I despise Romney, I have never voted for him and unless he's running against a demon I won't ever vote for him.

That being said, the "Binders full of women" controversy was bullshit. It was a manufactured controversy. It was in line with the Alinsky method of turning your opponents strength into a weakness and using ridicule as a weapon.

Romney has spent the past 30 years making himself acceptable to the center-left contingent of American politics and I have no doubt that he seriously looked at every qualified female prospect when he was recruiting. The operatives in service to the Democrat National Committee had to do something to de-emphasize the fact that Romney was much better on women in the workplace than they were.

LK

No, The thinking is consistent , not sound.

It's a good thing when law enforcement officers have to take time to do their jobs. The power of the state is a terrible and awesome thing. The last thing a free society needs is law enforcement with spare time.

An idle cop is a cop who will find something to do. If his job is to arrest people and present cases for prosecution, he'll find new and creative ways to make that happen.

In the UK, they're doing random searches for knives...That's unthinkable in most of my country.

Mandating the use of compromised cryptography doesn't benefit the citizenry. It makes it possible, and arguably inevitable, that the government will use the knowledge of people's private communications to quash legitimate dissent.

For example, it's alleged that the FBI had knowledge of MLK cheating on his wife. How do you think the department of justice would have used that information if they had captured emails or naughty text messages proving it?

I'll take risky freedom over the safety of an overpowering government, any day.

LK

I'm just over here talking about how thankful I am that 3.5 is still available via TDE.

LK

Killer Instinct, motherfucker!

That is all.

LK

I'd like to see the CIA claim credit for the "Flying earthenware vessel" spotted over Edo Japan in 1180 AD.

I guess they were doing really early recon for WWII. Just to make sure the Japanese weren't hiding anything...

LK

I saw something in the early 80s. I'm not trying to ascribe them to an extraterrestrial origin but they were peculiar.

What I saw wasn't a group of U2 planes in formation. I suppose it could have been A-12 Avenger IIs, but there's no evidence that they ever fielded airworthy aircraft. So, they're still unknown to me and thus it's accurate to call them UFOs.

What's funny to me is that even though I didn't know it at the time, they were moving away from an area with a nuclear research facility that employs a fair number of people in the area. I was a kid, I didn't know anything about the lab or what they did there so the significance of their path didn't occur to me until I was an adult.

LK

First of all, you say, "North Korea didn't hack Sony," as if it is an indisputable, known fact. It is not -- by any stretch of the imagination.

The fact is, it cannot be proven either way in a public forum, or without having independent access to evidence which proves -- from a social, not technical, standpoint -- how the attack originated. Since neither of those are possible, the MOST that can be accurate stated is that no one, in a public context, can definitively demonstrate for certain who hacked Sony.

Blameless in your scenario is the only entity actually responsible, which is that entity that attacked Sony in the first place.

Whether that is the DPRK, someone directed by the DPRK, someone else entirely, or a combination of the above, your larger point appears to be that somehow the US is to blame for a US subsidiary of a Japanese corporation getting hacked -- or perhaps simply for existing.

As a bonus, you could blame Sony for saying its security controls weren't strong enough, while still reserving enough blame for the US as the only "jackass".

Bravo.

Many of the same slashdotters who accept "experts" who claim NK didn't hack Sony will readily accept as truth that it was "obviously" the US that attacked NK, even though there is even less objective proof of that, and could just as easily be some Anonymous offshoot, or any number of other organizations, or even North Korea itself.

See the logical disconnect, here?

For those now jumping on the "North Korea didn't hack Sony" bandwagon that some security "experts" are leading for their own political or ideological reasons, including using rationales as puzzling and pedestrian as source IP addresses of the attacks being elsewhere, some comments:

Attribution in cyber is hard, and the general public is never going to know the classified intelligence that went into making an attribution determination, and experts -- actual and self-appointed -- will make claims about what they think occurred.

With cyber, you could have nation-states, terrorists organizations, or even activist hacking groups attacking other nation-states, companies, or organizations, for any number of motives, and making it appear, from a social and technical standpoint, that the attack originated from and/or was ordered by another entity entirely.

That's a HUGE problem, but there are ways to mitigate it. A Sony "insider" may indeed -- wittingly or unwittingly -- have been key in pulling off this hack. That doesn't mean that DPRK wasn't involved. I am not making a formal statement one way or the other; just saying that the public won't be privy to the specific attribution rationale.

Also, any offensive cyber action that isn't totally worthless is going to attempt to mask or completely divert attention from its true origins (unless part of the strategic intent is to make it clear who did it), or at a minimum maintain some semblance of deniability.

At some point you have to apply Occam's razor and ask who benefits.

And for those riding the kooky "This is all a big marketing scam by Sony" train:

So, you're saying that Sony leaked thousands of extremely embarrassing and in some cases damaging internal documents and emails that will probably result in the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment being ousted, including private and statutorily-protected personal health information of employees, and issued terroristic messages threatening 9/11-style attacks at US movie theaters, committing dozens to hundreds of federal felonies, while derailing any hopes for a mass release and instead having it end up on YouTube for rental, all to promote one of hundreds of second-rate movies?

Yeah...no.

Let me guess, you're also a cage fighter, 6'6" tall, and have a 10 inch wang?

And all the other *Kits - for making things fancy and GUI and creating a generation of Linux admins who don't actually know how things work.

And here, mass shootings tend to only take place in areas that prohibit or have severely curtailed the carrying of firearms.

LK

This is what's screwy with /.'s habit of pushing Journals to the Masses without specifically being told to do so. My apologies.

To clarify for you and for others, I wanted to set up Google Authenticator on Debian Wheezy. Instructions are pretty simple; I think it took me all of ten minutes to do, from start to finish.

If you're thinking about giving it a shot, the instructions are generic enough to cover many Linux distros. If yours isn't covered, you might be able to figure it out in pretty short order.