Advances in AI
Maybe it's because we haven't invented actual positronic brains yet? How on earth are feeble ARM/MIPS processors meant to cope with the moral quandaries posed by modern society? No wonder the first law is going out of the window.
168 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Sep 2009
A surprising number of UK ISPs supplying residential services leave port 25 wide open (although, granted, they may be throttled - I haven't stress tested the connection!). From my (limited) experience it seems that north American ISPs are more diligent on this matter while Australian ISPs are similar to their UK brethren.
Ports 465 and 587 with accompanying authentication protocols are definitely the way forward.
Having outgoing port 25 blocked by default but the possibility of it being opened at the customer's request seems like a reasonable way forward.
Your metallurgy must be longer ago than you realize
Fair cop guv.
Airbus has introduced laser welding on aluminium sheets long ago for the A380. With the right alloy and right welding parameters, you get a better strength-to-weight ratio than with rivets, which are a pain from a production engineering point of view.
Rivetting is a pita, not just for production, it can be a source of corrosion leading to fractures during the working life of the aircraft too.
And I take your point about laser welding on Airbus products, although that's quite a lot of qualifications for what turns out to be a relatively small part of the A380's fuselage. That being said I too expect the proportion will only increase.
However, imagine having to laser weld every dot of the structure in 3d as you print it. And when it comes to the jet engine turbine blades... after you sir!
When it gets to the stage where "ink jets" are in fact "atom jets" then you might have a process that could produce viable aircraft. Until then 3d printing for most aerospace applications, without significant treatment regimes afterwards, is just plain not going to work.
Those treatment regimes (annealing etc) would lose you most of the convenience of printing anyway. It's been a little while since I did any serious metallurgy but I hate to imagine the physical properties of aluminium that has been ink jet deposited. Consider the fact that planes use rivets rather than welds to hold them together because welding weakens the aluminium alloy too much and you get a sense of the problem.
The degree to which the alloys in aircraft depend on strict atomic-crystalline arrangements on a large scale for their structural integrity is very impressive especially when you realise you bet your life on the fact that it is so and will remain so for the duration of your flight let alone the lifetime of the component.
Presumably the more these stories hit the press the less actual outlaws etc actually use these services for anything significant. So the more the govts trawl these sources the more they are focusing on innocents and the less they are gaining useful intel on actual terrorists.
These broad tools appear only to make the "security" forces jobs harder in the long run.
The plan was for "a sealable 530ml container purchased for £3.50 from Tesco" according to previous coverage of this mission. But I agree, either the Lego hero is actually larger than life in real life (there's something to mull on over a (real life) pint) or else Tesco ought to be had under advertising standards/mislabelling.
@dan1980Settling out of court isn't sending a very strong message to either Verizon or other companies who are either currently engaged in similar behaviour or contemplating it.
As far as I am aware there was no court action, just the FCC investigation and the resulting conclusions which were accepted by Verizon because they paid the fine. That is quite different to settling out of court when a case has been brought.
The financial cost is not high for them, as you point out, but management have very publicly been found to be breaching the rights of their customers and admitted their guilt by agreeing to pay the fine. That is still serious.
Verizon is not a company that can just dissolve and come back again under a new brand. They need somehow to make amends. Perhaps it's too much to hope that it won't be by just sweeping it under the carpet...
Most routers don't use https for admin logins, so if someone has cracked your WPS and is listening to all network traffic they can scrape your admin password. At which point all of the above warnings are true.
The same thing applies to mac addresses because they can be spoofed quite easily. And if you're listening to traffic then you know which MAC addresses to try spoofing.
The WiFi range thing is a very useful limiter on your network's exposure. However there are many easy ways to boost signal strength (eg the infamous Pringle can method) and attack a network from otherwise unfeasible distances. Just because your iPhone can't see your home network halfway down the street doesn't mean it's impossible to access your network from there.
> Finding the balance between privacy and surveillance is probably never going to be sorted in our lifetimes. It's a tremendously complex and convoluted issue, and it's questionable if the intricacies can be covered in a handy sound bite.
If/when we find the balance then a handy sound bite becomes a possibility, useful as a point of reference. Until that happens sound bites only represent a particular point of view.
Also, I'm not sure that the issue is convoluted. I think people's understanding is generally convoluted and often confused or inconsistent because the issue is nuanced.
"If they're making out that the data is protected and secure that's a little disingenuous because if they want to operate a business here, that'd have to comply with demands from the authorities," said Jeremy Goldkorn
It's more than disingenuous, it's the lie that everyone swallows when they sign up for cloud-based anything anywhere, not just China.
... it's who she passes it on to afterwards.
After all, auntie June is probably not going to have the elite hacker skills necessary to discover the undeleted files on the (emulated) sdcard. So you're safe for now. But only until she sells it on eBay for ££.99 (excl p&p).
And then you're both done for...
@Joe Harrison
Its practical use is that it serves as a working system for many tech-savvy types, and also as a standard for other systems.
PGP was invented years ago and it was an enormous step forward, even though it was as tough to use then as it is now (in fact tougher - ever tried using it on a 386?). The thing is that the problems it set out to address then have only become worse in the intervening time: now there is not just the concern that it is possible to exercise mass-surveilance on populations in the "west", but the proof that it is in fact happening.
I don't know what the next big step forward will be or where/who it will come from, but I do know that it will need to give us at least what PGP does. Otherwise it won't be a step forward, but rather backwards.
The experts tell us that cryptography is hard and good cryptography is even harder. From my experience I would tend to agree. The question is, is it worth it? And attempting to answer that question leads you on to other rather bigger questions.
You don't need the whole certificate/key in a qr code, you can send that as an email attachment or download it from a web page or key server. The qr code would be useful for the key fingerprint though, which should be much more manageable. You would then use the fingerprint encoded in the qr code to verify you had downloaded the right key.
It might suck to use for all the reasons he gave, and yes SMTP sucks because it was designed without security in mind, but there is one reason at least why PGP absolutely rocks:
You can use it to encrypt a message to send via just about any medium. And you can verify that security independently of the infrastructure you used to communicate.
As soon as you start to build a monolithic "secure" system you lose that independence, which is a big loss.
In every secure system I am aware of (and I should say that I in no way consider myself an expert in the field) there is always a trade off between convenience and security. You can have more of one but it means less of the other. If this guy has come up with a way of increasing the convenience without losing any of PGP's security then I'm all for it, but if he's advocating the opposite I don't want to know.