Similar to what Steve Yegge said in his unintentionally published platforms rant:
- monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum.
1. If I'm going to be spending 2000+ plus hours a year in a single physical location it needs to have some privacy and comfort, at an absolute minimum.
2. I'm not willing to be scrutinized by others for exactly how I spend my time. Or how I appear to be spending my time. Goofing off, at least I'm only distracting myself, instead of wandering around distracting others. "Following orders" leads to intellectual heat-death. In the software profession this kills earning power.
3. Many people fail to realize that whatever minor thing they are currently locked on to psychologically is totally inconsequential. I can't have them hovering over me and yammering about it and trying to get me to click/type/open/smell whichever program/website/document/foodstuff has gotten them whipped up in a frenzy. People aren't conscious of boundaries when they're excited and this needs to be defended against physically with doors, desks, and body position.
4. Maybe it helps individual productivity to the detriment of group productivity. When I get a big raise based on group productivity, I'll start to care about it.
Yeah this looks viable. This would make the best fake bar. I don't think the metal even need to be alloyed, you can just pour in one first, then the other.
Given two gold bars, one adulterated with Tungsten, and one not, either the weight will differ or the volume will differ. So, given equal weights (i.e. standard 400oz bars), you can check the displacement to establish purity.
If you use a container that is filled up to a spout, and you measure the displaced water by collecting it in a measuring cup, you can just directly calculate density, and then compare it to gold.
My guess is that they are using human operators, and they probably have a retrieval squad on standby in case they lose contact. The regulatory issues I couldn't begin to guess.
The goal at this stage would be to validate the business model and to collect flight data and get a sense of the operational requirements. If it works and they want to develop an autopilot, they will then have all the flight data, landing zone choices and issues, and trained operators to consult.
I really liked all of them, but episode 2 was probably my favourite of season 1. It is over the top compared to other parts of the series, but not compared to other experimental far future or alternate universe scifi. For example: Dark City, Idiocracy, Cube, Moon, Battle Royale, Maze Runner.
You won't know in advance who is going to rob you, in this case it was the FBI but for this attack it could be anyone, even a reasonably organized group of 13 year olds could probably pull this off. For example the situation could be the same but DPR is a tech CEO working in a coffeeshop in Asia, and someone has just ran off with a copy of his email and financials. He chases them out of the door, gets hit in the face with a bike chain, and wakes up in the hospital, not even knowing if they were just aggressive petty thieves, or if he was targeted and someone knows all this plans.
I think that "lock and wipe" might be too much though, and locking only would be more practical, wouldn't constitute destruction of evidence (as far as they know), wouldn't punish mistakes so much. Right now, off the shelf, a computer will lock up on screensaver, or sleep/poweroff. For a high paranoia user, you could add headphone unplug, power cord in/out, any usb in/out, even monitor the mic for certain codewords to trigger the lock. And if it happens it isn't such a big deal, just re-authenticate.
Up to now I had never considered the need for protection against a mid-keystroke attack. Ideally it would have to involve no unusual hardware or software, or you might as well just slap a "I'm a criminal" sticker on your forehead.
Second, I can't see it working properly if you need to do something specific when you're being struck.
Closest thing I can think of:
- headphones must be plugged in to launch a certain program
- if headphones are unplugged before program is closed, lock and begin wipe
- don't, under any circumstances, let go of the headphones
At this level of paranoia you probably also need interrogation training. Ideally you'd also have your sensitive stuff on a machine that is both hidden and protected, and only access it remotely. You want to be able to deny its existence to have any chance of withstanding a torture attack.
Edit: iphone earbuds have a switch that you might be able to use in your hand/mouth as a deadman switch, but I can't see that being workable for more than a few seconds.
Also, if you're in public, they could film your monitor... so that would need to be sanitized somehow as well.
I've been considering running all my mobile data through a VPN for better security, and saving all of it so I can analyze anything after the fact. Anyone doing anything like this?
On letting the user switch between register and login at any time, there is one small thing that tumblr does that I like.
If you go to tumblr.com it displays the registration page with email/password/username. If you just type in email+password on this page, it still works. So an incomplete registration form can be used to login.
A lot of companies are giant faceless MBAocracies, and all their front line staff are designed to be minimum cost minimum fuss drones, which selects for checked out losers. The purpose of tipping is to bypass institutional apathy so you can deal with someone who will treat you as human for the right price
Cameras are cheap, networking is cheap and processing is cheap. The government is just the first mover, but there are many other parties that have the ability to build this kind of thing even just based on current technology.
Imagine if UPS placed cameras giving a 360 degree view on all of their vehicles, ran it through license place recognition to give a database of observations each having plate number, time, and location, and then allowed lookups or algorithms to be run for a price or subscription fee.
Any company with a large network of vehicles could do this, or it could be done less effectively but more cheaply with cameras on property. It would be easy to pool the data or sell it to anyone. In some ways it is similar to doing large scale face recognition, except it is much easier with current technology.
There is one paper I like about operational issues in general: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/... . It lists a lot of criteria that must be met for a system to be highly automated.