Your point has one problem; as of the time when True went out of business, the "we don't share information" part of their terms of service as still in effect.

Oh, and you misspelled HIPAA, in your quest to make this about the ACA. And also used it correctly...there is no "HIPAA and PII", it's just PII, which happens to be governed by a law called HIPAA. You'll do a lot better trying to convince others of your conspiracy theory if you can get the basic terms straight. Just sayin'.

Apparently, Wikipedia editors don't get sparse arrays either...because they define them as arrays where almost all of the values are 0 or null.

No kidding.

With regard to True, I once used their service, very briefly. And then, a year later, I started getting all kinds of spam to the email address I had created just for that one account. Mind you, I literally had given this email address to only one entity, ever...the True website. I ended up just re-creating the email account and blackholing it.

So either they had a breach (and didn't report it) or they sold the email address in violation of their own agreement. Since there are criminal legal consequences to not reporting a breach of PII and there have been many studies that indicate that companies (especially ones that are failing) violate their own privacy terms, I think the latter is more likely.

All of my scenarios imply...correctly...that there aren't helicopters on standby with nothing currently going on. Helicopters have several times the range, several times the capacity, and several times the speed of one of these things. They can do everything the jetpack can do, do it better, and more importantly, they can do a lot more. This is why helicopters go do these things. When these events happen, the helicopters are entirely busy, and not because they're just wandering around for someplace to be useful.

What makes more sense...sending out jetpacks to find people in need, and then sending helicopters...or just finding them with the helicopters, thus shortening the whole process in the first place? At night, the helicopters can find people with FLIR...the jetpacks can't. The helicopters can drop off supplies and bring out the injured for treatment elsewhere...the jetpacks can't.

I would hasten to point out that in both of the scenarios that I illustrated...both of which I took from the video off of the website, mind you...that it's not hard to find places where help is needed. These aren't the "stranded hiker in the woods" scenario where having more eyes is more important than having more hands. These are the "holy shit, the logistics of helping these people are fucking overwhelming" problems, which are definitely not served by flying in one more mouth to feed who doesn't have his own supplies, much less anything to help the others.

And they are the examples that Martin put forth as their business case.

The video shows floods, earthquake areas, even people trapped in burning buildings. And they talk about how these machines are somehow going to help.

Here's the problem:

(Flooded area...Jetpack Guy flies in near house with a family of 4 on top of it, as the flood waters rise...)
Jetpack Guy: "Hey, you guys look like you could use a little help!"
Family of 4: "Yeah,we sure could, Jetpack Guy! How about you fly us to safety?"
Jetpack Guy: "Ah, sorry about that...I've only got a weight limit of about 250 pounds, and on top of that, the weight would destabilize the pack. How about I just keep you company until you drown?"

(Earthquake-ravaged area...Jetpack Guy flies into the city, and lands...)
Jetpack Guy: "Hey, you guys look like you could use a little help!"
Earthquake Survivors: "Yeah, we sure could, Jetpack Guy! How about some food, water, shelter, or sanitation? Or equipment so we can rescue people trapped under tons of rubble? Fortunately, most of us are still alive, and we've got manpower to spare, but all basic services have been wiped out and there are people buried alive who need to be excavated!"
Jetpack Guy: "Ah, sorry about that...I've only got a weight limit of about 250 pounds, so all I could bring was these two shovels. How about I just keep you company for a while? It's not like one more person will add an extra burden to the lack of food, drinking water, or sanitation...right?"

Yeah, thanks a lot, Jetpack Guy. Fuckin' prick.

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.