This is arguably a dupe of Tumblr Co-Founder: Apple's Software Is In a Nosedive, but what the hey, it's still true.

I keep hearing this. And not believing it.

The most important part of a job is being able to do the job.

Nothing GREAT comes from "just fitting in". If you can't handle DOING THE JOB then screw you. You suck. Live with it.

No need to do such extreme damage, when the same effect can be achieved with a simple fuse on the positive voltage line of the port. Suspicious activity? Burn the fuse-- BAM-- port is dead, but easily fixed.

Doesn't protect against other attack avenues that have either been hypothoized or demo'd though. The entertainment unit always seems popular. Trojaned CD in the player, for example or exploit against the bluetooth system. Hey I wonder what happens to that cute bit of software that displays what song the FM station is playing if the station sends YourPawnedxxxxxxxxxx....?

I'm not sure most of the security sector put it together that someone might voluntarily install their own remotely exploitable device into the bus in sufficient numbers to be interesting. Guess we should know better then to underestimate the power of a discount!

(I do agree with the rest of your post btw.)

Min

lol - exactly what I thought. Where's my floppy with OMMM (opus matrix mail masher, fidonet's answer to sendmail!).

Min

Just as a point of interest, there was a talk at Defcon last year where someone built a IPS (intrusion prevention system) for the bus of the car. It turns out that the communication matrix for a car is a very static system. The parts of a car that communicate with each other do so often (e.g. Engine controller and injection system), and predictably. Other parts that don't (e.g. entertainment system, or that ODBII plug from the insurance company and the traction control system) never do. So it's possible to build a device that models the system by listening on the bus and if it suddenly sees new traffic patterns shorts out the bus, leaving you with a less smart, but still on 4 wheels and not careening into oncoming traffic, car.

Seems like something the OEMs should be looking into.

Min

You mean people like Madison and Hamilton, who wrote the Federalist Papers under a pseudonym to keep their authorship of them secret?

At this point... I would like to introduce the concept of "corruption vacuum", which I think is equal in metrics to the idea of "power vacuum".

Interesting analogy, because the "accuracy" in Interstellar actually was somewhat distracting to me because it made the areas that weren't accurate stand out more.

OK, so there are magic space aliens driving the plot at some point. That I didn't have a problem with. Magic space aliens doing magic, whatever, it drives the movie, willful suspension of disbelief and all that.

Infinite fuel space-planes and the magical spaceship that somehow carried enough supplies for a multi-year mission while looking way too small to do that, on the other hand - those annoyed me. If they hadn't gone for the "realistic" initial spaceship launch I probably could have binned those into the "magic space aliens" "suspension of disbelief" category and just ignored them, but when you go for "realism" you need to go for "realism" everywhere.

Sounds like it's the same with this movie. OK, so the hacking is super realistic, great. Too bad the rest of the movie isn't, making the contrast just that much more jarring.

(That being said, I enjoyed Interstellar. It's a good movie. The science stuff is still a bit bogus, but the core movie is good. Sounds like the same can't be said for Blackhat based on the reviews I've seen.)

I'll just point you to mythosaz's comment since otherwise I'd just copy it.

You do realize there is a massive realm of potential punishment between "nothing" and "years in a small cell," right?

Wait, I recognize your user name, which means you almost certainly do not.

And did he actually carry out those threats or is the traditional police tactic of "let's charge with literally everything we can and see what sticks?"

Because nothing in the article elaborates on these so called death threats and swatting claims. It's almost entirely about the LizardSquad DDOS, that involved neither of those.

And that has what to do with the Lizard Squad DDOS attacks on PSN/Xbox Live that the article is about?

Uh, that seems kind of harsh for someone who's crime is preventing people from playing with their new toys on Christmas day.

It's an artificial scarcity used to inflate value. Generating "just enough" electricity, rather than "more than enough", when you are using a nuclear plant, is more about what you do with the heat (do you turn it into electricity, or do you shunt it to the cooling towers, because you can't throw it on the grid), rather than whether or not the heat is going to be relatively constant, unless you are in a changeout cycle.

Thankfully your ala carte cable is coming to pass (i.e. the unbundled ability to get some channels online is now there).