Re: The criminals are already using this weakness
"It seems they hide a gizmo in the car to clone the signal for automatic garage doors which can then be operated remotely."
Hmm? But don't most garage door systems use rolling codes these days?
16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"The entertaining part is that that also has an as yet unused positive byproduct: thorium, which can be used to make far safer nuclear power plants than the current uranium based ones."
Wanna bet? The thorium cycle produces Uranium-233. VERY weaponizable. Can't rule out a state being desperate enough to extract it. Not to mention U-233 is a real problem in cleanup time, as it's even MORE problematic than Pu-239.
If that's so, why hasn't anyone gone the extra step of directly suing Comcast for deceptive trade practices? And for that matter, why hasn't anyone then attacked the FCC and FTC for failure to perform their duty? There ARE circumstances where US government bureaus can be sued for significant grievances.
I disagree. I say it SUPPORTS the supposition because ANY regulation, just like ANYTHING made by man, can be twisted and corrupted. Every form of government has fatal flaws. Even democracy can be corrupted by conning an unknowledgeable electorate.
Except that most telephone lines I've noticed are buried, a lot easier thing to pull off with something low-voltage like telephone lines. The term "telephone pole" these days are generally misnomers because the poles are actually owned by the power company.
And PS. I've had the cell towers break down before the landline phones, and without Internet access (which is more likely to be OVER than UNDER), the IP phone is dead, too.
"3) Telco's act in only their own self interest, net neutrality is to prevent Comcast from extorting money from content providers like Netflix in order to deliver their service at the same level as others, just like they did before it was implemented."
Here's a relevant concrete example. What's to stop Comcast from prioritizing NBC on demand stuff and giving say CBS on demand short shrift (since NBC is owned by Comcast and is free to pipe down their own private network versus CBS which is owned by rival Viacom).
"The free market isn't perfect by any means, but it's a lot better than the regulatory state presided over by flawed human beings."
I disagree. An unfettered free market is like a poker tournament. It's why I call it "winner economics". Eventually someone gets all the clout and can bully everyone out of the way: even pushing or buying out upstarts before they become disruptors.
"Do you pay "rental" for the electrical supply cable coming into your home, or for the pipes connecting you to the water supply, or for the cable connecting you to the cable TV service?"
Yes, though it's called maintenance fees. SOMEONE's got to pay for the upkeep.
No, because ale tends to be stronger than a thin lager. That's what I said, just alcoholic enough that it doesn't aggravate the blood vessels yet at under 40 degrees quickly cools you down, which is what you need when you're already in a sweat (if what you say is true, it would do that with cold ANYTHING). Your body wouldn't counter this at this rate since it's already heading towards heat exhaustion territory. Thing is, thin lager may be f'n close to water, but it's NOT water. Plus remember one reason people tended to drink beer versus water: beer BOILS the water; sometimes you can't trust straight water.
OTOH, a full-bodied ale tends to better dilate your blood vessels (alcohol's a vasodilator), increasing blood flow and making you feel warmer. And since it's fermented and served at room temperature, you don't have the chilling effect that counters this. Thus why the English tend to stick to them given their colder climate.
We're trying to future-proof the damn thing so we don't have to deal with this again in a few decades as uptake could spike and we jump from 48 bits gone to 64 bits gone faster than we go from 32 to 48. And before you say why won't we hit 128 bits gone, physical limits kick in. There just isn't enough matter in the universe to do that. That's why ZFS uses 128-bit limits.
Security by EXTREME obscurity. If you're looking for a few bone needles in a planet-sized haystack, eventually the return on effort gets too small. If you had a week to search a million lead lockboxes, even if you could check them once a second, you'd only get about two thirds of the way before time ran out (it would take nearly 12 days).
"NAT is not a "security by obscurity". It's the equivalent of a DENY ALL rule for incoming connections. If it doesn't have a rule to deliver a packet, it will drop it. Raw, simple, but effective. And - important - cannot be disabled but for a single host, usually."
But that's NOT the NAT at work. That's the firewall that's INCLUDED with the NAT. If the firewall wasn't there, the ISP (which provides your connection so you're subservient to it) WOULD have the ability to route directly onto your LAN if it knows your topology (and if the ISP can do it, the LAW can pressure the ISP to do it on their behalf). Someone demonstrated such a route about a month ago. It's ONLY the firewall that prevents this, NOT the NAT.
"Ignoring the really obvious problem of being expected to unnecessarily translate between IPv6 and IPv4 on your network boundaries, why are IPv4 private address ranges preferable?"
Because you have devices on your network that cannot be replaced or upgraded and can ONLY grok IPv4. Now what do you do?
"As to firewall separation, you can still configure your home router/firewall to allow the bits you want to access externally whilst protecting your garage door just like you do today. IPv6 firewalls work just like IPv4 firewalls do."
And in fact, one-to-one NATs in IPv6 can do some pretty neat tricks (and yes, they're in the spec). For example, ephemeral addresses for outgoing connections (meaning they're used just for that session and then disconnected). Lot harder to hack by reversing outgoing connections this way. Another example, you can have the router randomize the subnet addresses of exposed machines, making all of them look like a jumbled mess to an outside network mapper. Makes it harder to guess the topology and use that knowledge in an intrusion.
Part of the problem is routing. With 128 bits to work with instead of 48 allows you to provide more than enough bits for physical routing to match up and seriously simplify your routing tables, which was one big concern as IPv4 started getting crowded and the routing got all messed up. Now two 90. addresses didn't necessarily go to the same geographic region, for example. This is important as routing tables started getting SO big that stuff started breaking.
NAT isn't what blocks incoming connections. It's your firewall, and any firewall worth its salt has a DROP or REJECT rule for incoming connections by default. Without the firewall, an ISP (perhaps under pressue) can route directly into your LAN. The firewall doesn't go away with IPv6. Nor does NAT; it's just redone as one-to-one reconfigurable and ephemeral NATS which actually provide better protection by scrambling the visible topology.
"It wont stop every crap device, but if it makes it very hard for Joe Public to buy a shitty insecure camera or video recorder, etc, because none of the shops or sellers like Amazon (who of course would be the importer in this case) then its done its job."
Unless, of course, Amazon isn't in your jurisdiction, either.
"And don't forget, if you ever do have a true need, you can always ship an independent application to handle the entire interaction. This is a discussion about a general use tool."
Because you're catering to John Q. Public who doesn't want to get saddled with yet another piece of software. You're talking the Facebook generation here.
"* I have no clue whether NYC is vulnerable to this sort of attack. I'm just puzzled why more of those long range transmission lines aren't buried..."
Burying cables has tradeoffs, especially for longer distances, harder ground, and maintenance concerns. (Buried cable is MUCH more expensive, both in installation and maintenance, gets worse if you have to deal with harder ground, and doesn't lend itself well to upgrading). And IINM it gets more complicated when you're talking high-voltage transmission lines because now you have to take other things into consideration.
"The cascade blackout was entirely unnecessary and could have been avoided had anyone in the Ohio control room understood the business they were in charge of and taken some simple, widely known, industry standard mitigation steps at some point in the hours of warning signs they had."
Thing is, it spread BEYOND Ohio, meaning it wasn't JUST Ohio that was in trouble since the mitigations THERE failed, too. Plus there's the earlier 1960's blackout, which we KNOW started with ONE substation and cascaded.