Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26111 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
You can carry guns/ammunition in checked baggage but not a joke "take a number" sign shaped like a grenade?
In fact it's become standard practice among film-makers and photographers to pack a gun with heir expensive equipment and declare it - so that it gets special treatment, instead of being stolen by the baggage handlers or TSA.
Houston airport has a huge steel bar surrounded special luggage room just for lugagge with guns
Remember when they were planning this feature the NSA presumably thought the enemy might be Russia or China, or Iran, or Belgium. It's difficult to persuade the KGB to use Google for it's root CA.
Although nowadays it's probable that both the NSA and KGB outsource to Booz-Allen
No he makes the correct point that "number of offspring surviving to breeding age" is now totally disconnected with any genetically inherited characteristics.
If accidents are the major cause of death of young people it's hard to see the selection pressure - unless there is a gene for not stepping in front of a bus,
GSM wasn't particularly secure, partly because it had to be performed by 1980s era handsets and partly because it was designed in secret inside the companies by amateurs.
There was a weaker version of GSM for export to naughty countries - but I don't think anywhere seriously bothered and it was officially abandoned a few years ago.
GSM was really only secure against a journalist with an FM scanner listenining in to heirs to the throne - the government would simply tap the telco's network anyway.
Before the end of the cold war, they spied on CND, Greenpeace, opposition parties, trade unions journalists.
Now they spy on families of people shot by the police, families of people murdered where the police did nothing, people who object to fracking, animal rights campaigners.
And these are the cases where they actually bothered to insert actual agents - who do they spy on when it's more work to exclude somebody from a sweep than include them?
GCHQ discovered the maths behind the possibility of public-key encryption - that does not give them the ability to decipher it.
The actual encryption scheme chosen is independant of the idea behind public key. You can use any scheme you want, it just so happens that IE uses RSA with a failry short key length which can be broken
There is a reasonable definition of "can't be decrypted" if brute forcing it takes > million years.
There is some evidence that the NSA exploits weakness in RSA which is used by some SSL implementations - but mostly they don't need to because they can simply ask Google/Facebook/etc for the certificates which allow them to decode the keys anyway
> you can be honest about former employees
So long as you are really sure you are being honest.
Can you prove that your records are correct?
Can you prove that the statements weren't motivated by personal feelings?
Can you demonstrate that there was no discrimination against the person?
Remember in a libel case you have to prove that the allegations you made were true - the person allegedly libeled doesn't have to prove they weren't.
Is it worth the risk to your business or should you just say nothing ?
Because somebody in the US would have been bribed/blackmailed into handing it over to criminal gangs - and so billions would be being stolen from online bank accounts.
Or the Russians/Chinese would also have cracked it and everyone in the world would have boxes that decrypted American military communications leading to defeat at the hands of apparently insignificant 3rd world forces.
The army would then have turned up at NSA headquarters with a bunch of tanks asking why the NSA had let their soldiers die by not telling the army that their codes were crap.
And the person in front of the gates telling you which one to use.
... oh the empty one which has just been vacated by the last user ?
.... thank you very much I would never have figured that one at on my own...
Except in Manchester where they stand there to stop you using the gates - just be a minute - just rebooting them - just give it 5 minutes
So it was a total coincidence that soon after nice friendly eco-aware native Americans arrived on the continent all the big slow defenseless meaty animals suddenly disappeared?
Looks like we will have to rename "head smashed in buffalo jump" heritage site to "caring for the poor endangered species impacted by climate change buffalo jump"
Suppose somewhere in the Nokia patent portfolio there is one on saying the word "hello" on a mobile phone or something similarly ridiculous - that Microsoft can use to threaten all the other makers.
Remember they already make about 4x as much from patents on Android phones as they do on their own winPho.
