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Comment: Re:Wireless Privacy??? (Score 2) 103

by Isao (#37894196) Attached to: UK Police Buy Covert Cellphone Surveillance System
Another facet of this is that the devices can be tracked, whether or not the user is using it or making a call. As long as it is on and available to receive a call (communicating with the base) it can be identified and a coarse location determined. If it were me in the law-enforcement role, the way I would use this is to identify devices in an area of interest (the protest locations) and record the identifiers over a series of days/nights. Eliminating devices which did not appear during a majority of the observed days lets you focus on the core group of people present at the events. (This will include media, people who live/work in the area, police and civil support themselves, etc.) Some careful trimming of the data by time of day will help reduce the "noise". Then you have a subset to focus investigations on. If I were on the other side, I'd make good use of WiFi (fixed and hotspots), VoIP, and "burners" (prepaid phones bought with cash and no ID - don't know if that's possible in all countries). Those are easy protections. Defense can get more technical and fiddle with the device IDs, but that likely crosses a line - and I'd want to be pure as the driven snow if I was at high risk of being arrested at some point.

Comment: 3-2-1 Backup (Score 1) 499

by Isao (#37558458) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Best Long-Term Video/Picture Storage?
First off, Congratulations! Including files related to my 4 year old, I've got about 100GB of media. I recommend the 3-2-1 Backup method: 3 copies of the data, on 2 different drives/media, 1 of them off-site. I do this by having a "primary" copy of the data on a machine at home, which I copy to a backup drive periodically. The primary also gets rsync'd nightly to a cheap eeePC with a 1 TB USB drive in a closet at my parents place. All this is running Linux, but you can manage with other OS's. Bonus #1: They get local access to the media via an SMB read-only share. Bonus #2: I gave them a writable share for THEIR data, which is rsync'd nightly to our place as a backup. You can do this with friends, etc. Being on the same ISP helps as the sync traffic can stay in the provider cloud. I've also used Amazon S3 (~US$13/month for 100GB of non-redundant storage) and I still use rsync.net for more limited critical documents (encrypted), though their price doesn't scale well for large, static data sets (they don't charge for bandwidth so relatively small but dynamic data is a good fit).

Comment: Re:You can do that right now (Score 1) 436

by Isao (#37239936) Attached to: SignalGuru Helps Drivers Avoid Red Lights
No, s/he's talking about the ECU dropping the injector dwell to zero because the accessories can be run from the inertia of the car. Engine revs come from the wheels/transmission, not combustion, actually a lot like a hybrid's regenerative brakes. You can actually watch this happen in reverse when you get close to stopping because the revs are too low to sustain drive and the ECU starts fuel flow again, causing a slight blip in RPM as it transitions to idle. (This is also when the transmission disengages.)

Comment: Re:Why Gen Z Needs To Change for Work (Score 1) 443

by Isao (#36204722) Attached to: Why IT Needs To Change for Gen Z
Some provide a choice: company laptop with maintenance or your own device but you do the maintenance.

I can't wait for this, and the ensuing lawsuits. Am I lawsuit happy? Perhaps, but the first time client PII or similar data is lost through this practice, there will be a lawsuit faster than you can say "failure to perform due diligence".

That said I believe there are "right" ways to do this. Virtual machines, remote desktops, mobile apps, sandboxes, etc. My company has no problem buying an employee a Mac or Linux machine or iPad when the work really requires it. With apologies to MasterCard, for everything else there's VirtualBox.

Comment: Re:Deadlier than the terrorists (Score 1) 681

by Isao (#34305968) Attached to: Making Airport Scanners Less Objectionable
I don't like the backscatter machines OR the pat-downs, but I saw this and it raised some questions. Now I'm a Schneier fan-boy, and we even work in the same field, but let's take the NY 9/11 attack as a comparison (2819 according to NYMag).

So for the scanner to be deadlier than just that attack, it would have to kill 16 extra people a year for a bit over 176 years. Am I missing something?

For further comparison there's an 9/11-equivalent loss of life on US road every 27 days (using 2008 numbers from the 'pedia.) Maybe it's me, but I don't see it being more deadly than terrorists. That said, I'm not going in them - radiation is cumulative. RF (the MM-wave scanners) is not.

Comment: Re:Norman Spinrad had him beat by almost a decade (Score 1) 305

by Isao (#33973102) Attached to: Japan's Latest Rockstar Is a 3D Hologram
"Eve Tokimatsuri" from Megazone 23 came out in March of 1985. Note this is an Anime OVA, and I suspect influenced the desires of the folks working on Hatsune Miku. My only remaining questions are when the aliens attack our Dyson Sphere-like satellite city, and where to get my Garland prototype.

Comment: Re:Lowest bidder (Score 4, Interesting) 154

by Isao (#33769948) Attached to: Army DNS ROOT Server Down For 18+ Hours
There are two main approaches to government contracting: Lowest Cost and Best Value. Contrary to popular belief, Lowest Cost is not always the one chosen, by a long shot. I also previously misunderstood "Close enough for government work." Turns out most "government work" has very specific requirements and specifications, or you don't get paid. If you see something different, please call Waste, Fraud & Abuse.

Comment: Different exams (Score 1) 870

by Isao (#33573298) Attached to: Preventing Networked Gizmo Use During Exams?
Just a thought... I suggest a number of different exams (say 4, for a class size of 30?), randomly distributed to the students. This will help mitigate answer copying (unless the miscreants have the same version) - sending a question to get an answer means the answer provider has to do two or more exams, not just their own. You can't eliminate cheating, but you can raise the effort required to do it. This also means more work for you, but so would denying RF or IR comms, crib sheets, etc., and is less technically complex. Use a mix of different questions and the same questions with different parameters.

Comment: Re:Protecting what? (Score 1) 100

by Isao (#33568172) Attached to: US Gov't Makes a Mess of Classifying Sensitive Data
This is correct, the SSN is an identifier. (Yes, I know the card is marked not to use as identification, but that's different. The problem is that a secure transaction (on-line or off), requires an identifier and an authenticator. An identifier is like a username - it identifies who the party is. An authenticator is like a password - it attempts to confirm the entity supplying the identifier is the real one.

The problem is that the SSN is used as both identifier and authenticator, which is an inherent flaw. The SSN is a de-facto identifier. Any attempt to use it as a shared secret authenticator is doomed.

Comment: FTA & Wildfeeds (Score 1) 386

by Isao (#33381184) Attached to: Fun To Be Had With a 10-Foot Satellite Dish?
Free-To-Air (FTA) feeds and Wildfeeds are plentiful. Do some reading on http://www.satforums.com/ see if you can steer the dish, and if it's possible to enable it for Ku as well a C band (I'm guessing it's C because of the size). You can often refit a C band mesh dish to work on Ku by laying metal window screening on the surface of the reflector. Then you have to mount a KU feed at the focal point, usually offset next to the C feedhorn. Great site to find out what you can view FTA from your location: Lyngsat, for the central US try this page. To see if you can view a satellite from your location there are simple calculators on Lyngsat.

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