Dear Prince Bernard, If you're talking about my bank account, you're barking up the wrong tree :)

Some people only believe it if the ATF tells them it's true...

Why would you think it would take the national guard, or any sort of serious force, or messing with routing tables?

All it would take two agents and a national security letter.

Most datacenters don't have that many people working in them at any given time. Well, there might be people, but staff is usually a half dozen or less security, 2 or 3 NOC techs, and some sales people if they even bothered to work from the office that day. Two agents say "cut power to all the gear in the meet-me room", and confirm everything went dark. Done. People argue less when confronted by people with guns, and put up less resistance when handcuffed and locked in a room. If they're feeling particularly ambitious (and horribly annoying IMHO), they could hit the main breakers on the equipment side of the battery room. No power to the routers, no data going over them.

Do a few major peerings, and the Internet is dead. A perfectly capable kill switch.

Something like this wouldn't be used for a SCADA problem. It's more of to isolate Internet resources.

In a war scenario, one of the first things an attacker would do is neutralize infrastructure. Power, communications, water, etc. Power is done at power plants. Only isolated pieces remain, like places with their own generators.

Communications is the point we're talking about here. Internet, land lines, cell phones, and sat phones down with the "kill switch". You'll still have some working, like PBXs within an organization, and some (but not all) sat phones. At very best, you'll have some sat phones talking to each other, but they aren't calling land lines or now disconnected cell phones.

Water is mostly killed with the power, or can be addressed later.

The only communications you'll end up with are HAM radios, and those with illegal transmitters switching to commercial AM/FM frequencies. Of those, it will only be the ones who have their own generators. They'll be a lot easier to triangulate without all the normal RF noise present.

Then you isolate consumable transportation. Civilians will starve without food supplies being brought in. Major roads, railroads, and sea ports with be blocked or severed.

The sad thing is, everything I described is in all of the war plans. It can also be accomplished by a small group of civilians with a good plan. It's simply proof that there has been no real threat to the United States. .. and to whoever may be reading this that says "Oh shit, he's a bad guy", I'm not. But if your bosses insist you interview me, feel free to stop by and say "hi". Bring soda and smokes, and we'll have a nice long chat. Don't mess up the front door, we'll open it for you.

Yup, it's always been there.

Plenty of people know where all the international fiber endpoints are. I can think of a dozen buildings that if they were isolated, it would cripple Internet service in the US. They don't even have to shut down entire datacenters, only the power in the meet-me rooms. I think DHS can find 2 dozen agents in the US who would go to those buildings, shut down the rooms, and the Internet is gone.

As we've seen before, a problem with just one tier 1 provider can make Internet service crawl. Dropping a few major peering points would effectively shut the whole thing down. It's not even hard to find them, if you've been doing business with them. I've been to a few.

They could probably have it ready to shut down simultaneously with a 30 minute lead time to give enough time for the agents to drive to them. Internet and phones would be dead everywhere in the US, and severely interrupt international use. Any remaining links and private peerings would be saturated beyond use.

There are maps and lists readily available.

http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_exchange_points#North_America
http://www.bgp4.as/internet-exchanges
http://www.datacentermap.com/ixps.html

Fair use cases are very fact specific. If you start monkeying with the facts, Judge Chin might not feel the same way about it.

I don't know but please hire me as your lawyer when you do.

The Zoe is an electric only car that is marketed at European "company lease" users. Actual drivers don't "own" the cars, nor do their employers. To keep costs nice and predictable, Renault had to do this. Even the few private "owners" of these cars got scared of battery replacement costs of several hybrids we've had for the last ten years or so in Europe, but lease companies have started demanding warranties for the full duration from manufacturers to even consider the cars in their programs.

The fact that a manufacturer can remotely shut down your car using GPRS/3G is scary and not something you'd want. However, given the financial model and the amount of things that can go wrong in such an "experimental vehicle" it may be for the best. Failing throttles and brakes and no way to shut down the car is not what you want. Maybe Renaults *will* catch on fire spontaneously, who knows?

Thatswhatappealscourtsarefor

For some /.ers that's going to mean they have to do grunt suppression.

My understanding is that the false positive rate is so high that it's essentially useless at determining if someone is lying. As others have alluded to, it is the subject's belief that the interrogator with his machine that can somehow determine lies from truth that counts. Since even innocent people accused of a crime and interrogated in this fashion will have high stress levels, the machine itself has absolutely no technical capacity to determine truth or lie. The secret to beating a polygraph boils down to knowing that it's all smoke and mirrors and pseudoscientific BS.

Try those in the UK legal system. They are absolutely horrible laws, since you can even sue someone and win if they have only stated facts. Just because you actively did something to make them look less good, not by slander or falsely claiming they did something illegal, you're committing a crime.

I'm on DSL, you insensitive clod!

"Flawed in principle" is putting it rather mildly. I'd put it as "complete and utter bullshit." Polygraphs are on a level with dousing and voodoo dolls.

While your theory is sound, in practice, you never hit an exact identical car exactly head on. Statistically, smaller, nimble cars with attentive drivers tend to be more able to avoid you than big trucks and school buses. This leaves the amount of big vehicles in distraction-caused collisions larger than you'd expect from the amount of them on the road. The amount of failed avoidances is also pretty high, when you're in multi-vehicle crash statistics. That means that almost all crashes in which you hit another vehicle while being distracted will have acceleration forces of both cars play a role. A lot of those will even each other out, but you will also see that the forces will make things worse. Think of cars going sideways hitting other cars and objects, flipping over and even rolling because of "whiplash" effects.

Apart from that, frontal crashes tend to be a significant portion of the result of distraction, but they are hardly the only thing. There are plenty of other scenarios where you get into a seriously life threatening situation, like rolling the car a few times or flicking something and doing a sideways slide into a tree or lantern post. At speeds over 35 mph those can easily be lethal since air bags can't protect you effectively. Think of the added anxiety of not knowing what sort of crash you are going to be "simulating" to teach people not to fondle their phone while driving.