Yeah, that and the companies who don't want to do "military applications" can just do pure research. Pure, ivory-tower research... which the DoD can just pay someone else to integrate into an actual weapon system. It's not like a machine learning algorithm knows or cares to what use it's put, once it is out there.

Dumb posturing; I also wonder if these people have considered what a world dominated by Chinese and Russian military AI will look like, and what effect it would have... I am not sure it would be the best of all possible worlds, exactly.

I doubt this has been lost on the DefCon organizers. Presumably they think that they'd lose more attendance by moving to Europe than by having people who can't safely travel to the US just not come, or attend/present via videoconference or something. And I suspect that's probably true -- very few people (in my experience) go to DefCon or similar conferences on their own dime; you go on your employer's money. And getting your employer to comp you a few hundred bucks for a flight to Vegas and a shitty hotel room (Vegas hotel rooms are notoriously cheap) is a heck of a lot easier than getting a company to cough up for a transatlantic ticket, hotel in Europe, etc. As long as the majority of the attendees are in the US, this is where the conferences are going to be.

But coming here if you're involved in cybercrime is probably, uh, not a very smart idea. That Hutchins came at all suggests to me that he didn't know that the FBI was onto his alleged previous (pre-Wannacry) activities; the alternative is that he's dumb, and he doesn't seem dumb. (Though a fair number of very smart people are also arrogant and don't give other people credit for being able to figure things out, so that's also an option, I suppose.)

There is a legitimate question as to whether there should be some sort of cyber amnesty program, though, given the number of mostly-legitimate "security researchers" who have shady backgrounds but seem to have moved on from them. I've got some mixed feelings on that. On one hand, getting blackhats and their knowledge out into the open so vulns can be remediated and the network in general made more robust is a Good Thing. But I don't know if it outweighs the message it would send, which is that you can basically play Computer Mafioso when you're young and then retire to a nice, secure, respectable position as "security researcher" without the threat of your prior activities coming back to bite you. That's not really how things work in the non-IT world; if you spend your 20s working for the Mob, and then retire to a respectable profession, that respectability is unlikely to protect you from getting a knock on your door sometime later, depending on the statue of limitations, for stuff you did earlier. Might make a judge or jury go easier on you, but it's not an ironclad defense.

I think it's more like "one good deed today doesn't get you off the hook for the bad deed you did last week".

In other words, if you're a blackhat who happens to take down another blackhat, that doesn't buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can play when other things you may have done in the past surface.

Or at least, not to an extent that stops you from getting indicted. It might play pretty well in court if the whole thing actually goes to trial, I'd imagine. Can't hurt anyway.

That doesn't make any sense and has no basis in fact.

There are enough legitimate issues with the FBI / CIA and their handling of cybersecurity issues that creating conspiracy-theory narratives is both unnecessary and counterproductive. Frankly it just muddies the waters on the real issues.

Yeah I'd like some more meat to the story as well. Amazon Glacier achieves its pricing by using low-RPM consumer drives plugged into some sort of high-density backplanes; supposedly they are so densely packed that you can only spin up a few drives at once due to power and heat issues. Hence the delay.

I assume Google is doing something similar, maybe with somewhat better power or cooling since they're offering faster retrieval times which implies that perhaps they can spin up a higher percentage of drives at a time.

It's not a terribly serious setback in the history of space flight, but it could be a serious blow to Orbital.

Their whole program is built around the idea of using old surplus Soviet-era rocket engines, originally designed for the ill-fated N1 program. (The N1 program, as a sidenote, is responsible for one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history when one of its launch vehicles had a failure shortly after takeoff. On top of a zero-for-four launch record, it's not the program I'd pick to emulate.)

My understanding of the Soviet engines is that they have some design features that make them lightweight for their output, but represent tradeoffs not typically taken on Western engines, due to the risk of "burn through". But some people--perhaps including Orbital--thought that the designers had solved the problem and the risks were overstated.

Too early to tell right now, but if the engines turn out to have a fatal flaw, that would be bad for Orbital. It'd probably be good for SpaceX, since they're the obvious alternative, but it'd leave NASA down one contractor for the commercial launch program.

I believe it is called "Bud", "Bud Light", etc., while the Czech company uses the "Budweiser" name.

And even that was contentious.

In the US, trademarks only extend as far as someone might be confused by their use. It's not a hard black and white line, but you can use "Word" if you wanted to, in an unrelated industry from Microsoft's, provided that nobody thought that customers might be confused and think that your product was, or was in some way related to, Microsoft's. (Obviously since Microsoft is such a big company and does so much stuff, this might be harder than if they were purely in the word processing business.)

A good example is Apple Records vs Apple Computer Corp. There was a lot of argument that went back and forth as to whether Apple Computers might be confused with Apple Records -- which seemed ridiculous at the time, because why would Apple Computer ever get into the music business? So they worked it out and came to a settlement to stay out of each other's turf. That happens very frequently. (It got interesting when Apple-the-computer-company decided to get into the music business; my understanding is that they made Apple Records an offer they couldn't refuse.)

And given how ubiquitous Microsoft's products are -- love them or hate them -- the breadth of their trademarks are probably not unreasonable. A no-name company ought not be able to assert a trademark with any similar breadth, because there's so little chance of confusion.

Well they are registered in the .com TLD, which is basically United States namespace, so it would make sense that US trademark law would apply at least in terms of the domain name. I doubt some European company would be able to convince a US court to order Verisign to turn over the domain to them.

So at worst, I would think that Pinterest could continue to operate under the "Pinterest.com" domain name; the challenge would be whether they want to advertise in the European market, which might be prohibited without changing their name.

Unless the product has been certified for use with classified information, that's not much of an assurance. The government has its own internally-developed tools -- which presumably it has confidence in (SIPRNet, etc.) -- for protecting information that it deems sensitive. The NSA might well decide that subverting a commercial tool is worth the risk of compromising something that's used by the government, but only in relatively trivial ways.

I don't know enough to impugn Zimmerman et al, but I don't think "it's used by the government!" is necessarily a great seal of approval, unless it's a formal certification (e.g. NSA Type 1 listing) saying that it can be used to protect classified information. And I'm not aware of any COTS software products that are on the Type 1 list; the NSA only approves particular hardware implementations (at least that I've seen, though I'm happy to be corrected although I'd be surprised).