What the OP doesn't mention is that there's a kind of "scam" on Amazon where people self-publish e-books on a broad variety of topics and give them promising descriptions. The books are usually somewhat short and/or heavily plagiarized, but the key is that the entity doing the self-publishing shotguns tons of them out there. Some even use automated systems to simplify the process...it's on that scale. They're all crap, mind you, but they're cheap, so a lot of people say "what the hell...how bad can it be?" and buy them. Five bucks here, five bucks there, and the books turn out to be worthless, so the people who buy them rarely read more than a few pages in. This is a means of changing the economics so that if you are a self-publisher and your book is total shit, you won't get paid.

A valid question would be, "What does Amazon care?" The issue is twofold: one, the Kindle users have a bad experience, which is bad for Amazon, and two, the crap books clog up the search results. Both of these are against Amazon's (and our) interests. Hence the desire to figure out a way to cull such things. And I like that Amazon's effectively taking themselves out of the decision loop on this...ultimately, it's a way that the readers get to decide, directly, whether or not the person who published the e-book should get their money.

Does anyone have any banner or other information for this product that could be searched in Shodan? :)

By the way, if you haven't looked at the exploit on GitHub, it's ridiculously simple. The script on the server is there for file retrieval; pass it the path and filename to the file you want, encoded in base64, and it sends you the file.

Makes me want to ask the vendor, "Hi...I'm the idea of using service accounts with minimized rights for listening network services, Have we met?"

A large number of the people manning the phones for these boiler rooms have criminal records...most have done jail time. I've found that this provides me with no small amount of entertainment whenever these people come calling. Think of it as a combination of Jedi mind tricks and suddenly seeming to know more about them than they know about you. Sometimes it flops, but a lot of the time you can almost hear their eyes go wide on the other end of the line. Priceless. Even better, since the drones making the calls have no real ability to take people out of their database, you may end up recognizing the same people by their voice on subsequent calls...and this allows you to keep building on your past "conversations." Imagine a telemarketer dreading calling you :)

You're a bit late in your assessment of this, and also a bit incorrect...but unfortunately, not in a way that makes it any less bad.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

There's already a remarkable network of such cameras; what's left now is that more and more government agencies (because they are run separately, and have different needs and goals) are asking to drink from the data fountain they provide. There's no singular push on behalf of "the government systems," there are multiple efforts, each with their own intentions, on behalf of each specific agency that wants the data. And major cities (like New York) that have similar networks of city-run cameras are all getting the same requests, since there's nothing really special about one city or another that exempts it from the aims of such agencies.

But the poster isn't just speaking about a couple of psychopaths. He's describing a situation where people do this, do it often, and do it openly. Without even fear of consequences. And that nothing happened to them, when lots of people knew about it. And even more to the point, that this was a widespread thing.

I say again: bullshit.

I call bullshit.

Transformer cooling oil isn't just cooling liquid. It's non-conductive, because the inside of a transformer is full of bare copper, all of which is energized when the transformer is in use. If you shoot a transformer, it doesn't just drain out...it's a whole lot worse than that. When a transformer develops an air gap, you get an arc inside the transformer, which ignites the oil in the event that sufficient pressure cannot build to cause a BLEVE, but causes a BLEVE...even if there's a hole in it, sometimes, based on where and how big the whole is...if the pressure is enough. It takes fractions of a second for this to happen, because you can have a massive flash of heat and concordant pressure spike. Things like this have been responsible for loss of life at substations. And it's not something you just fix like a hole in a radiator...you have to replace the whole transformer, and often a good part of the lines leading up to them as well. In the meanwhile, you end up with a sabotage report and law enforcement involvement, and reporting to the local PSC/PUC.

Transformers detonate. They do it because the oil loses its dielectric property, or because an air space forms inside the transformer. The idea that linemen, who eventually would have seen an event like this take place as well as the injury/death that resulted (it's not all that rare, and used to be even more common, "back in the day") would cause such events just to get some overtime, sounds preposterous to me. It'd be like cops getting themselves shot at so that they could do the extra paperwork and get overtime, especially ones who had seen a colleague killed in the line of duty. I work in the power industry, today, and I've never heard of anything like this, nor have I met anyone who I believe would do this.

Which person? How can they tell the difference between the person sleeping and...

The other person sleeping next to them?
The pet in the room?
Curtains, gently blowing in the breeze?
The person shifting in their bed?
Sounds from heating/cooling coming online and the air shifting around in the room as a result?

How can it tell the difference between a response...a change in the state of something in the room...and a change in the object composition of the room itself? Without directionality, I don't see how it's possible. And indeed, as someone else pointed out, they did say that it requires phones with two microphones...which I missed when I read the article. So the point seems valid...and most phones won't be able to do this. Come to think of it, I am trying to think of what phones I know for a fact have dual microphones, and I'm coming up short.

Turning smartphones into sonar devices to monitor movements. I'm torn between "this is really cool!" and "these people are so full of shit and just trying to publish something to get tenure!"

I wonder how they solve the problems of directional discrimination without multiple microphones? How can they tell what direction a response comes from, with only one mic? And how do they intend to make this work on multiple phones, for that matter...with their vast differences in both microphone and speaker setups? I'm really skeptical of this.

They also talk about using ultrasonic frequencies...which I also doubt most phones can actually produce.

I've seen a lot of posts to this that seem to believe that all of America is like this. Let's be clear: this kind of crap is almost exclusively found in the Southeastern US. You don't see this in the Northeast (they believe in science there), you don't see it in California, or in the Pacific Northwest. Occasional pockets in the Midwest also get this batshit crazy, but there's a reason we hear about this for schools in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, etc.

Or, to put it in something that could be a the end of a very (too) honest public service announcement:

"Georgia Public Schools: someone has to build the cars!" (Credit to the show "Squidbillies")

If I had any mod points at the moment, I'd mod this up until we had to crane our necks looking upwards to be able to read it from underneath. Bravo, sir, bravo.

That's a good point. Perhaps we could drive the point home by bombing Mecca and then providing a low-resolution copy of it to fulfill the same purpose.

Companies where the open office approach succeeded had something in common: the population of the office chose it for themselves, early on. They had an open office environment because that's how they wanted to work, and because the dynamic that existed between the employees was compatible with it. Then later, a lot of other companies had executives look at both the success of those companies and the lower real estate costs that the model uses, and decided they would "choose" it for their own staff. And that's not quite how it works. It's rather like deciding that your goldfish would be better off in a salt water tank because of how big the fish were in some other tank you saw, and then finding yourself confused as to why the fish all died. Not all cultures are the same, and you can't change the culture by imposing something upon it that is toxic.

With tech workers?? Do you actually WANT to see what some of these pale, flabby people look like without clothes on???

Though, then again...if that was walking around me all the time, I'd keep my eyes focused squarely on my monitor and my work. My productivity would soar...hmmmmm....

The topic of the Manhattan Project is a red herring. Those people were choosing between two evils, because the Project was about building a weapon to stop a genocidal maniac from taking over the planet. By the time they were done, D-Day and V-E Day had happened, true, but those victories were far from foregone conclusions when the scientists started.

Nobody's building AI to try and prevent something on the same level as world domination by Hitler, sorry.

I'm wondering if the "editing" from the Slashdot editors wasn't the problem in the first place. How many Slashdot summaries wildly overstate/oversimplify/remove from proper context the real meat of a story? How many Slashdot comments essentially say, "RTFA...you'll see that [it only applies to this situation|they mean this instead of that|this was done on purpose under wildly crazy conditions to see if it could ever be true at all|this person has no credibility|this is really advertising for someone's product]"?