"So far, private donors have contributed $2.5 million"

Hey, if it's private money, not a big deal. In my universe, private people can spend their own money in any smart, dumb, legal way they want to.

Certainly, giving people money for nothing isn't the best use of money. You'll get people buying stem cells, mechanical stilts, a hundred cups of coffee, and/or burglar tool sets. However, the occasional goos soul might spend their free money buying food for hobos.

Organized crime and nation state actors are behind the vast majority of large scale, sophisticated ransomware attacks. Indiscriminately killing people in hospitals doesn't present them with any moral dilemmas. To the contrary, it provides them with victims who will be highly motivated to pay ransome demands. COVID 19 is just another money making opportunity and any comments they offer are nothing more than public relations hokem.

Hmm. If we do actually get hit a zombie apocalypse, this is how it will start. No doubt!

Let's put this into perspective for a moment. Large tech companies spend millions (or more) trying to write secure code for things like operating systems. Even so, a full featured consumer operating system doesn't yet exist. Why? Lots and lots of variables. Animal life is orders of magnitude more complicated than operating systems.

By interesting, I'm assuming that you mean absolutely terrifying and something that only authoritarian governments (e.g., China) would even seriously consider.

Can you even get more 1984 than this?

Very well said.

The government's perceived right to gain access to personal communication on demand is disconcerting but not new. This heavy-handed intrusiveness is more visible now because wide spread use of encryption prevents governments from carrying out large-scale, indiscriminate surveillance that they believe is required to identify and then track illegal activities. Most disconcertingly, our federal law enforcement overlords seem to be oblivious to the fact that enabling nation-wide surveillance of the citizenry is antithetical to the principles of individual rights and liberties enumerated in our Constitution.

Because most people aren't sociopath criminal wannabes

Here's a nice write up that 2019 Challenge task solutions. https://armerj.github.io/CodeB...

From linked article "After a while, we sent an HTTP request to an OAuth endpoint in an attempt to generate an authorization bearer ... Our user account, even though its permissions were intended to be limited to authorization and resetting our password, could generate a bearer which had permission to access the API version of the application."

The 2019 NSA Codebreaker Challenge had a related variant of this type of vulnerability. Lol. Bearer tokens allow anyone with access to it to use it. Needless to say, very strict limitations should be placed on the use of these puppies. The 2019 NSA Codebreaker Challenge vulnerability (that participants had to discover) was that an OAuth token verification mechanism didn't check user id of ther person submitting it. In effect, it was a bearer token! The creators of this challenge really know their sh*t!

Shows you that details matter in network security. Knowledge is power. Learn and earn, baby!!

There was a time, before Verizon fiber, that I was stuck with Comcast as my only broadband and cable TV provider. My recollection, years and years of customer service Hell. There is no deal, no service, no price that would EVER tempt me to buy Comcast again!

They have only gotten worse. Here's their offer now, "sign up with us and we'll force you to share your Internet and wifi network with rando, unknown people by turning your wireless network into a free wifi access hot spot!" Great deal. The people who run this company are morons.

Here's the deal. Big project means lots of different software design teams. Not easy to design integrated testing across all software teams and mission elements. Lots and lots of politics involved. Chunking up "end to end" testing placates those pesky folks in middle management positions. They get to maintain control over their personal, little feifdoms.

Not saying that it's impossible to create effective, modular integrated testing plans. Just really, really hard to do it right. How do you account for the unknown unknowns?

Forcing a private company to publish something that they don't want to is an abridgement of free speech. Seems to me that the less the federal government involves itself in my life the better. I've arrived at the belief that the people in our political ruling class have clearly lost their f'ing minds!

Since we are all celebrating the value of free speech, I'll take this opportunity to mention that I'm perplexed by claims that Trump is responsible for COVID deaths. Federal response could have been better. However, the Executive branch's response was far more proactive than leaders in the U.S. legislature and was far ahead of many state governors like Cuomo.

As I recall, Pelosi, Schumer, Biden and others attacked Trump, accusing him of being a racist xenophobe, for restricting travel from regions with high COVID infection rates. In fact, Pelosi and Schumer went on television telling the public that COVID was no big deal and they should continue their lives as normal. Pelosi, made her proclamation while standing in San Francisco's Chinatown surrounded by a large, densly packed group of people.

Honestly, I'd be willing to entertain Democrat party leaders' condemnations of Trump's handling of the COVID outbreak if the democrats had, at any time, presented alternate strategies. They didn't. They only sniped from the sidelines while the Executive branch was going all out making ventilators, finding new sources of PPE, and redirecting Federal resources to states with the highest COVID infection rates.

That's true, but doesn't solve the, "hard and crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside" problem. Vulnerabilities (e.g., active directory related) can have outsized, negative effects on (more or less) homogeneous Windows-based networks. Once you reach a vulnerable service, a Windows computer is a Windows computer. A couple of vulnerabilities/exploits can go a long way.

For the same reason that many large companies use Microsoft products for network management, Domain Controllers and Active Directory make it easy to manage large numbers of Windows user computers. Every Patch Tuesday, MS releases patches that admins need to apply to hundreds or perhaps thousands of computers. This occurs every other Tuesday like clockwork. Occasionally, MS releases out of cycle security related patches that need to be applied before blackhats RE that patch, id the vulnerability, and create an exploit for it. Just most efficient way to get things done, unfortunately. Until recently, it'd have been really hard to do this with non-MS products.

Good news is that virtualization allows companies to host large numbers of virtual Windows computers on a small number of physical devices. Cloud computing is a varient of the same. This evolution has opened the door for other, better net management solutions.

I imagine that a good patent attorney would avoid making patent descriptions so general that they encompass other processes/products that already exist. I read the original patent application online. Tracking individual phones over time using cell tower logs would seemingly fall under Blyncsy's patent. Problem is that law enforcement has been using cell tower logs to track suspects for many years.

In this case, I believe that Blyncsy would have been better served if they filed a more specific patent to mitigate risk of prior art challenges. What is new, unique in their filing? Wasn't clear to me.

IMHO, Blyncsy very might have filed their patent as a means of shaking down state governments and other corporations hoping that they settle out of court to save cost of litigation.

From the actual patent:
"One embodiment may include a method of converting an electronic device into a tracking device that is part of a system of tracking devices distributed throughout a geographic area to track signal emitting devices travelling through the geographic area."

Police use cell tower information to identify the location of suspect phones retrospectively. They've done this for many years. For example, Bob says he was at home when Sally's house was robbed, so he must be innocent. Oops. Bobs phone was recorded as being near cell tower next to Sally's house when the robbery occured.

1. A system of tracking devices: cell towers
2. Signal emitting devices: Bob's cell phone
3. Traveling through geographic area: Bob's cell phone was seen by all the cell towers between his house and Sally's house. Bob was at Sally's house at the time of the robbery.