Posts by Christoph

Major news

Some web sites were attacked. The attack failed.

Hey, that's a major news story. It can't be happening more often than, say, every few milliseconds.

Let me fix that for you

"put a business process into a worker's hands wherever they may roam and they'll be more likely to use it."

Put a business process into a worker's hands wherever they may roam and they'll never be able to get away from work and have time of their own.

Not difficult

It's very easy for a computer to be cleverer than a human being - when the human being is forced to mindlessly follow a script no matter how ridiculous it is or how inappropriate to the actual problem.

Watch out for foreign governments

"any backdoor would be open to abuse by hackers, including foreign governments"

The government of the USA *is* a foreign government. Why should they have backdoors into software used in other countries, which judging by their past performance they are guaranteed to massively abuse?

Not what I would describe as a good move

Have the cOMICS Group never heard of the Streisand Effect?

No problem

They're in Texas - just sue them because chewing up computers has been patented and the patent sold to a troll.

There's still humans involved

"getting humans out of the military equation"

No, there will still be plenty of humans involved in drone operations.

As targets.

Other reasons to grab tham

"it implies that the company being invested in has some tech the alphabet agencies would like to use, clone, or keep an eye on."

Or it has customers whose private information the agencies would like to siphon off.

"worked out some kind of tenuous IT link"

A live webcam so you (and we) can check on what the dogs are doing?

It is not their choice to make

Yes, this field is very new. Yes, it might well be to those authors' advantage to have the books scanned. Lots of people think it would be very good for the authors.

Lots of other people disagree. It is very new. It isn't settled yet.

The authors might be right, they might be wrong, it might be much more complicated than that.

But it should be the authors who choose! It is their work. It is their livelihood. It is their creation.

For many of them that creation is far far more than just a job of work, it is their dreams given shape.

It is for them to choose by what they personally consider best for what they personally want to happen to their work. It is not for Google to decide by commercial force and lawyers.

Err, hang on a minute ...

"What the public sees and reads is with rare exception, fantasy mixed with a few kernels of truth."

Have I got this right? They are going to extreme lengths to keep their work and their functioning secret. They are doing everything they can to stop the public finding out what they are doing and how they are doing it.

And now they are complaining that the portrayals of them are unrealistic?

I'll wait for the next version

I want one of the atomic clocks they're designing now, which they reckon will be accurate to better than one second.

That's not one second in X million years, that's one second in 13.8 billion years. Better than one second accuracy since the Big Bang.

Call me a taxi

"chip-enabled jeans which, when bonked on the floor, automatically call you a cab"

You're a cab!

"in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense."

Tough luck Signor Galvani - making frogs legs twitch doesn't help secure the defence of the United States!

So it doesn't work? So what?

We know it's ineffective. We know it doesn't work. We know there's easy ways round it. We know it will wrongly block innocent sites. We know that there will be creature feep - it will be extended to cover more and more and more, every time there's a scandal.

But we're still going to do it, because the Daily Mail told us to.

And another one

Another possibility - Mitchell Burnside Clapp's 'Black Horse' concept for Single Stage to Orbit. It used mid-air refuelling.

It sounds unlikely, but it's apparently quite practicable. It used standard existing technology as much as possible - and Mitch pointed out that the US Air Force does mid-air refuelling up to hundreds of times a day.

ObJoke

I thought the missing link between monkey chatter and human speech was YouTube comments.

Something wrong there

"23.6PB in 2012"

That can't be right. That would mean that the 3TB drive I bought last year was over a ten-thousandth of the total capacity shipped. There were several of that model sitting on the shelf in the one store. And a production run of only ten thousand even of that one model doesn't sound very economic.

See also SANS

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a good article on this

What is the point?

The value of big data is mining it for information by subjecting it to whatever crafty analysis you can think up.

But if it takes months to simply read the data in for analysis, the eventual results will be hopelessly out of date.

The data that's valuable in and of itself without all that analysis is only a miniscule proportion of that data heap.