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Comment Re:Who IS unhappy about the Sony hack? (Score 1) 85

They're not threatening anyone. Their English is bad enough, you need to put some effort into reading the message.

The real message reads more like "We don't know what to do. Sony doesn't feel threatened enough to pay us, now we're clueless how to proceed".

I don't know how good North Korean intelligence is, but I hope they are better than the writers of that message. And even if it's been drawn up to look like it does, what would be the use?

Comment Ignorance and arrogance seem to go well together (Score 5, Interesting) 54

This reporter is going to write about online security, but expects her old Twitter handle that she abandoned not to be available to others? How delightfully naive. She should fit well in a paper that's Christian and scientifically orientated...

At the same time it is arrogant to blame the system for your own ignorance.

Comment Re:SO many stupid comments these are hybrids not G (Score 1) 377

Aha! Finally someone who RTFA!

It's hard to tell beforehand if any change will be positive in Africa. Look at the french, who introduced cocoa in Africa years ago. That went very well, until a major price drop occurred and in some regions caused famine because farmers couldn't switch back to other food crops in time.

Besides, GMO has failed big time. Cross pollination has already carried the Roundup resistant genes, f.i. to at least 5 wild species. It's what's killing the cotton belt. These were harmless genes, AFAICT. But there's no telling if mutations in the wild will be harmless.

GMO is not necessarily evil. Look up "Golden Rice". That project had the best of intentions. But if people don't want to eat GMO's, it's end of story. The customer is always right.

Comment Re:You know what else that stuff can be used for (Score 3, Insightful) 260

And meanwhile, an Australian can't sell for instance a Dutch (Philips) made photomultiplier tube on ebay. I can 't get some FET transistors from TI they told me, because they couldn't really identify me. Strangely enough, the next day the FET's were in the mail...

Oh, well, next time i'll buy Chinese, German, Dutch or Japanese. But not from an American company.

And which country has the most problems with weaponry, by far?

Comment Re:That's a great plan... (Score 1) 197

Yeah, but what's real funny is that every GSM phone already has a kill switch. The use has been abandoned years ago, after a Danish wholesales cie sold a couple of thousand phones to an operator in Spain. One of those got stolen. The operator activated the kill switch, rendering the phone useless. Only to find out ALL the phones stopped working. The cie in Danmark had cloned the same IMEI number to every phone...

Submission + - Watchdog Report Says N.S.A. Program Is Illegal and Should End (nytimes.com)

schwit1 writes: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.

The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.

Defenders of the program have argued that Congress acquiesced to that secret interpretation of the law by twice extending its expiration without changes. But the report rejects that idea as “both unsupported by legal precedent and unacceptable as a matter of democratic accountability.”

The report also scrutinizes in detail a handful of investigations in which the program was used, finding “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.”

Submission + - Blackhole Exploit Author Arrested In Russia (techweekeurope.co.uk)

judgecorp writes: Reports that the author of the Blackhole exploit kit has been arrested in Russia have been confirmed. The creator, called Paunch,has been nabbed, according to Troels Oerting, head of the European Cybercrime Centre. Blackhole was being updated daily until four days ago, which is more evidence of the arrest — although security researchers warn there are still functioning versions out there.

Submission + - Why is there a lack of NSA-free advertisements from major Linux distributions?

An anonymous reader writes: The NSA/GCHQ disaster seems to be a really great opportunity for Linux distributions to advertise their spyware-free operating system and their intentional willingness to not cooperate with spying programs. Yet, while this pitch would be such a goldmine of excellent and almost free advertisement destined to go viral automagically, especially when all the big operating-system corporations have been found in a warm bed with the spooks, we do not see any such public announcements from Red Hat/Fedora, Canonical/Ubuntu or the likes. There is also no sign of dead man's switches appearing, which is the least one could do to avoid suspicion. Should we take these facts as signs of incompetence in benefiting from the NSA fallout or is it a sign that Linux, or its distributions, are not so innocent after all?

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