nfa

Paintball minigun - Hack A Day

Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's top intelligence official and a close ally of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, will step down at the end of the year, becoming the first key department member to leave in the wake of Rumsfeld's resignation.

Pentagon intelligence chief resigns - CNN.com

Further tweaks to the picture system have been made. Any pictures posted from this point forward will be higher quality. We may go through the existing posted picture and improve their quality as well..

Improvements have been made to searching. The search box on the upper right side of the screen is now contextual. Searches will be preformed on the content you are currently viewing. If you search from a user's blog, the search results will be from that user's blog. If you search in the agent, you will search the current group of users being viewed. Searches can be widened to the entire system at any time by clicking the "Search MemeStreams" button.

More performance tweaks to search are on the way... As are more picture capabilities. Sometime in the next few days, pictures will also start to appear in other pages on the system.

Enjoy!

MemeStreams Update - Improvements to pictures and search

terratogen wrote:
If you don't allow open rebellion through speech, then you end up with dissatisfied masses which have no other outlet to change things other than violence.

I strongly agree. Its just that in this environment, there is an inevitable interface between speech and organization, which is similar to the interface between the civilian and the solider, which is discussed in the linked article:

A prisoner of war, for example, does not have a constitutional right to counsel. Conversely, an accused in the criminal context does have a right to counsel and a host of procedural and substantive protections.

When wars were fought with muskets on designated battlefields, the division between these two spheres was clear. Today, the distinction is increasingly blurred.

We have to figure out where the line ought to be. The discussion is one of the most important ones going on today.

Time to Take Rights Seriously

In Louisville, Kentucky -- home to Louisville Slugger, America's most famous baseball bat manufacturer -- TSA has a special warning display near the security screening area at the airport.

Sadly, this is the closest thing to "local flavor" that I've seen at any of the otherwise uniformly-grim TSA outposts around the country.

What Happens When Local Industry Crosses Paths with the TSA in Lousiville on Flickr - Photo Sharing!

noteworthy wrote:

A long-overdue wake up call for the information security community.

This popped up on Slashdot recently. I'm curious to get feedback from the security experts here at Memestreams.

I wrote up a long response to this yesterday and unfortunately I managed to accidentally kill the browser window. Calling the whole industry out on the table is a classic method of self promotion in the security industry. Imagine if I wrote the same article about healthcare.

Clearly, we have failed to solve the problem of disease! Healthcare professionals are responsible! They are complacent and lazy! Look at all the health problems we face! AIDS, Cancer, Heart Disease, Lung Disease, Polio, Black Death, the Flu! Look at all these poor people who have been impacted by these diseases! We're one random mutation away from a flu virus that will wipe out all of humanity! And the CDC has the audacity to not be in a permanent state of emergency! Why? Diseases are out evolving our protections and healthcare is inaccessible!

Would you take this article seriously? Would you agree that the entire healthcare industry is a failure? Would you stop going to the doctor because you figure its a big waste of time? Would you get mad at your doctor for being a complacent member of the healthcare industry?

In fact, there have been significant improvements in the state of the technical situation, due to things like more vulnerability research, automated patching, IPS technology, and exploit protection technologies. A vast number of problems have been solved. DOS attacks are much harder than they used to be. Worms don't propagate as well as they used to. Most modern attacks cannot be targeted. Trying to entice people to click on your evil web page is harder than owning their network directly. The directed attacks we see today are very sophisticated. Compare the complexity of the most recent sendmail bug to bugs in sendmail 10 years ago.

We're not done yet, but its ignorant to argue that nothing substantial has been accomplished.

Attacks are up because there are more financial motivations today then there were 5 years ago despite the fact that its harder to perform attacks than it was 5 years ago. Computer security professionals will never "solve" crime because its not a technical problem and it doesn't have a "solution." With respect to things like phishing attacks and consensually installed spyware, computer security professionals also cannot fix the reality that a fool and his money are easily parted.

Certainly, new thinking is needed and welcomed. There are fresh ideas and strategic changes that will have a huge impact that are still waiting for the right person to find them. But an honest way to pursue that is to talk about the ideas. Calling the whole security industry a failure isn't about new ideas, its not true, and its not useful.

RE: Security Absurdity; The Complete, Unquestionable, And Total Failure of Information Security.

It looks like the election of Democrats has created some progress for those concerned about the NSA program.

"I wonder whether this reversal is only coming now after the election as an attempt to appease Democrats in Congress who have been critical of the NSA program and will soon be in control and armed with subpoena power," Hinchey said in a news release.

But not too much progress...

Translation: We’re going to look at how the intercepts from this program were handled internally, but not whether the program is legal.

Prediction: In six months to a year, the OIG will release a report stating that it could find no evidence that DOJ mishandled intelligence products from the program.

This link, and the stories it links, are worth a read.

Justice inspector general to review terrorist surveillance program - Homeland Stupidity

Despite news yesterday that the Justice Department has closed its investigation of the graduate student behind the controversial fake boarding pass generator, Christopher Soghoian may not be out of legal jeopardy yet.

27B Stroke 6 - Its not over for Soghoian.

My view is that either before we lose a city, or if we are truly stupid after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that we use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech.

The Gingrich quote in full. This perspective shouldn't be dismissed outright. Al Queda is a scene. It has no central organization. Its just a bunch of people who share a perspective. They share that perspective online. If you want to stop them from organizing, you have to stop them from hanging out online. And that runs into the first amendment like a train wreck. This is the fundamental question of our age.

Gingrich wants to restrict freedom of speech? - Countdown with Keith Olbermann - MSNBC.com

The Social Network section of the site has been updated. It now only produces graphs and statistics using data from the past month. The stats are more informative and include pictures. The graphs are not pure noise.

The Most Recommended Users page remains not quite as useful

There is still much room for improvement, but that portion of the site is actually useful now.

MemeStreams Update - Social Network