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I think this is of endgame for network security, I don't see a way out -- the Sony Rootkit[1] should have been the point where I realized but it is just sinking in for me now since the Snowden NSA leak.

Any network connected computer will be running an OS+Applications which are typically a gigabyte or more. This is produced by companies which are beholden to a nation state, and the companies can be coerced[2] or compelled[3] to use the software against the user. The software is also constantly being probed for vulnerabilities, which can also be exploited by law-enforcement / military [4][5].

So, if you turn on auto-update you have to trust the software maker is not being coerced by someone, or being compelled by a secret court to trojan you. If you don't turn on auto-update you can still get trojaned by any vulnerability. Lose-Lose.

[1] Sony Rootkit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootki...

[2] Qwest CEO Nacchio's claims: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...

[3] FISA court

[4] German Govt. Trojan from 2011: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-world-from-b...

[5] FBI's TOR trojan injection: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/freedom-hosting-fbi...


Agreed. What's funny is we're wondering why people who still buy stuff from Sony don't seem to get outraged about the NSA.

Nobody ever cares about this stuff until it is way too late.


I doubt anyone would disagree that triple negatives aren't easy to parse.


If that sentence hadn't mentioned triple negatives, I don't think I would have noticed anything abnormal about it.


It's not the triple negative that is the culprit here though. It's the inherent ambiguity in a phrase such as "never been better", which could be either a negative or positive statement. I'm sure there's a name for that construct?


I think tptacek's sentence would need a 'than' to have a valid reading as a positive statement. 'never been better' is ambiguous by itself, but by the time you put it into a sentence it may or may not be ambiguous.

So my answer is mu.


Now I'm curious how natural language parsers handle triple negatives.


You'll be pleased to know that they don't not do them unwell.


I'm not sure if I wouldn't be dissapointed to hear that they couldn't.


Yes, these criminal masterminds found a way to swindle honest hard-working themselves out of 440 million dollars and "get away with" a cool extra -12 million.


They also amassed over $3 billion net short positions spread across 75 stocks during those 45 minutes causing significant losses to investors with stop loss positions triggered that would not have happened without Knight's erroneous trades. They didn't just harm themselves...


Yeah, actually now that I'm reading the SEC report it appears pretty seriously reckless, also their lack of capital thresholds.


Stop loss orders amplify market instability. People with them deserved what they got.


You obviously have never traded stocks and I would strongly advise against it.


Anyone using stop loss orders harmed themselves. It's like saying that you wouldn't have gotten hurt rolling down the steepest hill in town on a skateboard with no helmet if someone hadn't parked in a red zone.


I haven't been following cracking development, is anyone aware of a back of the envelope analysis of how much using a preconceived mnemonic reduces entropy versus random letters? I would expect the math has been done, I think all you need are the 1gram counts for the first letter position[1].

[1] https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1DlRnW1...

EDIT: Based on a quick spreadsheet calculation, I think uniform A-Z each letter is 4.7 bits, and a phrase constructed of random english words each letter is 4.1 bits, so maybe not all that bad. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ar03cGpoaUJ3dHp...


Hilarious quote of Marco Arment from 4 years ago:

When a similar idea circulated back in 2009, Tumblr’s then–lead developer, Marco Arment, summed up the party line in a scornful blog post: “I hope they let me work on some of the many exciting projects at Yahoo … I want to move to California and get stuck in traffic every day on the way to my midlevel engineering job where I sit in a cubicle all day and can’t make any product decisions while working on something nobody will ever see to manage regional ad clickthrough stats tracking.” Thanks, but no thanks.


Most arrogant quote I've ever heard coming from a developer. I hope this sounded different in context because that is one of the most horrible and elitist things I've ever heard pertaining to our industry.


For the passage in the wikipedia diagram, both of the two paths after the first bifurcation (moving westward) pass through channels less than 24 nautical miles wide. Canada would need to build observation towers but it could be defended with "cannons" e.g. the M777.


I've got no direct knowledge of this in particular but I've heard that the mouse movement is one of the highest level interrupts in the OS and won't be preempted -- so the number is probably very small but the response by the application when you click may be longer. Also, this is why sometimes you'll see the entire computer locked up except for the mouse movement.


Part of that is due to having a hardware mouse cursor. Basically all the interrupt handler has to do is load the new coordinates into some registers on the video co-processor and co-processor takes care of all of the work of blitting the mouse around the screen. It makes processing the mouse interrupts very light-weight.


Which OS and hardware platform are you referring to now?


I think this applies to most desktop OSes and nearly all the hardware platforms they run on, aside from virtualised ones.


If their boat is more of a skiff, a couple paddles and a milk jug cut in half for bailing might be sufficient.

In terms of winter storms, this is approximately as bad as it gets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Juan .


Funny you should post that. I was travelling by car near Cap Chat when that hit and it wasn't amusing at all.

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=cap+chat+quebec&oe=utf-8&aq=t...

The st. Lawrence river might just as well be ocean for the purpose of driving along the shore road in winter, in the middle of a snowstorm like that it really makes you wonder what the hell you were thinking of driving there in winter.

I went there to visit a huge VAT ('eggbeater' or Darrieus rotor windmill), I should have kept a better eye out for the weather reports rather than to keep on driving, and I only caught the tail end of it. Live & learn...

(someone else's picture of the windmill: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman_76021/555075211/ )

It's an interesting experience to try to dig out your car before the next snowplow comes along.


Completely unrelated: I zoomed out on your Google Maps link and saw a suspiciously circular lake formation:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=cap+chat+quebec&hl=en&ie=UTF8...

Yep, it's the 4th most powerful known meteor impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9-Levasseur_Island

I love Wikipedia.


Go to Sudbury, Ontario for an even larger one! (they're still mining that one today).


That storm was unusual but we do often get a few Nor' Easter storms in the winter and at -20C and 100km/h to 120km/h it can be a bit rough.


Calling -20@100 km/h winds 'a bit rough' should qualify for the understatement of the decade if there is such a thing. I've been out in weather like that and it cured me of a desire to see snow and ice for a very long time. I've seen it be below -40 on St. Josephs Island a couple of nights every year and that was definitely quite strange. As long as the wind wasn't up it was doable, even the slightest breeze and you'd be crazy to go out (or you'd have to feed the stove...).


That's what I was thinking, about the paddles. Five minutes by motorboat in clear weather ought to be at least manageable even if the motor's out and the weather's terrible, so long as you've got paddles.


Carrying a burner is itself also suspicious -- the safest course it to be as normal as possible which means having a regular computer/phone with some stuff on it, or nothing. Also, it isn't sufficient to focus the the border policies for re-entry to your own country, you also have to consider every country you would travel to, all of which have their own laws, all of which can change at any moment, even while you are in transit. Carrying around "sensitive" data, along with the password (which is in your brain, thus you are carrying it) is just overall a really bad idea.


It's not a "burner" phone, it's an "international quad band unlocked" phone for local sims.


I believe one of the tests is crashing into a wall that yields very little, so the tungsten dumptruck would fare poorly, exciting as it would be to drive.

EDIT: this one: http://youtu.be/V5R80yUUVNk


The wall at left in that video is, at most, four dump trucks in volume and perhaps constructed of reinforced concrete (density ~2,500 kg/m^3)?

A single solid tungsten dump truck would have almost twice the mass of the wall. Even with a completely inelastic collision, the wall's going to shatter and move. For a 35 mph collision, I think you're right, that wall would ultimately bring the truck to a halt from friction with the ground. At higher speeds, I think the truck might make it through.

Tungsten is quite dense (19,300 kg/m^3). Such a truck would have a mass of >400 metric tons (2 x 3 x 4 m x 19 tons/m^3), or >247 Toyota Tacomas (2013 extended cab, curb weight 3560 lb --> 1618 kg).

The truck would be terrifying to drive, once you got it going. I don't know how you'd turn.

Alas, Youtube is short on tungsten dumptrucks, but this may suffice. In a demonstration, a truck uses its brakes to stop after obliterating a few cars. The truck is driven by a real person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6TRqjjnO58


>400 metric tons

So around the max takeoff weight of a 747, with approximately as heavy duty a wheel setup I assume. That would be quite a truck.


Given a heavy enough tungsten truck...


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