Posts by Ben Conley

NASA's drunken astronaut report released

History

Astronauts, test pilots, and Military Pilots (most notoriously fighter pilots) are famous (or infamous) for this. This isn't that shocking.

Ever read or watch the movie "The Right Stuff", remember (if you are an American, if you are a Brit you can look it up) the infamous Tailhook Convention, or descriptions of famous military pilots and aces.

This is surprising given that NASA is Civilian but, most Astronauts are from Military backgrounds. Besides those systems are almost entirely out of the Astronauts hands, so even inebriated they can't screw it up. Alas they should probably just sober up and pray this blows over quickly and quietly (or hangover like Tailhook did for the US Navy Aviation).

Fast flux foils botnet takedown

Effective Elimination: Blacklisting Firewall

A Viable solution could be to persuade or coerce several telecoms who do the Internet data transfer to block bots. When blocked consumers call to complain they will be delightfully informed that their computer has been infected, and has been used by others illegally and will not be allowed onto the network until their computer is no longer a threat to the outer world, not unlike a vehicle that fails emissions testing

The data can be obtained simply by tracing individual bots themselves post DOS attack or trace them through the website they support (such as the Chinese fishing Website.)

Europe's banks must inform customers of US snooping

Know your Rights

As an American I regret my countries policies and actions but, there are options besides cooperating fully.

I think that the banks could take the traditional approach of confidentiality, that such information will not be released or offered without a court ordered search warrant (approved by a judge). In other word tell the invewstigators to do their paperwork first as required by law in the US.

Lastly the banks could simply refuse to share the information at all with the US (and whether legal or not) and see what the US can do about it. After all ,Swiss banks for years operated among other things as a tax haven for American Businessmen like how banks in the Caymen Islands are used today.

Microsoft 'tweaks Vista' for Google desktop search goodness

Buyers and Sellers

Microsoft as a company has no obligation to play nice with other people's software. They are not in this case attempting to impair or prevent the use of 3rd party (in this case Google's software), they just made an operating system which does not work well with some software (I have Vista Home Premium, I know).

Developers should be fitting their software to the operating system, making a square peg to fit a squarehole, not complaining about how their square peg does not fit in a round hole. This almost like a tire maker suing a wheel maker because the wheel makers new wheels don't fit with the tire maker's tires.