You seem to know more than I do,however, the COW, being a device inserted into the carriers network by said carrier, I would think would have a different ID for whatever loadbalancing/handoff protocols occur on that network. This may not be true, as it may be easier to just copy an existing base station ID than provision all the backend hoo haw for a temporary device. But if it is true, my scheme should not produce as many false positives as thought.
By their nature (unless willingly installed by the carrier), a stingray would be spoofing its identity and therefore slightly easier to detect. Combined with a crowdsourced map to create a basic whitelist, you could do quite a bit I wager.

Instead of just spotting recent additions, also looking for timing advance shifts over a certain margin while the tower/antenna ID remain the same. I am not cellular engineer, but it would see that would be a possible indicator of a spoofed tower.

The cat is gone from that bag. Do you think dive wouldn't just handover the keys when asked? If you want security, encrypt yourself and kep private messages private. Trusting a 3rd party to any secrets is laughable.

That used to be the difference between hacker vs cracker. One was for personal enlightenment or social gain, while the other was for various profit/greed/destructive motives. Then the mass media co-opted hacker to be the bad guy.

Now we have 'hacktivists' (whether you love or loathe the term) who are supposed to use their powers for perceived social good. As is often the case, the distinction is not always black and white.

To what end should slashdot secure itself? Are you storing confidential info here? It is a public forum. Anyone, including an NSA agent can browse all your postings regardless of any encryption used between you and this site.

There would need to be a compelling business/financial reason for any site to do so. Helping others hide their traffic is not all that compelling from a beancounters point of view.

This is not your run of the mill ogg or mp3 codec. These codecs are typically VBR (variable bit rate), this means that the level of compression varies based on what the codec and network conditions dictate. If you swing the bitrate enough you WILL hear changes in volume and quality that sound like a flanging effect.
http://www.voiceage.com/Audio-...
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/...
You can :rolleyes: when you know more than just bb smiley code. Until then, hand in your geek creds please.

The cards may do nothing, but they ARE a placebo. And being used to influence the idiots who have the power to stop abusive and monopolistic behavior. Therefore they DO have a use, and not a good one.

It is distorted and fading in and out because somewhere (perhaps multiple somewheres) along its path it is being compressed with a lossy compression designed for human vocal ranges and not muzak. When the system was mostly analog, this did not happen, however high and low frequencies were cut, resulting in a tin-cannish sound if you listened for it.

So we are supposed to accept that anyone on the up and up should be tracked and indexed by Google? Are we supposed to look at it as seedy when it helps people organize and communicate in oppressive regimes?

Home of the Whopper.

Most are rather dumb. They will encrypt standard file types such as jpg and doc, but leave really critical stuff (qbw, pst, etc) alone. I guess the writers, not knowing what files being encrypted in a user profile might brick a machine only go for easy targets. They will readily encrypt any attached drive as well, following the same ruleset. If your backup program stores in a standard .zip or in the clear, it will be encrypted too. The best safety net is an online backup that does versioning so you can roll back to pre-infection versions of files.

One last note, in about 5%-10% of the cases I have worked on, I was able to recover files from VSS. Most of these variants attempt to disable VSS and delete the shadow copies, but they either are not successful or do it slowly. Yanking the drive from the running environment and looking at it with shadow explorer on a clean box can sometimes save some data. Here in the US Cryptorbit variants seem to be the most frequent I see (cryptodefense, cryptolocker, howdecrypt, etc). They have really exploded in the past month. A recent fake ADP email that was making it through spam filters was responsible for a lot. The linked site downloaded a zip containing an exe with an adobe pdf icon. If you have a suspect exe, see if it has been analyzed n malwr.com and you can get a good breakdown of its precise behavior.

I came here looking for -intelligent- laser jokes. Perhaps involving some sort of conspiracy/tinfoil hattery. I am sorely disappointed.

My Uncle has a country place that no one knows about / he says it used to be a farm, before the motor law.......

No, but post prime actors and directors do. So do Hollywood execs. Hell Get JJ. Abrams on board and add a bunch of lens flare.

The taxpayer.. for all of it. The beatings, the reports, the politicians and bureaucrats dickering over minutia.
Who doesn't pay? Those responsible for such atrocities. We increasingly live in a society where a few - IE military and intelligence brass, the rich, the police, and corporations and individuals with the money to play the game can do nearly anything with impunity.

This meets the definition of tyranny - arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power - and we live it every day, but most do not see it. The question is, is the natural state of being for humans - people abusing their power over others, or can it be changed and transcended?