Revenge is a dish best served in the wrong orbit?

Funny, isn't it, in the midst of all these sanctions and general brou-ha-ha over the Ukraine, with Russia taking all kinds of tit-for-tat punitive measure in response by EU attempts use economic fines in order to restrain their bad behavior, that, âoeThe nonstandard operation of the integrated management system was likely caused by an error in the embedded software," which manages to cost the EU the full use of a multi-million dollar satellite whose purpose was to provide competition with Russia's GLONASS system (in addition to American GPS)?

They didn't even have to do anything fancy, just twiddle a few lines of code to send it off course, then blame it on random "unforeseeable" coding error that they'll refuse to accept responsibility for.

Forget Federal funding, this needs to be Federal law , plain and simple. As in, no officer testimony or evidence gathered or submitted without corresponding and complete video+audio evidence shall be admissible in a court of law, absent other strong, irrefutable and corroborating testimony or evidence originating from a non-police/non-governmental source. After all, anybody who took a basic logic or philosophy class should know that the burden of proof lies on the accuser, not the accused, and anyone who has been paying attention should know that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to believe that police officers are somehow more honest than everyone else, or incapable of lying simply because they took some classes, swore and oath, and had a shiny piece of metal pinned on them: they are caught lying in and out of court ALL the time, on a daily basis, so why should their word be considered more reliable than anyone else's?

Frankly, the behavior of the police has been so questionable lately that there's no reason for anyone - especially otherwise honest judges - to take them at their word, especially when they're the ones completely in control of the entire evidence-gathering process, and thus have every opportunity to rig it in their favor.

There's just no excuse for officers NOT to be wearing cameras (particularly cell-enabled body-cameras that are constantly uploading to a remote server), much less for them to ever make an arrest or gather evidence without one running. Cost is not relevant: even if they are $1000 or $3000 each, that's still vastly cheaper than the lawsuits cities regularly pay out to as a result of police misconduct, alleged, factual, or otherwise. Cameras will help ensure officers conduct themselves professionally, knowing their behavior is being recorded impartially and will be subject to review, while simultaneously reducing false claims and ensuring that when such claims are made there is sufficient evidence to disprove them.

I designed a honeypot built on similar principles at the last data center I worked for, whereby I had at least two different VM's comprising at least two different OS' on each and every subnet on our network.

Using a custom implementation of PSAD and a bunch of PERL, the basic idea was that any time a specific IP (external *or* internal) scanned more than eight ports per IP across two or more subnets, it was unquestionably an illegitimate scan of our network, and the IP originating the scan in question was immediately submitted for null routing, because nobody could possibly have a legitimate reason for doing such a scan.

Port scans from internal IP's, along with those matching other patterns (such as multiple scans within a single subnet or attempting certain exploits/attacks that can be deduced from snort's output in /var/log/messages, like the slammer worm, etc.) were output to a file that was reviewed daily, and could then be fed either in whole or in part(s) to a script that would process the desired actions. Before I knew it, I was blackholing hundreds or even thousands of addresses a day... ~70% of which were from China Telecom, followed immediately by Russia, Brazil, and Moldova, with less than 5% of attacks originating from U.S. or European addresses. The number of compromised customer servers on our network plummeted, along with a corresponding and by-no-means-insignificant dip in network traffic.

What got me started on this project was that, among other things, hackers were scanning our network for Plesk's default admin login port (as Plesk at that time *had* a default admin login and password), and any time they got a response from port 8443 on an IP that previously did not have that port open, they would jump in and root new installs often before the customer ever logged in for the first time. Needless to say, I put an end to that nonsense.

However, calling spammers dumb as others have above is probably a mistake: they can often be fairly smart, but what they really are - usually - is Peak Lazy, and are aiming for low hanging fruit. Eventually, the more sophisticated ones will create or adapt new techniques to defeat - or at least cope with - this particular methodology, and the cat-and-mouse-arms-race game of security will continue on as it always has, with one side or the other evolving new defenses or offenses, and the other evolving an appropriate response. The fact that a particular batch of spammers got caught and will find the emails from their current spam campaigns not reaching their intended audience on this go round will only slow them down for a time on the domains this list covers, but to say the spammers have hit "Peak Stupid" as a result of excessive automation is, in fact, an NP-Dumb analysis.

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." ~Arthur C. Clarke

Just because they can't figure out HOW a digital machine would compute it does not mean that machine consciousness isn't possible... merely highly unlikely with the current state of the art.

Semi-/organic systems or components or other radically new or different implementations and designs of hardware, new materials, as well as new software techniques could blow their assertion out of the water next month as easily as in the next decade.

Pretty much every time someone says "you cannot", someone eventually comes along and develops something to prove them wrong. Just like they said no one would ever break the sound barrier, or put a man in orbit, or that there's only a need for a handful of computers globally. You know, like every time someone says "tape is a dead storage medium", or "ZOMG Moore's Law is going to fail in the next 5 years", and are consistently proven wrong. This scenario is no different, and merely indicates a lack of understanding of science on the part of the researchers, as well as a lack of imagination. Just because they can't figure out HOW it could be done does not mean it is not possible.

Star Wars didn't even remotely do this first... in fact, it wasn't even the first in major media, seeing as how this was the whole point of the "deflector dish" in Star Trek.

Also, they've "proven" or "demonstrated" precisely nothing, as they have tested - and derived results from - precisely nothing.

Finally, the feasibility of this was demonstrated long ago by an "odd" occurrence in a 3M plant making polypropylene film, not to mention the high-strength electro-magnetic fields (or "bottles") currently in use in experimental fusion reactors.

Just because I noticed that birds and other creatures can fly and write about it in a paper, does not mean that constitutes demonstration or proof of an assertion that human-powered flight is feasible, nor does it demonstrate the actual principle in any useful way.

If this exact same logic had been applied during the time the Constitution was written, these people would have attempted to ban anyone from possessing or using fire in any place where any document that any government agency might one day want to read is created or stored, because "the criminals might burn the papers we think might contain evidence against them, therefore nobody should be allowed to have fire and paper at the same time because it would inconvenience us."

Notation that you create a vacuum. ;)

Agreed entirely.

"Wah, technology is making our extremely self-isolated, often xenophobic culture irrelevant and unnecessary, and we're losing children to the 'normals' because the 'normals' want our precious deaf babies to be able to hear just like them, and then they won't be able to identify with our problems and won't want to be part of our little culture. Waaaaaahhhhhhhh."

It's a bit like the tiny backwards religions and cults (like the ones that preach total abstinence, for example) who can't figure out why their children don't want to remain part of their tiny little self-isolated ultra-religious, extremely narrow-minded and often rather intolerant communities for the larger world of opportunities without the shackles of self-imposed dogmas or bigotries. "We just can't figure out why these children would want to leave our perfect little nest and see or be part of the wider world."

That's part of what technology does: encourages progress, and helps us ablate away the slough and callouses on our society and cultures. 100+ years ago there were whole, relatively mainstream cultures focused on death because it was such an unavoidable part of life, during an age where you were lucky if 1 in 3 children survived to adolescence, much less adulthood. Since then, medical science drastically increased survival rates, and those cults faded away as fewer and fewer people suffered agonizing, tragic, or otherwise preventable losses, and thus as fewer people needed social support in their grief or hardships, such cults largely disappeared.

Deaf "culture" should be no different. It's a crutch, a support group, for people with similar problems to band together, however it very often creates as many problems as it solves. By pulling people away or serving to isolate them from their larger culture, not as an individual wishing to remain unique, but as someone who sees themselves as irrevocably different from, and outside the groups that would otherwise be their peers, if not for their disability, it creates a barrier to participation or feelings of inclusion in society at large, and in the end can do as much harm as good by fostering resentment toward a society they see as rejecting them, all while they isolate themselves from it further and further.

Having recently just re-watched all of ST:TNG, my picks for worst are fairly simple: most episodes focusing on Troi, any episode featuring Troi's mother, and almost every episode featuring or focusing on Worf's son Alexander.

Stop feeding the troll, kids.

Seriously, this is being reposted to multiple threads with no intent other than disrupting normal discussion, no different from the GNAA trolls of years past. Just move along and ignore it, nothing to see here.

> "is a 100% free software mobile device important to you?"

In a word: Yes.

The borderline (and sometimes not-so-borderline) criminal behavior of some software/hardware makers, coupled with often exorbitant costs for a device that will either be destroyed (via being cheaply made) or totally obsolete in a few years makes me quite leery of trusting or relying on a modern smartphone, much less actually spending my own money on one. Especially when my company provides me with a phone, POS though it may be.

If you can afford a 20TB RAID *and* have enough data of value to warrant *retaining* 20TB, then you can certainly justify the expense of a tape drive and corresponding tapes to back it all up.

Tape is not dead, contrary to more than 3 decades of claims otherwise. It is, in fact, perfectly alive and healthy, and well worth using (with a proper backup/rotation scheme) when you have that kind of data volume to store.

I've worked for Arcus/Iron Mountain and Recall both, and I can't tell you how many times over my years with those companies I've heard someone say "We don't need off-site backups" or "We don't need tape, we just have the IT guy take the hotswap drives home every day", only to have them come crawling back in tears weeks, months or years later when they've lost everything.

Because tape is a dead and obsolete technology too, just like people have been saying it will be with every new storage advance for more than 30 years, right?

*sigh* Let me guess, you're either between 15 - 25 years old, and/or have never worked in enterprise-class I.T.? Otherwise, you really ought to know better.

Before I ever entered I.T. professionally 20 years ago, people had been claiming the impending death of magnetic tape for more than a decade. at least, yet it is still with us today. Sure, the round-wheel tape is more-or-less gone, but tape is still going strong.

Similarly, SSD's are not going to completely replace mechanical storage any time soon, if only because as solid-state memory improves, so will mechanical devices continue to do, and they will almost certainly have a place in modern computing for many years yet to come, barring some as-yet completely unforeseen revolution in materials science lowering materials and production costs while raising quality and value to thresholds well beyond anything currently predicted. Then again, the same advance (such as room-temperature superconductors) could have wide-ranging positive impacts on both technologies, increasing memory operation speeds in SSD's while eliminating the mechanical bearing from HDD's and providing similar performance increases.

After all, I'm pretty sure that if I dig back far enough, I can find at least one thread - quite possibly one I made substantially similar comments in - on this very site from ~15 years ago with someone saying much the same thing about how optical (or magneto-optical) is going to make tape/mechanical-drives obsolete. Now we know optical disks have a life-span before they degrade, making them useless for long-term archival storage, and I couldn't tell you when the last time I saw a mini-disc was.

This is very common in large, enterprise-class businesses with significant numbers of PC's dedicated to end-users, as this methodology is used in various ways to provide security (to the enterprise, while simultaneously robbing the end-user of theirs in favor of the business'). The services provided by companies likeZScaler would be perhaps the most common use of these types of MITM attacks.