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Comment Re:call me skeptical (Score 1) 190

He's the one that made the claims. He said he did it, and then went to the FBI to explain how he did it. Other than finding the tampered box lid, all the "evidence" is in his claims.

I could knock a panel loose and then claim I hacked the in-flight entertainment system and made an airplane into a sperm whale and then a potted plant. That doesn't make it real, even if I showed them a box containing an infinite improbability drive. Funny thing about that, when most people see it, they see an empty box. How improbable.

Comment Asteriod redirection (Score 0) 150

NASA already has the answer. Glitter filled Super Balls are the best thing for the job. As we all know, they are infused with magic energy. A 10kg payload traveling at 11.2 km/s could deflect an object the size of the moon.

It does have risks though. Once set in motion, the Super Balls would be set loose on the universe, potentially disrupting entire galaxies.

For the sake of the universe, I hope we never have to deploy such a weapon.

Submission + - New MakerBot CEO Explains Layoffs, Store Closings and the Company's New Vision

merbs writes: MakerBot Industries is the public face of 3D printing. And whenever the public face of a nascent, closely-watched consumer technology undergoes a serious customer relations crisis, closes all of its retail stores, and lays off 20 percent of its staff, the impact is prone to ripple beyond the fate of a single company. Jonathan Jaglom, in other words, may be tasked not just with reversing the fortunes of MakerBot, where he’s just been appointed CEO, but an entire industry.

Comment Re:Tiversa breached systems? (Score 4, Interesting) 65

That's probably the biggest reason to have good in-house security people. They don't have a financial interest to make breaches or lie about them. It's in their best interest to keep everything secure, and continue to look for new ways to attempt breaking into their own stuff.

I've never felt good about letting third parties in to do security testing. When someone above my rank decided to let a 3rd party do external tests, they'll pick anything and make it sound disastrous. One place was bitching about anything.

They complained that we had the current version of Bind running on the DNS servers. "But people can do DNS requests!" Yup.

They flagged the fact that we dropped unwanted traffic at the firewall. Yup. Get over it. They were upset it took forever to scan the network. Good.

They flagged us for having a web server providing static content. They were upset they couldn't find any way to exploit CGIs or do SQL injection. Yup. That was kind of the idea.

There were a whole bunch of other trivial things that they flagged us for. Then they were brought to the office, and got upset that we didn't provide wifi. Nope, that's a security risk. They wanted to plug their laptop into our network, so they were only given external access. Again, they bitched. But letting an unknown computer owned by an unauthorized party plug into our network is a security risk.

They eventually gave up trying to bully us into dropping our security precautions and gave us a pass.

I already habitually ran tests with privileged access to make sure even if all layers of protection failed, nothing really bad could happen.

Honestly, if they are given everything, they can find something. Give them administrative rights to everything, and credentials to everything, they can find something. Like, email accounts can be accessed with full admin rights. Funny how that works.

Submission + - Enterprise SSDs potentially lose data in a week (ibtimes.co.uk)

Mal-2 writes: From IB Times:

The standards body for the microelectronics industry has found that Solid State Drives (SSD) can start to lose their data and become corrupted if they are left without power for as little as a week. According to a recent presentation (PDF) by Seagate's Alvin Cox, who is also chairman of the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC), the period of time that data will be retained on an SSD is halved for every 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) rise in temperature in the area where the SSD is stored.


Comment Re:At the same time (Score 2) 323

Yup, if it wasn't Microsoft, all kinds of other companies could have dominated the desktop market. IBM (OS/2), Quarterdeck (DESQview/X), Apple (Mac OS), NeXT (NeXT), any number of *nix companies (X11), and others.

Microsoft got big because they got the consumers interested, and questionable deals with vendors.

Plenty of people only know the tunnel-vision version of computer history and they believe Microsoft is it. They either don't remember (or are too young to have seen) software boxes (ahh, the good ol' days) had logos to indicate which OS they worked on so you could pick the right one.

Comment Re:this already exists (Score 1) 288

Saying "We're sure he had..." without evidence is not evidence. They have to have the evidence that he actually *did* have what is claimed.

That's the hard part. They have to gather the evidence to get the conviction. Without evidence, they can't get a conviction. At least if you have a competent attorney. If you have a crappy one, you'll get the 5 years because they talked you into taking a pre-trial plea agreement. That's how innocent people go to jail.

Comment Re:Too expensive. (Score 1) 112

You can change his plan too. Boost offers 2GB/mo 4G LTE for $30/mo, which simply degrades to 3G when he hits 2GB.

I don't bother with the higher plans. I play Ingress a lot, use it constantly for mail, and I do a lot of web stuff when not home. Like searching for reviews and price comparisons when I'm out shopping. I also occasionally tether my laptop if I need to do something and don't have wifi available. At home and when I'm in an office, I get on wifi. It's not a bandwidth saving measure though, it's just faster to be on a fat pipe than anything wireless trying to penetrate buildings. When I check my usage, I'm usually only at 1.2 to 1.5 GB per month.

I ran into my first problem with Boost a month ago. They messed up provisioning Visual Voicemail when I switched phones, so it isn't sending transcribed messages to me.

It would seem that they're targeting a small market with this new plan.

Ah, they got their site up. It was throwing an error last night.

Comment Re:WHAT? (Score 1) 313

If that's the story I'm thinking of, we're not resurrecting the mammoth, we're cloning it. Those are usually introducing the DNA into somewhat comparable modern animals. It's not like the mammoth would wake up and say "Hey, what happened? Last thing I remember was eating frozen grass in the tundra." That's assuming mammoths could talk. :)

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