JunkDNA

22 ms·

181.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Indeed. But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. In contrast to PRISM a lot of the techniques Jacob presented seem like they would only be useful for targeted work. The crucial question of where those
182.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Jacob made this assertion in his talk but presented no evidence. He explicitly said he wanted to call out the companies because they should be held accountable if they were complicit in this. But no evidence was presented that any of the ha
183.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual targets where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet stuff which is rightly worrisome, but the vast majority of the slides are sim
184.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People
185.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Thank you for this reminder. He's one of those people whose posts I've clearly read a bunch of times but never connected them to a single individual.
186.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Absolutely agree with you on the point that people are free to sell their work at whatever the market is willing to pay. I would not count myself as a piracy apologist. But I don't think you can overlook the point that changes in techn
187.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I'm not arguing that they weren't a criminal enterprise or that movie pirates are all closet consumerists waiting to be parted with their money. However, the article says that the vast majority of mega's money came from &quot
188.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I think the HN-specific landing page is not as informative as the actual main page: http://boards.coffeestrap.com/#/welcome The HN-specific page reads like startup satire.
189.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
What's interesting to me about all of this is that there's this caricature of movie pirates as not wanting to pay for anything and just being general freeloaders. Yet this makes it clear that people were willing to pay for this
190.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
As I said in my post, I don't really know what it should look like. But standing outside the Apple store telling people they just made a bad purchase decision is no way to win converts. This is like PETA standing outside a butcher shop
191.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I am a huge believer in the power of free and open source software. But I always cringe when the FSF runs these kinds of campaigns. They exhibit an astonishing level of tone-deafness about the audience they are attempting to reach. IMO, the
192.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
A person's priorities in life just change. I in no way ascribe to the "helicopter parent" approach to raising kids, but having kids changed me in fundamental ways that cause my outlook on life to change in a manner that often
193.
Target hit by credit card breach(online.wsj.com)
2 points by JunkDNA 13y ago|0 comments
194.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Well the problem is that a lot of antibiotic resistance can be attributed to efflux pumps that literally pump the stuff out of the bacteria. So these are generalized resistance mechanisms that target a broad array of environmental stuff tha
195.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Initially, the founders did not want political parties. But factions quickly formed anyway. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United...
196.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I'm not sure what they used for 286 era machines for hard drives but I suspect it was plain old IDE, which you could probably connect directly to a more modern machine. I was still in Amiga land until the 486. Incidentally, the only 28
197.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
It took me until 2005 to have a computer I liked nearly as much as the Amiga: I bought a Mac mini running OS X to tinker with and I ended up switching to Mac OS about 9 - 10 months later. It still wasn't the same though. I think the fr
198.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
If you missed the Ars series on the history of the Amiga, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing: http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/ I missed it when it came out, but got sucked in while r
199.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
The only real fight I ever recall my parents having was when my dad came home with that $1,000 100 meg hard drive. My mother was livid that he had not discussed it with her first. Years later, as I came to learn what our financial situation
200.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
This is just wonderful. About three and a half years ago I booted the first real computer from my childhood as well: a Commodore Amiga 500. I had one mission and that was to clone the hard drive so that I could get all the stuff off of it b
201.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Thanks for injecting some actual peer reviewed research into this discussion. As I mentioned elsewhere, I was mostly responding to the notion that one can engineer a virus with specific properties as opposed to relying on natural pathogens.
202.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
You are correct, I was mostly interpreting his post to be about a purposefully engineered virus with specific properties. One could throw darts and hope to get "lucky" by recombining and tweaking existing pathogens. That individua
203.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
You are right. I chose my words poorly. This is what I get for trying to make a complex point in a quick post between meetings.
204.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Certainly, I will grant that it is possible to blindly shoot in the dark and get lucky creating something that we don't understand, but is nevertheless deadly. Absolutely that could happen, and another commenter upthread gives some ver
205.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I address this in my second paragraph. You can't assume the advances all happen on the negative side (the ability to perfectly engineer a deadly virus) without corresponding advances on the positive side (enough understanding of biolog
206.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Yes, thanks, edited.
207.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
>We now have the tools to create viruses in labs. What happens when someone creates a virus that spreads extremely easily, has greater than 50% mortality, and has an incubation period of several weeks? Something like this, released by a
208.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I used to work in anti-infectives research and if you talked to virologists long enough they would all insist that huge numbers of human ailments were caused by as yet undiscovered viruses. I admit that I'm a bit biased toward this mys
209.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
Indeed you are right. For much of the time people have thought that at least you could classify cancers by the tissues where they present themselves (e.g. colon cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, etc...). But more research is showing t
210.
by JunkDNA 13y ago
I've commented on this around here before. You read lots of junk about cancer "cures" in the popular press. They are almost always in mice or something and I or someone else with a similar background always feels compelled to

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