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 also strongly prefer ASCII emoticons. The graphic ones aren't consistent across platforms, and often aren't readable enough on phone screens (even not counting that texting them from Android to iPhone or back tends to replace them with different ones with a similar theme or else ??'s.)

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.

Cisco Advanced Malware Protection is their "hash transmitted/received files, compare with hashes of known malware" which has its own uses in this sort of environment.

The newer GPSs are getting better about voice assistance, before they totally vanish from the market. Also, they're not telling Google/Amazon/Apple everything you're saying at home (yeah, I know, theoretically they don't usually do that) or letting TV commercials order bags of dogfood sent to you (really big bags, because Alexa knows it was a Labrador Retriever barking.)

Trade shows used to raffle off iPads and such. Now it's mostly Amazon Echo variants, which I actively don't want in my house, as opposed to drones, which I'm not interested in but not annoyed by.

A couple of months ago I'd gotten sufficiently fed up with Android that, when my Android tablet decided to reset itself again, a week or so before I was going on a trip, at the same time that Fry's had an Ematic Win10 tablet on sale, that I'd give Windows tablets a chance. The one I bought had 32GB of flash (plus a microSD card slot), and had 15.9GB of that free. I ran Windows Update, which told me that Anniversary Update was available and needed 16GB of free space; turns out that doesn't mean 15.9, nor 16, nor 16 with an empty 64GB SD card - I had to drag&drop enough different things over to the SD card to get about 18-19GB free on the built-in to get the update to run. But once it had enough space it ran cleanly.

The latest outrage from MS is that the email account I registered it with had the form "username+tag@domain.com", and MS has decided that to protect me from losing access to the account if I forget the password, they need to VERIFY that by sending it an email, which never arrives because they're confused by the "+tag" in the name field, so when I tried to add a different email by answering a bunch of bogus security questions with the same answers as last time, they sent the "VERIFICATION" email to the new address, I clicked on it, and the first thing it does is demand that I re-verify it by having them send a code to the old address. I have not given them a phone number to call, since I have no interest in giving them my real information; I'm tempted to borrow a burner for that, or see if they can send the code by audio to a VOIP system or something.

(That's not even counting that Windows 10 tablet mode is pretty lame, and works much better with a keyboard, and the nice ergonomically designed keyboard that came with the tablet died after about a month, but that's more a symptom of what you get for $70 on sale.)

As far as I could tell, the main reason people were annoyed about Google Glass (besides the ostentatious bragging of wearing $1500 glasses) was that somebody wearing them could be taking your picture at any time, without obviously holding up a camera or a phone or wearing a lapel-pin camera or having a pen-sized camera in their shirt pocket or something clipped to their backpack straps or whatever else. These glasses still do that, just not as well as a cheap camera or phone.

But the display inside the glasses, which made Google Glass more useful than a camera thing, isn't in these, and it's also missing the potential Google functionality of doing face recognition and telling you the name of the person you're looking at, which you forgot. Sure, somebody wearing Google Glasses could look like they're looking at you but really be watching cat videos or talking to somebody else, but cellphone headsets had given us those a decade earlier, and now there's Pokemon Go or whatever follows it.

Also, social views of always-connected cameras are changing, as a result of Black Lives Matter and other episodes of people recording cops behaving badly and the near-ubiquity of cellphone video. Yes, there are privacy tradeoffs we need to figure out (e.g. secure recording for your pictures doesn't have to also mean that Google or Apple iCloud has access to your data.)

Of course Obama should pardon Snowden, but we all know that ain't gonna happen. The real question is whether some EU country like Germany or some other country besides Russia will offer Snowden asylum. So far, none of them have had the guts, even Ecuador which is giving Julian Assange some slack, though most Latin American governments are too tightly tied to the US to offer protection against kidnapping as well as against official extradition or look-the-other-way rendition.

Russia's currently some protection for Snowden, but only while he's politically useful to Putin, and Putin's still in power. If anything happens to Putin, or to Snowden's usefulness (e.g. Putin wants to do a favor for President Trump), he's in trouble.

Sure, it's just a simple matter of programming to re-architect the signalling system that's driven the phone companies since the mid-80s. Unfortunately, number spoofing has been an important feature for legitimate businesses - it lets them do things like always give you the number of their main office as caller-id, even if the person is calling from a remote office, or let you give the direct number of the caller, even if the call is getting routed through the company's main office PBX VOIP gateway. It also provides the ability to do a lot more complicated things. And (this mattered more back then than now) it let them run phone switches on processors that were made in the 1960s and 1970s, and with mainframes that might have 10 MIPS of CPU power (compared with the wimpy 1 MIPS VAX I was using in 1980.) My wristwatch probably has less RAM than that, but probably a much faster CPU, and my wimpy Android phone has about as much RAM as my VAX had disk.

And yes, within the next decade we may well have re-architected the world's phone systems away from the designs we used back then (and much of the implementation has changed radically already), but interface standards stick around a lot longer than implementations, and are a lot harder to get rid of.

I don't have mod points so I can't mod it down. And the shooters were right-wingers yelling hatred for Turks.

"Denied" would be the party not accepting him because he's not a member or didn't file the right paperwork or whatever. Dude lost, not only because he didn't have the credibility with most of the party that Gary Johnson has, but also because he's too crazy and embarrassing even for us.

"Foiled" would be ok :-)

Bitcoin isn't really designed for investment, in the buy-and-hold sense where you hope the value goes up.
What it's designed for is making transactions, so you can buy and sell regular goods over the internet with lower transaction costs than credit cards or PayPal, and so you can buy and sell (ahem) less regular goods over the internet with much less traceability than credit cards or PayPal, even though you don't get the advantage of being able to cancel the payment or limit it to $50 if the seller defaults.

Of course, what it's really not designed for is storing in a bank where somebody you don't 100% trust is holding it for you, because it's also an extremely convenient transaction methods for embezzlement, either by the bank's managers or employees or other insiders, and digital safecracking lets you become an insider without all the noise and dust of using dynamite or the risks of using guns.

I'm really not worried about Chinese or Russian or Enemy-of-the-month-i-stani 1337 h4x0rs tracking what the US presidential campaigns are doing. I'm much more concerned about US government hackers monitoring who's involved with what political campaigns, and slightly concerned about campaigns and their totally-not-coordinated-with-the-campaign supporters' committees hacking each others' resources.

The biggest risk with foreign hackers isn't foreign governments tracking our political movements - it's foreign criminals compromising web pages, figuring that they'd be good targets, and if you're giving that $20 donation to some candidate who's not good at web security, they can redirect it to themselves.