How do you hide something unreadable within something readable? ... damn, you're going to make me RTFA, aren't you? :P

As I read the blurb (I have no inside knowledge) they're not making the PAYLOAD look unencrypted. They're circumventing the type-of-flow identification mechanisms built into router filtering by encapsulating the encrypted data within an outer layer (and addressed to the port of) another protocol. (They may even have put a layer on top of the existing service so that, unless it identifies the flow as an encapsulated TOR flow, it actually PERFORMS the service.)

The result would be that, if they intercept the flow and try to parse it as what it purports to be, it may not make sense. But if their router look at the parts of the packets that are characteristic of what the flow purports to be, it will identify it as normal traffic and let it through. And if the router tries doing something like a keyword search through the bodies of the packets it won't get hits because the bodies are encrypted.

You can use this approach with any protocol that can handle the traffic patters of a TOR connection (possibly with added padding packets to make the characteristics look more like the purported flow).

Downsides might be:

1) If you do a masked TOR only server on the port they might try to connect to the purported flow and detect that this server is not what it seems.

2) If you do a diverting pancake you need a way to flag for the pancake that this is the masked TOR flow. If that's well known they might write a filter for it. (Eric Wustrow, Scott Wolchok, Ian Goldberg, and J. Alex Halderman have developed a steganographic method for applying such a tag. It is embedded in their own "TELEX" network-based firewall bypasser but might be adapted to this purpose. paper a href="https://telex.cc/"code")

A Republican administration is somewhat more likely to start a war,

Actually, Democratic administrations are more likely to start wars (though with the imperialistic Neocons the Republicans have run lately the difference isn't as great as it once was). Democrats are both clueless about how violent conflict works and prone to incrementalism. The latter avoids "Schelling points" where the frog jumps out of the heating pot. This is very effective for incrementally imposing their will on a population already under control. But when applied to war it leads to doctrines like "proportional response". This leaves the enemy with no logical time to surrender, even if he WANTS to, leading to continuous escalation and disasters like Vietnam.

But that's not germane to Ron Paul., who should NOT be lumped with generic Republicans. He's a constitutionalist of the "liberty wing". His foreign policy is "no entangling alliances" his strategy "Bring the troops home unless war is DECLARED. If war IS declared, achieve the stated target and STOP." ... and a good deal more likely to adopt policies that will increase our deficit (cutting taxes "permanently" w/o cutting spending, in particular, ...

And Ron Paul is again not in the same lump as the rest of the Republicans. He's an Austrian School economist. For the last THIRTY YEARS he's been preaching that the problem is really government SPENDING diverting resources from productive effort, not the details of how the resources are diverted.

PLEASE don't lump Paul in with "the Republicans". As The Muppets might sing: "One of these men is different from the others ...". Take a look at his actual positions and voting record before sounding off against all Republicans.

(It should be noted that the Liberty movement has positions in common with, and positions opposed to, EACH of the major parties, in about equal proportion. Because of the major party advantage, Ron chose to try to work within one of the parties rather than outside both (though he DID run for president with the Libertarians at one point). He picked the Republicans because his hottest button was economic and the Republican lip-service position was closer to what he considered correct and necessary. Getting the Rs to live up to their rhetoric was perceived as more likely to succed than turning the Ds around.)

Unless the USB keys themselves were stolen ... there is no transfer of property. We need to ... get the media to start correcting ridiculous statements.

The companies doing the reporting are also the companies who own the "content" that is being "stolen" (or "copied without purchase of the right to do so").

So I wouldn't bother spending any effort trying to get them to change their language to be more accurate (but less accusatory).

Sweet - get the TSA in there to feel up all the big, hairy, stoked-up sports fans with facepaint and a few six-packs already down the hatch

"Feel up"? Don't you mean "irradiate"? G-ray scanner capable of looking through inches of steel isn't too safe for gonads. Especially if they don't shut down the source if traffic gets tied up in front of it.

If most of 'em weren't already past breeding age it might make a nontrivial improvement in the nerd/jock ratio of upcoming generations.

(Yes, yes, I know they said it was for use on cargo vehicles. But if operated with the usual competence level of government projects ...)

The whole argument from your link about it not being as lethal as H5N1 is pure speculation - as he admits, we don't know transmissibility of the strain in humans, because we won't do that experiment.

Right. But the expectation is that the mutations the virus makes, in the process of improving their ability to infect the new non-human host, typically reduce their ability to infect humans. Not necessarily true, of course. But more likely than not.

Even if the new host is "closer to us" on the evolutionary tree, immune systems and cell-surface viral targets are about the fastest evolving (and diverging) parts of the genome. If they'd done this with primates as the target I'd worry. But (absent some research showing that the hemagglutinin targets on ferrets are especially similar to those in primates) I wouldn't worry lay odds that hops from birds to ferrets might make the virus more dangerous, rather than less dangerous or unchanged, when it comes to people.

As I understand it the original research was into finding out how the virus does/might hop species. That's something that does need to be researched. Even if it might make something that you REALLY don't want to escape as a side effect.

Meanwhile the fact of what they're up to and how they did it IS a cat out of the bag, even if the particular two residues that changed isn't yet published. Absent stealing the resulting virus from the lab, a potential bioterrorist would probably be ahead doing his own make-it-hop experiments using something antigenically closer to humans than he would getting the info on THIS thing's sequence and trying to hack the genome of the wild strain to match.

IMO every one of the Republican nominees are pretty damned creepy, ...

Have you actually LOOKED at Ron Paul 's positions and voting record (rather than the Lamestream Media's smears)?

At any rate, we have no good choices. I'll probably vote Green or Libbie anyway, just because I find it incredibly stupid to vote for anyone who wants to put you, some of your friends, or members of your family in prison.

When both major parties hand you lemons, who cares which one wins? The only way to make your vote count is to send a message for next time around. Voting for (or writing in) a minor candidate says "Here's a vote you COULD have had if you hadn't run such a turkey." Voting for one with a position on his keynote issues is close to your position on YOUR important issues says "And here's what's important to me and which way to change to get my vote next time."

(I note that Ron Paul's position on the drug war is to end the federal part of it - which is all he'd have influence over. The drug war is mainly driven by the fed and pushed onto the states, so returning the issue to the states would essentially kill it - or at least both give you a smaller job to finish it off where you live and a number of safe havens.)

You may vote for ponies, but what you're getting is a kitten or a puppy.

Given the cart that needs pulling to get out of the quicksand, I'll vote for the pony.

The Republicans can't win the general election without the Ron Paul supporters and they know it. And polling indicates that at LEAST half of the Paulistas will NOT vote for any of the other members of the Republican field, considering them at least as much of a problem as Obama. (Only Ron Paul and Mitt Romney poll as potentially winning against O. And in the general campaign Romney can expect to lose ground due to his history while Ron can expect to GAIN ground - especially among independents and anti-war Democrats - as more people are exposed to his politics.)

When both sides hand you a disaster candidate who cares who wins? The only way to NOT waste your vote is to use it to send a message for the next time around:
  - Voting for a minor party candidate (or writing in a candidate not on a major party ticket) says "Here's a vote you could have had if you hadn't run such a turkey."
  - Voting for the candidate whose position on his highlighted issues is closest to your own on YOUR important issues says "And here's what's important to me and which way you need to change to get my vote next time."

Republicans have sacrificed virtue for "electability" as have the Democrats. So rather than voting in the primary for people who really represent their beliefs, they vote for someone who is "electable" ...

The mathematical psychologists - as far back as the 1960s - had a term for this "Dishonest Voter". It referred to someone who, rather than voting for the candidate closest to his own position, voted for the closest within the constraint of perceived electability. It played HELL with the mathematical models.

... in the process getting someone who doesn't represent their beliefs at all.

This is why it's a bad strategy.

An example of how it can go wrong is the replacement of California's recalled governor (Gray Davis) in 2003. Jim McClintock would have made about the ideal rein-in-the-government Republican candidate. But his name recognition was a bit low. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger entered the race. A LOT of Republican voters switched because of his name recognition advantage and the perception that McClintock might not be able to win - which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Arnold became "The Gubernator", self-admittedly JUST on name recognition. Later polling showed that McClintock WOULD have had enough votes to win handily had Arnold not entered the race.

It turns out that Arnold was one of the most extreme RINOs in existence. He was nominally a Republican because he'd been very impressed by Nixon as a new immigrant from Austria (perceiving him as anti-socialist in the Nixon-Humphrey debates). But he married into the Kennedy family (Maria Shriver) and acquired political connections and advisors (and ambitions) through them. It was noticed at the Inauguration that virtually everybody on the VIP platform was a noted Democrat. He appointed a Democrat as his chief of staff. Faced with a solidly Democratic legislature (thanks to a combination of a leftist-majority urban population and gerrymandering) he submitted a few government-cutting proposals to voters as initiatives. When these failed he threw in the towel and became a generic Democrat-equivalent California governor for the remainder of his term limit.

What could possibly go wrong . . .

One word: Krakatoa.

Three more: Mount Saint Hellens

As I understand it, the explosion of the Krakatoa volcano was a steam explosion, caused by high-pressure ocean water coming into contact with lava deep underground, with the only way to release the pressure being to push the mountain into the air. The result was the loudest sound ever recorded: It was detectable on barographs world-wide.

The details of mountain explosions were something of a mystery until an "AHA!" moment produced by a heroic seismologist. He was too close to Mount St. Helens when the explosion finally occurred. So he took a series of shots of the process with his camera, then wrapped it in his spare clothing and backpack so it would survive the shock, flying debris, and pyroclastic ash flow (which he, of course, did not). Stitched together the shots formed a jerkey movie which clearly explained the mechanism:

Extreme pressure under the volcano (in this case volcanic gas) gradually raises the dome, with resulting faulting and shocks. Eventually one side of the mountain collapses in a landslide. This removes a LOT of weight very suddenly. The remaining weight is entirely inadequate to restrain the gas pressure which, in addition to expanding in all directions as a shock wave, blasts the rest of the mountain into dust and lofts it into the upper atmosphere.

Pressure injection wells produce earthquakes by turning areas the size of counties into the large piston of a hydraulic jack, pushing apart and lubricating faults. Enough pressure cracks the rock, producing additional faults to be "jacked open".

The potential problem from doing this with water is that it can suddenly open a passage and bathe a lot of lava-hot rock, suddenly and drastically heating and expanding the water AND increasing the size of the "large piston". If it can't make it back out through the injection well, make it out through a new geyser, or relieve its own pressure faster than it rises by jacking open the ground, it might create a Krakatoa version of the Mount Saint Hellens scenario.

I hope the engineers have calculated for this scenario and determined that it isn't plausible and/or designed adequate pressure relief to take into account things like earth movements simultaneously shoving a slug of water against a lava face and blocking some avenues of its retreat.

Why would it have to be more complicated than the magnetic patch antennas used with satellite phones?

A patch antenna is not a phased array. It has a broad, roughly conical, pattern, has one feed point (or two for circular polarization), is not electronically steered, and so does not require a large number of independently phased drives or a similar number of phase-switching components. It's a passive, single-pattern antenna - like the horn in a dish or a rubber duckie on a land-based cellphone.

Like the land-based cellphone system, things like Iridium depend on only one or a very small number of the constellation of satellite "cells" being in range of a given phone at a time. The phone only chews up time/frequency/spreading-function slots in a handfull of satellites at a time. Given the low data rate, eating a slot in several sats is acceptable.

For high-speed internet it's another case. The higher bandwidth means you need a better signal-to-noise ratio or higher power. And it also means you don't want to chew up several times your allotment by shouting at all the satellites that are above horizon at a time. So a steerable antenna on the ground station is likely to be necessary when the system is fully deployed and starting to push saturation.

Now you might get away with patch antennas INITIALLY and maybe for low-bandwidth emergency uplinks even when fully deployed. But deploying with near-omnidirectional antennas and high-power remote terminals, when you'll have to switch out your deployed base's equipment in a couple years if your system succeeds, is a poor business plan.

Regardless of whether patch antennas will do or phased-array antennas are needed from day one, the original question was essentially "why not phased arrays". That was what I addressed.

Make sense?