Posts by dssf

Physical Security...

The moral of this story is, whatEVER your phone is, don't allow anyone unsupervised use of your phone nor possession of it if is unlocked.

This is, however, a good case for micro-SD cards being beneath the battery, so that tampering will be evident. Now, if you somehow download a rogue app to your phone, all bets are off... unless you're given to factory-resetting your phone evern other week, or secretly using a second, well-hidden phone while pretending that your compromised phone is your main phone.

So, if you're for whatever reason deprived of your phone, say, it is taken by lobby security at work, or by police, then if you're paranoid, you'd probably remove your removable data, purge, jack up, or overwrite data you know you sent to or from sites via that phone, and then give the phone an acid bath or put it under the seat of a taxi or long-distance train. Or, leave it on, and ditch it in an adult theater that might still exist in some locales.

But, you can bet your ass that intel agencies and police agencies probably can remotely compromise your phone no matter WHAT you do, other than turning it off, wrapping it in foil, and putting in a sound-suppressing box, inside a drum of oil, buried 9' under ground. Then, just early-term the contract and save the money. But, fi you NEED the phone, and want to play games, then take up relationships on a same-sex adult site and keep the minders busy reading until they get bored and automate the key-word/trigger-word processing (if they for some reason used live listeners).

As for spouses or partners who feel they are beign spied on, they can set up fake meetings in limited access areas, then play the spy game by doubling back to check for tails. Having a well-disguised hat camera or buttonhole camera at for points, doing this about 15 times means a trail who is a PI too poor to have 25 tails on call will eventually and non-coincidentally appear in more than one piece of footage...

When I first read the title, I thought I read:

"Apple pulls AN Intifada"... Then, I though, "On WHOM? Hmmmm"....

I wonder if this is tangentally related to the recent confiscation of servers in

Reston, VA... data center raid.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/22/fbi_data_centre_raid/

I wonder if this is related to the scareware crackdown

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/23/fbi_scareware_arrests/

A possibly less expensive alternative...

Why not equip them with (as partly mentioned above) with Android, phone-like devices (or, cheap phones if lack of fire-department dedication would adversely jack up the pricing). Add on top of those via the headphone jack a set of Vitals wires, sort of like what astro/Cosmonauts might wear. On top of that, add the appropriate softwared to feed the vitals to the phone and here, then, the signals go encrypted to a local phone tower..

In the Incident Command vehicle, the FD (or law enforcement) would have jack-in permissions to co-opt local cell towers in the name of Civil Defense and Disaster Response. They might have to pay a "rent fee", or the cell tower owners might be accorded tax offsets, or some sort of incentive to allow the FD/LE use to de-prioritize iPhoners and Androiders until the system stabilizes. Meanwhile, FD/LE usage in bigger cities shouldn't be a problem.

However, I can see where DHLS and LE and fire depts may want their own mobile units. There won't necessarily by towers out in the boonies where some miscreants or wanted individuals are holed-up. Also, the FD/PD having their own units means they are not at the mercy of a cell tower going out if some inebriated motorist crashes into a green box at the curb.

Was he firing on all SEAL-ENDERs, while someone

was "getting a 'tune-up'"?

Was the plug sparking?

His ignition sequence was in full overdrive, i guess.

There's a file SOMEdamned where...

What if the clouds go "poof"? Data has to be store in 1s and 0s on media in case the RAM dies. Otherwise, all the data EVER being uploaded would constantly have to be circulated. Even though blood and oxygen and cells and food die and get replaced, data cannot be morphed or transmuted adversely if the user/owner will need to access and use it.

Why in the hell would they want to destroy the local file system? Forcing Apple hardware/service users to give up the ability to save data locally means -- if allowed-- creating it on some external device, uploading it to an approved Apple device from an Apple-approved, and editing or storing it on the iCloud system/server.

Just some quick thoughts

Hey, FAE

FAE might work.

How about an E-2C with downward-pointing radar? Enough MWs to fry eggs 10' under water. (Yes, I know water attenuates radar, but I doubt a mild-quasi-nuking of the RADAR kind will leave the invasion force woozy as hell and amped up on Dramamine, No-Doze, Viavrin, and some narcotics...) Would atropine help? (Aside from their eyes being gelatinized?)

Maybe Tim Cook can do double duty?

Wouldn't that be something if that analyst posited that idea, that Tim Cook be named as Ballmer's acting and possible actual replacement?

Serious conflicts of interest might ensue, but look at ms branding. What "branding" is there? Innovative or not, no one can keep dry pants and loin when looking at the sheer presence of iPhones. i am not an Apple consumer by any measure (save for one case where I bought for someone an iPod touch... I thnk that is what it was...) of personal use. But, when I get on the train for commuting home and see on one transit rail system up to 8 iPhone-holding people just on ONE END of ONE train car, and this repeats on each end or varies from 4-8 iPhones (3, 3gs, 4) from car to car, it gets heady and crazy. Nokia cannot claim that anymore. Samsung might be close. HTC EVO 4Gs are creeping up there, but not like iPhones.

Then, to get off of THAT train, and see it all over again, but with different faces, on another transit system, it gets way beyond heady. Just yesterday, I sat down and by the time I sat, which was about 6 minutes into my ride, I noticed a couple each with their own iPhone 4, sitting with their dog. Panned around. Three more people with iPhone 4. Some more 2 more. In less than 15 minutes, as people debarked, the view opened up. I saw the distinctive iPhone/iPod headphones. Surely they had to be iPhones. Sure enough, iPhone 3's and 4's. All told, I counted 12 visible iPhones on one HALF of a 2-car train. This plays out almost every workday of the week, over a sliding 2-hour window in my commute, in either direction. Almost always, these iPhones are within 10 feet of me on a rouglhy 40-foot car.

if Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, and maybe 30 others in Apple could be cloned and grafted onto ms' DNA, and if ms mellowed out more and stopped trynig death-by-a-thousand-cuts on Open Source (yes, not all of OS is under attack by ms, but they try to slice the jugular when/where it matters), ms might take "saturation' to a whole new level. Actually, I'd PREFER to see clones of Apple grafted onto Open Source, but somehow be non-destructive to either Apple or ms, since they all need competition to keep them in line.

About two weeks ago, I had counted 8 iPhones within 10 feet of me on the train. I saw two guys separately on their own iPhone 4's. I told them that I bet all that tracking has had some drunken-giddy effect on Apple and that they must "play with themselves" every night in excitement when they get the daily iPhone-on-Transit cluster reports. They smiled and one wryly laughed at my naughty references. But, one said, "That's why I bought them." He said he bought Apple stock the moment he heard about the iPhone product announcement. Years ago. I bet he is sitting pretty on a wad of cash and rounded out porfolio. Casually dressed, confident, well-groomed, and SEEMED like an exec or mid-to-upper-level type.

I bet this is what happened with facebook...

Why their and others' sites said users need to change their passwords to rid these horrid, privacy-threatening cookies.

I think -suspect- that fb is not the only site susceptible to this...

To HELL with "Rapture", there's more to enjoy unfolding the universe

It's eye-watering, heart-warming stuff like this that makes me hope like hell that there is no "rapture" for at least 6 million years. Rapture should be a day of reckoning on the individual basis, not planetary or universal scale.

Will that subscription come with a cooling unit?

I wonder how many iPads will be overheating, sizzling in ecstasy in air and wire. Maybe the gyro and accel can be assiduously retuned as a Hump-ometer?

How could they NOT take this seriously?

INT WTF? They by default or via user-activated Wi-Fi usage set phones to help Google map out every known or unknown unique, detected Wi-Fi hotspot and had tables logging away on the phone. Now, we find -- and I've suspected all along -- that the calendar and contacts list could be exploited. I think I have not put a damned thing on the calendar out of fear of being exploited. But, prior 2011 (IIRC), Google made it MANDATORY that the android phone and the google contacts be sync'ed up.

If one wants to think conspiratorially, this could EASILY and HANDILY serve the needs or desires of domestic intelligenc agencies of various countries. They could just hoover up the stuff and then build a portfolio, using, say, Visual Analytics-like apps, to monitor clusters of individuals and map them to associations and coincidental convergences and locations.

How could Google NOT know this. I think that one day we're going to find that Google is a increasingly compelled to become a tool manipulated by intelligence agencies, google-complying or not.

Why do i get the feeling something like this is happening to fb?

At least in Firefox, even if i reset cookies, the fb page would just reset and say something about username or password error. Logging in under mobile, or/then switching to touch would allow me to then use my desktop page. Weird. Maybe my browser is jacked?