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FYI—Qantas flight QF481 is an Airbus A330-200. Just wondering if SSID's like 'Airbus A330 Navigation' or 'Airbus A330 Maintenance' would have cleared the plane; they certainly would have scared me a lot more. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/02/wi-fi-hotspot-named-detonation-device-causes-bomb-scare-at-melbo/ Wi-Fi hotspot named 'detonation device' causes bomb scare at Melbourne airport The Qantas flight was due to fly to Perth Jonathan Pearlman, *The Telegraph*, Sydney, 2 May 2016 A poorly-named Wi-Fi hotspot sparked a security scare on a Qantas flight and prompted about 50 terrified passengers to refuse to fly. The hotspot name -- Mobile Detonation Device—was spotted by a female passenger who saw it on her phone's Wi-Fi menu before the plane left Melbourne airport. She alerted the crew who notified the pilot and security officials. Passengers aboard the flight said the pilot asked the person responsible for the Wi-Fi name to come forward but no one did. The passengers were then asked to leave the plane, which was due to fly to Perth. Security officials checked the plane but were unable to find a threat and cleared the flight to leave. "The pilot said a particular passenger had gone to log on and a hotspot name has come up with one which was a scare to Qantas and passengers," a passenger told Channel Seven. "The pilot made us aware and said they were going to take proper security precautions... After half an hour no one came forward, the Wi-Fi covered a fair distance so [it] could have been someone in the terminal." Qantas offered to transfer concerned passengers to alternative flights. An estimated fifty passengers—about half of those on board—opted to take a different flight. Qantas said there had been no risk to the flight, which was delayed by two hours. "Some passengers elected not to travel so there was a delay as bags were taken off and those passengers disembarked," said a Qantas spokesperson. The passenger said he believed the scare was caused by "some immature person, possibly in the terminal".
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/05/02/1755200/without-encryption-everything-stops-says-snowden
Politico, 2 May 2016 SECURITY FEARS EQUAL PAPER BALLOTS: The Republican National Convention is shunning electronic voting, because: cybersecurity. And other things. "Senior party officials - worried about hacking and Internet reliability in the overcrowded Cleveland arena and eager to preserve the live television drama surrounding a drawn-out roll call - are ruling out a change to convention bylaws that would allow for electronic voting on the ballots to select the GOP's presidential and vice presidential nominees," POLITICO's Darren Samuelsohn reports. On the cybersecurity side of it specifically, Indiana RNC member John Hammond said about the possibility of an attack: "You certainly wouldn't want it to happen under those circumstances when the entire world is watching." <http://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=db12ef29fba0aff9aff27d9b4eefc021b7057b09faf1a9899d0e36cebbf7e5de>
http://dilbert.com/strip/2016-05-01
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/senator-patrick-leahy-pgp-encryption-letter-20-years In 2016 some senators are trying to limit encryption, the technology that keeps your messages and personal data safe from prying eyes, with a bill that's so bad, one expert called it the most "ludicrous, dangerous, technically illiterate tech policy proposal of the 21st century." Two decades ago, some senators were fighting to make encryption more widespread. As part of that fight, which some call the first Crypto War, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) decided to make a statement about the importance of crypto by using it himself. ....
Ben Lovejoy, 9to5mac.com For the first time in a federal case, a suspect has been ordered to use her fingerprint to unlock her iPhone using Touch ID. The LA Times reports that a federal judge signed a warrant allowing the FBI to compel a suspect in an identity theft case to to unlock the phone just 45 minutes after her arrest. Authorities obtained a search warrant compelling the girlfriend of an alleged Armenian gang member to press her finger against an iPhone that had been seized from a Glendale home. In the Glendale case, the FBI wanted the fingerprint of Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan, a 29-year-old woman from L.A. with a string of criminal convictions who pleaded no contest to a felony count of identity theft. The warrant is consistent with a 2014 case where a Virginia District Court ruled that while passcodes are protected by the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination, fingerprints are not. Legal experts, however, have differing views. [...] http://9to5mac.com/2016/05/02/federal-court-touch-id-fingerprint/
During a live TV weather report, the map display was obscured by a dialog box saying that Microsoft recommended upgrading to Windows 10. See the video below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMPeTrHNX1U&feature=share
This year effectively ends the last non-Internet generation. Every person born since 1995 has lived in a world where the Internet has always been generally available to almost everyone in the first world, and over about the last ten years, it's been fairly fast broadband. Think about this. Anyone born prior to 1995 has memories of a time when Internet access was not ubiquitous, was often unavailable in some areas or was very expensive, and in most cases was slow, and when I say slow, in 1988 the most common modem speed was still 2400 baud. That's 240 characters per second. When I first got into computers back in 1978, you had mainframes, which served lots of users but was expensive. Our computer at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA, served about 100 terminals on two campuses from three computers, and, as one of our professors told us, cost "a megabuck," that is, over a million 1978 dollars. And they weren't even all IBM, one was from Magnuson, the other from Amdahl but all ran IBM's OS/VS1 operating system and later VM hypervisor. The open source emulator Hercules can run that operating system in simulation on a PC probably faster than it ran on the original big iron. You also had minicomputers, Long Beach City College, Long Beach, CA had in its Math department a PDP-11/03 that had 56K of memory - and that is not a mistype, it had 56K, not 56 meg - had three CRT and one typewriter-style terminal, used two 256K 8" floppy disks, and cost $20,000. You probably have more capability now, in your hand, if you own an Android tablet or phone that costs about $50. So people born before about 1980 can remember when we didn't have quite powerful computers in our homes. And those who were at least teenagers in 1995 can remember when we didn't have Internet even if we did have a computer. But the kids that are just turning adults this year have no memory of a world without cell phones, computers and the Internet. The proliferation of apps for handheld computers, I think, has barely scratched the surface, and as near-universal wi-fi and connectivity become more common, I suspect we will see new developments that will change the world again. The availability of the PC starting in the early 1980s and the even less expensive availability in the late 1990s as well as what they became capable of doing for us, or allowing us to do with them, changed so many things in so many ways it's hard to believe how different this world is from say, 1987. Compare 1964 ro 1984 and the differences are not that significant. Color TV was crisper, microwave ovens and VCRs were around, but the way we interacted with people was similar to that of perhaps 10 years earlier (except phones were more common). Now look back on 1996 and now, cell phones are everywhere and cheap, most cell phones are actually computers, all have either local or carrier-provided Internet, and what we can do with systems rivals what required supercomputers twenty years ago, or might not even have been possible - like 3D printing of objects - and yet, again, we are just now entering a world where every child has lived in a country that has always had Internet connectivity. Now the only question is, will we have the ingenuity to use the power we have to do great accomplishments, or will we suffer from a lack of vision and foresight to think about new things and improvements? As the group Asia put it, "Only Time Will Tell." Paul Robinson <paul@paul-robinson.us> - http://paul-robinson.us (My blog)
Lindsay Marshall and the other cat-haters should be pleased by this development, currently undergoing testing in anticipation of widespread deployment. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/apr/17/robots-lasers-poison-the-high-tech-bid-to-cull-wild-cats-in-the-outback
> "There are (at least) two causes for the huge potential for
> miscommunication using emoji:"
I have a third: not being able to figure what is meant by the itty bitty
facial expression. I gave up *years* ago.
[BTW, catless is catless now because of a broken watermain. Many cats do
not like water? How could you miss such an excellent cheap shot? Maybe,
you think that catless and PiGeoNs do not belong together.]
[BTW, our friends at Newcastle will be attempting to reboot catless,
perhaps today. PGN]
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