Posts by Kurt Cypher

Driver follows satnav to his doom

Re: Darwin Award or RoTM?

I'd say a little of both. The driver was stupid enough to be in the running for a Darwin Award by blindly following the machine's directions, and the machine recognized and took advantage of the aforementioned stupidity.

Car-stopping electropulse cannon to demo 'next month'

Re: IEDs not carbombs

"I dont think you could use this for check points - you would piss off every car owner coming to the checkpoint by killing their car (bomb or not!)."

Sure you could. You don't leave it on continuously, you only fire off a pulse when you have a reasonable suspicion, like the car is headed toward the checkpoint without slowing down, ignoring all the signs saying use of deadly force is authorized. Zap the car, taking away one weapon, and have your rifles ready to take care of the occupants, assuming the EMP doesn't cause them to blow up at a distance from the checkpoint.

RE: A potential actual use...

On the down-side, what if the fail-safe mode for the IED is to blow up if the electronics fail due to an EMP (assuming the bad-guys can figure out how to build such a failure mode)? This would also prove problematic if the EMP gun is used on a car-bomb at a check-point.

Database anonymity at risk, warns researcher

We should trust people?

"So my solution is that we shift our trust from the technology to the people"

"The people" are the cause of most of the privacy/data breaches. The technology just assists in making the breach easier.

McAfee: Why we blacklisted SANS

What About False Negatives?

We hear a lot about the false positives, but I wonder how many false negatives make it through SiteAdvisor in a given month, leaving people open to a false sense of security?

Samsung laptop battery burns

@Joey Y

"If we cannot make users less foolish, at least make the equipment more foolproof."

Unfortunately, if you make something foolproof, the world will create a bigger fool to invalidate your efforts.

Sun introduces first Intel workstation in two decades

Problem with Sun's AMD & Intel Offerings

My problem with Sun's AMD & Intel offerings is that they do not offer a writable optical drive as a build-to-order option. Your choices are DVD-ROM & DVD-Dual, and as far as I can tell the DVD-Dual is not writable. Sun's standard way of distributing Solaris x86 is for you to download & burn ISO images, yet they don't sell workstations that come with a way to burn the images.