The customer, his doctors and insurance companies would be free to look at the FDA data and decide for themselves what to medicate with.

All this does is move liability for bad drugs to entities less able to defend against bogus claims. No doctor would prescribe anything with a scintilla of risk.

Not all 4 legged animals are dogs and I don't think that your reversal of the scenario proves the point.

Can a court really throw out a document, signed by a genuine cop authorizing the person to commit a crime? The cop knowingly signed the document. Isn't this more important than the beliefs of the thief? The thief could explain his belief as "I thought that I was authorized if any one of us was a cop". So, his belief is premised on a factual basis that happened to be unlikely, but true.

Niether your opinion, nor mine matters -- all that matters is what a competant court decides. I wonder if there are any cases where this has actually happened?

So, assuming Microsoft is sincere

That's a pretty fuckin' big assumption there, guy.

>BMO goes back to read the Halloween documents

The Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, A Sincere Microsoft Board Member, and a Rabbi (a Rabbi is required in every joke) come to a 4-way stop/intersection at the same time.

Who goes first?

The Rabbi, because the others don't fuckin' exist.

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BMO

Having a habit of asking all of your criminal buddies to sign such a statement, and signing it yourself claiming that you are a cop, would tend to show that you know it's a sham.

But it's not a sham for the hypothetical real cop. The fact that all the documents signed by non-cops were sham documents isn't important.

Note: don't get your legal advice from /. -- it's likely to be wrong.

Fox News is not offering a different viewpoint, they're offering right-wing FUD.

I am not sure that it really is right wing, instead it is news through the lens of the super-rich.

Otherwise it's potentially just a matter of inserting a tiny reprogramable USB stick when there are few cashiers on and the cashier who is on isn't looking for a few seconds (ie two people walking into a Staples store can pull this off really easily).

Indeed, so much this.

I've seen open USB ports on all sorts of POS terminals and it just boggles my mind, especially because I've been in industrial environments in small companies where hot-gluing USB ports shut is a matter of course.

You can buy a USB flash drive that sits almost flush and if you take a little bit of elbow-grease and sandpaper, you can get it to sit flush easily.

So I don't see how big companies like Staples, who have the actual budget to look at security this way, don't even bother to do the basics like this. It's time we start fining/class action lawsuit-ing firms that don't even do the least bit of security, with amounts of money that actually hurt and not take "5 minutes of profits" to pay.

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BMO

What I really want to know is how did the FBI figure out it was the work of North Korean government agents.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste". They don't seriously think it was North Korea. Instead, there is an ulterior motive for blaming North Korea.

Apparently this critter is so new that by the time we checked, only a few AV companies had caught on to it.

What this shows yet again is that anti-virus scanners are a flawed methodology. There will always be a delay between a virus being released and the signature updates getting to the clients. It's inherent in the concept.

Unfortunately, some early technology journalists were partially responsible for this because, in reviews, they ranked anti-virus products that identified threats by signature higher than ones that identified threats through behaviour -- and this was because signature analysis also provided a name to the threat. In other words, the flawed idea that if you tell the user a name for the threat, you provide better protection than if you just block it. This reinforced the concept of signature analysis and slowed down research of identification of threats based on generic behavioural patterns.

Peer Name Resolution.

The problem is that it's patent encumbered, by Mickeysoft, so it's useless.

There is also something called Hierarchical DHT-based name resolution.

Abstract:

Information-centric network (ICN) architectures are an increasingly important approach for the future Internet. Several ICN approaches are based on a flat object ID namespace and require some kind of global name resolution service to translate object IDs into network addresses. Building a world-wide NRS for a flat namespace with 10^1^6 expected IDs is challenging because of requirements such as scalability, low latency, efficient network utilization, and anycast routing that selects the most suitable copies. In this paper, we present a general hierarchical NRS framework for flat ID namespaces. The framework meets those requirements by the following properties: The registration and request forwarding matches the underlying network topology, exploits request locality, supports domain-specific copies of binding entries, can offer constant hop resolution (depending on the chosen underlying forwarding scheme), and provides scoping of publications. Our general NRS framework is flexible and supports different instantiations. These instantiations offer an important trade-off between resolution-domain (i.e. subsystem) autonomy (simplifying deployment) and reduced latency, maintenance overhead, and memory requirements. To evaluate this trade-off and explore the design space, we have designed two specific instantiations of our general NRS framework: MDHT and HSkip. We have performed a theoretical analysis and a simulation-based evaluation of both systems. In addition, we have published an implementation of the MDHT system as open source. Results indicate that an average request latency of (well) below 100ms is achievable in both systems for a global system with 12 million NRS nodes while meeting our other specific requirements. These results imply that a flat namespace can be adopted on a global scale, opening up several design alternatives for information-centric network architectures.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm...

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BMO