I've known projector operators who would do it for free.

So first you demand that people cite actual laws, and you refuse to accept things like "copyright infringement", "slander of title", or "defamation of character".

And then when someone cites chapter and verse of the law you reply with a wikipedia link saying it isn't correct.

No, for the law cited above it was fraud. The definition in that chapter is clear: "For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services." They were expecting the honest service of the specific newspaper. Instead they received a different service, an intentionally deceptive site that transmits something called a "computer contaminant" in the law. Chapter 63 (criminal fraud) doesn't have any of the now-common exceptions "except for law enforcement as part of an investigation". Officers can commit quite a lot of what would normally be crimes when they get court approval, but fraud is not on that list.

Their malware is covered under at least one of the variations in the state law, RCW 9A.52.110, 120, and 130. Since the government may argue it wasn't done with the intent to commit another crime (since they were intending to enforce laws but accidentally committed crimes in the process) then 110 may be out, but 120 and 130 both apply.

For copyright, you can pick quite a few different laws under title 17. Several of the exclusive rights in 106 were violated, as were 113. Their designs were protected so 1301. You can pick and choose quite a few more under Copyright as well, with a notable absence of court-authorized police action exemption.

For trademarks the newspapers have certainly trademarked their logos, names, and probably a few other distinctive elements.15 USC 1114 seems to have that covered quite thoroughly, including penalties against DNS hijacking. And thanks to 15 USC 122, they cannot claim immunity for that one.

Defamation is pretty strong since their use injures the newspaper's reputation. People will now pause and think "why should I go there since the government hijacks them"? While there is the statute, it is now the court's test that qualifies it. The four-prong test by the court is, first, a false element purported to be fact (in this case, they communicated that the false website was true), second that it was published (clearly the fact was published), third, actual fault on the person making the statement amounting to at least negligence (in fact, it amounts to the level of fraud, as covered above), and fourth, some harm to the subject of the statement (which can be shown as a harm to trust and harm to their stock). Again, there is no "official government action immunity" to commit fraud thanks to 42 USC 1983. Now if they had limited it to the very specific individuals under investigation this one might not apply as a legal intercept, but since they chose to throw a broad net and infected thousands, causing a huge impact to their brand the single authorized intercept exemption doesn't apply.

I'm sure there are many more, but while some laws make exception for court-authorized police action, these specific laws do not.

Sure! I mean, I may not care much for horse urine, but we use components of urine in lots of perfumes.

The combo of eggs, almonds, and vinegar sound tolerable as pickled eggs are a popular dish in many countries. And alcohol scented, no problems there. Sweet ether sounds reasonable, as well.

Time to fire up the marketing machine.

Looks like it is out in more than just the report. More news agencies are publishing extra details.

The news agencies are pointing out the brand (Hospira) and the exact models of devices that are Internet-controllable. They mention the type of signals that need to be sent (multiple commands to infuse the drug) and they discuss the security measures already in place.

It seems the only thing they left out of news stories is the actual payload.

In the engineering community that is so standard it entered into the common usage. "Fail safe", meaning that for any failure you need to go to the safe option. A gate or switch or lock should either fail open or closed, which one is safe depends on the circumstances.

On a more prophetic note, the story two weeks ago predicting the first online murder by the end of the year seems that much closer. The reports nearly give explicit instructions.

Seems like this Billy Rios researcher identified the problem but didn't kill anyone with it. But he could have if he wanted. Someone else could read the details and figure they are anonymous enough to flip the switch just for grins and giggles.

I did the "stay at home Dad" thing for a few years. It is a pretty sweet deal in many respects. Today I do contract development work and am at home as often as I can be.

Many of the parenting tasks were mind numbing and thankless, but that's so different from software development. My wife would sometimes complain that I was putting too much effort into child activities, but I think think the results were awesome. Not only did I get to spend a bunch of time with my kids during their formative years, I got to live many things vicariously (I was a latchkey child and missed a lot), I had frequent trips and annual passes to local zoos and the local aviary, but we also spent a lot of time at learning-oriented parks, museums, libraries, and more. We did lots of tech experiments and science stuff, including playing around with microcontrollers and circuit boards and servos, dabbling in chemistry, making model rockets, and assorted other geek stuff. The kids are all intellectually skilled, great readers, and both talk about and do big things. One of my daughters (now in high school) complained about how petty most of her classmates are, more concerned about friends not immediately returning texts or teachers demanding that they actually turn in homework (gasp!) rather than bigger issues, and I openly commiserate while inwardly praise just how awesome she turned out.

Yes, stay at home if you can. It is worth it. Women who want to work all day can have it! Contract from home in your spare time, software development is a great field for that.

For me personally, I don't use gmail regularly, only to get access to Google's services. I'm careful to NOT opt in to anything with the account on the very rare occasions I need it. On the ultra-rare occasion I need to log in to the gmail account it is always filled with spam --- from Google itself. Whenever I add a Google service it automatically opts in by itself to spam me.

Just checking it now, I've got an enormous list under a tab called "promotions" with ads from Google Play. I've got a similar list under "Social" filled with weekly ads from YouTube. And I've got a weekly notice of how other people are using AdSense. Then I've got a bunch of "circle requests" from a bunch of spammy-looking people.

So gmail's spam filter works for me --- if it ends up in gmail, it is spam.

You might take a look at the article and at Intel's reply.

The issue is in sine, cosine, and similar trig functions, with an actual error of 4e-21. That error scales, of course.

Intel's documentation change basically says you should scale and reduce your numbers first before running the functions.

Consider what that level of error precision means. If you were measuring with a meter stick, you could be measuring the radius of electron charge radii with several precision bits left over. If you were measuring the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centari, you could do it in millimeters and have accuracy to spare.

Even though I've run HPC simulations most of my career, we've seldom needed more than around six decimal digits of precision; that's akin to variations of human hair width when working at the meter level. It's only a problem when someone throws some strange scale into the mix; we're running physics on the kg-m-s scale, and suddenly someone complains that their usage of microseconds and nanometers breaks the physics engine We answer simply, "Yes. Yes, it does." If you need to operate in both scales, you need a different library that handles it.

Finally, even the actual article admits this is mostly about documentation. "The absolute error in the range I was looking at was fairly constant at about 4e-21, which is quite small. For many purposes this will not matter. ... for the domains where that matters the misleading documentation can easily be a problem." He then points out that a bunch of existing math libraries know about it. He mentions that high precision libraries have different solutions and always have. He mentions that most scientists who need it use better, high precision libraries. And he details that is really just the rough approximations done on the FPU that already plays fast-and-loose by switching between 53-bit and 63-bit floating point values that have been documented as being only good for that kind of approximation since the 1980s. Everybody who works professionally with floating point for any amount of time already knows the entire x86 family (including AMD and Intel) dating back to the original coprocessor are all terrible if you need high precision.

<troll>Well, with yours you'd need a macro lens or a deep zoom, so your attitude makes sense.</troll>

More seriously, it is only a tiny subset of the modern society who does that.

On the male side, I'm guessing they're the ones who assume that if they show it off others will be attracted to them, or at least admire them somehow. They're the flashers who are confused why the women they flash don't immediately open their legs to them. They hear a woman say "What's your name?" and they reply "Can we have sex?" Or a woman sends a "lets go out to the movies" text and he replies with a picture of his junk, somehow believing that is appropriate. I'm hoping that they represent the tiniest sliver of society, but their actions are so outlandish that they get online notoriety.

On the female side, I'm guessing they're the ones who are desperately craving attention or the ones who give in to pressure. Women who want to show of their bodies can easily find the males looking for it (see above) and wouldn't need to send pics that delete themselves; for these women a permanent picture is unlikely to bother them. But like the males, I think the ones who do it without coercion are a tiny sliver of society, not the norm.

The problem isn't really with Google's business model.

It also is not limited to the US government.

Think back to various releases. News stories of the US government intercepting Cisco equipment shipments, installing back doors, and sealing them back in their original boxes with new factory seals. There are many news stories of logs with people communicating over supposedly secure connections and exchanging honeypot URLs, only to have the honeypot link hit several hours later by government-owned IP blocks or sometimes Microsoft or Apple IP blocks when using their 'secure' products.

As a result of those we set up honeypot links of our own, and I've seen reports that a percent of our site-to-site messages with honeypot links really are being visited by IP blocks from several nations. This is not just the US government, multiple governments and probably multiple big businesses have their spying tendrils inside businesses. We're looking for and slowly tightening down on potential leaks, either that or the assorted groups are slowly hitting our honeypots less and less. I used to think some of our security policies were draconian, but seeing how many probably-government groups are watching internal messages, I've become quite paranoid myself.

If someone cannot trust that their encrypted, supposedly secure communications are safe, they will stop using the products. When a government IP address hits a honeypot link shared over Apple's iMessage, does that mean Apple is a willing participant forwarding the messages while telling the public it is secured, or does that mean Apple is a victim too? Either way, iMessage is now one of many banned products in our workplace, sending any type of secure business information over it (or over Lync or Google's services or any but a short list of secure communications programs) has become a fire-able offense.

When the news broke on the Cisco equipment being intercepted this spring, their stock price plummeted and orders slowed. I know in my organization there were several major purchasing announcements, and they only buy HP equipment now (although I'm sure those are intercepted just as readily). Cisco went directly to the POTUS both publicly and privately to tell them to stop harming the company. I would not be surprised if their lawyers are nearly ready to file lawsuits for tortuous interference.

This is about far more than Google's business model. People cannot communicate within their own company infrastructure about business needs without some sort of government espionage or corporate spying. It is completely out of control.

It is very nearly eradicated globally. Good thing too.

The paralysis aspect is horrible. Those who got the disease didn't know if they would be hit by the paralysis. Those who were hit with the paralysis didn't know if it would become permanent.

Some people who had the paralysis hit lungs or heart and didn't make it to the hospital quickly enough were occasionally considered lucky. Some very unfortunate people were condemned to spend the rest of their lives on a ventilator. I knew several people (most are dead today) who had deformed faces, arms, and legs from the virus resulting in permanent paralysis. I knew several older folks with a gravely whispered voice as a result of the paralysis. I heard horror stories about people fighting in lines as the vaccine became available in the 1960s.

Last year the WHO declared a surge in polio as a world health emergency, it had jumped from below 200 globally known cases to over 400.

They track the progress and update it weekly. the web site says there are 209 year to date with a new outbreak in Syria.

It is a horrible, destructive disease. The Gates Foundation has made enormous donations, $1.8B last year. This year the Larry Ellison foundation threw in another $100M. The disease is so incredibly close to global eradication, it just needs that one final little nudge to the finish line.

So many responses are like "meh, polio, who cares."

The devastating effects of this virus are obviously forgotten by this generation. It results in paralysis that is fatal when it hits things like lungs and hearts, and results in sometimes temporary, sometimes life-long paralysis in many victims. I knew people who permanently lost their ability to talk, others with one paralyzed leg, others who lost an arm, others with distorted facial muscles and other ugly effects. In the early 1960s when it was released people lined up for the vaccine, they would lie, cheat, and steal to get the vaccine when supplies were still limited.

In you're case, you're basically discounting anyone under age 6? Polio is a 4-dose vaccination where the last dose usually isn't until age 4-6. Google says that is a half million people in Belgium. That's "not much of an issue"?

Anyone who has had a reaction to one of the components and cannot have the series, they also are irrelevant? It's probably a million or so of the population. Again, you're okay with them getting a permanently disabling disease?

The vaccines are not 100% effective, many people who were vaccinated according to schedule are still able to become sick. No idea what the percentage is, but anything other than 0 is too much. Are they really not that important?

What would you think if it was YOU or a loved one in the hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were paralyzed, hoping that the paralysis is temporary in your case.

Now, if we could limit the infections just to anti-vaxers (not the innocent children of anti-vaxers) that would be something else entirely. Anti-vax for chicken pox or milder diseases are not that bad, but anti-vax for polio and other seriously ravaging diseases is just stupid.

Polio is so close to global eradication. I applaud those like the Gates Foundation that are funding killing off the last few known wild cases.

Well known problem. Once attached to a domain, Windows attempts to do all kinds of stupid things. One of the most common problems is the open/save file dialog. The OS attempts to display it, then blocks until it contacts the domain servers to look up the user's actual name. Then there are similar delays that happen as it goes out and probes each drive, which is a problem if they are mapped network drives as the display waits until everything is built before the UI appears.

On a machine that is disconnected from the domain, perhaps a laptop away from the office, it gets even worse. Internally there is a 45 second delay on each of the network probes, and between Windows 2000 through Windows 7 they all fired sequentially. So if you had your own friendly name plus three mapped drives, that's three minutes of waiting for network connections to time out. It is somewhat faster under Windows 8, but in bad cases can still take ages.

For these specific issues they will not fix the root problems of the shell blocking until after data is loaded or probing the domain for security settings as it would break many shell plugins. It can be made partially better by disabling some of the features; they include disabling certain group policies on shell extensions, turning off certain domain security and SCAPI settings, and disabling drive mappings whenever possible. When disconnected, removing all VPN lookups and disabling proxy detections can also help. Even with those improvements, attaching a machine to a domain introduces an immediate performance penalty on everything shell-related.

Another similar set of problems is apps that try to probe the MRU file list when files are on the network. Many parts of the OS try to cache things based on prior use, and once you're wired in to the corporate network these probes (which stupidly are often blocking tasks) can take seconds to run while on the network, or minutes to run when they time out when off the corporate network.

I don't know, we call just about everything a terrorist act these days. Anything high profile they try to announce that it WASN'T called a terrorist attack. Look at the Chicago airport issue last week, many news outlets lead with "In what is not a terrorist attack, a fire in an ATC building..." I've seen news reports that call simple street vandalism and muggings "domestic terrorism".

However, I completely agree with you. Holder's statement basically says personal devices should be inherently insecure, but it is okay for corporations to have a little bit of security. How many companies have BYOD policies? How many companies buy consumer parts?

Is he thinking the government can compel Apple to make "iPhone 7 Unencrypted Consumer Edition", and "iPhone 7 Corporate Secure Edition"? Or similarly force Android, with Google and LG and Samsung and others to split into an insecure consumer version and a more secure corporate version? I don't know, maybe they could. Of course, even the non-technical sheep could be taught to notice and push back.

Yes, a security hole that will play wonderfully when it hits the news:

HEADLINE: Millions of credit cards stolen in latest data breach, NSA encryption backdoor blamed.