Comment Error (Score 1) 584
Marxist AGW scientists? #include "irony.h"
error: conflicting declaration or overloaded equality operator
Marxist AGW scientists? #include "irony.h"
error: conflicting declaration or overloaded equality operator
I like the tone of this post. Some nits to pick:
Yes. (The U.S. government can do anything. Your only recourse if they do something wrong is to sue them. Suing them typically takes years of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars for you. Thus, in a practical sense no one really has any firm rights any longer because the system in charge of correcting breaches to those rights is not accessible or swift for an average citizen using it.)
It may not cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars if you can get the EFF or the ACLU on your side, but you are basically correct. Do you have any advice about how to secure data loaded into the cloud? Obviously, encryption comes to mind, but it would be helpful to have some discussion about techniques. If you are using compute instances allocated by a cloud (e.g., Amazon EC2 or Rackspace, etc.) then the means of decryption may also exist in the cloud which doesn't provide you any protection. Got any tricks to share?
You are sort of personalizing the question to me, whereas I'm just using common sense. I don't have a particular care for security myself. For example, unlike most others around me (who are often completely untechnical) I don't even bother with a passcode on my smartphone. Well, that's not entirely true. I have enough of a care for security that I don't want to get a virus or malware, but I already use a minority operating system, so I don't get them. I also don't want people to gain easy access to my systems, so I use a decent password on them. Problem solved for me, but I'm just doing the equivalent of locking a door. The poster has a whole different level of security in mind.
So, again, I don't have any personal tricks, only ideas. If you want to encrypt data in the cloud used for computing one option would be homomorphic encryption, but it is more of an idea itself than a workable product. Slashdot ran an article on it previously:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/06/11/2056235/the-beginnings-of-encrypted-computing-in-the-cloud
A more practical idea would be messing with the encryption key in clever ways. For example, you could store a encrypted key on a 3rd party site and only allow access to it from a specified IP range. Therefore, even if your application was stolen and all its data, that application run on another machine still couldn't access the key.
Truly, there aren't any great solutions because someone getting access to your cloud data is like someone rooting your home computer if your data was on your home computer. It's like saying "How can I secure my home data while a hacker has remote root access to my computer." Really, you can't.
Use FreeBSD or other extreme minority operating system.
I've seen numerous people recommend FreeBSD. What's so special about FreeBSD that makes it more secure than anything else? Keep in mind that OSX is based on FreeBSD so the "extreme minority" concept may not apply to it.
Most OS X hacks rely on the stuff built on top of BSD, not BSD itself. One of the big ones this year used Java vulnerabilities. That said, FreeBSD is a fairly security-conscious operating system and is a minority operating system. Hackers, both professional and script kiddies, tend to use known toolkits and so using a computing environment that is not mainstream is generally advantageous for security. It doesn't need to be FreeBSD.
Not any, but likely most
Do you have any detail to back up your assertion that it is safe to buy a PC from any manufacturer? From what I've seen, DELL and HP and Gateway and various other PC builders load every system up with crapware -- that doesn't sound particularly secure to me.
That was a question about hardware, not software. Clearly if you are extremely security-minded you are going to do a reinstall of some other operating system for whatever computer you get.
Again, usually it would be. It seems like software is typically the vector of attack. Hardware much less often comes with built-in vulnerabilities.
Got any backup? I find your comment encouraging but unless it's backed up with some sources, I'm inclined to be skeptical.
How many viruses have you heard of? How many of those were hardware viruses?
Okay, kidding, here's a link: http://books.google.com/books?id=w3Tdn_942t4C&pg=PA61&lpg=PA61&dq=%22hardware+vulnerabilities+are+less+common%22&source=bl&ots=ej4zaoygcA&sig=jYHdJ0hukca3k6lNn2Ho38x83Po&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bwHgULKAMdCt0AHH3oDwAw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22hardware%20vulnerabilities%20are%20less%20common%22&f=false
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"But if you're not going to give anyone permission to use your code, why post it on GitHub in the first place?"
You can use someone else's code in two perfectly legal ways in this scenario. First, you could copy it and alter it to the point it no longer bears enough resemblance to the original to cause any trouble, even though it still works great. Second, you could simply study it and learn how it works and then start from scratch yourself.
By analogy, this would be like like Green Day copying Chicago copying Led Zeppelin.
Well I guess we are alone in the universe. If no aliens found us in the 80's it's not looking good.
Plenty of aliens found us in the 80's. However, they did so using microscopic-sized nano-probes, extremely powerful telescoping cameras and the second and third track titles of Duran Duran's self-titled album, so we never noticed.
One planet is almost entirely sugar...Life could be present in these odd places...
I imagine a long dead civilization rotating around a familiar looking star. Thousands of years later when their radio messages get to us, we will be puzzled by their repeated SOS messages sent into the void. What killed them? It wasn't an ecological disaster, a virulent plague or a nuclear war -- it was diabetes.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.