mpyne

46 ms·

571.
by mpyne 12y ago
> There's also the added bonus of timing, as the torture report seemed to only be gaining steam up until this. I doubt it was that, if only because North Korea has been complaining about this movie since long before the CIA torture
572.
by mpyne 12y ago
There are interesting "free speech" implications to this too. E.g. North Korea seems to have succeeded in scaring off all the major theater chains from showing "The Interview" in theaters.
573.
by mpyne 12y ago
> So if I am scammed I not only lose out on the scam but I am further punished by the protocol to lose this collateral as well? Well, that's the Bitcoin philosophy in a nutshell: they solve the problem of being screwed by third-part
574.
by mpyne 12y ago
> Hacking is a cheap weapon with no answer to it Hacking does have answers (things like DDoS are harder to defend against though). However, those answers tend to require significant resource investment (formal verification, use of soft
575.
by mpyne 12y ago
> Taking away the A10 to feed the JSF program is like deleting txt files to get hard disk space back. Sure, but A-10 is one of only many txt files USAF is trying to delete so they can defragment. > > doesn't deter conflict aga
576.
by mpyne 12y ago
> It's not a good plane to fight the hypothetical wars against adversaries that the US might never engage on the battlefield. More to the point, it is taking away resources to field the planes that would be needed for that hypothe
577.
by mpyne 12y ago
> a tiny amount of radiation coming from speck of decaying radioactive material released by Fukushima that is floating around in the air of your office room. By that logic, we should panic if we inhale the sweet scent of someone eating a
578.
by mpyne 12y ago
And yet, the tailings for uranium are much less in volume than the tailings (and eventual processed waste products) from the fuels that would replace it, like coal and oil. Uranium itself is only weakly radioactive anyways (the kind of uran
579.
by mpyne 12y ago
Even the old Western designs are/were safe within the parameters of their design. Many are running even today because it has proven politically impossible to replace them. The one major exception is Fukushima Dai-Ichi (which used one o
580.
by mpyne 12y ago
In fact the base nuclear fuels are almost extraordinarily safer than the products of their use, speaking from a nuclear perspective alone. Nuclear fuel that is stable enough to be useful as a reactor fuel has such a long half-life (usually
581.
by mpyne 12y ago
I'd take issue with the idea that there was no/minimal coordination with the reactor operators. In fact, the issue that made the turbine spindown test such a disaster for Chernobyl was the extended amount of time and number of pow
582.
by mpyne 12y ago
Actually, KDE made KHTML (for the Konqueror web browser), which was then used by Apple to create and evolve WebKit, and you know the story from there. But KHTML wasn't just a code name for WebKit, it actually came from outside Apple.
583.
by mpyne 12y ago
Sadly, it's not rhetoric. Also sadly, yes you would think some progress would have started years ago.
584.
by mpyne 12y ago
It's pretty sad, government actually used to be the innovator of IT. The Navy is still doing personnel management (albeit behind a ton of Web-based wrappers) on systems written by government programmers back in the 70s, and the governm
585.
by mpyne 12y ago
> The problem, from my perspective, is that NO ONE is responsible for everything in the .gov namespace. Actually, the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for the security of .gov (at least in theory). I don't think they h
586.
by mpyne 12y ago
And yet, somehow I'd be very suspicious of cars that require electronics to make steering or braking work at all. Not everything needs to be turned into fly-by-wire.
587.
by mpyne 12y ago
Well, just because the laser wasn't obtained from an acquisition program intended to defeat enemy EO sensors doesn't mean that it won't be useful for that purpose, either by destroying the EO sensor's platform or getting
588.
by mpyne 12y ago
I was about to ask how the BadUSB brouhaha affects the YubiKey, but then I just realized that (of course) my own smartcard reader is plugged in via USB, so the situation can't be that much worse.
589.
by mpyne 12y ago
Thanks. I wish I'd remembered that from when I read the article yesterday as in many ways it even over-emphasizes the point I was making.
590.
by mpyne 12y ago
> It could be that they target specific individuals of the Turkish government instead of storing and analyzing everything that goes in and out of Turkey. Maybe. But how do they do that? Do they individually hack into routers only when an
591.
by mpyne 12y ago
> How do we not have freelance bioweapons developers? Would it be any more difficult to prohibit the development and auctioning of cyberweapons? First of all, we do, in the Middle East. But bioweaponry development is orders of magnitude
592.
by mpyne 12y ago
This occurs to me every day that I enter someone's birthday in my contact list so that I get the nice birthday warning on my calendar. Google has crowdsourced the production and cross-checking of a very valuable data set to the people,
593.
by mpyne 12y ago
It's actually very difficult to comply with, but that's a topic for a different conversation. That spreadsheet you keep of customer orders that you've mailed goods to from your personal eBay business? Definitely not Privacy A
594.
by mpyne 12y ago
> Sure, let's wiretap cell phones of all Turks in Europe? I don't think so. Wait, Germany was actually shown to be engaging in surveillance of Turkish telecommunications... for 38 years . http://www.reuters.com&#x2F
595.
by mpyne 12y ago
It gets even more incredible. The landings would have been canceled for the day they actually happened, except that the meteorology officer in Eisenhower's staff predicted that there would be a short break in the bad weather sufficient
596.
by mpyne 12y ago
An OS doesn't have to have a file browser either, yet no one cried antitrust when Windows 95 bundled Windows Explorer instead of forcing people to buy Norton Commander. This whole argument is kind of silly anyways since it's lea
597.
by mpyne 12y ago
No acknowledgement of the source, either in the Technet article or the security bulletin's acknowledgements. I wonder who the private source must be that would ask for anonymity?
598.
by mpyne 12y ago
> What would be so bad that you wouldn't be able to make excuses for it. Consider the nature of the environment. On HN when I see things that I agree with, I upvote them. Often I have nothing better to add, as very good points have
599.
by mpyne 12y ago
You should pay attention to the UN more then, even if they do usually abstain from voting.
600.
by mpyne 12y ago
The PRC doesn't feel embarrassment about this, but not because of anything the US is or isn't doing. The way they see it, espionage is a fair method of catching up to (and then exceeding) the US, and if it keeps working then maybe

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