Honest question from a web developer, and I'm ashamed I don't know more, is there a clear concise guide to building accessible websites? I've had to support ARIA for U.S. Government websites, and certain color schemes for color accessibility, but I really don't feel like I know how to build a web product with accessibility in mind. I am genuinely sorry that I haven't developed the skill more, and would like to take this opportunity to learn more.
Older military aircraft used to have a 'War emergency power' setting (WEP), it produced more than 100% of the engine's normal rated power but it decreased the operating life of the engine substantially and could only be run for a few minutes.
I assume that if you're freelance you're at more risk of finding yourself on the receiving end of a CFAA violation. What I wonder is that if security researchers who work for domestic companies face the same degree of scrutiny that these freelance researchers do.
I guess that if you work for a company you're probably not looking at anyone's website that's not explicitly paying you/your company and under some contract.
While what you posted makes sense with the right definitions, I think you might understand better if you're careful with your definitions of "security specialist" (what SubiculumCode said), "security researcher" (what you said), and the other classifications.
Not all specialists or researchers are doing penetration testing. Of those, not all of them are penetration testing third party stuff, and of those, not all of them are doing it without permission. That's the only one that will get you into trouble.
I'm not, technically, a "security specialist" of any stripe, but I take a very careful interest in the defensive side of security, and am currently in the middle of implementing a fairly security-sensitive system. I don't worry that the FBI is going to bust down my door at 2am because I've tweaked the API of my code to make it harder to write cross-site scripting attacks, or because I fixed the architecture so that authentication is done very early in the request cycle instead of ad-hoc and inconsistently very late in the request cycle in a way that requires every developer of every individual web page to have to enforce all authentication. Most security work is going to involve internal matters and the fixing thereto, and, yeah, the job isn't going anywhere any time soon.
(Though it does have the eternal challenge of convincing people they need to pay for it, and the problem that even in companies where programming is the major product like Facebook and Google, you're still going to be a cost center.)
Working for Intel didn't stop Intel getting a conviction against Randal Schwartz (which was eventually quashed, but he ended up being " felon" for over 10 years...)
Probably a daft question but I'm curious as to what others have to say. If this happens, what kind of attorney or lawyer should you contact? Is simply googling "attorney's near me" and reaching out to the first result good enough? The lawyers I work with are all corporate contract lawyers, not the kind that deal with criminal law.
If the FBI wanted to interview you, your best bet would probably be to ask one of the corporate contract lawyers for a white collar criminal defense lawyer. If you couldn't do that for whatever reason your next best bet would be to shake your network to find another lawyer and ask him for a recommendation for a white collar criminal defense lawyer.
Me personally? I'd ask my family law attorney for a referral first (he's the guy who did our wills), and then go straight to the local bar. But you can ask your corporate contract lawyers, friends, colleagues, parents, priest, or mentor for referrals.
I'm sure this is good advice, but just stating it like that makes it seem like a protection racket, doesn't it? The only way not to suffer at the hands of these people is to hire them...
If you were able to get drugs from a pharmacy or dispensary or a regulated service, there would't (hopefully) be a black market to supply the drugs which creates untold violence.
I have a completely untested theory that the number of deaths would be less with a well regulated legalization of drugs than with an unregulated black market where gangs and organized crime supply the demand for illicit substances.
There's a black market because most people can't just get a prescription from a doctor, they have to lie or get someone else's drugs, there isn't enough legal availability to rule it out.
>> If you were able to get drugs from a pharmacy or dispensary or a regulated service, there would't (hopefully) be a black market
Medical marijuana is legal where I live, you can buy it at a regulated service, however there are plenty of people who still buy it on the street or produce more than they are legally able to and sell the excess.
Except Joe who grows weed in his cupboard isn't really capable of producing heroin let alone the extraordinarily dangerous opium derivatives that pharmaceutical are pushing on doctors.
The required acreage to yield opium in significant quantities is way beyond a closet (or even a basement). Not to mention that heroin is ~1% of total opium weight.
If we're talking about Joe's personal use, a single poppy plant produces multiple doses, according to this[1] reference and some anecdotal drug forum dose suggestions, on the order of tens of mg.
Could you tell me what number "multiple" is and what a "dose" looks like?
Are we talking about raw plant material that is opium, or refined heroin/morphine/codeine? The conflation of the word drugs and plant material seems like the most absurd gorilla in the room.
This quote was stolen from the comments section on the original article by Brian_EE
"I wonder how realistic the operations of the virtual airlines are. In the game, do you get to have local police come on your plane and beat up your passengers and drag them off before you take off on your flight route?"
FS is pilot-focused. They dont simulate the exciting world of ticket counters and baggage limits. But there is probably a german sim that, from the makers of AirportSimulator (see nerdcubed's coverage of that series). German simulators are a strange market niche.
I haven't wasted enough time on the United incident, but I would guess that the pilot did get involved at some point. They have, similar to a ship's captain, a legal status that goes beyond that of, say, a bus driver. I don't think the cabin crew would invite police onboard without the captain's approval.
And, while I am German, I have not seen Ryanair Checkin Simulator 2000. I'll have to check the section behind the curtain, though. May have been x-rated for excessive violence and unsatisfactory kink.
Of course, it's easy to create it yourself in Simulator Simulator 2017 if you have the "Extreme Queuing (Britain)" expansion pack.
I've also wondered about the pilots during the United incident, and media coverage has been strangely quiet on that topic.
The executive summary of the incident seems to be that there just weren't any adults in the room. One can easily picture gate agents, flight attendants, and the aviation department staff involved basically feeling that they must follow instructions, being worried about breaking policies, being written up, whatever.
You'd hope that if the whole thing were put in front of a pilot, they'd perhaps take a more wholistic, pragmatic, problem-solving view, and try a few other options first. Seems like almost anything would have been better - talking to the passengers, getting everybody to leave the plane and reboard / sort it out in the terminal, cancelling the flight, getting a bigger plane, putting the airline staff on a different airline, anything. If a pilot couldn't come up with a better solution to something like this, I'd worry how they'd fare in the air with a mechanical emergency.
My uninformed guess is that the pilots had no idea of the details of what was going on. They were probably in the cockpit with the door closed preparing for their part of the flight. No doubt they were kept informed of the situation, but it was probably vague generalities like, "We need to bump four passengers so we can deadhead crew, we should have you ready to go in 15 minutes." And next thing the poor pilots know, they have a starring role in a lawsuit.
I think that's quite possible, and I'd like to believe that's what happened. I guess there must be a cockpit voice recording somewhere - I wonder if that will ever come out, or if people need to die for that to happen.
I'm still kind of skeptical that the pilots could be completely oblivious about it though. You'd think that if something is serious enough for a flight attendant or gate agent to call law enforcement, and get them onto the plane, then they'd tell the pilot about it too, if only as a courtesy or practical measure so they're not surprised about the noise or banging on the door. Also, at some point the pilots are going to have manifests of passengers vs crew, and that would change, so you'd think they'd see that happening, since the plane was fully boarded it seems possible they'd have had the first manifest, and wonder about / be annoyed about late changes. Or, maybe they'd simply see the law enforcement folks get on, or hear the call on the intercom / radio, etc.
I'm more inclined to think that the situation was misrepresented to them ("we have an unruly passenger, but we're taking care of it"), and they took it at face value without asking any questions. Will be interesting to see what comes out.
Actually, they were not United pilots, but pilots for Republic Airlines which was operating the United flight. The United Pilots union issued an angry statement, as unions are wont to do. [0,1]
Sorry if this is a sidetrack but thinking about weird simulators reminded me of a "simulator" of sort that I ran into way back when. It involved getting individuals in a town to do various tasks by manipulating their vices and virtues.
I heard that game has some cult followers in Korea. Some gamers buy steering wheels and gears, put on the monitor a sticker saying "Freight Union", wear fingerless gloves and a red Freight Union vest, and start driving while listening to radio...
I've played it for a bit, I can see the appeal. For a game it (IMO) gets very old very quickly though, not much progression in it.
Used to have a different game back in the day, Hard Truck iirc, which was a lot more game-y - areas you couldn't reach with the one truck, offroad sections, truck racing, etc. Very satisfying at the time.
I found Papers, Please to be a really fascinating game. I've been on a indie binge lately (Firewatch is another recent favorite) and I felt Papers, Please had a really great story that a lot of indie games are missing. Plenty of options and tough choices to make, with different outcomes for everything.
I also appreciated that I could walk away at any point and pick it up later. I didn't feel "trapped" having to finish a mission like too many AAA games. Well worth the ten bucks in my opinion.
Take it from a lawyer: Do not argue with them. Pilots and ship captains are special. Their word is law. You can sue them afterwards, you can report them to police and they could be charged if they had no good reason to order your removal. But at that moment on that plane they are kings. If a pilot wants you off you have to get off. Once the pilot requested police help there was nothing that man could have done to stay aboard.
They should not have treated him in that way, they should not have been violent, but so long as the pilot wanted him off he was obligated.
Untrue in my jurisdiction and likely others. We have a limited range of circumstances in which the pilot in charge (or their delegates viz. cabin crew) may compel disembarkation. Drunkenness or presenting a safety risk are on that list. Overbooking is not.
So then one possible course of action in case of post-boarding overbooking would be free drinks until enough passengers are sufficiently drunk to be removed? One more for the endless list of less bad things that could have been done instead at the United incident.
That's isnt the same thing. The pilot can be incorrect. Him ordering your removal can be a criminal act. Him ordering you off could see him put in jail. There were cases about this decades ago (think white captains refusing black passengers). That doesn't mean that a passenger can stay once ordered off. Whether the removal order is legal or not comes afterwards.
Like trying to throw someone already boarded out of the plane, involving security officers, police, violence and broken teeth?
Yes, I would definitely say that that kind of behaviour was a really outrageous safety risk.
The pilot, accordingly to your narrative, should have thrown out of the aircraft all the crew and whoever was involved in this gigantic fuck up to avoid a very serious safety risk.
True, but a pilot can leverage that later power by not taking posession of the plane. Door stays open, airline cancels flight and everyone is now a trespassor and must get off.
Is this a reference to United Airlines? It's funny its going viral in all sorts of places! There was a comment here that was since deleted https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/37169 about carpets and being dragged off the plane.
It's very impressive to me that Microsoft took the technical details of Flight Simulator so seriously that it fielded questions from customers like this. What's doubly more impressive is that Bill Gates got directly involved with what is essentially a bug report.
Then they sold it, and the new owner is now pulling a Train Simulator and going for thousands of dollars of DLC on Steam, which will likely kill the entire modding community that kept FSX alive once they realize they can sell it on Steam. Kind of sad to watch such a historical product be squeezed for the last dollars in slow motion.
X-Plane 11 looks absolutely fantastic, thankfully. Might be about time to pay FSX a final salute, and nice to support X-Plane as a reward for standing up to patent trolls.
There's actually two living forks. One is Dovetail Games' FSX: Steam Edition which you're talking about. The other is Prepar3d, sold by Lockheed. The license stipulates that it is "not for entertainment purposes", but otherwise it's basically just a port of FSX that works better in modern systems.
The general consensus among the flight sim community is that their license from Microsoft forbade them selling it as a video game, to avoid them competing with first Microsoft and later Dovetail.
There's actually a reason for that: Microsoft had a separate product called ESP [1] that was based on the Flight Simulator codebase that was marketed as a platform for doing industrial training simulations.
Development stopped with the dissolution of ACES, the Flight Simulator team, but Lockheed acquired rights to continue to develop MS ESP, which eventually became Lockheed's Prepare3d [2].
It's one of the oldest Microsoft products that's not Office or OS-based. Truly amazing how much time they've invested in it over the decades. I wonder how much code from the 1980s is still shipping.
Definitely is quite a legacy. I didn't realize it went back that far, but I do recall it running on DOS. Only had one brief go at it on a friend's computer in the late 80s. Don't recall being very good at it. As I recall, it wasn't very friendly to mistakes, especially on landing. I remember crashing a lot.
Yeah, I played Atari ST version and it was a blast. Gorgeous filled polygons, up to 4 simultaneous 3D views, weather conditions, stunt flying... However this is off-topic as only PC versions were made by Microsoft.
To be fair, which side companies take on international disputes (in this case a border) sometimes matters. e.g. all the craziness over Taiwan being part of China or not.
MS has had to take actions over border disputes in the past. Original releases of Windows 95 included a map that you could use to select/show your timezone. There was a dispute over the Pakistan/India border, and MS opted to later remove the map than attempt to correct it.
They fielded the question and did a lot of work because they cared about the quality and details of their product at a level that I would agree with OP was impressive.
That it turned out to be a nonsense issue is immaterial to that judgement.
There are exemplary aspects to the story, but I think the only real lesson to be learned is "don't blindly spend a bunch of time/effort on an issue unless we're sure it's actually important".
