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Submission + - An Open Letter to Google Chairman Eric Schmidt on Drones (diydrones.com)

Submitted by savuporo
savuporo writes: DC Area Drone User Group has posted an open letter in response to recent comments by Eric Schmidt about banning drones from private use. Closing section:
Personally owned flying robots today have the power to change the balance of power between individuals and large bureaucracies in much the same way the Internet did in the past. And just as the military researchers who developed GPS for guiding munitions could never have imagined their technology would be used in the future to help people conduct health surveys in the world’s poorest countries or help people find dates in the world’s richest, there is a whole world of socially positive and banal applications for drones that are yet to be discovered. We should embrace this chance that technology provides instead of strangling these opportunities in their infancy. Our hope is that you and the rest of Google’s leadership will embrace this pro-technology agenda in the future rather than seeking to stifle it. We would welcome the opportunity to speak further with you about this topic.

Comment Classics time \o/ (Score 2) 450

by radl (#43295269) Attached to: Largest DDoS In History Reaches 300 Billion Bits Per Second
Your post advocates a

( ) technical (*) legislative (*) market-based (*) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(*) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(*) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(*) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
(*) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Government

Submission + - Syria off the Internet Grid (paritynews.com)

Submitted by hypnosec
hypnosec writes: Amidst the ongoing civil war, Syria has gone off the Internet a few hours ago with all the 84 IP block within the country unreachable from the outside. Renesys, a research firm, keeping tabs on the health of the Internet reported at about 5:25 ET that Syria’s Internet connectivity has been shut. The internet traffic from outside to Syrian IP addresses is going undelivered and anything coming out from within the country is not reaching the Internet. Akamai has tweeted that its traffic data supports what Renesys has observed.
Google

Submission + - German parliament to discuss controversial online copyright bill (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The German parliament is set to discuss a controversial online copyright bill that is meant to allow news publishers to charge search engines such as Google for reproducing short snippets from their articles.

Earlier this week, Google started a campaign against the proposed law.

Google was criticized for its campaign against the law. The search engine "obviously" tries to use its own users for lobbying interests "under the pretext of a so-called project for the freedom of the Internet", wrote Günter Krings and Ansgar Heveling, politicians of the CDU and CSU conservative parties, who together form the biggest block in the German parliament.

But Max Planck scholars said, overall, the proposed law is not well thought through, and it can not be justified by any substantive argument. And since not even the publishers unanimously agree on the necessity of the bill and a similar proposal was almost unanimously canceled by politicians 2010, any basis necessary to adopt the proposed rule is lacking, they wrote.

Comment Re:WTF is SCADA then? (Score 1) 104

by radl (#42099489) Attached to: Researcher Finds Nearly Two Dozen SCADA Bugs In a Few Hours

"Researchers have identified a hole (an overlooked security concern) in the TCP (Transmission Control Protocol a system of information transmission that aids in reliable data transfer) layer (a metaphorical layer in a sandwich of other layers each of which pertain to certain elements of the network stack (the combination of hardware (physical parts of a computer) and software (the computer code that resides on a computer's storage that makes up a computer program) that allow a computer to /talk/ to another computer over a network)) of Windows (a computer operating system (a complex computer program that coordinates and translates software requests into hardware actions))."

At least it would look nice.
The Internet

Submission + - ACTA rejected by European Parliament (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Grumbleduke
Grumbleduke writes: Today the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly to reject the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Despite attempts by the EPP Group to delay the vote until after the Courts have ruled on its legality, the Parliament voted against the Treaty by 478 to 39; apparently the biggest ever defeat the Commission has suffered.

However, despite this apparent victory for the Internet, transparency and democracy, the Commission indicated that it will press ahead with the court reference, and if the Court doesn't reject ACTA as well, will consider bringing it back before the Parliament.

Comment Has been around for a while (Score 1) 249

by radl (#35441046) Attached to: Text Messages To Replace Stamps In Sweden
In Germany Deutsche Post started this more than two years ago http://www.deutschepost.de/mlm.nf/dpag/images/flashapps/handyporto_bin/index.htm For reasons unknown until today I never recieved a letter with the so called "Handyporto". Maybe this is because they are charging text message porto customers 72% more per letter (0.95 € Handyporto VS 0.55 € regular stamps). But this is just a wild guess...
Software

Graphic Map of Linux-2.6.36 25

Posted by timothy from the under-the-hood dept.
conan.sh writes "The Interactive map of Linux Kernel was expanded and updated to the recent kernel linux-2.6.36. Now the map contains more than four hundred important source items (functions and structures) with links to source code and documentation."
Classic Games (Games)

Hank Chien Reclaims Donkey Kong High Score 122

Posted by Soulskill from the barrels-of-fun dept.
An anonymous reader writes "If you can say anything about Hank Chien, it's that he evidently doesn't take defeat very well. Sure, he knew not so deep down that his Donkey Kong World Record score wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't have foreseen that it would have been toppled so quickly. Twice, even. But he also knew that more Kong competition would be coming his way; namely Richie Knucklez Kong-Off in March. So Hank had something to prove, and prove he did. Scoring a massive 1,068,000 points in less than three hours, Hank has officially reclaimed the high score in Nintendo’s 1981 arcade classic."

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