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Comment Privacy, not so much (Score 1) 32

The ARRL meltdown may or may not have compromised private user information. Most of the licensing information is in the public domain. The large Logbook of the World database is valuable, recording millions of QSOs (contacts) between amateurs, but it is not exactly private.

The more interesting data are in-house emails relating to policy and administration. Think salaries and other employee data, Board discussions, strategies, etc. The work of ~100 staffers has been interrupted for a week, as the headquarters internet and phone services are down. WFH. A blow to morale.

Most significantly, to me, is the lack of any meaningful communications with the membership about what is really going on. What is known about the cause of the outage, what concrete actions are being taken. None of the League's statements have been signed by leadership.

de AA6E

Comment Re: Regardless which side you prefer to win this (Score 1) 152

Very important analysis. But "Idaho" secession is even harder if you consider the economic problems. Kind of like Brexit. Somehow Idaho has to take on it share of the national debt and give up all national subsidies. Of course they also stop paying taxes, but many/most secession-minded states get more from the federal government than they pay in taxes.

Submission + - Darkened SpaceX Satellites Can Still Disrupt Astronomy, New Research Suggests (gizmodo.com)

Anonymouse Cowtard writes: SpaceXâ(TM)s attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers.

It's an improvement, but still not good enough, according to the team, led by astronomer Takashi Horiuchi from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. These "DarkSats", as they're called, also continue to cause problems at other wavelengths of light.

The first batch of orbiting Starlink satellites is brighter than 99% of objects in low Earth orbit. This is a huge concern, given Elon Muskâ(TM)s desire to launch upwards of 12,000 Starlink satellites and possibly as many as 42,000.

Submission + - The Challenges of Moderating User Content on the Internet (and a Bit of History) (vortex.com)

Lauren Weinstein writes: I increasingly suspect that the days of large-scale public distribution of unmoderated UGC (User Generated Content) on the Internet may shortly begin drawing to a close in significant ways. The most likely path leading to this over time will be a combination of steps taken independently by social media firms and future legislative mandates ...

Comment Be your own backup (Score 1) 409

If your transporter converts you into a bit pattern and squirts that somewhere else, it's likely you've got yourself in RAM somewhere. (Or maybe it's just your flash frozen body.) It's a snapshot of yourself, and you can make as many copies from that as you like. Each one has your same life history up to the snapshot.

As a SF plot (I think it's been done), this is more interesting than simple transporter operation.

Comment Social Media Internet (Score 1) 111

Shutting down the Internet completely includes e-commerce, e-mail, traditional news media, etc. The bread and butter Internet is economically important and politically relatively innocuous. Social media (Facebook, messaging, etc.) are much more worrisome and dynamic and subject to all kinds of abuse.

I might be open to shutting down social media -- in the weeks before an election, for example. We have seen tremendous abuse, both foreign and domestic.

Shutting down SM in case of civil strife is a harder case. It helps level the playing field by letting individuals show what's really happening, but of course it also empowers the forces of reaction. There many cases of both.

Comment Do it yourself? (Score 1) 356

You whippersnappers may not remember there was a time when there was no commercial software, with the exception of assemblers and, if you were lucky, compilers. Somebody showed you how to punch cards or paper tape and gave you an instruction manual. (Thinking Datatron 205 or IBM 1620.)

So there were mostly no bugs except your own. There was little "OS" except a boot loader. There was no "network" and no bad guys lurking around.

It was a lot of fun.

Comment Re:I got a different email (Score 1) 104

Paying customer here. Got the same letter. I figured that if I really need the service, it's worth paying for. Free services (looking at you Google) are always suspect, since your info is likely to be the product, and they have no particular commitment to keep their services alive.

Still, Dyn's $36 is pretty steep for a low-volume DDNS customer. I see that no-ip provides a similar tier for $25.

The hard-to-quantify advantage of Dyn has been their (claimed) reliability and depth of technology - redundancy, etc.

Submission + - New John the Ripper Cracks Passwords on FPGAs

solardiz writes: John the Ripper is the oldest still evolving password cracker program (and Open Source project), first released in 1996. John the Ripper 1.9.0-jumbo-1, which has just been announced with a lengthy list of changes, is the first release to include FPGA support (in addition to CPU, GPU, and Xeon Phi). This is a long-awaited (or long-delayed) major release, encompassing 4.5 years of development and 6000+ commits by 80+ contributors. From the announcement:

"Added FPGA support for 7 hash types for ZTEX 1.15y boards [...] we support: bcrypt, descrypt (including its bigcrypt extension), sha512crypt & Drupal7, sha256crypt, md5crypt (including its Apache apr1 and AIX smd5 variations) & phpass. As far as we're aware, several of these are implemented on FPGA for the very first time. For bcrypt, our ~119k c/s at cost 5 in ~27W greatly outperforms latest high-end GPUs per board, per dollar, and per Watt. [...] We also support multi-board clusters (tested [...] for up to 16 boards, thus 64 FPGAs, [...] on a Raspberry Pi 2 host)."

Comment Re:Passenger Drones are the clear answer (Score 1) 428

The military have converted many of their air operations to drones, and that must be part of the pilot shortage story. If we can operate in Afghanistan from a comfy seat in Reno, isn't this the inevitable future of air transport? It's much like the self-driving car situation, only a mistake kills ~300 people at a time. What would it take to convince YOU to fly on an automatic airplane?

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