* Posts by MNGrrrl

146 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2016

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Dear hackers, Ubuntu's app crash reporter will happily execute your evil code on a victim's box

MNGrrrl
Holmes

Confuzzled Researcher

> "Projects such as Tor, Tails, Debian and Ubuntu all need more eyes for audits which can improve the safety of the internet for everyone."

I have some bad news: Debian and Ubuntu isn't a single software package run by a handful of coders. It is a collection of tools and applications designed by others; They simply package it all up in a unified fashion for the end-user. You can't ask them to audit that much code pouring in; You'd need to basically xerox copy every programmer on the planet, then move them to an island filled with nothing but houses, debugging tools, and mountain dew, to make that fly.

The fact is, we can't afford to formally audit most of the stuff we use every day -- and even if we could, the auditing would take up more 'head space' than currently exists on the planet. We'd have 95% of the world's population breathing down the neck of the remaining 5% to make that fly. As in real life, auditing is never comprehensive, but rather more like how we inspect bridges: We look at the critical support members and spot check non-critical areas looking for systemic flaws.

So while yes, we do need more eyes looking for bugs, really, this is less about auditing than it is process control: Everything these days is black boxed. Or part of a proprietary API. Or... or... you get the idea. Most of what we program has already been done before... there's very little "new" going on in computers... contrary to what the latest iCommercial would have you believe. If we didn't have to reinvent the wheel with every new coding project, a lot less auditing would be needed. Open source is a step towards that, but it's not a solution by itself -- we need more than just "free" code, we also need people working to make more code reusable, modular, and accessible. By reducing the massive amounts of redundancy inherent in programming -- mostly due to legal, rather than technical, considerations, we can actually make a worthwhile investment in auditing.

But good luck ever getting that to happen... it would require basically throwing tens of thousands of business "leaders" into a shark pit to open the door to real change. And most of middle management. And their lawyers. And the law makers and politicians. Frankly, I just don't think there's enough sharks in the ocean right now to get the job done.

Someone needs to start breeding more sharks.

Apple ordered to fling some spare change at wireless patent troll

MNGrrrl
WTF?

Judge Derpy Von Bonehead...

How does not wanting to negotiate with a troll indicate "wrong-doing"? We don't negotiate with terrorists -- does that mean we're hiding something? Extend this logic and it quickly becomes clear it's completely absurd: If every negotiation that broke down indicated "wrong-doing", diplomacy would basically amount to the childhood game of "If you don't say _____, you're gay!" It becomes a game of trying to trick your opponent into a no-win situation, rather than negotiating in good faith to avoid costly litigation, wars, divorce or... worst of all, winding up living in the suburbs.

Although... it would make these court trials less boring if they consisted of "I know you are, but what am I!" and other highly sophisticated legal deductions.

DDoS script kiddies are also... actual kiddies, Europol arrests reveal

MNGrrrl

Re: Prevention campaign

> Hit them where it hurts. Confiscate their phones.

Clearly you haven't spent much time around children. No, the way to really hit them hard is to login to their game and delete all the good kit they spent hours grinding to get, delete all their savegames, then hide behind the couch. As the slow horror of what you've done dawns on them, sneak up behind them and whisper "We saw your report card." Then slither away.

Botched Microsoft update knocks Windows 8, 10 PCs offline – regardless of ISP

MNGrrrl

Re: Before anyone else says it

> It's because of Brexit ....

Admittedly I haven't followed brexit beyond what the BBC has reported on it, but I was under the impression the UK wanted to divorce itself from the European Union, not the entire human race. Not that I would blame them, we are a sorry lot right now. I'm pretty sure miserable Britain wants to suffer like the rest of us with its modern conveniences. Though there is a degree of dramatic irony in being so accustomed to having to "Turn it off and back on again" to fix a problem that we're now trying that with entire countries....

MNGrrrl

Re: Only Britain? Short answer: No.

> No it doesn't. Can we stop this rubbish please.

Yeah, no idea where people get this idea from... Let's just google "Windows 10 requirements"

Info box at the top of the page, above the results: "A Microsoft account and Internet access."

MNGrrrl
Facepalm

Only Britain? Short answer: No.

Guys, El Reg is located in Britain*, as is most of their readership. However, the hardware that this is affecting is everywhere. It's happening in Brazil, the United States...in lots of places. And it's a supreme irony that Windows 10 requires you to be online to use it and yet once again here we are watching it furiously stomping on its own dick. I have lost count at how many problems Microsoft's new-found love for 'agile' has spawned. If computers were people we'd have convened at the Hauge by now and put Microsoft on trial for genocide.

What other branch of engineering allows so many to believe "Build Now, Plan Later" is a recipe for anything but disaster? Not that it's just Microsoft. My entire industry is just one glorious failure after another, set to hip commercials showing off the 'cutting edge' of technology. The new iThing 9000: Dance madly with us on the lip of the volcano! And everytime someone falls into the molten glory hole of terrible engineering practices, we just accept this, like it's normal or something.

Moscow says writing infrastructure attack code is a thought crime

MNGrrrl
Pirate

Typical

Russia is once again re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Who decides what is sufficient protection? By what process? And if there is a flaw in said process, how is it addressed? What counts as an attack? Most security problems, and indeed most infrastructure problems, are not caused by deliberate, malicious acts. Servers don't crash to the scream of "Jihad!" ... They most always die to the quieter utterance of "Oops." So what, Russia plans on imprisoning anyone in IT who makes a typo and craps out a router? I mean, how do you prove it wasn't malicious (other than, you know, common sense)? And round and round we go.

Here's the big problem: We're not *allowed* to engineer secure systems. Everything is a black box due to "trade secrets" or "copyright" or "patents", and so nobody has a damn clue how anything works, and when it breaks, we can't even open it up and try to suss out the problem. The code that runs the overwhelming majority of our infrastructure is under lock and key, in a disused lavatory, in the basement, with a sign outside that says "Beware of the Leopard." And we did it all because businesses asked our idiot lawmakers to do it, and not being engineers, they were only too happy to eviscerate any hope we might have had at using the hard-won lessons of every other branch of engineering.

And now that everything is on fire, their solution is to yell at the fire fighters who are hopelessly ham strung by the idiotic machinations of the government (generically: As in, every government has contributed to this)? Sure. Yeah, okay. You know what, Russia? Here's my bucket. You deal with it. I'm going home.

Hollow, world! Netflix premieres Java in-memory database toolkit

MNGrrrl
Devil

Nice dodge, Netflix.

The companies most likely to do this are those that can't afford a proper distribution platform and/or are looking at any way to cut resource usage down on their end. One of many such examples is in the game world, especially on Steam, where companies install windows services or a launcher that torrents updates. Sometimes they continue to run when the game isn't active. So the developer saves money, and the consumer gets left with a slower internet connection.

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Is Netflix doing it for this reason? It's very maybe-ish. They're being pretty evasive about the size of the database, and this could just be a trial balloon to see if anyone notices before flipping the switch on some darknet. That's usually how deployments like this go. Or, it could be just what they say -- a way to speed up performance. I'm skeptical because they're keeping a tight lip on how it will be implimented. Will the data stream be compressed? Delta updates daily for new content? How will the cache be synced? There's no technical errata, not even what platforms it is deploying to, which considering that this is a *technical* update, I'd expect more of. The lack of technical data suggests to me that management is in the loop -- and is hiding something.

What, is anyone's guess.

Why your gigabit broadband lags like hell – blame Intel's chipset

MNGrrrl

Re: From the original article

> Every article. Every.single. article. Whining about windows 10 in the comments regardless of the content of the article.

It's a side effect of Windows 10 installation... it causes the syst...er... user, to become stuck in an infinite reboot loop. Microsoft has been promising a patch er, since it was released... but I wouldn't get my hopes up. At least it's not a -4931337 error... also known as 'Smug Of Death' bug that plagues certain macintosh users. That one is just awful.

Amazon tries again with AppStream because customers didn't like it

MNGrrrl

Re: Yeah, no.

> Yep, but it's different this time. Nothing much new has arrived in desktop software for some time so upgrade revenues have collapsed. All tech companies are now desperately casting around for something with recurring revenues rather than coming up with genuine new ideas.

It collapsed because there is no way to innovate when every possible invention and permutation of inventions have 150+ year copyright and patents attached to them. So now they're taking what we already have, and moving them to a subscription-based economy, and our idiot legislators are content to let them do it because "what's good for business is good for the country". The internet, and IT in general, is rapidly becoming the "Information Super Tollway".

MNGrrrl
FAIL

Yeah, no.

This idea recirculates every couple of years. It used to be the mainframe and 'dumb' terminals. Then it was "thin" clients. Then it was Citrix. Zenworks. This has been tried over and over again, and it always flops.

It all comes down to latency, and to a lesser extent, bandwidth. The delay from when you take an action in a virtual environment until that action registers is perceptible to people; Even as little as 30 milliseconds, a fairly typical latency on the internet, is noticable... and people conclude that it is slower than their own computer. And it's a giant bag of "Nope" then. It never really catches on because while the computer can cope with lag, the human brain? Not so much.

But even if we used magical pixie dust to erase that problem, people have been trying to shove everything into the browser pretty much since the Netscape 2.0 days. That idea also digs itself out of the grave every couple of years and shambles across the landscape, and the fact is... the browser is a terrible platform to develop complex interactive applications on. Microsoft has even tried streaming XBox games to the desktop... and even then, when it's literally in the same room... not many people write rave reviews about it. It may simply be that this is a human perception issue -- even with all the problems of latency, bandwidth, etc., solved... people still just don't seem to want it.

"AppStream" died before it ever launched, or re-launched... and it'll die again on its re-re-re-launch, because it's a solution in search of a problem.

Congrats America, you can now safely slag off who you like online

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Re: now if

> only every social media type thing that allows you to "like" something would allow you to "dislike" as well then maybe we can make some more progress.

You're more on point than you know. eBay stopped having the ability to rate negatively a long time ago. An "A-" rating is like, the worst thing you can say... "WEEEEEERNSTROM!" And they tweaked the hell out of the system so a negative review can be deleted by the seller. Steam changed its reviewing system so you only see the "most recent" reviews, and it resets with every patch. You may notice that crappy games are patched many times a day, thus burying any negative reviews. Businesses are already well ahead of this: Even Google allows you to "report" negative reports as "abusive", and get them removed. Businesses may not be charging people but they have something better: They're gaming the system itself.

Has Canadian justice gone too far? Cops punish drunk drivers with NICKELBACK

MNGrrrl

Re: I have to be a weirdo then

> Especially like putting on "If Everyone Cared" on repeat and cranking up the volume when I feel depressed.

Yeah, like an alcoholic getting drunk to feel better...

Microsoft goes all Tiananmen Square on its Chinese AI assistant

MNGrrrl

Re: Coming to a street near you....

> Without corporate and government infrastructure across which to propagate then there is no open source.

This is like saying without corporations and government there would be no building blueprints. Like, the knowledge would simply disappear if there aren't palms being greased. Please. Want to know what the leading corporation said about the world's first computer? "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943 ... Hell, the internet wasn't designed by corporations, but by the government. It was popularized by universities. Corporations didn't come until much, much later.

What's sad is that there are a *lot* of people like this guy, who think that corporations are somehow necessary or civilization will collapse. It's what led America to both of its great depressions -- the first being a lack of regulation and the idea that "what's good for business is good for America". Oops. Then it happened again with "Too big to fail." Oops again.

If you want to be a "real revolutionary"... tell people like this that the reason our infrastructure is crumbling to pieces is a patent and copyright system that allows corporations to black box everything. Imagine if we allowed companies to build skyscrapers without disclosing the building materials, blueprints, and forced people to sign an NDA before they could enter it, and sued anyone who described what was inside. Because that's what we do with computers... and then we wonder why our devices routinely explode in our pockets, software fails for no reason, over half of all IT projects fail, and it's practically impossible to keep the "hackers" out. Well gee, go figure: Everyone who works in the field has to build it from scratch, without much in the way of best practices, or proven designs, or even the ability to simply phone someone else in the field and ask them to look over their work.

Corporations and government aren't the solution... *they're the problem*.

MNGrrrl

Re: Google and Co.

> Is it evil to provide a censored service, as opposed to none at all?

Yes, actually, it is. It's not any different than when companies were caught selling gasoline, rubber tires, and other materials Germany was using for its war effort during WWII. I shouldn't need to explain the "evil" that was going on at the time. Those companies were asked to stop, because they were complicit in allowing human rights abuses. So yeah, it's evil -- it's just that we don't care what our mega corporations do in this country anymore. Ethics? Morality? Not if it gets in the way of the stock price.

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Not that Google is unique here; Your iPhone was built in a factory that's surrounded by suicide nets. Most likely the clothes you're wearing were made in sweatshops by children. Your produce was picked by undocumented workers, who get no health care and work long hours in the brutal sunlight. The engagement ring you got for your wife/husband was likely dug out of the ground by slave labor at the behest of a warlord somewhere in Africa. Google isn't the exception, but the norm, in the United States. My country was built on slave labor, and it continues to run on it to this day. We allow all manner of human rights abuses in the name of economics.

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We've gotten very good at rationalizing it, as you just did. Google isn't different from Microsoft: They're identical to Microsoft. The only thing that's different is the product line. And everybody knows everybody. Go ahead and click around... they're all interconnected. It's a small, small world for our mega-corporations. But I mean hey, whatever lets you sleep at night.

Google's board of directors:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/google/advisors

Microsoft's:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/microsoft/advisors

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Google and Co.

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"Do No Evil"*

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*) Some restrictions may apply. See official rules for full details. Offer not valid in countries containing the letters i, o, u... or other vowels. Please seek medical attention immediately if you have an election lasting longer than 4 years as it could indicate a potentially serious complication with democracy. all rights wronged, patent pending, void where allowed or prohibited.

Google's Chromecast Audio busted BT home routers – now it has a fix

MNGrrrl
Linux

"simple" solution...

Just roll your own dns server, and dump a zone file in it to pretend to be whatever server the router needs to connect to... then put an http server on it or something. You could probably use VMware player for it, or similar... and run it on a linux micro distribution. Also... Google... grow a brain. -_-

Super Cali goes ballistic, considers taxing Netflix

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Tax is a blessing

The irony here is that network neutrality may get a boost when companies realize that if they let the genie out of the bottle to try to slurp up money, the government may decide to get in on it and now we've suddenly got 50,000 new kinds of taxes for everything, and what a logistical headache that's going to be for businesses. But I mean, hey, that's a nice little racket you got going there... shame if something were to... happen... to it. In reality, all that'll happen is all these companies will just move overseas to tax shelters, and the laws will be left on the books, collecting nothing, but ensuring that internet startups in the country pretty much 404, and along with it, jobs, growth, and the economy. But I mean, it's all cool right... as long as multinational companies win, we do too, right? Uhh, right guys? Why are you holding pitchforks and torches? Guys?

San Francisco's sinking luxury Millennium Tower: Tilt spotted FROM SPACE

MNGrrrl

Re: Not the developer's fault.

> Two of you there using the word "Subsistence", I'm pretty sure that means surviving or existing; you may be looking for Subsidence. This building's subsistence is being threatened by the subsidence.

Pedantic, def.: This guy.

MNGrrrl

> Kansai Airport has sunk far more than expected, and there is some nervousness that it won't stop before it sinks beneath the waves. The building jacks keep them level, but won't keep them dry.

There isn't any nervousness. Yes, it's sinking more than expected, but there was a high degree of uncertainty in that project: Nobody has tried something like this before. They can remove the jacks and sub-flooring if needed and add bigger jacks. The airport has a sizable boundary around it so they can add more landfill in without disturbing the buildings. There are contingency options here because while the best estimates they had said it probably wouldn't be needed, there were a lot of unknowns in the model. I have no doubt the airport will still be there in 30 years. I don't know what will be needed to keep it there, but it's not like Godzilla is going to crawl out of the ocean and eat it.

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Re: Not the developer's fault.

> Seriously MNGrrrl, who told you there is no bedrock under SF?

There is no bedrock at or near the surface. Source: US Geological Survey department. https://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/soiltype/ "Includes unweathered intrusive igneous rock. Occurs infrequently in the bay area."

Anyway, nice strawman you made there. You should put a hat on it though and some sunglasses and really complete the look.

MNGrrrl

> The maths were already done on a similar building, in similar conditions, practically next door.

Two blocks away marks the start of landfill. It was a swamp before. All you've done is pointed out why engineers do site surveys before they build: Because the geology even "right next door" can be radically different. It's a very good thing civil engineers don't have the accumen of internet pundits, or the first wood pecker to come along would destroy civilization...

MNGrrrl

Re: Not the developer's fault.

> There seems to be a lot of ignorance here about the effects of different terrains on earthquake damage. The fact is that a thick layer of soil (or landfill) between bedrock and the buildings does not "cushion" the waves, it amplifies them.

This is why I generally shake my head and mutter whenever someone from Southern California tries to sound edumucated. The other 47 states on the continent keep praying you guys fall into the ocean so as to rid us of your stupidity, but the geologists keep telling us it's going to take too long. Sigh. So here we go again, from the top:

*** There is no bedrock in the San Francisco bay area. ***

************** 404: GEOLOGY NOT FOUND. **************

Bedrock sounds like a really nice, reassuring word, and of course everyone wants to know why every building doesn't simply drill down to bedrock. Well, there's a simple engineering answer: It's not necessary. Foundations in a building serve only one purpose: Load spreading. And the method used for constructing the tower is a proven one: Friction piles. To understand how they work, take the wooden handle of a broom and push it into the ground. Hammer it in, if you want. You're not going to get very far down, and that's just dealing with the topsoil and clay in your backyard. Friction piles operate on the same principle: They're just a lot bigger. They will easily support the weight of many, many tons without moving, because the static friction along the sides keeps it from sinking. That's how the Millenium Tower was built, and it's solid engineering practice. And there is zero risk of liquifaction here: The foundation is irrelevant, the geology of the site isn't suseptible to it unless you have an earthquake of a magnitude that would wipe out pretty much everything except a military bunker.

I have said it before, and I will say it again: The design is solid, and the site survey was done properly and to best practices. What was *NOT* done correctly was the dewatering of the whole area, which radically changed the friction and compressibility of the soil under the tower, and that's what has caused it to sink and tilt. There is no disagreement about this amongst engineers. You can't expect the engineers to have anticipated that, after construction, the next door neighbors would fuck up the geology under the building like this: Their dewatering has dropped the water table by over 20 feet. The piles that previously were in the water table are now sitting above it. Water tables do not simply drop by 20 feet in a coastal area in the span of a few months. It's not a natural process.

So please, stop acting like you know something about engineering: You don't. And as far as the waves being amplified: Learn the difference between primary and secondary waves, because one induces compressive load and the other shear load. If you build down to bedrock, your piles need to be able to withstand both as first-order effects. If you don't, the piles only need to worry about compressive load because there won't really be any sheering... the building will move with the earth underneath it (which it wouldn't, if it were nailed to the bedrock). Though in practice, all of this simply means tweaking your concrete mixture... the design will be the same.

MNGrrrl

Re: Not the developer's fault.

> Blaming the developers is a big stretch unless they suborned the Engineers and/or Building Surveyors. If the latter, then they are culpable since this is professional misconduct.

First, I agree with everything else you've said. But this isn't and either/or conclusion -- the amount of oversight by the government varies considerably from one municipality to the next, and most of these agencies are criminally underfunded. These agencies provide almost no additional safety. Example follows.

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One of the worst building engineering disasters was the collapse of a pair of walkways inside a multi-story hotel: Until 9/11 it was the worst structural collapse in US history. The hotel had about 800 rooms and was maybe 20 stories tall -- The building inspection for the site took less than 15 minutes. It was eventually determined that the engineers were responsible, that this was a bona fide design flaw, but despite dozens of people being involved in the project, numerous government agencies, and other safeguards, a very obvious structural flaw was overlooked.

My point here is that the majority of the safety of buildings comes from good engineering practices within the companies doing the work. There is no real oversight or auditing beyond that, so unless there was a very obvious flaw it is unlikely inspectors would discover it. Corruption might be a problem if there was any real risk of a project being stalled out by such a problem getting discovered... but the odds of it happening, realistically, are about nil. The inspectors are overworked to the point of being ineffectual.

MNGrrrl

Re: Not the developer's fault.

> Based on what?

Based on the plans filed with city hall, and independent review by other engineers. Do you seriously believe something like this is an everyday occurance in the field? A building falling down, or even having the potential to fall down, is a big deal. If there was a design flaw, or the survey was done badly, we'd know it by now. There would be klaxxon alarms going off, engineers would be going to their local media and saying "There be dragons here". It would be a Very Big Deal.

1) If you read the articles

... written by non-engineers with only a tenuous grasp of the subject material. Also, said articles as linked to by El Reg failed to note the dewatering at a new construction happening right next to the building. That's, uhh, kindof important.

2) This building is uniquely heavy

... Compared to what, exactly? Is this the first skyscraper ever built? Does every floor have giant lead plates bolted to it? Have buildings never been made out of concrete before?

3) It had sunk almost 12" before Transbay started construction, 50% more than the lifetime projected amount the developer's engineers had predicted.

The estimates for the subsistence were based on how much it would sink *after* completion. Again, this is what happens when you ask journalists (and apparently random internet pundits) to review technical and engineering studies and data, without knowledge of the field.

4) It's tilting AWAY from the Transbay construction, the developer is attempting to argue that the de-watering is causing it to tilt in the opposite direction WTF?

The ground directly under your feet may have a very different composition than what's 20 feet away. Just because it looks the same on the surface, does not mean it is the same underneath. Dewatering, if containment is not done (or done improperly) can affect the ground for miles in every direction. Fracking, something that has made the news recently, has been responsible for earthquakes that have affected buildings hundreds of miles from the site of the injection. This is why it is so important to conduct a proper site survey prior to construction: The Millenium Tower developers *did* do this. The Transbay developers *did not*. If they had, they would have realized the need for containment, and it's just plain reckless to dewater a site right next to a recently constructed multi-story building. Any civil engineering student would tell you to be very, very, careful when doing multiple constructions projects near to each other without coordination.

MNGrrrl

> At least for once the victims are also rich tossers.

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That's not a helpful attitude. The same design process that put up this skyscraper is also behind the skyscraper you go to work in, the stadium you see your football in, the train station you wait for your ride home at, and more. You may laugh now because the "rich tossers" are getting screwed, but what happens when the skyscraper you're working in falls over during an earthquake and pancakes you? Are you going to have the same happiness about *that* engineering failure?

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> the developers were too cheap to sink the piles all the way down...

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Yes, cost is a consideration in almost all engineering projects. Was it necessary to sink the piles all the way down, given the results of the site survey and proposed design? The slide rulers said no at the time. Hindsight is 20/20.

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> and now they're saying they don't even have to fix it, they can just let it sink and it'll stop eventually.

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Buildings are usually over-engineered to provide for a safety margin. Bridges, for example, may be rated to hold 100 tons, but may in fact be designed to hold 200 tons, to account for unexpected load. Subsistence is also calculated ahead of time, and a safety margin is present there as well: All buildings will sink. They build it so that it can sink farther than expected and still be safe. In fact, the Japanese built an entire airport on a man-made island that is sinking at many centimeters per year... and all of the structures there are built on jacks. It's actually quite remarkable. So if something sinks more than expected, that doesn't mean the safety margin has been exceeded. Hence, nothing needs to be done, provided this new behavior is thoroughly understood. Is it? I don't know, but it's not necessarily a wrong answer.

> But there's no reason to believe that 31 inches is an actual limit - that was an estimate from an engineer hired by those same shady developers.

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All engineering disciplines use estimates, rules of thumb, and the like. There's every reason to believe that engineer: If he's wrong, his career might be over. As to "shady developers"... you know, when something goes wrong, it's usually not due to malice but incompetence or ignorance. You can't scream "Illuminati!" whenever anything goes wrong. Car didn't start this morning? IT'S A CONSPIRACY! Or, maybe it's just been 7 years since you last replaced the battery... something you might have overlooked.

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> It could sink another 100 feet - which would be fine, the big problem is if it falls over.

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Having a building descend 100 feet into the ground at the center of a major city when it was built to sit on top of the ground is never "fine". I've watched movies where that happens, and played video games. It rarely ends well for the people living in said city. Usually there are demons, fire, aliens, or other things that tend to drive down property values to go with it.

MNGrrrl
Thumb Down

Not the developer's fault.

If you dig into it you'll find out that the site survey and build was done to all engineering standards; The problem is that, after the preliminary design and survey work, and construction had started, the city decided to start building a new transit station nearby. This involves dewatering -- pumping water out of the foundation so that it can be compacted more easily, and there is less settling in the foundation. The problem is, the way they are dewatering is that it removes water from everywhere nearby, not just the area directly under where the new transit center will go. As a result, the sand under the Millenium Tower is compacting at a highly accelerated rate, and it is doing so unevenly.

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Now yes, there is finger pointing over who knew what, when, and all of that, but this is not a design flaw. This is not an engineering flaw -- when the designs were approved and the survey completed, everything was done by the book up until that point. What has happened here is a external and unanticipated factor.

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As to building foundations down to bedrock -- while yes, that could have been done, there was no need. Many, if not most, of San Francisco's buildings, do not have foundations that go all the way to bedrock. In fact, in an earthquake-prone area, this is often a *bad* idea because during a quake, all of the wave action will be translated via those concrete pillars directly to the building. You have to build in extra dampeners, possibly a counter-weight / pendulum system, to absorb all of that extra mechanical force -- which isn't necessary if the foundation doesn't get nailed into the bedrock... Instead, the sand, gravel, etc., absorbs that stress and there is less mechanical force being forced into the building structure.

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So I need to be absolutely clear here: The building's design, including foundation, and the surveying done ahead of time to ensure it would be sufficient, was done to textbook. There were no flaws. The flaw here, is that something was built right next to it right after it went up -- before it had a chance to settle naturally and compact the foundation evenly. All buildings settle, even skyscrapers. There are models to predict how much and how long it will take (Typically, it takes about 20 years before it becomes insignificant).

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Now, all that said, this is a classic case of tragedy of the commons: If your property has a drainage ditch that prevents flooding for your neighbors' properties, and that drainage ditch becomes obstructed somehow, are YOU responsible for fixing it, or are the people benefiting from it (ie, your neighbors)? This is a very simplistic example, but it's fundamentally what this entire affair boils down to: Transbay dewatered the area for its own project, and in doing so, led to the problem the Millenium Tower is facing. Who knew what, when? We probably won't know for a long time. But ultimately, this is a question of who is going to pay for the foundation to be reworked. This could cost $10 million dollars, or much much more -- it varies by site and building, but a similar problem has happened in Brazil, known as the Leaning Towers of Santos, and it's over a hundred buildings all suffering from the same problem. That's about the cost for these smaller apartment blocks, per building... and so far, nobody has stepped up to pay for it; Though, when they were built, subsistence was not as well-understood as it is today.

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Integrator fired chap for hiding drugs conviction, told to pay compo for violating his rights

MNGrrrl
WTF?

Re: In this part of the world...

> However, by not disclosing you had a conviction, you have essentially lied on the application, and this in and of itself is enough to get you fired, or not hired at all , depending when it was caught.

There's no box after checking yes or no to write a small essay on the inherent social inequalities of the justice system. But if you're the kind of person who thinks it's okay to punish someone for trying to escape such inequalities by lying, you're probably (a) white, and (b) male. Because everyone else knows the system is rigged, and would never say it's only down to their "honesty".

'Data saturation' helped to crash the Schiaparelli Mars probe

MNGrrrl

Re: Easily said, not easily done

> No, the simplest thing to do with an insane reading is to ignore it until it becomes sane again.

I don't think you're grasping my point here: You're expecting programmers to be physicists. They aren't. They don't know what physical forces will be in play, what the flight model is, what the possible dynamic forces at work are... they only know code. They have to be told exactly what's going to happen, in what order, and what to do if what is expected *doesn't* occur (read: Failure modes). If they weren't told that the IMU could go off-scale high or low -- there's no reason to expect them to code for that possibility, and even if they did... where would that logic branch terminate?

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It's easy to say "Oh just wait until it becomes sane again". Okay, fine. Wait for how long? What if the sensor is broken, and will never again return a sane reading? What if the readings are within the expected range, but are behaving in an otherwise anomalous fashion (ie, incrementing upwards during a descent)?

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You can't just say "Sanity check!" and hand wave the problem away, as everyone in this thread has done. This isn't like normal computer science -- these guys weren't building a data interface for a web page, where they had professional knowledge of what "sane" ought to be. These guys are ordinary programmers, not rocket scientists. You cannot expect them to be the all-knowing gods of information systems. If they weren't told (and it's very clear they weren't) that the sensor could exhibit this kind of behavior, then we cannot blame them for designing a processing system that would not discard its input when said behavior presented!

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As I said before: This was a problem with the simulations. This was a problem with systems integration. It was not a programming flaw: The computer didn't crash with an unrecoverable error during descent. It didn't hang. It didn't branch to the wrong code segment because someone typed '1' instead of 'l'. It wasn't a case of a dereferenced pointer to invalid data that caused the failure. It performed exactly as designed.

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This is hardly a unique problem to the ESA: Planes have fallen out of the sky before due to blocked pitot tubes I don't even know how many times, because the PILOTS (not computers, but the intelligent meat bags you're trusting with your life) didn't realize that the airspeed, altitude, or other standard indicators, might lie to them. These are people that know everything there is to know about how an airplane flies and its various dynamic modes of flight... and even they, with all the knowledge and training, could succumb to a simple sensor error.

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Shall we yell at the pilots for not "sanity checking" all of their sensor inputs too? Even pilots, if they aren't trained to be aware of what these sorts of failure modes look like, will often fail. What hope does a computer have of recovering from something so unexpected? This was NOT a programming mistake. The end, and I don't care how many of you downvote me, you're still wrong.

MNGrrrl
Devil

Easily said, not easily done

People say "Just sanity check the inputs!" ... but of course, they fall silent when asked what the corrective action should be in software. Detecting bad input doesn't mean anything if you don't have a way to correct for it. This is not just about sanity checking the input data -- it's also about poor simulations that did not see how the software would handle excursions from the expected flight profile. Of course a chute opening is going to torque the vehicle... and if they'd properly setup the simulation, they'd have discovered that in a stupidly thin atmosphere like Mars, the rotational rate can be very high, and that their IMU could saturate, and once they saw that, they could have setup logic to handle saturation.

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They didn't do any of that. Don't blame the programmers -- it wasn't their job to "sanity check" the inputs... if they were told the IMU would only report data within range X, and it left range X, what are they supposed to do? Write "Can't happen" in the comments and then add magical pixie dust code that correctly guesses a resolution?

Comcast is the honey badger of ISPs – injects pop-ups into browsers, doesn't give a fsck

MNGrrrl
FAIL

More than a security problem

It's not just a security problem: There's more than just web browsers using http. Any automated tool that pulls over HTTP could potentially be broken by this sort of injection because it is expecting the remote end to respond the way it always has -- without injected code. It may have hardcoded offsets, etc. The average person (cough, or even more inept, the average lawmaker) of course doesn't ever think about this but most of the communication on the internet is automated, not interactive. We're wiring in toasters, cameras, cars... we're wiring in all our public utilities infrastructure too. And a lot of the time, those things are accessed over http -- you think your wifi box is the only thing with that? Try again: The chemical factory four blocks from where you live probably has similar web management interfaces. Or the sewage processing plant. The internet of things is here, and the most common cause of failure isn't hackers or terrorists -- and it never was. Failure usually doesn't come to the screams of "Death to America!" or "Gimmie your money, bitch!"... it's to the quiet sound of "Oops."

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Network neutrality isn't about bandwidth or protecting competition and all that jazz... it's about protecting the integrity of the communications themselves. When you start screwing with the content, you're making assumptions. Comcast is assuming that only web browsers live on port 80. Engineers know better.

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Enlightened engineers are hoping the world comes to its senses and bans this sort of thing before something bad happens. Which is adorable. The more practical of us are just waiting out the inevitable death, destruction, and mayhem that's going to happen eventually, because we know that lawmakers are like children: No matter how many times you tell them not to touch the hot stove, they're not gonna listen, so you just sit back and let them burn their hands... not because you hate the kid, but because that's just the nature of what a child is.

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So, a word of advice: If Comcast serves internet in your area and you live next to the sewage processing plant, invest in a pair of rubber wading boots.

Twitter bans own CEO Jack Dorsey from Twitter

MNGrrrl
FAIL

Captain Obvious To the Rescue!

Twitter can't possibly monitor the firehose of tweets that millions of people submit; We all know that, like so many sites, they rely on algorithms to deal with abuse and harassment. But as we've seen many times -- a concerted effort by threat actors can manipulate the system to nuke accountsed. And that is, of course, what happened here. The lack of press release is further evidence of this: Nobody wants to admit that the resources required to effectively and fairly police their users would exceed their income. They have to present the idea that the policies are effective, even when they aren't. It's bureaucracy 101: "We don't have a problem and we're working to fix it as fast as we can."

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All algorithmically-based anti-abuse systems are invariably misused to silence critics. You can't effectively prevent abuse, harassment, or hate speech through algorithms; The reverse is usually the result -- abusive people manipulate those systems to damage their opponents far more than they could if the provider remained neutral. It may *also* slow down or deter the behaviors in question, but that quickly becomes the exception, not the norm, as resources expended remain constant while user count skyrockets.

IETF plants privacy test inside DNS

MNGrrrl
Megaphone

Corrections

To clear up a few misconceptions posted in the comments (not the article):

- DNS lookups are not encrypted -- even if you are using a VPN, they typically are sent in the clear over the 'default' routing rule. Thus, what you're looking for from within the VPN is leaked over clear channel.

- This is NOT a protocol to prevent DNS poison pill attacks, or man in the middle attacks. You must still trust your DNS resolver (typically your ISP). This is designed to protect your queries between you and your ISP's DNS server *only*. As you may well know, ISPs often sell this data, and are often required by various local laws to store it. This protocol will not stop that.

- This protocol is NOT for establishing chains of trust between DNS providers. That is handled elsewhere (DNSSEC).

- This protocol does NOT protect against traffic analysis, nor does it provide any encryption beyond the IP->name lookup. Which means, by itself, it provides little, if any, protection against "pervasive surveillance". Anyone who can intercept your DNS packets can probably also intercept your plain-text HTTP lookups, screw with SSL connections, and more.

Facebook Fake News won it for Trump? That's a Zombie theory

MNGrrrl
FAIL

FACT CHECK: El Reg missed something

Facebook used to have a curated staff for its news feed. They were all fired amidst complaints that it had a "liberal bias" -- and replaced with an algorithm, something that might sound familiar... since it has been how Facebook responds to everything: Get rid of people, replace them with machines. WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Well, harassment of minorities and elimination of their Facebook presence thanks to automatic reporting and their 'real name' policy, to start with. Housing and employment discrimination on the basis of race... again, because 'algorithms did it'.

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And if "the algorithm did it" sounds like a way of shirking responsibility, it is. But it underscores a more fundamental problem: Namely, that when algorithms provide our content instead of people, when they are what is politicing the community, they are biased towards profit, not silly things like civil rights, human dignity, ethics, or morality. The result is pretty much what you'd expect. Google created the greatest algorithm for confirmation bias the world has ever known, and everyone is copying it because it makes money.

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The end result is while we are drowning in information, we're less informed than ever. Thanks, math. Good job.

Facebook recruits some help to fight fakes, but doubles down on wisdom of the crowd

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Re: Censorship?

> Stop trying to be so lazy all the time!

But... that's what Facebook is for. So people can be lazy at work. It's like the main selling point! I mean, besides making *you* a selling point...

MNGrrrl
Angel

Zuckered

I will never understand why people think Zuckerberg is smart. Let us now recount previous ways in which the Zuckerberg has iceberged like the Titanic into ethics and just like that ship of legend, he too has decided to go faster and faster through dangerous terrain...

His "real name" policy became a magnet for abuse against LGBT, domestic abuse victims, and basically every other marginalized group in society. His solution? Algorithms. And the abuse continued. His solution again? To affirm that, of course it's wrong to go after these people and you know, please stop. People didn't. His solution even booted off Facebook the former employee who campaigned to get extra gender options added to the website... repeatedly.

But that's just one example, right? No. Then it leaked out the advertising backend was tracking people's race, gender, etc., and that these options could be used to discriminate against people in housing and employment. And the same scenario played out: He promised oversight, and a new algorithm was rolled out, which of course promptly fell flat on its face... because it only tracks a few keywords and is easy to get around. And there's no punishment for repeat offenders of course, because acting ethically would get in the way of Facebook being the premier source of turning people into products for advertisers.

And now, this lovecraftian horror story of what happens when you let someone young and stupid become rich and famous (nothing good, obviously) has its third chapter: It's now destabilized a major world government by pumping out fake news that crashed an election, and again the excuse was "the algorithm did it". And the same empty promises: That it will be tweaked soon. You can trust us. Honest. We're good at this. And people keep right on believing that with the right application of code, algorithms, and technology, we can just dial up justice. Fairness, perhaps, but never mistake that for justice -- the cold logic of a machine can pump out baby bottles and with equal efficiency launch the missiles that will end civilization.

Those of us who helped bring the internet to the masses thought it would encourage democracy, that the free flow of information would lead to better education and decisions, and that social problems like sexism, racism, nationalism, and more would all be washed away and we'd all become international citizens and kick off an evolution in what it means to be human that would accelerate the elimination of these social problems.

We were very, very wrong. I feel like Wernher von Braun watching his V2 rockets sail into Paris... the rocket performed perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet. The internet is my generation's V2, and the sad part is... even as our world burns, people still applaud. They have no idea what they've done.

The solution to security breaches? Kill the human middleware

MNGrrrl
Pint

Buzzword Bingo

Everyone who shouldn't be, talks about cybersecurity these days, and thinks they (a) know what it is and (b) how to "make things secure". This is not because they know much, but rather the inherent human need for order and an over-estimation of a person's influence. It's why Trump wants to build a wall along the Mexican-American border: Not because it will do any good, but because it looks like a decisive take-charge can-do action. It makes people feel good. Cybersecurity is like that: Most of what people think will make things secure are based on incomplete knowledge and over-estimating their abilities -- they want to quantify the risk, somehow manage it. People despise unknowns.

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Here's the truth: The most basic working definition of "cyber" (I will never like that word) security is that "the device does what I expect it to do, and does not do what I do not expect it to do." Whether it is malware that destroys your server, or a software bug, or human error, the result is the same. The cost is the same. And any infrastructure meant to protect from that happening must be all-encompassing. Unfortunately, security will never be perfect. It won't even be good. This isn't because we can't design secure systems, but rather that the designs are not open. There are no laws or regulations governing proper design -- our industry is an unregulated one. Oh yes, bad hacker -- shame on you for stealing all our personal information. We're going to give you 500 consecutive life sentences in the electric chair! But the law is silent on what we should be doing to prevent such problems in the first place.

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We've grown accustomed to corporations selling our personal data, our phones tracking our every move, our computers having 'telemetry', and companies big and small can roll out a new product without any certification or validation. But worse than that, because of copyright and patent law, it is *illegal* to follow good engineering practice. When we construct buildings, we do so with the collective knowledge of every engineer who built one that fell down. We share that knowledge freely, blueprints and designs are available for any who know where to look to see. And as a result, very few buildings fall down.

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But in this industry, everything is a black box. We don't share blueprints -- we sue people who try to copy ideas, and make sure those ideas can't be copied without being sued for hundreds of years. Everyone has to reinvent the wheel, and possibly reinvent it many times, to avoid patents and copyright lawsuits. We've had successful lawsuits with hundreds of millions of dollars hanging in the balance over *beveled* corners. And so knowledge of how to build something properly just isn't there. Every engineer in this field can only advance to his or her own level of understanding -- they cannot build, or even see, the work of others. And as a result, our information infrastructure regularly suffers catastrophic failures... and these too, are not shared. It's illegal to know or use a well-understood and known method of doing pretty much anything... and if and when something fails, the default is to cover it up and whistle loudly.

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Our problems with "cyber" security have nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with a broken system that values profit above solid engineering practice. It's why we have a "cyber" security problem in the first place -- old vulnerabilities never truly die, because everyone is forced to build everything from scratch. No matter how good you are, you're going to make at least one mistake in your design. Meanwhile, the criminals, the neer-do-gooders, are not hindered by laws, ethics, or any of that -- they share their knowledge with each other freely. The end result is, they know all the millions of places you can make a mistake... and computers and software, freed of legal obstructions, can go through all those millions of places with solid design, peer review, and decades of historical data at their fingertips and find every crack in your armor.

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If you want "cyber" security, stop screwing around and demand that we treat our information systems like any other engineered system: Delete the broken patent and copyright systems, and allow that knowledge to be shared. Force every corporation that releases a product to the public to disclose its source code. And don't even think of giving me any crap about how this isn't secure because "terrorism" or "hackers", or whatever boogyman you're worried will look at it and think bad thoughts. Boeing tells everyone exactly how their planes are built -- and air travel is the safest way to move people because there are many, many eyes looking at each and every design inside and outside the company, and everyone in the industry can look at other designs and know which ones work, why they work, and when failure happens -- it is an open and transparent process to find out and disseminate the findings to keep it from happening again.

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Everything else is just buzzword bingo... it's so-called "experts" re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Facebook agrees to dial back 'racial affinity' ads

MNGrrrl

Re: Big Data

That's not, nor ever has been, how marketing works. Marketing is a game of statistics, of odds. And so you try to maximize the amount of eyeballs interested in whatever you're selling -- and demographics does that. You've confused macro and micro-economics.

MNGrrrl

Re: Yeah right.

> In this case, what's stopping Farcebook from reversing the choice.

Economics. It's cheaper not to care.

> Lawmakers, as the name hints, make the laws. It would be the judiciary that applies them and the executive that enforces them (in States following the principle of separation of powers).

Pedantic, def.: This.

MNGrrrl
Trollface

Yeah right.

You mean like how they promised they would stop banning drag queens, rape victims, and other people with their 'real name policy' by algorithm? At some point, people need to wakeup and realize you can't solve social problems with technology. And by people, I mean the lawmakers who should have sued Facebook into non-existance years ago.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

MNGrrrl
Mushroom

Book banning

On general principle, books should never be banned no matter how offensive. As to whether or not they are dangerous -- knowledge by itself is never dangerous. A gun is not dangerous simply sitting in a vault, nor will the world end because there are thousands of silos full of nuclear weapons all around the world. It takes the same know-how and training to make bombs as it does to fly rockets. The knowledge that created guns also created mining, building demolition, and other essentials. Every tool is useful to society in some way.

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That said, many a murderer or would-be murderer has googled "How to murder someone". Many wannabe terrorists have googled for ISIS online. And, obviously, many a bomber has bought books online on how to make bombs. There must be a compromise reached here between our personal freedoms to know these things (and own them, as in books, computers, etc.), and the practical consideration that these materials *are* in fact often sought out by people who mean harm.

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We should not be jailing people for buying books on these topics. There *are* good reasons for someone to want to know, or to own, such things. But we should *also* keep a closer eye on those who express interest in these materials. If the police could be trusted to be discreet, objective, and narrowly focused on the investigation of whether people intent to harm the public, this discussion would be over right here: Sell the books to anyone who wants them, and give the police the tools to investigate and use surveillance to assess threats.

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Unfortunately, at least in the United States, most of Europe, and indeed the world, government actions and laws do not inspire faith in law enforcement. Politics have, do, and will continue to, cause great harm to personal liberty and act counter to the public's best interests. It was politically advantagous in the 90s for the United States to "get tough on crime". But it was socioeconomically disasterous -- we now have the highest incarceration rate of any country on Earth, and it had no impact on the crime rate. Our "war on terror" has yielding similarly disasterous results -- a decade-long recession, trillions in debt, tens of thousands dead, and many times that with permanent injury or disability, torture of innocents, and the list goes on.

People are racially, ethnically, or religiously profiled constantly. Justice is not impartial, and investigations are rarely narrowly limited in scope to assessing harm -- and confidentiality is a joke. In the United States, all investigations are a matter of public record... unless you are wealthy. An accusation alone can bring severe consequences to a person's life -- for example, after the Boston Marathon bombing, an innocent man was ethnically profiled by the popular site Reddit, and although cleared of any wrongdoing, later committed suicide as a consequence of continuous death threats, inability to find work, and other issues related to said vigilantism. The FBI routinely screws up in its investigations; It has upset elections, wrongly imprisoned people, forced false confessions, and committed acts of excessive brutality, including torture.

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The general public and law enforcement so often fail at first principles -- impartiality, confidentiality, limited scope -- that the benefits gained are eclipsed by the damage caused. We have to at least pass the point where more guilty people are caught than innocent, before we can morally or ethically justify such invasions of privacy and enroachment of personal freedom. Whenever we sacrifice our principles to gain apparent security, we invariably lose both.

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Leaked paper suggests EM Drive tested by NASA actually works

MNGrrrl
Alert

A word on what science is

Science is -- at its core -- figuring out how to do something over and over, and get the same result. The how and why come later -- the important thing is that whatever we're observing, it is a repeatable observation. NASA has done this. It controlled as many variables as it could account for, ran the experiment, and is now going to publish the results. Maybe this device does generate thrust. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe mistakes were made. Maybe it's beyond our understanding. But definately: None of these things bother a true scientist. An experiment that confirms a theory is just as exciting (and important) as one that doesn't.

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Unfortunately, there's the general public... and not being scientists, they don't understand this mindset. The average person has so little tolerance for running into unknowables that they invent fictions the moment one appears. I don't understand lightning therefore Thor is riding a chariot across the sky. NASA is right not to publish it, because it has already attracted the moths of mediocrity to the fire of enlightenment on this one. And when the excited dog of averageness wets itself on the carpet of knowledge, everyone's going to blame science for getting it all worked up... because that's what average people do. It's the reason we can't mention "cold fusion", "perpetual motion", or a few dozen other high profile things... things that we should still be researching; Or at least talking about and using as examples in our textbooks of how not to do experiments.

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NASA doesn't want to release this because it is (rightly) worried that people will denegrate the organization, or the entire institution of science, when it turns out that the technology won't give them the flying car.

MNGrrrl

Re: Battery plus Faraday cage?

> Why then didn't they mount the device on the torsion balance together with a battery powered RF generator and a programmed test controller inside a non-gas-tight box in order to provide electrical, magnetic and thermal shielding?

Because all of those things add extra interactions, heat, etc. This is a test of whether the drive itself creates thrust... not whether the battery does, or the generator, or the test controller..

Teen in the dock on terror apologist charge for naming Wi-Fi network 'Daesh 21'

MNGrrrl
FAIL

A most dangerous game

France has helped terrorists in the past: Specifically, America during the war of independence. Should we ban anyone who expresses support for the United States in any way? Should France arrest itself? Because that's the only way actions like this can be morally cohesive. Of course, they won't, so it's not just morally incoherent but it's also prejudicial in a legal sense. It may not be politically convenient to admit, but terrorism *is* an effective method of political change when all other methods have failed. We can denounce it, but we cannot ignore it -- and we cannot answer it with silence and expect a peaceful outcome. Stopping terrorism is about making sure those other methods *don't* fail.

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It is not a free and democratic society as long as someone can say they sympathize with a terror group and then find themselves in legal trouble. If they actually *fund* terrorism, give *substantive* material support in some fashion, or incite or advocate specific acts of violence, then there is a strong moral basis for punishing them. The mere expression of an opinion, however offensive, distasteful, immoral, etc., should never be a crime.

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This law may have been passed out of a desire to remove terrorism from the public conversation, ostensibly to curb support for it, but the fact is, we can't beat terrorism by closing our eyes, plugging our fingers in our ears, and arresting anyone who doesn't follow suit. Terrorism is an idea, and ideas can only be defeated with better ideas. The freedom of speech and the civil liberties that a democratic society depends on is the best antidote to not just terrorism, but political violence of any kind, domestic or foreign.

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Violence starts when people stop talking, for whatever reason, and violence ends when people start talking. This isn't just about terrorism, this is about the fundamentals of what it takes to make a society. Any society. Society doesn't start until the transition from vigilantism to the rule of law. We develop judges, juries, and trials. We resolve our differences with words, not guns. Violence decreases whenever there is an increase in communication -- when we allow people to peacefully protest, they are less inclined to violently revolt. Even if the trials are rigged, unfair, even if we have secret courts and gross perversions of justice... that system is still better than vigilantism. Every move towards communication, even with a lot of political corruption, is a step towards a greater peace. The reverse is also true: When people feel ignored, when they are afraid to speak out against injustice, they are liable to take justice into their own hands. Fundamentally, this is what leads to terrorism: A sense of powerlessness. It crosses boundaries of social class and economics -- rich and poor alike will revolt if they feel ignored.

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When the citizens of France read stuff like this, that's what some of them are going to feel. They're being disenfranchised; Ostensibly on the basis of religious preference. The intention may very well be to prevent violence, but that's not how it will be interpreted or how it will end up. They might as well be slapping up recruitment posters for ISIS because that's who is joining them: People who feel the government is ignoring or persecuting them. And seeing stuff like this is just reinforcing that. It's like the racially-motivated violence happening in this country: It's not just one thing, but a thousand papercuts that eventually drive people to radicalize. Everytime something like this happens, it's another papercut, and thanks to the miracles of confirmation bias -- de-escalation becomes exponentially more difficult the more it happens.

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I know it's "just" a wifi network name, but look at it through the eyes of our abstract disenfranchised citizen who reads this and thinks "If they're willing to go to such lengths for merely mentioning it..." And then they're going to be afraid. I know, you may think this is a good thing: People who sympathize with terrorists *should* be afraid, but it's the wrong answer because fear is what drives radicalization. To fight radicalization, we need to engage the segments of the population that are vulnerable to it and make them a part of the political process. We have to make them feel included, not excluded. They have to feel safe enough to come forward and air their greviances, whatever they are.

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Right now, peace can be had in France at a bargain price. But that price is going up with every news story like this, every act of overt discrimination and prejudice. The citizens of France may not like what the price will become if they keep ignoring the inequities in their country much longer. And the same can be said of many, many other countries right now. Legal actions like this are playing a most dangerous game, and the only winning move for this game... is not to play.

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