That's the asinine thing about the ID fetish that all the apparatchiki are pushing. The 9/11 perps weren't using fake IDs, even. They had genuine passports and credit cards.

Including the fact that after the entire plane, fuselage, wings and passengers completely vaporized in the 9/11 event, the undamaged, unburned passports of those terrorists were found cleanly on the ground below, in the rubble of the aftermath.

Yes, they may have used legitimate passports, but... were they actually dropped by those people?

"How about if by installing a GPS device they catch a serial killer the month before he was going to rape and murder your wife/girlfriend? Isn't that enough repay? Or it's never enough?"

There is absolutely no justification for invading my freedom or revoking my right to privacy, including any faux crimes that may be leveled as reasons. I will not, ever, reduce my own guard to freedom or privacy, just to protect my family. That is a slippery slope, and exactly why we are where we are today, with 80% or so less rights and privacy than we had when our founding fathers created the documents that founded this country.

Take a read at one of my older blog posts that should explain my feelings on the matter a bit more concretely.

"The Goverment is running the largest deficit in history. Now a technological innovation allows to do the same as before with less money... and that's the problem. Right..."

Yes, that's exactly right. There is no way the government can possibly repay the cost of the loss of our freedom and privacy, ever.

Weigh our laptops? Exactly how much does a 1 weigh? a 0 weigh? If I create some new data and delete old data, will my laptop weigh less? Or more? How much more does a 200k keylogger weigh?

Seriously, this is silly, because TFA is talking about re-imaging laptops before/after. That would imply malware/spyware being surreptitiously installed, but that won't change the weight directly.

Re-imaging the laptop if a hardware keylogger has been installed wouldn't have any effect either (but could possibly be detected by weighing).

There's ABSOLUTELY NO WAY AROUND IT

1. Myth: "They'd need physical access to install anything to log keystrokes anyway!" Wrong. They can do this all remotely, using your own patched operating system's default capabilities.
2. Myth: "You could just borrow a machine there and boot to a KNOPPIX CD and work from that!" Wrong. If a hardware keylogger is installed, it captures everything.
3. Myth: "You could just use your own laptop and re-image it!" Wrong. If someone owns the network above you, they're certainly sniffing that.
4. Myth: "You could just use SSL and secure your communications!" Wrong. See 1.) and 2.) above

...and so on. If someone wants access, they'll get it. Either on your local machine in software, on your local machine in hardware, or on the network outside of your machine.

"One link is for, what at the moment, is the latest version of the modified hosts file and the other link is to the installation instructions and general information."

Why not just use "Hosts Man"?

"I've talked to a few people who use AT&T and still have tethering on their iPhones after upgrading. They got the new configuration bundle and have no problems."

AT&T removed tethering from every single BlackBerry device out there... at least in the heavily-dense northeast corridor here. They did this without warning, about a week after the last Apple announcement about the new iPhone 3GS and how it supports tethering, but not on AT&T.

Why? Because people who had no idea what tethering was, Googled it, found it useful, and flooded AT&T's network (and over-sold capacity), causing them to shut it down.

I've talked to no less than 100 separate people who were previously using tethering on their BB devices on the lengthy train ride to and from NYC from Boston, and they've all been locked out, including myself. It doesn't work on Windows. It doesn't work on Linux. It did the day before, and hasn't since... without any changes on our ends.

So if iPhone users can still tether, they're ahead of us now. BlackBerry users have been permanently locked out.

Fuckers.

"How is injuring the perp while subduing him with your hands any better than injuring him while subduing him with a Taser?"

I'll give you one: Controlling the situation.

How many people who have been tased standing up (and lived), suffered arm and leg fractures, dislocations from an uncontrolled descent to the hard pavement, or cracked their head during a freefall from standing to pavement? Plenty.

Now do the same thing while you tackle/subdue/etc. someone physically. How many times are you going to see anything more than pulled muscles, abrasions and possibly bite marks (in the case of mental health patients) or minor dislocations (wrists, fingers)?

"A more interesting one would be how many of those deaths were in cases where use of a gun wouldn't have been sanctioned."

...like the elderly woman who had passed out and was tasered 3 times..

...like the middle-aged man who had seizures after the first tasing and was tasered two more times, and died.

...like the young, very overweight black man who was already handcuffed and sitting in the back of the cruiser... tased more than once.

..and on and on. Cops are getting too used to pulling out the taser as a means of control, NOT a means of ensuring safety or using it as they should be, as an "Escalation of Force".

"You just know that somebody, somewhere, in a board meeting is saying "Fuck it, we're going to 9 monitors, with an aloe bezel""

"Fuck everything, we're doing FIVE blades!"

"There's all sorts of interesting parallels to the gun control debate here."

There will always be more unstable people with access to guns, than bullet-proof vests.

In this case, there will always be more malware than tools available (and current/updated) to fight it. It's a losing battle, and we're always going to be in reactive mode, not proactive. The latest malware is sneaky as heck, and it's getting smarter and stealthier all the time.

I'm lucky I don't run Windows (or Mac for that matter).

"That price should also keep it out of reach of casual hackers (or crackers!)"

You're joking, right? Do you know how much money the click-fraud and spam campaigns make, every single month? Try more than I make in a year, and I make a modest 6-figure income. Trust me, $1,700 is a pin-drop to these folks.

All they need is enough to suck out the entire contents of the repository, and it's a goldmine for thousands of new bots, malware revisions and other miscreant creations to pop up.

Back in the early 90's, I ran a BBS called "Hacker Heaven BBS", and I provided online access to the full Dr. Solomon catalog, f-prot's database (for searching viruses), AND I had file bases with thousands of samples of source code for ASM viruses and other infections at the time. Thousands.

People weren't coming to my BBS for research, they were coming to figure out what was the most-dangerous, and then fetch that. I could see them hit the database, search around, and then hit the virus vault to download the matching source to build their own nightmare.

IMHO, this is a bad, BAD idea.

ÜberTwitter has been doing that for awhile now, probably since the first release. I've been using it on my BlackBerry Bold for quite some time now, and it works great!

"Then maybe the real story here is how Microsoft has extended XML to include non-standard features, which they can implement in their own software while restricting third parties from implementing the same features..."

Is XML patented? No.

Is HTML patented? No.

Then why should an "extension" written in the same language, be patentable? Can I add some tags to HTML5, and patent it as HTML6? No.

As with most things coming out of the USPTO these days, this too... is comical.

"This is a legal gray area, but a couple years back Wired suggested that hitting the passport's chip with a hammer would disable the RFID without obvious signs--a disabled RFID chip does not invalidate the passport."

I seem to recall that putting it in a microwave on the "defrost" setting for a minute or so had the same effect, without destroying the passport itself.

Now, whether you're in a long line of people with "valid", functioning passports and yours is the only one not functioning (for the RFID scanner that TSA uses), might be in a legal gray area, but it might also gain you some additional, unwanted scrutiny into your job, your background, your hobbies and anything else.

Finding this Slashdot article in your browser cache, and you being in possession of a disabled RFID passport might be enough probable cause to dig deeper and find more. And more.