period before any real trust is given with the new hires.

Irregardless of any IT skills I look for these in my junior levels

First the trifecta-- Does a new hire arrive prior to "on time", is prepared for a days work, and then works a full days work?
This is a real tell as if they have been prepared well enough at Univ or 2 year + job experience and scores high to building professional confidence in them.
My experience this is counter intuitive: the less education the more the person know these.

Second -- Stop, Drop and Document
Does the candidate know when to stop working on a dead end resolution, Does a candidate drop things (work assigned & hot potatoes onto others), lastly do they document as they go or promise to do so at the "end."
My experience anyone with less than 2 years will flounder and fail miserably at all three.

Last -- Look then Jump, or Jump then Swim
Depending on the need either could be called for. Maintaining a tuned system the former; building a prototype the latter. Mixing the 2 simultaneously is the most common mistake and has led to disaster in my experience. The guy that didn't do anything decided to tweak the system on Friday night as accounting needed its batch jobs by Monday morning. The woman that was hired to RAD quickly shifted to studying the heck out of things instead of whipping up inspired GUI mockups.

Each did so without asking their colleagues and both ended poorly

Unless the Univ or 2 College or voc ed school did numerous substantive team projects+individual performance most would flail at least 2 of the three "professionalism" hallmarks in less than 3 months.

This is more toward Cryptome.org territory as its was accidentally posted as part of a memo then publicly stated for withdrawal by the city government for secrecy reasons.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0VB_QrXYauUJ:www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D12380%26Itemid%3D22+http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_content%26task%3Dview%26id%3D12380%26Itemid%3D22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

The map was included in the PDF for Jan 14 weekly updates to the city council
http://www.bouldercolorado.gov/files/City%20Council/WIPS/2010/Jan_14_WIP/Medical_Marijuana_WIP.pdf

The memo has not even a classification nor mark stating it is secret, confidential, restricted, eye only ,etc yet will be withdrawn because it is "Secret."

The memo is _Still_ reachable as of Jan 9... the fast wheels of city government

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