Posts by Bumpy Cat 535 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2009
I have home insurance. When a year goes by without my house being burgled, flooded or burnt down, I don't reach for my pitchfork demanding answers.
Establishing links with neighbouring countries, building a self-sustaining presence, and educating your population seem to be worthy things to do, even if you don't have to evacuate your country.
Anon/LulzSec hack into systems and break them - BAD
They release documents that show inner workings of govt, some of which is corrupt - GOOD
They piss off the FBI - BAD (idea)
FBI arrests people who broke things, probably LulzSec - err ... good? I think?
People arrested get abused in prison - BAD
Verdict: everything is BAD and broken forever. Also, it's raining and my coffee is cold.
And nutrition fluid designed for mammal infants will hold a lot of nutrition for other mammals, infant or not, of different species.
Seriously, you can make any foodstuff sound weird:
- eggs? Unfertilized offspring of dinosaur descendents
- cheese? Curdled mammal infant nutrition fluid
- meat? Muscles and organs from mammals
- rice? Fertilized seeds from the dominant species on the planet (by biomass)
I mostly agree, but my point is that John Random Hacker is not going to know anything about gas turbine fired power stations. A disgruntled insider or an engineer who worked on the systems *would* know enough to do lots of damage, but in that case would they need to hack in?
The pool of people who can usefully hack into systems, SCADA or otherwise, is small. The pool of people who know how to tweak SCADA systems in a bad way is also small. The intersection of these is necessarily even smaller - and (thankfully? hopefully?) the number of those who actually wish to cause harm is even smaller.
Also, a malicious SCADA hacker who knows how to mess up sewage plants probably can't affect traffic lights, or nuclear plants. We're just lucky enough that the intersection of two rare skill sets and malicious intent is pretty small.
I think the key point in not in knowing how to fiddle with a system, but how to meaningfully fiddle with a system. As you say, an expert hacker can penetrate, study and understand a system, but would have to be an expert in sewage systems, traffic lights or nuclear plants to actually do something specific. Shutting down is probably easy to figure out, but closing this or that valve to achieve backflow somewhere is not going to be obvious.
Yes, it is too much to expect.
I worked for a little while locating lost/hard-to-find properties for Thames Water. Even with an address and a description of the property, it's frequently very hard to find an actual place. If you look at how many addresses are within 8 minutes driving (at blue-lights speed) you'd be surprised - and I'm pretty sure you'd never learn every single address.
It seems that a lot of corporations now do their utmost to shut the shareholders out of any decision-making. The corps want the money but don't want to actually be accountable (might interfere with the executive compensation committee, you know). Good work from the SEC!
For both the reasons you mention. There is an official union, which is just a branch of the ruling communist party and is just another instrument of state repression. And if workers actually try to unionize independently, then they'll be sacked and hired thugs from the companies in question would beat them up and throw them out of the company-provided housing.
Looks like you may want to revisit your theory there, buddy.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2012/01/03/january-2012-web-server-survey.html
65% of major sites run on Linux, as opposed to 15% on Windows - so for big hauls of credit card numbers, Linux is the way to go.
Then again, if you're after desktop PCs for DDoS, you would want to aim at the ubiquitous and poorly-secured ...
... but don't you support womens right in Afghan anyway? Or is it the case that, because supporting womens rights means supporting NATO operations in Afghan, the correct attitude is "sod the women"?
This is unfortunately the case with a lot of the Stop the War lot ... NATO is inherently bad, so anyone who opposes them is naturally good, so yay Taliban!
This is a good place to put your money (unfortunately).
Zynga is really going to determine the future of gaming, based on sheer weight of numbers. When you can develop spend a year developing a complex game for 20 million hardcore gamers, or spend a month developing a simple game for 500 million casual gamers - which would you choose? Which do you think is going to determine how games are developed? There's quite a good take on it here:
http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/
Carrier IQ's initial reaction - to sue the researcher - is the most damning response possible. If they had simply called him up and given their fluffy diagnostic-tool answer in the first place, none of this would have happened. It's this response more than anything else that makes me suspicious.
This addresses two issues that bother me:
- the constant fleecing of gov money by large corporations
- the incompetent/uncaring result of outsourcing function to said large corporations. As a university sysadmin, you can bet I'll work like a dog to fix a problem - it's my system! For some of our partners, they'll do the bare minimum to fix something, and more worryingly our policy ends up being dictated by them.
Educational systems are better run by people who work at the institution, because we have a much better view of how systems should work, and how they tie in to the rest of the institution.
There should be a clear paper trail of instructions from the Home Secretary all the way down to Bob the passport guy. This would clearly pinpoint who made the call (and maybe why) and firings could follow.
If the paper trail doesn't exist, then firings can start even earlier! Whoever failed to clearly instruct their subordinates is obviously not fit for role. And if this was a case of government policy by soundbite, then it's the Home Sec who should leave.
Also, "these policies have been around since 2008/2009"?! Does that mean various nutbags have been getting in unhindered for years?
Jallalabad to Abbottabad is about 150 km, Kabul is about 240 km. An hours flight or less in most helicopters.
Plain old Blackhawks or the standard SF Pave Hawks would probably have done the job just as well - go for the slightly better variant because it has better radar/night vision and the specialist pilots are trained on that.
The US special forces have a choice of three different types of Blackhawk alone, while the UK special forces air assets consist of an old Lynx painted black. :(
The US dictated both the 7.62 and the 5.56 rounds to NATO, the first in the 50s and the second in the 60s/70s. "Us Europeans", especially the British, were very keen on the old .280 round, which both in tactics and ballistics is quite close to ... the 6.5 Grendel.
So you've just re-invented something that we developed 50 years ago, and are ranting at us for adopting something that you forced us to adopt. I guess it's true - Americans don't understand irony.
The FN MAG is an older gun, dating back to the 1950s and used by almost everyone. This was taken into service as the GPMG by the UK many years ago. Eventually the US saw the light and ditched the M60 in favour of the FN MAG, which they called the M240.
The FN Minimi dates to the 70s. It was adopted by the US in the early 80s, and only taken into service by the UK in the last few years, as a UOR (Urgent Operational Requirement) for Iraq/Afghanistan.
People will die at the hands of other human beings. But it will be quite hard to conceal a ballistic missile launch, or to deny a role in it, and so the perpetrators will go to jail for a very long time. If they're stupid enough to launch from a different country, then they can expect airstrikes or a ballistic missile in response.
So we have to rely on the innate goodness and self-preservation of humans. It's the same reason we don't have (too many) incidents of people driving cars at high speed into crowds.
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